Is That It?

No "why"s in Liberalism.

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Back in the Neolithic era when I first rented somewhere to live, I remember signing a document that said that if I did this, that and the other thing, I was entitled to “quietly enjoy” the property. Even at the time, my reflexes of a former student of literature were aroused. What did that mean? Was I supposed to spend my days in smiling contemplation of four walls?

At first I thought it was an affectation of the antique English in which such contracts are written. But then some time later I discovered that similar contracts in French use the equivalent word jouir, which as you may know covers various forms of enjoyment, not all of them quiet. In fact, the two words share a common heritage, from the early French enjoir meaning “rejoice” or “take delight in.” So now you know. But what’s really striking is the coincidence of two elements—property and legal documents—which are the essence of a Liberal society, where life consists essentially of sitting happily in an empty room. If the room is your property, so much the better, and so much the more enjoyable. Apparently.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that with the ultimate triumph of Liberalism in the last half-century, our society has undergone a radical, nihilistic transformation towards pure form without substance, and mere existence without anything you could reasonably describe as life. So when people complain that life feels meaningless today, that’s because it is. When people say they have nothing to look forward to, it’s because they haven’t. When people die young, of despair or suicide, that’s a quite natural and logical reaction to today’s world. As I will suggest, we are now approaching the apotheosis of Liberalism: a society which is all form and process without content, nothing more than the universal, mechanical pursuit of the very quintessence of individual self-interest, enforced by a framework of draconian laws, and leading theoretically to a perfectly operating market where all wants are satisfied automatically. Except that Liberalism has no real idea of what these wants are.

Now, you may reasonably say, wait a bit. Haven’t there been societies before where people have despaired? Well, yes: many in fact. Think of the fashionable melancholy of Shakespeare’s time, as featured in Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide:

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

It’s a common theme among stories about bored aristocrats from Peacock to Chekhov, and in the romantic era in the suicides inspired, for example, by Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. A feeling of pointlessness and weariness with life suffused much of the early poetry of T S Eliot, and of course Albert Camus made an entire business out of the Absurdity of life in a world without God, and wondered whether the only real philosophical question was whether he should off himself or not. And there are plenty of others.

But you will have noticed that these are writers and philosophers, and that they were expressing a personal reaction to their world that by no means everybody shared at the time. What’s different today is that life is officially intended to have no purpose, outside the Liberal minimalism of extracting money from the economy and from others for its own sake. Figures of fun and scorn in the literature of the past are now role models: Molière’s Harpagon, Marlowe’s Barabas (“infinite riches in a little room.”) It’s not even as though conspicuous consumption was really the objective either: most of the “riches” amount to ones and zeroes stored in computer networks, or what I describe as Schrödinger wealth: credentials that could give you access to money if they could ever be sold. Millionaires lighting cigars with fifty-dollar notes did at least provide some entertainment.

Thus, beyond the never-ending pursuit of rational self-interest, it’s not at all clear what a Liberal society is actually for. What is the purpose of piling up ever more strings of ones and zeroes in competition with each other? Why are we supposed to approach ever closer to a frictionless world where resources are perfectly allocated? And what happens then? There are a couple of theories that I’ll nod at briefly, but neither is really satisfactory.

One is that we are pursuing Growth. But this is observably not true, simply because Liberal economies have been much less successful than the collectively-managed ones of the past, and a nation genuinely interested in Growth would not destroy its industry, its infrastructure and its education system. In reality, as the death-grip of Liberalism has tightened, Growth, in the twentieth-century sense, has practically disappeared, and in many western economies, nominal GDP growth is mostly about asset price inflation. (How much is your house worth?) We’ve seen a massive transfer of resources to the rich from ordinary people, and the rich are the only class whose wealth has actually increased in net terms. Indeed, the Party has now abandoned Growth as an objective, because it would require unacceptable things like investment, training, education and government intervention. Much easier to stage another smash-and-grab raid on the poor.

