“The new, ‘spiritual’ man of today can browse through bookstores or surf the internet to find any religious idea or practice that strikes his fancy, from Western to Eastern, from Sufism to satanism. The more data he stores in his head, however, the more vague his worldview becomes. He has religious interests in several areas, but he basically believes that all is relative, i. e.: ‘My ideas work for me, your ideas work for you.’ He believes in everything at once, but in nothing very deeply, and in nothing that will demand a sacrifice from him. He has nothing worth dying for. But his antennae are out, feeling for something else that will strike his fancy, that will satisfy his vague unrest without asking that he honestly look at himself and change, without disturbing his constant endeavor to satisfy his ego.”
—Hieromonk Damascene
June 2013
24 posts
“Unlike the Romans, who relied for their military strength on a professional army (and therefore on tax), freeborn Germanic males looked on fighting as a duty, a mark of status, and, perhaps, even a pleasure. As a result, large numbers of them were practised in warfare — a very much higher proportion of the population than amongst the Romans. Within reach of the Rhine and Danube frontiers lived tens of thousands of men who had been brought up to think of war as a glorious and manly pursuit, and who had the physique and basic training to put these ideals into practice.
Fortunately for the Romans, their innate bellicosity was, however, to a large extent counterbalanced by another, closely related, feature of tribal societies — disunity, caused by fierce feuds, both between tribes and within them. At the end of the first century, the historian and commentator Tacitus fully appreciated the importance for the Romans of Germanic disunity. He hoped ‘that it may last and persist amongst the barbarians that if they can not love us, at least they should hate themselves … for Fortune can give us no better gift than discord amongst our enemies’. Similarly, at a slightly earlier date, the philosopher Seneca remarked on the exceptional valour and love of warfare of the barbarians, and pointed to the great danger that there would be for Rome if these strengths were ever joined by reason (ratio) and discipline (disciplina).” —Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization
Fortunately for the Romans, their innate bellicosity was, however, to a large extent counterbalanced by another, closely related, feature of tribal societies — disunity, caused by fierce feuds, both between tribes and within them. At the end of the first century, the historian and commentator Tacitus fully appreciated the importance for the Romans of Germanic disunity. He hoped ‘that it may last and persist amongst the barbarians that if they can not love us, at least they should hate themselves … for Fortune can give us no better gift than discord amongst our enemies’. Similarly, at a slightly earlier date, the philosopher Seneca remarked on the exceptional valour and love of warfare of the barbarians, and pointed to the great danger that there would be for Rome if these strengths were ever joined by reason (ratio) and discipline (disciplina).” —Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization
“Anarchy, Anti-Germanism, Apathy… Bankruptcy, Barbarization, Bathing …’ — a German scholar recently produced a remarkable and fascinating list of the 210 explanations of the fall of the Roman empire that have been proposed over the centuries. In German they sound even better, and certainly more portentous: Hunnensturm, Hybris, Hyperthermia, moralischer Idealismus, Imperialismus, Impotenz. (For those who are intrigued, Hyperthermia, brought about by too many visits to overheated baths, could cause Impotenz.)”
—Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization
“Sad people are unloved unless they let themselves be consoled, unless they can give others the rare satisfaction of knowing that they are good, generous, and strong. A sad person who refuses consolation becomes boring, uninteresting, tiresome. The would-be comforter cannot reveal his great goodness, he cannot satisfy his legitimate pride in consoling and encouraging— that is, his feeling of being strong and generous, of growing in his own moral estimate. How much more agreeable, on the contrary, are those unfortunates who let themselves be consoled and encouraged, whom you find in tears and leave with a smile on their lips, saying, ‘Thank you for coming! Your being here has done me so much good,’ etc., or ‘What would I have done if it hadn’t been for you in such difficult moments?’”
—Mircea Eliade, The Portugal Journal
“In 393 the Roman aristocrat Symmachus brought a group of Saxon prisoners to Rome, intending that they publicly slaughter each other in gladiatorial games held to honour his son. However, before they were exhibited, twenty-nine of them committed suicide by the only means available to them — by strangling each other with their bare hands. For us, their terrible death represents a courageous act of defiance. But Symmachus viewed their suicide as the action of a ‘group of men viler than Spartacus’, which had been sent to test him. With the self-satisfaction of which only Roman aristocrats were capable, he compared his own philosophical response to the event to the calm of Socrates when faced with adversity.”
—Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization
“
Suffering has long been a component of many religious traditions, and often practiced in wild, forbidding places. Milarepa, the eleventh-century Tibetan mystic, spent months wandering in the Himalayas, protected only by a thin cotton sheet and living off nettles. Manchurian shamans of the ninth century tested themselves by swimming underneath the ice of a frozen river, between air holes cut far apart in the ice. Missing a hole meant death.
The Tamang shamans, or bombos, of Nepal completed their initiation with trances brought about by fasting for seven days in a gufa, a barrel set high on a pole. In the first century A.D., Simeon the Stylite of Syria spent thirty-three years perched on a high pillar and Saint John of Rila lived much of his life in caves and among tree roots on the slopes of his namesake mountain in Bulgaria.
Early last century, Igjugarjuk, a member of the Caribou Inuit tribe in Northern Canada, was dragged on a sled into the wilderness by his teacher, Perqanaq, and sealed inside an igloo. For a month. In the depth of winter. Igjugarjuk wanted to become an angakoq, or shaman, and this was his initiation, which he later described to the Danish ethnographer Knut Rasmussen. During the thirty days of dark solitude he had no clothing, no food, barely any water, and only a piece of hide to lie on. His suffering was so great, he said, that at times he ‘died a little.’ But it was only the beginning of a lifetime of fasting and privation, which, he learned, were essential to accessing shamanic powers.
‘All the true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in the great solitudes, and it can only be attained through suffering,’ Igjugarjuk told Rasmussen. ‘Suffering and privation are the only things that can open the mind of man to that which is hidden from his fellows.’
