Holding Powerful People Properly to Account
How do you usually assess matters of life and death, and how much power do you currently have in relation to those matters?
Perhaps you think your life is valued little by people with more power than you possess.
What do you know about the science of extreme weather events?
How do you assess tragedies of one sort or another or another or another or another or another or another or another or another?
How carefully do you distinguish between Jacobins, Jacobeans and Jacobites?
What have been your experiences of bins, beans and bites?
What do you regard as the most important responsibilities of people with power?
Some people mainly express power through groups.
Yet most individuals, and most groups, have very little power at all.
No-one in a position of power, influence or authority takes much notice of them, unless they become aggressive.
What power, if any, do you have in relation to the environment in which you live, and how do you know?
How do you assess matters associated with the concept of defence?
How do you assess matters of hygiene?
Some people are powerful for only a few years, or only a few moments.
But what is political power?
What is societal power?
What is cultural influence?
What do you know about the power of protest, and the dangers of it?
How do you assess danger?
How do you attempt to maintain safety?
How do you attempt to contribute to improvements in health and safety?
How do you identify and address conflict?
What do you know about transport in relation to danger and safety?
Perhaps you believe the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee lacks power.
Whether you hold a salon or not, how do you attempt to influence people?
What do you prefer to discuss with people?
How do you attempt to persuade people to act in a particular way, and why do you do so?
Who holds you to account?
How do you attempt to hold other people to account?
Revolutions, whether political or economic, cause considerable societal disruption, in much the same way as catastrophic natural disasters and comparatively unnatural ones.
How, then, should intellectuals respond to disruptions?
How should moderates respond to disruptions?
Perhaps you regard yourself as a moderate intellectual.
How do you usually respond to radicals and revolutionaries?
How do you usually respond to conservatives and counter-revolutionaries?
It is reasonable to respond to any crisis situation through the development and implementation of appropriate policies in a timely way.
Perhaps political situations are only dangerous when the powerful are corrupt and/or the poor are very hungry and/or very angry.
You may prefer to address a lack of accountability in various ways.
Of course, a lack of accountability is one of the main signs of corruption.
Identifying hypocrisy is important.
Addressing hubris is even more important.
Perhaps you address hypocrisy and hubris by pointing out discrepancies in attitudes, activities and goals.
Perhaps you conduct interviews and protests and produce placards and embroidery.
How influential is your activism, and why?
What is your approach to the distribution of information about your knowledge, beliefs, worries and values?
What have you discovered through learning about Madame Roland, Olympe de Gouges and Charlotte Corday?
What have you been learning about the sans-culottes and other unruly mobs, and how?
What have you been learning about the Civility Journalism Circle?
What have you been learning about yourself?
How do you respond when people are dyeing or dying?
How do you know whether something is natural or not, whether in terms of the colourful or the catastrophic?
How have you assessed the history of accountability?
How have you assessed the history of liberalism?
How have you assessed the history of rebellion?
The Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee always encourages peaceful opposition to wrongdoing. The committee also encourages courteous responses to reasonable questions.
What is your acquaintance with any other type of freedom?
Perhaps you associate freedom with your personal autonomy.
Perhaps you associate freedom with the absence of political violence.
Perhaps you associate freedom with personal safety.
Perhaps you associate freedom with personal wealth.
Perhaps you associate freedom with societal and political influence, and possibly even power.
How do you define sexual freedom?
Perhaps you associate it with the libertine.
Perhaps you associate it with chastity.
Perhaps you associated it with intimate activities between fully consenting, reasonable adults.
Perhaps you associate it with the sexual revolution.
To whom are you accountable for your sexual decisions?
You may associate freedom with various rights, possibly including human rights.
How do you hold people to account for abusing rights?
Perhaps you associate freedom with liberty, possibly including civil liberties.
What do you know about the history of representative democracy and liberal democracy, in any part of the world?
Do you usually associate democracy with accountability?
Do you usually associate good government with accurate accounting and an absence of political, and societal, turmoil?
Have you adequately examined the limits of the rule of law?
