We’ve been conditioned to believe that it is experts like Hillary Clinton and James Comey who maintain the social conditions necessary for our health and happiness.
We are all now familiar with the decision by FBI Director James Comey not to seek an indictment against Hillary Clinton for her email scandal. In his announcement, not only did Director Comey contradict a number of Secretary Clinton’s claims, he laid out the case of gross negligence and extreme carelessness that would have landed anyone of us in prison.
But not Hillary Clinton.
Director Comey fabricated what Charles Krauthammer called a “completely, irrelevant new standard which is ‘malicious intent’,” as a way of absolving her from indictment. You can be grossly negligent and even lie about it, but if you didn’t really mean it, it’s cool.
So what’s really behind all of this?
First, we need to understand that the modern age is comprised of two main classes of people, what C.S. Lewis called the “conditioner” class and the “conditioned” class. What he meant by that is because the modern age operates according to complex technological and scientific processes, it requires a class of experts and engineers who have the specialized competency and expertise to govern this technocracy. And so within such a modern matrix, the wider population is conditioned to believe that their health and happiness is dependent upon this ruling class of experts and engineers.
Second, we also have to understand that technology-based societies tend to reject traditional moral conceptions of life. This is because technology is organized and governed by modern scientific processes which are considered value neutral and thus devoid of moral frames of reference.
What this means is that traditional conceptions of law and order are increasingly replaced with modern conceptions. So while traditional societies viewed human law as something reflective of transcendent divine law, modern societies actually invent law, they make it up in accordance with the needs of social conditions as the elite class of conditioners understands and interprets them.
And so, in modern societies, there are two fundamentally different relationships to the law. While the conditioned are always under the law, in that we don’t invent but are called only to comply, the conditioners are always above the law, since they are in a position to invent law in such a way that complies with their own social management and engineering.
You see, in a society where laws are made up by a class of elites, it’s not a coincidence that those elites tend to benefit from those laws and their variant interpretations.
But wait a minute: why aren’t people up in arms about this? Arbitrary laws? Where are the mass protests over the injustice of such a thing?
Ah, don’t forget: We’re the conditioned class. We’ve been conditioned to believe that it is experts like Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Comey who maintain the social conditions necessary for our health and happiness. So this is just a small toll that we pay for all of these wonderful benefits of living in a modern society.
In fact, if you really think about it, now that law is just arbitrarily made up, deriving its legitimacy not from God or divine justice but from the state, then there is no basis for a citizen to contest the justice of a law or its application beyond the decrees of the state.
So what then would we be protesting?
And of course, this goes the other way; all the efforts of politicians and media commentators to exonerate Mrs. Clinton by playing the lawyer, making legal distinctions and exceptions in her favor, are in the end meaningless. There is no ultimate standard of justice behind these laws and their application; the issue is only power, whether the circumstances benefit or hurt their trusted conditioner.
The good news is that there is a mass gulf growing between the conditioners and the conditioned. As we have seen in the recent GOP and to a certain extent Democratic primaries, there is a profound distrust brewing among citizens for the so-called “establishment.” And if global events are any indicator, this distrust will eventually reach critical mass, resulting, as it has so often throughout history, in a tectonic social and political shift.
Until then, however, the modern elite will continue to have their fun engineering society for their own benefit, and at our expense.
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The featured image is James Comey’s official portrait as the Seventh Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
This is the age of nihilism wherein you can arbitrarily make it all up as you go along, the end, to command, being of import and the means whatever is necessary. Or, whatever difference do they make? Should she be elected she will make Nixon look somewhat saintly.
The modern state has become a giant milk cow for the political parasites. It was always there but it has grown to huge proportions. You need only wonder at the size of state and federal budgets and the results thereof to grasp the enormity of the mess. And it still grows.
People quickly turn into the most strident of nominalists in these situations: “Who can say what ‘gross negligence’ or ‘malice’ means? Who among us has the wisdom to plumb such depths?”
What I find amusing about all this is the way “conservatives” have bought into the elite’s standards without even realizing it.
When self-anointed pundits and oracles solemnly declare “Clinton is not qualified to be President”, or “Trump is not qualified to be President”, they have bought into the bogus script of ‘qualifications’.
All I ever saw in the Constitution is that a person be over a certain age, and of a certain nativity, and have a majority of votes in the Electoral College. All else is blather.
I am not surprised Progressivists maintain this illusion, but “Conservatives”?
Great point, David!
240 years or so was a good long run. It’s sad that it is now over, or nearly so. The events of the last couple of weeks confirm for me that I am no longer a free man with responsibility to uphold the law thereby acknowledged, but rather, I am now a subject of the state with obligations imposed by those who make the laws and are not subject to them.
Once I served the state voluntarily by virtue of an oath and a uniform, and I voluntarily and knowingly discharged my responsibilities under the law and a strict code of conduct. Now a candidate for the state’s highest office — who would exercise authority over others who are serving as I was — has obviously flouted that responsibility with impunity, but would undoubtedly hold others to an even stricter standard of responsibility — one of loyalty to she, not to the law. That makes them, and all of us, subjects of the crown once again. God save us!
What happens to Hillary matters because, if she gets away with this email scandal (and Benghazi and numerous others), it just reinforces the idea that certain “Elites” can do just about anything and not be held accountable. And, to the extent that normal Americans are cynical about their government, this just rightly makes them even more cynical.
Director Comey should have stepped down long ago for his disgraceful anti-Semitic and anti-Polish pro-Nazi comments in a speech about the Holocaust . I am not surprised he is as bad a cop as he is a bad historian.
The Comey-Clinton vignette is yet another of the manifold confirmations of the Divine Wisdom expressed in I Samuel 8.