1. One knows God in knowing finite things through openness to and dependence upon the Logos within all things, and also on account of the indissoluble, nuptial unity of consciousness and being. Everything that exists receives existence from God and subsists mysteriously in God. God is Being itself, not a category of being. There is metaphysical bond between God and Nature. Earthly objects receive reality from God’s own Being; they do not possess their own being. A created order is not independent of God, who is Being and Logos. Yet nominalism denies there is an intrinsic essence in anything, instead assuming that matter has meaning through acts of motion or will. This is distinct from the view that a being is part of God’s nature, because He is united in creation. To remove God further is to place man’s relationship to Nature as one of want and will instead of discovery bound by natural laws. There is then no teleology to life. In reality, the self is not willed but created with purpose. The self should seek communion – or theosis – with its originator – Logos – by an understanding of the telos of life.
2. The telos of life is theosis with the Logos through ascesis.
3. The Logos, the Unmanifest, the Being-Intellect, the Absolute, is the source of all, including matter-nature. There is no base division between the natural and the supernatural, as nature is theophany and its fulfillment a revealed Being self-sacrificed in becoming. The point of human life is to use reason to control appetites for the sake of the good, which is Logos.
4. Substantive moral principles conduce to the common good, principles that officials should read into the majestic generalities and ambiguities of laws. These principles include respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function; solidarity within and among families, social groups, and workers’ unions, trade associations, and professions; appropriate subsidiarity, or respect for the legitimate roles of public bodies and associations at all levels of government and society; and a candid willingness to “legislate morality” — indeed, a recognition that all legislation is necessarily founded on some substantive conception of morality, and that the promotion of morality is a core and legitimate function of authority. Such principles promote the common good and make for a just and well-ordered society.
5. Truth has an absolute and necessary quality deriving from the unconditional character of existence itself.
6. Resentment is a contemptible form of egoism.
7. Original sin should not be viewed as political error.
8. Culture, more than politics and economic structure, determine the success of society. Politics, who and whom gets what when, shapes but does not originate culture. Politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes, downstream from culture.
9. A healthy body politic is a healthy culture, which will not highly value the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. The main justification of the existence of a nation is its culture.
10. Any self-identity based on negation is ultimately parasitic on the image of the enemy it opposes.
11. Disputes over law, liberty, and justice should be addressed to a historic and existing community. The root of decent politics is attachment, the motive in humans that binds to place, customs, history, and people who are theirs.
12. Reality is that which, when one stops believing in it, doesn’t go away.
13. Obligations precede rights; rights are situational and relative while obligations are metaphysical and absolute. An obligation arises from encountering another.
14. Humans cannot bear very much reality.
15. Human power is by definition hypocritical.
16. Amongst decent civilizations, patricide is suicide.
17. Identity should be localized. Abstracted, large identity is a revolt against nature, an unnatural adherence and focus on opinions, ideas, and events far away outside of one’s true environmental existence.
18.  The central aim of a constitutional order should be to promote good rule, not to “protect liberty” as an end in itself.
19. Clarity is more important than agreement.
20. Absent absolutes of right and wrong, anything can be rationalized. Absent divine origin for those absolutes, they cannot be absolutes.
21. The only way to avoid metaphysics is silence.
22. Law is superior to lawmaking because the source of law is a Divine Spirit.
23. Few rhetorical strategies are more dangerous to truth than weaponized ambiguity.
24. Humans cannot live well without some form of sacred authority, because choas fills the void of a transcendent order to which they should conform desire.
25. Sexual intimacy is consecration or desecration, with no neutral territory; little matters more than the customs, ceremonies, and rites with which humans lift the body above its material and toward the soul.
26. Humans are rational creatures and morality is practical reason.
27. Truth is the conformity of intellect to reality, not the conformity of intellect to life. This is because Truth and Reality are a Divine Spirit, Christ.
28. Revolutions are not conducted from below by the people, but from above, in the name of the people, by an aspiring elite.
29. Science cannot identify intrinsic value; it can only be the handmaiden of the religious.
30. The child of sin is death; what begins with desire ends with death.
31. The way of revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised as creeds.
32. Humans are political by nature. It is not the case they must never use power, lament its use, or severely limit it as if power were some impurity. The question is whether the use of power orders to virtue or vice.
33. Whenever a state accepts the validity of usurious contracts, citizens are saddled with unrepayable debt. The state allows the usurers to loot labor to pay for the usury burden. Capitalism posits the primacy of usury over human labor as the source of wealth and therefore as the most basic principle of the economy. Capitalism is usury at the expense of labor. To conform to the Good, economics must subordinate itself to the moral law.
34. Capitalism is state-sponsored usury; economics should be a branch of moral philosophy; labor is the fundamental unit of value; oligarchs highly value the bread and circus of “sexual liberation” as a form of political control, and as a means of wage stagnation.
35. Superiority excites envy.
36. Humans inherently need a transcendent purpose, which only God can fully provide.
37. When a large group of fanatics share a cultural norm of crushing dissent, they self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting ideas they don’t like.
38. Virtuous activity makes life happy not by guaranteeing happiness, but as the goal for the sake of which lesser goods are pursued.
39. Bad is the dominion of the multitude.
40. Totalitarian ideologies develop as rationalized resentment around a common cause, envy and spite.
41. The truth is treason to evil.
42. Everything good, beautiful, and true is an indication of God.
43. Humans invariably form cohesive groups which invariably exploit one another, and with the state invariably functioning as an instrument to do so.
44. Ideas should be considered contestable, not heretical.
45. Natural law is too general in itself and needs human positive law and custom to give it definite form. Without social contexts, there is no connection to natural law commands, such as to honor the dead. Natural law needs law and custom to be actionable; custom needs natural law to be intelligible.
46. Myth is the province of religion and not fiction as it does not deal in imaginary worlds. Myth is received as a narrative of the world, but on a higher plane in which individual characters are dissolved into archetypes and accidents subsumed by fate.
47. The final objective of the law is to make men morally better.
48. Symbol, etymologically, ‘brings together’ things that otherwise would remain separate, by providing a new form of expression that unifies disparate realities without being reducible to any one of those realities. It is a sign as much as an idea, a promise, an inexhaustible conceptual and linguistic ellipsis that sustains hope and faith by its very irreducibility, its persistent impenetrability, its invitation to be understood.
49. Laws inherently impose a moral vision and order on society.
50. The job of the adjective is to change the noun.
51. A theory’s validity derives from its predictive power.
52. The size, complexity, atomization, liberalization, and elitism of mass society is a machinery of misery.
53. Artistic genius does not absolve sins, nor do sins negate artistic genius.
54. Society as a compact based primarily on transactional and contractual relations, without the guiding presence of the clergy and nobility, struggles to nourish the sentiments and attachments necessary to dignify a people.
55. Cultural cohesion and unified nationhood comes in large part from a subset of population genetics that is cultural continuity and genetic similarity.
56. Sin is the alluring agent of chaos.
57. No institution can be neutral and any institutional authority aiming only for neutrality will be captured by the faction more committed to imposing ideology.
58. To change the meaning of a symbol is to change the meaning of reality for those that look to that symbol to structure reality. To communicate and structure inner feeling requires a symbolic order.
59. Economic and social systems with uncorrelated status paths toward high status are less fragile. The more severe the imposition of a single hierarchy, the more likely people are to engage in conflict.
60. It is the duty of the critic to annoy the untalented.
61. Politics is a contest of interests constrained by moral principles but rarely in their service.
62. Information is cheap while meaning is expensive.
63. In politics, power helps to control discourse and controlling discourse helps to possess power.
64. He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.
65. As a phallic cult rises, so also does impotence.
66. A strong and healthy family is the first and basic unit of society and of the state. The strongest and most well-organized state will come to a condition of decline and disintegration if its family unit falls apart and there are no bases of family life and upbringing.
67. Humans are transformed not from external reasons but from moral changes.
68. A paper is only as meaningful as the men who create and enforce it.
69. Most true and lasting sociopolitical change happens through networks of elites and their institutions working with a common purpose.
70. The soul has needs that cannot be denied, but only deformed and distorted.
71. There is no democratic path for the mystical imperium of Logos.
72. Cultural revolution and zeitgeist change happens when elites and elite networks come to agreement on conceptual frameworks, and make acceptance the cost of admission into sociability.
73. Best for a nation is to be bound by bonds of history and memory, tradition and custom, language and literature, birth and faith, blood and soil.
74. For those who hate the truth, the truth looks like hate.
75. The aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the past, its vandalization of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the world of history, was also a denial of community, home, and settlement.
76. Populations separated for an evolutionary significant amount of time evolve different distributions of traits.
77. The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.
78. The malice of men can fetch poison from Hell.
79. Totalitarianism can come from disintegration, even before a totalitarianism of domination. It can dominate by disintegrating. Totalitarianism is a condition in which politics invades all of life.
80. In a multicultural democracy, citizens vote less for ideas and candidates than for who they themselves are.
81. Uprootedness uproots everything, except the need for roots.
82. Hope is memory plus desire.
83. It is better that scandals arise than that the truth be suppressed.
84. Successful peasant revolts are rare; successful elite revolts are common.
85. Politics should be an expression of a fabric of social life organized around families, churches, ethnic groups, trade associations, and other means of belonging. Man’s metaphysical element, oriented to the good, should inform a healthy polis.
86. A society without shared premises does not exist.
87. The river of time in its current bears away all the affairs of men, and drowns nations, kingdoms, and kings in the abyss of oblivion. And if, through the sounds of the lyre and the trumpet, anything remains, it shall be devoured in the jaws of eternity and not escape the common fate.
88. The power of words over reality cannot be unlimited since reality imposes its own unalterable conditions.
89. Symbols are real. They belong to the mind, which is of a higher level of being than matter.
90. Human perception of sacred order gives form to social order. Acts of interpreting the sacred within the profane is formation of culture.
91. Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.
92. By a “condensed symbol” do certain practices and ideas become shorthand for a whole worldview or fearful understanding.
93. In a scientistic-technocratic culture without binding religious ideals, political discourse becomes a discourse of selective moral scandal.
94. Civil religion is the appropriation of religion by politics for its purposes.
95. Politics, who and whom gets what when, is the method by which power is organized and distributed.
96. There is no social progress outside the moral order.
97. It is better to be a citizen than a consumer.
98. The hallmark of a sane society is reconciliation of the present and the future to the past.
99. Dogmas properly divide good citizens, while a love of generalities unite them.
100. Ideological language is a seemingly magical instrument of forcing reality to conform to a particular vision of the world.
101. The modern world demands approval of what it should not dare ask to tolerate.
102. The cultured man has the obligation to be intolerant.
103. A people either dominates or yields to domination.
104. Women can both rock the cradle and dig the grave of civilization.
105. The who and whom question of politics is powerful because humans are inherently tribal. They are rational insofar as they rationalize their decisions and will. Politically, human will should not become law without strict regard to human limitations and a transcendent moral order.
106. Labor is the source of all economic value.
107. Only those who have a properly-ordered view of the end of life can obtain any semblance of fulfillment.
108. In war, the law is mute.
109. The incarnation is the ultimate expression of what it means to be human, now and in the age to come. The human being, therefore, is at once an ensouled body, and a bodily soul. One’s personal identity and wholeness is bound up with this interconnection. The body is the visible, objective expression of the life of the soul. What happens to the body happens also to the soul, and what happens to the soul happens also to the body.
110. Sexuality is an inextricable part of the cosmic order and therefore of the social order.
111. Worship and communion must be physical to carry transformative power. Life must be anchored in the physical, especially religious faith. When the virtual becomes too large it produces emptiness; it infects with emptiness.
112. Worship and communion must be physical to carry transformative power. Life must be anchored in the physical, especially religious faith. When the virtual becomes too large it produces emptiness; it infects with emptiness.
113. Signs refer to an external, pre-linguistic world, not a construct of human experience. Representation is not performative but referential. Humans cannot deconstruct and reconstruct self and society at will.
114. Authentic human freedom is the freedom of just reciprocal relations.
115. A human society worthy of the adjective “human” must articulate a metaphysical system to make sense of reality, to offer consolation, and to present a sense of meaning so as to face vicissitude.
116. Art is communion between inspiration and the soul of the observer.
117. Modernity banishes spiritual enchantment, a unifying vision of the whole of life and death. To reject the sacred, which means also to reject sin, imperfection, and evil, is to reject the reality of human limits. To be “free” from religious heritage or historical tradition is to situate oneself in a void and thus to disintegrate. The absence of a transcendent dimension in secular society weakens the social contract in which each limits freedom in order to live in peace with others.
118. To be “liberated” from anything that restrains the “autonomous” will or desire is to be a slave to the passions.
119. There is no such thing as a lost cause because there is no such thing as a gained cause.
120. As varied as revolutionary forms are, a common feature is correlation between the elevation of politics to religion and the negation of the supernatural.
121. The subtlest foe of humanity is the tyranny that wears the mask of humanitarianism and benevolence.
122. Wisdom is that which is true.
123. At the foundation of strong wit is truth.
124. Women should inspire, not aspire.
125. In every action, humans reveal what they value.
126. Good art is inherently anti-egalitarian.
127. Public opinion is an effect, not a cause.
128. Those who can influence one to believe absurdities can influence one to commit atrocities.
129. Social isolation and societal secularization will lead to a personal loss of spiritual meaning.
130. Dormant and misdirected religious impulses can do grave damage to a social order.
131. The study of politics is not principally the study of ideas but the study of power: how power is acquired, lost, used, and concealed, and who or whom gets what when. The primary political question is which elites will rule, not whether elites will rule. Elites tend to rule through myths, stories, and ideals that justify their dominion by endowing it with moral credibility. Seizing and holding institutional power – the legitimization of managerial control – is served by ideas and civil debate, but are not its source.
132. In political affairs, stability itself tends to be de-stabilizing.
133. A primary political error is unbounded moralistic optimism.
134. Tribalism is a long-standing, global phenomenon.
135. There is a moral hazard to externalizing risk
136. Revolutions have little to do with the masses. They are made and led and defended by elites, and the people follow who wins.
137. Tradition is a socially embodied argument.
138. Scapegoating and ritual sacrifice is an essential aspect of group identity and solidarity. Sacrifice and scapegoats organizes in a polity as a response to a sense of crisis.
139. When truths become unspeakable, they eventually become inconceivable.
140. A culture’s greatest achievements come in pursuit of ideas that transcend human differences.
141. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs.
142. Humans need shared loves and a coherent narrative – a shared vision of the good – regarding human identity and common life to flourish.
143. Religion is essential to the functioning of a society, and the etymology of the word is “to bind.” This is why conquering tribes throughout history have taken the faith of the natives they ruled – or made sure the defeated converted to their way of thinking.
144. It is impossible to create a system so perfect that man does not have to be good.
145. Human freedom is in the space between the will to happiness and the will to justice, both of which are given to lead to Logos.
146. The law of nature is certain and imprinted by Logos. The principles of knowing and acting, and of the proved conclusions, agree with the proper end of man. Human reason knows these conclusions from the consequences of life, so that man may recognize and choose the good and avoid opposites.
147. Family, community, religion, and nation are inexorably linked.
148. Elite culture, and elite networks, are the deciding factor in the direction of a culture.
149. Power is best and most fairly exercised when closest to those subject to it.
150. Demography is the basis of political power. Demography is socio-political destiny.
151. Manners are a matter of morals and metaphysics when a culture is determined to deny reality.
152. Nations are distinct geopolitical creations to privilege tribes – race and ethnicity. A nation can lose the loyalty of the people which established the nation for the benefit of themselves and their posterity. It will become de-nationed, a nation in name only, divorced from the mystic chords which historically composed it.
153. Liberalism, the political expression of the Enlightenment project, is fundamentally false. The project claims neutrality, to stand above every particular conception of the Good, granting freedom to all and favoritism to none. Yet it imposes its own narrow vision, a tyranny of abstracted equality and freedom. Claims to neutrality are an imposition, without assertion, that its claims are objectively true. Therefore it does not assume the responsibility that comes from being a recognized establishment.
154. Freedom from constraint is different from freedom for virtue. True freedom is only found in obedience. Miracle, mystery, and authority bind to Logos, but these things are not the same as faith. They are icons through which one can view God. If they are substitutes for God, disordered desires, they become idols. Ordered liberty is true liberty: man must in and through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation.
155. A paradox of modernity is refusal to define progress in a way accordant with the nature of fallen man, a rejection of hard-won wisdom.
156. Tradition is the handing down of permanent values, which by definition must be recognized as such by experience, not conceived theoretically as instruments.
157. The wealthier a society, the lower the relative cost of degradation.
158. The earth, a pale blue marble cast among the stars, testifies to the Logos.
159. A man has as many masters as he has vices.
160. Men compete, then cooperate. Women compete, then cast out. Vertical male hierarchy, even if established by violence, in the end ensures a place for all. Order is kept via violence, rules-based discipline, and threat of demotion. This allows for clarity, graceful losing, and the possibility of peaceful surrender. The order is stable. By contrast, horizontal female hierarchy causes churn, clique formation, uncertain and shifting status, and frequent change of allegiance. This is not order: it is zero sum and highly unstable.
161. Through aesthetic judgment humans strive for a world that signifies and amplifies their humanity.
162. It can be as wrong to love good things in the wrong way as it is to love the wrong things.
163. Real and lasting political and social policies are not the result of blueprints or manifestos but the product of talent, or lack thereof, applied to circumstance.
164. The public square is shaped by those who are most committed to seeing their vision of society realized and made hegemonic.
165. The fact that a person has a desire is no guide in determining whether such desire should be indulged.
166. The brutality of a totalitarian oligarchy or tyrannical dictatorship is proportional to the cowardice of the men of the non-oligarch “underclass.”
167. The instability of evil is one small morality of the cosmos.
168. The mind should guide the will toward the good; the more the will knows the good, the better able it is to love it. And the more a rational human’s embodied spirit knows and loves the good, the freer it is.
169. Revolutionary abstractions of liberty and equality have, time and again, given rise to tyranny.
170. All political ideologies are false. Politics are not subject to universal formulas and deductive syllogisms in the manner of mathematics.
171. The liberal project of creating neutral institutions has two problems. First, it is destructive because the bonds of affection out of which communities are built are, by definition, non-neutral. Second, it is a lie because someone must administer this project; and administration, though advertised as neutral, is not. People are not neutral and some must administer over others.
172. Dying to self is a lifelong challenge.
173. Beauty is unity, proportion, and clarity. It is good and true, perceived by humans through senses that inheres the object.
174. To live without a faith, without a patrimony to defend, without a steady struggle for the Truth, is not living but existing.
175. Man loses the possibility of contact with metaphysical reality when materialism kills possibility, deflects intent, and deforms living a higher spiritual life.
176. A proposition that can’t be acted upon must be false, or meaningless. Related, if a person cannot avoid acting as if a proposition is true, then it must be true.
177. Nominalism can be asserted only by means of the universals it reprehends.
178. Error, sin and disordered affection, is seductive and prolific.
179. Nothing cures one of the illusion of human rationalism quicker than expressing an unpopular opinion.
180. Sin is not only rule breaking but declining to live in accord with the structure of reality itself.
181. Religion teaches metaphysics, how to examine the self and one’s relationship to the universe. A materialistic philosophy has no sense of the spiritual or sublime, leading to solipsistic, overly emotional fevers.
182. Good art is from religion. Such art frees the mind from the parochial trap of the immediate.
183. Man has a purpose. The human body bears the image of God, though tarnished by sin, and is a pinnacle of a created order imbued with meaning. A primary task of life is conformity to the means by which God orders creation, for the sake of harmony with His purpose.
184. Political power attracts pathological personalities.
185. True joy is found in commitment to something greater than the self, and the sacrifices entailed by it.
186. Those who give scandal are guilty of murder. But those who allow themselves to be scandalized are guilty of suicide.
187. To be obsessed with questions of power and status is to possess a constant personal insecurity.
188. The result of virtue-signaling is a boosted signal at the expense of virtue.
189. Goodness is what best conforms to truth and a thing’s proper end.
190. The tenuous threads that hold society together are difficult to knit and easy to shred.
191. The attraction of an ideology is not in it end vision but in the means needed to realize it.
192. The most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is the ignorance of work.
193. A social-spiritual void demands infinite promise and surrender to a totalizing force.
194. Human beings defend themselves by attributing their own bad traits to others.
195. The human person is an indivisible unity of body and soul; the male and female bodies are bearers of intrinsic meaning. The facts of biology are integral to personhood.
196. A so-called egalitarian empathy, projected from afar and without discrimination, is principled rather than properly attentive. It is content to posit rather than to see the humanity of its beneficiaries.
197. Humans are wanderers looking for a cheering hearth, shipwrecked sailors searching for a last port, who should embrace life as a pilgrimage and as a purposeful journey – one to be spiritually undertaken by arduous, unrelenting effort.
198. To find true and enduring love, stop indulging lust.
199. Disgust can be an essential human strength.
200. Literature ought to deal in universal truths.
201. Female hypergamy is fed by male neediness; it is starved by male aloofness.
202. Permitting the mob is assisting the mob.
203. Marriage has to be sexually complementary because only the male and female partnership mirrors the generativity of the divine order.
204. Humans are a species with amnesia.
205. The dignity of man ultimately depends upon the primacy of the Good and the affirmation of the sovereignty of God.
206. Biology explains more than sociology.
207. What a person does with sexuality cannot be separated from what a person is.
208. “Church” and “state” should not exist as separate institutions; rather, spiritual and temporal authority should cooperate together within a single social whole for the establishment of earthly peace, ordered to eternal salvation.
209. A culture can degrade such that seeking or holding political office is, in and of itself, proof that the person is psychologically and morally unfit to hold public office.
210. For humans to cast aside their past of place is to pollute the spiritual ecology. The past cannot be only consumed; it should in some way be incarnated.
211. Social order is not grown in a “state of nature” in which liberty is untrammeled. Liberty presupposes order; once a proper social order is established, it will engender such liberties as are rightly fitted to historical circumstance. Then, liberty supports and reinforces robust social order so that it is robust under stress. If social order is mad, so will liberty be mad. Liberty will devour social order, as liberty is a subsidiary of social life. It is a derivative feature of social order, but not its source. Social order consists in constraints upon individual acts, whether through custom, taboo, scapegoating, or law. Social order is the source and basis of liberty, not vice versa. And where there is no social order, there is no freedom to do anything but fight.
212. What can happen to a man has happened so often that little remains for the imagination.
213. It is a false conception of freedom that severs human beings from one another, especially their society, nation, and family. This erodes the common good, natural law, and collective morality, exacerbating a reign of egoism.
214. Public paternalism can encourage private virtue.
215. What foreign arms could could not quell, by civil rage and rancour fell.
216. One need not support coercion to recognize that the state cannot be neutral. And in its choices, the state contributes heavily to public de-legitimization.
217. Valuing tradition does not mean valuing the past as past; it means valuing what in the past was eternal, with the potential to renew the present. It is a mistake to try to recreate the past, which is a foreign country.
218. The human body is a part of moral ecology, which helps to create an environment within which others live, people toward whom there are responsibilities to act with respect and affection. There should be a sanctified sense of wonder at the beauty of the person, and were a hidden-ness is the a habitat of glory and sanctification. The body is more than one more trivial amusement for the temporary satisfaction of passing interests. Physical intimacy only truly matters, and only is truly satisfying, within such parameters. If sex is no longer sacred, it becomes empty.
219. Sacred things are most often secret things. For the body, modesty preserves its meaning.
220. Freedom is not the lack of restraints or “self-realization;” it is following of the order and reason that stands outside of creation, the Logos.
221.  Sheep attract wolves.
222. It is not enough to hold correct doctrine in mind. Humans must construct lives, build habitus, in such a way to be oriented towards God and in constant motion towards ultimate unity with Him, an unfailing awareness of the divine presence and doing all things with Him in mind. Secularism is the negation of man as a worshiping being. To be fully human involves true communal worship with grave consequences for viewing the world. The cosmos and the natural terrestrial world are sacramental; the world is an epiphany of God where humans can encounter His revelation, power, and presence.
223. Demons and the monsters of sin grow more powerful the more humans deny their reality. A man has as many masters as he has vices.
224. Friendship between females is a temporary ceasefire.
225. Little that is truly important in life can be measured or quantified.
226. Rationalization is moral engineering.
227. Beauty will save the world.
228. Lust transforms into disgust of object and self.
229. Eternity is newness as such and the source of all that is new.
230. The more decrepit the paradigm, the more immoderate and extreme the truth “seems” within that paradigm.
231. What goes un-said tends to go un-thought. What is outside of acceptable orthodoxy to be said tends to stop thinking well about societal problems.
232. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to “create” oneself, then necessarily God is denied. Man is stripped of dignity as the image of God at the core of his being. The defense of the family is about man himself. When God is denied human dignity also disappears; whoever defends God defends man.
233. Where orthodoxy is optional it will be proscribed.
234. Technological power has little to do with knowledge.
235. When a person sets a goal, they inherit a lifestyle.
236. Freedom of speech is freedom from consequences.
237. Seemingly chance events are still caused, even if only by a coincidence of causes.
238. Beauty is a primary sign of God’s presence. In beauty and goodness does truth take concrete form. Wisdom requires humans wed their souls to the good and the beautiful so as to discover the true.