So it’s not Growth. But what about that other standby, Progress? Well, Progress in the sense that we knew it in my youth started to slow down after the Apollo Moon landings. In some western countries, it continued into the 1970s with high-speed trains and anti-pollution technologies, but the Party, then in embryonic form, had begun to realise it wasn’t actually necessary. Progress, in the traditional sense of making the lives of ordinary people better, had long been a vote-getter, and even parties of the Right couldn’t entirely ignore it. But for some time now, the Party has simply decided there will be no more Progress, because it’s too expensive and potentially dangerous, and anyway it’s unnecessary so long as all the factions of the Party agree not to use it against each other. So where we had Progress, we now have Regress. It’s taken for granted that the lives of ordinary people will become less secure, that they will be less able to eat and clothe themselves properly and support themselves decently, that their children will never be able to afford a home of their own, that standards of health and education will decline, and that the infrastructure of their country will increasingly fall apart. Progress requires hard work, ethics, dedication, investment for the future, education and most of all a feeling of social solidarity. Regress just requires two fingers to the electorate who, you suppose, have nowhere else to go anyway.

Well if all else fails, isn’t it just greed and the accumulation of wealth and power by the rich, if you can describe that as a “purpose”? Even that seems doubtful to me, or at least to have gone beyond any rational economic activity, and to have become purely pathological. When you are “worth” say ten trillion dollars, in some sense of the theoretical value of electronic coupons if they could be sold, what rational, impeccably Liberal, reason could there be for trying to be worth eleven trillion?

So modern Liberalism (we will glance at the past in a moment) has nether Growth nor Progress as its objective. What does it have then? Nothing, really, and that’s the terrifying thing. Because it is all process without content it can in principle go on forever, as the machine grinds up tinier and tinier obstacles to the Liberal nirvana of a perfect equilibrium of rational pursuit of individual self-interest. Liberalism is the epitome of left-brain thinking with no off-switch: in Iain MacGilchrist’s terms, the Emissary has usurped the Master, and is now out of control.

This runaway destruction, like the actions of some Frankenstein’s monster, is only possible because of the lack of any guiding moral principles of general application. Indeed, early Liberals said specifically, and modern Liberals used to believe, that ethics and morals were an entirely personal affair, and everybody should be free to have their own provided they didn’t inflict them on others. This sounds great in theory, until we realise that in practice societies without generalised moral and ethical norms (even disputed or competing ones) cannot really be societies at all, and so cannot function either. This is happening now, to the surprise of Liberals and others. But what did they expect?

Of course, individually and in groups, Liberals have supported moral and ethical causes. But this is largely coincidence. Liberals would normally have supported slavery, for example, as being economically efficient. But in Britain they were not only prominent in the struggle against the Atlantic slave trade, they pushed the government into trying to wipe out the trade in Africa itself, and in the Gulf. But this was because the abolitionists were devout Nonconformist Christians, not because they were Liberals. And more recently, Liberals supported progressive economic reforms, as much as anything else to avoid competition from their bitter enemies the Socialists. Now, it’s all different. In the Champagne area of France, no less, there have been recurrent scandals about the trafficking of illegal immigrants from West Africa and Afghanistan, some of them children, to work on the grape harvests. Bought from effective slave dealers in Paris, scarcely paid, fed or housed, this year a number died of heatstroke in the fields. The affair hasn’t received that much publicity, as would be expected in a Liberal society. After all, this is what competition does to wages and conditions of work.

In practice, Liberalism is a nihilistic philosophy which treats all social and family relationships, all community, all shared culture and history, all altruistic feelings and actions, as obstacles to be eliminated in the teleological progression towards a utopia where human life will consist of nothing else but rational, self-interested choices. Thus, decisions about personal relationships, whether to get married, whether to have children, how to behave to friends, family and colleagues, are guided purely by considerations of rational self-interest. To the extent that the vast majority don’t want to, and never have wanted to, lead an empty and meaningless life based on egoism and selfishness, Liberalism has had to struggle mightily to suppress the most fundamental characteristics of human nature. Indeed, Liberalism is by some measure the most ambitious, longest-lasting and most ruthless piece of attempted utopian social engineering in human history. It is also incontestably the most successful, given its political dominance in the West, and its wider global influence.

But as an ideology it is purely destructive, incapable of knowing where to stop. Its adherents see themselves as “removing obstacles to competition,” but in spite of the trumpeted qualification “free and fair,” in practice its institutions make no real attempt to apply any moral or ethical checks on economic activity, or even to enforce such laws as may exist. (Indeed, enforcing laws on conditions of work puts your country at a competitive disadvantage compared to countries that don’t.) The result, as you might expect, is a social and economic race to the bottom, where every time you think you’ve heard it all, something worse turns up. The inevitable result is the reduction of the human being to the status of raw material, to be used up and thrown away. No wonder our caste of techno-fantasists looks forward to a work-force of robots. We are half-way there already.

