Only half the problem
Unz has a lengthy article on the power of blackmail, triggered by the Epstein mess.

Unz misses more than half of the story. He assumes that leaders do bad things because they're blackmailed into doing bad things. Single cause-effect.

Blackmail is certainly a force, but it's not the primary driver.

First, not everyone responds to blackmail. Deepstate likes to hire leaders with messy personal lives because they're easier to subdue. Some messy people turn out to have guts. Sometimes Deepstate has to go ahead and kill the disobedient leader, as they did with Harding and JFK and a hundred others.

Second, leaders have power. Some leaders are naturally evil, and all leaders can engage in counter-extortion. Unz says that Lady Edgar was blackmailed into going easy on the mob because she didn't want her tendencies to be exposed. Nonsense. The FBI was a mob from the start. All Federal "law" "enforcement" agencies are mobs, sometimes cooperating with other mobs and sometimes fighting them, as mobs do. Lady Edgar was the BEST blackmailer in the country, able to subdue most presidents.

Third, the whole country was founded by mobsters and pirates and smugglers. For the first 30 years after the revolution, much of our tax revenue came from officially authorized piracy. A potential leader who isn't already a mobster doesn't get very far, and doesn't WANT to get very far. As with any job, people without the proper qualifications don't pass the exam; and people without the proper passions leave the job when they realize they don't belong.

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Speculating on why some messy people have guts.... I think we're conflating two distinct types. Blackmail works best on living contradictions like Vidocq or the arsonist fireman. Working both ends of the same spectrum at once. Blackmailers can control the respectable end of the life by threatening to expose the criminal end. Most people with messy lives just don't give a flying fuck about public approval. They have enough confidence or enough depressive cynicism to simply do what they think is right. Blackmail doesn't work well on this type.

Looking at the effective leaders I've been discussing lately, Salvini and FDR belong to the confident type, while Putin and Harding belong to the depressive cynic type. Orban and AMLO are not blackmailable at all. Both have clean and simple personal lives. Their public lives are unfashionable, which doesn't provide a handle for the extortionist.

Labels: Constants and Variables

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