Are you adequately acquainted with the concept of an open society?
Perhaps you are acquainted with the history of parliamentary systems, including the one in Britain.
Perhaps you are familiar with the history of revolutions and civil wars.
Perhaps you are familiar with the history of political repression and ethnic conflict.
How do you define the public sphere?
When do you regard revolutionary practices as justified?
If you have ever been a head of state, what did you regard as the most important aspect of your actions in terms of accountability?
If you have ever been a head of government, what did you regard as the most important aspect of your actions in terms of accountability?
There are many ways to assess the rights and freedoms of the public, the responsibilities of citizens, the duties of ceremonial and procedural officials, and the leadership provided by political representatives of citizens.
What do you know about corruption?
What do you know about cruel decisions perpetrated as public policy?
When people in positions of power are rude or otherwise cruel, how do you respond?
How powerful are you at present, and how do you know?
How do your decisions affect other people's lives?
How, if at all, do you prevent yourself from perpetrating hubris?
How do you assess the meaning, the causes and the consequences of revenge, reprisals, retorsions, feuds, rampages, massacres, genocide, war crimes, workplace deviance, crimes against humanity, Schadenfreude, sadism, tantrums, retributive justice, narcissistic rage, breaches of the peace and righteous indignation?
How do you attempt to maintain dignity, for yourself and other people?
Enlightened leaders encourage mutual understanding, interpersonal civility, respect for human rights, and the dignified moderation of emotions.
Ability is power.
Inability is powerlessness.
What do you have the ability to achieve, in an enlightened way, and how?
Every act of violence is a sign of failed leadership.
Real leaders do their best to prevent violence, including the desire for revenge.
When, if ever, have humans been at peace with one another, or even with themselves?
When, if ever, have humans been at peace with nature?
How do you usually attempt to account for anti-social behaviour and other expressions of maladaptation?
Of course, even the most sensible revolution is likely to attract the hostile attention of counter-revolutionaries, namely the beneficiaries of existing power structures.
What do you know about evolutionary mismatches?
What have been your experiences of emotional exhaustion, sensory overload, information overload and other indications of an inability to adapt to stressors?
How do you usually attempt to judge reasonableness?
You may be acquainted with Suzanne Curchod, Madame Necker, and her daughter, Germaine, Madame de Staël. You may also be acquainted with Albertine Necker de Saussure.
How do you attempt to prevent all forms of tyranny, including the tyranny of an unenlightened majority?
How do you attempt to prevent unwise changes?
How do you attempt to encourage wise improvements?
The intelligently kind goals of world peace and universal prosperity are important to achieve as soon as possible, in accordance with scientific knowledge and environmental evidence.
Acquiring good evidence, and succinctly conveying an overview of it, whenever necessary, helps with the reassessment of plans, goals and policies.
The
acquisition process requires curiosity and possibly even creativity but it mainly requires accuracy.
All real world leaders are accomplished in the art and science of appropriateness, whether in terms of knowledge, manners or decisions.
How have you most recently been acting in the public sphere, and why?
How intelligent and kind and frugal do you happen to be, and where is the evidence?
How would you describe the insights you have gained through the publication of the Compte rendu au roi?
What do you know, of ongoing significance, regarding the American Revolutionary War?
How would you describe the insights you have gained from learning about the 18th century famine pact conspiracy theory and the Great Fear?
Perhaps you are primarily attempting to cope with cruelty, or not coping with it at all.
Have you ever been invited to be part of an assembly of notables?
If not, perhaps the people with power do not regard you as notable enough.
Are they the wealthy?
Are they the inheritors of ancient privileges?
Are they the intelligent?
Are they the well educated?
Are they the socially connected?
Are they the most aggressive?
Much societal chaos is caused by cruelty, as anyone with even a rudimentary acquaintance with history will know.
Much societal control is also caused by cruelty, of course. It is control instilled through fear, shame, confusion, poverty and guilt.
What do you know about the history of Anglo-French Wars?
What do you know about the financial costs of the American Revolutionary War, and of other wars?
