On Dec 12, 2009, at 12:10 AM, Eric Beck wrote:
> Everyone already knows that The
> System is fucked. What nobody knows, including especially the
> prophetic left, is what to do about it.
Or that anything can be done about it.
It's been a while:
> What element of the higher circles - what would-be element - has
> such immorality not touched? Perhaps all those cases that come
> briefly to public attention are but marginal - or, at any rate,
> those that were caught. But then, there is the feeling that the
> bigger you are, the less likely you are to be caught. There is the
> feeling that all the petty cases seem to signify something grander,
> that they go deeper and that their roots are now well organized in
> the higher and middle American ways of life. But among the mass
> distractions this feeling soon passes harmlessly away. For the
> American distrust of the high and mighty is a distrust without
> doctrine and without political focus; it is a distrust felt by the
> mass public as a series of more or less cynically expected
> disclosures. Corruption and immoralities, petty and grand, are facts
> about the higher circles, often even characteristic facts about many
> of them. But the immoral tone of American society today also
> involves the lack of public sensibility when confronted with these
> facts. Effective moral indignation is not evoked by the corrupt
> public life of our time; the old middle-class moralities have been
> replaced in America by the higher immorality.
>
> [...]
>
>
> 'Crisis' is a bankrupted term, because so many men in high places
> have evoked it in order to cover up their extraordinary policies and
> deeds; as a matter of fact, it is precisely the absence of crises
> that is a cardinal feature of the higher immorality. For genuine
> crises involve situations in which men at large are presented with
> genuine alternatives, the moral meanings of which are clearly opened
> to public debate. The higher immorality, the general weakening of
> older values and the organization of ir responsibility have not
> involved any public crises; on the contrary, they have been matters
> of a creeping indifference and a silent hollowing out.
>
>
> - C Wright Mills, The Power Elite, pp. 341, 345
>