” —Maria Coffey, Explorers of the Infinite : The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes
(A fantastic book, highly recommended)
“Being ecstatic means being flung out of your usual self. When you’re enraptured, your senses are upright and saluting. But there is also a state when perception doesn’t work, consciousness vanishes like the gorgeous fever that it is, and you feel free of all mind-body constraints, suddenly so free of them you don’t perceive yourself as being free, but vigilant, a seeing eye, without judgment, history or emotion. It’s that shudder out of time, the central moment in so many sports, that one often feels, and perhaps becomes addicted to, while doing something dangerous.”
—Diane Ackerman, On Extended Wings
“Man overcomes himself, affirms himself and realizes himself in the struggle toward the summit, toward the absolute. In the extreme tension of the struggle, on the frontier of death, the universe disappears and drops away beneath us. Space, time, fear, suffering no longer exist. Everything then becomes quite simple. As on the crest of a wave, or in the heart of a cyclone, we are strangely calm — not the calm of emptiness, but the heart of action itself.”
—Lucien Devies, Annapurna
“Whoever argues for a restoration of values is sooner or later met with the objection that one cannot return, or as the phrase is likely to be, ‘you can’t turn the clock back.’ By thus assuming that we are prisoners of the moment, the objection well reveals the philosophic position of modernism. The believer in truth, on the other hand, is bound to maintain that the things of highest value are not affected by the passage of time; otherwise the very concept of truth becomes impossible. In declaring that we wish to recover lost ideas and values, we are looking forward toward an ontological realm that is timeless. Only the sheerest relativism insists that passing time renders unattainable one ideal while forcing upon us another…
Now the return which idealists propose is not a voyage backward through time but a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically. They are seeking the one which endures and not the many which change and pass, and this search can be only described as looking for the truth. They are making the ancient affirmation that there is a center of things, and they point out that every feature of modern disintegration is a flight toward periphery. It is expressible, also, as a movement from unity to individualism. In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.” —Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
Now the return which idealists propose is not a voyage backward through time but a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically. They are seeking the one which endures and not the many which change and pass, and this search can be only described as looking for the truth. They are making the ancient affirmation that there is a center of things, and they point out that every feature of modern disintegration is a flight toward periphery. It is expressible, also, as a movement from unity to individualism. In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.” —Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
“It seems plain that the democrats are ignoring a contradiction. Had they the courage to be logical, they would do as their predecessors in ancient Greece and choose their governors by lot. An election, is after all, a highly undemocratic proceeding; the very term means discrimination. How is it possible to choose the best man when by definition there is no best? If a society wishes to be its natural self, that is to say, if it wishes to flourish wild, unshaped by anything superior to itself, it should make a perfectly random choice of administrators. Let youth and age, wisdom and folly, courage and cowardice, self-control and dissoluteness, sit together on the bench. This will be representative; this is a cross-section, and there seems no room to question that it would create that society ‘filled with wonderful variety and disorder’ which Plato called democracy.”
—Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
“The most portentous general event of our time is the steady obliteration of those distinctions which create society. Rational society is a mirror of the logos, and this means that it has a formal structure which enables apprehension. The preservation of society is therefore directly linked with the recovery of true knowledge. For the success of our restoration it cannot be too often said that society and mass are contradictory terms and that those who seek to do things in the name of mass are the destroyers in our midst. If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.”
—Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
“It is inevitable that the decay of sentiment should be accompanied by a deterioration of human relationships, both those of the family and those of friendly association, because the passion for immediacy concentrates upon the presently advantageous. After all, there is nothing but sentiment to bind us to the very old or to the very young. Burke saw this point when he said that those who have no concern for their ancestors will, by simple application of the same rule, have none for their descendants. The decision of modern man to live in the here and now is reflected in the neglect of aging parents, whom proper sentiment once kept in positions of honor and authority. There was a time when the elder generation was cherished because it represented the past; now it is avoided and thrust out of sight for the same reason. Children are liabilities. As man becomes more immersed in time and material gratifications, belief in the continuum of race fades, and not all the tinkering of sociologists can put homes together again.”
—Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
“The man of self-control is he who can consistently perform the feat of abstraction. He is therefore trained to see things under the aspect of eternity, because form is the enduring part. Thus we invariably find in the man of true culture a deep respect for forms. He approaches even those he does not understand with awareness that a deep thought lies in an old observance. Such respect distinguishes him from the barbarian, on the one hand, and the degenerate, on the other. The truth can be expressed in another way by saying that the man of culture has a sense of style. Style requires measure, whether in space or time, for measure imparts structure, and it is structure which is essential to intellectual apprehension.”
—Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
“[S]ince modern man has not defined his way of life, he initiates himself into an endless series when he enters the struggle for an ‘adequate’ living. One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today. Charles Péguy has referred to modern man’s feeling of ‘slow economic strangulation,’ his sense of never having enough to meet the requirements which his pattern of life imposes on him. Standards of consumption which he cannot meet, and which he does not need to meet, come virtually in the guise of duties. As the abundance for simple living is replaced by the scarcity for complex living, it seems that in some way not yet explained we have formalized prosperity until it is for most people only a figment of the imagination. Certainly the case of the Baconians is not won until it has been proved that the substitution of covetousness for wantlessness, of an ascending spiral of desires for a stable requirement of necessities, leads to the happier condition.”
—Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
“The whole tendency of modern thought, one might say its whole moral impulse, is to keep the individual busy with endless induction. Since the time of Bacon the world has been running away from, rather than toward, first principles, so that, on the verbal level, we see ‘fact’ substituted for ‘truth,’ and on the philosophic level, we witness attack upon abstract ideas and speculative inquiry. The unexpressed assumption of empiricism is that experience will tell us what we are experiencing. In the popular arena one can tell from certain newspaper columns and radio programs that the average man has become imbued with this notion and imagines that an industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.”
—Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
“
[The] story of man’s passage from religious or philosophical transcendentalism has been told many times, and, since it has usually been told as a story of progress, it is extremely difficult today to get people in any number to see contrary implications. Yet to establish the fact of decadence is the most pressing duty of our time because, until we have demonstrated that cultural decline is a historical fact — which can be established — and that modern man has about squandered his estate, we cannot combat those who have fallen prey to hysterical optimism.
Such is the task, and our most serious obstacle is that people traveling this downward path develop an insensibility which increases with their degradation. Loss is perceived most clearly at the beginning; after habit becomes implanted, one beholds the anomalous situation of apathy mounting as the moral crisis deepens. It is when the first faint warnings come that one has the best chance to save himself; and this, I suspect, explains why medieval thinkers were extremely agitated over questions which seem to us today without point or relevance. If one goes on, the monitory voices fade out, and it is not impossible for him to reach a state in which his entire moral orientation is lost. Thus in the face of the enormous brutality of our age we seem unable to make appropriate response to perversions of truth and acts of bestiality. Multiplying instances show complacency in the presence of contradiction which denies the heritage of Greece, and a callousness to suffering which denies the spirit of Christianity. Particularly since the great wars do we observe this insentience. We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.
That is why, when we reflect upon the cataclysms of the age, we are chiefly impressed with the failure of men to rise to the challenge of them. In the past, great calamities have called forth, if not great virtues, at least heroic postures; but after the awful judgments pronounced against men and nations in recent decades, we detect notes of triviality and travesty. A strange disparity has developed between the drama of these actions and the conduct of the protagonists, and we have the feeling of watching actors who do not comprehend their roles.
Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. Hope of restoration depends upon recovery of the ‘ceremony of innocence,’ of that clearness of vision and knowledge of form which enable us to sense what is alien or destructive, what does not comport with our moral ambition. The time to seek this is now, before we have acquired the perfect insouciance of those who prefer perdition. For, as the course goes on, the movement turns centrifugal; we rejoice in our abandon and are never so full of the sense of accomplishment ag when we have struck some bulwark of our culture a deadly blow.
In view of these circumstances, it is no matter for surprise that, when we ask people even to consider the possibility of decadence, we meet incredulity and resentment. We must consider that we are in effect asking for a confession of guilt and an acceptance of sterner obligation; we are making demands in the name of the ideal or the suprapersonal, and we cannot expect a more cordial welcome than disturbers of complacency have received in any other age. On the contrary, our welcome will rather be less today, for a century and a half of bourgeois ascendancy has produced a type of mind highly unreceptive to unsettling thoughts. Added to this is the egotism of modern man, fed by many springs, which will scarcely permit the humility needed for self-criticism.
” —Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
“
After it has been granted that man is molded entirely by environmental pressures, one is obligated to extend the same theory of causality to his institutions. The social philosophers of the nineteenth century found in Darwin powerful support for their thesis that human beings act always out of economic incentives, and it was they who completed the abolishment of freedom of the will.
The great pageant of history thus became reducible to the economic endeavors of individuals and classes; and elaborate prognoses were constructed on the theory of economic conflict and resolution. Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and -consuming animal.
Finally came psychological behaviorism, which denied not only freedom of the will but even such elementary means of direction as instinct. Because the scandalous nature of this theory is quickly apparent, it failed to win converts in such numbers as the others; yet it is only a logical extension of them and should in fairness be embraced by the upholders of material causation. Essentially, it is a reduction to absurdity of the line of reasoning which began when man bade a cheerful goodbye to the concept of transcendence.
There is no term proper to describe the condition in which he is now left unless it be ‘abysmality.’ He is in the deep and dark abysm, and he has nothing with which to raise himself. His life is practice without theory. As problems crowd upon him, he deepens confusion by meeting them with ad hoc policies. Secretly he hungers for truth but consoles himself with the thought that life should be experimental. He sees his institutions crumbling and rationalizes with talk of emancipation. Wars have to be fought, seemingly with increased frequency; therefore he revives the old ideals — ideals which his present assumptions actually render meaningless — and, by the machinery of state, forces them again to do service. He struggles with the paradox that total immersion in matter unfits him to deal with the problems of matter.
His decline can be represented as a long series of abdications. He has found less and less ground for authority at the same time he thought he was setting himself up as the center of authority in the universe; indeed, there seems to exist here a dialectic process which takes away his power in proportion as he demonstrates that his independence entitles him to power.
” —Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
“In considering the world to which these matters are addressed, I have been chiefly impressed by the difficulty of getting certain initial facts admitted. This difficulty is due in part to the widely prevailing Whig theory of history, with its belief that the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development, aided no doubt by theories of evolution which suggest to the uncritical a kind of necessary passage from simple to complex. Yet the real trouble is found to lie deeper than this. It is the appalling problem, when one comes to actual cases, of getting men to distinguish between better and worse. Are people today provided with a sufficiently rational scale of values to attach these predicates with intelligence? There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot. So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state may be a fallen state, that one questions whether people now understand what is meant by the superiority of an ideal. One might expect abstract reasoning to be lost upon them; but what is he to think when attestations of the most concrete kind are set before them, and they are still powerless to mark a difference or to draw a lesson? For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.”
—Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
“Unlike the United States, India never became a great ‘melting pot’ where many kinds of people came together and learned to speak a common tongue, intermarry, and share a common civic outlook. Rather, more like Europe, it has been a huge ‘mixing pot’ — a continent where countless numbers of different kinds of people have mingled but have never lost their most distinctive features. Groups never lost their elemental identities because, from the outset and for the most part, they did not allow members to intermarry across ethnic, cultural, and/or class lines. As much as possible, each distinct ethnic group strove not to intermarry and, to that end, developed sophisticated social technologies for retaining its own unique place in the universe. In doing so, each community perfected some incredibly complex and durable systems of social control — by means of customs, rituals, and other institutions. As a consequence, for century after century, despite the perpetual coming of one people after another people into the continent, each group has managed to preserve its own identity.”
—Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present
“Thomas Christians of India have themselves tended to fashion their own full rich heritage of historical understandings in ways comparable to how such understandings of ancient India were long fashioned by virtually all other elite communities within the Indian continent. Each community, from out of its own store of cultural and material resources, sought to preserve its own oral traditions, its own epic historical narratives (itihasa-puranas), and its own narrative genealogies or lineages (vamshâvalis). Family members told and retold their own stories — about how their own family and their own community first came into being; how much adversity they suffered or how great the good fortune that came to them or brought them honour and status; how their own people first settled onto special lands or gained special distinction; and, among other things, how they first developed their own unique institutions. From generation to generation, children listened: during evenings, after the sun went down and in times before lights were abundant, enthralled by stories that told about their own ancestral origins. Embedded in what was heard, in the form of bardic songs and oral traditions — and in what eyes beheld, in epigraphic copper and stone inscriptions, as well as on palm-leaf manuscripts — were hallowed sources of narratives that were ritually celebrated, danced, and sung.”
—Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
—Sir Charles James Napier (10 August, 1782 – 29 August, 1853)
“
[Calvin] abominated ‘mixture,’ one of the most pejorative terms in his vocabulary; mixture in any area of experience suggested to him disorder and unintelligibility… Mixture, for Calvin, connoted ‘adulteration’ or ‘promiscuity,’ but it also set off in him deep emotional and metaphysical reverberations. He repeatedly warned against ‘mixing together things totally different.’ ‘When water is mixed with fire,’ he observed, ‘both perish.’ He abominated the papacy above all because it had, as he believed, mixed human invention with divine ordination, earthly with heavenly things…
The positive corollary of Calvin’s loathing of mixture was his approval of boundaries, which separate one thing from another. He attributed boundaries to God himself. God had established the boundaries between peoples, which should therefore remain within the space assigned them, a painful thought for an exile. ‘Just as there are in a military camp separate lines for each platoon and section,’ Calvin observed, ‘men are placed on the earth so that each nation may be content with its own boundaries.’ In this manner, he concluded, ‘God, by his providence, reduces to order that which is confused.’
” —William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait
“Some would say that Eurocentrism is bad for us, indeed bad for the world, hence to be avoided. Those people should avoid it. As for me, I prefer truth to goodthink. I feel surer of my ground.”
—David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
May 2013
36 posts
“Don’t tell me you don’t wish to fight; for the moment you tell me that, you are already fighting: nor that you don’t know which side to join; for while you are saying that, you have already joined a side: nor that you wish to remain neutral; for while you are thinking to be so, you are so no longer: nor that you want to be indifferent; for I will laugh at you, because on pronouncing that word you have chosen your party. Don’t tire yourself in seeking a place of security against the chances of the war, for you tire yourself in vain; that war is extended as far as space, and prolonged through all time.”
—Juan Donoso Cortés, Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism
“The comity of peoples in groups large or small rests not upon this chimerical notion of equality, but upon fraternity, a concept which long antedates it (equality) in history because it (fraternity) goes immeasurably deeper in human sentiment. The ancient feeling of brotherhood carries obligations of which equality knows nothing. It calls for respect and protection, for brotherhood is status in family, and family is by nature hierarchical. It demands patience with little brother, and it may sternly exact duty of big brother. It places people in a network of sentiment, not of rights — that hortus siccus (dry garden) of modern vainglory.”
—Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
“It is our first duty to be men, strong and splendid, or women, healthy and perfect, if we are desirous of securing life’s most gratifying prizes. Many actually go through life only half alive. They are, to a certain extent, doped by their physical deficiencies. They have been handicapped by a lack of the energy that comes with physical development. They need to be stirred by the regular use of the physical powers of the body. When the body is complete in all of its various parts it is truly a marvelous organism. Throbbing vitality stirs the imagination, gives one courage and capacity, thrills one with the possibilities of life, fires the ambitions. The efforts involved in one’s daily duties, be they ever so important, then become mere play. To such a man inactivity is impossible. Every day must be filled with active, interesting duties, and progress in such cases is inevitable. Such a man grows, he improves, he ascends. He becomes a positive dominating force in the world.”
—Bernarr Macfadden, Vitality Supreme (1915)
“He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.”
—Proverbs 25:28
“
Hulme’s personality was a curious mixture of intellectual brilliance, aggressiveness, and sheer buffoonery. At school, when he was required to apologize to a mathematics master whom he had tormented to tears, he composed the apology in the form of an illuminated manuscript, and sang it to the astonished man. Yet he was a brilliant student, and particularly in mathematics; he won two scholarships at his school, and when he was awarded an exhibition at Cambridge, his headmaster wrote: ‘I feel they have not offered him as much as he deserves.’ But at Cambridge he took only a third in his first May examinations, and when he was sent down during his second year, for knocking down a policeman, his academic status was apparently almost as low as his disciplinary one.
In London he was equally clownish and bullying. He once held Wyndham Lewis upside down on the railings of Soho Square, and on another occasion, when Henry Simpson, Hulme’s principal opponent in the Poets’ Club, appeared at one of the Frith Street gatherings, Hulme threatened to knock him down the stairs (which were four flights long). He carried a knuckle-duster with him always, and a lady of whom he was fond recalls that when her conversation became too self-centered he would thump her on the arm with it and exclaim, ‘Forget you’re a personality!’
This last remark is significant, for Hulme’s aggressiveness was intimately connected with his theories; he seemed to desire so strenuously that people should see things as he saw them that he would assert his ideas by sheer force if necessary. With Hulme, as with many powerful men, the separation of idea and action was not natural or easy.
” —From Sam Hynes’ introduction to Further Speculations by T. E. Hulme
“In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.”
—Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture in Literature 1970
“The loss of personal values and of an individual particularity is certainly a major evil of our times. Arbitrary government that creates and is created by herd-mentality; mass-production that so blindly produces as deliberately to destroy part of its own product; the vast automatism of contemporary life whose diversions are as mechanical as its labour; the authority of abstractions like the State, are all hostile in grain to the spirit of place and to the sensitive human vision which discloses and interprets it.”
—H. J. Massingham, The English Country
“The dedication of the patriots who refuse to compromise will remain as long as they have life. It is for them a duty to carry the torch of a glorious past through an inglorious present and hand it over to what, if they can make it so, will make it a glorious future. We who know the strength and insidiousness of diabolical influences standing athwart their path can at least, in all humility, salute them and offer them all the support in our power. The Captains and the Kings have departed, the aristocracy has turned craven, the squirearchy has gone bad, but the true Loyalists of every land still advance into the battle with hearts unafraid and with intrepid souls.”
—A. K. Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords
Men who are physically strong are more likely to have right wing political views →
dailymail.co.uk
Men who are strong are more likely to take a right-wing stance, while weaker men support the welfare state, researchers claim.
Their study discovered a link between a man’s upper-body strength and their political views. Scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark collected data on bicep size, socio-economic status and support for economic redistribution from hundreds in America, Argentina and Denmark.
“Preserve a quiet conscience and you will always have joy. A quiet conscience can endure much, and remains joyful in all trouble, but an evil conscience is always fearful and uneasy.”
—Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
“
Typically, Banfield explains, poverty is merely a transitory phase, restricted to the early stage in a person’s working career. ‘Permanent’ poverty, by contrast, is caused by specific cultural values and attitudes: a person’s present-orientedness or, in economic terms, its high degree of time preference (which is highly correlated with low intelligence, and both of which appear to have a common genetic basis). Whereas the former-temporarily-poor-yet-upward-moving-individual is characterized by future-orientation, self-discipline, and a willingness to forego present gratification in exchange for a better future, the latter-permanently poor-individual is characterized by present-orientation and hedonism. Writes Banfield:
If [the latter] has any awareness of the future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen. Impulse governs his behavior, either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future. He is therefore radically improvident …. He works only as he must to stay alive, and drifts from one unskilled job to another, taking no interest in his work …. He is careless with his things … and, even when nearly new, they are likely to be permanently out of order for lack of minor repairs. His body, too, is a thing ‘to be worked out but not repaired.’
[…]
While high time preference is by no means equivalent with crime — it also may find expression in such perfectly legal forms as personal recklessness, insensitivity, rudeness, unreliability, or untrustworthiness — a systematic relationship between them still exists, for in order to earn a market income a certain minimum of planning, patience, and sacrifice is required: one must first work for a while before one gets paid. In contrast, specific criminal activities such as murder, assault, rape, robbery, theft, and burglary require no such discipline: the reward for the aggressor is tangible and immediate, but the sacrifice — possible punishment — lies in the future and is uncertain. Accordingly, if the degree of social time preference is increased, it can be expected that the frequency of aggressive activities will rise. As Banfield explains:
The threat of punishment at the hands of the law is unlikely to deter the present-oriented person. The gains that he expects from the illegal act are very near to the present, whereas the punishment that he would suffer — in the unlikely event of his being both caught and punished — lies in a future too distant for him to take into account. For the normal person there are of course risks other than the legal penalty that are strong deterrents: disgrace, loss of job, hardship for wife and children if one is sent to prison, and so on. The present-oriented person does not run such risks. In his circle it is taken for granted that one gets ‘in trouble’ with the police now and then; he need not fear losing his job since he works intermittently or not at all, and as for his wife and children, he contributes little or nothing to their support and they may well be better off without him.
” —Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy - the God That Failed
“
The first decades of the Inquisition’s operations were not as fully documented as they were after 1540, but historians now agree that these were its bloodiest days and that perhaps as many as fifteen hundred people may have been executed, or about thirty a year. Turning to the fully recorded period, of the 44,701 cases tried, only 826 people were executed, which amounts to 1.8 percent of those brought to trial. Together, this adds up to a total of about 2,300 deaths spread over more than two centuries, a total that is a far cry from the ‘conservative’ estimates that more than thirty thousand were burned by the Inquisition.
In fact, fewer people were executed by order of the Spanish Inquisition over more than two centuries than the three thousand French Calvinists who were killed in Paris alone during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Or compare this with the thousands of English Lutherans, Lollards, and Catholics (in addition to two of his wives) that Henry VIII is credited with having boiled, burned, beheaded, or hanged. The fact is that during the entire period 1480 through 1700, only about ten deaths per year were meted out by the Inquisition all across Spain — and usually to repeat offenders! By modern Western standards, of course, even ten executions a year for various acts of religious nonconformity seem a dreadful excess. But during the time in question there was no religious toleration anywhere in Europe and capital punishment was the norm for all offenses, religious or otherwise. In context, then, the Spanish Inquisition was remarkably restrained.
” —Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity : How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion
“One reason Roman men so often married very young girls was their concern to be sure of getting a virgin. But an even more important reason was a shortage of women. A society cannot routinely dispose of a substantial number of female newborns and not end up with a very skewed sex ratio, especially when one adds in the high mortality rate associated with childbirth in all ancient societies. Thus, writing in the second century, the historian Dio Cassius noted the extreme shortage of Roman women. In a remarkable essay, Gillian Clark pointed out that among the Romans, unmarried women were so rare that ‘we simply do not hear of spinsters…. There is not even a normal word for spinster.’
As further evidence of the acute shortage of women, it was common for them to marry again and again, not only following the death of a husband, but also after their husbands had divorced them. In fact, state policy penalized women under fifty who did not remarry, so ‘second and third marriages became common,’ especially since most women married men far older than themselves. Tullia, Cicero’s daughter ‘was not untypical… married at 16… widowed at 22, remarried at 23, divorced at 28; married again at 29, divorced at 33 — and dead, soon after childbirth, at 34.’ Another woman was said to have married eight times within five years. Apparently, there always was a considerable surplus of marriageable men.
