Leo Strauss: We’re better than you
Many of the leaders of the world’s largest corporations, large financial institutions including the World Bank, military groups, for-hire mercinaries organizations, evangelical Christian groups, and several major governments (the U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany, Mexico, Britain, etc.), are disciples of a somewhat obscure political science professor at the University of Chicago - Leo Strauss.
Strauss was a proponent of the idea that human beings were unequal in their intelligence, basic humanity, and important skills. Therefore he said, they were also unequal in their right to equality before the law.
He taught that most people are “too stupid” to make rational informed decisions about anything. Instead they needed an elite of philosophers to run things for them... and to tell them what to do. He formed this opinion in part by watching the Wiemar Republic of this birth degenerate to dictatorship with the rise of Hitler. Strauss had nothing against dictatorship, it was a god idea in his opinion. So long as the dictatorship was by the elite philosophical cadre which Plato and others convinced of their superiority, preferred.
He believed that western liberalism was destroying true (i.e. his idea of) morality, and therefore of society as a whole. Since most humans other than the elite were too stupid to make rational decisions about their society or about politics, they should not be allowed any say at all. Instead he taught that rule of the elite, of trained philosophers, must decide on affairs for the bulk of humanity. Of course this elite could consist only of those in agreement with Strauss.
But unlike Plato and so many other philosophers throughout history who believed the same thing, Strauss went one step further than most of these: He argued that radical measures, including deception, lying, and removal of individual human rights, were utterly justifiable in an effort to restore shared moral values to society. His philosophy was antagonistic to the modern philosophical (i.e. post-enlightenment view) of progressive evolution of thought and material, available to all through advancing physical science and technology. He believed that this post-enlightenment approach exposed the ‘common man’ to hard truths – the non-existence of a deity, biological imperatives rather than wise reason, the meaninglessness of ancestral tradition, and so on. Such exposure he said, was too difficult to for the average man. For these hard truths could only lead to nihilism, the meaningless life of the bourgeois, and to the dangerous hunt for new gods such as political demi-gods such as Hitler or alleged celebrities such as Paris Something-or-Other.
He believed only philosophers were of sufficient fortitude, intelligence, and training to withstand the rigours of truth, which must at all costs be hidden from the ‘common man’.
To put this in the broadest possible terms: At the core Strauss taught that all societies are hierarchical. For those at the pinnacle, there can be no moral code which limits them – the only right is their superiority, and their right to rule over all others. While the masses may embrace or believe in moral laws, for the elite, there were none. Hence because the masses were intrinsically wicked (uneducated, morally bankrupt, unworthy rabble) they must be controlled. The only way to control them is to unite them. And the best way for that is to unite them against an enemy. Imagined or real. A truly Straussian society operates most easily from the point of view of the rulers, in a state of perpetual war. And to perpetuate such a war, lies, deception, disinformation, and untruth were required. Hence a Straussian society requires amongst others things, a controlled and complicit press and should lying be insufficient, and armed force.
Now of course I have grossly simplified Strauss’ philosophy here. For details there are philosophical schools at a number of post-secondary institutions devoted to interpreting and expounding his ideas. Unfortunately his ideas and writings are not very clear and therefore have been interpreted in various ways. For example he decried Niccolò Machiavelli’s work as ‘evil’, yet his own work at points seems to embrace notions which the author of The Prince would have found far too extreme.
For example, Strauss opposed the idea of individual human rights, suggesting that nothing from the writings of philosophers in pre-modern times indicated that there should be absolute limits on state power. This latter is of course wildly historically inaccurate. One small example: Norton indicates that what Strauss and his followers liked so much about the U.S. president Abraham Lincoln was that Lincoln was more than willing to operate outside the law. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed dissidents, and viciously suppressed free speech. Lincoln was an ideological crusader for whom coercion and excesses of power were allowable under Straussian thought, for the furtherance of his goals. The later revisionism of Lincoln’s role not withstanding.
An important tool of enforcing ones leadership of the ignorant masses was though use of what Strauss termed “regime change”. Here the elite political philosophers were entitled to use any and all means to ensure that those in power antithetical to their (the elite’s) views, were deposed. (It is interesting to note that when an unelected Straussian in a coup d’etat took over a powerful nation, the term ’regime change’ became justification for the genocide he then ordered.) Bottom line: any means to gain and hold power were acceptable.
Since Strauss felt that the role of politicians was to assert power absolutely, it was quite natural (to him) that one of the means to do this woudl be through the purposeful creation of inspiring myths and illusions. That is to say, crazy big lies. He discussed this in various ways, perhaps most famously as the distinction between ’esoteric’ and ’exoteric’. The former being used to conceal the latter. Therefore it would be acceptable to a Straussian to create the myth that the citizenry was under threat from dedicated and organized stop-at-nothing people who hated them.