This is usually the stage of the discussion of any failed philosophy where the “no true Scotsman” argument is wheeled out. It’s never been properly tried/you’ve misunderstood what X wrote to Y in year Z/ this modern book explains how to do it properly/that’s not what the founders wanted/the theory has been perverted, and so on. And no doubt Liberals can be found who were kind to children and animals and personally charming to others. But by your fruits shall you know them, and it must have been obvious from the start that a theory of radical egoism and selfishness which sought to overturn tradition and society and introduce a value-free world of the pursuit of self-interest, was going to finish badly. Critics in the early days of Liberalism understood and articulated this very well, whether they were traditionalists of crown and church, or socialists and anarchists. Thinking Liberals today increasingly resemble those deluded scientists from 1950s science fiction films: if only I had realised the implications of what I was doing at the time….

So person’s impersonality to person has been part of Liberalism from the start. Now of course slavery and other forms of extreme exploitation of humans go back thousands of years in nearly all parts of the world. But what is new in the last century or so, is exactly the rational management of this exploitation that we would expect from Liberalism, with its worship of abstract “efficiency.” Because the current Liberal treatment of human beings as raw material to be managed and then disposed of has some antecedents, and quite disturbing ones at that, in the totalitarian dictatorships of the last century. We tend to forget that when the Bolsheviks began the process of modernising the new Soviet Union, the model they turned to was the United States: the acme of technological and managerial innovation of the day. The new government structures (the Soviet Communist Party was the original Professional and Managerial Caste) eagerly embraced American management theory, and sought salvation through statistics. (Stalin was a particular fan of the American management guru Frederick Taylor, and fascinated by the manufacturing methods of Henry Ford.) There were targets for everything: even the NKVD was given targets for the number of Trotskyist agents it was to uncover and arrest, which led to practical problems later.

How far Stalin’s purges were calculated and how far they were the result of a paranoid personality, historians will debate for ages. But the purges encouraged nothing so much as the rational pursuit of individual self-interest, which in this case meant denouncing your colleague before he or she could denounce you. Even the NKVD tore itself to pieces with enthusiasm, and power and survival in the Party came not from competence or expertise, but from exactly the grubby PMC skills of today: toadying, finding patrons, keeping your head down, and most of all mastering the verbiage and clichés of Stalin’s brand of Marxist-Leninism. The result of the Taylorite managerialist mentality of the Party was the ruthless abstraction of human beings into mere numbers to fulfil production quotas and construction targets, especially through the use (and abuse) of prison labour, in which tens of thousands died.

But that was just the twentieth century limbering up. I’ve previously compared the Nazis to psychopathic management consultants, and it was they who perfected the use of human beings as mere factors of production, to be procured, used and thrown away when no longer needed. The work camps run by the Nazis (we won’t go into the confusing terminology of “concentration” camps now) sought to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of the populations of the conquered countries. Their economies were looted, their resources were stolen, their populations were essentially serfs. Above all, there was a need for labour. The use of prisoners for forced labour had begun in Germany itself in the 1930s, largely as a cost-saving measure. It was later generalised to occupied territories, especially in the East, where the fit were put to work and those unable to work were killed. (The prototype MBAs of the SS—which attracted many intellectuals—no doubt gave prototype PowerPoint presentations on the advantages of such schemes)

Yet actually, it was already running out of control: the process was taking over. Records show furious arguments between different parts of the SS about the treatment of prisoners. Even their fate seemed arbitrary, trapped in a system that by then no-one really controlled. So about 200,000 French people were deported to camps in Germany, around a third for direct Resistance activities, the rest for a variety of political reasons. (Only about half survived.) Yet there was little logic in their selection. Some Résistants were shot out of hand, some were shot after a trial, some were deported and killed immediately, some were used as slave labour, some were even forced to work as specialists. Nobody knew why, and lives were taken or saved on an apparently arbitrary basis. The Italian resistance worker Primo Levi, a scientist whose life had been spared because he had skills in chemistry, tried asking a guard at Auschwitz why things were organised as they were in the camp. Hier is kein warum was the answer: there are no “why”s here.

