The Cuntocracy or: How well is David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ going these days?

Why not call the present political system a ‘cuntocracy’?  It is most certainly not a democracy—at least not the type any one would want.  We need a new name for not just what our leaders do to us because of greed and stupidity: we need an accurate irrefutable term for all of society’s organisation as an undesirable but innate feature of the effects of the power-hungry.  We need a term who’s very existence and use will return power to the ordinary people—or at least give them a voice and provide a way to talk back to those who pose as leaders but take us nowhere.  If people in power object: then the term is working.

So what are our base assumptions? Well, there is probably only one ‘law’ that we could say social science ‘discovered,’ and this seems to have been by sheer flippancy. This was Lord Acton’s statement (in a letter to a Bishop) that all power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. No one has thought to extrapolate our one law further to establish its social determinants. You are simply not allowed to.  Nevertheless, we can adapt Acton’s Law into: all power tends to create cunts and absolute power creates total cunts.

If power and cuntishness are thus implacably entwined we can say that they would form a metaphysical pathos.  An inescapable trap of becoming a cunt awaits the power-hungry individual: a trap made of fate and vanishing freedom, confusion and loss of values, emotional colouring whether they are aware or not.  If you really believe that you rather than all the others should be in control the result is pessimism and fatalism towards all else, including analysis of the situation.  This trap gives rise to a functional rationality to keep the illusion going: the cuntocracy.  Max Weber’s concept of the inescapable ‘Iron Shell of Bureaucracy,’ or Marx’s ‘Barbarism’ as the incurable ‘leper of civilisation’ point to its social psychology.[1]

If mention of ‘capitalism’ is always off the media agenda, so that its effects on society can always be ignored or obfuscated, then we are being tacitly urged to switch to something else, something we can see everyday and everywhere: a cuntocracy. Who would need a lengthy theoretical excursion into the reality of a cuntocracy when they daily encounter the activities of every bureaucracy, or have recently spoken to their boss, or flicked through a few television channels and caught sight of the Police, Politicians, Bankers and Media Moguls saying something? So, given our present system of rewarding the wealthy for robbing the poor, it is vital that this reality is reflected in a terminological exactitude open to every citizen: other terms lack cuntocracy’s profound poetic grace.[2]

Most of them have come up with nothing particularly useful, but sociologists tell us that they have laboured away to arrive at an account of why our society is the way it is.  Let us leave them to it, and, with one term, state who is in control, as much as it can be said anyone is in control, and how they pull off the con. The advantage of ‘cuntocracy’ is that it does all this sociological work for us. But there is a problem here: sociologists make a living sublimating the ways of the powerful, so that people comply with directives from ‘above’. We are reversing this process for free, so that people do not. For academics, ‘society’ has to remain something of a perpetual mystery, although we know that they know which side of their bread is buttered. Yes, there are writers who have uncovered the existence of a cuntocracy in the ways of the powerful, but they are outcasts. Their work is totally unwanted because it reveals that the cuntocratic world has certainly been made by cunts, and its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of these cunts’ minds.  Universities are there to hide such knowledge (that reality is whatever powerful people say it is) using a sophisticated form of administrative pedagogical cuntocracy that involves the selection and employment of ignorant, lazy cuntocrats to run a system reproducing the cunnus quo at the expense of any encouragement of an awareness of it.

But a system largely based on bribery and compliance should be perfectly amenable for our purposes of selling the term, normalising it. If we wish to convince the intellectuals so that they can aid us spread the word, we will have to start by examining the theorists on whom the principles of the cuntocracy are clearly dependent: those who advanced being a ‘total cunt’ as a desirable condition. In the rest of this essay I will attempt to draft this out.

I

A good start would be Robert Michels’ the ‘iron law of oligarchy’, that took forever to insist that nature had determined that whatever the top cunts say goes.  It might well be wayward gibberish, but the chances are that it, and the theorists he uses to back it up, will offer a chance to find enough other cuntologists to provide the main thing that proves things to intellectuals: the academic citation. For example, Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca could be plundered to offer evidence of the ‘circulation of cunts.’  Surely too, there must be reams of it in James Burnham; but here we are only talking about neo-Machiavellianism mixed with people’s desperate desire not to be thought of as a communist. We should go back to the timeless master, Niccolo Machiavelli here.  Would not ‘The Cunt’ have made a better title than ‘The Prince’?