239. Good literature is an approach, through fiction, to truth.
240. Secular thought is full of repressed religion. A “godless” search for universal law is futile; without a law giver, universal moral law has no meaning.
241. A great challenge is to understand the place and priorities of one’s identity. Race and ethnicity, while real and measurable realities, cannot fully support the definition of personhood. Therefore identity politics is misguided because prioritizing race or ethnicity above all else artificially bloats it with meaning.
242. When there is a problem of elite overproduction, secular elites try to take roles from religious organizations.
243. People tend to mistake what is good for them personally with what is good for the institution.
244. Logos involves not just logic, reason, and order but communion. Therefore reason is intimately connected with transforming encounters with the living, loving God.
245. A racial group is an extended family that has a higher than random level of coherence and continuity due to some degree of endogamy. Viewed as concentric circles, it is extended family partly inbred. An ethnic group is a population united by some cultural characteristics that are typically passed down within genetic families but that don’t have to be, such as language and religion.
246. If there are justice and law and hope in the universe, they are to be found on the far side of the grave. And if none of these things exists, then there is no unimaginable reality, nor any point in one, nor any point in poetry and music and speech and temporal love – just mud and silence.
247. Civilizations are a combination of racial expression, of the collective genome, and of their ideas, hopefully of high purpose and character.
248. “Freedom” is the not absence of anything standing in the way of individual will.
249. Feminism is a death cult because it reverses sexual polarity; it pushes men and women apart to assume roles unnatural to their biology.
250. Any pretext of philosophy that does not bear fruit in the cultivation of virtue and the guidance of conduct is futile and false.
251. Rivalry and violence result inevitably from the clash of mimetic desires. Then, there is scapegoating. The discord is refocused onto a third person or group, an outsider. The former rivals form a unified front and redirect their efforts toward a scapegoat whose elimination, they convince themselves, will resolve the original conflict of competing desires. And the scapegoat, once safely out of the way, is sanctified and even deified. The story of the scapegoat comes to serve as a founding myth for cultures and religions.
252. Politics is more about tribe than policy. In a democracy, people vote for who they are.
253. Ideology can be a source of tribal identity at its most extreme if dependent not on principles but on the psychology of an adversarial relationship to rivals – if rivalry is a source of meaning. This is why extremist ideologies tend to be built upon fabulist views of a future: the more spectacular the vision, and the more unreachable the goal, then the more immersive the cause.
254. Sin is some manner of disorienting, distorted love.
255. Feminism asserts that men naturally want to harm women, followed by pleas to men to solve women’s problems.
256. Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms.
257. All states have their origin in plunder and conquest.
258. In society, if there is nothing but transgression and dissent, then there is nothing to give acts of transgression the purpose, substance, and meaning that make them more than just puerile self-indulgence.
259. To be alive is to be locked in struggle with death.
260. Success with women is more disillusioning than failure.
261. Individualism is not the alternative to statism, but a primary cause.
262. Nothing causes more outrage than a statement that is both obviously true and fervently wished by everyone to be untrue.
263. To know is to be responsible.
264. The greatest of social changes tend to happen insensibly. Even when they seem sudden, this is merely a very long gradual transformation finally bearing fruit.
265. Humans are as courageous as they are convinced.
266. Violent delights have violent ends.
267. There are always public consequences of private vices.
268. People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
269. Philosophically liberal nations are physically arranged to produce maximum loneliness, arranged economically to produce maximum anxiety, and disposed socially to produce maximum alienation – they slouch in the direction of depression, rage, violence, and death. A philosophically liberal order catechizes. It is not neutral.
270. Large social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval.
271. Pride is the root of sin; therefore, humility is its eradication.
272. For empires and nations, grand socio-political strategy is a by-product of geography.
273. Society is affectionate first, or it is not society. Only derivatively can society be exploitative, abusive, and evil.
274.  A symbol is a concept that brings together data and organizes them in a rational, orderly way to convey meaning.
275. A capitalist culture is, of necessity, a secularist culture, no matter how long the quaint customs and intuitions of folk piety may persist among some of its citizens; secularism is capitalism in its cultural manifestation. Interminable acquisitiveness, self-absorption, lust, and moral relativism are not an accidental accretion upon an benign economic system but the inevitable result of fundamental capitalist values.
276. Nothing is beautiful but the true.
277. Women are the body that reflects the soul of her society.
278. Symbolism and stereotype tend not to lie.
279. Linguistic engineering always precedes social engineering.
280. Biological similarity, in and of itself and guided by nothing higher, is not sufficient for a thriving society. A shared faith, the ties of a common culture and language, can guard against materialism, cultural malaise, and spiritual disconnection.
281. The only way to avoid becoming metaphysician is to say nothing.
282. Everyone is a traditionalist in their area of expertise.
283. Reality edits falsehood.
284. Humans falling in love is less of a choice than an experience one suffers, a power that humbles individualism. Forms of love are mania, a madness that might have a divine inspiration.
285. That which humans cannot see can protect them from what they do not understand.
286. For a good community, a shared moral sense is embodied, enforced and passed through institutions, customs, and personal loyalty.
287. A strong sense of loyalty can cut both ways: it can blind one to subversives, but once betrayed it fuels a righteous vengeance for the scalps of one’s betrayers.
288. Statism in liberalism enables an individualism that requires statism because philosophic premises demand constant “liberation” from externally imposed limits (nature, tradition, God). Then is the creation of substitute constraints in the man-made form of the state. The result is a degradation of life and citizenship.
289. Societies no less than people can serve both God and Mammon.
290. Liturgical worship is an essential declaration of one’s citizenship in the Kingdom of God, such as kneeling before the Creator.
291. A “neutral” nation-state based primarily on abstract principles and without attachments to a particular culture, language, religion, tradition, history, or shared sacrifice cannot inspire the necessary mutual loyalty and national cohesion required for a morally decent, cohesive society to thrive.
292. The aspirations for transcendence that young people especially feel so keenly need outlets for expression and cultivation in art and the devotional life of religion – not in politics or emotive tribalism.
293. It is rare for a man to be at home in more than one culture, but it’s an alluring myth. Being among one’s own kind means no need to explain a cultural or historical reference, that little is exotic, conversations are subtle and more allusive, humor can be deft, one does not apologize for just being, and where there are also niceties to observe and taboos to avoid – obligations that are not comprehensible to outsiders.
294. Flourishing consists of doing things, not just in getting things, or having desirable or pleasant experiences, or having things done. The good consists in activity. Human goods are realized by acting, thus enriching life and ennobling oneself as one fulfills one’s natural human capacities or friendship, knowledge, and aesthetic appreciation. The common good is best conceived as a set of conditions for enabling members of a community to attain for themselves reasonable objectives, to realize value for the sake of collaboration with each other in community, which enables people to do the things of integral flourishing.
295. Human flourishing comes from a common idea of virtue, one relational to other persons and grounded in the Logos. A decent society requires the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjugation.
296. Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers humans the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.
297. Conservatives believe in unchosen obligations, in pieties, whereas classical liberals, right-liberals, believe the source of obligation is choice.
298. The critic should have no theory, no ideology, no asphyxiating -ism. The critic’s chief loyalty is to beauty and wisdom, to the well made and usefully wise, to the ligatures between style and meaning.
299. Good and bad coexist and remain present in humans, amid idealistic gestures that crash into daily disappointments.
300. Whatever a man prefers to God, he makes a god to himself, even as all creation is an icon or an idol responsive to the divine. Participating in the truth means to be mastered by it rather than mastering it. The supernatural was not a distinct or separate realm of being that superimposed itself onto an independent and autonomous realm of nature. Instead, it is a divine mean to bring created realities of time and space to their end, or telos. Access to truth is sacramental participation, theosis, toward the unfathomable mystery of Logos. Humanity has descended from a sacramental entry into the mystery of God to a syllogistic mastering of rational truths. Whereas the earlier sacramental symbolism had regarded truth as participation in divine mystery, a new rationalist dialectics maintained that truth meant complete rational comprehension of propositional statements. Yet everything in reality points toward the ultimate reality, which is God – or Being itself, as distinct from the Supreme Being. One should enter into the sacramental mystery of God, not pursue a syllogistic mastering of rational truths. The divine Logos is reflective in all.
301. Man is a rational animal in which will follows intellect. The will cannot create its own contents – it must first receive them from reason, as man cannot define what is real or good apart from his knowledge of what is.
302. There are four things people need to thrive: a theological or philosophical view that explains death and suffering, a family, close friends, and meaningful work.
303. Humans exist across time but are also inescapably trapped in the present moment.
304. A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
305. The division of citizens into distinct groups and classes composes a strong barrier against the excesses of despotism by establishing habits and obligations of restraint in ruler and ruled alike grounded in the relations of groups or classes in society.
306. A good poet will borrow from authors remote in time, alien in language, and diverse in interest.
307. When humans sin, they magnify demons.
308. In the business of romance, the hindbrain owns the forebrain.
309. A civilization that fails to protect and preserve the legacy of its ancestors will fail to protect and preserve the future for its descendants.
310. Sexual selection electrifies all human interaction.
311. Shame and hypocrisy are essential for a decent society.
312. Leviathan is voracious and never satiated.
313. The political nature of man is that by which man is organized into particular, morally authoritative self-ruling units. These are nations, tribes, polities.
314. That which is of the political right is of belief in social entropy and in the denial of a natural tendency for society to “progress.” Concern with order, discipline and hierarchy follow.
315. An ideologue is someone who can’t count past one.
316. Civil peace is not the natural state of affairs; it is an achievement of civilization.
317. Live life as a tourist, not a pilgrim because life is a pilgrimage, not a vacation, and a collective undertaking of a certain destination.
318. Cultural heterogeneity and egalitarianism do not exist in a polity.
319. Public protest and activism is not the path to power. They are the end result of it.
320. The false action of philosophical liberalism is to charge the state with maintaining social stability and preventing a return to natural anarchy, as humans are by nature non-relational creatures, separate and autonomous. They are not so.
321. The goal of the liberal project of modernity is universal individualism and contractual relations between individuals, with no non-commercial community bonds which would limit. Such transactionalism is dehumanizing because humans did not evolve in a social vacuum.
322. The fictive kinship that sustains a healthy culture and national cohesion is more easily formed and coalesced in a nation of ethnic and racial kinship. Culture flows like a river from the source pool of genetic heritage. Without the binding agent of race and ethnicity, the ability to find commonality in shared history, shared values, and shared myths is corrupted and greatly weakened.
323. Defining freedom as liberation from social relationships and obligations culminates in national ruin.
324. Man is always and inherently shaped by his place.
325. The material world is not inert matter upon which humans project meaning. It is charged with meaning that humans discover.
326. Liberalism is false because autonomous self-determination is false. The state cannot be “neutral” and atomized “individuals” united by nothing but the pursuit of their own private “good” is inherent conflict. Thus the result: fragmented persons divorced from land, heritage, kin, progeny, body, self, and God.
327. All gods who are not the true God become hungry.
328. Rejection of moral truth allows for rationalization of cowardly, destructive, degenerate self-indulgence.
329. Sustaining virtue through the things humans have in common – habits, traditions, and institutions, as orientated toward the Logos – builds a happy and productive community life.
330. Moral posturing and virtue signaling do not usually accord with the actions of revealed preference.
331. A borderless world exposes society to the vacuum of space, decompressing and ripping apart traditional community, leaving “individuals” to float as isolated, lonely, interchangeable atoms. A world of nation-states, by contrast, is one in which competition is structured by the nation and the mediating institutions within it. These institutions are in turn connected to one another politically, economically, and culturally – invested in the whole, yet functional and responsible.
332. Justice refers to a reasoned ordering and is primarily about God’s intellect.
333. Culture devoid of sacred sense loses its sense.
334. Without the bonds of locality and family, the common good and an enduring, productive, and collective morality disappear for the reign of egoism.
335. Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
336. Good art and writing can be revelatory of transcendence. They are not merely expressive of the creator’s feelings, but should be arrows to pierce hearts and open eyes to Truth.
337. Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
338. If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations.
339. Modernity is a comforting drug, but it is wrong to trade the sacred and the sublime for the mundane and the modern.
340. Identity tends to be the strongest level of persuasion.
341. A good society can live for a while within a democracy. Then, the hemlock. Democratic parliaments are not forums where debates take place, but where popular absolutism registers decrees – to arrive at a judgement and then seek a principle. Democracy is a troubled spirit, a disease, fated to never rest, and whose dreams, should it sleep, present only visions of hell.
342. Peace isn’t the absence of war; it is the application of justice in charity.
343. To “liberate” human desire is to liberate violence.
344. Mind, soul, and body feature an inseparable relation, as they were wondrously intertwined. The created order has multiple causes — first and final, efficient and material causes. Creation is the realm in which humans participate as living and moving as the Logos provides a great book of metaphors and analogies for grasping His will for the world. And so the sensible realm is not a purposeless thing, a domain of physical causes awaiting human mastery and manipulation.
345. Political power should be exercised for a version of the good life as orientated to the Logos, not to secure “consent.”
346. The main “tradition” of liberalism is a liturgy centered on a sacramental celebration of the progressive overcoming of the darkness of bigotry and unreason. To participate in that tradition, that liturgy, is necessarily and inescapably to commune with and be caught up into a particular substantive view of time, history, world and the sacred – the liberal view.
347. Constitutional processes best work in the social ecosystem of a particular people, where a people can understand the folkways of their extended kin.
348. Clarity of text is major sign of the maturity of an idea.
349. Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.
350. The main criterion of “progress” between two modern cultures consists primarily of a greater capacity to kill.
351. Female beauty is objective, universally agreed upon, and biometrically standardized.
352. Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon.
353. Only under patriarchy are women’s beauty and femininity, and men’s strength and masculinity, fully appreciated.
354. The modern world demands that humans approve what it should not even dare ask them to tolerate.
355. People possess desire for solidarity that cosmopolitanism does not satisfy, immaterial interest that redistribution cannot meet, and yearning for the sacred that secularism cannot provide.
356. Race is not a social construct; society is a racial construct.
357. The human condition is that humans are fated to wonder as they wander and to wander as they wonder.
358. Liberalism minimizes virtue for voluntarism (the “unfettered” and “autonomous” choice of individuals) and an appeal to self-interest. This conception of “liberty” undermines appeal to the common good and induces a zero-sum mentality that becomes nationalized and polarization for citizens increasingly driven by private and largely material concerns. Liberalism thus sees the traditional institutions for the transmission of virtue as inherently oppressive, by their very purpose and intent, and as a limit human choice and a restrain of human action.
359. Diversity is a weak and stupid god.
360. Any system tends to chaos unless energy is put into it.
361. Liberalism is itself an ideology, not simply a procedural construct, and it depends on a prior set of beliefs concerning what is good. Philosophical liberalism will atomize the polity, and turn life into a market with a supreme good being “choice,” such is its nature.
362. Moral action is a matter of personal motivation, resolve, action, responsibility, and consequence, requiring a sense of personal identity and continued moral commitment over time.
363. The paradox and tragedy of feminism is that it fulfilled the dreams of generations of male predators.
364. The mind follows the heart, and the heart directs the body, which reciprocates in kind.
365. When a country is mostly homogeneous, there is no need for identity politics. Once a country is demographically fragmented a country, however, identity politics is inevitable as it is based on human nature.
366. Pre-collapse late stage empires are marked by a retreat from the masculine virtues and an embrace of the feminine vices.
367. In societies where people differ from each other in race, ethnicity, and culture, social antagonism is greater and political economy outcomes are worse.
368. Freedom is the learned ability, cultivated through discipline and education in virtue, to properly govern one’s self in accord with the Logos of creation. The freedom to do what one desires is a false freedom because the world is limited but desires are not, so that in pursuing them humanity become their slaves. Becoming free, then, is the process of achieving mastery over selfish impulses.
369. Most surviving conventions exist for excellent reasons.
370. Legitimacy comes from acceptance, not imposition.
371. No people welcome armed missionaries.
372. Art presents the most refined figuration of reality.
373. Technology has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.
374. When politics has come to be what it ought to be, it turns humans not to the practical life of the world but to the contemplative life, to the highest things.
375. The diffusion of a mechanistic, technological mentality has been accompanied by the disappearance of the words true and false, good and bad, even beautiful and ugly. A consequence of the rejection of permanent values is a replacement of the dyad ‘true-false’ with the dyad ‘progress-reaction.’
376. Humans are happiest when they align emotions with material and moral realities. A rational life is better than one built on self-deception and false hope.
377. Humans are only free to be what they are, which is rational in Logos. To rebel is to be enslaved.
378. Freedom is not the lack of external restraint. Freedom is the learned ability, cultivated through discipline and education in virtue, to properly govern one’s self. The freedom to do what one desires is a false freedom because the world is limited yet desires are not, leading to a slavery of the passions. Becoming free is the process of achieving mastery over base impulses.
379. As “individuals” in philosophical liberalism are stripped of the cultural norms that formerly governed social conduct, the resulting anarchy requires the state to step into the breach by threatening to punish those who violate the “rights” of others. People are “freed” from old restrictions only to be subjected to the more abstract, alienating powers of capitalism and bureaucracy.
380. There is a circularity between good politics and good individual conduct. A society can only govern itself well if it comprises self-governing citizens, and citizens can only learn self-government within a well-governed society.
381. Those on the alert to oppose tyranny may fail to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
382. In a decent polis, there is an abundance of churches, voluntary associations, and mutual aid societies with significant function and role in the larger society.
383. Opposition offers the luxury of principle in politics.
384. The law of prayer is the law of belief: how humans worship God shapes what is believed about Him. Defection from liturgical traditions leads to defection from the creed itself.
385. The maximum of unconstrained individual liberty requires a tyrannical rule of law. It requires anarcho-tyranny. In a society with a strong cult, people are more apparent and more meaningful. Their idiosyncratic differences are glorified by contrast with their basic agreements and magnified in virtue of their basic agreements. In a society coordinated under the aegis of a strong cult, people are more at liberty than in a disordered libertarian society.
386. A functional and cohesive nation is an extended phenotype of race.
387. It is not hypocritical to treat different things differently. It is hypocritical to treat same things differently – especially for men and women, who are not the same, as the fitness costs for promiscuity are quite different.
388. The good society is a society that makes it easier to be good – but only with common agreement of goodness and freedom in content more substantive than individual will.
389. A symbol is something that both points to something greater, and participates in it. Symbol means to bring together, to integrate. The antonym for symbol is diabolos, which means to tear apart, to separate, to throw through another thing. Thus the diabolic is a disintegrating force. Humans live in a world in which they have lost the reflexive sense of God’s presence in all things, symbols and icons.
390. Choice is important in liberal systems as it hides the fact that consent is so easy to manipulate and because hegemony is so often based on the covert manipulation of disordered passion. Yet liberalism fails because at its core it stands for “liberating” the “individual” from unchosen obligations. Liberalism “forms” consumers, not citizens.
391. A fixation on what is measurable in political decision-making is a way of pretending to be apolitical while actually favoring a certain style of politics.
392. People are not fungible.
393. The winners of a revolution might not have deserved victory, but the deposed might well have deserved the fall.
394. To live well is to live in a way proper to being, a way of meaning. Love is the basic act and order of things; it brings all all there is into existence; it is through love that all there is continues into existence, and it is for love that all things exist. Reality is triadic: all things are in, through, and for love. Being is therefore an order and logic of love. Properly understood, freedom is rooted in an understanding of reality as love, with a commitment to this truth. Love grounds human freedom.
395. In nations with a Deep State, the official ranks of government don’t coincide with real and lasting power.
396. A dictatorship of relativism does not recognize anything as definitive, as the ultimate goal consists one’s own ego and desires.
397. Truth reveals itself.
398. Masculinized women are the worst of both men and women, stridently aggressive and competitive like men but lacking the instinct of loyalty, cooperativeness, and duty of men – cruelly subversive and passive-aggressive like women but lacking the nurturing vulnerability and intoxicating femininity of women. Nothing good can come from entangling the masculine and the feminine in physical and psychological bonds each was never meant to accommodate.
399. Feminism is a disease of envy. It spreads via women due to the temptation to envy the position of men. For men, it spreads via the temptation to declare oneself the only real man, as other men aren’t worthy of respect.
400. The liberal conceptions of autonomy and abstract, universal reason little allow for complex notions of identity, affection of families and persons, the subjectivities of everyday life, the emotions of moral and political commitments, and variations in human reason.
401. Either there is a Logos at the foundation of reality, inherently intelligible and meaningful, and therefore natures and forms that persist across time and environment, or reality is fundamentally meaningless with meaning as a construct.
402. Without a sharing fundamental moral principles, a society does not hold together.
403. Critical reflection should distinguish the true prejudices by which humans understand from the false ones by which they misunderstand.
404. Human nature is conquest: tribe against tribe, forever, unchanging, intractable.
405. A woman’s indifference, not indignation, is the opposite of her love.
406. Assuming the “individual” as the fundamental unit of political, social and economic order shears the “individual” of the republican virtues cultivated within communities of tradition. Though this is done in the name of empowerment, it actually makes one subject to tyranny. Limitless emancipation in the name of progress is a final and binding mechanism of control. Every quasi-religious concept about liberty and freedom can be used by a parasitic elite.
407. If one argues for the non-intentionality of the cosmos, he must employ instances of intentionality.
408. Moral ambiguity is inherent to serious drama.
409. The liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life is false. Man has both a temporal and an eternal end; therefore there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And as man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.
410. Culture is a form of capital, a kind of power. It starts as credibility, an authority one to be taken seriously. It ends as the power to define reality itself. It is the power to name things.
411. The end of rational being is to be governed by the laws of nature and the interest of the universe, for these two are both the oldest and the best rules to can go by.
412. Humans are not fungible and the human races are not interchangeable.
413. In its high philosophical formulation, cosmopolitanism is loyalty to Logos, as a good life consists in man’s subjecting himself to the inherent, unchanging order of the whole.
414. Art can act as a deep expression of the unconscious mind. Great art resonates with a people when it taps into those elements of the collective unconscious most in need of resolution, broaching unresolved tensions of the conscious and unconscious minds, ultimately providing a step towards psychic integration. The artist may not even be aware of the full extent his work is accomplishing this.
     
415. It is not accurate that the framework of human action, the only humanly significant realities, the only ones which are entitled to incontestable rights, are the individual on the one hand and humanity on the other – that between these two there is nothing of worth. Such a doctrine should not apply to different areas: in economic terms, against any form of protectionism; in political terms, against any form of national sovereignty; in moral terms, against any intermediary group whose legitimacy might contradict the rights of the individual or of humanity.
416. Love is to will the good of another. Love for another can never be simply an emotion, a desire. To be fully itself, it has to exist in relationship to an idea of the Good. A shared concept of the Good is necessary to govern the self.
417. Man proposes; Heaven disposes.
418. The people, not the paper, make a nation. Nations, peoples, and societies are defined first and foremost by genetic relation. and only secondarily by a common shared religion, language, culture, history, and customs.
419. There has to be a shared, communal conception of the good for moral reasoning to have authority and meaning.
420. There is always a king.
421. Cities must attempt to satisfy all the faculties, spiritual and material. The urbanites task is to build the conditions whereby life in the city is worth living.
422. Many things which were better in the past have been abandoned for supposed convenience.
423. The truth is armor.
424. All sin is disordered love.
425. Very little interesting would happen in a woman’s life if she did not have a man to make it happen.
426. Writing is the best way to distance oneself from the century in which it was one’s lot to be born.
427. Struggles for power are not the basis of society, but rather defects thereof. Society is constituted fundamentally of charitable exchange, communion, friendship, familiarity, and commensality.
428. The liberal state suppressed the warrior and priestly castes – the two main barriers to its power – in the act of establishing itself, and then embarked on a project of destroying all vestiges of the ethos of both castes.
429. Envy tends to be the true force behind moral indignation.
430. Indifference, not hate, is the opposite of love. Love means choice, discrimination, preference; to love means to choose and therefore there is nothing further from love than indifference.
431. To find what out what a man is, look at what he doesn’t try to prove. To find out what he isn’t, look at what he is trying to prove.
432. In order for societies to function well, there must be commonality of values and visions.
433. Religion must be a cultural experience and commitment, as one needs the support and formation and achievements of a culture. The human person is a cultural animal.
434. None in politics can foresee the consequences either of what he destroys or of what he constructs.
435. If a man is driven by lust and desire, he loses his positive, decisive will. As culture becomes infected by emotionalism and desire, forces rise which are not directed through a man’s will for good. He is open to political, economic, and sociological manipulation by elites.
436. Reality tends to be defenseless against a well-armored, comforting narrative.
437. There cannot be be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there must be good laws.
438. Humans either approach beings according to their inherent order or they surrender them to egotistical exploitation. Should they decide to see things and persons within the horizon of their natural goals and order, they get to know them more intimately, learn to love them, and mature. Yet if they turn away from the inherent order, they see only from a selfish perspective.
