The Tyranny of Omnipotent Moral Busybodies

Pushing back against self-righteous politicians and their billionaire friends

By John Leake

Last night Dr. McCullough & I attended a wonderful gathering at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, California, hosted by Pastor Rick Brown. Upon meeting Pastor Brown, I was impressed by his prepossessing stature, which seemed an outward expression of great inner strength and calm. I immediately sensed that he’d been exposed to danger in his past, and perhaps even sought it. I therefore wasn’t surprised to read in his bio this morning that he’d been a rodeo bull rider in his youth. This reminded me of the time—years ago at a Christmas party in Texas—I met a bull breeder who told me that if I wanted “eternal bragging rights,” I was welcome to ride one of his small and immature bulls. I took the dare, but then, the next day, I lost my nerve as soon as I saw the “small” bull in the flesh.

Pastor Brown gave the opening remarks, during which he proffered one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

He followed this quote with a quotation of Maximilien Robespierre’s infamous praise of terror in his May 7, 1794 address to the National Convention.

The basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror. Terror without virtue is murderous, virtue without terror is powerless. Terror is nothing else than swift, severe, indomitable justice – it flows, then, from virtue.

I’ve long thought that Robespierre’s speech was an extreme expression of the huge moral blind spot in the hearts of all self-righteous people. The self-righteous are dangerous because they lack awareness of their own capacity for doing terrible things. As the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung put it, they fail to recognize their own “Shadow”—that is, the dark side of human nature that dwells in all of us.

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.

The Russian novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, characterized this moral deficiency as a form of sentimentality.

Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mother’s Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at the Traviata.

A deep, rich vein of this sort of humbug is a marked feature of Davos Men—those smug billionaires who descend on the World Economic Forum’s annual meetings in their private jets in order to lecture the laboring and middle classes about being better stewards of the earth and the need to “reset” our profligate ways.

Lewis, Jung, and Nabokov used different idioms to describe the same moral and spiritual catastrophe so garishly on display in the characters of California Governor Gavin Newsom, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and especially Australian Northern Territory chief minister, Michael Gunner—the epitome of a self-righteous fanatic.

Beware of billionaires such as Klaus Schwab telling us we “will own nothing and be happy.” Be ever vigilant about the danger of granting emergency power to preening malignant narcissists like Trudeau. The revolting exhortation, “We’re all in this together” bears an eery resemblance to slogans promulgated by Italian and German fascist propagandists.

It’s also the slogan uttered by state security operatives in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil—”a satire of technocracy, bureaucracy, hyper-surveillance, corporatism and state capitalism, reminiscent of George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four…”

As as old Michigander friend likes to say whenever he senses I could use a little gallows humor, “We’re all in this boxcar together.”