Some Call It Progress

A friend recommended two books that were phenomenal. I love it when friends do that. I can think of no better gift. This is also rare because most people are incurious even to the point of myopia in the way they seek out comfort of that closest to them and shun analysis of ostensibly distant events that move them in dark ways so that they'd never suspect or notice that they themselves have changed fundamentally. So this happens much less than, for example, others might tell you about a good restaurant.

First there was Leadership and Self Deception which he described as "life-changing". The friends and family that I passed it along to all rave and tell me that they now look at themselves and their relationships differently in light of the ideas they took from this book.

But the one I really want to write about is The Cult of Power by Rex Warner which was written during an earlier time but if you hadn't known when it was written you would have thought it was written yesterday. The author has written extensively on allegory and tragedy, particularly Greek since they do this best, he observes. His fictional works rely heavily on allegory in getting its points across. This particular work starts by giving one an idea of what will follow:

The worship of violence, of absolute power, of lawlessness, the setting up of the individual against the universe--all these are old things.

He distills commonality from historical opposition to power by individuals and groups. It all starts with a group of “rugged individualists”,  bold iconoclasts all, admirable in some respects, and united in their goal of shirking off one yoke of oppression or another. This examination of the commonality, framework or mechanisms by which we evolve socially in fits and starts is interesting and it’s my belief that any but the dullest will be hard-pressed not to be startled by how closely it tracks current events…things we’ve all seen happen in the last 40 years or so. I was left with the open-ended question of whether the distinctly American manifestation will end in widespread tragedy for those who are sucked along in the wake of a media-amplified, fervent few.

He describes the role of what he calls the “brilliant and irresponsible individualist” who is “conscious of the pressure of society and convinced of his own ability to break free from it.” He calls this the “philosophy of the self-made man”, noting that the so-called self-made man will usually admit that he has “made” himself at the expense of others. He also notes that in its intellectualized form this philosophy has “never been able to sway great masses of people.” and that the “self-made man” often wins “the grudging admiration of his fellows but seldom their enthusiastic support.” These are, the author claims, arguments for moral anarchy and an irreligious form of individualism signifying “the break-up of a whole social system of values which have, for one reason or another, become too weak to inspire respect or to enforce obedience.” At its heart is the “assertion of the individual combined with a refusal to admit the existence of supra-individual forces…” He adds that these arguments for moral anarchy are an important stage in “the sequence that leads us to the position in which we find ourselves today”, but that was yesterday he wrote about and not today so it’s left as an exercise to the reader to decide for themselves whether there might be parallels with the current time and what those might be.

He examines the sequence of steps by which all the valiant yoke-shirking, hard work in itself, inevitably leads to tragedy. History leaves us with no shortage of examples which bear this out. But is it applicable today? Maybe things are different now. Has he captured something of the essence of human nature that provides insights into the present and future?

Humanity is lifted and moved as if by waves. As individuals it’s easy to get lost in the necessities of life and creature comforts of family and the familiar so that tumultuous change at first seems to to leave everything more or less in place relative to visible markers or reference points. However as subtle and almost imperceptible as it might be, it all happens outside the periphery of the focus of our daily lives so we are unavoidably affected yet understandably hard-pressed to identify the causes. Those who eschew analysis and merely consume the reasons offered by the simplest “common sense” explanations (often all too common and sort on sense) embrace the same narratives that work so well in our insular, day-to-day lives in what becomes an approximate myth to explain what is happening on a much grander and almost infinitely more complex scale. Those simple narratives often fail to pass a basic smell test regardless of how comforting they might be.

Author and psychologist R.D. Laing expresses this impeccably:

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

Alas, we are puny finite beings but it is always within our power to grow, if only just a little…a far cry from the irreligious hubris of the self-made man, one perceiving himself as some minor god…master of the universe. Warner also affirms the inherent puniness of humanity, conjuring up an image of the individual as mindless automata that might make Kierkegaard proud:

What , in our present situation, would strike one as most remarkable, if one had not observed much the same thing happening before in history, is the rapidity with which generally accepted ideals of the early twentieth century such as toleration, kindliness, objective truth, freedom have been replaced in many people’s minds by their exact opposites. More remarkable still is the enthusiasm with which people have accepted the substitution. It is true that we see this process most clearly in fascism and, among fascist states, most clearly of all in Germany; but it would be most unwise to regard it as a process that is wholly alien from ourselves.”

It is the “unwise to regard it as a process that is wholly alien from ourselves” looms larges in that quote and would boldly defy the very spirit of American exceptionalism. But really, we’ve seen these things within our own lifetime, haven’t we? We see people grounded in a capricious “common sense” that just ain’t so with doozies such as “America was founded as a Christian nation” and “the federal government shouldn’t stick its nose into capitalism”. Most firmly believe that their outer world was torn asunder (and even find feet at which to lay blame) while they themselves remained constant when, in reality, it was the other way around with them being both in possession of an ungrounded “common sense” that goes whichever way the winds blow and active participants in the destruction of tradition and all they claim to protect. Today the waves of change occur more frequently but this only increases our alienation from ourselves and our extreme thirst for something to believe in, so aptly described by R.D. Laing:

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

Laing goes even further, suggesting that there is only a thin line between so-called normal is nothing of the sort citing ones acculturation including the madness of war

We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world—mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt. 

Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100, 000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

Laing gazed back upon a different 50-year period than we do today so this 100,000 number must be adjusted upwards by more than a factor of 10 given advancements in military technology...which seems to make it all the more important to take care with the truth.


I would never spoil it by telling those who might be curious how it ends but to me the remainder of The Cult of Power is a credibly applicable account of where America might be headed. Decide for yourself. I’d not suggest anyone do otherwise.