Some readers may be of the opinion that making up such a term is meaningless. What idiot would fall for something as obtuse as this? What half-wit would take it seriously and start using it?  Well the word ‘meritocracy’ was invented by Michael Young in his (1958) satirical book The Rise of the Meritocracy. Young’s joke was that the meritocratic class had gained a monopoly on ‘merit’ and got together with the symbols and designators of merit, to perpetuate its own power, status, and privilege.  He wrote in to the Guardian in 2001 pointing this out when Tony Blair started prominently using Meritocracy as part of running the country — to define what our society should aspire to.[3]  So it should be relatively easy for someone to drop ‘cuntocracy’ into some dreary ramble or manifesto once conference time crawls round again.

So what is the cuntocracy? Is it a class or an elite? Who are the cuntocrats?  How does it work? Class, it should be remembered, is not real as such, it is something people do to one and other, it is an interaction, the way you are treated and treat others. We will all have a barrage of suggestions as to what the main cuntocratic features of our society are: but the cuntocracy is not limited to bureaucracies: these are the reflections of the political institutions that empower them to act while I am talking about a totality. This explains why bureaucracies are run by cunts who continually find themselves saying: ‘I don’t make the rules.’

This bureaucratic adoption of a functional rationality also extends into a de facto code of silence that contributes to the practice of the cuntocracy hiding its actions and existance: any crisis that threatens the cuntocracy or its important members tends to trigger a closing of ranks to protect it from outside scrutiny, interference, and legal oversight. Class and bureaucracy form certain contours of the cuntocracy, but they are not the cuntocracy. When the cunts who ‘do not make the rules’ go home they only escape into a wider cuntocratic realm of which they too are at the mercy of.  Franz Kafka worked in an insurance company; this was where he got his ideas. Fiction, such as Kafka’s The Trial, or Huxley’s Brave New World, have ran ahead of us, with characters who sense that they have no effective defence against the cuntocracy that runs the World. [4]

Books such as Amoral Politics, outline thousands of years of experience to support the idea that political institutions are fundamentally amoral and constitute a cuntocracy.[5]  This ‘bureaucratic amorality’ is basically the Nazis’ claim that they could not be held personally responsible because they had a legal duty to achieve politically empowered tasks to the exclusion of anything else: either they were following orders or the law, or did not know the consequences of their actions. But they were still total cunts.[6] Possibly the Nazis were the Cuntocracy par excellence, but we will have to play this down as just one example amongst a rich field of history.  Our task is to win over the intellectuals, many of whom, if pushed, might disagree with some of the Nazi’s methods: so we are going to need to put it on solid (i.e. more generally acceptable) theoretical grounds; but we do not want to chuck the baby out with the bath water, let our watchword be subtlety.

II

The academics —the smart cunts— might ask their usual questions as to the established theoretical foundation and provenance of our term: where does it come from (that has nothing to do with the working class) and what acceptable people have gone along with it (so that they can)?  The difficulty of tracking down the exact origin of something can be obviated if we simply provide our own mythology.  People are a lot more willing to go along with myths rather than waste time finding out facts.  If a trick works once it might just work again, for example: one overlooked aspect of F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (the book Margaret Thatcher slapped the table with saying that it had taken over her mind) is in a short section called ‘Why the Worst Get on Top’, where it is argued that the most amorally flexible people involved in a bureaucracy tend to rise to the top and become its leaders.[7]  Hayek pretended he was writing on ‘totalitarianism,’ something he largely invented to roll the Soviets, Nazis and socialists into one; but bureaucracies are much the same everywhere, and it is clear from the examples he uses that we are talking about capitalism here too. But in this mélange, does not Hayek accidentally point to the underlying meta-cuntocratic principle underlying most societies? He also points to bureaucracies as not integral to it, but just perfectly suited to helping the unprincipled attain positions of influence and power—largely because a lack of scruples gives them an advantage in advancing their careers.  As Hayek puts it:

‘…the probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping-master in a slave plantation.’[8]

This is a ginger cat’s whisker away from my conception of cuntocracy: for Hayek, there is a gradient in society that makes it inclined towards certain proclivities. For those who have not read Hayek (and indeed for his followers) it should be clarified that this whipping-master job is not an aspiration: it is being ambiguously presented as an analogy, rather than how it was put forward in Enoch Powell’s famous speech on which race should have the ‘whip hand’ in the cuntocracy. Here Powell advanced what we could term an ‘Athenian Cuntocracy.’ So if we try to define our conception of ‘cuntocracy’ for the academics, we can outline Hayek’s belief that bureaucracies form a kakistocracy: government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens known to humanity.