The best estimate is that there were 131 males per 100 females in Rome, rising to 140 males per 100 females in the rest of Italy, Asia Minor, and North Africa. In contrast, the growing Christian communities did not have their sex ratios distorted by female infanticide, on top of which they enjoyed an excess of women to men based on the gender difference in conversion.
This would have resulted in very substantial differences in overall fertility between pagans and Christians even had the average woman in each group had the same number of children. If women made up 43 percent of the pagan population of Rome (assuming a ratio of 131 males to 100 females), and if each bore four children, that would be 172 infants per 100 pagans, making no allowance for exposure or infant mortality. But if women made up, say, 55 percent of the Christian population (which may well be low), that would be 220 infants per 100 Christians — a difference of 48 infants. Such differences would have resulted in substantial annual increases in the proportion of the population who were Christians, even if everything else were equal.
But there are compelling reasons to accept the testimony of ancient historians, philosophers, senators, and emperors that everything else was not equal, that the average fertility of pagan women was so low as to have resulted in a declining population, thus necessitating the admission of ‘barbarians’ as settlers of empty estates in the empire and especially to fill the army. The primary reason for low Roman fertility was that men did not want the burden of families and acted accordingly: many avoided fertility by having sex with prostitutes rather than with their wives, or by engang in anal intercourse. Many had their wives employ various means of contraception which were far more effective than had been thought until recently; and they had many infants exposed.
Pagan husbands also often forced their wives to have abortions—which also added to female mortality and often resulted in subsequent infertility. Consider the instructions the famous Roman medical writer Aulas Cornelius Celsus offered to surgeons in the first century. Having warned that an abortion ‘requires extreme caution and neatness, and entails very great risk,’ he advised that the surgeon first kill the fetus with a long needle or spike and then force his ‘greased hand’ up the vagina and into the uterus (there was no anesthesia). If the fetus is in a headfirst position, the surgeon should then insert a smooth hook and fix it ‘into an eye or ear or the mouth, even at times into the forehead, and then this is pulled upon and extracts the foetus.’ If the fetus was positioned crosswise or backward, then Celsus advised that a blade be used to cut up the fetus within the womb so it could be taken out in pieces. Afterward, Celsus instructed surgeons to tie the woman’s thighs together and to cover her pubic area with ‘greasy wool, dipped in vinegar and rose oil.’
[…]
Both Plato and Aristotle linked their positions on abortion to threats of overpopulation, but that was not the situation in the Roman Empire in the days of early Christianity. Rome was threatened by a declining population and, consequently, there was much concern to increase fertility. In 59 BCE Julius Caesar secured legislation giving land to fathers of three or more children (he himself had only one legitimate child, but many bastards, one with Cleopatra). Cicero proposed that celibacy be outlawed, but the Senate did not support him. In 9 CE Augustus promulgated laws giving political advantages to men who fathered three or more children and imposing political and financial penalties on childless couples, unmarried women over the age of twenty, and upon unmarried men over the age of twenty-five. Most subsequent emperors continued these policies and Trajan even provided substantial subsidies for children. But nothing worked. By the start of the Christian era, Greco-Roman fertility had fallen below replacement levels so that by the third century CE there is solid evidence of decline in both the number and the populations of Roman towns in the West.” —Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity : How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion
As further evidence of the acute shortage of women, it was common for them to marry again and again, not only following the death of a husband, but also after their husbands had divorced them. In fact, state policy penalized women under fifty who did not remarry, so ‘second and third marriages became common,’ especially since most women married men far older than themselves. Tullia, Cicero’s daughter ‘was not untypical… married at 16… widowed at 22, remarried at 23, divorced at 28; married again at 29, divorced at 33 — and dead, soon after childbirth, at 34.’ Another woman was said to have married eight times within five years. Apparently, there always was a considerable surplus of marriageable men.
The best estimate is that there were 131 males per 100 females in Rome, rising to 140 males per 100 females in the rest of Italy, Asia Minor, and North Africa. In contrast, the growing Christian communities did not have their sex ratios distorted by female infanticide, on top of which they enjoyed an excess of women to men based on the gender difference in conversion.
This would have resulted in very substantial differences in overall fertility between pagans and Christians even had the average woman in each group had the same number of children. If women made up 43 percent of the pagan population of Rome (assuming a ratio of 131 males to 100 females), and if each bore four children, that would be 172 infants per 100 pagans, making no allowance for exposure or infant mortality. But if women made up, say, 55 percent of the Christian population (which may well be low), that would be 220 infants per 100 Christians — a difference of 48 infants. Such differences would have resulted in substantial annual increases in the proportion of the population who were Christians, even if everything else were equal.
But there are compelling reasons to accept the testimony of ancient historians, philosophers, senators, and emperors that everything else was not equal, that the average fertility of pagan women was so low as to have resulted in a declining population, thus necessitating the admission of ‘barbarians’ as settlers of empty estates in the empire and especially to fill the army. The primary reason for low Roman fertility was that men did not want the burden of families and acted accordingly: many avoided fertility by having sex with prostitutes rather than with their wives, or by engang in anal intercourse. Many had their wives employ various means of contraception which were far more effective than had been thought until recently; and they had many infants exposed.
Pagan husbands also often forced their wives to have abortions—which also added to female mortality and often resulted in subsequent infertility. Consider the instructions the famous Roman medical writer Aulas Cornelius Celsus offered to surgeons in the first century. Having warned that an abortion ‘requires extreme caution and neatness, and entails very great risk,’ he advised that the surgeon first kill the fetus with a long needle or spike and then force his ‘greased hand’ up the vagina and into the uterus (there was no anesthesia). If the fetus is in a headfirst position, the surgeon should then insert a smooth hook and fix it ‘into an eye or ear or the mouth, even at times into the forehead, and then this is pulled upon and extracts the foetus.’ If the fetus was positioned crosswise or backward, then Celsus advised that a blade be used to cut up the fetus within the womb so it could be taken out in pieces. Afterward, Celsus instructed surgeons to tie the woman’s thighs together and to cover her pubic area with ‘greasy wool, dipped in vinegar and rose oil.’
[…]
Both Plato and Aristotle linked their positions on abortion to threats of overpopulation, but that was not the situation in the Roman Empire in the days of early Christianity. Rome was threatened by a declining population and, consequently, there was much concern to increase fertility. In 59 BCE Julius Caesar secured legislation giving land to fathers of three or more children (he himself had only one legitimate child, but many bastards, one with Cleopatra). Cicero proposed that celibacy be outlawed, but the Senate did not support him. In 9 CE Augustus promulgated laws giving political advantages to men who fathered three or more children and imposing political and financial penalties on childless couples, unmarried women over the age of twenty, and upon unmarried men over the age of twenty-five. Most subsequent emperors continued these policies and Trajan even provided substantial subsidies for children. But nothing worked. By the start of the Christian era, Greco-Roman fertility had fallen below replacement levels so that by the third century CE there is solid evidence of decline in both the number and the populations of Roman towns in the West.” —Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity : How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion
“The most beneficial factor in the rise of Western civilization was the fall of Rome! Like all of the ancient empires, Rome suffered from chronic power struggles among the ruling elite, but aside from that and chronic border wars and some impressive public works projects, very little happened — change, whether technological or cultural, was so slow as to go nearly unnoticed. This prompted the distinguished Roman engineer Sextus Julius Frontinus (40–103 CE) to note that ‘Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments.’
Instead, as the centuries passed most people continued to live as they always had, ‘just a notch above barest subsistence… little better off than their oxen.’ Of course, as much as half of the population of the empire consisted of slaves who, in effect, were oxen. But even most free Romans lived at a bare subsistence level, not because they lacked the potential to achieve a much higher standard of living, but because a predatory ruling elite extracted every ounce of ‘surplus’ production. If all production above the bare minimum needed for survival is seized by the elite, there is no motivation for anyone to produce more. Consequently, despite the fabulous wealth of the elite, Rome was very poor. As E. L. Jones noted, ‘emperors amassed vast wealth but received incomes that were nevertheless small relative to the immensity of the territories and populations governed.’
When the collapse of the Roman Empire ‘released the tax-paying millions… from a paralysing oppression,’ many new technologies began to appear and were rapidly and widely adopted with the result that ordinary people were able to live far better, and, after centuries of decline under Rome, the population began to grow again. No longer were the productive classes bled to sustain the astonishing excesses of the Roman elite, or to erect massive monuments to imperial egos, or to support vast armies to hold Rome’s many colonies in thrall. Instead, human effort and ingenuity turned to better ways to farm, to sail, to transport goods, to conduct business, to build churches, to make war, to educate, and even to play music.
But because so many centuries later a number of examples of classical Greek and Roman public grandeur still stand as remarkable ruins, many intellectuals have been prompted to mourn the loss of these ‘great civilizations.’ Many who are fully aware of what this grandeur cost in human suffering have been quite willing even to write-off slavery as merely ‘the sacrifice which had to be paid for this achievement.’ To put it plainly, for too long too many historians have been as gullible as tourists, gaping at the monuments, palaces, and conspicuous consumption of Rome, and then drawing invidious comparisons between such ‘cosmopolitan’ places and ‘provincial’ communities such as medieval merchant towns.
In any event, there was no ‘fall’ into ‘Dark Ages.’ Instead, once freed of the bondage of Rome, Europe separated into hundreds of independent ‘statelets.’ In many of these societies progress and increased production became profitable, and that ushered in ‘one of the great innovative eras of mankind,’ as technology was developed and put into use ‘on a scale no civilization had previously known.’ In fact, it was during the ‘Dark Ages’ that Europe took the great technological and intellectual leap forward that put it ahead of the rest of the world. How could historians have so misrepresented things?
In part, the notion that Europe fell into the ‘Dark Ages’ was a hoax perpetrated by very antireligious intellectuals such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who were determined to claim that theirs was the era of ‘Enlightenment.’ Another factor was that intellectuals too often have no interest in anything but literary matters. It is quite true that after the fall of Rome, educated Europeans did not write nearly as elegant Latin as had the best Roman writers. For many, that was sufficient cause to regard this as a backward time.” —Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity : How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion
Instead, as the centuries passed most people continued to live as they always had, ‘just a notch above barest subsistence… little better off than their oxen.’ Of course, as much as half of the population of the empire consisted of slaves who, in effect, were oxen. But even most free Romans lived at a bare subsistence level, not because they lacked the potential to achieve a much higher standard of living, but because a predatory ruling elite extracted every ounce of ‘surplus’ production. If all production above the bare minimum needed for survival is seized by the elite, there is no motivation for anyone to produce more. Consequently, despite the fabulous wealth of the elite, Rome was very poor. As E. L. Jones noted, ‘emperors amassed vast wealth but received incomes that were nevertheless small relative to the immensity of the territories and populations governed.’
When the collapse of the Roman Empire ‘released the tax-paying millions… from a paralysing oppression,’ many new technologies began to appear and were rapidly and widely adopted with the result that ordinary people were able to live far better, and, after centuries of decline under Rome, the population began to grow again. No longer were the productive classes bled to sustain the astonishing excesses of the Roman elite, or to erect massive monuments to imperial egos, or to support vast armies to hold Rome’s many colonies in thrall. Instead, human effort and ingenuity turned to better ways to farm, to sail, to transport goods, to conduct business, to build churches, to make war, to educate, and even to play music.
