Will to Power or Will to Destroy

If you follow the ambient debate, you will have heard, over and over again, that the Black Lives Matter protesters, coupled with the leftis elite media, want, above all else, to have power.

It’s all about power, don’t you think\?

I will admit to a queasy feeling when I hear philosophical terms like “power” bandied about with wild insouciance. The concept comes to us most recently from everyone’s favorite syphilitic philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.  

By what he called the will to power, people try to impose their will on others, to force them to see things as they see things. The will to power is antithetical to any sense that people want to engage in free exchanges of ideas, open discussion and debate. It is inimical to republican government. Look at Germany in the first half of the twentieth century and you will see the will to power run amok

In this sense, it is fair to say that the current protest movement is doing its best to impose its beliefs on others, especially on white people. The goal of the movement is to gin up white guilt, to make white people feel guilty for having inhabited the planet and for having created a great nation. In time white people will be told that they need not feel pride in anything they have ever accomplished. In the great clash of civilizations, we are no longer judging civilizations by whether they produce wealth and create security. We are judging them by a diversity score.

By the current conventional wisdom we should be competing in the world arena with the most diverse team, not with the the best players.

One does not, of course, know whether those guilt-ridden white fools who are bowing to the awesome power of blackness really mean it. Or are they putting on a show to placate a mob?

And yet, when we hear the word power, we assume, in its common usage that the left really wants to get back in power, to be back in charge, to impose its will on the country through political action, through regulations and legislation. 

Obviously, the inability of the left to accept the legitimacy of the Trump presidency is one of the most serious threats to democracy since the Civil War. Nothing can undermine democracy more definitively than the notion that elections are not legitimate, but are merely power grabs.

Yet, as you watch brain dead protesters ravaging America’s shops, streets and squares, destroying statues and monuments to the heroes of the American Republic-- both those who fought for the Confederacy and those who defeated the Confederacy-- you start to see an ugliness that we saw during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Not a will to power, strictly speaking, but a will to destroy other people, especially to destroy what other people have built. Apparently, destroying someone’s life work makes you feel more powerful than building something yourself.

Do not for an instant imagine that the rampaging mobs who are destroying American merchants and monuments could ever build anything themselves. They are doing everything in their power to persuade you not to raise the issue.

If you do raise it, they will quickly blame your white privilege for the fact that they are incompetent good-for-nothings.

Why would they want simply to destroy what others have built? In part they want to strip away American pride and American patriotism. They do not want you to love your country or to be proud of your country. They want to demotivate you, to demoralize you, so that they might compete against you. It is psy ops.

They want to strip away your pride in achievement. They do it to create their own sense of false pride. They are masking their shame at not having built anything of consequence themselves. Surely, they are citizens and might share in the pride of American achievement. But they only believe in race, and if America’s achievers were not sufficiently diverse, they feel left out.

When your neighbor builds a new house, one that is nicer than your house, you have a choice: you can rebuild your own house or you can burn his house down. Or else, you can respect in his achievement by being neighborly. You might not care about comparing houses.

Of course, if you have no couth and resent his achievement you might set out to deprive him of his pride, by rendering his house unlivable. It might make you feel better, but in order to sustain your false pride-- aka self-esteem-- you will need to continue to destroy.

In another context, it’s called the Palestinian cause.

It also echoes an absurd notion, first introduced by Barack Obama and then restated by Elizabeth Warren. The phrase: You didn’t build that. Obama was pretending that when you build a factory other people were part of the process. And thus, you should not claim credit for building the factory. He was systematically trying to dismantle American national pride, and the pride of factory-builders, on the grounds that you belong to a nation and that other people contributed to your success. 

Isn’t it ironic that, after Obama, the American people elected a builder. Perhaps not the most successful builder in our history, but someone who had actually built things.

You can rise up the ladder by a series of achievements, or you can jump up it by claiming that your failure to achieve is someone else's fault.

Of course, by Obama’s logic, what you earned is not really yours. It all belongs to the collective. The thought has a long and distinguished history in the twentieth century. It is the basis for communism, and it shows that the communist presumption that you did not earn what you earned leads to lethargy, indolence, immiseration, poverty and starvation.

Despite what everyone thinks, China dispensed with it some four decades ago. Thanks to Obama and Warren we have brought it back from its grave.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution did not just strip party officials, bureaucrats and the ruling elite of their pride. It also destroyed the Chinese economy. By the time Mao had breathed his last, China did not have an economy. The vast majority of its people were living at extreme poverty levels.

So, the Cultural Revolution represented a will to destroy. It was led by students who did not know how to build anything. So they exercised their power by destroying and discrediting what others had built. 

The American left wants the power to destroy what others have built. It wants everyone who ever built anything to feel guilty. It is not so keen on gaining the power that allows it to advance a legislative agenda and to be held accountable for the results. What is the Green New Deal but an effort to destroy the American energy industry, and with it, any parts of the nation that rely on energy. From the mind of an idiot bartendress, the GND will damage the country far more than have the rioting and looting.

The rioters refuse to be judged by results. They are successful because they say they are successful. And they believe they are successful. If you disagree, you will be canceled. They might not have succeeded at anything, but it's the fault of white people. They have no use for playing by the rules or accepting the results of a fair match. They reject as illegitimate any results that do not affirm their false pride. They force other people to look at them in awe, in awe at their power to destroy.

The power to build is not the same as the power to destroy. If you imagine that you can assert your own superiority by destroying what others have built, you are not manifesting your power. You are manifesting weakness and failure. Every time anyone builds a new building, factory or product it bears silent witness to your inability to build anything at all. 

For this reason, the Black Lives Matter people are obliged to discredit Trump. They are doing it for their great leader, Barack Obama.

They are obliged to do so because, in electing Trump, the American people repudiated the Obama legacy. It suggested that Obama had not succeeded, but had failed. And they cannot to allow that.

Thus, behind the current madness sweeping the country is the notion that they want to resurrect Obama, to bring his legacy back from the dead, to make him into a towering success, not a failure. Haven't you thought that Barack Obama is the unmoved mover behind all of the current chaos?

Today’s black power movement claims that if colleges, universities, sports teams, television shows, advertisements and corporate boardrooms do not look like America, do not have a proportional representation of people of color then the game must be rigged. Fair play is not enough. If the outcomes are not as we wish the game does not fulfill our idea of justice.It must be rectified by depriving the winners of their success and by promoting people on the basis of skin color or even gender. 

Keep in mind, if you promote people on the basis of race you are excluding people on the basis of race. And besides, how does it happen that in a nation supposedly defined by white privilege, the students who are doing the best in America's schools and universities are invariably Asian? Duh.

Should we dispense with the American Constitution because some of its authors owned slaves? Does their slaveholding compromise the document and the republic which it founded? Should we reject independence because Jefferson owned slaves? Should we return to the folds of the British Empire? Should we renounce our victory over Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, because the troops were not sufficiently diverse. Should we return France to the Third Reich because the landing craft on D-Day did not look like America?