439. Power is controlled by elite minorities. These are groups of men with similar political, economic, and cultural interests. Driven by insatiable appetites and irrational beliefs, men seek to dominate each other or to escape domination by others. This struggle inevitably results in a minority coming to power – monopolizing as much as possible political, economic, military, technical, and honorific resources, excluding and oppressing the majority. This bureaucratic oligarchy rules the majority and exploits it for its own benefit through force and fraud. The record of this unending rise and fall of ruling minorities is human history.
440. Women lead homes and men lead nations. Men test actions and ideas and women test men. Men assert their interests through logic, dominance, and physical strength. Women assert their interests through beauty, guile, and deception.
441. Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good.
442. Social order is sacred order. Society is ordered by what its people consider to be sacred.
443. With modernity, humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power. Modernity is a phase of diminished consciousness.
444. The love of God pervades all reality, and a misdirected love distorted by humans values the transitory and worldly. God wills unity, not uniformity, in a law of love that rules all. A cosmos of many splendors is meant to live in harmony, and in Love’s will is human peace. A rightly-ordered human desire, the base of moral agency, should be the driving force behind all human interaction with others and the world.
445. The right to misgovern oneself is as valid as any other political right, and it is exercised more often than most.
446. The basis of reality is relational – the Triune pervades all reality. The Creator has ordered His creation, and His intelligence is everywhere present; it fills all things and can be discerned by those with the eyes to see.
447. The natural, material world is dependent upon the immaterial world in the sense that the former is caused by the latter in a fundamental unity.
448. The alpha and the omega of politics is demography. The social, cultural, political, and economic character of a country is of strong relation to the people there.
449. Where orthodoxy is optional it will eventually be prohibited.
450. Libertarianism is liberalism, a conservation of “enlightenment,” and a sacrifice to an undefined “freedom.” If the term is defined, it is done so negatively, becoming indistinguishable from license.
451. Societies need an authoritative account of ultimate values to legitimate political institutions. The collapse of metaphysics leads to a crisis of authority – that highest values are exposed as relative and contingent.
452. The death of culture begins when normative institutions fail to communicate ideals as inwardly compelling, beginning with cultural elites. Resistance to the diabolic requires remembrance, which requires enculturation. The culture of modernity annihilates memory as an enemy.
453. People must live for something beyond themselves, or they, both as persons and as a people, perish in aimless wandering.
454. Philosophical liberalism is a mix of rationalism and romanticism – a romanticized rationalism.
455. The sacred gives birth to societies.
456. Every functional civilization has regulated the sexual behavior of its females as a matter of practical necessity. The demand for cheap labor and the sexual and political “liberation of women” were defining features of nearly every major civilization collapse.
457. Every man participating in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world.
458. Identification by race becomes a constant idea if there is always an other to continuously remind you of the trait.
459. Time participates in the eternity of God’s life. It is this participation that is able to gather past, present, and future together into one. Yet nominalist metaphysics occasion a loss of the sacramental dimension of time. Before the liberal, scientific revolution the world was more a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved. A desacramentalized view of time tends to place the entire burden of doctrinal decision on the present moment. The Tao, the Logos, unites will and nature at their common Source. Everything on earth is reflective and analogous to something in Heaven.
460. Not much is inevitable until it happens.
461. Human blunders shapes more history than wickedness.
462. Nations are essentially societal, political and geographic expressions of race, of tribe, of extended family partly inbred. The further a nation retreats from this, the less it resembles the nation of its distinctive heritage. A homeland unrecognizable to its native people is not a home; it’s an imposed fiction. Worse, it’s a spiritual prison.
463. Miscengenation is a genetic portal to social chaos.
464. It is common to learn from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
465. The liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, which states that political rule must order man to his final goal, should be rejected. As man has both a temporal and an eternal end, there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to the eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power. Because man’s temporal end is subservient to his eternal end, the institutions which exist to help fulfill temporal ends must be subservient to those which help to fulfill eternal ends.
466. Liberalism is the view that equal freedom is the highest political, social and moral principle. The goal is to do and get what one wants, as much and as equally as possible. It assumes transcendent standards don’t exist, or aren’t knowable. Thus desire is the standard of action. Desires are equal and all equally deserve satisfaction. Nothing is exempt from this system, so everything becomes a resource to be used. The result is an overall project of reconstructing social life to make it a rational system for maximum equal preference satisfaction. However, traditional ties like family and inherited culture aren’t egalitarian or hedonistic or technologically rational. They have their own concerns. So they have to be done away with or turned into private hobbies that people can take or leave as they like. Anything else would violate freedom and equality. Elites assume liberalism as true, ultimate, and socially necessary. So far as elites are concerned, liberalism gives the final standards that everyone has to defer to because they’re demanded by the order of the community and also by the fundamental way the world is. It is the established religion. Like other religions, there are saints, martyrs, rituals, and holidays. All education is religious education, so education is shot through with liberal indoctrination. Liberalism even has blasphemy laws, in the form of the laws against politically incorrect comments. Liberalism is a stealth religion. It becomes established and authoritative by claiming that it is not a religion but only the setting other religions need to cooperate peacefully. Yet religion, as with liberalism, has to do with ultimate issues. The religion of a society is simply the ultimate authoritative way the society grasps reality, so it can’t be subordinate to anything else. Liberalism has been successful at obfuscating its status as a religion, and that’s been key to its success. People believe they are keeping their own religion when they give first place to liberalism. Original religion gets assimilated and becomes a poeticized version of liberalism. Liberalism holds that humans are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility. This is a substantive set of philosophical commitments deeply contrary to the truth that humans are by nature relational, social, and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which humans experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation; and that both the “social” realm and the economic realm must be governed by a set of moral norms – above all, self-limitation and virtue. Left-liberalism (“equality” as unconcerned with the Good) and right-liberalism – the belief in the universal equal rights of individuals (“freedom”), in turn lead to further left-liberalism (“equal freedom”), the belief in enforced group equality of outcome. Left-liberal and right-liberal “progress” celebrate domination over nature, the sort of progress that makes purses from human skin. Humanity and societies do not consist of universal individuals. They consist of various cultures, ethnicity, languages, and races – all of which have particular identities, characteristics, abilities, values, and agendas. The mass presence of different groups in a host society, far from advancing right-liberal freedom, empowers identities and thus changes the host country to government-enforced equality, whose ruling principle is equality of outcome for all groups.
467. The main principle of liberalism is the belief that the self, namely one’s own self, is the highest value and the source and criterion of all values, a belief that is expressed as self-love, self-worship, and expressive individualism as the highest good. Under the liberal order, the substantive content of one’s choices as compared with the substantive content of other people’s choices is irrelevant. All that matters is that they are choices made by the self. Liberalism strips the mind of its necessary capacity for making judgements along a gradient. It does not want to admit that it is an exclusive theology, and thus does not want admit that it is rejecting a definite other theology, a rival set of beliefs about God and man. Liberalism is based on two foundation principles, each false: the sanctity of individual choice, and the liberation from natural limits.
468. There is no finity apart from the Infinite; no solute apart from the Absolute; no power apart from Omnipotence; no time apart from Eternity; no creature apart from the Creator.
469. If a work of art merely evokes seedy and disgraceful things, and has no compensating vision of redemption, then it has no aesthetic merit.
470. Few things are more frightening than the relentless, cheerful presence of contradiction.
471. Prayer leads to belief and liturgy to theology.
472. The purpose of words is to convey reality.
473. The best type of human life, that in which the tradition of the virtues is most adequately embodied, is lived by those engaged in constructing and sustaining forms of community directed towards the shared achievement of those common goods without which the ultimate human good cannot be achieved.
474. A set of highly sophisticated institutions developed by and for a particular people at a particular point in time and space is not operational for all peoples under all circumstances.
475. Hell is knowing what other people think.
476. Liberalism is a political form of a technological view of reality, of a mechanistic understanding of nature. Political philosophy presupposes a view of reality and of human nature, and a technological order sets the basis for our political order, a way of construing the world according to technological criteria. Truth becomes what is technologically possible. Yet humans can only discover limits of possibility by transgressing limits, so technological society has a permanent revolution as a way of viewing the world and there is no such thing as an intrinsic order built into reality. There is no ultimate meaning beyond what is chosen. Freedom is, then, not about having and exercising the power to live out the good, but about acquiring and utilizing power to enforce will. The state is free to transgress.
477. The mark of an authentic and living tradition that it points beyond itself. Tradition is like an icon, and it must be rooted in transcendence and begins with revelation. Enlightenment’s claims of universal rights grounded in “reason” saw itself as not depending on Tradition to arrive at truth. Yet it is difficult to hold on to these supposedly universal truths without having grounded them in the tradition that produced them.
     
478. Modernity’s inadequacy to spiritual realities is in its incomprehension of consciousness, agency, meaning, value, morality, and in the limit truth, beauty, and virtue – or their antipodes. It is incapable of coherent treatment of any of the basic aspects of life as it is actually lived and experienced. It is unable to understand minds; it wants to make bodies basic and reduce all experience to motions of bodies. To be religious with a clear philosophical conscience, or do theology, or think coherently about minds – to live a fully human life, a good, rational and intelligible life, of meaning and significance – one must invert the Modern perspective: one must take the spiritual to be basic, and the corporeal to be something added visibly atop it – not superfluously, but superveniently.
479. All things exist and have a God-given essential nature independent of human thought. The essence of a thing is  built into its existence by God. Its ultimate meaning is guaranteed by this connection to the transcendent order.
480. There are three kinds of truth. An objective truth is one that can be demonstrated scientifically or logically. A subjective truth is a truth that can only be apprehended personally. It doesn’t mean that it is objectively untrue, but that its truth can be known by taking it into one’s own life and living as if it were true. An intersubjective truth is a truth that is only true when it is shared by a network of subjects. It is a subjective truth that depends on a group of subjects believing it for it to have the force of truth – such as currency.
481. Irreconcilable differences are what separate countries are for.
482. A major struggle of society is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
483. Democracy does not work in multiracial societies.
484. Persons are not concrete entities, but rather characters of concrete entities.
485. Being is acting. Actual occasions are not static, but dynamic; not dead, but alive. They are intensional, about things other than themselves: first, their causal inputs, obtained from their past by their feeling or grasping (“prehension”) of the moral and aesthetic character of that past; second, of their consequences, the states of affairs that arise from occasions as they have decided to be – the final causes of things, meanings, intentions, or purposes. The nisus toward the Good, inherent in all things essentially, derive from their forebears who share in it, but most and in the first instance from their palmary incipient prehension, which is of and from God, who as First of all things is first in every instance of becoming.
486. Culture is a process through which people learned to bind and to loose, to form their souls to a higher order, hopefully a “sacred” one that allows life to continue, generative, and regenerative. An anti-culture is one that destroys all possibility of order and of the generation of life.
487. The state expands as civil society contracts. When persons stop acting responsibly, government enlarges. The greatest invitation to statism is a society that won’t take care of itself. Especially susceptible to this trend is a construction of government as an open-ended rationalist process. Better is a nation born with ethnic and cultural preconditions. The most successful national or constitutional orders are expressions of already formed cultures.
488. The permanent bureaucracy determines the shape and structure of a sociopolitical entity, mostly ignorantly and for their own benefit; and any political analysis that doesn’t start from there is worthless. Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken are responsive to the ideas around. It is important to develop alternatives to existing policies and to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes less so.
489. Fortune is a wanton creature that does not stay long in one place.
490. A false, fashionable notion is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances. Ideology, fear, envy, and utopia are causes of war.
491. Moderation is not an ideology, not an opinion, not a thought. It is an absence of thought.
492. A society that has no strong concept of the Good other than granting individuals within it maximum liberty to live as they prefer to is not a society that has within in it the capacity to govern itself. A religion that is about formless ‘love’ is a religion that worships emotion, and that makes an idol of the Self.
493. It is not the personal that is political, but the political that is personal. People with unusually thin skins ascribe the small insults, humiliations, and setbacks consequent upon human existence to vast and malign political forces; and, projecting their own suffering onto the whole of mankind, conceive of schemes, usually involving violence, to remedy the situation that wounded them.
494. Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved. Humans will never create a society free from contradictions.
495. Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.
496. Public vice begins privately, in a reciprocal relationship.
497. The future casts a shadow back into the past.
498. The solipsism of expressive individualism damages society’s most crucial institution, the family – the primary source of basic order, structure, discipline, support, and guidance every human requires.
499. Best is the expressions of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture.
500. The entire world testifies to God’s presence in His creation.
501. All modern political teachings are secularized theological concepts.
502. There can be no patriarchy without the king, and no king without the patriarchy to model.
503. A purely juridical order devoid of metaphysical and theological judgment is as logically and theologically impossible as a pure, metaphysically innocent science. One cannot set a limit to one’s own religious competence without an implicit judgment about what falls on the other side of that limit; one cannot draw a clear and distinct boundary between the political and the religious, or between science, metaphysics, and theology, without tacitly determining what sort of God transcends these realms. The very act by which liberalism declares its religious incompetence is thus a theological act. Its supposed indifference to metaphysics conceals a metaphysics of original indifference. A thing’s relation to God, being a creature, makes no difference to its nature or intelligibility. Those are tacked on extrinsically through the free act of the agent.
504. In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself.
505. The natural and default state of men among men is hierarchy. This is because hierarchy is the end-product of competition and men instinctively compete with each other.
506. As insanity and non-reality pervade culture, tensions and resentments generated in daily life by the dissonance between reality and culture grow, and with them the demand for catharsis in ritual sacrifice of scapegoats.
507. Even the most systematically skeptical have little choice to avoid faith. To speak of accident is to assume the existence of something that is not accident, something like purpose. One cannot avoid the choosing of icons. Many false gods have ridden a triumphal chariot over heaps of corpses.
508. The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
509. To speak of the person is to speak of soul and body, of an existential urgency, as the soul is the principle of being whereby a person in space and time and body is bought to full communion with God’s mystery. The truth of Logos forward in time is comprehending to the soul. From this truth are visions persons generate and those they receive.
510. Facts do not “speak for themselves.” They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are isolated curiosities. Thus science and technology do not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people; it can be the opposite.
511. In literature, importance is not important – only good writing is.
512. Citizens desire to vote when the intermediary institutions between them and the state have failed. Different forms of government work for different groups of people. In multiracial societies, citizens do not vote in accordance with economic and social interests but in accordance with race and religion.
513. The liberal vision of political community as founded upon the formality of social contract and around universal human values and rights, neglects the reality that every such community must be bound together by the forces of sacrifice, of faith, love, and identity, forces that are inescapably particular. Peoples and places are forged around shared customs, values, religions, languages, histories, cultural canons, symbols, and sacrifices and it is only thus that universal human goods are realized.
514. To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you are not allowed to criticize. The powerful tend to claim they stand only for everyone’s equal rights.
515. A polity cannot remain the same as the population changes.
516. The only part of any religion that is empirically verifiable is original sin.
517. Every nationality, every ethnicity, prefers to be misgoverned by its own people than to be well ruled by another. Culture follows genetics. Across time, environment, and culture, people first think with tribal blood. Blood trumps principle and organizational structure. A lasting and real nation is a country of a common blood.
518. Habits become character. Virtue are habits which people require to live satisfying lives and which communities require to function as communities. Four are especially important: honesty, marriage, industriousness, and religiosity, meaning loyalty, temperance, and patience at a minimum. Four principle factors make up a successful human life: family, vocation, community, and faith.
519. The health of a nation is inversely proportional to the number of laws needed to govern it.
520. A society’s stability and fairness and unity count for more than its aggregate wealth. A nation should be a cohesive society, not just a random group of people within an arbitrary set of borders. It’s a product of a certain history and the repository of a distinctive culture. A citizen should be educated to understand that country’s history and take pride in its culture and traditions.
521. The true basis of a rightly ordered society is proper adequation of human lives to the Good. The basis of right social order, and therefore the proper objective of public policy, and for personal comportment, is pursuit of the Good. Democracy for its own sake, with choice and consent as the highest values, is a ridiculous and ignoble circus.
522. A society of “consenting adults” is a society that does not care about one another. It is a public existence without concern. Invading this moral vacuum is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Brotherhood is the defense against this, based upon kinship and rootedness. This is the answer to many significant public questions.
523. Culture is a pattern of moral demands, a range of standard self-expectations about what one may and may not do, in the face of many possibilities. Different cultures have different standards of inhibition and release; but within particular cultures, those who are members of it know what is permitted and what is not. There is at some point “anti-culture” – a cultural system that cannot do what cultures are supposed to do: say what is forbidden. Cultures endure when institutions embody common understandings of the good, that are all the more powerful for being implicit.
524. Life is a shipwreck, and humans stagger around the beach, trying to help each other make sense of it all, looking to the lighthouse, so as to get through the catastrophe and find the way back home.
525. Culture derives from biology, and civic habits and principles cannot be severed from the people and their pedigree.
526. Atomized societies that are susceptible to demagogues, not societies that enjoy strong social bonds and organic communal solidarity.
527. Freedom pre-requires order and pre-requires hierarchy. Remove the hierarchical order and what remains is chaos. Thus there is always an oligarchy.
528. Heaven is earth’s model; earth is heaven’s creation. The universe has a telos, and is more than matter in motion. Innate in all creation is the basis of rationality and the ultimate appeal of ethics – not utility, consent, and social contract.
529. As roving bandits become more stationary bandits, they call themselves kings and princes.
530. Absent a transcendent basis for laws, they cease to be something that attempts to mirror the divine order (law doesn’t point to a reality beyond itself), but rather becomes about manipulating things to achieve desired ends.
531. Non-liberal forces – tribal, familial, religious – speak more deeply than consumer capitalism to basic human needs: craving for honor, yearning for community, desire for metaphysical hope.
532. Happiness is the fulfillment of human nature, not in the domination of nature.
533. Evil is self-destructive. If a system, ideology, structure, philosophy, person, or thought contains within it the seeds of contradiction, internal or external, or systemic collapse, it is against God and therefore evil. Also for those with unresolved or incorrectly resolved cognitive dissonance is this true, because God is both real and Creator of reality, and all that is in conflict with reality is necessarily in conflict with Him.
534. Anti-political politics is politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the utilitarian, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them – as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for humans.
535. Goods, whether of the divine or of “progress,” exercise final control over arguments and conclusions. Political analysis becomes, like other dreams, the expression of human wish to the admission of practical failure.
536. There is no such place as utopia; everything is a trade-off.
537. The “free market” is based on the definition of freedom as an absence of external constraints. The wider choice, the freer the market. This is problematic because it is agnostic about the existence of good and evil. The free market, thus conceived, catechizes into believing there is no truth, only individual desire. But desires are unavoidably social, so the will to power in society belongs to those who maximize individual choice by tearing down any structure or belief system that denies the primacy of individual choice.
538. The assent to beauty is one with the assent to God, as Beauty Itself is one of the divine names. Beauty refers to a real property of being rather than a description of a subjective judgment of “taste.” The encounter with something beautiful is indeed an encounter with a particular participation in Beauty itself and, therefore, opens a path for perceiving intellect to approach God. More than allowing sympathy or communication between one human mind and another, artworks by their nature participate in the Beautiful. It must be that beauty is real, is a divine name, and can manifest.
539. The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.
540. Any guarantor competent to all creaturely goods cannot but be omnipotent, omniscient, and ubiquitous. It cannot but be the absolute judge and arbiter of all goodness, beauty, truth, righteousness, virtue – of all perfections whatever. An absolute, omnipotent sovereign is present for any transactions ending in the realization of any lesser goods – no king, no kingdom.
541. Good craftsmen are not expressing themselves. They are expressing something outside themselves because craft is not about selfhood.
542. No function of man has as much permanence as virtuous activities.
543. To discern the nature of anything requires an understanding of its end and function.
544. It is human nature that people are more likely to be appalled at the crimes of their enemies and excuse or ignore those of their allies.
545. A wicked society frustrates familiarity; and there can be no fraternity where there is no common sense of familiarity. A rightly ordered society will understand that all men are made imago Dei, and honor their basic dignity.
546. The natural law, derived from a natural order in which things are identified by functions within a whole, is telelogical. There is a natural end so as to live satisfactory lives in accordance with the natural order of the universe. Social and political order is attained by conforming to this natural order. Politics is an adaption, as particularities of an environment conform imperfectly with the truths of the natural order. Too much should not be asked of politics, as the social and psychological complexities of human civilization cannot be remade according to plans. A metaphysical assumption of telos should be present in socio-political thought, as the principles of political order are found not by utility, contract, and consent.
547. Liberty is not the basis of rightly ordered society; is rather a byproduct of a rightly ordered society. A society that lacks liberty, that contravenes the doctrine of subsidiarity, devolves to each organ of the social hierarchy (thus, in the limit, to individuals) all the powers they can well handle, or delegate in their turn, is not just; but that injustice lies not in its lack of liberty but that it is wrongly ordered. Liberal individualism, the creed of self-interested, socially autonomous people, leads to a dictatorial majority.
548. Horror is reaction to human hubris and ancient desire for man to be as god. It is a reaction to radical self-autonomy, particularly in the sexual realm. Sexual intimacy will always have consequence. Horror is a revulsion to its excesses, to Enlightenment “morality.” The source of mayhem is sexual “liberation:” voluntary sterility is horrific. To remove the consequences of intimacy (human life) from the act itself is to engage in horror. In fiction, this offers fright to an audience that also senses the true source of horror. To step outside of the moral order is to enter horror, the results of lust without restraint. If “liberty” is used not to act in accordance to ordered reason, to Logos, but to simply to gratify passion, then the act of such “liberty” make man in the thrall of passion. Sexual passion separate from the moral order leads to murder, terror, death. The genius of the Enlightenment was to make passion an instrument of social and political control. Horror is a revolt against it. Fairy tales, myths, and horror are stories humans have in common to think through dilemmas and to keep alive registers of emotion and imagination otherwise eroded.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
549. Marriage should not be de-institutionalized as the anchor of adult life and family life.
550. Sex is too important to be left to the judgment of young women, because they do not possess good judgment.
551. A society does not just one day “accept” homosexuality. It first became “gay” itself – childless, transient, attention-seeking, debauched, dead.
552. The societal inability, or refusal, to have children is a self-annihilating reaction to the stress of modernity.
553. Enlightenment atheism has a social function: it draws authority away from clergy, to the secular “priests” of science.
554. For people, a place for everyone, and everyone in their place. Leaving people rootless and without any sense of belonging to something greater than themselves is not just destabilizing, it is cruel.
555. He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future.
556. The witness of the martyrs is the end of theologies of glory.
557. Culture, of which religion is a part, is defined by what it prescribes and what it forbids. A culture based on knocking down taboos, on forbidding to forbid, is an anti-culture. It cannot do what a culture must do.
558. The only true tragedy in life is not to have been a saint – the opportunity to use the authorship God gives to write a redemptive ending.
559. Even a devout atheist has sacred values.
560. The altar of the great cathedral brings indoors the majesty of the open sky, as the architect lifts the eyes from the altar to the wide beauty and precision of the ceiling.
561. Unrestricted female sexuality is far more dangerous to the health of civilization than is unrestricted male sexuality – and why thousands-year-old religions have evolved to specifically curtail the existential threat of female infidelity.
562. History repeats the old conceits but appears fresh and piercing when seen in new contexts.
563. Cultures cultivate. A culture is more like an ecosystem than like a market. Human persons, as encultured creatures, are less like rationally choosing actors than  organisms whose environment predisposes a set of attitudes and actions.
564. The loss of belief in the sacred and binding qualities of vows can be behind social and civic collapse.
565. To turn away from Truth is to turn away from the heart of what is objective and real, and then toward what is less so – to begin an inward gyre.
566. When an old order is in crisis, something distinctive happens to the men who lead it. A strange paralysis sets in, a curious mix of denial and resignation.
567. The conversation style that elicits joy from children is similar to the conversation style that elicits arousal from women. Children expect short answers because they have underdeveloped attention spans and a hunger for amusement, as do women. Women grow old; they do not grow up.
568. Female beauty is nature reasserting life and fertility in the face of bloodshed and slaughter.
569. Physiognomy is real.
570. The female moral dichotomy is to declare inclusion and indulge exclusion. The former gives license to the latter.
571. Prosperity, liberty, dignity, fraternity, harmony: these are the bloom of social health, not its source. They are symptoms of health, not the health itself.
572. Love calls humans to the things of this world, to assist in properly naming, knowing, and ordering many loves. Literature in the older and higher sense of the word enables to see both things and people in a larger perspective than myopic moments call to apprehend. The best literature transports to another time and place, to return to better.
573. The cause of truth is never lost, as hope is not a plan or a strategy. It is a supernatural virtue.
574. Politics should seek to reconcile and harmonize the diverse energies and interests of a society for the common good.
575. The great travesty that has happened to women since suffrage is not misogyny or sexism, but being put on the same education and work timeline as men despite of having a completely different biology. Women suffer because they are living lives that were designed and optimized for men.
576. It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
577. The king towards his people is rightly compared to a father of children, and to the head of a body composed of members.
578. Political corruption is, in the main, the result of a conflict of interest that politicians feel between the general welfare and a private or parochial concern.
579. The idea of motion cannot be conveyed by the geometrical conception of a succession of points.
580. Fiction should be about what it is to be a human being.
581. One can only exaggerate the truth.
582. No one can know who they are without a reference point outside of self. An examination of external reference points to help others avoids getting lost in the abyss of the self.
583. Acts of creation are acts of differentiation. Human material sexuality is derived from cosmic sexuality.
584. Every revolutionary regime has to suppress the symbol system that keeps the people it wishes to rule bound to old ways of thinking. The forces of revolution deprive the ruled of their memories.
585. The knower and the known are not identical, but they may be inseparable.
586. Memory brings something from a past into a present.
587. Ideas and beliefs are not abstractions; they are historical, like everything human. People do not have ideas; they choose them.
588. What marks the movement in the history of societies and peoples is the not capital, but the accumulation of opinions.
589. Since all that can be quantified about human nature, including the dimensions of behavior, personality and intelligence, are to some degree heritable, those features will diversify along with features such as height, skin color, hair texture, and disease susceptibility.
590. One practical use of history is to deliver from plausible historical analogies.
591. Language, a living organism, is always on its way to changing into a new one. Language is a bundle of dialects, arising from the process of gradual and unstoppable change. Gradual change leads to inconsistencies of language, but these do not necessarily impede communication.
592. A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
593. An ethics of sex must be coordinated with an ethic governing the relations among institutions familial, economic, ecclesial and political.
594. Beauty is remedy for the chaos and suffering in human life.The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. Beauty is more than subjective; it is a universal need.
595. Suffering is integral to the drama of the human story. It cannot be merely accidental: the universality of the experience suggests it to be essential to human nature. Yet by Logos, human suffering itself is redeemed. Through suffering, Logos opens Himself; what lacks in the world’s experience of its redemption becomes completed.
596. The dictatorship of relativism does not recognize anything as definitive; its supposed good consists of ego and desire. That which is truly rational and true conforms to the purposes of Logos. Everything of lower human will is small and temporary.
597. Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late. Later, it is important to recognize each person’s right to property, and giving them a sense they own something that they are responsible for. Thus patriotism is devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.
598. There exists a transcendent moral order, to which humanity ought to try to conform the ways of society.
599. Human beings, or governments, are not black boxes engaged in a competition of interests. What matters most is the character of the individual, the character of the community and the character of government. When designing policies, it’s most important to get them to complement, not undermine, people’s permanent moral aspirations – the longing for freedom, faith and family happiness.
600. Existing communities have legitimate expectations which take precedence over the demands of strangers. There may be duties of charity toward strangers, but charity is a gift, and there is no right to receive it, still less to force it from those reluctant to give.
601. True neighborhood associations – like all voluntary and contractual associations – are built upon the very same institutional foundations as markets: private property and voluntary exchange protected by the rule of law. Where these institutions are protected, markets develop and rule economic affairs. At the same time, the existence of these institutions allows for individuals and families to band together in voluntary associations to provide for many of the goods that pure economic exchange does not. This sort of private ordering is the heart and soul of civil society. It cannot be duplicated by government.
602. Rhetoric is an ethical as well as an instrumental discipline. A debasement of language is also a debasement of reality. Some words are god terms which can validate almost anything. These words become unassailable, as do the causes attached to them.
603. Envy plus rhetoric equals “social justice.”
604. Knowledge and accomplishment are not democracies and society does need, and require, an aristocratic intellectual class, but one formed by the ancient classics.
605. Democracy, Immigration, Multiculturalism – pick any two.
606. Religion is a social and not merely an individual institution. In the formation of social institutions the past is our indispensable teacher. Tradition matters not merely because it is the beginning but because what past generations have discovered and passed to us is valuable. Religious institutions are central to culture’s traditions; they are inseparable from its political and social health.
607. The professoriate has been given the greatest luxury society can offer: studying beauty. All that they needed to do to justify that privilege was to help their students see why they should fall on bended knee before Plato, Dante, Di Vinci, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and so on, in thanks for lifting humanity out of stupidity and dullness. Instead, they set themselves up as more important than the literature and art that it was their duty to curate and created a tangle of anti-humanistic nonsense that merely licensed students’ ignorance.
608. An intellectual is someone who cares more about ideas than people. An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who only speaks out in others, and a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot. A public intellectual is either an expert working dutifully within the confines of his expertise or a fool at best and fraud at worst.
609. The skepticism of intellectuals means that they are wont to look suspiciously upon any idea that does not first flatter them into believing that they are central to its realization.
610. It should not pass our notice that almost all of our so-called iconoclasts are not so bold as to smash the idols of this age, in whose presence they are wont to grovel, but rather are only so bold as to make great play of pulverizing the already smashed idols of another.
611. Many of the faults and follies of the world have arisen and flourished because of the desperate attempt by fools to eschew what they believe fools believe.
612. The human psyche is fundamentally rational, but with zones of commitment fenced off from the ordinary rules of evidence and logic. These zones are chiefly race, religion, and innate genetic difference.
613. There is too little reading in the world and too much writing. People do not willingly read if they can have any thing else to amuse them. To write well, one must read good writing.
614. The corporeal is the mysticism of the materialist.
615. Voluntary community associations organically formed and grounded in the nuclear family are the best protections of individual liberty.
616. Most people are not rational. They are tribal.
617. Propaganda and morale are as important as military superiority.
618. Capitalism is a useful means of economic wealth creation but a poor means of healthy and lasting social organization.
619. Commoditification outside of created goods is dehumanizing. Individualism is a fetish devoid of the goodness humanity may access.
620. Tradition, custom, and social cohesion are necessary to convey norms and reign in the excesses of public markets.
621. The unitary state must never be trusted. Constitutions are useless without strong, local, voluntary institutions that exist outside the jurisdiction of politics.
622. We must bring to our private lives the love of human beings, which is inseparable from the belief that all human life is inherently valuable and was created in the image of divinity.
623. There is always present the cancer of human vice rooted in selfishness and the ultimately pointless search for status.
624. The human race is a tragic, comic mixture of decency and wickedness, whose inconsistencies make for literature and the possibility of redemption.
625. In the name of individualism, liberty, equality, the free market, science, and progress, modern society has undermined families, kinship groups, churches, and other regional associations to which humans should be loyal.
626. In the quest for personal liberty, humans appeal for deliverance to the nation-state, which alone has the power to challenge and suppress. In the exchange for deliverance, allegiance is transferred to the state. Ties are then severed to local institutions that provide meaning and purpose, moral guidelines and restraint. Stripped of these, the restoration of community is sought through mass politics. Community is then defined, perversely, as political power through collective association.
627. War is the primary means of expanding state power, which upends traditional loyalties and institutions. It lessens intervening authorities between the state and the citizen.
628. The irreducible unit of civil law is not the individual citizen. There are multiple social units, each with sovereignty within its sphere of legitimate authority. The common and final is the natural rights of men, represented by the family, upon which all others are based. Pluralistic authority within the nation-state must be lodged in institutions, not the individual or civil government. There is no final earthly authority.
629. A functional pluralism of covenant best maintains civil liberty. Intermediate institutions – church, voluntary associations, family, and kinship groups – keep the state from tyranny.
630. If divine temporal sovereignty is not represented, the possibility of unnecessary conflict is lessened. Final temporal sovereignty in a sanctions-bringing institution is always operational and scornful of vital intermediate institutions such as church and family.
631. Final sovereignty should rest not in the state but in the natural rights of citizens. The twin doctrine of the rights of individuals and the centralized state as the protector of individual rights is the road to terror. A final sovereignty that rests in the state or in the individual conscience marginalizes the institutions and customs necessary to maintain the freedom of conscience.
632. Covenant, not contract, is the best central political and legal organization of community. Covenant is permanently binding and immune from annulment or revision except by specific custom.
633. All things good are as difficult as they are rare.
634. Market utopianism, assertive lifestyle individualism, and celebration of consumerism will always be inadequate to address the innate desire for meaning, solidarity, and common purpose that modern commercial society must prepare for.
635. Societal central planning is irresponsible because humans are severely limited in knowledge. Our knowledge is bigoted, dispersed, and fragmented, wholly unavailable to society at large, governmental representatives, and would-be experts. Much of it, in fact, is embodied in habit and practice unfit to convey in explicit propositional form.
636. There must be consistent resistance to the pleasant illusion that social problems can be solved through education. The cause of most national social problems is too little marriage and too much illegitimacy.
637. The first and chief responsibility of the state is the physical protection of citizens. Citizenship must be earned by a subjection of personal preference to the healthy norms of community.
638. As individuals distance themselves from the positive, traditional norms – viewed as remnants of a discredited past – fanaticism, nihilism, and cultural pessimism fill the void. Social disruption is then a means to seize power and fortune as an apocalyptic mood and calls for purifying upheavals devolve into a new civic religion.
639. It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
640. Forbid less; demand more.
641. Civilization has been built on bloody conquest. It has also been built and maintained by willingness to both kill and sacrifice oneself to evade bloody conquest. This is part of our nature and part of what built the shining cities which dot our weary world.
642. The fetish of egalitarianism has initiated much harm. Two cherished ideals are contradictory: first that ability should be fully employed and fairly rewarded, and second that all are metaphysically equal in ability, with observed differences mere illusions and likely arising from some malign intent on the part of the observer.
643. Electoral democracy is problematic in a multicultural society, as there is strong temptation to vote for representatives of your own cultural group.
644. The notion that the human species can be improved in any large way, and that humans are capable of living in harmony, is a deeply dangerous idea.
645. Our lives do not belong to us. We are under the sway of Powers that transcend human reason.
646. If there are neither true nor false judgments, man is no longer held accountable. Without universal foundations, morality is impossible.
647. Ideology, not faith or national custom, destroys cooperative consensus. Ideology is the enemy of personal and political freedom, religion, patriotism, and tradition. Pluralism sourced in tradition is an essential means to pursue the truths that imperfect humans perceive through a glass darkly.
648. Repentance and self-limitation must be the foundation of human existence. Any means of personal definition must never be exalted above humility and self-sacrifice.
649. As society gradually solves problems of basic survival and reduces other miseries of the human condition, the fringe elements of that society feel an increasingly strong compulsion to become obsessively angry about ever more trivial causes to recapture the sense that life is a painful struggle.
650. Wise behavior and good conduct secure economic well-being. Disintegrating families invite the waste of public funds and policy gimmicks.
651. Those cultures with a history of liberty that are infected with the pandemic of self-aggrandizement and lust have forgotten that the family, not the individual, is the base unit of society.
652. We must be concerned with how to transmit values. There is a crude commercial culture that states there is little more to life than consumption. Yet there are deep ties and obligations across generations. These are much more satisfactory than the thin freedoms of mobility.
653. The flesh is the test of the spirit.
654. Total loyalty is possibly only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
655. The state which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing a suffering person needs: a loving, personal concern.
656. All efforts to create human flourishing must coincide with a need to be loved, recognized, and a part of meaningful work.
657. The disappearance of nations would impoverish no less than if all humanity became alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind; they are its collective personalities. The very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a unique facet of divine intention.
658. Land has been the main source of wealth since pre-modern times, and it has always belonged to tribes, families, or individuals, unless monopolized by monarchs. To compel people to give up what they own and surrender their private interests to the state requires violence as a routine means of governance.
659. A transcendent moral order is aided by a natural organic state, not an artificial one based on planning. Society cannot be planned and precision engineered like a machine, which is rigid, repetitive, and tends to break down. Organic life is flexible, adaptable, self-perpetuating, and based on the realities of evolutionary nature. Artificial, highly-planned states and the multinational firms that advance their power treat humans as little more than components.
660. Strong government need not be intrusive or large. It is an error to make government both large and weak, which is ineffectual and unworthy of public respect. Large-scale governmental power must defend national interests and provide citizens with the services they demand in the most efficient manner possible – little else.
661. All societies are based on a particular view of human nature.
662. People are not equal, interchangeable units of production and consumption. Differences of race, nationality, culture, gender, and ability are not obstacles to social harmony that must be removed. Citizens must never feel compelled to conform to any model of an ideal society.
663. Public affections begin in families. Our distinctive identities require that humans rightly love their kin above all strangers. Charity arises from the home.
664. All societies are a contract between the living, the dead, and those yet born. Individuals are parts of a larger body which will continue after individual death.
665. The manners and morals of a nation, codified chiefly by its religious and political institutions and its social structure, are prescribed by its past.
666. There is moral equality of mankind that is to be found by virtue in all conditions. Yet any political program of egalitarianism is treacherous. First, it is unjust because such a program would rely upon compulsion and encourage envy. Second, it would move masses downward as upward mobility is impossible because of genetic inequality. Defying nature is unworkable.
667. Ambitious elites deploy the rallying cry of equality as a pretext to reallocate resources for themselves. Abstract principles, however appealing, cannot be applied directly to solve any real political problem.
668. Humans are tied to a family, a locality, and a nation. These societies are not mechanistic; they are organic because the present and future are inseparable.
669. Wisdom and prejudice are often synonyms. The origin of prejudice, its nature and function, are the collective experiences of the past which contain much wisdom. The longer they have lasted, the more they prevail and the more they must be cherished. When feelings contradict theories, the feelings are true and the theories are false.
670. Liberty is seldom derived from universal principles. It is the legacy of the hard-won battles of ancestors. Imposing liberty upon other lands is exceedingly difficult challenge made impossible by any uprising supported by the local populace. Such a fight would require a level of frightfulness that does not merit close inspection.
671. The ideal political party is one comprised of firm and determined patriots who manage the state based upon the morals of continuity.
672. Leisure and relaxation are desirable because those who always labor have no true judgment. It is necessary to survey completed work and to plan for the future by the past.
673. Human beings prefer to be misgoverned by people like themselves, rather than wisely, fairly, and honestly ruled by the Other or the Other stooges.
674. The energy that shapes world events springs from the innate emotions of tribal pride and religious belief. These must never be considered anachronisms.
675. Other peoples do not wish to be like those that think so.
676. Do not mistake solemnity for significance. One must avoid the use of the language of ethics as a tool for self-interest.
677. Virtue does not exist without the free choice of what is good. Although humans are not determined creates, we are conditioned ones. Human persons have not only a conditioned free will but a conditional one. We must avoid the extremes of determinism and fatalism and a radical, post-moral self-will.
678. A rejection of the idea that the self is internally structured by conscience is a rejection of truth on behalf of emotional egalitarianism.
679. Egalitarianism, democracy, and pantheism are lethal toxins without manners and mores.
680. When words become a test for virtue, they also serve as a mask for vice. This is why sanctimony and ruthless self-interest are such powerful allies.
681. It is uncomfortable to discuss the constraints of culture because of the fetish for multiculturalism and the stubborn insistence to see the world through the prism of class.
682. Much of modern life is wholly unnatural and therefore insufficient for the nourishment of the human soul.
683. An education that is only negative, that only questions assumptions and received wisdom, is destructive to the social fabric.
684. It is best to follow leaders who might show us better versions of ourselves. There are many false and angry gods who would distract us from cultural decay. The communion of minds and the collective memory of a society are kept alive and healthy by an understanding of and respect for enduring and profitable prejudices.
685. The best way to defeat status-seeking outrage among those seeking to achieve victim status is to demonstrate status high enough so that one’s position cannot be affected. Impotent outrage is the quickest to dissipate.
686. The issue is not the existence of planning, but whether it should be accomplished centrally or divided among many individuals.
687. The intellectual foundations of Western civilization are the Christian ethic, the scientific spirit, and the rule of law.
688. A market economy incorporates an unimaginably large number of personal decisions based on an even greater number of individual preferences, and does so with accuracy through the price mechanism. The system is often unfair but remains preferable to all alternatives.
689. A well ordered society exhibiting rational coordination among its members need not be a designed and commanded order.
690. Legitimate government actions are those that adhere to the principle of equality before the law. This takes root infrequently and must be carefully guarded.
691. Abstract rules of just conduct, which is the ideal, require agreement of and confidence in values.
692. The organic growth of socially beneficial customs and tradition is a rare and valuable thing. If they decay, there is no way that legislation can replace them. They arise spontaneously or not at all.
693. The bonds of history, territory, language, and allegiance hold a society together. Only when there is a sense of membership are people disposed to submit to a common rule of law and willing to place contractual obligations to strangers above family and tribe.
694. Excessive emphasis on the free and sovereign individual frays the necessary bonds of community and tradition. And the heavily interventionist state undermines these traditions further. This is why civilized order is a rare achievement in human history. The goal of any political leadership must be to give a coherent and humane account of the kind of pre-political membership that will sustain free institutions and a rule of law. This essential loyalty cannot be replaced without cost by relations of a purely contractual kind.
695. Modernism was a kind of architectural Protestantism that sought to “cleanse” its version of sacred space from the corruptions of Genius. Buildings were to be monuments to the genius of the modernism architect rather than to the glories of Greece, Rome, or God. This “rationalist” turn of mind does not uplift the soul. Modernism appeals to the forbidding chill and soulless slab of staid bureaucracies, not to a public sense of beauty.
696. A war of ideas is not an intellectual process; it is a political one often corrupted by the games demonstrating of moral superiority.
697. The self is diminished, not fulfilled, when intimacy is separated from love. To give our lives meaning, it is necessary to make commitments to each other. These define us. Mores and manners have everything to do with what distinguishes us as human. No amount of cultural programming can ever deny that we have higher desires than those of the body.
698. It is poverty to in the name of openness and personal expression cast aside the wisdom of convention as repressive and meaningless.
699. Seemingly new social models such as modernism or cultural revolution embrace egalitarianism and the fall of boundaries under the false pretense that we may bend reality and human nature according to our own desires. In the end there is the emotional emptiness of the noncommittal, the ever changing, and the isolated.
700. To be nonjudgmental is a poor virtue where there are limitless choices and the inability to weigh one against the other. The refined capacity for judgment is an attractive quality.
701. A world without consequences is a destructive lie. Freed from the restrictions of convention, we do not satisfy our every desire and increase the store of human happiness. The emotional, the moral, and the physical consequences make us yearn for the order and restraint of traditional social forms.
702. The common good is achieved first by the principle of association, which are the little platoons of families and neighborhoods.
703. Science beyond its appropriate bounds is the chief thread to allegiance of the principle of human equality. Science demonstrates that we are not equal in our natural capacities. Groups of humans scattered around the world are very different in capabilities, attitudes, and behaviors. Many of these differences are genetically mediated and cannot be altered by education. We are equal, however, in our standing as human beings in relation to something higher than ourselves.
704. People will not follow abstract theories. They will behave in ways that promoted the survival of generations of their ancestors.
705. Starting with limitless freedom ends with total despotism.
706. Transnational pathologies cannot seep across borders without a loss of confidence that there is something worth assimilating toward.
707. The significant task is not just to criticize power, but to exercise it well and with restraint. The integration of art and life is not a grubby compromise if the task is to bring art and knowledge into fruitful engagement with experience.
708. Those overwhelmed by hate cherish it as a badge of moral superiority.
709. In building grand projects for the purification of humanity, ordinary life and the ordinary people who live it often become dispensable.
710. There is a transcendent order that rules society and conscience.
711. Humans have attachment to the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence even as they stand against the leveling forces of modern society.
712. Civilized society requires orders and classes. A free and civilized society requires freedom and faith in custom and convention, a distrust of sophists, calculators, and economists who would reconstruct society upon abstract design. It requires a wariness of innovation and a recognition that prudent innovation is the means of social preservation.
713. The idea of natural right asserts knowledge and virtue as a sturdy foundation of a well-ordered society.
714. The more you socialize the costs of personal and family autonomy, the more license you give others to regulate it.
715. Ordeal comes before dominion. Belonging comes before belief.
716. Race and gender have more to do with biology than with literature or theory.
717. Concerns of family, illegitimacy, divorce, and marriage are at the root of most poverty.
718. To have moral realism is to resist living a life of ideology, with its special form of unconsciousness and risk of becoming an agent to evil.
719. Not every good fight is a millennial fight, a twilight struggle.
720. For all the fealty to historical materialism, political movements rise to power not on the wings of theory but through the politics of irreducible choice.
721. It is difficult to demonstrate democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state.
722. Human nature has no history.
723. Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.
724. The religious impulse cannot be suppressed.
725. Most evil is banal and committed by ordinary people choosing their appetites and habits, not a splendid and Miltonic fall of a few grand and tragic choices. It consists of a steady stream of small-time compromises, petty sins, and small steps downward. Hell is repetition, where the same pattern of choices are reasserted and no sin is an island.
726. Reason does not lead to the dead end of atheism and rebellion against God; properly employed, it leads to a well-governed life where suffering and evil can be mitigated and confined to bearable proportions. Sensible policy, achieved on the basis of consent, is possible if the constitutional order is well designed, and if the people have sufficient virtue.
727. Every living creature must possess some spiritual dynamic, which provides the energy necessary for that sustained social effort which is civilization. Normally this dynamic is supplied by a religion, but in exceptional circumstances the religious impulse may disguise itself under philosophical or political forms.
728. The truth of the self-sufficient soul coexists with the truth of the vital importance of human connections.
729. Every man is a reactionary in the subject of his knowledge.
730. Great critics have no theory. Those who adopt a theory are imitating somebody else. All useful criticism is based upon experience of living. Just as wisdom is personal, there is no method except the self.
731. Because there are pockets of ambiguity does not mean there are not fields of clarity.
732. We must depend on education, tradition, belief, and prejudice, the products of culture which are inherited wisdoms and experiences, because our power of reason has limits.
733. The task of critical reason is to peer through the cultural web in which we are enmeshed so as to perceive clearly the reality that exists, including the man-made reality of the social order, whose terms give our lives meaning. Yet when questioning our culturally created assumptions to clear away attitudinizing or propaganda or superstitious prejudice, it must be recognized that human nature is not man-made and society cannot be molded at will.
734. We cannot live justly and happily unless we live under a power out of ourselves, a power above us, transcendent over our wills and our choices. Human government is not viable or sufficient without divine government above it in some unspecified relationship.
735. A non religious principle, replacing God, that is truly transcendent and not a tool of our passions does not exist. It is the power of the human desire for justice, so often partisan and perverted, that turns men into fanatics. The strength of religion is to recognize two apparently contrary forces in the human soul: the power of injustice and the power of our desire for justice. The stubborn existence of injustice reminds us that man is not God, while the demand for justice reminds us that we wish for the divine. Religion tries to join these two forces together.
736. Humans like to interact most with people like themselves, and they will develop institutions to allow them to do so.
737. Genetic differences between human groups, and in particular differences in average native intelligence, has been an important factor in human history.
738. Competitive moralism, of which we see too much, is driven by something amoral and animalistic: it is the age-old struggle for supremacy, the competition of rivals, placed in more respectable terms. The struggle becomes absurd — not in its underlying aims which are ever natural — but in the ever greater distance between high claims and base motives, wherewith the only point is in outdoing one’s rivals in “goodness” whilst not actually caring a damn whether anything good will come of it. Intellectual life — that supposedly higher sphere and haven from beastly struggle — becomes diseased with it, even such that, in terrible and political times, there is a delirium of the senses, and a dulling of the faculties, except for the primitive and still acute instincts for success.
739. Relativism is the compliment that desperation pays to failing ideas.
740. Tribal particularities are far more powerful than ideological abstractions.
741. Discontent is the parent of all radicalism.
742. The natural family is the fundamental social unit, inscribed in human nature. It is centered around the voluntary union of a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant for the purpose of satisfying the longings of the human heart to give and receive love, welcoming and ensuring the full physical and emotional development of children.
743. Military strength is necessary to preserve peace, and the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense and at its weakest when war is most limited.
744. Strong nuclear families are the basis of any good society.
745. Law and order are the first duty of the state.
746. Every age has its compensations. Youth has innocence; adulthood has power; age has wisdom.
747. There are no inevitable courses of events powerless to human planning and reason. It is not right that what in history is known to us is called laws of inevitability, and what is unknown is called free will. Reason does not lead to the dead end of atheism and rebellion. Properly employed, it leads to a well-governed order, a well-tempered religion, and a well-governed life. Suffering may be mitigated and curbed, confined to bearable proportions.
748. Guidance by will and not by reason cannot lead to a more accurate understanding of human nature, a sound guide for human life and self-governance. Therefore an ideal system is private property rights and a prudent mixture of hereditary monarchy and representative government grounded in local communities. This will allow for a landed class of hard-working, independent-minded, and politically responsbile workers tied to the land who may become the foundation of society. They will have both the power and the interest to stop insane slides into the destructive fury of revolution.
749. A state is an organization with a comparative advantage in violence, extending over a geographic area whose boundaries are determined by its power to tax constituents.
750. It is unfortunate when movements advocating equality of opportunity turn into movements focused on enforcing results. Theory poorly explains differences in group outcomes: groups are not abstractions. They come with histories and cultures, neither of which are postmodern or arbitary but instead deep and long-lasting. And genes for mental traits are not distributed perfectly evenly among groups.
751. In an unequal society of human capital, the majority resents its diminished status. It harbors the expectation of employing elections to drastically overturn its condition. In turn, the minority fears the outcome that may follow from free elections and the assertion of majority rule. As a result, it resorts to authoritarian institutions to guarantee its social and economic advantage.
752. To speak of a moral culture is redundant. Culture is a received inheritance of moral precepts, reflected in the doings and not-doings of a social order. In an anti-culture, however, the doings are dominant, all the sources of restraint, especially shame and guilt, are cast aside as oppression.
