Power-holders cannot be criticized

A reader sends this very apposite quotation of Voltaire’s:

To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you are not allowed to criticize.

What Voltaire says is roughly true of all societies. But in liberal society there is a further twist. In liberal society you are not even allowed to identify who rules over you.

Why is this so? Because, as Jim Kalb pointed out many years ago, liberal society is the sole form of society in which the powerholders deny that they exercise power. They claim that they stand only for everyone’s equal rights.

UPDATE, August 28

As I argue in another entry, the fact that the diversity ideology is not criticized or even identified (that same diversity ideology which says that the purpose of NASA is to increase Muslim self-esteem; which says that the prevention of the Fort Hood massacre via the apprehension of Nidal Hasan would have been a “greater tragedy” than the massacre itself; and which conceals the fact that Hasan is a Muslim and portrays the massacre as an instance of workplace violence) proves that the diversity ideology rules over us.

- end of initial entry -

Terry Morris writes:

Your expansion of Voltaire’s principle puts me in mind of Federalist No. 1 wherein Alexander Hamilton writes:

… and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.

… and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 27, 2012 01:36 PM | Send