More thoughts regarding comfortable, powerful people who seem willing or even eager to blow up the system.

I wanted to elaborate on my post from yesterday, about comfortable, powerful people who seem willing or even eager to blow up the system. It’s a bit of a puzzle why they’re not happy with incremental gains, given that they already have so much and they’re well situated to keep getting more. The best answer, I think, is that these activists think that the current system is (a) going in the wrong direction and (b) unreformable. That’s how left-wing activists in the 1960s thought about the military-industrial complex and it’s how right-wing activists today think about an unsustainable debt caused by mandated payments to special interests. (Of course I’m drastically simplifying in both cases, just trying to give the basic picture.) A similar case could be made by comfortable environmental activists who say that our industrial society is unsustainable. The difference is that environmentalists today, unlike left-wingers in the 1960s and right-wingers today, are far from power: some…