Power and its Enemies

                  

                     Power and its Enemies




One of the difficulties in reflection on any problem is that we all bring our own colored glasses to the viewing room. So those with a special knowledge or dislike of religious persecution see religion as a special victim or persecutor. The aristocracy is an obvious target; few persecutions are from small groups so obviously unqualified to appoint themselves to lead. The Marxists target the historical backward waiting for displacement, i.e. most people. But this all omits the crucial element: Oppression. What we should always be concerned about is the arbitrary assumption of power. And we should particularly raise our concerns when groups try to undermine institutions and political infrastructure as policy; they can only want one thing.

This is from the witheringly brilliant Lord Acton and his February 26th, 1877, address to the Bridgnorth Institute, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity“:​

In the zeal for the popular interest, however, there was no provision for the unpopular, and the minority soon found itself at the mercy of the majority. The people, now sovereign, felt themselves bound by no rules of right or wrong, no criteria except expediency, no force outside of themselves. They conducted wars in the marketplace and lost them, exploited their dependencies, plundered the rich, and crowned their guilt with the martyrdom of Socrates. The experiment of Athens taught that democracy, the rule of the most numerous and most powerful class, was an evil of the same nature as monarchial absolutism and required restraints of the same sort: institutions to protect it against itself and a permanent source of law to prevent arbitrary revolutions of opinion. Men learned for the first time what later history was to confirm again and again: ‘It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.’