That could do, really, as the motto for Liberal society. There are no why’s, only process and procedure. There are no real purposes, but only sheaves of useless “objectives.” The only answer is “because.” Outcome does not matter. I was talking to someone recently who had undergone a treatment for cancer which had left her with unnecessary neurological damage. The treatment could have been stopped earlier, but “the protocol” for the treatment apparently could not be varied, even by eminent surgeons. Another in the endless series of triumphs of form over substance and process over objective which necessarily characterise a mature Liberal society. In the end, patients are just another input, like surgical masks and medicines. It’s the process that counts. And this is now typical of organisations as a whole: universities have many better things to do than waste time and money educating students properly, just as private companies now hate their clients and try to rob them. Decades ago, when the “people are our most important asset” nonsense started, (if that were true you wouldn’t need to keep saying it) I came across a Dilbert cartoon which expressed the real situation admirably. I thought it had vanished, but I found it again here.

In their defence (assuming anyone wanted to defend them) the Soviets and the Nazis at least thought they were trying to accomplish something. Stalin may have used human beings as mere units of account, but the White Sea-Volga Canal did open in 1933, ahead of schedule and in spite of thousands of deaths among the mainly prison labour force. Even the Nazis were in principle trying to support their war effort with millions of forced labourers, although the urge to exterminate inferior races versus the need for a workforce actually capable of working, produced a bureaucratic shambles which makes the horrifying human suffering involved even more grotesque.

By contrast, Liberal managerialism, as I have suggested, really has no objectives at all, other than the vague teleological search for a state of pure competition and infinite personal freedom, both by definition unattainable in this world, and both requiring unrelenting destruction of all organisation and society that might obstruct them. It is this quasi-religious aspect, I think, that helps to explain many of the most puzzling features of actually-existing Liberalism. After all, turning your back on Growth and Progress may provide short-term financial benefits for those who have too much money anyway, but it is already starting to negatively impact the lives of the Liberal priesthood itself. Decaying infrastructures, failing education systems and rotting public services will ultimately impact everyone, up to the evilest moustache-twirling villain. When Amazon can’t deliver packages because it can’t recruit people who can read, because some areas of cities are controlled by drug gangs, and roads and bridges aren’t safe enough to use, then a certain kind of nemesis will have arrived. Restaurants are already closing in major cities because staff can’t afford to live locally. Suddenly, the local wine shop closes because the franchisee can’t afford the rent. The local garage that services both of your cars shuts down. The supermarket on the corner closes early because it’s too dangerous for staff to take public transport at night. This is starting to look serious, even if the statistics say everything is fine.

A generation ago, Thomas Frank pointed out the dangers of deifying “the Market” and thinking of it in the way that recalls the operations of religion. He was writing about the US, but such ideas have now spread widely. In a way that would have seemed inconceivable at any other point in history “the Market” has been reified, as though it was an actual existing thing, like the weather, and not shorthand for hordes of grubby and often ignorant people buying and selling bits of electronic paper. Yet the fundamental point of the Market, of course, is supposed to be that it is benevolent, if only we worship and leave it alone. And it has many of the attributes of God, one of which is omniscience.

The first time you encounter the theory of Perfect Competition (sometimes called Perfect Information), you will probably think you’ve stumbled on a parody of the dumbest features of modern economics. But no, it exists, it dominates economic thinking, and Amazon is full of expensive textbooks about it. It says that all actors in the economy have perfect information about prices and supply, that all competitors make interchangeable goods of the same quality and that there are no transaction costs such as advertising, transport, rents, borrowing or staff. No wonder most people think it’s a parody. It would mean that if I wanted to buy a blue shirt, for example, I would have perfect information about the cost and availability of all blue shirts (which would be identical) and in turn shirt manufacturers would know the price and other preferences of all potential buyers of blue shirts. I could walk into the first menswear shop I pass, and buy the first blue shirt I saw, confident that it would be exactly what I wanted at the price I was prepared to pay, and the shop was prepared to sell (which would be the same price as all the other shops, because perfect competition.)

Put like this, the idea seems as lunatic as it really is. But here’s an economist, who spent last Saturday afternoon actually looking for a blue shirt he liked and couldn’t find one, to tell us that of course this is only an “idealised model.” In practice, yes, the world is more complicated than that, but isn’t this a useful mechanism for judging how “imperfect” actual competition is, so that it can be made more perfect? No, not really. It’s like teaching principles of meteorology by assuming that temperatures, winds and rainfall are identical everywhere in the world, before going on to look at “imperfections.”

