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C. Wright Mills and The Power Elite
Posted : 21 Oct, 2010 02:44 AM
C. Wright Mills was a University of Wisconsin Ph.D. when there was in Madison a concentration of talented people who had energy and momentum. At the university there was in the fifties an exceptional social, political, intellectual, artistic and literary public life. Unfortunately, the Christian public life that existed was highly conformist, and the Christian Remnant did not exist in Madison. As far as I know it is still absent from that city.
But the ruling elite may not want this type of concentration of exceptional people to exist in the major universities. And - C. Wright Mills wrote an early book on that ruling elite which stimulated additional academics to study the elite.
A radical sociologist from Waco, Texas C. Wright Mills explained why the Left is just as corrupt and immoral as the Right. He said in his 1956 book, The Power Elite,that political corruption is one aspect of a more general immorality Higher Immorality is institutionalized. He said the elite are in command of the major hierarchies of modern society. They rule the corporations, they run the machinery of the state. These hierarchies of state and corporation and army constitute the means of power; as such they are now of a consequence not before equaled in American history.
What he is saying is that by the fifties the major institutions of American society, especially government, corporations, education, the medical profession and institutional Christianity had developed into an extreme top-down order of control.
Because tremendous control over society could be exerted from the top of large corporations and from the top of the government, this hierarchy made it possible for a very small group of the ruling elite to have the power they now have. The ruling elite is not totally secret or behind the scenes; we know who some of them are. Now state, county and city governments follow the federal government. But this conformity was not the intent of the Founding Fathers. The corporate hierarchy has also driven a great many local small businesses out of business. For example, thirty, forty or fifty years ago, small grocery stores were scattered all over , but now we have to drive miles to Krogers, or Wal-Mart (Red China Central). There was more public social life in the small grocery stores of a bygone era than now in big chain stores like Wal-Mart.
On the pages off the Internet I found from The Power Elite (1956), he did not go into the psychological and spiritual makeup of this very small ruling elite. Below them there is a ruling class of bureaucrats,lawyers, doctors, professors, members of Congress, local officials,
etc.The radical Texas sociologist did not deal with the membership of the ruling elite in secret societies like Skull and Bones, nor with their
participation in Luciferian High Level Freemasonry. Psychologically. It appears that many of the ruling elite can be
described as mattoids, or highly cunning and intelligent psychopaths.
The Power Elite (1956) was the pioneering academic work on the ruling elite. Since 1956 there has grown up a literature by professors on the ruling elite which is mostly focused upon the Council On Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones, for example, was written by Antony Sutton who was a non-tenured faculty member at Stanford University. The Power Elite was published by Oxford University Press.
An outsider to the universities, the Texas sociologist attained to full
professorship at Columbia University. He claimed he was an outsider to the academic world because his Texas rancher grandfather had been killed in
a gunfight. Somehow that helped make him a maverick.
The Texas
sociologist graduated from the University of Texas and then went
to study at the University of Wisconsin as a grad student under the very unconventional German sociologist Hans Gerth, who used to do a good imitation of Hitler and had seen him. I was in one of professor Gerth's classes in 1957 when Gerth got into a brief fight with a
student who came into our classroom before Gerth had finished his lecture. I was a first year grad student at Wisconsin then and later finished my Ph.D. there. And, like Mills, I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin before going on to Wisconsin. I took only one class from Gerth, and my major was experimental psychology rather than sociology.
In The Power Elite Mills said no man makes himself, least of all the members of the American elite. In a world of corporate hierarchies, men are selected by those above them in the hierarchy in accordance with whatever criteria they use In a system of co-optation from above. Whether you begin rich or poor seems less relevant in revealing what kind of man you are when you have arrived than in revealing the principles of those in charge of selecting the ones who succeed.
This argument might have in part influenced Lionel S. Lewis to write his book, Scaling the Ivory Tower: Merit and Its limits In Academic Careers(1975), where he says image rather than merit is the most important criteria for selecting assistant professors as well as giving them tenure..
Another major criterion for selecting tenured professors is the
belief that they will not rock the boat. As a professor at Columbia, C. Wright Mills, the Texas sociologist, commuted to campus dressed
like a guerrilla warrior, with high top boots and a motorcycle helmet on his head. He
often carried an army surplus duffle bag on his back filled with books and notes. It would seem to me that his dress alone would be defined as rocking the boat by most present-day tenured professors. .
If, in the comic strip of a few years ago, Dr Onemug were to leave Alley Oop in
Moo for a while and use his time machine to transport C. Wright Mills in his
guerrilla warrior outfit from the year 1958 to present day Columbia University,
the products of the overgrown sissy nurseries (universities) might run
screaming down Park Avenue. Then they might call "Heartbreak Ridge" (Korea 1951, Homeland Security) and report this terrible terrorist.
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