The Compromise

Column by Paul Bonneau.

Exclusive to STR

Why is it that evil proliferates? What mechanism keeps it going? Who is to blame?

Why are there so many wars and occupations? Why such huge amounts of theft (“taxes”, fines, fees and “civil forfeiture”)? Why are so many nonviolent people in jail? What keeps the “War on Some Drugs” going? Why does the police state expand and expand? Why do cops get away with literal murder? Why are children stolen from their parents for nothing? Why do children learn nothing in school but conformity and submission? How do people enter adulthood with no skills or work ethic? Why does half the population live on the spoils of plunder? Why are we being snooped on and cataloged in databases? Why has our manufacturing capacity been exported? Why is every aspect of our lives regulated (assuming we permit it, as most do)?

It’s easy to focus on the Harry Reids and the Dianne Feinsteins and the John Boehners, the Obamas and Bushes, all corrupt and mad for power; but such psychopaths are a tiny minority in society. What gives them such a reach? How can they dominate an entire society, even the entire planet?

I think the real problem are the good people.

The term “Good German” was used to describe all the basically decent people who made their peace with or accommodated themselves to the Nazis and to the evil the Nazis produced. I used to call it the “concentration camp guard syndrome,” meaning those who guarded the Jews in death camps likely went home to a normal family life at the end of each day. Probably loved their kids, too. Or the conductors running the trains on time, when those trains had boxcars full of Jews and war matériel for the front. Or the bureaucrat who ensured compliance with town ordinances and informed the Nazis of anything “questionable” they saw. Or the grocers who enjoyed extra business supplying the soldiers. Or the maintenance men keeping the local Gestapo headquarters in good running condition.

We now have huge numbers of “Good Americans.”

Just think how different this world would be, if these normally decent people refrained from accommodating themselves to an evil milieu; if, rather than rationalizing an association they initially understood was at least questionable, they simply refrained from it?

There are not enough truly evil and psychopathic individuals around to maintain a broad condition of evil, all on their own--even if they were given completely free rein. They require help from the general population; and that requires a general population of weak will, and trained in the art of rationalization.

John Taylor Gatto worked as a government school teacher for some 30 years, using his considerable talent to minimize the damage that the system wreaked on children. While I am glad of what he has become now, and while I understand it took those 30 years of Hell to turn him into it, just think how much he inadvertently did to actually keep the system he opposed going! We should consider all the good teachers in this system, and all the good parents who surrender their children to it. What if they refrained? The government schools would collapse in an instant, and instead we’d have the sort of amazing, diverse, effective and cheap system (or to be more accurate, non-system) that was the rule in America before Prussian indoctrination was imported into Massachusetts in the 1840s and subsequently spread across the entire country, stifling almost all alternatives.

Gatto is actually a rare bird. Most people probably have some funny feelings about their initial accommodation to the evil, but in time it gets easier, and eventually they are able to swallow anything, because they have gradually traded what some people call their soul for a few pieces of silver. They have created a gigantic edifice of rationalizations; and sheltered within it, they are never troubled again.

Evil people will always be with us. I expect them and prepare in some way or other to guard against them or avoid them; they are so rare that this is not difficult. But I save my curses for the good people who, through their misguided efforts, keep the whole ugly mess going. The simple, basically decent, weak-willed and indoctrinated people who take the easy way without considering the bill that will have to be paid some sad future day.