Dostoevsky & the Bourgeois

And why are there so many lackeys among the bourgeois, and of such noble appearance as that? Please don't blame me and don't exclaim that I am exaggerating or being libelous or spiteful. The fact is simply that there are many lackeys.
...Servility keeps seeping into the very nature of the bourgeois and is increasingly taken for virtue.
...In general, the bourgeois is very far from being stupid, but his intelligence is a short-term one somehow, and works by snatches. He has a great many ready-made conceptions stored up, like fuel for the winter, and he seriously intends to live with them for a thousand years.
And what indifference to everything, what short-lived, empty interests!
Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

These are the kind of people, not bourgeois materially but spiritually, who would bend over backwards to justify to themselves actions like these- infanticide in the great abstract distance- though of course no such bodily contortions would be necessary to effect the convincing, the merest of twitches would be excessive. The very idea that they would be expected to 'justify' they would find outrageous, juvenile. While Dostoevsky is especially writing about the French bourgeois, in the English speaking world the depth of their vision appears to be that in the world of politics the actions of the British or Americans are intrinsically good, at worst mistaken in means. The end, however, is never in doubt. It, by definition, must be good. And there is always the possibility, distinct or remote, that the future will even end up justifying the means, however lacking in elegance those means might appear at the moment. So even if the means are torture, mass-murder and economic rape; still the purity of the underlying ideal glows on unassailed by any cynical doubts as to its nobility.

The greatest of all these lackeys must be the propagandist scribes (Dostoevsky's own Ratikin from The Brothers Karamazov something of an archetype) : those who having been gifted somewhat, if only comparatively, in the area of the mind, have put these minds to the service at a nice price of such committers of infanticide far away; the apologists and cheerleaders of these lowest of men whose single-pointed devotion to this lowness endows them, according to their scribe lapdogs, with greatness.

And perhaps these political kings of the ant-heap genuinely are something of an ideal for these scribbling servants. Such scribes will remain in closely guarded ignorance of the things it would be better not to know about, such as infanticide; and one week they will write their little propaganda piece about the War on Terror - though of course they have ensured that they actually believe the truth of what they write, justifying if one reads a little between the lines ever greater power to the ruling masters; the next week, or perhaps even in the same edition, they will write a charming piece about some Brave New World inane propaganda entertainment piece- Ant & Dec or Pop Idol perhaps.

As Machiavelli writes of the eponymous warlord in his Life of Castruccio Castracani , and it is tempting to think or wonder at least whether he saw himself in the following:

Castruccio told a man who professed to be a philosopher: "You are all like dogs, who always come running up to the man who can give them most to eat." The philosopher replied: "No, we are like doctors, we go to the houses of those who have most need of us."' 
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"But why are you insulting them?"
"By calling them cowards and slaves? Well, it's true isn't it?
"If it's true, why waste your time? What can you expect from a slave?"
"But they're only superficially cowards and slaves. Perhaps this way I can tap into their pride."
"There is no pride. Or whatever is there is channelled into pride at being a slave, an intrinsic and vital part of the great whole. All you're provoking is their hatred. You imagine that at the centre of them you will find a reservoir of truth, if you can just break the ice. You will never find that centre. It's the last thing they want to find, so what hope have you? That centre would put the lie to their present mode of being. And he is so proud of this mode of being. 'Intends to live like this for a thousand years,' as Dostoevsky puts it."
"Well, then they deserve to be insulted."
"Ah, vengeance. There is a lot of wisdom in the idea of shaking the dust from your feet. You'll only end up poisoning your own well."