Combining the goals of regime change with mythical illusion led to Strauss’ championing of the so-called ‘Noble Lie’. This tool was allowed to the ruling elite of political philosophers since they were the only group sufficiently intelligent to discern and do what had to be done. The ‘Noble Lie’ therefore, or as we might more properly calling ’lying through ones teeth’, was the quickest means of cajoling the masses to do ones bidding. Hence the obvious lie that a poor nation with a tiny army and almost no modern weaponry was ready to set the world on fire, was to Strauss’ followers, fully acceptable in order to convince a reluctant public to invade said nation and grab their resources.
This ’Noble Lie’ was little more than a modern rephrasing of an old idea. Plato stated quite clearly that in his opinion philosophers needed to tell ’noble lies’ to the people at large. Why, because the people were incapable of making right (i.e. what Plato considered ’right’) decisions for themselves. That in so doing Plato completely abrogated the methods and teaching of Socrates, who believed in truth for all was as for Straussians, irrelevant. Locke who also despised the rabble, felt the same as Plato. As have done many other throughout history from the assassins of Caesar, to the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko with polonium 210.
Strauss felt that the ’realism’ of Thrasymachus or Machiavelli was practical and realistic. Plato was right to call for rule by elite. And if falsification and subterfuge were necessary to defeat the intelligence of the vulgar masses, so be it. In his lectures Strauss argued that the rights of the individual ought to be sacrificed for the public good. That the rights of the many out way those of the few, as Spock would say. How to determine which rights should be sacrificed? Strauss’ answer, like so so many western philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Kant Hegel, Margaret Thatcher) was to let the elite decide. Let the ’haves’ decide what the ’have nots’ should be allowed - a philosophy whose emblem should be a mountain of corpses rampant on a field of blood, for those who consider themselves above others have a long history of promulgating and perpetuating war and suffering from their arm chairs.
The Noble Lie is is also the basic tenet of many religions. That is, those religions which teach their priestly classes that the masses are ignorant and must be led to the religious leaders’ version of truth. The methodology use for this is invariably
via indirection similar to what Strauss proposed. The pretencion that if a lie could ever lead anyone to truth does seem to be an odd line of reasoning.
Regardless much of Strauss’ writing can be seen as antithetical to Foucault, Bourdieu, and in particular Heidegger (whom he knew personally). Strauss was also opposed to most of the other post-modern thinkers. Instead he was partial to the emphasis on value given by Weber and Nietzsche. That is to say, relativism in the context of generating historical momentum. Not to put too fine a point on it, he preferred reason over revelation as he believed that latter undermined the rule of the oligarch. To my reading, he was oblivious to the fact that his preference of ’reason’ was a particularly narrow interpretation eschewing formal logic, fuzzy reasoning (a type of mathematics), and a host of other formal and informal reasoning systems. ’Reason’ to Strauss simply meant that his methods were correct, and others were not.
Therefore his Noble Lies in the service of his belief system were justified; the lies of others were neither noble nor justified.
What turned Strauss from a rather obscure and rather unoriginal philosopher was certainly not his rather pedestrian ideas. But rather it was the influence of those ideas upon several of those politicians lusting after power.
Strauss’ followers learnt to exploit populist sentiment in order to remove rights of minorities whom they felt to be undeserving of state largess. That is to say, they sought to remove the social safety net for the most vulnerable. They further sought to use the Noble Lie to replace the rule of law with a carefully controlled and guided populism. Strauss argued that the elite need to lie in order to protect themselves from possible reprisals. Hence the mantra ’we will reduce taxes if you elect us’, is countered by another lie ’the previous government misled us about the sate treasury – we cannot yet reduce taxes’. Noble lies protect their perpetrators says Strauss, and are valuable in keeping the elite in power. The strategy works rather well in controlling populist sentiment.
And is of course inimical to democracy.
"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. [...] The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practised in past centuries." — David Rockefeller, Honorary director of Council on Foreign Relations, honorary chairman of Bilderberg Group, founder of Trilateral Commission, etc.
The hypocrisy of those who assume power in the Straussian fashion has historically shown to be absent of limit. For there is no lie or fallacy they will fail to perpetrate upon the citizenry with patriotic and fear based appeal provided that the lie serves its purpose of keeping the citizenry docile and obedient.
and therefore have been interpreted in various ways. For example he decried Niccolò Machiavelli’s work as ‘evil’, yet his own work at points seems to embrace notions which the author of The Prince would have found far too extreme.