753. There is much to admire about those traditions of duty, plain speaking, courage, male companionship, reticence, decency, scorn for affectation and pretense, skepticism of government, dislike of intellectuals and religious enthusiasts, love of gossip, and dedication to tobacco and booze.
754. It is important to delight in the everyday life that has been granted us, and to have little patience with the psychological problems of free people, especially if they involve a ‘search for identity’ or some other form of self-seeking and self-involvement.
755. Stupidity and evil are the same if measured by the result.
756. While death destroys man, the thought of death saves him.
757. Mankind is inherently self-interested and not mold-able into a form like the high-minded with their hands on levers of power. Mankind engages in a perpetual and restless desire for power and status. Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
758. A world of harmony and universal satisfaction are mirages. Trade offs between competing wants are inevitable.
759. Benefits from evolved societal rules cannot be articulated because they are developed through trial and error over centuries. Traditions provide wisdom without reflection.
760. The nation-state should be built as a political expression of a particular people. Map lines should follow organic human developments and histories such as ethnicity and religion as much as possible so as to minimize opportunities for conflict.
761. Humans are marked by more intractable separations than they would like to believe. Differences are not superficial and easy to combine. This tourist, superficial, overly aesthetic vision is carried by a passion for resemblance. Beyond recognizing and respecting the humanity of each person, there is pressure to see the other as the same as ourselves, and if we cannot stop ourselves from perceiving what is different, we reproach ourselves for doing so as if it were a sin.
762. In some contexts, the city-state and nation-state are the two political forms that have been capable of realizing the intimate union of civilization and liberty. The sovereign state and representative government are the two great artifices that have allowed for accommodation of huge masses of human beings within an order of civilization and liberty.
763. Defeating a guerrilla uprising broadly supported by the local populace requires a level of frightfulness that does not bear close inspection.
764. The state is a blunt instrument to modify social behavior and political climate.
765. The basis of society is not the individual, but the family and the neighborhood, because that is where citizenship is first and best learned.
766. The tendency of citizens to abandon the wider society and to define their lives in terms of material well-being and in relation to a small group of friends and family is most likely to occur in places of significant heterogeneity.
767. Without first principles, it is impossible to judge competing ideas without appeals to strength.
768. Virtue is not an exclusive commodity, and it should be defined outside of normal human experience. It is accessible but difficult. It signifies a habit attached to a faculty of the soul, disposing it to elicit with readiness acts conformable to our rational nature. Virtue is a good habit consonant with our nature.
769. Prejudices are visions about the way things are. They are a divination of the order of the whole of things, and so the road to a knowledge of that whole. The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty.
770. Mostly-inbred human groups develop group characteristics of behavior, and attitude, and sociability, as well as of mere appearance.
771. The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another less than they do in the most homogeneous settings. Nearly all measures of civic health are lower.
772. The emotional and imaginative resources people invest in places are important components of individual and social self-identity and a source of loyalty and affection. These places are usually physical places.
773. The deformation of modern philosophy was caused by the rise of rationalism in extremis. Man is more than weights and measures; he is a creature rooted in Aristotelian common sense, who seeks the divine ground of being.
774. The rationalists destruction of the concept of the moral imagination resulted in man being disconnected from reason, order, peace, virtue, and fruitful penitence, and into the antagonist worlds of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow.
775. The moral imagination triggers the act of pneumatic differentiation where man recognizes the distinction between the radically transcendent God and the created realm or world. It allows the growth and development of consciousness, initiates the theophanic event that enables man to enter the metaxy where he exists in his fullness in his questing for the nature of his existential being within the truth of reality. It is the key ingredient in man’s relentless search for truth, without which man may gain knowledge, but not wisdom, peace, or salvation.
776. There is the mystery of free will, of individual choice, of divine Providence, and of the creation and sustaining of tradition. These mysteries have been addressed throughout human history, not through science or discussion, but through myth and story.
777. When human relationships are debased and brutalized into an animal relationship for public spectacle, the entire culture is infected, debased, and brutalized.
778. The task of morality is to suppress selfishness. Loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity are moral concepts. The innate moral intuition are: preventing harm, reciprocity, loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority, and a sense of sanctity.
779. Moral cultures are cultivated based on the three binding foundations: ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity, as well as on the universally employed foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity. The ideal is not a world of maximum freedom; it is a world of order and tradition in which people are united by a shared moral code that is effectively enforced, which enables people to trust each other to play their interdependent roles. It is a world of high social capital.
780. Small is the part of all the human heart endures can laws or kings cause or cure.
781. The good political order must be based upon human virtues. A de-emphasis of virtue is destructive to this. It believes that sufficient virtue are not attainable and therefore the good political order must be based on men as they are, that is upon their mediocrity and vices. This is not just realism or mere cynicism. It amounts to a deliberate choice as to how society should be organized, a decided de-emphasis on personal virtue. It leads to the new discipline of social science, which is concerned with coldly describing men as they actually are. But this is empty because only men with civic virtue will obey a constitution. This view leads naturally to value-free social science and social policies that seek to solve social problems through technocratic manipulation that refrain from “imposing value judgments” on the objects of its concern.
782. If man exists in opposition to nature, conquering it to serve his comfort, then nature does not define what is good for man. Man does. This view is the basis for the modern penchant to make freedom and comfort (that is, prosperity) the central concerns of political philosophy, whereas the ancients made virtue the center. Once man is outside nature, he has no natural teleology or purpose, and therefore no natural virtues. Since he has no natural purpose, anything that might give him one, like God, is suspect, and thus modernity tends towards atheism. Similarly, man’s duties, as opposed to his rights, drop away, as does his natural sociability. The philosophical price of freedom is purposelessness, which ultimately gives rise to the alienation, anomie, and nihilism of modern life.
783. Politics implies natural goods that are prior to human thinking about them. If man is political by nature, the goods of politics also exist by nature. The goods of politics are the ways man must behave to make political community work. If there are natural goods, there is a natural hierarchy of goods, and therefore a natural hierarchy of men, as different men pursue different goods. Civic equality may be salutary for the functioning of society, but men are not truly equal in value.
784. Reason and revelation cannot refute each other. Religion is the great necessity for ordinary men because it is in essence revealed law.
785. The instincts which give rise to the mysterious process of nature, by the dark and inscrutable ways in which we come into the world, are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burdensome duties towards those with whom they have never made a convention of any sort. Children are not consenting to their relation, but their relation, without their actual consent, binds them to its duties; or rather it implies their consent because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things.
786. Intelligence – the different statistical profiles of different peoples on measures of cognitive function — is an important factor in history and the development of human groups. The workings of biology cannot suspended so as to maintain unpopular opinions that are indicators of low status in elite culture, and speculation based on sound science is descriptive and useful.
787. The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers.
788. Morality is not grounded in an ethic of wants and sentiment. It is grounded in reason, which is the arbiter of proper action. Humans are not always at liberty to pursue their wants, but they must always respect the dignity of the human person. There is a real self beyond the collections of perceptions and passions.
789. Most history is written by the dissenters.
790. The common good must begin with families, in neighborhoods and in communities. It begins with an organic cultural and religious transformation from the ground up.
791. One of the asymmetries of history is the lack of correspondence between the abilities of some leaders and the power of their countries.
792. The proper development of order, convention, religion, respectability, and solidity begins with family life, as the illusion that we are entirely self-sufficient creatures whose destiny is in our hands shatters.
793. A society must progress by building on what has successfully provided it with peace, virtue, and freedom in the past, and so by building on the best fruits of its own traditions; to do this a society needs to preserve and sustain the sources of its strength. It is necessary to defend and uphold a society’s particular explicit and implicit creeds – prejudices – a word robbed of its full and complex meaning. These deeply held and widely shared premises are what holds a society together and what sustains unity, peace, and sensible reform in the otherwise raucous atmosphere of an increasingly democratic politics.
794. People mostly care about themselves. People are motivated by selfish altruism. People don’t think much. Conformity is the norm. People are insecure and worry that others will discover and reveal their flaws. People are pretty much only focused on themselves, so while Person A is worried that Person B will discover and reveal his flaws, Person B is worrying the same thing about Person A. In the end, people see in the world what they expect to see in it.
795. There are four braided but distinct strands of modern American conservatism. Traditionalists value continuity, order and hierarchy; libertarians prize personal freedom and social spontaneity; neoconservatives blend the New Deal’s idealistic spirit with conservatism’s muscular nationalism; and religious conservatives fight relativism, secularism and immorality.
796. Education is that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid the vast limits of their knowledge.
797. Defense of the realm, a stable moral order, and unobtrusive government should be the highest aims of a nation.
798. Humility, Kindness, Forgiveness, Diligence, Charity, Temperance, and Chastity should be the highest aims of a person.
799. Human nature tends toward sin and we should adopt customs that steer us away from those tendencies.
800. Since the invention of photography, art has been more or less consciously fraudulent.
801. Morality arises from sympathy among like-minded persons: first the family, then friends and colleagues. Rights grow from convictions about how we ought to manage relations with people not like us, convictions that are nourished by education, religion, and experience.
802. There’s a limit to what you can say in a multicultural society, especially with regard to inherited difference in intelligence, as measured by abstract reasoning ability, among groups.
803. There are many nation-states impervious to the logic of reason but highly sensitive to the logic of force.
804. The law of unintended consequences is a harsh mistress.
805. Local devotions are likely to be overcome by the power of unleashed human ambition.
806. Multiculturalism has led not to integration but to segregation, endangering liberal democracy which is poisoned by the rise of identity politics as aggrieved groups jockey for special treatment. The effect is inexorably divisive, a culture of victimhood that sets group against group, each claiming that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than that of others.
807. Clichés are annoying for the tediousness of their truth, not their untruth.
808. We may not be interested in the reality of human nature, but it is interested in us.
809. The truth is great and shall prevail when none cares whether it prevail or not.
810. A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.
811. Always lurking are cults of murderous violence that exalt death and destruction and despise the life of the mind.
812. Civilized decline can be so charming one does not notice it is about to accelerate into uncivilized decline.
813. No well-adjusted person should be, or should be required to be, interested in politics very much.
814. It is almost always relevant to ask the classical question, who stands to gain?
815. It is a moralistic fallacy to think that phenomena that ought not exist should therefore be spoken and written about as if they do not exist.
816. Politicians look to the next election; statesmen may look to the next generation; but monarchs must look to the next generation. There is significant reassurance and security of a certain amount of continuity at the top in a highly mobile and volatile society. People are comforted by a familiar name and face.
817. There is a deep emotional satisfaction in the pride of a father whose child wants to emulate him.
818. When the exceptions become the rule, it is possible to indignantly dismiss biological conjectures so as to deny that there is a basic human nature. This facilitates intellectuals being funded so as to carry out improbable social engineering projects.
819. Citizens lose trust in political leaders not because they are imperfect but because they are not honest.
820. When confronted with uncomfortable truths, most people will resort to the “cultural conditioning” argument. Fear of the unchangeable is common.
821. Much of life is best understood through the prism of status wars.
822. Success comes to those whose desire is stronger than their fear.
823. Proximity and diversity is a dangerous combination.
824. Politics and history are a moral contest between good and evil, not of individuals who are products of historical forces greater than themselves.
825. Liberty should not be an end in itself; it is instead a means, a natural endowment, by which to achieve the common good. Individuals must use their liberty well. Authority, by creating a just order, encourages liberty over license.
826. A person will flourish by concentrating on the aspects of life that can be controlled rather than by reacting to external forces.
827. Every society and civilization is an attempt to create order, an orientation of men’s lives toward nature, society, and the divine.
828. The most subtle test of character is set in the absence of adversity.
829. There is far too much corruption, racketeering, and nepotism among humans to have faith in placing large amounts of money and property in the hands of “the people.”
830. Life is short, and truth works far and lives long: speak the truth.
831. If one has the intelligence to see which rules are real and which are fake, the respectfulness to follow the real rules, and the courage to break the fake rules, one can get ahead in this world. In fact, people will love the breaking of the fake rule.
832. Outsider powers can play an important facilitating role bringing together partners, but only if they have independently determined that they prefer peace to a continuation of war.
833. Diversity and freedom of speech are always in tension; as diversity grows, so, inevitably, will the demand for censorship.
834. An individual will make worse decisions in individual cases on average if excluded from consideration is prior learning about the general category.
835. Reality is largely a probabilistic affair best described by statistics.
836. Ambition can create a little madness.
837. Culture must be at ease with the inheritance of the past. It must be able to refer to things beyond itself.
838. To view all forms of violence as equally evil is to think that as long as one persists the others may still be undertaken.
839. The question of if genetic differences exist and why falls into the domain of science – of genetics, psychometrics, and anthropology. A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.
840. Instead of scooping for symbols, seeking poetry, and being at least receptive to majestic truths, many prefer to rewind their petty postmodern formula for one more deconstruction. And if hegemony and racism and social constructs are what is sought, that all belief in the power of art has been destroyed.
841. There should be little patience with “ologies” and “isms” that claim life can be reduced to a single guiding force or principle – economics, race, the mind, brute force, sexuality, material chance.
842. Reality consists of two distinct, absolute, and all-inclusive elements, something like matter and mind or nature and spirit, which exists together in a complex perpetual relationship in the universe and the existential world of mankind.
843. To be born into a minority is, in part, to be born into a collective experience of insecurity. Group identity can be the enemy of individuality; the group is naturally threatened by the impulses in some of its members to step outside of the collective experience, as an indulgence in individuality can be seen as a collaboration.
844. Any chain of cause and effect must ultimately begin with an uncaused cause. No matter how far science advances, an explanation of ultimate origins must always, by the very definition of the scientific method, remain a non-scientific question. It is possible to defer to scientific explanations for physical processes while still remaining within the central Christian tradition: God provides answers for ultimate cause and purpose.
845. There are advantages to small community: in the small state, the city, or the village, the man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is that in a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.
846. The American founding documents intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
847. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.
848. Virtue should not be an ideology.
849. Something is not wrong because it is illegal; it is illegal because it is wrong. Once this distinction is lost, civil society becomes all but impossible because a broadly agreed morality is a basis of social cohesion.
850. When there’s no longer a sufficiently strong moral consensus and when the state actively disapproves of a self-reliant citizenry, what remains is the law. And law detached from any other social pillars is not enough to sustain a civil society.
851. Models and thought experiments are designed to illuminate principles. Simplification is necessary to see the world more clearly.
852. Perfectly in accord with settled principles of biology and genetics are the following: there are group-statistical differences between races and genders, these differences have developed via the pressures of natural selection working on the peculiarities of small founder populations, and they likely include group-statistical differences in personality, cognitive function, and behavior.
853. History cannot be a science; it is the very opposite, in that its interest resides in the particulars.
854. An age (a shorter span within an era) is unified by one or to pressing needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide.
855. A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately boredom.
856. The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occasionally an estimate of their relevant strength.
857. The potent writings that helped to reshape minds and institutions in the West have done so through a formula or two, not always consistent with the text. Partisans and scholars start to read the book with care after it has done its work.
858. History, fundamentally, is made by individuals. All forms of determinism are grievously mistaken and destructive.
859. Human liberty is an absolute datum of consciousness and reality. The supreme pleasure and prerogative of the human person is to feel at once a moral being and a natural philosopher.
860. There are two dominant modern intellectual extremes and errors: scientific reductionism and histrionic subjectivism. Both are a state of childishness, where humans are permissive not from a love of liberty but because of a lack of self-control and fear of restraint. Innocence is praised because of the want for a license to behave like an infant. These extremes congeal into intellectual attitudes and institutional forms in the culture: the scientistic worship of material procedures and objects, and the anarchic exaltation of aesthetic eccentricity and self-expression, a world of incessant autobiography.
861. Any work of the philosophy of history that denies human agency and novelty does not understand that history is the graveyard of trends and the birthplace of counter-trends. There is no mono-causality and no determinism in history.
862. Life which spurs desire and fills the mind is wider than science or art or philosophy or all together.
863. Responsibility, the foundation of the penal code, eludes scientific analysis. Learned foolishness is a dangerous folly, especially when clothed with the notion that purpose is an illusion.
864. Humans must respect themselves; morality and the civic social life are impossible without it. Yet self-respect must not engender vanity and self-righteousness.
865. Hope is itself a species of happiness, the chief happiness which this world affords. It is necessary in every condition.
866. In order to be taught to speak and seek truth, it is necessary to learn to hear it.
867. Tolerance, generosity, and reasoned skepticism are hallmarks of the truly liberal spirit.
868. Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.
869. The left believes in evolution but not biology; the right believes in biology but not evolution.
870. History does not consist of the struggle to determine the proper ideology. It is never “finished” after the end of all plausible alternatives. History is not about ideology, but “Who? Whom?” It continues because the struggle to determine who will be the who rather than the whom will never end.
871. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. And government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
872. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
873. Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
874. Flaws in character produce flaws in behavior that must be accounted for.
875. Humans judge others by their actions and themselves by intentions.
876. Liberty contains the seeds of its own destruction. Liberty inevitably gives way to license, yet time after time, liberty, while not without its drawbacks, is the most reliable path to human excellence, prosperity, and progress. It is the natural condition in which human beings flourish.
877. It is in the nature of civilization that it must be in constant conflict with barbarism.
878. Surprise is a powerful antidote to cynicism.
879. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
880. To go through life is not to walk across a field.
881. Often, change is made to create the illusion of progress.
882. Fear cuts deeper than swords, but inspiration cuts deeper still.
883. Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not given a priori; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action.
884. The word ‘social’ in a sentence negates the meaning of the word following it.
885. Humans are creatures with souls and are not reducible to either bodies or minds. The tendency to identify primarily with bodies leads to an increasingly paranoid, puritanical, and prohibitionist attitude toward health and safety, while the tendency to understand as minds apart from bodies allows humans to treat bodies, and even moods, as property to be sold and manipulated technologically.
886. Architecture is perennially important because, unlike poems and songs, most acts of architecture are substantial public acts. What damage is done if a poet writes yet another bad modernist poem? Yet bad buildings and developments do not just come and go. They can degrade shared environments and damage the lives of thousands of people in practical and immediate ways. They will also be around for long periods of time. It is style and not sincerity that counts. Those who must use the building know the impact of the facade. There is a large difference between a sheet of glass and an arch that guides. One welcomes and one creates anxiety. The modernist is a repellent, rationalist hell, populated by anxious people whose minds are elsewhere and who’d rather be anyplace else. It has all the personality and lovableness of a bureaucracy. The opposite orient themselves by reference to cultural history and norms and to basic human scale. Yet the details, textures, and motifs vary wildly. The structures relate to human scale as a physical being, and coexist easily with nature. It is better to produce structure that’s devoted to beauty, class, and pleasure. There’s subtlety, texture, depth.
887. Large social phenomena have an urban manifestation – subtle, cerebral, intellectual, tending towards decadence – and a rustic one – plain, active, instinctual, tending towards fanaticism. The two factions ought to strive to get along in pursuit of their common goal and hope that their negative tendencies will cancel each other out.
888. The despair of intellectuals is the hope of the nation.
889. Defending the virtue of traditional cultures should never give rise to a high-minded rationalization for a persisting status quo of intellectual poverty.
890. Words and sounds – the rhythmic patterns in which they are bound together in music and poetry – have a unique power to awaken the mind. Rhythm has the power to prepare the soul to receive truths that would otherwise remain unintelligible.
891. Politics does not help to find meaning; it is not primarily about catering to one’s feelings and passions. It is the deployment of self-interest in the public arena.
892. As sympathies vary from person to person, some may respond more or less to these feelings, but the use of craftsmanship does not vary. It enables, but is not an end in itself. Art, at its best, give form to feeling but does not exist independently of it.
893. Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence.
894. Fascism is the cult of state organized unity, and it was a movement of centralized planning, group identification, and willing obedience to a charismatic leader. This movement is collectivist and authoritarian – large, intrusive, and modernist, a rallying point to or a substitute for commonality, an organism that should nearly always respond when people “hurt.” Fascism should be understood as a supercharged nationalistic statism, finding its theoretical wellsprings in Hegelian historicism, Rousseau’s protean “general will,” Nietzschean will-to-power, Darwinian evolution, and a smattering of the Social Gospel thrown in for good measure—all of which overturned the older liberalism of Locke, the Enlightenment, and the American Founders. It is committed to an ever-expanding state, without any limits in principle. Fascism is a collectivist doctrine, worshipful towards the centralized state, socialist in economics, hostile to both tradition and capitalism — in short, a left-wing ideology opposed in almost every respect to classical liberal conservative individualism. Fascism was a religion, and the animating dogma of the faith was that all citizens must be together. It is belief in the primacy of the state as a historical actor: everything in the state, nothing outside the state. All the statist and collectivism -isms were reactionary in that they sought to repackage tribal values under the guise of modern concepts. Hitlerism was socialism for one race. Bolshevism was socialism for one class. Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy. Fascism has a grave moral defect: it fails to recognize the individual as the key social unit. Right economic reasoning begins not with the nation but with human action, and right social policy begins with the recognition that society is made up of individuals with souls. Fascism, on the other hand, by ignoring the individual soul, is socialism’s close cousin because it exults in the idolatry of the state. Contemporary progressivism is a political religion with its roots in German state theory, sharing a close family resemblance to fascism. Among the anatomical and genetic similarities: cult of unity, sacralization of politics, philosophical pragmatism, corporatism, relativism, Romanticism, hero-worship, collectivism. Here, corporations are a “partner” with governments. The profit motive is “good” for efficiency and rewarding talent, but beyond that, there is a desire for order and predictability and planning. This mindset informs the entire class of transnational progressives, the shock troops of what H. G. Wells hoped would lead to his liberal-fascist “world brain.” They want big corporations and big government working in tandem with labor, universities, and progressive organizations to come up with “inclusive” policies set at the national or international level. That’s not necessarily socialism – it’s corporatism. This is the economic philosophy of fascism. Government is the senior partner, but all of the other institutions are on board, so long as they agree with the government’s agenda. The people left out of this coordinated effort – the Nazis called it the Gleichschaltung — are the small businessmen, the entrepreneurs, the ideological, social, or economic mavericks who don’t want to play along. Fascism is a form of government characterized by explicit anti-egalitarian ideals, and with a non-monarchical head of state. A fascist state is an anti-egalitarian republic. Thus fascism is a reaction – defined more by what it is not, than what it is – a reaction against the egalitarianism of the mainstream left; and a reaction against the divinely-ordained monarchy and/or rule by priests of the traditional (religious) Right.
895. Strong families and common, shared, confident culture is the backbone of strong community. Government should perform its limited and necessary duties well, as an instrument to support families and the organic development of communities.
896. Morality, not attempts to “change a system,” should be at the foundation of what must change in a time of public sickness.
897. Government can never be transformational; it can never love you; it can never serve as a substitute for parenthood; it is not a living organism. It is a blunt instrument that might or might not have a degree of competence.
898. Underneath the veneer of civilized discourse humans act in ways that are brazenly self-interested in the short term. Seeking short term status is a matter of self-interest.
899. The physical body is not irrelevant to a human community. The emotional subtext of human communication is crucial to human thought. It isn’t a footnote. There is no thought without emotion, and there is no real communication without emotion‹subtle emotions that allow humans to recognize another human being and understand the nuances of what is being communicated.
900. Minority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a ‘victim’ group, while those at the receiving end of their behavior are blamed simply because they belong to the ‘oppressive’ majority.
901. Multiculturalism often means a society in which, in the interests of protecting the “collective rights” of various identity groups, individual rights are circumscribed and public discourse is ever more regulated by the state.
902. In a non-homogeneous nation-state, free markets and democracy will bring ethnic conflict.
903. Few are immune to the appeal of identity politics.
904. Community does not simply denote an aggregate of individuals, but a unity of persons in a common culture.
905. Members of a common society hold some moral obligations in common.
906. Liberal democracy is a radical imposition on the natural human desire to live clannishly.
907. The debasement of language goes hand in hand with the debasement of thought.
908. There is a large set of traditional values that have proven worth maintaining and over which we are perpetually obliged to deliberate in order to make the tough and sometimes tragic decisions about how to maximize the fulfillment of as many of them as possible; the state should be very small, so that the determinations of this deliberation – and not a general will or utopian disdain for the perpetual task of deliberation over the set values – can hold sway.
909. One should not accept a firm distinction between national interests and universal ideals.
910. One’s ethnicity should not replaces one’s humanity or individual character as the primary quality in virtue of which one deserves respect.
911. Humans would rather remember than think.
912. Statism and the politicization of life are common temptations that should be resisted regardless of environment. A lost faith in limited government, free market ideas, political democracy, diverse and competing social and cultural institutions, and the messiness of a free society is to gain faith in utopian scheming. Soon there will be a semi-religious awe for the centralized state as the expression of united national community. There exists within statism a fear of free will which in the end results in disallowing chance for virtue.
913. The more closely related the alleged conspirators are, the more likely that there is an actual conspiracy.
914. Anyone who can appease a man’s conscience can take his freedom away from him.
915. The very foundation of humanity is ordered freedom, not a mere absence of external restraint or a resolve to act “authentically,” but the capacity to choose between good and evil. Genuine art serves freedom, not by instructing humans how to act but by helping to resist the forces that threaten to strip humans of moral agency altogether.
