Many neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz are disciples of a philosopher who believed that the elite should use deception, religious fervor and perpetual war to control the ignorant masses.

What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn’t find the evidence to justify a war?

A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done – people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.

The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled ‘Selective Intelligence,’ was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.

Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky’s alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.

Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include ‘Weekly Standard’ editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.

Strauss’ philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men – as is obvious in Shulsky’s 1999 essay titled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt "criticize America’s intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss’s idea of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."

Rule One: Deception

It’s hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior."

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Marc Mohan in The Oregonian

The nonfiction works of Swiss-born author Alain de Botton occupy a curious place between stringent academic philosophy and gauzy self-help manuals. Using references from great thinkers and authors of the past, books such as "How Proust Can Change Your Life" and "The Consolations of Philosophy" aim to make their ideas accessible and useful to lay readers in a way that has made them frequent best sellers. His latest effort, "Status Anxiety," uses the same techniques to address the sources of, and solutions to, that ubiquitous impulse known in the vernacular as "keeping up with the Joneses." In his continuing quest to assist readers in leading happier, more fulfilling lives, de Botton rightly addresses one of the major sources of modern discontent as "a worry . . . that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect."

This concern, he posits, has emerged over the past couple of centuries in Western industrial societies as the possibility of social advancement has expanded to larger sections of the populace, and as the levels of material acquisition attainable have increased exponentially. "A sharp decline in actual deprivation may thus, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing or even escalating sense, or fear, of deprivation."

We desire riches or power not as ends in and of themselves, according to de Botton, but as a way of seeking the "love" of those around us. Another factor has been secularization: "(W)hen a belief in an afterlife is dismissed as a childish . . . opiate, however, the pressure to succeed and find fulfillment will inevitably be intensified by the awareness that one has only a single and frighteningly fleeting opportunity to do so." The emergence of capitalism as the planet’s dominant mind-set has also contributed to the use of material or monetary benchmarks of status, and to the sense that those who fail to meet expectations are somehow faulty.

What methods, then, does de Botton prescribe to counter the relentless urge, seemingly bred into us, to judge ourselves by what others think of us? He divides his solutions into five categories — Philosophy, Art, Politics, Religion, and Bohemia — but the simple answer is: Learn to realize that other’s opinions are ultimately insignificant. Easier said than done, to be sure, but worthy advice nonetheless.

Philosophically, de Botton suggests a touch of the "intelligent misanthropy" put forth by Schopenhauer: "The views of the majority of the population on the majority of subjects are perforated with extraordinary amounts of confusion and error." The "intelligent" side of the equation should be emphasized; total disregard for society’s opinions is, de Botton holds, an equally serious, if less common, problem. Art, from the novels of Jane Austen to the paintings of Thomas Jones, can "challenge society’s normal understanding of who or what ‘matters.’ " "Oedipus Rex" demonstrates that anyone can be a failure, while The New Yorker cartoons frequently show the opposite.

Understanding politics can reveal the contingency of a society’s status markers within a historical context; here de Botton essentially expands on Marx’s thesis that "the ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class," and reminds us that any oppressed group can see itself as the victim of forces that can be challenged. This does lead to the debatable proposition that "in modern Europe and North America, entrepreneurs and scientists will be the objects of admiration."

De Botton credits Western civilization’s Christian heritage, and the art it has inspired, with providing an awareness of death and a sense of the eternal, as well as fostering the notion that success can be graded outside of the material world. The most radical antidote to status anxiety, though is Bohemia, defined by de Botton to include all of the iconoclastic, anti-rational schools of thought of the past 200 years — Romantics, Surrealists, Dadaists and more. From Thoreau to Baudelaire, they offer up vivid examples of perhaps the simplest method of avoiding shame in the eyes of the bourgeoisie: Thumb your nose, behave "inappropriately" and welcome their disapproval. Here we’re back to "intelligent misanthropy," and de Botton’s solutions sometimes do seem like different religions with the same god — varying means toward an identical end.

That end, though, is laudable. One phenomenon that would have been an interesting addition to this tract is the recent, mutant offshoot of status: celebrity. When people are venerated not for any discernible accomplishment, but simply for veneration’s sake, we seem to be headed for a potentially radical redefinition of success.

In the meantime, it’s not a bad idea to keep in mind de Botton’s parting advice: "A mature solution to status anxiety may be said to begin with the recognition that status is available from, and awarded by, a variety of different audiences . . . and that our choice among them may be free and willed."

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