But because so many centuries later a number of examples of classical Greek and Roman public grandeur still stand as remarkable ruins, many intellectuals have been prompted to mourn the loss of these ‘great civilizations.’ Many who are fully aware of what this grandeur cost in human suffering have been quite willing even to write-off slavery as merely ‘the sacrifice which had to be paid for this achievement.’ To put it plainly, for too long too many historians have been as gullible as tourists, gaping at the monuments, palaces, and conspicuous consumption of Rome, and then drawing invidious comparisons between such ‘cosmopolitan’ places and ‘provincial’ communities such as medieval merchant towns.
In any event, there was no ‘fall’ into ‘Dark Ages.’ Instead, once freed of the bondage of Rome, Europe separated into hundreds of independent ‘statelets.’ In many of these societies progress and increased production became profitable, and that ushered in ‘one of the great innovative eras of mankind,’ as technology was developed and put into use ‘on a scale no civilization had previously known.’ In fact, it was during the ‘Dark Ages’ that Europe took the great technological and intellectual leap forward that put it ahead of the rest of the world. How could historians have so misrepresented things?
In part, the notion that Europe fell into the ‘Dark Ages’ was a hoax perpetrated by very antireligious intellectuals such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who were determined to claim that theirs was the era of ‘Enlightenment.’ Another factor was that intellectuals too often have no interest in anything but literary matters. It is quite true that after the fall of Rome, educated Europeans did not write nearly as elegant Latin as had the best Roman writers. For many, that was sufficient cause to regard this as a backward time.” —Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity : How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion
“Thus says the Lord,
‘Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths,
Where the good way is, and walk in it;
And you will find rest for your souls.’” —Jeremiah 6:16
‘Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths,
Where the good way is, and walk in it;
And you will find rest for your souls.’” —Jeremiah 6:16
“The notion that Christianity was a religion of outcasts in the Roman Empire is totally erroneous. One need only peruse the Roman Missal and observe the social background of the early Martyrs to see that Christians could be found in all layers of society — among the patricians, the families of senators, the emperor’s family, among actors and intellectuals. Nobody can maintain that the early Fathers of the Church were mostly simpleminded illiterates. Ignatius of Antioch, Tatian, Justin, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement of Rome, Lactantius, Minucius Felix, Clement of Alexandria, Polycarp of Smyrna, Irenaeus, and Novatian were first rate intellectuals, spiritual men — and certainly not ‘social reformers.’ A religion of slaves undermining an aristocratic-heroic commonwealth: This picture is totally unhistorical. But there always will be a certain breed of ‘conservatives’ with a pagan-heroic outlook who are prone to see in Christianity a weak, unmanly faith of crybabies.”
—Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse
“My sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered: there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast or appearance of divine glory in almost everything. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon for a long time; and in the day spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things: in the mean time, singing forth, with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer. And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunder-storm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoiced me. I felt God, if I may so speak, at the first appearance of a thunder-storm; and used to take the opportunity, at such times, to fix myself in order to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God’s thunder, which oftentimes was exceedingly entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God. While thus engaged, it always seemed natural for me to sing, or chant forth my meditations; or to speak my thoughts in soliloquies with a singing voice.”
—Jonathan Edwards, Personal Narrative found among his Mss.
“Our terrestrial existence is a continuous wandering between dream and reality. Life’s contradictions prompt secularized man to seek refuge in dreams, illusions, utopias, ideological castles in the air. In his self-deception, profane man thinks that what he receives in his mental consciousness is the real and the objective; at the same time, he hopes that by his dreams, utopias, ideologies, and so forth, he can change the world and make it better. This self-deception is twofold. What he calls real or objective is only the outermost layer of creation, that which is accessible to sensory observation. And what man hopes to do and to achieve in the world is founded on subjectivism: on impressions, dreams, speculations. Man achieves objectivity only when he goes beyond the limits in which he lives as a sensual ego.”
—Tage Lindbom, Lucifer
“
Egalitarianism, as we have already intimated, cannot make much progress without the use of force: Perfect equality, naturally, is only possible in total slavery. Since nature (and naturalness, implying also freedom from artificial constraints) has no bias against even gross inequalities, force must be used to establish equality. Imagine the average class of students in a boarding school, endowed with the normal variety of talents, interests, and inclinations for hard work. The powerful and dictatorial principal of the school insists that all students of the class should score Bs in a given subject. This would mean that those who earned C, D, or E would be made to work harder, some so hard that they would collapse. Then there would be the problem of the A students whom one would have to restrain, giving them intoxicating drinks or locking them up every day with copies of Playboy or The New Masses. The simplest way would probably be to hit them over the head. Force would have to be used, as Procrustes used it. But the use of force limits and in most cases destroys freedom.
A ‘free’ landscape has hills and valleys. To make an ‘egalitarian’ landscape one would have to blow off the tops of the mountains and fill the valleys with rubble. To get an even hedge, one has to clip it regularly. To equalize wealth (which so many ‘progressive’ countries on either side of the Iron Curtain are now doing) one would have to pay ‘equal wages and salaries,’ or tax the surplus away — to the extent that those earning above the average would refuse additional work. Since these are usually gifted people with stamina and ideas, their refusal has a paralyzing effect on the commonweal.
In other words, there is a real antagonism, an incompatibility, a mutual exclusiveness between liberty and enforced equality. This is a curious situation if we remember that in the popular mind these two concepts are closely linked. Is this only due to the fact that the French Revolution chose as its slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ - or is there another reason?
” —Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse
“My neighbors, how can I tell you about Essence when you do not even understand stories. If you only knew how great the sweetness, the expanse, and the strength are when one reaches the bottom of all the stories — there where the stories begin and where they end; there, where the tongue is silent and where everything is told at once. How boring all the lengthy and tedious stories of creatures then become! Truly, they become just as boring as it is for one who is accustomed to seeing lightning to hear stories about lightning.”
—Saint Nicolai Velimirovich