For Hayek, government bureaucracies, as the agencies of the cuntocracy, depend on an unreflective wielding of the power made available to their administrators: a ‘truthless’ rather than a ‘ruthless’ willingness to wield an agency’s power is then an occupational requirement for someone to rise to the upper echelons of the cuntocracy.[9]  But our argument is that such blithe indifference must be a bit of both since both seem components of a larger enduring system. The confusion here is because the attraction of power-hungry people to positions of authority in a bureaucracy will of course have consequences for everyone affected. Thus the cuntocracy must wear a benign mask at times — feigning truthlessness in a ruthless manner.  In the modern world the whipping-masters tend to have a euphemistic job description. Power-oriented people mask their masterly whipping via such entities as ‘indicative planning’ or ‘performativity’. Here bureaucracies can fairly freely express inhumane and largely insane, deluded prejudices, a bit like Tony Blair’s use of meritocracy and ‘God.’ Government bureaucracies do not think, only individuals do that; but bureaucracies tell them not to. Thus some bureaucracies are said to be the institutional equivalent of a psychopathic individual.[10]  So our concept of the Cuntocracy is an update to what Ashley Montagu called the last century’s ‘dehumanisation syndrome’.[11]

In our mission to win over the ‘intellectuals’ we will need to throw in some kind of bone for them to gnaw on—an academic dichotomy, the perpetual discussion of which will keep them in business. This is astonishingly easy and such-like circular arguments are lying about everywhere largely undisturbed should one have access to the material academics hide, ignore and want money for.  Take Robert Merton’s observation on the importance of discerning the difference between manifest and latent functions: never heard of it—perfect!  A distinction between a manifest and latent cuntocracy could be devised to start the advertent confusion between conscious motivations for cuntocracy and its objective consequences. In other words: do cunts actually try to bring about a cuntocracy or does it just seem that way? Is it because we identify motives with functions and confuse the subjective categories of motivation with the objective categories of function?[12] You get the idea. Hopefully that one can run as long as the Miliband-Poulantzas debate (still raging).

One thing is for sure: any self-disrespecting cuntocrat will tell others what to do. In our academic elaboration, there is no way we are getting bogged down in all that semiotic linguistic guff so we will say that the cuntocracy uses what C. Wright Mills called a ‘vocabulary of motive.’[13]  Rather than expressing something that is prior and in the person, language is taken by other persons as an indicator of future actions.

Mills also gave us the mechanics of how a cuntocracy operates through his conviction that in the US an elite group had enormous power denied to everyone else; that they were increasingly becoming a self-perpetuating elite; that their power was becoming increasingly unchecked and irresponsible; and that their decision-making was based on an increasingly military definition of reality, a ‘military metaphysic,’ a crackpot realism, that was in fact oriented towards immoral ends. Surely any academically sanctioned cuntocracy would incorporate this — once spun as some glorious national security business rationale that must blind us to all other considerations.  Mills also believed that the ‘Power Elite’ had ‘sold’ a believing world on themselves; and they had to play the chief fanatics in their delusional world.[14]  Perfect for our purposes: this indicates that there is a market for this.  But we do not want our theory to appear radical — fraudulent yes, radical no: the academics must recognise us as one of their own. Once formulated, better to launch it in a for-hire think tank like Demos or the Society for Social Cohesion, perhaps with a suitably recompensed article in Prospect by Michael Ignatieff.

III

Possibly the greatest theorist of Cuntocracy was Thorstein Veblen. His ability to gaze upon ‘industrial warfare’ and the ‘businessman as predator’ was with the ‘eyes of a stranger.’  He showed how the trained incapacity of businessmen, acting in accordance with entrepreneurial canons, resulted in an efficient sabotage of production and productivity. So, like Mills, he demonstrated entirely unwanted abilities in social science and is to be avoided like the plague.[15]  One does not rise to be the Oxford University Rupert Murdoch professor of language and communication writing about how the money was made that sustains such a prestigious accolade.[16] The ire of Veblen’s academic detractors was prompted because:

‘Veblen may be said to have betrayed the betrayers by thinking unholy thoughts on holy ground and by using the ritualistic paraphernalia of scholarship — ordinarily employed in buttressing the social order and impressing the gullible — for profoundly subversive purposes.’[17]

