Absolute Relative Values and the Modern State

Dear George,

Moral relativism is the engine that drives the Corporatist State. This engine is all the more efficient because the state believes that its actions are driven by moral absolutes. The more absolute it believes it morals to be, the deadlier is its relativism.

My meth-addled brain vaguely remembers someone, maybe, saying, maybe, that the use of force is evil, which is why it is favored by small children and large corporate nations. Or maybe nobody said it, but who gives a shit!

The Corporate State celebrates life by destroying it just as it celebrates freedom through oppression. It is always does the opposite of what it contends to believe. It touts the virtues of growth through competitive free enterprise even though its reaction to the presence of real competition borders on the phobic.

Corporatism abhors the messy inefficiency of an open bazaar in which small enterprises compete. It would much prefer to buy up the enterprises and corner the marketplace, which it proceeds to bulldoze because it needs the land to build its corporate headquarters. It’s more sanitary that way.

One writer points to the Plunge Protection Team as an example of corporatism’s fastidious approach to free competition. Known officially as the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, its function is to stave off precipitous market plunges. If the market looks like it’s going to take a violent dip, the team springs into action. It has, in place, front companies through which it operates. The Fed releases funds to these companies with which they buy, buy, buy, thus either reversing the downward dip, or at least mitigating it.

What was once called illegal market manipulation is now called legal, and necessary, market stabilization.

Fastidiousness, George, has always been the midwife of oppression. Despots are neat freaks who seek to sanitize life through their oppressive micromanagement. We’re seeing an example of it here with the bans on trans fat and second-hand smoke. Oppression is best marketed a facilitator of healthy living.

Inducing an obsession with individual health is always an effective vehicle for state oppression. The individual who is concerned about the state of their bowels is less likely to be concerned with the misdeeds of the state. People don’t care if their government stinks as long as the people around them smell nice.

Moral relativism makes possible the primitive hypocrisy without which the ship of state would founder on the shoals of decency. So it is that we can go spastic over the Russian defense of South Ossetia while ignoring both our invasion of Iraq and the hissy-fit we through during the Cuban missile crisis. Politicians never lie; they simply shine a new light on the facts as they make them up. It’s called statesmanship.

But it’s not all moral relativism. There are two absolute values the corporatist state lives by: greed and exploitation, two values that have resonated down through history.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones