Get Your Mao On (III): Relations Between Officers And Men
Our comrades must understand that ideological remolding involves long-term, patient and painstaking work, and they must not attempt to change people’s ideology, which has been shaped over decades of life, by giving a few lectures or by holding a few meetings. Persuasion, not compulsion, is the only way to convince them. Compulsion will never result in convincing them. To try to convince them by force simply won’t work.
I don’t know why “ideological” has to be an epithet in these post-normative days of universal middle-class entitlement mentality. I was brought up on my parents’ knees to understand ideology as an identifiable system of beliefs or a worldview which prompted measurable behaviour in a society, nothing more and nothing less. The question is how to get your ideology accepted as commonsense, isn’t it?
So how to change the behaviours of the people who rule us, and how is the Government to expect any change from their thoroughly-bribed electorate, without citizens’ re-education camps, and without without communards ripping the cobbles out of Bent Street and throwing them at the donkeys quaffing red wine in fashionable eateries? Is Deliberative Democracy the wishy-washy hands-holding-around-the-fire answer, or a bit of healthy workers’ ownership?
How could a Government, for instance, convinced that its programme of electricity privatisation was necessary, convince its Party and supporters of the scheme? How would an electorate go about the same task in reverse, and persuade a recalcitrant and morbidly fixated Cabinet of the futility and non-democracy of their task?
Mao?
all people in the revolutionary ranks must care for each other, must love and help each other.
Well if we can’t be socialists, we can at least all share a chardonnay.
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