I subscribe to the Substack of Michael Jochum, drummer and astute observer of life. I don’t read all his missives, especially when I have a reading backlog, but I try. One he wrote a few days ago, “The Permission to be Cruel” was unusually powerful for me. It is on the theme of “the cruelty is the point,” which is something he frequently takes as a point of departure, but this one took a different tack. Starting from a recent doctor’s visit where he experienced empathy and caring, he tried to understand what it’s like to be in the mind of someone devoid of those things. It was a nice approach, and effective too.

In his essay, he wrote:

“This is no longer an ordinary disagreement over taxes, spending or the proper reach of government. It is a moral catastrophe, because political differences are being used as permission to stop seeing other people as human beings. Once that permission is granted, cruelty is no longer an unfortunate consequence of policy. Cruelty becomes the policy, the spectacle and, for far too many people, the reward.”

Reading that, it hit me that the appetite for cruelty will not stop. There’s not going to be a point where these people have driven out, imprisoned, killed, deprived of rights and power and agency all the people they want to and then stop. There’s no goal line they’re going to reach and say “We are done, it is complete.” Many of them may not see it themselves — yet — but there is no end game. No number or target that they’re going to reach and then declare victory, go home, and suddenly start being nice people. The cruelty is not just the point for the victims, it has become the point for them.

I kept going back and forth between writing that “it has become the point for them” and “it is the point for them” because I keep vacillating between whether they have always been that cruel or if they have only recently learned how to give into the cruelty because of the slumlord currently squatting in the People’s House. They were radicalized toward cruelty at some point in their lives, but now the have the ability to indulge it without fear of consequence. Does it even matter when it happened? It matters that it happened.

They’re never going to stop because there’s always going to be a need to feed the cruelty beast. When we’re all gone, they’ll turn on each other, like some of them are doing even now. We should have seen it sooner; the thing about Wilhoit’s Law is that is dynamic, not static; for conservatism to survive, there must always be more out-groups. New ones must always be created. It’s a critical feature of the system. When you finish with one out-group — through elimination, assimilation, or simple avoidance — you have to replace it with another. Conservatism can never “be done.” The real end of history is when everyone left has atomized themselves into in-groups of one, with the rest of the world as their eternal and infinite out-group.

Conservatism is subtractive; anti-conservatism must, therefore, be additive. Some — eventually, everyone else — must be deprived vs. all must not be deprived.

It’s that last bit — “eventually, everyone else” — that’s different in this moment. Between the rapacious self-serving greed of the naked emperor slumlord and the pseudo-libertarian self-absorption of the tech bros, we are seeing the elevation and even the enshrinement of “I have the power to get it all.” It’s intimately bound up in the law because what necessarily follows is “…and you can’t stop me.”

It’s the reductio ad absurdum: greed requires the power to rewrite law to legitimize itself.

La loi c’est moi. It even rhymes.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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