Veblen died in 1929, but these people have memories like vicious elephants and their very trade is in sets of grudges masked as scholarship, that are then passed on before they die: was not his term the ‘Leisure Class’ elegantly harmonious with our own?  And here, with Veblen, we allude to an interesting feature of this form of rule.  While an aristocrat might feel happy with being called an aristocrat and can even point to noblesse oblige, the cunt will generally not like the cuntocracy delineated as such and is not disposed towards any connasse oblige. Or are they? Theoretically if the cuntocracy is as axiomatic and self-evident as we might suppose, we should need to only listen to those at the pinnacle of a cuntocracy to formulate our opinion that we indeed suffer under the cuntocracy they are dishonour bound to create.  An audio archive such as this interchange between Nixon and Kissinger might suffice to test this theory:

Nixon: I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: That will drown about 200,000 people.

Nixon: Well, no, no, no, no, no, I’d rather use a nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready?

Kissinger: That I think would just be too much, uh…

Nixon: A nuclear bomb, does that bother you?  I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.[18]

You really have to listen to the savour of the tang of cuntocracy in Nixon’s voice when he torments Kissinger with that ‘does that bother you?’ The printed page just does not convey it.  But of course quite a bit of Nixon’s activities were secret, or so he thought. So surely a cuntocracy is dependent on a vast hidden propaganda apparatus?  Well we are just back to people keeping quiet about certain things or going along with the nightmare for the money; but yes there are elaborate the forms of backstabbing and confusion sown by covert agencies, PR companies and the mass media—usually to cover up features of the kleptocracy we inhabit.  Nevertheless, techniques of control are ultimately the basic methods by which an individual or a group asserts its cuntocratic orientation: its power and the ability to exploit this power.  Even ‘secret’ techniques of control require channels, institutions, and structures by which the techniques and basic methods are implemented—and as we all know it can spectacularly unravel.   But to prevail, control techniques must form a cunto-methodology by which a cuntocratic potential is actualised and once actualised, is maintained, and this is where our academics come in.  An established cuntocracy will presumably seek to maintain the pattern of structural and behavioural relations that it has developed in the system it tries to control (or indeed wreck): this maintenance pattern demands control devices — propaganda being one of them.  So we will tell the academics that this is a form of ‘public diplomacy.’

We can entice them further by appealing to their vanity: they can exploit another functional duality here.  Because no cuntocracy is likely to adopt a single technique or restrict itself to one basic technique, certain sets of techniques tend to be required: as we said the top cunts must appear as ruthless and/or truthless when it suits them—the good cunt/bad cunt routine. For example, if violence is the preferred technique, violent cunts will increase in importance and potential. Some concrete group of violent cunts—i.e. the police, the army, or parapolitical agencies— would subsequently increase their scope and intensity and rise to the top of the cuntocracy. But a cuntocracy might switch from violence to mass manipulation as its preferred technique.  As a result manipulatory cunts might rise in importance and potential at the expense of violent cunts — if we take the two to be significantly unrelated. Violent cunts might lose their relative elite position in the cuntocracy and move to a lower level in the cuntocracy, while manipulatory cunts using actors such as propagandists, covert operators and professional befuddlers—in short academics— would appear in the elite upper echelon gaining prestige and influence: taking on the appearance and vocabulary of top cunts. Here we need only mention Oxford University’s Rupert Murdoch professorship of language and communication again and drop hints that academic cuntologists, like Hayek, invented the incredibly well-funded field of cuntology to accompany the vicissitudes of this process. Yes, the academics might feel that they would become analogous to those who prepared the Brothers Grimm’s celebrated ‘Emperor’s new clothes;’  but remember: the ‘clothes’ sold: the academics will merely be required to smother any small child who might one day try to expose the racket — business as usual one might say.

IV

A problem exists in much sociological work involving the very identification of whatever it is that you are talking about — hence the subsequent ease of substituting one term for another. This suits us fine: we will say that some writers who are presumed to have been writing about elites, or bureaucracies (remember our task is to subsume both) were actually mistranslated, or better still, deliberately misunderstood by socialists. The task is not merely one of reinstatement: yes we just slip it in, but there needs to be sleight of hand. Unfortunately, our justifications of it will have to be unbridled tedium, or the academics will smell a rat.  We might, for example, complicate things with lots of pointless counter arguments, so that our serious study of cuntology can pretend to be objective: the way the more Thespian Academics tread the boards.

