Power for Power's Sake
The Worst Rise to the Top
In Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, he talks about how the worst rise to the top.
We can certainly see now, that the worst of society— these kind of people run our institutions, our countries, supranational organizations— the worst people rise to the top.
So why is that?
Is it because they’re just evil, and they know that they’re evil, and they want to do more evil, so they climb up the ladder until they get there, and then they commit evil onto everybody on purpose?
Or is it more that, there are certain people who really crave power and believe that they know best how everybody else should run their lives?
Fauci: “We don’t want to be told what to do, well I understand that, but now is the time to do what you’re told. And I think it really is something that we should be doing right now.”
I tend to think that it’s the second part, the second category, the second answer is true. This is what Hayek points to in The Road to Serfdom.
There are people who want to impose their will on others. What these people do, with or without realizing it,— mostly, without realizing it— is that they crave power. And the more power that they get, the higher they get up on the rungs of that ladder, the more that they crave power for power’s sake.
As they climb up, they take the people around them who have thought, “Oh, this person has great ideas for how to run society, for how to run other people’s lives, for this new social program, this new socialist program (as Javier Milei pointed to), these people know best, so we’re gonna follow them!”.
And then they follow along. These are all of the people sitting in the chairs at Davos, all of the elites. They think, “Oh, we’re part of something great! We are doing something for the greater good.”
They believe it!
Watch the full video here:
Great commentary! The answer lays in understanding the sociopathic mind. Read Hervey Cleckley’s “The Mask of Sanity”, 1941 and Robert Hare’s works, especially his “The Psychopathic Test” which is on line.
These people have been with us for all human development but only recently have they formed coalitions to boost each other in this power grab. Power is all they know or respect. All the evil that has ever occurred has been by them. They are the predators of others’ wealth and influence. They know no bound in their hunger for power. They simply want more power today than they had yesterday.
Years ago, I was teaching a principles of economic class and explaining that even the wealthiest centuries ago were paupers compared to almost anyone in the West today. Some students were so ahistorical that they wouldn't believe the numbers. One student believed the numbers but said he would rather have been powerful and relatively poor centuries ago than who he is today. At first, I thought he was joking. He wasn't. He explained he enjoyed ordering people around.