Dear Friends,
It seems to me, with all the talk about revolutions we hear of late, I thought I would weigh in on the subject. All revolutions are started and run by intellectuals while they are manned by peasants. Even the American Revolution followed this paradigm. All revolutions are started and run by unhappy intellectuals and the peasants become the soldiers. The peasantry make up the soldiers because workers are too busy working and the middle class is too busy turning out a living by their wits to participate. The industrialists, if there are any, almost always fall on the side of the dominant paradigm, and only recently the psudo industrialists (corporatists), have switched to the side of revolution. The problem with revolution then is, what philosophy are the revolutionaries going to implement?
From the Orange revolution in Ukraine, to the Yellow Vest revolution in Europe today, revolution is in the international news. Obviously not in the US main stream news, since reporting international news would be biased, just like following the Constitution is now unconstitutional. The latest is revolution in Venezuela. For some people it is of the utmost importance that the US get involved. Some, to “save the day,” while others want to have a scapegoat, to pin the blame on… to protect socialism. Either way the majority of the political elite are in favor of revolution, in Venezuela today at least. Sadly, none of them care what the people of Venezuela want, they project what they think the people of Venezuela want, on all sides. You see, revolution rarely ushers in a golden age… only another tyranny.
One of the primary factors, as to how a revolution will turn out, is the philosophy of the intellectuals that lead it. If their philosophy is Marxist, Progressive, socialist or national socialist, we know the resulting government will be autocratic, the economy poor and society rife with low level crime. The elite will live like kings of old however, making their disappointment at the poverty of the people, more bearable. The revolutionaries of the American revolution were enamored with Enlightenment Principles and so created a Constitution implementing those ideas. The French Revolution followed the socialist model and resulted in rivers of blood, a foretelling of the tsunami of blood that would result from the large scale embracing of Marxism and National Socialism, in the Twentieth Century.
It is hard to get a bunch of people together and foment violence to topple the status quo. It takes a special kind of person, they need to be smart, unfatiguable, charismatic, without a conscience and mostly… motivated. The strongest motivation is that of self interest, and so most revolutionaries, no matter the rhetoric they spout are really in it for themselves. Moreover, if you did a Venn diagram of the characteristics of a good revolutionary, they encompass those of a psychopath as well. The circle of psychopaths would fit neatly within that of the revolutionary intellectual. If we take a glance at past revolutionaries we see that most of them have indeed been psychopaths. Just as the leaders of cults are usually psychopaths. So the people toss off the yoke of a tyrant and get a psychopath instead.
Revolutions are messy things. Lots of innocent people die… and for what? So their surviving families can be oppressed by people with a different ideology, or worse, full blown psychopaths? The days of any revolutionary claiming the mantle of the Enlightenment are past. Today the choices are corporatist welfare state, or socialist absolutism, both globalist. Enlightenment’s limited government doesn’t even have a chair at the table. Take Venezuela, the world getting in there will only make the whole affair more messy, more people will die, already inhumane conditions will become worse and in the end… there will be another welfare state crypto Marxist globalist in power. Today, no revolution will grant the people the Right to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness… The preconditions are not met for it.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
