[lit-ideas] Re: Anzio and the meaning of war

EY:
I think you should consider my semi-serious "20 percent hold back the other 80 percent" thesis.
I have seriously considered your semi-serious thesis and have decided that you've got it backwards. It's not 20 percent holding back the 80, rather they're leading the 80 into behaviors that benefit the 20. And it's not 20 percent, rather, it's more like 2 percent. It's the ruling elite (the oligarchs -- mostly the very wealthy) and the insane. 98 percent of the human race is too damn busy making a living to pay attention to politics, and even if they did pay attention, they don't own the police, the 2 percent do. If you're a good boy, loyal and true, then the 2 will feed you, set you up in a nice house in the suburbs, call you "sir". If you balk, talk back, it's off with to the mines with you. Come along now, that's just the way things are, always have been. Best we tend to our poetry, leave death and destruction to the big boys and the crazies. We don't really have any choice anyway. 

Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric Yost" <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 10:15 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Anzio and the meaning of war



LH: Wars often, perhaps usually, decide things.
If they are decisive defeats they provide provisional decisions, which is the only type of decision humanity has really known ... unless freedom, democracy, and the value of the individual really have staying power.
I think you should consider my semi-serious "20 percent hold back the other 80 percent" thesis.
LH: Why would the Athenians want to attack the democratic Syracuse it in the middle of the Peloponnesian War?
That was Alcibiades, wasn't it? Clearly one of those 20 percent. A narcissistic goofball who forgot everything Socrates tried to teach him, 


Aspiring to rise above the 20 percent,
Eric
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html 

------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts: