The Metamorphosis of “The Man”

There’s something happening here

Telling me I got to beware

I think it’s time we stop

Everybody look, what’s going down?

“For What It’s Worth”, Buffalo Springfield

As a Baby Boomer entering the university in 1966, I heard these Buffalo Springfield lyrics repetitively echoing over the airwaves as the mantra for the emerging counterculture. Student protests that had begun at Berkeley several years earlier as the Free Speech Movement screaming “defiance against the system” morphed into an intellectual crusade at Columbia University, championed by the Marxist political professors Cloward and Piven. “The Man” was not to be trusted.

Amid the immoral Vietnam War and the rights-abrogating conscription, student protests continually erupted around the country. Encouraged and emboldened by a small group of core “revolutionaries,” the playbook was Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, believing it was their blueprint to social utopia. The chanting, peace-loving hippies of the ’60s quietly transformed into the radical, political yippies, and I had a front-row seat.

Against the war and the draft, I found myself alongside strange bedfellows out to transform the alleged political corruptness of the system. They may have had the right cause, but the wrong solutions.

In the early ’70s at Columbia University, I regularly heard Mark Rudd, president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), preach the overthrow of the establishment and the military-industrial complex, with the Black Panthers standing by as their brothers-in-arms and protectors. The Weathermen splintered off, promoting transformation through violence, allegedly bringing power back to the people. When they realized they couldn’t effectuate “The Revolution,” they vowed to entrench themselves into the system to actualize change from within.

Majoring in economics and working at The Nathaniel Branden Institute (headed by Ayn Rand’s protégé), I was a laissez-faire, free-market advocate who firmly understood the morality of individual rights. While philosophically I was against the war and the draft, I found myself alongside strange bedfellows who were out to transform the alleged political corruptness of the system. They may have had the right cause, but they had the wrong solutions. Across the country, relatively peaceful demonstrations were rapidly growing with solidarity, and students felt their voices could be heard to make a difference.

What a field day for the heat

Mostly say, “Hooray for our side”

It’s time we stop

Everybody look, what’s going down?

“For What It’s Worth,” Buffalo Springfield

Then in 1970, the unrest heightened with the Kent State shooting and killing of four innocent protesters by the Ohio State National Guard, eventually spilling riots onto my campus with daily chaos and violence. When the advocates of “student power” attempted a violent rebellion at Brooklyn College, some students organized the ad hoc Committee Against Student Terrorism (CAST), and my brother and I attended the initial meetings. The organization condemned the use of offensive force by the protesters and utilized the works of Ayn Rand to identify the philosophical principles underlying the issues. This was the genesis of the Libertarian Party, and by 1972, John Hospers, the chairman of our Philosophy department, ran as their first presidential candidate.

With the end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the resignation of Nixon, the country moved towards more peaceful times. But the core group of radicals searched for a new cause and aligned around the environment as their rallying cry. After all, who can be against clean air? Then, developing into the mainstream, they became politicians, educators, newsmen, and cultural icons, to continue the subtle indoctrination of the populace. This was the New America, with the citizens duped into a counterfeit serenity.

The elite, ivory-league professors stacked the deck, training the next generation of instructors throughout our universities, ultimately guiding the teachers of our primary and pre-schools. The dream of Fabian socialist John Dewey (thought of as the “Father of Education”) became realized nationally when the curriculum of his progressive educational system was implemented nationally. This collectivist ideology, eventually supported by the teachers’ unions, preached the perceived “evils” of America’s core values, imagined through western colonialism, imperialism, alienation, racism, and “exploitive” capitalism. Critical Race Theory was only being groomed in the ivory tower in those days. Although the last two decades of the twentieth century seemed calm and prosperous, the seeds of today’s evils were already planted, just waiting to germinate.

To Gen Z and Millennials, those times just appeared to be the “turbulent years,” with today’s problems nothing more than a reboot of past activism. Sure, like then, Bernie Sanders tapped into today’s discontent by identifying the correct problems and, like then, offered the wrong solutions, but that’s where the similarity ends. The organic engagement of the “peace, love, and rock & rollers” mutated into a systematic, woke postmodernism by the same hippies/yippies/yuppies of the ’60s. They have become The Deep State—a loose network of unelected bureaucrats, academics, media, think tanks, defense industries, and crony capitalists—now openly plotting a global technocratic tyranny via the World Economic Forum. They have methodically become “The Man,” paradoxically nothing like the target of the spontaneous outrage of the Woodstock generation.

With critical thought gone and common sense non-existent, the propaganda disseminated from our educational system, aided by political depravity, has churned out masses of unthinking sheeple looking for anyone to give them answers. Unfortunately, this intellectual vacuum has ushered in and encouraged power-seeking, money-grabbing “leaders” and looters furthering their control and just getting what they can from whoever they can, while the getting is good. Backed by the strong-arm tactics of the state, censorship and suppression of “misinformation and disinformation” is their lethal weapon to retain power. Transparency and freedom of speech, their mortal enemy.

In our naivete of simpler times, we chanted, “Never trust anyone over thirty.” Today, I say, “Never trust anyone under thirty.” Ironically, the generation against “The Man” has become “The Man,” supported by an army of youthful, uninformed minions with blind allegiance. I have come full circle from my early years, distrusting all official narratives, and once again, I am now suspicious of “The Man.”

Hippies/yippies/yuppies of the ’60s have become The Deep State—a loose network openly plotting a global technocratic tyranny. They have become “The Man.”

We are witnessing a transformation of America that began over a century ago. With the continued violation of nearly every one of our precious Bill of Rights, we have a civic responsibility to call out the immorality of this fascist corruption. As Ayn Rand so aptly noted in her 1963 essay, “Collectivized Rights”:

There is a difference between a country that recognizes the principle of individual rights, but does not implement it fully in practice, and a country that denies and flouts it explicitly. All “mixed economies” are in a precarious state of transition which, ultimately, has to turn to freedom or collapse into dictatorship. There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule—executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses—the nationalization or expropriation of private property—and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw. Observe, on this particular issue, the shameful end-of-trail and the intellectual disintegration of modern “liberals.”

Notice those four characteristics and how they have crept into our current political reality. The division created by ceding to an all-knowing, all-powerful state undermines the rugged individualism and fundamental principles that our Founding Fathers expressed in crafting the Constitution. We must never let that slip away. As proclaimed by the eighteenth-century statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Despondency, anxiety, and fear have taken hold of our citizenry while the country struggles to not fall over this precipice. Realizing that, and finding it apropos, I will return to the final verse of that Buffalo Springfield classic “For What it’s Worth”:

Paranoia strikes deep

Step out of line, the men come and take you away

We better stop

Everybody look, what’s going down?

Related Posts:

1. Is Javier Milei the First Chief of State to Talk—and Walk—Radical Capitalism?
2. David L. Norton’s Philosophy of Ethical Individualism
3. Addressing the Gaps in Libertarian Theory

   

About the Author: Edward Pozzuoli

Edward Pozzuoli is a retired mortgage banker and businessman, music aficionado/promoter, restaurateur, casual real estate developer, and armchair Objectivist. He graduated from Brooklyn College with an economics degree and a doctorate in the "street smarts" of his Brooklyn Italian neighborhood. He worked at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in the late 1960s while attending college. He currently resides in South Florida. He bills himself as a seeker of truth in a "happy bubble."