What do you know about the political costs, and for whom?
Perhaps you have experienced fortuitous interactions on many occasions.
Perhaps you were fortunate enough to be born into a supportive family environment.
Perhaps your earliest years of life were filled with the love and care and safety you required for your later successes.
Regardless of your early fortune and/or misfortune, how are you already making the world a much better place than it would be without you, and how do you know?What do you know about assessing the value of life?
What do you know about assessing the value of uniqueness?
What do you know about assessing the value of amazingly successful planning?
How do you ascertain value in private terms, public terms and communal terms?
How does your assessment of value contribute to your planning, and especially to your identification of worthy goals?
The Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee urgently seeks your answers to such important questions.
You may be aware that the people preventing proper acknowledgement of the Earth's energy budget are dangerous reactionaries, not reasonable counter-revolutionaries.
What do you know about the economics of defence, and where, and when, and against which foes?
Perhaps you are familiar with the British Financial Revolution of 1689.
What do you know about the history of wars and humanitarian conflicts involving the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland?
What do you know about the history of wars involving the United States of America?
Powerful people often attempt to influence public perceptions, whether accurately or otherwise.
Unless you have an accurate account of history, and science, you are unlikely to be able to hold powerful people to account properly.
How do you interpret the mainstream of society and extremist points of view?
How do you know when the mainstream is extreme?
What have you discovered through learning about government debt?
There is much to be discovered through an analysis of good plans, and bad ones.
Inadequate governments fail to make proper contingency plans. Yet they are rarely held properly to account for that failure.
Perhaps your aims and objectives are not particularly associated with global pleasantness at all, or even local pleasantness outside your immediate vicinity.
Perhaps you believe it is quite possible to have good outcomes through happy accidents and haphazard discoveries rather than through carefully researched and cautiously implemented plans. That indicated, however, that you have a very limited understanding of history.
How, if at all, has serendipity, and any other form of luck, contributed to the success of your plans in the past?
What is your acquaintance with Friederike Brun, Sarah Villiers, Emma Hamilton, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Wilhelmine von Sagan and Juliette Récamier?
You may be aware that various, relatively small cultural groups in history have had considerable influence, whether politically or otherwise.
What are the goals you have been attempting to achieve in various contexts over the past few years, and where is your evidence?
What are the values you have expressed in relation to those goals?
What is your acquaintance with Jane Davy and her second husband, Humphry?
How do you distinguish between intellect, power and influence?
What do you know about credit risks and insurance risks?
Holding powerful people to account properly takes more than simply waving a placard about and chanting slogans in front of television cameras.
The first step to take is to identify exactly what is wrong with a situation.
Where, for example, is the hypocrisy within it, and where is the hubris?
What are the facts regarding the most worrying problem?
What should be the necessary strategy to solve all the associated problems effectively?
Perhaps you would rather leave such matters to an elected government or royal courts to solve.
Perhaps you do not regard the most worrying problems as your personal responsibility to address.
Perhaps you regard worrying problems as nothing more than news headlines, even if you do actually worry as a consequence of noticing those headlines.
Perhaps you prefer to distract yourself from worries, especially if you are a person with considerable power to solve problems but you wish to avoid using that power, for various reasons.
You may or may not hold an intellectual and/or literary salon of your own.
Salons are communal gatherings associated with affluence and cultural influence though they are not directly part of the public sphere as they are not directly associated with the development of public policy and/or public opinion. They may or may not influence intellectual opinion more widely.
What have slogans about liberty, equality and fraternity actually achieved?
How can any reasonable person responsibly reconcile the extensive misuse of firearms and missiles with the aim of protecting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
To whom did the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 apply in practice, given the subsequent rise of the Reign of Terror and other atrocities?
How do you compare one work of art with another?
What do you know about Diodata Saluzzo Roero and the Academy of Arcadia?
What do you know about the Jewish Enlightenment and the history of anti-semitism and pogroms?
What do you know about the first Age of Enlightenment?
What are your views on the sovereignty of reason?
Who do you regard as a dignitary, and why?