916. Nothing can effectively cast aside blood and kin and faith.
917. Conservatism is opposition to all forms of political religion. It is a rejection of the idea that politics can be redemptive. It is the conviction that a properly ordered republic has a government of limited ambition. Liberal institutions in Europe are largely conservative ones in America: private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how they will live within these guidelines. Progress comes from working out inconsistencies within this tradition, not by throwing it away. Conservatism has to do with social order; it recognizes that the sufferings of the underdog are not caused by the fact that some have managed to rescue themselves from their predicament. It is anti-utopian and against the view that what is human should be measured in terms of wealth or power. Conservatism originates in an attitude to civil society, and it is from a conception of civil society that its political doctrine is derived.
918. Enlightenment theorists promised liberation from various types of external authority: familial, religious, and political. But an unintended consequence of the implementation of Enlightenment theories is the elimination of freedom.
919. Civilization, at any given moment, can be boiled down to what its living members know and believe. This makes civilization fragile and it makes parents the primary guardians of its posterity.
920. Virtue, freely chosen, should be the aim of humanity.
921. When private charity is cast aside for institutionalized compassion, there emerges a source of enormous corruption.
922. Good intentions imposed in their normal belligerent and self-righteous way are deeply offensive.
923. The mere fact that someone desires something is not enough to grant a right to pursue it provided there is no interference with the rights of others. Human desires are fundamentally in need of emendation.
924. Intimacy as an affair of organs, discussed in measurable terms and in terms of sensation, is unjustly emancipated from the great project of human love. This is a form of liberation, but to liberate people from love is undesirable. It is a liberation into emptiness. It degrades not only the person but also child-rearing and responsibility and all of the difficult sacrifices which are necessary if one generation is to inherit the social capital of the previous one. Likewise homosexuality: to know inwardly a gender is to recognize the intimations and desires; there is no venture outwards into the unknown. It becomes in the end a matter of dehumanizing contractual negotiations.
925. Self-expression is proper if there is something interesting to express. And what makes a self interesting is a rigorous process of discipline and order and self-understanding.
926. Radicalism is a matter of temperament. Radicals are those who are arrested in the state of adolescent rebellion. They have grown away from experience and social capital. The temperament is an attempt to repudiate this so as to shape identity. Yet true maturity consists of the process of coming home again and seeing those things grown away from as true. Radical temperament is mistreatment in the middle stage. The exploitation of the adolescent, where it looks not only normal but sacrosanct, is tragic.
927. Lustful fantasy depersonalizes the human being and impoverishes the ability to confront human beings as they are. It is a flight from reality where one “controls.” This is different from imagination, an imaginative re-creation which enables one to confront real people.
928. Every possible form of restraint and parental control should be encouraged, as there is much that threatens the ability of society to reproduce itself in an ordinary way.
929. Crowds are terrifying because they have a will of their own and act independently of rationality.
930. At the root of social order should be loyalty, allegiance, community, and tradition. Such a vision of society is one in which autonomous institutions and private initiatives predominate, and in which the law protects the shared values that bind the community together. Such a vision is only tenuously related to the market economy, to monetarism, to free enterprise, or to capitalism. It involves neither hostility toward the state, nor the desire to limit the state’s obligation to the citizen. Its conceptions of society, law, and citizenship regard the individual not as the premise but as the conclusion of politics. Such a vision is opposed to the ethic of social justice, to equality of station, opportunity, income, and achievement, and to the attempt to bring major institutions of society under government control.
931. Hope can be a terrible liar.
932. There are two fundamental biological drives: the drive for self-preservation and the drive to spread genes through reproduction. Further, eggs are expensive and rare, while sperm is plentiful and cheap, a truism with significant sociological consequences.
933. Self-deception keeps humans sane. Even when they do have enough clarity to realize the truth about themselves, if put on the spot, especially in front of strangers who will be judging them, they will still probably lie to save face. Judge people by the results of their actions and maneuvers, not their words. People will say almost anything to justify their actions, to give them a moral or sanctimonious veneer. The only thing that is clear, the only way to judge effectively, is by looking at actions and the results of actions. That is the effective truth.
934. Rationalism, with its universalistic “rights of man,” has an enthusiasm of its own that springs from an abstracting lack of concern for the densely complicated facts of any existing political landscape. And so the rationalists unleash unintended consequences that in turn unleash murderous passions and despotism.
935. The most dangerous human folly springs from convenient reason combined with an exaggerated love of justice.
936. There is a cultural metabolism that underlies the dialectic of modernism and its aftermath: much that humans continue to esteem in the creative achievements owes its existence to a curious compact between the bourgeoisie and its licensed opposition. But the dynamism of the avant-garde, with its unremitting appetite for innovation and its steady erosion of established values – including the values established by its own efforts – came in time to exert a powerful control over the very culture it still ostensibly “opposed.” So completely did the bourgeois society cede its cultural initiatives to this licensed opposition that the terms of their compact came to be fatefully altered. It was now the avant-garde that dominated cultural life – thus, in effect, ceasing to function as an authentic avant-garde – and the surviving remnants of bourgeois “reaction” that went through the motions of a principled resistance.
937. Romantic excess comes to a dead end with complete self-indulgence and the therapeutic effacement of the ideas of sin and redemption.
938. Those who get something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.
939. Any calling which claims to be a whole philosophy of life is not one at all. It is a religion, and a false one.
940. Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the costs become prohibitive.
941. There are no sweeping state solutions to a permanent problem of the human condition. There is no first step to such a solution.
942. Beneficial reform can only be gradual, and even when beneficial it must come with trade-offs. There is no cure for the ailments of the human condition. Human knowledge is gradual, cumulative and, perhaps most of all, fragile. The sophisters and calculators who seek to erase tradition in a riot of will and rationalism invite nothing but thunder and doom.
943. Every person has meaning apart from the society in which individuality has been formed.
944. A preoccupation with the future not only prevents from seeing the present as it is but often prompts rearrangement of the past.
945. Ignorance of human society runs deep. The experimentation of an open society is needed not only because different people often want different things, but even more importantly because humans are rarely sure of what works.
946. The most intelligent collective action eventually fails because of human weakness and selfishness.
947. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Moral failures become institutional and societal failures.
948. The more the state gets out of the business of policing the sin, the more the rest of the society needs to get into the business of condemning it.
949. The past shows that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.
950. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
951. No one is immune to vice or a vessel for virtue, and all are at risk of doing things that violate principles.
952. Patriotism is a species of unity that has some redeeming moral and philosophical substance. Patriotism, as opposed to nationalism, is a love for a creed, a dedication to what is best. Nationalism, a romantic sensibility, says, “My country is always right.” Patriots hope that their nation will make the right choice.
953. People at the top need a relaxed perspective, which gives judgment and balance. Workaholism is an introspection-killing disease, the anxious disability of tunnel-vision middle managers.
954. The more variety, the more power needed to smooth differences in variety out. This is against particularity, against the local, and that necessarily will work against freedom.
955. He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.
956. All of the totalitarian “isms” are reactionary in the sense they are attempting to restore the ancient and instinctive yearning to live in a sacralized tribe. Socialism arises out of the burning issue of “the social question.” The social question was aimed at how all of society was to be properly organized so as to give the masses a sense of belonging and meaning. The Fascists wanted socialism in one state. The Nazis wanted socialism for one race (an obvious form of tribalism). And the Communists desired socialism for one class. All of these ideologies sought a “new” politics of meaning, but what their adherents really desired was to restore what they thought they’d lost.
957. Individualism in the extreme leads to totalitarianism. Absent a cultural, religious or moral reason for action, it falls to the state to take the place of inherited tradition in the hyper-individualistic state.
958. What distinguishes civilized man from a barbarian must be acquired by every individual anew.
959. With power comes money, and money corrupts. States are giant extraction devices. They enable one to consume the products of human effort without producing anything oneself, and without winning the voluntary consent of the producers. State power is one of the most highly addictive substances known.
960. Tradition has a purpose. It’s not just myth and habit. Tradition is the collective experience of humans.
961. Justice and liberty must stand or fall together. Liberty, a definite liberty, exists under law, the limits of which are determined by prescription. These liberties are not innovations, discovered in an Age of Reason, but ancient prerogatives guaranteed by immemorial usage.
962. In the revolutions of secular political religions there is a radical repudiation of all existing institutions and arrangements, absolute confidence in competence to build a new and far better society, willingness to kill contemporaries in great numbers, for the supposed benefit of posterity, contemptuous hostility to all religion, and a program for its enforced elimination from the world.
963. A statesman’s chief virtue is prudence.
964. The central revelation of Western experience is that man cannot stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep. Even out of the depths of despair, humans take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep they fall, for there is always hope.
965. The intellectual probity of a person is measured not merely by what comes out of him, but by what he puts up with in others.
966. The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence.
967. Traditional conservatism at its highest is for the regeneration of spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded.
968. The scientific and other forces that have compelled society to think constantly in terms of the mass cause humans to accept the idea of ever more complete planning. But planning tends only too easily to totalitarianism; and the reason is that the secular state always concerns itself with riches or power – which are means, and not with the destiny of the soul, which is the end. The forces that appear to make human civilization so irresistible – wealth, organization, military power – are essentially hollow, and crumble to dust as soon as the human purpose that animates them loses its strength.
969. All culture arises from cult, from the religious belief systems adopted by communities in specific times and locales. All history is not simply a series of accounts of human conflict as told by winners, but is instead the working out of mysterious design on earth only fitfully discerned as such. The divine madness, a mind beside itself, allows one to order the soul properly. Imagination enables humans to begin to enter into the mind and experiences of others, upon which the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – is predicated. The effect of imagination is to deepen understanding of the larger world.
970. Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different they are in the real world.
971. The world is not awash in a field of love consciousness. It is instead awash in fear, hatred, anger, jealousy, duplicity, lust, ego…and occasionally love. There is a reason so many people yearn for its life-giving power of requited love – because it is so rare.
972. It is not true that man cannot organize the world without God. But without God, he can only organize it against man.
973. The natural moral law, the moral truths we known by reason, is a kind of global grammar by which the world can rationally discuss its future.
974. A nation is an enthno-cultural entity many years in the making. It is not an ideological proposition. It is not infinitely plastic. Change cannot be introduced without consequences.
975. Humans desperately want to recreate the feeling of the of spiritually resonant tribe. There is an inborn quest for community. This desire can be productive and vital if acted upon in a healthy manner. But it can also be twisted, distorted and corrupted when left unconstrained by law, philosophy and dogma. Tribalism is too central to the human condition to be transcended.
976. The more that social order is threatened by the unwillingness of individuals to comply with its instructions, the more coercive it will become.
977. All is not philanthropic that speaks of utopia.
978. The most dangerous constants of our human condition – selfishness, status-seeking, the thoughtless imposition of will – have no solution. The state does not give meaning or dignity; every person possesses these inherently wholly apart from that place where individuality and family identity are formed. Unity organized by the state is false in any moment when concepts of “justice,” “rationalism,” and “rights” are taken to the uniformity of existence. There should be an order of voluntary associations serving as a barrier between the state and the individual, family, and community. The state is the arbiter and never a servant to a particular class or metaphysical interest. Our spiritual unity should always be grounded in the shared humanity cleansed by our creator and redeemer. The society possessing spiritual-like goals to be overseen by the state is the society that takes idealism into the realm of prohibitive and unforeseen danger.
979. Beauty is an index to civilization.
980. In organization, resist ideology, reflexive partisanship, wishful thinking, and emotion.
981. One cannot philosophize without knowing why certain self-evident truths are the basis of justice and of sanity. There is no ground for human rights in positive law unless there is a prior ground in natural law recognizing that human beings are neither beasts nor God.
982. The human brain is wired to prefer tribal organization. All of the big “isms” of the 20th century – communism, fascism, socialism, environmentalism, and progressivism – are predicated on a truly reactionary vision that tries to recreate tribal living on “modern” lines. Communism is a tribalism of class, fascism is tribalism of nation, Nazism is tribalism of race, jihadism is a tribalism of religion. Egalitarianism itself is a form of tribalism. It comes from the instinctive jealousy which says “no one should have more than his share.” There has been only one truly revolutionary political idea: liberalism of the classical variety. It sought to break the logic of tribalism. Freedom is what we have in a state of nature. This naturally terrifies us and is why we prefer to live in the tribal arrangements we evolved in. Yet liberty is a human invention requiring civic education and commitment to certain enduring principles. It takes work precisely because it does not come naturally.
983. There are those who want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a dilemma: either they can abandon cherished religion, or they can remain forever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is very appealing; and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs. It’s very difficult to understand the machinery of hatred, because you wind up resorting to logic, but trying to understand this with logic is like measuring distance in kilograms. Many in Islamic nations are envious. To them, life is an unbearable burden. Modernism is the only way out but that is frightening. It means they have to compete. It means they can’t explain everything away with conspiracy theories. Talent and the free inquiry necessary to cultivate it support jealousy among the constrained. As Muslims believe they are in possession of the final revealed truth, and that they have a testament and a tradition of sayings of the prophet that in essence answer all human questions, by that light all questions ought not only to be answered but are answerable. While no doubt there are Christians and Jews who feel similar about their favored scriptures, Islam must now live in a world of competing ideas. Yet they have created societies in which it is possible, perhaps, to dispute what the Koran and Hadith mean, but not their underlying authority to answer all questions. It is still not safe in a Muslim country to say ‘There is no God and Mohammed was therefore not his prophet.’ In summary, we have: metaphysical superiority, technical and intellectual retardation, self-hatred caused by the impurity of their own desires, no practical means of escape from genuine quotidian humiliations, and the promise of rewards for their families on earth and for themselves in the outer world.
984. For much of the world, organized by tribe, people choose the strong horse over the weak horse, the goal is always to dominate your enemy and dominate the peace, and respect comes from strength and fortitude.
985. Individual ambitions and human weaknesses will never be tamed, no matter how noble the collectivist project to do so.
986. Modesty and chastity awaiting marriage are not just strategically sound and psychologically important. They are also an emblem of the unique friendship that is the union of husband and wife, in which the giving of the heart is enacted in the giving of the body, and in which the procreative fruit of their one-flesh bodily union celebrates their loving embrace not only of one another but also of their mortal condition and their capacity self-consciously to transcend it. There is no substitute for the contribution that the shared work of raising children makes to the singular friendship and love of husband and wife. Precisely because of its central procreative mission, and, even more, because children are yours for a lifetime, this is a friendship that cannot be had with any other person. Uniquely, it is a friendship that does not fly from but rather embraces wholeheartedly the finitude of its members, affirming without resentment the truth of our human condition. Not by accident does the same biblical Hebrew verb mean both to know intimately and to know the truth, including the generative truth about the meaning of being man and woman.
987. A gentleman is one who is merciful towards the absurd.
988. There is an all too common double game in academia – claims about the radical unintelligibly of “truth” to authoritative pronouncements on matters social and political.
989. In order to remain politically viable modern socialists no longer advocate direct government ownership of production. Instead, modern socialism operates on two different levels: at a personal level, it speaks to the alienation of the individual, stressing the need for caring and sharing and the politics of meaning. At a regulatory level, it seeks to identify specific sectors in which there is a market failure and then to subject them to various forms of government regulation.
990. There is no such thing as a policy solution. There is policy trade-off.
991. In a society which values personal freedom and autonomy, it is easy to lose sight of human dependence on others as well as the responsibilities born towards them. Humans were created as social beings who find fulfillment only in love, for God and for neighbor.
992. The downside of modern liberal democracy and capitalism is that it arouses in people the desire to live in a more “natural” un-modern way. That desire will never go away because human nature is eternal.
993. The human being is more than a thing, a means, an instrument, a non-moral, non-spirited material agent.
994. There are three basic human weaknesses: too little consciousness of the irony, tragedy, and irrepressible sinfulness of human affairs; an unrealistic appraisal of the proper role of power and self-interest in all human institutions; and a strong tendency toward rosy, gauzy hope in “progress,” including utopian fantasies about “new” types of human societies.
995. There should be an appreciation for the wisdom of ancestors and for modes of philosophical and moral thinking that complement what we know from science. Science makes a marvelous servant of humanity, but a very poor master.
996. The city of man is built on the power to put down insurrection and impose the peace.
997. Theory is gray but green is the tree of life.
998. In the face of cultural and political currents that attempt to eliminate, or at least to obfuscate and confuse, the sexual differences written into human nature, considering them to be cultural constructions, it is necessary to recall the design of God that created the human being male and female, with a unity and at the same time an original and complementary difference. Human nature and the cultural dimension are integrated in an ample and complex process that constitutes the formation of the identity of each, where both dimensions – the feminine and the masculine – correspond to and complete each other.
999. The real philistines are not those people incapable of recognizing beauty – they recognize it only too well, with a flair as infallible as that of the subtlest aesthete, but only to pounce on it and smother it before it can take root in their universal empire of ugliness.
1000. Freedom is not license; freedom must have as its end the full development in persons of what it means to be truly human.
1001. Reason is a natural faculty, both empirical and thus good in the realm of science and also moral and thus sufficient for binding and foundational law; it is further an experience by which humans negotiate the tensions of existence, thus formative of order in the soul and by extension in the collective souls of a community.
1002. Civilization was laboriously achieved and only precariously defended. Its defense must be fully manned, as many are gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.
1003. The finest form of charity is to enable a poor man to support himself with honor and usefulness.
1004. The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. Humans want their wishes to come true; they want the universe to care about them; they want the esteem of peers. For most, wanting to know the truth about the world is far down the list, and scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust.
1005. Multiculturalism provides the rootless consumer, whether of cuisine or ideas, with a wide variety of lifestyle options and choices, pieces to try, taste and enjoy, and throw away. Multiculturalism feeds the perverse desire to crown oneself with the epithet ‘itinerant,’ even the bank account does not allow for such freedoms. Multiculturalism’s dramatic rise in popularity is due also to a lack real interests, as the sheen of glamour fades and a new goal must quickly be established. The goal is attained, the lifestyle is tried on and experienced, found to be as superficial and unsatisfying as the previous ends, and the peripatetic continues roving. Multiculturalism may superficially gratify restless hearts, but how many decades must be wasted before the realization that no foundation built on sand can ever support a home.
1006. The most enduring forms of order are not built, but grown over time. Humans cannot always understand the advantages of the current social order.
1007. There is no such thing as a “writing talent.” Anyone can be taught to write a good sentence. What writers are born with is a “third ear,” not for words but for human nature.
1008. Elites generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.
1009. The goal of teaching should be to make certain that students understand the perspectives and rich debates that have shaped the dialogue of civilization, not to create disciples of a worldview. Students should learn how to read deeply, how to analyze, how to locate the essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers, and how to understand, with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of thought.
1010. Humans are inclined to believe those whom they do not know because they have never deceived.
1011. Language is the dress of thought; every time one talks the mind is on parade.
1012. Hope is itself a species of happiness, and perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
1013. Where status for the beast of the field is determined by power, for man it is determined in innumerable ways because of language. And it is language that gives man rational thought.
1014. Culture cannot be entrusted to the democratic process precisely because of the carelessness with words, the habit of unthinking cliché, which always arises when every person is regarded as having an equal right to expression.
1015. Someone who fails in in private life has failed in their public life, because they are the beneficiaries of a public trust which requires them to live out their daily lives during their term in office with an ounce of moral character.
1016. Reform is profoundly un-radical. It is about taking existing institutions that have strayed from their original purpose, that are failing to achieve the goals they set out to achieve, and revitalizing them.
1017. The basic antagonism of economic life is that work is toilsome and necessarily serves another interest.
1018. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. In seeking to relieve of prejudice, the supposedly well-meaning also seek to relieve of those unspoken commitments that families and local organizations have painstakingly sought to instill.
1019. Instead of trying to achieve the ideal, instead of letting the ideal dominate, it can be best to set the ideal off on a distant plateau, give it respect, and acknowledge its beauty. Then, shake the spell off and get back to fumbling through the here and now.
1020. Multiculturalism follows inexorably from the rejection of a universal human nature. If there is no single human nature, then there is no single standard for human excellence. Indeed, there is no single standard for anything, from rationality to morality. When rationality and morality are reduced to social constructions, the best humans can do is learn how societies construct things, rather than why certain constructions endure the test of time. Learning becomes a matter of uncovering the social and historical context behind every book and every idea. Rather than ask what a text has to teach, it is asked what the text is trying to hide. And the answer to that question is presupposed from the start: what is foundational to all social constructions just happens to be what is so self-congratulatory about modern education. All books and ideas are trying to hide their prejudices about race, gender, and class. Learning is about identifying with the experiences of the victims of “social injustice” – experiences that will be held up as absolutely different. All of this is profoundly anti-Christian, as Christians believe in universal human nature and universal truth claims about human nature, even as not every statement about human nature is true.
1021. Marriage is an intrinsic good in itself because it bridges the difference between the sexes, uniting man and woman in one flesh. It marks a sacred rite of passage — entry into a fundamental commitment that binds the individual to a larger purpose and community. And although marriage unites two distinct and morally responsible individuals, it is no more about the individuals than it is about their union into one — a marriage that unites and transcends their individual purposes and desires, which henceforth are to be fulfilled in, through, and in concert with the other.
1022. The collapse of public moral standards and the vast expansion in the notion of individual rights are make it increasingly difficult to deny right to fulfill desires, whatever they may be. In the revolt against the allegedly unjust and discriminatory authoritarianism of morality, there is lost any ground from which to draw moral lines.
1023. Highly polished existentialism, radical autonomy, contempt for tradition and authority, and the elevation of youthful indulgence is more seductive than its better, reason free from passion.
1024. It is difficult to face the notion that the gap between becoming who one is and being who one is rapidly closes. There is the realization that the world is not of infinite possibilities; that by one’s own choices one has decisively foreclosed certain avenues; and that the net effect is rapid convergence on a person one had not yet met or even imagined the existence of: oneself. It comes uninvited.
1025. The sway of “theory” is terrible: a stylistically barbarous, philosophically frivolous mode of writing and thinking that reduces great art and all sorts of human achievement and historical fact to arbitrary linguistic categories and oppressive power structures. A de-constructive obsession with “difference” amounts to a betrayal of the humanities, of the students, of the university mission. The abdication of educational responsibility leaves students to their worst instincts, a juvenile nihilism and self-infatuation. Literature has the ability to express the sorrows and joys of life. It can tell truths of the human condition.
1026. Legal principles are pragmatic solutions to real-world disputes.
1027. Unmasking arbitrariness in others is a defense against doing so in the self.
1028. Emotivism informs a great deal of contemporary moral utterance and practice, and the central characters of modern society embody such emotivist modes.
1029. The nation-state can be a state in which law springs from within, expressing the mutuality and the common allegiance of the people. In such a state there is a clear perception of the limits to law, and a jealous attachment to freedom. The best task is not to roll back its frontiers, but to re-establish the frontiers of the nation-state, and to reanimate the natural hostility citizens feel toward laws that are imposed by people with whom they do not belong.
1030. There is a conflicting premise of decent governance: the abstract ideal of autonomy, however admirable, is radically incomplete. Individuals have free will; they can make choices, act on reasons, and are guided by conception of what exists and what is wished. Yet the form of freedom requires a content. Freedom is of no use to a being, living in a solipsistic vacuum, lacking the concepts with which to value things. The ends of conduct cannot be derived from the idea of choice alone. There must be a showing of how the agent values the intention of action. Through what concepts, and through what perceptions, is the end represented as desirable.
1031. The power of tradition is twofold: it makes history into reason, and therefore the past into a present aim; second, tradition arises from every organization in society, and is no more trapping of the exercise of power. Traditions arise and command respect wherever individuals seek to relate themselves to something transcendent.
1032. Words may lose precision – not in spite of science, but because of it; not in spite of the loss of true religious belief, but because of it; not in spite of the proliferation of technical terms, but because of it. Modern ways of speaking veil the world since they convey no lived response; they are mere counters in a game of cliche, designed to fill up silence, to conceal the void.
1033. Society is indeed a contract; but not a contract among the living only; rather, it is a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. And only those who listen to the dead are fit custodians of future generations.
1034. Religion is the lifeblood of a culture. It provides the store of symbols, stories and doctrines that enable us to communicate about our destiny. It forms, through the sacred texts and liturgies, the constant point to which the poet and the critic can return—the language alike of ordinary believers and of the poets who must confront the ever-new conditions of life in the aftermath of knowledge, of life in a fallen world.
1035. Humans can do nothing unless they first amend themselves. The task is to rediscover the world which made them, to see themselves as part of something greater, which depends upon them for its survival.
1036. Secularists emphasize rights because, having rejected the idea of an objective moral order, they exalt unfettered freedom. What freedom is for then merits little attention.
1037. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve is the definition of a statesman.
1038. Viewing the inescapable difference between the sexes as political and pop-scientific grievance does grave harm to women.
1039. Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
1040. Mass immigration is class war against the domestic poor.
1041. Science isn’t absolute, it’s relative. It’s a process for increasing the relative accuracy of predictions. The more accurate compared to randomness predictions get, the more scientific they are.
