Staying Bought: The high price of being in charge

If our leaders often seem resistant to evidence and reason, it’s because their material interests depend on being blind to challenges to the status quo

WE’VE ALL MET THEM, blokes who rely on the opinions of blokes just like themselves for guidance and inspiration. The sort of men for whom evidence is much less important than what they “just know”. Tell them that they’re wrong and they’ll tell you that: “No, you’re wrong.” Provide them with evidence, and they’ll accuse you of “making it up”. Whip out your smartphone and allow Professor Google to confirm your claims and, if they don’t immediately punch you in the face, they’ll simply turn away and pretend you’re invisible. Such men are a significant and often dangerous obstacle to human progress at any time – but never more so than when your country’s government is chock full of them.

What makes these blokes so impervious to evidence-based arguments and/or expert advice? Are they simply poorly-educated? It’s tempting to think so, but that would insult all those poorly-educated people who are, nevertheless, hungry for information and always eager to learn.

Working-class people growing up in nineteenth and twentieth century communities where educational opportunities were strictly limited proved this point over and over again by reading everything they could lay their hands on. So hungry for information and knowledge were they that those who had yet to attain full literacy would often club together to pay for someone to read to them while they worked.

One of the many sad stories emerging from the Christchurch earthquake was the loss of the impressive library of socialist, economic and trade union literature collected over more than a century by the Canterbury Trades Council. With the Trades Hall severely damaged by the quake, Christchurch authorities prohibited any recovery attempt. Eventually, the library’s rare and irreplaceable volumes, many of them first editions, were simply gathered up with the rest of that broken city’s rubble and buried.

No, imperviousness to rational argument is not the consequence of an inadequate education. Those who are open to knowledge will never attempt to discourage or silence those who are ready and willing to impart it. Reliance on a narrow set of ideas and assumptions, accompanied by relentless antagonism towards any person, group, or institution daring to suggest that those ideas and assumptions might not be altogether reliable, is most often an indication that ideological diversity would pose a material threat to the impervious ones’ dominant political, economic, social and/or cultural status.

No one has ever summed up this walled-in mindset more succinctly than the “muck-raking” (i.e. scandal exposing) journalist, novelist, and socialist agitator Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Of such obdurate types he wrote: “It is hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”

Such individuals simply cannot afford to be broad-minded and tolerant of difference and dissent, because if they were they would very soon come to the realisation that the ideas they cling to and the assumptions they make are utterly incompatible with recognising and upholding the rights of other human-beings. Blindness to the rights of others may be evidence of sociopathy, or even psychopathy. Certainly, a lack of empathy offers no impediment to being a successful oppressor. The principal explanation for social sadism, however, is that, having been paid to deliver it, the perpetrators feel obliged to satisfy their paymasters.

If a political party receives millions of dollars in donations from individuals and corporations with a powerful interest in the unimpeded exploitation of human-beings and the natural world, then the chances of that party taking effective measures to protect workers and the environment are slim. If a donor makes huge profits from the sale of fossil fuels, then he, she, or it will not expect the recipient politicians to prosecute the fight against global warming with excessive vigour. Almost invariably these expectations are met. Once bought, it is only right and proper that a purchased politician should stay bought.

And it’s not just politicians who find themselves in need of exculpatory ideologies. All those whose job it is to tell other people what to do and how to live would find it difficult to carry out their responsibilities without believing firmly in the idea that some people are born to be leaders and others are born to be led. By owning or operating a small business, one has already declared for the economic exploitation that makes profit possible. Salaried employees seeking rapid promotion in a large corporation are unlikely to preach socialism in the staff cafeteria. Those who have spent years (and borrowed thousands) studying for their PhD are much more likely to be meritocratic than democratic. Democracy is all very well, but the poorly educated need to be guided by those holding the appropriate qualifications.

As the British Labour cabinet minister Douglas Jay, without the slightest sign of embarrassment put it in his pamphlet, The Socialist Cause. “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves”.

Which only proves that it isn’t just those boorish right-wing blokes in the pub (and the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Cabinet) who rely for inspiration and guidance on people as morally compromised as themselves. Revolutionaries as well as reactionaries will defend their interests (and salaries) by trotting-out ideas, assumptions, and justifications unsupported by evidence, and which they will not test in open debate. Not without a bloody big fight anyway, and probably not even then.

Inequality and exploitation extract an enormous intellectual and moral toll from those burdened with their perpetuation. Being the beneficiary of an unjust system comes with a devastating psychological downside. Only through the creation of elaborate strategies of denial and deflection can those whose job it is to keep the system going preserve their sanity. Very few people are able to embrace the injustice they daily dispense, but even fewer are unaware of its impact on their wellbeing.

Is this what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meant when they penned the final sentences of The Communist Manifesto? That in order to win the world, one must have nothing to lose.

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Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (democracyproject.substack.com).