The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought
Daniel Schwindt
Top 10 Best Quotes
“When we refer to Liberalism, then, we must be understood as referring to the continuous and wide-ranging tradition of the Enlightenment, a tradition which has gone to form the political and social consensus of the modern world, for there is no developed nation that is not a child of this original Liberalism. It informs and dictates the positions and goals of both the American Right and the American Left. If the former seems by its rhetoric to despise it, we must simply remember Davila's observation: "Today's conservatives are nothing more than Liberals who have been ill- treated by democracy.”
“Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man—as distinguished from man’s end—had become that center or origin.” ~ Leo Strauss”
“Whether we are speaking of the philosophical history of the concept (universal suffrage) or the contemporary reality of its application, everyone stops somewhere. They all set a limit, even if that limit is the requirement of adulthood (a completely arbitrary classification if there ever was one). This unwillingness to apply the principle completely tells us something: First, it tells us that almost everyone knows that there ought to be some sort of qualification for electoral participation; and second, it tells us that no one knows exactly what this qualification ought to be. Because everyone agrees, even if unconsciously, on the first point—that qualifications there must be—then we can consider this an implicit acknowledgment that universal suffrage, even where it is preached, must be considered a purely sentimental notion which no one is actually willing to implement. We may then set about examining the second point, concerning the necessity and nature of the qualifications that ought to be set before the voting citizen.”
“When we select a candidate for any office we are not selecting a leader—in fact we are not looking at character traits at all—we are merely selecting a mirror, and the man who can best function in that reflective capacity is the victor. Unfortunately, since this requires the politician not only to try to "mirror" my desires, but also a thousand others, the one who wins is not simply a mirror, but a complex "prism" of sorts, attempting to "represent" a thousand wills at once. The last person he is actually allowed to be is himself. Needless to say, no authentic man—much less a great leader—would subject himself to such degradation. And yet we demand it of all politicians.”
“When man becomes the origin of morality, the external moral imperative, which traditionally tethered his actions to a standard outside himself, giving him an external and objective aim, evaporates into thin air. He has freedom, yes, but it is like being liberated from one's natural atmosphere, like being flung into space, or into a desert. You are free, you have become the autonomous source and measure of the good, and you may go whatever direction you like—but you find yourself in empty space, in an infinite vacuum: you can go anywhere, but there is nowhere to go, and so you are not really free.”
“When Liberalism denied the correlation between right and duty, it ended by emphasizing right to the exclusion of duty. The led inevitably to the present situation, where no one can coherently speak of duties at all, for the only duty left is to respect another man's rights.”
“When God created the angels he knew that this implied the possibility of devils. He thought it worth the risk. In the act of Creation, God, the cosmic monarch, showed man the path of courage. Modern man chooses instead the path of cowardice. If God had been a democrat, he'd have created very little. He certainly wouldn't have created man. He'd have stopped at the creation of vegetable life, and perhaps a few low animal species: for here he could have been guaranteed a comfortable mediocrity, for animals cannot become devils. But this was not the way of the Creator: he wanted saints, and if he had to suffer death on the cross at the hands of a few devils, he'd suffer it. This was the way of courage the way of the King. "Power corrupts!" the democrat shouts. "So be it," replies the Creator as He gives him the gift of power. Saints he would have, and devils too, but devils for the sake of the saints. The democrat chooses to have neither (and in fact he has neither heretic nor martyr in his regime), and he pats himself on the back for achieving this comfortable mediocrity where none can rise or fall, and where every horizon is dictated by cowardice.”
“We do indeed live in an 'information age," but we tend to forget that the sheer availability of information may or may not have any impact on whether or not that information can be distributed effectively, much less utilized properly. In fact, we could say that the greatest lie of the information age is that, just by piling up trillions of bits of data, we perpetually increase the intelligence of the human race as a collective whole. This optimistic assumption about the human mind has been almost universally accepted since the rise of humanism, and is completely false. There is a very rigid limit on the amount of knowledge that an individual can absorb and utilize, and it is never very much. We all live and die in ignorance of almost everything there is in the world to know. To say this is not pessimism, but is simply an honest acknowledgment of the vastness of our reality, its laws, and its mysteries.”
“Universal suffrage enfranchised everyone and, in doing so, reduced everyone's power to the smallest share possible. While this was acceptable when it was conceived as impotence over others, it becomes intolerable when we realize that our power over ourselves is included in the bargain. The individual in a regime of universal suffrage has an absolute minimum of influence.”
“Thomas Carlyle once said that "Democracy prevails when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ." Although most democrats would not perhaps admit this degree of prejudice, Carlyle's words do capture the spirit of the democratic mind. So afraid are we of offending against the doctrine of equality—of implying that one man might actually be better, wiser, more virtuous than his neighbor—that we cannot bring ourselves to make any distinctions, however glaringly obvious they may be.”
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Book Keywords:
elections, voting, virtue, vote, universal-suffrage, duties, monarchy, aristociacy, freedom, ideology, enlightenment, liberalism, atomization, corruption, traditionalism, rights, government, morality, information, knowledge, democracy, ignorance