1042. Racism and segregation violate human dignity, restrict liberty, and inappropriately extend state power. Racism and segregation as an implication of society rather than a violation of individual rights are a more amorphous feeling that leads to an ever-shifting set of “solutions” that naturally create an expanded public presence in the form of new government agencies and programs. It’s not surprising that a more broad feeling of “guilt” leads to constantly evolving policy responses as its not possible to assuage a generally guilty conscience. Shifting blame from individuals to more amorphous “forces” makes it nearly impossible that the guilt will ever disappear.
1043. Liberty and self-government require a cohesive culture, which in turn requires strong family ties, which in turn requires traditional morality.
1044. The Kingdom of God cannot be coerced into existence by any amount of social or political effort. It remains the gift of God and of the returning Lord to a world that cannot perfect itself by its own efforts.
1045. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing. It should not be written with a capital G or so as to refer to people.
1046. Marriage is part of all cultures because it’s both hard and necessary. It works when it’s the standard solution to the problem of heterosexuality. The more distant this bedrock, the harder it is to sustain marriage culture.
1047. Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake.
1048. The state must not be the means by which society could be redeemed collectively. There will never be a kingdom as the complete ideal of human society to be realized on earth. Sin is not something that is committed by a society; sin is something committed by an individual.
1049. An experiment in self-government will fail if the people who constitute the political community cannot self-govern. And individuals will not adequately self-govern unless commanded by some divine, natural law.
1050. Example is the effective school of mankind.
1051. When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.
1052. God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Yet, some protest, it is really only power that matters. This view conceals a revolutionary expectation, one that pushes toward a humanity in which no distinction between individuals is tolerated, one where everyone performs the same functions. But this is gravely contrary to the complementarity at the heart of God’s design. The harmony of the couple and of society depends in part on the way in which the complementarity, needs, and mutual support between the genders are lived. Each of the genders is an image of the power and tenderness of God, with equal dignity though in a different way.
1053. A sense of grievance or entitlement, as a result of the mistreatment of ancestors, is not likely to get one very far with people who are too busy dealing with current economic and family realities to spend much time thinking about their own ancestors, much less other people’s ancestors.
1054. Love of beauty and home are those motives that keep people in real and reciprocal relation with each other, whether here and now, or across the generations.
1055. Despair is the parent of achievement.
1056. In necessary things unity, in undecided things freedom, and in all things charity.
1057. It is clear that the mandarins have a pretty good idea of just what the rhetoric of community buys them practically. Power, for one thing. When entrenched privilege finds itself threatened by new and aggressive forms of energetic activity, it typically counters the danger by using the power of the state (disguised into an agency of noblesse oblige or social solidarity) to cement an alliance with those at the bottom of the heap. Decaying patrician orders have historically maintained their preeminence by taking the lower depths in hand and giving them the benefit of a (wise and benevolent) paternal superintendence.
1058. The public adores the familiar, even if all they know is that it should be familiar.
1059. Many theorists are saddled with a doomed task, trying to fit the square peg of reality into the round hole of hope. Sometimes things just are what they are. And wishful theory is no match for nature’s stubborn ambition.
1060. If love is true, a true thing really existing as an object to which the universe itself must bend, then there remains a place for reticence, and secrets swallowed, and the dead allowed to keep their darkness to themselves.
1061. A political order must be built on an underlying reality such as kinship. Common ancestry, a common homeland and a shared history are not arbitrary. A nation is like a large, intermarrying extended family; and family ties are ties that bind. It is nearly impossible to kick someone out of your family. That is why a stable, free and democratic form of government can only be based on the shared interests of a dominant ethnic or religious group. Humans need some palpable, concrete link to each other in order to co-operate and built communities. It may not be pretty, but it is a much more stable basis for a humane society than airy words about universal human rights. Politics means working with human material as it is, not as we wish it would be. Small numbers of individuals can be adopted into the tribe, but they must intermarry and give themselves over totally to their new loyalties. Importing large numbers of minorities is a recipe for disaster. They, quite naturally, want to stick to their own kind. Once a critical mass is reached, they don’t intermarry and don’t assimilate, even when heavily pressured to do so. The group-ness of an individual often matters more to them than their individuality. This is deeply ingrained in human nature and cannot be wished away. Any political order that tries to totally overcome this instead of working with it does so at its own peril. We cannot achieve the City of God here on earth; we can only achieve smaller, local goods. Trying to achieve the former often endangers that latter. Basing political rights on shared familial ties may not be a perfect fulfillment of the obligation to love all mankind, but it produces a concrete good which we should not blithely throw away in pursuit of heaven on earth.
1062. Do not be too cavalier towards the benefits of the rule of law. Order, even an unjust order, is preferable to chaos. Slavery was unjust, yet St. Paul advised Christians to accept it. That does not mean one cannot try to change things, but it does not justify total upheaval of the temporal order. Morality demands thought, not just feeling.
1063. Love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter – appeal of the body and instinct, power of feeling and affectivity, aspiration of the spirit and of the will. Love aims at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul; it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility.
1064. Most people tend away from goodness, beauty and truth and towards the simple, superficial and self-serving.
1065. Any attack against hierarchy in thought or culture in service of fighting power and hierarchy is trying to establish power as a hierarch. It is impossible to reason without ordering principles, and ordering principles imply hierarchy.
1066. There is a universal pivot of the human will, the desire of each human to live a purposeful, and morally and intellectually consistent, life.
1067. Hooked on political correctness and incapable of doing without the daily diversity fix, the universal character is regarded as an offshoot of the melting pot and the conclusion is that the reactionaries are up to their old tricks.
1068. To those who despise religion and worship science, the idea of special grace is an outrage, for science is neutral with respect to all peoples and all times. Since the boast of enlightened, rational promise, many have wanted the authority to order problems according to an image of man in anything but man in the image of God.
1069. Society should be seen not in terms of abstraction or slogans, but in terms of the people it produces, the energy combined with self-reliance and quirkiness.
1070. Calls to indict may be a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out and ultimately to bring it down.
1071. Noticing similarities and differences is one of the fundamental methods of gaining knowledge about the world. Knowledge is useful because it allows for making more accurate predictions about reality, which allows for better decisions.
1072. Humans like things unpredictable but with a comprehensible narrative logic.
1073. The only thing that can stop the lethal anarchy in many neighborhoods is personal responsibility, starting with the duty of men to raise the children that they sire. What is most needed is self-control and respect for fellow human beings. There is very little the government can do to make up for those deficits. When the marriage norm has disappeared from a culture, the greatest civilizing force disappears as well. Young men who know that they can endlessly inseminate girls without getting a wife or having to support their children have no incentive to develop the stable character and work habits that would make them an attractive husband and employee. And the boys raised in those fatherless households have a much lower chance of receiving the parental discipline and guidance necessary to keep them out of trouble.
1074. There are three historic cultures of the world: 1st world, which was pagan, 2nd world, which was sacred order Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, and 3rd world, which is modern and postmodern and the negation of all sacred orders.
1075. Heaven is the locale of the greatest conversations, most beautiful music, and truest poetry and drama – at last, full communion.
1076. Freedom and tolerance are so often separated from truth. This is fueled by the notion that there are no absolute truths to guide our lives. Relativism, by indiscriminately giving value to practically everything, has made ‘experience’ all-important. Yet, experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead, not to genuine freedom, but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect, and even to despair.
1077. Change is constant; and the great question is not whether to resist change, which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines.
1078. All societal problems are cultural and moral; all cultural and moral problems are familial.
1079. There is a long history of revolutions that refuse to acknowledge the reality of humans. Humans are irrational animals as well as intellectual creatures. Human traditions and religions evolved with them. The purposes of those traditions and religions are not easily explained. Destroy them and find out why they existed.
1080. All goals, such as justice, community, and love, which make human life into a thing of intrinsic value, have origin in the mutual accountability of persons, who respond to each other I to I. Humans are thus satisfied that they understand the world and know its meaning when they can see it as the form of another I – the I of God, in which all stand judged, and from which love and freedom flow.
1081. Humans have an innate need to conceptualize the world in terms of the transcendental, and to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane. This need is rooted in self-consciousness and in the experience that remind of shared destiny. Insecurity and disorder come from the tension in which humans are held when they cannot attach inner awareness of the transcendental to the outward forms of religious ritual.
1082. The Enlightenment dream that Reason alone can disclose authoritative truths to live by has been shown to have been empty. All Reason alone gives is radical subjectivity. It has shown how and why to doubt everything, but does not demonstrate why humans should believe in anything other than the truths disclosed by science – which aren’t moral truths at all.
1083. Specific government policies tend to matter less than the quantities and qualities of various populations.
1084. If each man’s morality is defined merely to suit himself, then everyone will endure the consequences of the individual’s autonomously defined ethics.
1085. Many defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.
1086. The young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
1087. Nearly all men can stand adversity. To test a man’s character, give him power.
1088. Modernism, prosperity, a fetishization of the collective, and original sin are a terribly lethal combination.
1089. Only fidelity to conscience and to the wellsprings of goodness within the soul allows one to affirm the true goodness of life and the essentially moral character of human existence.
1090. Some ideas are eventually undermined by a massive onslaught of circumstances with which they cannot contend.
1091. Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
1092. A free-market system must not rely solely upon economics as the source of order. In this reliance lay the great mistake of nineteenth-century apologists for capitalism; in fact, only a solid social structure predicated upon individual virtue, cohesive families, and local communities could counterbalance the frequently disruptive side-effects of the dynamic, highly efficient market system. A decay in those fundamental building blocks of social order must lead to atomization, alienation and ever increasing demands for state control over the economy.
1093. The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.
1094. Human nature is unchanging across time and space and thus predictable.
1095. Unequal outcomes are unproblematic so long as rules and barriers to entry are clear and objective. It is wrong to have different standards and barriers to entry solely based on an unchangable, inherent characteristic. To do so is to first serve ideology, in a patronizing and condescending fashion, which breeds resentment and legitimate insecurity.
1096. Humans have liberated fantasy but killed imagination, and so have sealed themselves in selfishness and loneliness. Fantasy is of the solitary self, and it cannot lead away from self. It is by imagination that humans cross over the differences between themselves and other beings and thus learn compassion, forbearance, mercy, forgiveness, sympathy, and love.
1097. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
1098. Morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.
1099. It is comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all voters have to do is make sure they don’t put psychotics in high places and problems can be solved.
1100. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just.
1101. One of the objects of a mature political philosophy is to reconcile people to the painful limitations of their condition.
1102. Poetry should stand for a principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe. The old poetic culture of the West, with its emphasis on harmony, proportion, and order, brought coherence to the world and did much to reconcile men and women to the larger rhythms of life. The roots of this culture grew out of the Greek belief that poetry and music, together with rhythm and harmony, powerfully influence the mind and are therefore one of the bases of civilization. If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.
1103. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment do so with the approval of their own conscience.
1104. For much of humanity, morality is genetic affinity plus expedience plus quid pro quo plus self-serving status posturing.
1105. Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.
1106. The spending of a population is based on its wealth. In the long run, its wealth is mostly a function of its human capital – the population’s ability to earn money. It is important to not debauch the average human capital of a population.
1107. Conscience is the mind thinking morally. It is the human ability to reason not just logically or pragmatically, but according to the categories of right and wrong, and of good, better and best. It is practical moral knowledge.
1108. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
1109. Information is different from knowledge, and it has nothing at all to do with wisdom.
1110. False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
1111. The tension between dead hope and unwelcome reality is acute, resolvable only, as is always the case with such psychic stresses, by doublethink.
1112. Culture is, first and foremost, a normative order by which humans comprehend themselves, others, and the larger world and through which they order experience.
1113. To hold together a multiethnic or multilingual state, either an authoritarian regime or a dominant ethnocultural core is essential. Mass immigration benefits the ruling elites economically by crippling the middle class and depreciating the price of labor, politically by supplying statist voters, and culturally by deracinating the ethnocultural core. Mass immigration, particularly of incompatible newcomers, is a classic divide-and-conquer strategy of the ruling classes.
1114. College bottles up thousands of hormone infused, immature youths in one place, gives them all the comforts of life for free, and requires virtually nothing of the student in return. It’s a perfect recipe for creating spoiled brats.
1115. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
1116. Condemning people in the past is a way of misplacing guilt, a way of saying, “I’m morally superior to you,” so as to feel better and not own up to personal, current sins.
1117. Indispensable social institutions, such as marriage, really are rooted in biological imperatives. Humans really are belonging and begetting beings – social animals, and a lot of our happiness comes from following natural, social inclinations.
1118. Anarchists are leftists who are mad at government because they are not in charge. Anarchism is especially appealing to youths because they have so little power and such low status. People have instinctive desire for power and status, hence the violence.
1119. Inequality is inherent in human life.
1120. The emphasis on the individual has been at the expense of the associative and symbolic relationships that must in fact uphold the individual’s sense of integrity. Once, both human material and spiritual needs had been met by non-state institutions. The family was a locus of identity, as well as the vital economic base for food, housing, and education. Churches and guilds provided economic support as well as creating identity. When the expanding liberal nation-state began to usurp economic functions, and to perform them more efficiently, people no longer turned to these intermediate institutions. Without the strong connection of physical need, bonds between individuals and institutions grew tenuous and no longer created meaning and community.
1121. Natural law, which is at the root of the recognition of true equality between persons and peoples, deserves to be recognized as the source that inspires the relationship between the spouses in their responsibility for begetting new children. The transmission of life is inscribed in nature and its laws stand as an unwritten norm to which all must refer.
1122. Culture matters. How humans talk about society helps form society. And the kind of society humans have places enormous constraints on economic mechanisms and the economic expectations and ambitions of individuals and the public.
1123. Success is when opportunity meets preparation.
1124. Terrorism is a tactic, a technique, a weapon that fanatics, dictators and warriors have resorted to through history. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means. Yet terrorism – the killing of innocents for political ends – can only triumph if the aggrieved play the role the terror masters have scripted for them in their bloody drama.
1125. Children are the living messages humans send to a time they will not see.
1126. A social order has to have something in it that inspires love.
1127. Folly’s reservoir never runs dry.
1128. Civilizations exist because men wish to overcome death, and have learned that ties of blood and language are not sufficient to win immortality. They require a form of social organization that rises above mere ethnicity, that promises a higher form of continuity between the dead and the yet unborn. But supplanting the ties of blood and language is a daunting task at which most civilizations ultimately fail. Mortality becomes nearly unbearable in the face of modernity.
1129. To overcome mortality humans create culture, a dialogue among generations that links the dead with the yet unborn. Without the hope of immortality they cannot bear mortality. Cultures that have lost the hope of immortality also lose the will to live.
1130. Islam parodies Christianity. Christianity proposes to incorporate all of humanity into the new People of God, by effecting an inner transformation of every individual. By this transformation, Christians believe, all of humanity can become holy. Islam offers a universal religion not of inner transformation, but of obedience. Precisely this form of surface universalism ensures that Muslims carry the baggage of traditional life into the new religion, for it offers no point of departure from traditional society. As a universal religion, Islam can only universalize the aspirations of the tribes it assimilates, rather than transform them, and cannot rid itself of its pagan heritage. Instead, it lashes out against the encroachment of more adaptive civilizations.
1131. The pitting of freedom against truth is the original sin of the liberalism. The truth about freedom is that there is no freedom apart from truth.
1132. Whenever orthodoxy becomes optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed.
1133. There is a decisive importance of civil society for a flourishing social order, and above all for the poor. The weakening of mediating institutions like the family, church, vibrant neighborhoods, and voluntary associations, which form our moral affinities grant fortitude and character to live meaningful lives as citizens, empower not people but the suffocating bureaucratic state. A democracy without civil society will soon be no democracy at all.
1134. Women often hate working for other women. While men compete for status by trying to include as many underlings as possible in their hierarchies, women gain prestige by excluding the maximum number from their cliques.
1135. The less humans deserve good fortune, the more they hope for it.
1136. Enforced egalitarianism entails the death of excellence. It seizes the rewards that excellence earns and turns them over to politicians and bureaucrats for distribution to the mediocrities upon whose votes they depend.
1137. The companion of autonomy is loneliness.
1138. Religion seems to be intuitive belief in some sort of presiding, which seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience; and this intersection (along with the force of custom and tradition) has produced and sustained the religious traditions.
1139. To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.
1140. The world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.
1141. When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia.
1142. If you would civil your land, first you should civil your speech.
1143. Charisma is the ability to make other people wholeheartedly buy into narcissism.
1144. Politics is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
1145. Children are the wealth of nations, provided that their nations can put tools in their hands and the rule of law at their back. Countries that lack children are poor.
1146. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
1147. It is a weakness of human nature to imagine the most antagonistic motives of another person if what that person says is not thematically consistent with the narrative playing out in one’s head.
1148. Unintended consequences predominate in education because the reigning dogma of the education industry — the intellectual equality of all students — is wrong. This obdurate refusal on the part of everybody who is anybody in the education business to admit publicly the manifold implications of some kids being smarter than others makes it difficult to get anything done in the real world.
1149. Grace can wound before it heals.
1150. Marriage as an individual right offers no cultural basis for helping people answer the questions that matter most.
1151. Homogeneity evokes loyalty, stability, and harmony.
1152. One cannot be a conservative and an uncritical admirer of free market capitalism, a most revolutionary force.
1153. Humans must adapt to changing times with unchanging principles.
1154. Children are societal wealth, and families its custodian.
1155. Ideas create idols; wonder leads to knowing.
1156. The ceaseless labor of life is to build the house of death.
1157. Creative art arises from participation in the mind of God.
1158. To destroy the morality of a people is to completely break their will, to prepare the conditions through which they will happily submit to the most degrading slavery if it means they will have a steady supply of the poisons of their choice.
1159. Contrary to the Enlightenment mentality, human beings are ritual creatures; they don’t by nature simply feel or experience the divine; they ritualize it. Cultures have their times and seasons, their rituals and festivals, to mark major stages in human life: birth, marriage, death, harvest, victory, loss. So when human beings’ rituals get changed, it hurts. With reference to Christianity, the times and seasons and rituals mark and make . The liturgy in particular goes back to the Last Supper, the synagogue, the Jewish Temple, the tabernacle, and ultimately Eden. Eden is actually a temple of the divine presence, the Tabernacle was the locus of the divine presence, and Solomon’s temple and the second temple were built to reflect Eden and thus be the locus of the divine presence, and synagogues were representative of and oriented to the Jerusalem temple.
1160. Much of modernity is deadly, as one cannot ultimately separate form and content. Form is essential, not accidental.
1161. Dogs are a link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.
1162. Conflicts in a striving meritocracy can probably be managed more easily where there are groups whose membership of the nation is ambiguous, who are very dependent on elite sponsorship, and whose presence flushes out ethnocentric responses among the masses which can then be held against them. A society tied to the notion of meritocracy may therefore have a particular need for minorities.
1163. True knowledge is ignorance. To proclaim one’s ignorance sincerely is to remain open to one’s historical, cultural, and cosmological place. Admitting one’s indebtedness requires a healthy dose of humility.
1164. Liberalism depends on the modernist conviction that neither religion nor tradition nor inherited loyalties has any binding authority. Anything that denies equal freedom is to be condemned as oppressive and marginalized, even outlawed. This is liberalism’s “tyranny.” Having abandoned the idea that the Good stands outside the individual’s judgment, common life becomes a matter of negotiating preferences and satisfying wants.
1165. Humans differ from each other in various ways because of different genotypes. Differences include, but are not limited to, physical appearance, athletic ability, personality, and cognitive abilities.
1166. The law is the place where morality meets custom, and compromise, and common sense.
1167. Orators are most vehement when the cause is weak.
1168. Whatever fortune has raised to a height, she has raised only to cast it down.
1169. The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
1170. Monopolies produce high prices and low quality. This is especially true of the government supported monopolies of corporatism.
1171. In order to live well, humans must work to bring habits to accord with reflective beliefs.
1172. Knowledge is important not when it first becomes available but when an audience becomes available to absorb and act on the knowledge.
1173. The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.
1174. The results of cognitive testing are an important reality, not because they predict everything perfectly, but because they predict better than anything else, and because they are consequential for so many areas of life.
1175. A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy; that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately boredom.
1176. Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
1177. It is impossible to eschew ideology in order to “just do what works,” because any understanding of “what works” depends on the antecedent questions of what policy goals should be and which instrumental policies are most likely to succeed, both of which are heavily ideological questions.
1178. All theory is against the freedom of the will and all experience is for it.
1179. The truest tendency of art is toward the exaltation, not the reduction, of its subjects. The highest art is able to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.
1180. Art’s encounters with morality and politics are made difficult by the fact that moral and social systems require rules to be observed and obeyed. Moral or legal systems essentially ask that people be good, and prefer or require narratives to promote that end. Art’s requirement is not that the characters it portrays be good but that they be interesting and true.
1181. The trouble with economists is the failure to recognize that economic institutions matter far less for economic performance than economists believe. People, who are not like things, are not everywhere the same. The content of a population is more important to development than structures and institutions.
1182. An argument cannot be had with someone who has an existential problem.
1183. Conservatism is a negation of ideology, the political secularization of the doctrine of original sin, the cautious sentiment tempered by prudence, the product of organic, local human organization observing and reforming its customs, the distaste for a priori principle disassociated from historical experience, the partaking of the mysteries of free will, divine guidance, and human agency by existing in but not of the confusions of modern society, no framework of action, no tenet, no theory, and no article of faith, a distrust of the systems and processes of the idol of self and of the lust for power and status, scorn to all approaches of ideology and meta-narrative.
1184. Conforming religion to modernity makes religion superfluous.
1185. The brutalities of ignorance are not as extreme and destructive as the inhumanities of theory.
1186. Pretending that unequal behavior plays no role in unequal social outcomes is a large mystification in contemporary political discourse.
1187. Humans are not free floating utility maximizers.
1188. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
1189. Biology limits the aspirations of social engineers.
1190. Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.
1191. Humans need rootedness, a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture – an identity that is both collective and personal.
1192. Historical nations cannot be reduced to an aggregation of individuals held together by a shared belief in equality and rights. Populations are not interchangeable.
1193. The ceaseless labor of life is to build the house of death.
1194. Indignation is the force that reorders the cosmos to meet the justice of its cause.
1195. “HateFacts” are facts that no one refutes but everyone ignores because of their connotation.
1196. Humans, by and large, are whining bundles of hopes and fears.
1197. Liberalism – individual autonomy in various forms – is not compatible with cohesive institutional authorities such as families, churches, or states.
1198. Freedom is in the long run inconsistent with freedom, because it is inevitably exercised in ways that engender control.
1199. The purpose of an open mind is to close it on some subjects.
1200. It is not a badge of character to continue down the wrong road.
1201. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.
1202. An artist creates his own “school” of predecessors that nobody noticed had anything in common before.
1203. Cling to what is permanent, but let go of what is not lasting. This life is perhaps the best example of what must be given back to God.
1204. Humans are not rational beings; they are rationalizing beings.
1205. Reality is most predictable at the group level, and being scientific is being concerned with prediction.
1206. When desires are different, envy is impossible.
1207. There has to be cosmic justice in a world beyond the world in order to make sense of the observed facts about human morality.
1208. Left-liberalism, a belief in an egalitarian form of justice, combines a great desire for power and a great feeling of moral superiority – and in this way it is dangerous.
1209. Politics should not be divorced from morality, and therefore divorced from justice, which is a part of morality. Politics divorced from justice is absurd, as justice is the entire reason for politics.
1210. The dominant mood within liberal commercial societies where there is a modicum of actual equality is inquietude – anxiety, a sense of not knowing what to do, of feeling lost. When humans are feeling anxious, they’re tempted to look to the government for help.
1211. To import a Third World population to perform low skilled work in a post-industrial, knowledge-based economy with a well-developed welfare state and multicultural sensibility is to invite serious trouble.
1212. A moral hierarchy is imperceptible to most modern thinkers. One of the most unfortunate consequences of political liberalism and the democratic ethos is the overpowering influence of equality. Equality is the fundamental end of moral thinking and our political life, even when it contradicts justice and charity.
1213. The dream of universal brotherhood, because it rests on the sentimental fiction that men and women are all the same, cannot survive the discovery that they differ.
1214. The justification for discrimination in hiring and admissions is the supposed educational benefits of a racially diverse student body. Those benefits are dubious, but even if they exist, they are simply not worth the costs of racial discrimination, namely: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure or academic under-performance for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many are academically noncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.
1215. Conservatism is itself a modernism. What distinguishes conservatives from the revolutionaries is not attachment to things past, but desire to live fully in the present, to understand it in all its imperfections, and to accept it as the only reality offered to us. They recognize the distinction between a backward-looking nostalgia, which is but another form of modern sentimentality, and a genuine tradition, which grants the courage and the vision with which to live in the modern world. Insofar as to be modern is to live abstractly or anywhere but in present reality, a realistic assessment of the greatness and misery of the modern world is actually postmodernism rightly understood. That means there is a sense in which postmodern conservatism is a distinctly modern phenomenon. It is all about living well in the modern world, our world.
1216. Stigma is the only way that a free society can be generous; to stigmatize stigma is to empower the state.
1217. The absence of the legal enforcement of communities does not mean the absence of communities in general, but only the absence of government-mandated communities.
