Dear George,
America has a new mission: economic insecurity for the proles through wages that are as thin as watered-down gruel. The razor with which you cut wages is the same razor with which you slash the safety net to shreds. A prole kept perpetually off balance and unsure of his future causes no trouble. He readily accepts whatever lie the State chooses to dangle before his eyes because in the certainty of that lie he catches a glimmer of the security that has been taken away from him.
To accomplish our mission, we must rehabilitate fate, and convince the proles that the hand of God is a clenched fist poised and ready to brain them with neither cause nor warning. This implies that any economic disaster, be it a major illness or a job loss, is an expressions of God’s wrath.
In describing the difference between Protestants and Catholics, Max Weber wrote that a Catholic sins, goes to confession, goes home, and gets a good night’s sleep. The Protestant, on the other hand, never sins and lies awake all night worried that he might have. We need to encourage a Protestant guilt that leads to the individualized self-monitoring so essential for an atmosphere of comprehensive social control.
Individual guilt fragments as anger over the arbitrary power of the State is repressed because the individual sees it as a form of deviant thought and keeps it to himself. This snuffs the flickering flame of rebellion before it has a chance to spread to others.
Prosperity gave us the anarchy of the sixties. Impoverishment will give us the oppressive security of the twenty-first century.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
5:37:45 AM 
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