So we will say things like: according to Key (1961) a main characteristic of cuntocracies in constitutional systems of government is: “absence of sufficient cohesion among the cunts to unite them into a single group dedicated to the management of public affairs and public opinion.” Thus, as the accent moves away from the term it becomes accepted as a plausible pretext for another tedious debate.  We will have to quote enough of the right people, so we will say that Raymond Aron (1950) categorised cuntocracies in constitutional systems as divided cuntocracies; or we could say Ralf Dahrendorf (1959) extended this to argue that because of this division it was impossible to identify a cuntocracy because it: “consists of two constants, bureaucracy and government; and one variable, the cunts whose claims are, in particular situations, incorporated in government policy.”  If required to elaborate with specifics, we can say that this forms the Burnhamesque view that government managers make decisions by processing the interests pressed on them by a variety of outside interests and ‘top cunts’.[19]  If some outsider makes the derogatory assertion that our social science work here merely forms a type of satire and is incompatible with a ‘serious’ sociological analysis, and, is in effect some kind of conspiracy theory, we can say that it is at times difficult to be able to distinguish between the two when these things are made so; but we may have to serenade them and bring in Machiavelli the maestro to show that the two are not mutually exclusive. Hit it Nicky:

‘I come now to the last branch in my charge: that I teach princes villainy, and how to enslave. If any man will read over my book [of the prince] with impartiality and ordinary charity, he will easily perceive that it is not my intention to recommend that government, or those men there described, to the world, much less to teach men how to trample upon good men, and all that is sacred and venerable upon earth, laws religion, honesty, and what not.  If I have been a little too punctual in describing these monsters in all their lineaments and colours, I hope mankind will know them, the better to avoid them, my treatise being both a satire against them, and a true character of them…’ [20]

Here, in a letter (presumably to another Bishop) Machiavelli, in explaining the basis of ‘The Prince,’ only seems to think that we need managing in being cuntocratic towards each other, no initial impetus or training.  And note too that this conveniently comes from the epigram of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, that said that an Athenian cuntocracy had been replaced with a more anonymous, but functionally indispensable, managerial cuntocracy.[21]

What other great works should undergird our thesis?  Well, those that no one has any intention of reading naturally offer themselves up, particularly ones steeped in the past that will impart some gravitas to the term. We can trot out Alexander D’Entreves (1967) description of Plato’s ‘Argument of Thrasymachus,’ and note the early inclusion of the cuntocratic in Socrates’ response to Thrasymachus.  If anyone can be said to have proved we live in a cuntocracy it is Socrates.  D’Entreves study of the State quickly arrives at Plato’s theory of the ‘Noble Lie,’ what we will adapt as the ‘Noble Cunt.’[22]  Here we will stress that only humans lie properly.  A Nietzschean ‘higher morality’ (‘higher cuntality’) could be trundled out that enables the Überfotze (super-cunt) to rise above the restrictions of ordinary morality.  In its essence the Noble Lie establishes rigid divisions (an exploitative cuntocracy) by telling us that only certain people can be leaders: the ‘guardians of gold.’  So, as a sop, we can always offer the higher-up academics the possibility that only certain people can be cunts and that the chances are they will already be in, or want, control of things because they feel they should: let our watchword be sycophancy. For D’Entreves the Noble Lie was now variously termed ‘ideology,’ or ‘myth,’ or ‘political formula,’ so we might as well feel free to add another name for it combining the lot.  A powerful regime is surely one that succeeds in excluding from people’s minds the issues most dangerous for that regime: that we are ruled by rich cunts in our case.

So, what are the conditions that create the cuntocracy that we presently inhabit?  Let us just go back to C. Wright Mills: his view was that the US had no nationally responsible political parties offering and standing upon alternative political orientations and programmes — well, we will need that but impute that it is a good thing: ‘consensus.’  For Mills there was also no significant senior civil service composed of those whose careers were independent of private interests — that sounds perfect, we will make that sound like job creation and ‘joined-up thinking.’  The political directorate were said to be composed of former generals, former corporation men or hangers-on of the highest business and legal circles — again: if they do not produce a cuntocracy no one can. The State, in its personnel and in its persistent outlook, appeared to Mills to be a committee of the ruling circles of corporation and high military.[23]  Fine, but what drives it all? In Mills’ cuntocracy, and the US is now the only Super-cuntocracy, a high-flying moral rhetoric was joined with an ‘opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands’— again perfect: there is our teleology. The main content of this form of ‘politics’ was a struggle among those equally expert in practical next steps in the thrust toward killing for sordid or for idealistic reasons — again a text book formulation.[24]

One final problem with promoting the term is that the loony left will say that it will be useful to big business and dictators. Perfect: if that is the case we will be welcomed into academia with open arms. Once normalised, if there was big money behind it an academic managerial niche would be found for it instantly, or my name is Rupert Murdoch.

