(Mostly Tiberius, some Cato, Benedict edited)
I am ashamed to have been a federal employee. Every week we were inundated with patriotic verbiage about how awesome we were, from our out of touch clueless leadership. (This was exceptionally bad during the weeks that followed our inept withdrawal from Afghanistan.) I had a long habit of ignoring the communications from the leadership, because it was always tone deaf, and the priorities they set and their intellectual and moral deficit upset me greatly. (More signs that I should have left long ago.) The truckers and nurses are showing us up, they are the real patriots. Anyone who is willing to face poverty to fight what they know is wrong, that person is actively doing something to fight this garbage, this tyranny, this fake news narrative propaganda.
My wife learned a gardening lesson last year. She has a pretty good green thumb but she's a confessed novice. She has a healthy mania for cleanliness (I am grateful!) so she trims the flowers and leaves off her bulbs at the end of blooming season every year. But she usually did not get those bulbs to grow again the next year, and she did not know why. Her sisters schooled her last year, that by doing that trimming she was killing the sexual reproduction process in the plants, effectively making them eunuchs.
A eunuch cannot have children. An animal that cannot reproduce is a sad creature. Part of the definition of biological life itself, is the instinct to reproduce.
Be patient with me I am going somewhere with this.
People in the First World today, especially "professional people," delay or foreswear having children.
They effectively neuter themselves, they make eunuchs of themselves. They pinch off the branch of their own family tree that goes back thousands of years.
I was dismayed in my federal service to learn how many of these highly educated intelligence analysts I worked with were married with no kids. "Double Income No Children", or DINCs; I never heard of this until I was a fed. You serve your country but you don't lay down seeds for the future?
They leave themselves nothing but the State to be loyal to. They have an awesome life, living in the here and now, traveling around the world, collecting toys and houses, building nothing, making no future.
Having a child makes you acutely aware of society at large, because you cannot control everything that affects your child. Having a child is definitely a window to the mysteries of life, and the hand of God.
DINCs in the federal workforce remind me of the eunuchs of imperial palaces in ancient times...no life but that of plots and counter-plots in the corridors of power. Cloaked in reams of words, using patriotism and the new thing, virtue-signaling by touting to be some sort of icon-smashing destroyer for racism and bigotry. All the while donning ever-thicker ideological lenses so they cannot see their own mantles of the New Bigotry.
How can you be a loyal civil servant and say that the head of that government is not your chief? If you have any integrity, then, resign! Otherwise shut up and learn how to be detached and perform your function!
Most federal workers are not political in the old-fashioned sense. They don't follow politics much, their main concerns are with their benefits and pay and promotions, their per diem when they travel, their possible trips to favorable locations...they are political in terms of having or following whichever agenda they think will gain them advancement. The bureaucracy is full of cliques. There is nothing at all special about our federal apparatchiks, other than the fact that they occupy too large a share of the economy. So presidents and politicians know that they must be won over, so they often get even more benefits, raises, and bonuses, in other words, political bribes.
Why was this not a story in the news during 2020-2021? That most federal workers stayed home? Why were Americans not scandalized by this? Stop and think; do you really think that the telework performed by home, if honest work there was, was performed at anything like normal productivity? Let me clue you in on something: classified work cannot be performed remotely. Yet employees of CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA, and a whole host of other secret and secretive agencies did NOTHING and stayed home for many months, and were paid. Why was this not mentioned in the headlines? Are all journalists now either married or related to federal workers? Do you know that Covid relief money was paid to federal employees that already had steady pay?
Apparatchiks - A Russian term for those people who work for an apparat, which is a department or bureau of a government.
You cannot underestimate the sheer venality of the USG federal worker-- they all took an oath to uphold the Constitution, but will do nothing to risk their "high 3" and assorted benefits package. What is "high 3"? It means that when you retire, your retirement payments will be based on the average of the highest paid three years of your career. So if a federal employee gets promoted but retires soon after, his high 3 average will not be raised very much. There are many who should retire but don't, endlessly chasing a higher "high 3".
So they are a huge sector of the workforce, and of the economy. Any president knows that they have to placate the "federal workforce." Presidents are not supposed to manipulate this workforce politically, but most succumb to the temptation. The Trump administration seemed to completely miss the bus on any such opportunity, but I doubt they would have made much headway. Just by looking at the names of the speakers invited to NSA, I knew that the agency had a unhealthy bias to Leftism and Liberalism.
It strikes me as significant that so many of the federal employees that I met had no children. I don't know how many. I am possibly distracted by this and possibly making too much of it. It reminds me of ancient empires in China, Persia, the Ottomans, and the Byzantines. Supposedly if they don't have children, they are more loyal to the state. But they are usually recorded in history unfavorably, possibly because the practice disgusted the Western author. Whispers and plots in the palace corridors. I often saw traces of this in government.
What do you think?
#eunuchs
#Federales
#apparatchiks
I like your writing style and am glad that you discovered the depth of depravity our government has sunk to these days. I've always been a skeptic but once Trump was elected the sheer amount of propaganda directed at him overwhelmed me (loathed trump but now see that he was fighting uphill against morally depraved ghouls) and I succumbed to it until Covid happened. The sheer irrationality of every mandate and preventative measure finally snapped me out of my trance, seems like something similar happened to you. Everyone in this country has been subjected to insane levels of propaganda for at least 75 years now so the fact you've awoken to it shows that you are capable of critical thought, that's a skill that the "elite" have been trying to destroy, just look at public education. Your screen name, Cato, is the name of a character in a series of novels written by Simon Scarrow that are about 2 centurions serving in the Roman army during the conquest of Britain in 44 AD. As the series goes on they eventually end up in Syria, I'm on the 10th novel now, think there are 20 total, and highly recommend reading these if you're into Roman history.
I think you are making too much of the eunuchs. People with and without children can make the government their god and they can both also be political animals. One could argue that people with children are more prone to suckuppery since they have extra responsibilities at home. Eunuchs can tell the boss to piss off and go find another job and not worry about "encumbrances". Eunuchs are, though, less preoccupied, as a general rule, with legacy. Our country's legacy. What is left to and for the next generation. Some care deeply. Are they outliers? Who knows. You were in the NSA. Maybe you know. NSA sure has enough information to sort it. But they are probably concentrating on other things... all for the benefit of the people I am sure.