A little Edmund Burke
“A deleted scene from the first, and unpublished, book in the “Ace Marks” series where Michael Thompson is wading through Edmund Burke’s writings”
He’d heard an abbreviated version of the quote before, maybe when he was at university. He read aloud, slowly and deliberately.
“No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
Michael gazed out the window, sighing as the red flashing lights of a cyclist whizzed past. Burke was right, although too bloody verbose. To be fair, he was a product of his time. That was how they wrote two hundred years ago in Georgian England. It was hard to imagine they talked that way; cabals of ambitious citizens wouldn’t get anything done.
It was logical. Evil regimes have picked off vast numbers of individuals for centuries. They’re doing it today, Michael reflected sadly. The wholesale slaughter of good people through the ages didn’t bear thinking about. But if they banded together, like resistance groups in World War II, they experienced success. Among the bloodshed.
Michael was thankful New Zealand wasn’t an evil state, although centrist governments weren’t completely trustworthy anymore. Besides, the capitalist system doesn’t want to kill workers, it wants to farm them and over the decades it has been perfecting its art. Pay people enough so they are scared of losing it, but no more. The perfect, elusive carrot.
Throw society a few bones in the form of ridiculous salaries to incompetent twerps at the top of the tree, CEOs, directors and the like, so everyone dreams, American style, one day they will win societal lotto. The game was a giant Ponzi scheme. If you peeled away the glitzy facade, what remained in equal measures was hope, desperation and bloody awful odds.
There was fifteen minutes until the bus arrived. With a deep breath, he returned his concentration to Edmund Bourke. The section he was reading, and re-reading, was from Thoughts on the Causes of our Present Discontents. From what he’d gleaned, Michael believed Burke’s thinking was as applicable today as it was in the 1800s. That was an impressive feat, separated as he was from Burke by centuries. When Burke died, the Treaty of Waitangi was forty-five years away.
In the essay he was reading, Burke was making the point that when people oppose evil with united strength, they can make a difference. They can defeat evil doers. Conversely, when individuals act alone, they’re ineffective. Using Burke’s words, ambitious citizens will pick them off one by one, unpitied sacrifices, leaving evil to prosper.
Even though Burke wasn’t considering events like pandemics, his logic remained valid. Countries, like New Zealand, where the population acted in concert with urgency, whether by dictate or leadership, had fared better than those where politicians left it to the virus to force untimely decisions. The self-titled ‘strong men’ leaders, Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Putin were now referred to as the myopic men due to their extreme short-sightedness. Collectively they were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths as the virus made unpitied sacrifices of individuals and economies. The international call for them to be tried for crimes against humanity was unlikely to proceed, but it grabbed media headlines.
While Burke’s logic was sound, that didn’t make it an inevitability. Burke wasn’t Nostradamus. Michael was acting in isolation, but meticulous planning was why he was confident his lone wolf approach would be successful. And if he was successful, he wouldn’t be alone. A cabal of good citizens would take up metaphorical arms putting the evil doers to the sword. Michael would cheer them on anonymously.
Night was closing in fast; it was time to catch his bus. Shaking himself back to the present, leaving his philosophic musings, he put his laptop into his overnight bag and locked the rest of his gear in the boot, ready for tomorrow. Stretching, he looked around casually. All he saw was an ordinary suburban street scene. Everything was on track.
As he wandered towards the bus stop, he determined that next week it was time to act. It would be the first day of spring, the perfect time to start removing that block from the base of society’s wall. Although it felt like he could keep up this pretence for years, he knew the longer it went on, the more he risked slipping-up and being unmasked. He had an escape plan, but he wanted to use that when he was ready, not when he had to escape.