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[1] See Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber, (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970). In Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (London: Routledge, 1946) pp. 41-42, after World War I, Weber basically called Ludendorff a useless fat cunt who should be hung: and he is the father of sociology as it were.

[2] It should be pointed out that the term is drawn from the UK’s northern urban demotic and the linguistic properties thereof. Those offended by it could easily replace it with ‘cantocracy,’ given that this might be the way some pronounce it anyway.

[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment .

[4] Both works could quite easily have been re-titled: Brave New Cuntocracy, or Brought before the Cunts. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, could easily have been called ‘Cuntocratic Cooking.’

[5] Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Amoral Politics: The Persistent Truth of Machiavellism, (Albany: University of New York Press, 1995).

[6] Hans Sherrer ‘The Inhumanity of Government Bureaucracies,’ The Independent Review, pp. 249-264,aboutus/person_detail.asp?id=621> .

[7] Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944) pp. 148–67.  On Thatcher see: http://hayekcenter.org/?p=3004 .

[8] Hayek, ibid, p. 152.  It escaped Hayek that it is possible that a tender-hearted person might have gained the job so as not to carry it out, operating under a pretence. Hayek’s assumption is that whipping-masters like their job, are thus dedicated and good at it and not mindlessly flailing: this is an uncharacteristically heroic vision of the working class.

[9] Ibid. pp. 159-67.

[10] Gilles Amado, ‘Why Psychoanalytical knowledge helps us understand organizations,’ Human Relations, No. 48, April 1995, p. 351.

[11] Ashley Montagu and Floyd Matson, The Dehumanization of Man, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983).

[12] Robert K. Merton,  Social Theory and Social Structure, (New York: Free Press, 1957) p. 60.

[13] C. Wright Mills, ‘Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,’ Sociological Review, Vol. 5, No. 6, 1940.  This is related to the earlier C. Wright Mills, ‘Language, Logic, and Culture,’ American Sociological Review, Vol. 4, No. 5, 1939.

[14] C. Wright Mills,  ‘Introduction,’ p. vi-xix, in Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1953).

[15] Thorstein Veblen: ‘The Main Drift,’ in C. Wright Mills, Images of Man, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), pp. 336-369.

[16] Yes it is real see: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=416805&c=1 .

[17] Daniel Aaron, Men of Good Hope, (Oxford University Press, 1951) pp. 208-245. Veblen’s conceptualisation of economic relations included his ideas of a ‘strategy of mutual defeat’ that governed the work of the industrial system.  And surely utter futility is the hallmark of a cuntocracy.

[18] http://www.mostdangerousman.org/press_materials/MDM_presskit_Word.doc .

[19] V.O. Key,  Public Opinion and American Democracy, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961); Raymond Aron, ‘Politics and the French Intellectual,’ Partisan Review, pp. 595-606, Vol. 17, July 1950; Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, (Stanford University Press, 1959) p. 305.

[20] James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, (Penguin, 1942), p. 13. There was a second part to the quote from Machiavelli that Burnham (for his own reasons) omitted: ‘Whoever, in his empire, is tied to no other rules than those of his will and lust, must either be a saint or else a very devil incarnate; or, if he be neither of these, both his life and his reign are like to be very short; for whosoever takes upon him so execrable an employment, must turn all topsy turvey, and never stick at anything; for if he once halt, he will fall and never rise again, etc.’

[21] Richard Gillam, White Collar from start to finish: C. Wright Mills in transition, (Stanford University, 1981) p. 4.

[22] Alexander Passerin D’Entreves, The Notion of the State, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).  Our use of D’Entreves would maintain that Thrasymachus had it that to talk of justice in relation to the state is irrelevant: ‘If one is determined to do so at any cost, one must recognise that Cuntocracy, when great enough, is mightier, freer, and more masterly than justice.’

[23] C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956) p. 88.

[24] C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958) p. 90.