What are your most notable views on legitimatisation and institutionalisation, and how did you acquire those views?
What are your views regarding sovereignty and constitutionalism?
Perhaps you are rarely, if ever, asked such questions by anyone, including journalists, even if you happen to be a politician at present or have been one in the past.
Perhaps you usually regard women, even of relatively high social status, as devoted entirely to trivialities rather than diplomacy and diplomatic necessities.
You may or may not associate a salon or a soirée with the assessment of personal and/or interpersonal qualities.
You may or may not usually compare a throne with a tomb.
Do you read widely?
Do you entertain elegantly?
Do you compare yourself with classical poets?
Do you educate influential persons in the art of necessary propriety and decorum?
Are you regarded as a socialite and/or celebrity and/or sensible social critic?
Perhaps you are a royalist or even a monarchist rather than a devotee of republicanism, or at least the muddled republicanism usually foisted on the public by misguided idealists.
Perhaps you have difficulty imagining a right royal republic in which an ideal persona is the legitimate symbol of a state and/or polity.
Perhaps you have difficulty imagining that persona as a head of state, as strictly separate from the legislature, the judiciary, the military, the administration of government, and the practice of religion and/or ideology.
Yet ceremony is a performing art.
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Unless the cruelty of hazing is involved, ceremonies tend to be more predictable than protests, at least when properly managed in an environment of adequate physical and political security.
No cruelty is tolerable to reasonable persons, whether performed by powerful bullies or less powerful bullies.
All bullying is cruel.
Quality leadership is always a reflection of reasonableness.
How does a reasonable leader hold powerful people to account?
If you regard yourself as a reasonable leader, how do you help people to think for themselves?
When powerful people fear reasonable criticism, there is much danger. Such people are liable to experience paranoia. And paranoia often leads to aggression.
What is the purpose of government, from your point of view?
Perhaps you do not have a point of view of your own on the subject. You may, like most people, either have no opinion on the subject whatsoever or you vaguely follow a particular opinion without adequately critiquing it.
Perhaps you have mistakenly generalised particularly traumatic experiences in your assessments of people as a whole.
Perhaps, however, your experiences of people have generally been traumatic for you.
Perhaps you believe there are conspiracies against you, or towards beliefs and practices you value, even if there is no real evidence.
Perhaps you have acquired powerful enemies.
If so, how have you attempted to understand their motives for disliking you?
Perhaps you regard international law as an expression of hypocrisy.
What do you know about puppet states and puppet politicians?
What have you discovered about front organisations and undercover operations?
What do you know about covert operations and clandestine operations?
What do you know about intelligence gathering, including black reconnaissance?
How do you compare one propaganda image with another?
How do you tell the difference between manipulative scaremongering and the genuine communication of danger?
The Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee understands real danger very well indeed.
Perhaps you are more interested in comparing the fashions of various eras, with or without assistance from history.
Perhaps you are more interested in buying presents for people instead of appreciating their presence in your life and understanding their real needs and values.
How have you attempted to understand the causes of the French Revolution?
How have you attempted to understand the causes of any other revolts and revolution, including the first Industrial Revolution, the second one, the third one and subsequent activities claimed by their advocates to be revolutionary?
What do you know about false evidence, police misconduct, organised crime, state terrorism, and miscarriages of justice?
What do you know about black markets, frameups, cybercrime, disinformation, and state-funded deception?
Clear definitions are necessary for any reformist pursuit.
As all governments conduct terrorism themselves to some extent, either through their policing practices, military practices, administrative practices, propaganda practices, or through any other unjustly coercive practice, aggressive threats, and unverifiable threats of danger.
Even when unjustifiable threats are subtle, they are still likely to be as abusive as overtly threatening behaviours.
What do you know about bribery?
What do you know about black bag operations and other black operations?
The Reign of Terror was certainly not the beginning of terrifying political practices. Nor was it the end of them, of course.
Some of those people may have deluded themselves into believing they are carrying out justice, or even the will of a deity, or the will of the people, though most have probably been merely excited by the idea of expressing violent power.
