The ANTI-INTELLECTUAL: a Menace and a Hypocrite. [Part IV.]

I thought I recognized this jerk and then I found this joke. Let’s read his famous quote, the very definition of a sin, made darker and more blatant by the irony of ignorance and of denial:

“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”

Let us paraphrase that, shall we? “Why’s it murder that I killed those people? It’s the State that’s killing me for doing so!” “Why is it rape I had my way with her? It is the prison system that rapes me!” “Why is it torture that I hurt those people to get what I wanted? What is greater torture than to be denied?” “Why is it crime of war we bombed that country? *Our* country does not recognize their independence!!”

Go ahead and tell me, once again, that it’s not *greed* that you are sitting, like a bloated dragon-hoarder, on the wealth you stole — I’m sorry: “earned” — with no intent to benefit your fellows. Go ahead and tell us it is *we* who are responsible for robbing *you*.

And then I’ll answer plainly: money never is “somebody else’s”. It is mine because it’s ours, and, if you don’t recognize that fact, it is no longer yours. You have not “earned” it but by virtue, and, without that virtue and its fruits, your property — not our taxes on that property — is theft.

“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned…”

Even Chairman Drek perceives the irony at work...

Such is the very definition of the sin, the very nature of the problem: greed is willing to possess instead of share, though others are in greater need. It’s to acquire for yourself and not to earn for Others. It’s to use the instruments of State for *your* advantage, so corrupting those same instruments, then keeping the advantage you have taken by demanding rights and vilifying those same institutions you corrupted when they seek reform for the corruption. You have broken the machinery of State to serve yourself and your own belly, then, when that machinery is fixed and would deprive you of your bounty, you insist that it was always broken by design, though it was you that violated its design by breaking it.

The nature of the sin was saying, “This is mine; it is not yours.” The irony is that it only could be yours by being ours, though the nature of the sin obscured that fact. Denying it as being ours, you have made it so it is no longer yours yet still is mine. So I am left to parrot your own words: “It is not yours, but mine.”

Yet you have made it so by trying to possess it for yourself. It’s not my greed but yours that robs you of your station. Blameless people won’t sit idly by in watching you corrupt their institutions and defame us; we would have you follow the example we have set, for that is what the institution truly needs if it’s to work, and, if you do not wish for it to work, except for you, then you can’t say that you have truly worked for it and earned its powers.

It is greed that says, “This isn’t yours; it’s mine.” It’s greed that also says, “That isn’t mine; it’s someone else’s.” Either form commits the selfsame sin: it segregates the Self from Other, based on acquisition rather than discretion. It deludes itself by thinking in such narrow and repulsively myopic terms, content with its own lot in life when greater matters happen all about it.

Evil pilfers sins in little dribs and drabs, pretending to have “earned” them when it merely has acquired them for its own purposes. Yet nothing can be earned except by virtue, and the mark of virtue is in magnanimity and generosity, pursuing common goods beyond one’s private person. It is never just that such a spirit should be hampered by the self-entitlement of smaller minds, and if such smaller minds put on a show of dignity by “working hard” they but corrupt those very institutions which they claim to serve. Their acquisition is a theft, since it is founded on a lie, a show of decency concealing private motives, motives which are utterly corrupt *because* they’re private, since no more is necessary to invalidate them.

Yet like any villain avaricious men will try to pin the blame on those who seek to bring them down. They’ll make of their own sin an act of “moderation”, and they’ll make of all resistance an “extreme”. “I merely wanted what I earned,” they cry, “Now I am robbed by these extremists.”

Yet is it extreme to combat blatant evil? No. Denying sin by claiming moderation only adds to it; dismissing virtue as “extreme” will only make it that much more severe. It is not avaricious to deprive you of your earnings if by doing so I help more people or those with the greater need. It’s rather avaricious of you to refuse these ends and substitute your own, since avarice is truly nothing more than seeking to acquire for oneself instead of seeking to acquire for an Other.

We’re not merely doing what you’re doing in a more neurotic way (hypocrisy); we’re doing the antithesis of what you’re doing, in a righteous way (superiority). The fact remains that you are doing what you *think* that we are doing, and you’re in denial of it. Yet the difference (between your own hypocrisy and that of which we are accused) is that we do *not* do what you believe we’re doing, and we are not merely in denial of it, since we know that what we’re doing serves a higher purpose.

It’s this very higher purpose which you must incessantly deny, since failing to deny it would be to expose that you’re the greatest hypocrite of all, not only for accusing us of that which you are doing, but accusing us of that which we don’t even do, and doing so in such a way that you accuse us of that same hypocrisy which you commit, attempting to disarm our “elitism” when we but seek equality of higher quality than that equality you seek, by *your* elitist means, for *your* elitist ends, to institute.

Ergo, in order to assuage all accusations of hypocrisy against yourself, you must deny the possibility of any “higher good” which would absolve your adversary of the guilt you bear. In order to deny your sin and the extremes you’ve gone to in defending it, you must preclude all hope of human beings living as true equals in a satisfying social order. You resign yourself to cynicism only to defend your narcissism, to the point that even heroism has to be dismissed as narcissistic just so that a nihilistic worldview might persist. You wanted to possess the power for yourself, and so you’ve made it that your enemies must now exclude you from its bounty, which is ever shared among the noble-minded whom you hate.

Life is not tragic; only yours is.

**[({R.G.)}]**

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