"I see mass movements of solidarity as arising when the stock of reason gives out – they are the place to which we return when we cease to negotiate, cease to recognize the other as entitled to his otherness, cease to live by the rule of humility and compromise. Mass movements reflect the default position of the human psyche, when fear, resentment or anger take over, and when no social order seems acceptable without an absolute unity of purpose."
"Conservatives understand this; they wish to keep the frail crust of civilization in place as long as possible, knowing that beneath it there does not lie the idyllic realm of Rousseau’s noble savage, but only the violent world of the hunter-gatherer. Faced with civilizational decline, therefore, they hold with Lord Salisbury that ‘delay is life’."
"My argument has implied that the virtues of the Western democracies are inseparable from the secular rule of law, and that secular law is inherently territorial. Only such a law can accommodate differences of religion, lifestyle and ethnicity under a shared form of civil obedience. Hence we are committed to the nation state, and the continuing attempt by trans-national bodies to confiscate the legislative powers of sovereign nations must be resisted. Some say that, in the case of Europe, this is a lost cause. But that is only because our political class has refused to act on the opportunities available, seeing the advantages to itself in the ability to pass all difficult questions to a committee of unaccountable bureaucrats, housed in some spectral tower of glass in the dispossessed city of Brussels."
"There is another reason, too, why our politicians have succumbed to the bureaucrats in this matter, and that is the rise and triumph of economics, and its transformation from the science of instrumental reasoning to the ideology of modern life.
Conceived as an ideology, economics describes a world in which value is given in advance of our associations, in which the goals of life are clear and predetermined, and in which the task of politics is simply to assess the costs and benefits and choose the ‘optimal’ solution. When economics triumphs over politics, the sole ‘experts’ consulted are those who promise to replace the difficult, because human, questions of political choice with the easy, because mathematical, questions of economics, starting from assumptions that no one would ever make were he not in the grip of a self-aggrandizing obsession."
Conceived as an ideology, economics describes a world in which value is given in advance of our associations, in which the goals of life are clear and predetermined, and in which the task of politics is simply to assess the costs and benefits and choose the ‘optimal’ solution. When economics triumphs over politics, the sole ‘experts’ consulted are those who promise to replace the difficult, because human, questions of political choice with the easy, because mathematical, questions of economics, starting from assumptions that no one would ever make were he not in the grip of a self-aggrandizing obsession."
"That is the way in which the case for Europe has been argued, by those who have failed to understand that oikonomia without the oikos ceases to be a practical science and becomes an ideology instead, an ideology every bit as insane as Marxism or fascism. The old guard of the Tory Party, who conspired to rid it of Margaret Thatcher, did so on the grounds that she refused to follow this way of thinking. Now the Liberal Democrats are repeating their arguments, insisting that the British economy will suffer if we do not continue to replace our workforce with recruits from elsewhere, and regarding with indifference the fact that so many of our inner city schools are filling with children who do not speak English. Indeed, this change is welcomed as a sign that economic thinking has triumphed over the benighted forms of attachment dear to ‘Little Englanders’."
"In the case of leftists, the mystery is not so difficult to unravel. There are avenues into politics on the left that bypass all natural forms of human life. You start with a cause, you join an NGO (a non-governmental organization), try to squeeze into a quango, enter local government, acquire the habit of dispensing other people’s money, and learn to play the political machine. All that can be achieved without risk and without ever doing what others would regard as an honest day’s work."
"And there are ways into conservative politics from there, since it is the business of consultants to lobby on their clients’ behalf. Still, it is not necessary that this process should yield a political class as detached from humanity as the one we see. There ought to be ways in which a consultant every now and then brushes against reality, so as to understand that we live through our attachments and are lost when they are taken away."
"And there are ways into conservative politics from there, since it is the business of consultants to lobby on their clients’ behalf. Still, it is not necessary that this process should yield a political class as detached from humanity as the one we see. There ought to be ways in which a consultant every now and then brushes against reality, so as to understand that we live through our attachments and are lost when they are taken away."
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> Still, it is not necessary that this process should yield a political class as detached from humanity as the one we see. There ought to be ways in which a consultant every now and then brushes against reality, so as to understand that we live through our attachments and are lost when they are taken away.
Sadly, I do not believe there is such a way. As you said yourself, these people found a way zt gather power before they worked a single day of their life, and the well known rule of "something given has no value" aplies in this case more then in any other. In addition, since these people get power that is enough to change lives, they truly do not understand the shere destruction they can be causing. Since the power was free, therefore even lives they rule over must be equally worthless...