And far too many people have been coerced into acting aggressively through the use of threats against them and/or the people they love.
What is your acquaintance with military 'discipline' and military recruitment?
Perhaps you have a romantic or Romantic view of politics, with or without knowing much about the history of history painting and competitively imperialist events.
Perhaps you are quite interested in Empire style furnishings and/or fashions.
Perhaps you often have difficulty distinguishing between theories of peaceful liberalism and practices of aggressive radicalism, especially if you regard your political perspective as conservative.
It is not possible to hold anyone to account properly without first holding oneself to account properly.
One of the causes of the French Revolution was the inadequate supply of raw materials for the French textile industry, thereby diminishing the economic prosperity of major towns.
Weather-related disruptions in 1788 and 1789 had increased the misery of the poorer sections of society, and deepened their impoverishment and discontent.
What, if any, have been your personal experiences of destitution?
What is your acquaintance with Malthusian theories of economic problems?
What do you know about food price riots in one century or another?
What do you know about past and present famines?
What do you know about food security, food safety and measures to reduce poverty, and reduce illness?
How much of your income and/or savings do you spend on somewhere to sleep, and why?
How do you assess human welfare and standards of living?
How do you assess the causes of radicalisation?
How do you assess the causes of reactionary aggression?
Why do some self-proclaimed conservatives emotively and publicly denounce even the most reasonable reforms, including those aimed at preventing civil unrest?
The answer, of course, is that they are the direct or indirect beneficiaries of corrupt practices. They may hypocritically masquerade as upholders of private morality while practicing economic immorality and/or political immorality.
What do you know about economic dumping of one sort or another?
How do you assess whether a task has been successfully completed for the greater good or for another reason?
What do you believe to be the main purpose of political leadership?
What do you know about the effects of the Eden Agreement of 1786 on the French textile industry, and on the French economy more generally?
Injustices often have a compounding effect, as you may already be aware. The desire to win at any cost will always result in unintended consequences of the detrimental variety.
What do you know about social dumping of one sort or another?
How do you ascertain whether an apparent leader is actually no more than a gambler, an opportunist and/or a charlatan?
What, for example, do you know about predatory populists, bribe takers, rabble rousers, radical journalists, fake moderates, various extremists, politicians with hidden agendas, politicians with no agenda at all, and politicians with a deeply disturbing agenda?
How, if at all, have you attempted to improve a culture, particularly one long associated with venality and/or nepotism and/or cronyism and/or gambling and/or prejudice and/or sexual abuse?
What do you know about the history of economic protectionism and economic sanctions?
How do ideas and images reflect and represent your political point of view?
How does the way you dress, speak and act reflect and represent your political point of view?
How do your social interactions reflect and represent your political point of view?
How does your geographical location reflect and represent your political point of view?
How does your cultural background and ethnic heritage reflect and represent your political point of view?
What do you know about toxic waste, and how do you define that waste, including in its colonial context?
What do you know about fossil fuels as toxic waste?
What do you know about industrial waste more generally?
What do you know about military education and training?
What do you know about wasted lives and destroyed lives?
What do you know about corruption in relation to waste and destruction of various sorts?
What do you know about looting, including looting by current generations of resources belonging to future generations?
The people socialised into being immoderate are unlikely to improve unless they wish to do so, whether in a consistent way or otherwise.
No amount of resocialisation will counteract reluctance appropriately, even in total institutions. Only the adequate expression of free will provides an ethical approach to learning.
What does it mean to be well read?
What does it mean to be highly cultured?
What does in mean to be suitably sensitive and empathic?
What does it mean to be tastefully attentive towards the acquisition of information about human needs and human suffering?
What place does chivalry have in the world, in any century?
You may be aware that military education and training, including of mercenaries, has never been adequately chivalrous, and nor has the arms industry and the military-industrial complex more generally, or the crony capitalism associated with it.
If you have access to considerable wealth and/or diplomatic immunity, do you use those resources for worthy political purposes?
Whether you do or not, what do you believe a worthy political purpose to be?
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