The Establishment & Its Lackeys

"The Establishment draws in recruits from outside as soon as they are ready to conform to its standards and become respectable. There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment—and nothing more corrupting".
Historian A J P Taylor

Which one could argue is something of a pithy summation of the mainstream media & its figures oozing in the glorification of hobnobbing with the greats of the political/intellectual/cultural establishment, even when the cultural establishment amounts to idiocy disseminators in the form of boy-bands or the political leaders being blatant puppets of sick ruling elites. Our happy intellectual knows no task too demeaning so as to retain his boot-licking place with The Establishment, & since consciousness so subtly follows one's actions, he, in the iedal case at least, no longer has the critical distance necessary to even be aware of the indignity of his position...he has wholly become the prostitute of his actions & so spouts the establishment propaganda without remorse. Which is ideal; no need to wrestle with troublesome issues like hypocrisy & self-lacerating guilt. He is one of the finest examples of the Slave Mentality. John Swinton, editor of the New York Tribune, called by his peers, "the dean of his profession," was asked on February 26th, 1936, to give a toast before the New York Press Association. He responded with the following statements:There is no such thing as an independent press in America, unless it is in the country towns. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.
"I am paid $150.00 a week for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should permit honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, like Othello, before twenty-four hours, my occupation would be gone.
"The business of the New York journalist is to destroy truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon; to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools and vessels for rich men behind the scenes. We are intellectual prostitutes."

As something of a counter-balance to this are the words of Marcus Aurelius:
"That men of a certain type should behave as they do is inevitable. To wish it otherwise were to wish the fig-tree would not yield its juice."
There are no shortages of lackeys under any regime & as WB Yeats more or less wrote, "Cast a cold eye on pitiful intellectual prostitutes. Horseman, pass by!"