Yet as often, it’s not the staring-eyed theologians and ideologues who are the real problem, but rather the decision-makers who half-listen to them. The idea of “the Market” as a self-regulating mechanism where a hidden hand will actually resolve all problems at a higher level of abstraction, has wormed its way into the collective unconscious of decision-makers even if they can’t quite understand how. Meanwhile, like medieval theologians economists tell us not to worry if things seem to be going the wrong way, because powerful forces we can’t comprehend will sort them out in ways we can’t understand. Until they don’t. So in France, the France Telecom monopoly was broken up in the name of “competition” and there are four mobile telephone operators (of which the old FT, now Orange, is by some way the best.) However, the market isn’t really big enough, and one of the four is in a bad way and may be bought by another. So the government is now being asked to spend public money to subsidise the market, to keep four operators in business, to maintain competition to keep prices down. Of course a government monopoly can set prices as cheaply as it likes, but that would be no fun. And so on.

If we keep in mind the essentially religious nature of belief in “the Market,” several things about the last couple of decades become clearer. Most importantly, decisions taken by “the Market” are necessarily right, even if mortals cannot understand them. Thus, closing factories, offshoring production, de-skilling industry, becoming dependent on potentially unfriendly countries for raw materials, were all the right decisions to take, because all decision taken by “the Market” are necessarily right, even if mere mortals cannot understand them. In the Liberal frame of reference, competition always produces the right answer, unless government interferes.

But you can take the logic further. Maybe We Don’t Need no Edukayshun after all, beyond elementary level. If there’s no market for engineers and scientists, then we might as well close the Departments down, because they are clearly not needed. After all, if there was a need for them, employers would be demanding that universities produce more. If the actual provision of education, technical training, infrastructure skills, foreign languages and manual skills was important, then the private sector would be competing to provide it. But if the actual decisions of economic actors are to slash and burn the education and health systems, infrastructure and industrial capacity, well those must be the right decisions even if we can’t understand why, we just have to take it on faith. Higher rates of crime because there are not enough police, longer waiting times because there are not enough doctors, falling educational standards because there are not enough teachers, are problems that will all be mysteriously put right in the end.

On the other hand, if ultimate objectives have to be left to the higher wisdom of the market, we can have a lot of fun with the management of the process itself, and make a lot of money out of it. Thus, the luxuriant growth of administrative weeds around the operational parts of every organisation today. In the end, it doesn’t matter if students get a good education: they’ll get a certificate, which will entitle them to a job (or at least it did) where their competence won’t matter because the gods of Liberalism will sort it all out in the end. The quality of the student intake and the teaching staff doesn’t matter, in the end, what’s important is stuff that we can measure like skin colour and sexual orientation. Liberalism is, as many have noticed, a secular form of Deism, where the universe is so structured by a benevolent but absent God that once the button is pushed, it will automatically produce, if not necessarily utopia, then as Leibniz thought the best outcome that was feasible in the circumstances. There is little or nothing that humans can do to make that outcome even better, and it’s advisable not to try.

Nonetheless, the attempt to impose, sometimes by literal force, an ambitious, utopian scheme of social and economic reform has brought with it certain problems. The most obvious, is that the tenets of Liberalism—competition on the basis of rational self-interest—run directly counter to how most people want to live their lives. In general, people will cooperate with each other where possible, and form and maintain bonds of community. They will also hold to ethical and moral standards that go beyond individual self-interest. Moreover, a society based on self-interest alone simply cannot endure: as I’ve pointed out several times, a Liberal society depends for its very survival on the commitment of people (doctors, teachers, policemen, people who empty the rubbish) who don’t work primarily out of self-interest. Likewise, the forcible introduction of Liberal ideas into organisations (using money to motivate people, slashing numbers and reducing prospects, forcing people to compete with each other, covering everything in layers of bureaucracy) destroys those organisations, with consequences that finally affect the Liberal PMC itself. And finally, from a very long list, the lack of any ethical foundation to Liberalism itself, and its destruction of already existing foundations, necessarily encourages unethical and criminal behaviour, since dishonesty is a rational type of self-interested behaviour. As I’ve pointed out before, corruption is actually logical and rational in a Liberal society, and Liberalism has no argument of principle against it. And of course the lack of trust between individuals and organisations so engendered, means endless laws and regulations designed to cope with the consequences.

