Tagged: fear

On the Passions

“Love is blind,” they say. The same, however, might be said just as surely about anger, envy, indignation, and above all, fear. Any passion, if allowed to become dominant in the soul, causes blindness. For by highlighting an object exclusively so as to make it appear overwhelmingly preeminent within its context — which is in effect to remove the object from its proper...

Reflections on Power

Language and politics.– One man believes the central question of practical politics is, “Which powers should the government use?” Another man believes the central question is, “Which powers should the government have?” One word of difference is all that separates these two men — one small word that holds within it all their respective premises about human nature, the individual, and the value of...

Irreconcilable Differences, Part Three

A few more ways that I am at odds with today: I would rather live in a world with many things to fear than in a world with nothing to fear, because the opposite preference represents the emotional state of a child — and implies the practical conditions of a slave. It is preferable to live in a society in which people care...

Democracy

Oligarchs play demagogues to cajole and placate the ill-informed, safety-and-comfort-obsessed majority by inciting distrust and hatred of the genuine best men — the sober, non-tribal, intellectually courageous lovers of goodness and beauty. Together, these two groups, the demagoguing oligarchs and the ignorant majority, forge a tyranny, operated by and for the oligarchs, but advertised as being operated by and for the safety-and-comfort-obsessed majority....

Fear of Death, Fear of Life

The single most universal and inescapable necessity of all human life is death. In principle, though not in subjective experience, it is known from the very beginning of life that this outcome is inevitable. This awareness, to the extent that it is achieved, colors every aspect of life, and increasingly so over the years, until its certain, though temporally unpredictable, arrival. It would...

Reflections On Independence

The blind leading the blindfolded.— We allow the state to decide for us, not because we believe the state knows what is best — practical results consistently prove beyond any doubt that the state does not know — but because we have been convinced that we do not know, and therefore that the easiest course of action is to leave the complex decisions,...

Still Alive?

To avoid death at all costs is the primary aim and concern of human life — so says this late modern age, which at the same time is so smugly proud of having scientifically proven that life does not exist, but is merely an epiphenomenon of accidental material interactions.  To avoid death at all costs is to define oneself as subject to continuous...

The Moon and Aphrodite

A beautiful world is a comforting thought, until you allow yourself the luxury of comparing that thought to our present reality, at which point the phrase “beautiful world” suddenly becomes a cruel mockery of our lives, and possibly a source of paralyzing cynicism. The danger of “idealism,” then, lies in its potential to eviscerate the will to live by making all hope appear...

Late Modern Passions

To escape a perceived object of fear, late modern humanity will eagerly sacrifice anything — up to and including human life itself, the soul of man. In self-defeating hopes of protecting his most worthless and subhuman objects of desire — immediate comfort and immediate pleasure — late modern man will enslave both himself and his neighbor without hesitation, even seemingly without differentiation, thereby...

Herd Immunity, Tyrant Style

Back at the very beginning of Global Totalitarian Lockdown Fever, in Italy, the justification offered for the extreme assault on individual liberty was that the death rate from COVID-19 was so terrifyingly high that governments ought to spare absolutely no effort to curtail the spread of the virus at all costs. At that time, I argued loudly and repeatedly that this reasoning was...