It’s sometimes argued that the basic value of Liberalism is freedom, but most unbiased observers would have difficulty in believing that today. Origins matter: the”freedom” that the original Liberals sought was essentially to promote their own economic and political interests and opinions, and organise politically against the monarchy. They sought power and freedom from constraint for themselves, whilst working to deny it (often brutally) to ordinary people. The generalisation of Liberal principles is by definition impossible, because freedom is not cumulative, it is (ironically) competitive. So Liberalism promotes exactly the competitive attempt to impose obligations on others in the name of “my freedom” that we would expect it to. Because there are no ethical standards in Liberalism, arguments are therefore conducted in courts, before judges, who are supposed to simply interpret the law and say technically who is right, and whose freedom should prevail. The result is to hand over what are basically political and ethical judgements to groups of legal scholars who are hopelessly ill-equipped for the job, and ultimately to bring the law into disrepute. This is also, ironically, why Liberal societies, allegedly so much in favour of personal freedom, have introduced so many laws regulating personal behaviour: they have no other way of tackling the social problems they have themselves created. Freedom has to be destroyed in order to save it: a familiar argument from history, I think.

But surely personal freedom means that you can do whatever you want as long as it only affects you? Not so fast. A couple of weeks ago an online personality in France who had made a fortune from being voluntarily insulted, humiliated and assaulted by his colleagues, died in front of his audience. Once again, Liberal opinion is starting to say that well, there must be some limits on what people are allowed to freely consent to, because the unfortunate individual concerned surely could not have freely chosen to suffer in this way, he must have been manipulated. Bring in some sub-Foucault theorising on hierarchies of power, patriarchy, etc. etc. and we can see that quite soon your “freedom” to do certain things might be cancelled because you are judged not to be really “free.”

I cited last week a comment by Guy Debord that Liberal societies prefer to be known by their enemies than by their results. When you have no results, you need an awful lot of enemies. This is one of the main reasons for the unreasoning hatred of Russia at the moment. The externalisation of tensions in a political environment drained of any content is bound to be uncontrolled and violent, and of course the existence of an external enemy gives you, in turn, an excuse for identifying and targeting internal enemies you seek to identify with them. This is what Liberal societies do instead of politics. But when external enemies fail to satisfy, or become outdated, those energies which would normally be directed into healthy debate and arguments over policy become just about faction-fighting and purging your enemies. And if the Party is not to destroy itself, it must find, or if necessary create, agreed enemies in society at large.

And so we get to the sordid tragicomedy of the struggle against the “extreme Right,” which recalls nothing so much as the struggle against Left and Right Deviationism in Stalin’s Russia. Where there were no enemies it was necessary to manufacture them, and provide them with dangerous and terrible ideologies. In reality, it’s been fifty years now since to was possible to neatly categorise ideas as “Left” or “Right.” Some “extreme Right” ideas such as controls on foreign ownership or the need for an industrial policy, were once part of the consensus of the time. Others, like controls on economic immigration were historically causes of the Left.

The Liberal evacuation of politics from politics, and its transformation into a technical managerial exercise, means that by definition the concerns of ordinary people must be ignored. To the extent that they cannot be ignored, they have to be de-legitimised by association with “extremism.” So the process is simple enough to describe. (1) refuse to talk about a problem of popular concern. (2) leave groups outside the Party as the only ones who will talk about it (3) claim that therefore only the “extreme Right” is interested in the problem. Thus, a political system which has nothing to offer and no moral or ethical base is at least able to find an enemy to mobilise against.

But there are signs that this cunning plan is no longer working as well as it did. People are concerned about poverty, insecurity, immigration, crime, their children’s education and many other issues not because they have been propagandised by the “extreme Right” but because of their daily lived experience. They are tired of being instructed what to vote against, while being offered nothing to vote for. The fact is, our political class and their parasites are not very bright, and in real life there are no moustache-twirling villainous masterminds behind them. But they are trapped by their own ideology and their propaganda, and no doubt they will still complacently be trying to quietly enjoy their property when the mobs arrive to smash the windows.