1218. One great big thing has been lost, a precious thing to be remembered with affection, and that can’t be replaced. That one big thing is the sense of nationhood, of belonging to a huge extended family, united by long familiarity, common understandings, and common history — a country, not a mere place, inhabited by a people, not a mere population.
1219. A true science is based on objectively established criteria and agreed foundations, with a rational methodology and mature criteria of proof – not the multitude of pseudo-sciences which have marked characteristics which can easily be detected and exposed. Science, properly defined, is an essential part of civilization. To be anti-science is not the mark of a civilized human being, or of a friend of humanity. Given the right safeguards and standards, the progress of science constitutes our best hope for the future, and anyone who denies this proposition is an enemy of science.
1220. Most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
1221. When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.
1222. The essence of politics is talk, human interaction. Such interaction is formal and informal, verbal and nonverbal, public and private. It is always persuasive in nature, causing audiences to interpret, to evaluate, and to act.
1223. National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.
1224. Civilizations thrive when the lower classes aspire to be like the upper classes and they decay when the upper classes try to be like the lower classes.
1225. A nation that has stripped itself if its historic particularity can no longer function as a real nation, but only as the incarnation of a universal ideology. And in such an “idea nation” that citizens are helpless to preserve actual existence as a nation.
1226. Attributing divinity to the natural world helps bring God closer to human experience while depriving him of recognizable personal traits.
1227. Some of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
1228. A good way to prevent people from talking about things is to collapse complicated ideas down into single words with a strong emotional coloring.
1229. The first union of natural human fellowship, society, is that between man and wife.
1230. Human freedom does not legitimate bad moral choices, nor does it justify a stance that all moral choices are good if they are free.
1231. Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared.
1232. Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to provide results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not.
1233. Biology should not be severed from parental responsibility. Such responsibility should extend from biology, not choice or intent. Men and women have have different, and complimentary, dispositions and attributes to child-rearing. Contractual obligations and absent parenthood, rather than the spiritual and physical bonds of investment, are flimsy invitations to heartbreak and chaos.
1234. Ordinary politics is partisan politics.
1235. Modern society is gnostic, which means the replacement of the divine and natural order by an artificial, man-created order which worships itself. Gnosticism begins with dissatisfaction of the world brought about by the desolating experience that the divine has been withdrawn from this world, leading to the belief that the world is false and evil. The various gnostic movements throughout history have consisted of a variety of methods of overcoming this false and evil world and reabsorbing the divine back into oneself so that one may possess the divine completely – profound alienation from reality leads to the desire to “immanentize the eschaton,” to bring about heaven on earth, often through revolutionary politics. The essence of gnosticism is the attempt to overcome the natural and transcendent order of the world, which is regarded as false, by drawing all divinity into oneself. There are three primary modes of drawing divinity into oneself: (1) through intellectual knowledge of the hidden truth (whether the hidden truth of the “true” god, as in ancient gnosticism, or the hidden truth of the shape and end of history, as in modern gnosticism); (2) through mystical participation in the hidden truth, in which the divine enters fully into the person; and (3) through activist seizure of power over the world. Ancient gnosticism is about finding the “real, hidden god” who is concealed by the false God of the Bible and his false creation. Modern gnosticism is about getting rid of God and the transcendent and making man into a god in some political transformation of the world. The world and humanity can be fundamentally transformed and perfected through the intervention of a chosen group of people (an elite), a man-god, or men-Gods, who are the chosen ones that possess a kind of special knowledge about how to perfect human existence. This stands in contrast to a notion of redemption that is achieved through the reconciliation of mankind with the divine. There is a desire to eliminate the uncomfortable and frustrating distance between man and God by making God immediately present, by absorbing God fully into oneself. This is a belief system that denies and rejects the structure of reality, particularly the reality of human nature, and replaces it by an imaginary world constructed by gnostic intellectuals and controlled by gnostic activists. It is a world in which, for example, all people have the same abilities, and women are the same as men, and human inequalities and differences and disagreements are solely the result of unjust social institutions which must be or already have been supplanted by just institutions.
1236. It is precisely the capacity for imbuing sexuality with spirituality and mystery that elevates it to the sublime. Many have no idea what they missed and are missing. They are being consciously stripped of their humanity in an effort to render them more malleable for utopians and social engineers.
1237. In every corner of the world and in every epoch of history, the men and women of every culture deserve each other.
1238. Forms, rules of protocol, the observance of ceremonies, are the heart and soul of civilized life. And that is why the conservative is so solicitous of them, for he knows that civility is what keeps the wheels of social intercourse rolling.
1239. Liberalism, the kind propagated by an avaricious elite, represents the undermining of kin. This occurs on both macro (nations and races) and micro (family, communities) scales. The kind of liberalism that doesn’t view itself as a tool for promoting a global utopia, but rather as a means for appropriating wealth and power uses this pernicious strategy to accomplish their objectives. What the power elite do is enervate the strength of kin bonds, replacing these elements of self-governance and value with those of a larger community more easily manipulated through public coercion. Left-liberals detest the nuclear family, seeing it as a vestige of our bucolic past. They glorify single motherhood as an honorable and viable situation, one that of course often leads to government or communal assistance. Further, they champion birth control and exaggerated theories concerning global warming as a means to depress birth rate and thus decrease family bonds. Homosexuality: this is a childless relationship. The codification of homosexuality implies liberals undervalue reproduction and family as an important facet of life. And as race often acts as the primary demarcation for social groups, this allows liberals to formulate a Marxist conception of humanity. By dismissing race as a biological entity, they attempt to classify any inequity as the result of oppression and any loyalty or commonality as unreasonable.
1240. Masculinity and femininity are languages. They enable humanity to articulate an essence, a spiritual core that is entirely individual. Courtship, romance, chastity and marriage are forms of eloquence. Everyone, even those voluntarily celibate, can speak these languages. They are essential to identity and reflections of divine love. The human body, oriented from within by the “sincere gift” of the person, reveals not only its masculinity or femininity on the physical level, but reveals also such a value and such a beauty that it goes beyond the simple physical level of “sexuality.” In this way the consciousness of the meaning of the body, linked with man’s masculininity-femininity, is in some sense completed. On the one hand, this meaning points to a particular power to express the love in which man becomes a gift; what corresponds to this meaning, on the other hand, is power and deep availability for the “affirmation of the person,” that is, literally, the power to live the fact that the other – the woman for the man and the man for the woman – is through the body someone willed by the Creator “for his own sake,” that is, someone unique and unrepeatable, someone chosen by eternal Love. The problem of pornography is the death of eros, the deadening of the soul to real passion and longing for another. This makes actual human connection more difficult.
1241. Politics is who/whom gets what, when, and how.
1242. The unexpected always happens; the inevitable never.
1243. Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are not basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
1244. The discovery of myself as a person is the discovery that I can speak, and am thus a persona or speaker; in speaking I am both speaker and hearer; and since the discovery of myself as a person is also the discovery of other persons around me, it is the discovery of speakers and hearers other than myself.
1245. Communication – a unity of thought between the artist and the audience – can tell a great poet because he makes us poets: in other words, we find, perhaps only with effort, that we can make the poet’s words our own; and it is this unity that makes up understanding.
1246. Liberalism may be defined as “equal freedom.” Liberal society can only fantasize the human equality it desires. Other times it actually achieves it. It has achieved it, for example, by allowing a mass nondiscriminatory admission, while simultaneously radically lowering educational and behavioral standards. Liberalism reaches, or at least approaches, the goal of equality, not by raising up the “worse-off” to the level of the “better off,” which is, after all, impossible, but by progressively lowering the “better off” toward the level of the “worse off,” which is possible.
1247. The will needs a goal, and humans would rather will nothingness than not will, rather believe than know.
1248. The natural law is the idea that there is an objective moral order, grounded in essential humanity, that holds universal and permanent implications for the ways humans should conduct themselves as free and responsible human beings.
1249. One cannot have effective religion without charisma, which entails “holy terror,” the name for an instinctive response to the presence of absolute truth and authority, that is, God.
1250. Myth is not falsehood. It is the symbolic representation of reality.
1251. The language of liberalism is often centered upon “rights,” liberty,” and “freedom” without the necessary accompanying adjectives, namely “order,” “virtue,” and “duty.” There is an importance of social context to an individual freedom, meaning that the socialized sources of a person’s individuality must not be neglected. A pre-existing culture, tradition, and custom encompass humanity’s relationship to a politicized state. The network of social relationships discourage one to attempt define and impose a concept of existence and meaning, as mystery, community norms, and the limits of reason provide a check to the hubris that lead to ideology.
1252. War is the health of the state, and a foreign policy based on non-intervention is necessary for keeping the state to non-messianic missions.
1253. Societal stability requires pragmatic trade-offs.
1254. Humans need an expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture — an identity that is both collective and personal.
1255. What makes Western civilization unique are the Catholic Church and Christianity, a tendency toward monogamy, a tendency toward a family structure based on the nuclear family, a tendency for marriage to be companionate and based on mutual affection, a de-emphasis on extended kinship relationships, a relative lack of ethnocentrism, and a tendency toward individualism and its many implications (individual rights against the state, representative government, moral universalism, science).
1256. Conservatism is pragmatic, pessimistic, skeptical. It is not a doctrine but a disposition. The world is what it is, not as it should be. One must distinguish between “is” and “ought.”
1257. Nature works because it has order, and from order, it has beauty.
1258. “Libertarian” liberalism exists only in theory. In practice, it is an invitation to statism. People need their civic institutions for a sense of belonging, and they are willing to look to the state. “Individualism” doesn’t exist in harmony with communal human nature.
1259. If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasure ceases to be pleasure.
1260. Liberalism incorporates the idea that humans are the products of their social environment and that by rationalistic management of the environment it is possible to perfect or ameliorate significantly the human condition. The environmentalist and ultimately utopian premises of liberalism are the justification for the expansion of state and bureaucracy, the regulation of the economy, the redistribution of wealth, and the imposition of progressive education and egalitarian experiments on traditional institutions and communities.
1261. The universal franchise must be accompanied by widespread virtues such as honesty, self-control, providence, prudence, and self-respect.
1262. Immediate loyalty and a concrete, small scale of life are preferable to an abstracted militarization.
1263. The “sexual revolution” has caused great harm. A river of tears runs through culture. Intimacy is miraculous and it has been made dull and destructive, murderous even and cruel.
1264. States are not founded on social contracts, protection of the individual; they are founded upon congregations. It is not common interest but common love that defines states. There is no “self” interest as such; our “self” belongs to our ancestors and our children.
1265. Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned or, at least, adds something new to it.
1266. The strictures of traditional society are a flimsy defense against modernity. The moment that members of traditional society cease to live under a regime of compulsion, they tend to adopt the habits of the ambient culture.
1267. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
1268. Nostalgia is a seductive liar.
1269. The real Hobbesians are the statists who neglect the importance of organic social institutions such as families and communities, and see only a multitude of individual wills which must be brought into the gravitational orbit of the state.
1270. The role of conservatism is not to oppose all change but to resist and balance the volatility of current political fads and ideology, and to defend a middle position that enshrines a slowly-changing organic humane traditionalism. For example, in the 19th century, Conservatives opposed classic liberalism, favoring factory regulation, market intervention, and various controls to mitigate the effects of laissez faire capitalism; but in the 20th century, the role of conservativism was to oppose a danger from the opposite direction, the excessive regulation, intervention, and controls favored by socialism.
1271. Liberal progress consists in identifying and prohibiting, as “discrimination,” more and more aspects of natural, social, and spiritual reality. No human institution or society can survive the consistent application and expansion of the anti-discriminatory principle which is at the core of modern liberalism. As liberalism keeps pressing against the limits of reality, it is destroying the society that sustains it.
1272. Man is attracted to nationalism, especially the brand pertaining to ethnic kin. He’s a social animal who seeks to form groups of similar persons and, by default, such inclusion often leads to exclusionary enmity. He seeks hegemonic power and finds much satisfaction in achieving this predominance through aggressive means.
1273. The dying man is the true man, in the sense of being the one who reveals what humans essentially are. Humans are on the death bed from the day they are born.
1274. Conservatism is a morality that aims for political arrangements that make society good. A society is good if it enables the people in it to lead good lives. Therefore, aside from virtue, conservatives never hold one value supreme among all others, whether the value is freedom, security, wealth, or any other.
1275. Not everything can be reduced to a clear rational system, and not all impulses are equally good. Goods and goals are partly social, since what’s on offer and what it’s worth depends partly on other people.
1276. Knowledge is partly local, individual, and inarticulate, since not everything can be made explicit, noted down, and incorporated into expertise. For that reason, much of human knowledge comes from experience and the resulting growth of habits that work. More generally, society learns through tradition, and as social beings we learn through participation in the traditions of our society. The effect of such recognitions is fundamental rejection of liberal modernity. Since expert knowledge, social engineering, and subjective wants aren’t enough for social life, expertise, utility, and equal freedom can’t be the highest standards.
1277. The main axioms of the Enlightenment were secularism, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism. What was replaced was not worse.
1278. True liberty can only be realized by people who root themselves in limits and loyalties that constrain choice.
1279. God is Truth, Holiness and Moral Perfection, but God is also Beauty. Beauty disarms: it is irresistible for contemporary men and women. It has everything to do with truth: “Beauty is the splendor of truth.” And beauty has everything to do with the good. The Greeks even made it into one single word: kaloskagathos. Beauty can make a synthesis of the true and the good. Truth, Goodness, Beauty. Here are three names and three access roads to God.
1280. Conservatism needs an expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture – an identity that is both collective and personal.
1281. The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a willful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a willful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognize the extent to which selfishness and calculation reside in the heart even of the most generous emotions, awaiting their chance.
1282. Humans become human by participating in a beloved community, which is a common experience and common effort on a common ground to which one willingly belongs.
1283. These are the sirens of the sexual apocalypse that help to explain cultural lament: effective and widely available contraceptives, no-fault divorce, women’s economic independence, rigged feminist-inspired laws that have caused a disincentivizing of marriage for men and an incentivizing of divorce for women, social conditions, such as the decline of shame, where hypergamy may run rampant and de facto “sharing” becomes the norm.
1284. Only in community is it possible to become fully human. Only in the midst of community propriety (and impropriety), community goods (and evils), can humans experience “partiality and mortality” and the many connections to place and past, the quick and the dead.
1285. A graveyard is full of indispensable men.
1286. Attachments ripple in overlapping chains of diminishing concentric circles: family, extended family, town, state, religion, ethny, nation. The ripples don’t stop at a nation’s borders.
1287. Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
1288. A nation is at its core an ethnic group living in its homeland, with shared elements of culture and means of communication.
1289. Human societies have an internal dynamism, dependent upon social structures and articulation.
1290. Every considerate man knows that the world is threatened with a de- humanization, which assumes, as one of its sharpest forms, a de-poetization. Winged words are no longer trusted. Rhetoric, once viewed as the appropriate vehicle of judicious thoughts, has become, to a cynical and knowing generation, the harlot of the arts. Rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by extending up toward the ideal, which only the intellect can apprehend and only the soul have affection for. This is the justified affection of which no one can be ashamed, and he who feels no influence of it is truly outside the communion of minds.
1291. A liberal belief in equality encourages the adoption of a path of materialism and a pursuit of desire rather than the good of the whole, thus bringing about fragmentation, strife, and disarray. The pursuit of material goods blinds to the existence of order and value, thus rendering an incapability of self-discipline and coherent thought.
1292. Moral understanding is more a matter of having the right sensibilities and dispositions than of having of a correct theoretical understanding. It is difficult for someone to have a correct theoretical understanding if he does not to some extent already have the right traits of character. Much of human knowledge is tacit rather than articulate, embodied in habit and tradition rather than in the explicitly formulated propositions of a philosophical theory.
1293. There are many and varied social consequences of what can seem like purely individual choices. There is no such thing as a pure, private, pre-linguistic sphere and it is a misunderstanding of language even to seek one.
1294. Human knowledge is partial and attained with difficulty. The effects of political proposals are difficult to predict and as the proposals become more ambitious their effects become incalculable. Humans can’t evaluate political ideas without accepting far more beliefs, presumptions and attitudes than they could possibly judge critically.
1295. The family is the natural and fundamental social unit, inscribed in the nature of human beings. It must be rooted in marriage, rooted in the commitment to bring new life into the world, and rooted in a deep respect for both ancestors and posterity. This is a universal rule of human nature. Happiness comes through natural family bonds and the future of any nation is by way of the family. Family is a man and a woman living in a socially sanctioned bond called marriage for the purposes of propagating and rearing children, sharing intimacy and resources, and conserving lineage, property, and tradition. To be human is to be familial. Any significant departure from the family rooted in stable marriage, the welcoming of children, and respect for ancestors and posterity, lessens humanity.
1296. Ages of faith are not marked by dialogue but by proclamation.
1297. Cultures do not spring up in a genetic vacuum; they are reflections of the biological predispositions of their peoples.
1298. Masculinity has an active, restless energy to it that wants to be tested, exerted, engaged, and put to use. The mere execution of a repetitive process, whether in a factory or a cubicle, can’t possibly offer the dopamine and testosterone spikes that a man would get from aggressively testing himself against his environment or other men.
1299. Follow archetypes, not stereotypes, and in the ages, not the age – the magical creative imagination that is released when the opposites of strict form and wild spontaneity coalesce in beauty.
1300. A nation should not fall for the ravages of political theology, a messianic idealism secularized.
1301. The dishonesty of politicians competing for votes in an unlimited democratic system is exacerbated by an ethnically and racially diverse populace. This is because diversity is the crucible of hate; it breeds short-sightedness and antagonism, as human groups unequal in status demand of their representatives policies that continue and strengthen parasitic relationships even when the long term consequence of such vengeful and envious voting behavior is national diminution.
1302. The family is the essential social unit. All ideological “propositions” otherwise are empty abstracts. Communities should be linked to their native soil and bonded by kinship, memory, language, faith, and myth.
1303. The human personality – in its first predisposing bias – has contours of bedrock laid down by biology, on which is scattered a soil, thicker or thinner, of early habit and training, in which grows a vegetation of taste, culture, acquired knowledge, and chance variation.
1304. Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
1305. What is beautiful is not always what is true.
1306. Passion can overcome passion.
1307. The scorn of the idiot is praise.
1308. The commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings – a commitment that involves the mutual surrender of their reproductive self-interest – is a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. Domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents. Recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, wedlock must have a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions, and taboos. The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable – a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations – that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.
1309. Puritanism and its progeny are ideological thought and the reduction of life to formulas.
1310. A nation should not be an idea, but a people with a historical existence. A society and a form of government must be dependent upon certain underlying cultural habits and moral and religious beliefs.
1311. No nation has a charge to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world.
1312. Ideology claims to possess an absolute truth that can perfect human nature and attain a terrestrial utopia. The horrors of conflict reveal the falsity of this vision, and the lethality of its illogic.
1313. Social change isn’t like technological progress.
1314. Traditions can be understood as evolved collections of memes that have been adapted through millions of iterations and hundreds of generations to integrate truths and practices transcending what the individual adherents could comprehend.
1315. Race trumps gender in delineating collectivist loyalty.
1316. Humans see through a glass darkly. That doesn’t mean they know nothing whatever, it means knowledge is imperfect.
1317. The issue isn’t tradition as opposed to truth and justice, it’s how humans know what’s true and just and what it makes sense to do about it. To look back so is to how how to go forward – it’s how humans understand where they are, what the surroundings are like, and how things work.
1318. Paganism is the social order that underlies idolatry: the primacy of the animal ties of ancestry, in which the family is a small clan, the clan is a small tribe, and the tribe is a small nation. Pagans worship their own blood and soil at the altar of their nation. It is the attraction of self-worship.
1319. Ideology is an artifice of mind that attempts to construct upon reality an encompassing system that removes man from his existential limitedness. Man assumes God-like status, projecting truth on empty matter, demanding its transformation. Thus ideology compels the rejection of all competing explanations of the human predicament.
1320. Conservatives are people of the heart who use the weapons of the mind to defend the things of the heart. Conservatism is the belief that there’s more to a flourishing society than just the claims of autonomous individuals, the conviction that existing prohibitions and taboos may have a purpose that escapes the liberal mind, the sense that cultural ideals can be as important to human affairs as constitutional rights.
1321. Prejudice is prejudgment. And if prejudgment is rooted in the history and traditions of a people, and what life has taught , it is a shield that protects. Only a fool would reject the inherited wisdom of his kind because it fails to comport with the ideology of the moment. Prejudice, wrote Burke, is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled and unresolved. Indeed, without prejudice, we are tabula rasa, blank slates, upon which any ideology may be written.
1322. The politico-moral neologism attempts to capture the way politics and morality are being unified (or reunified), as the political expands to annex the once-independent moral life. “Political correctness” is one widely recognized facet of this centralization of moral authority; orthodoxy returns and here is only one right thing to do as specified not by religious revelation or the ancestors but by social activists, celebrities, media elites, and bureaucrats.
1323. Occam’s Razor does not apply to things of the spirit that have come as gifts and not as logical necessities.
1324. Any ideal rests on exclusions.
1325. Unless there abides in the people the spirit of industry and thrift, of sacrifice and self-denial, of courage and enterprise, and a belief in the reality of truth and justice, all the efforts of the government will be in vain.
1326. The only freedom man truly desires is the freedom to become comfortable.
1327. All forms of anxiety come from either fear of judgement or fear of death.
1328. Freedom is the right to tell others what they do not want to hear.
1329. Meaningful freedom directed man to transcendent ends. Human life should not be about securing the widest possible realm of individual choice; it must consider the kinds of choices people make.
1330. Virtues do not change, for they are the pillars supporting the natural law governing all human relations, in all places and at all times. Although that law never changes, it can be denied at one’s peril.
1331. Rhetoric is the attempt to influence others through symbols; it is the use of words by humans to form attitudes and to induce actions; it is a kind of action as things are done to it and as it does things.
1332. Rhetoric is the process of justifying conditions under conditions of uncertainty.
1333. Civilization survives every crisis except the last one.
1334. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
1335. In every corner of the world and in every epoch of history, the men and women of every culture deserve each other.
1336. Choose whichever – standard utilitarianism, theory of justice, attempts to ground moral thinking in evolutionary biology or neurophysiology — and there will always be, if subjected a preferred ethical naturalism to a sufficiently unflinching scrutiny, that at some primal and irreducible point it must simply presume a movement of good will, an initial moral impulse that, with a kind of ghostly Gödelian elusiveness, can never be contained within the moral system it sustains. All the polyphony of nature falls mute when asked to produce one substantial imperative, unless one believes (explicitly or tacitly) that the voice of nature has its origin and consummation in the voice of God.
1337. Conservatism means the maintenance of the social ecology. Individual freedom is certainly a part of that ecology, since without it social organisms cannot adapt. But freedom is not the sole or the true goal of politics. Conservatism involves the conservation of our shared resources – social, material, economic and spiritual – and resistance to social entropy in all its forms.
1338. Every government, like every political career, ends in failure. Such is the nature of the polis in this world. The economic cycle, hubris, sheer bad luck: they brings governments to an end. Good governments undertake actions which outlast the economic cycle, the hubris and the sheer bad luck.
1339. There are natural limits to human sympathies, limits liberalism can only condemn, never respect. And there is no reason to credit its attitude with “idealism.”
1340. The highest form of appreciation is worship.
1341. The great truths are above all public, available equally to all reflective men.
1342. Humanity is the co-author of their own misfortunes.
1343. The gift of self ought to be at the center of every act of physical love.
1344. Marriage should be a lifelong partnership of the whole of life, of mutual and exclusive fidelity, established by mutual consent between a man and a woman, and ordained towards the good of the spouses and the procreation of offspring.
1345. Hubris often derives from intellectual aptitude.
1346. Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasoning but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.
1347. The meaning of political correctness is the requirement to live in the fantasy world of rulers. To refuse to do so is to destroy the only public order possible, and so set against social order as such. That can’t be allowed, so stamping out dissenters becomes a basic bureaucratic function.
1348. Leisure is nothing less than an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.
1349. Ideology is always wrong because it edits reality and paralyzes thought. Ideology, a metaphysical politics and an abstract dogma, is thought disconnected from actuality and destructive to social institutions, which are the habits of society.
1350. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
1351. There is a metaphysical grounding to human nature. This nature precludes the possibility that there can be a number of different, competing views of the good life.
1352. The standards of good and right are not determined by the force of God’s will. Rather, the standards of good and right are true per se, and God’s will is bound to follow them. God does not invent goodness; indeed, God’s intellect grasps the true and the good, and His will, determined by his intellect, accordingly commands what is good.
1353. One of the principal ideas of liberalism is that of the “individual.” This is the being who, because he is human, is naturally entitled to “rights” that can be enumerated, rights that are attributed to him independently of his function or place in society and that make him equal to any other man. As familiar as this idea may seem, it is strange. How can rights be attributed to the individual as individual if rights govern relationships between several individuals, if the very idea of a right presupposes an already instituted community or society? How can political legitimacy be founded on the rights of the individual, if he never exists as such, if he is always necessarily linked to other individuals, to a family, class, profession, or nation? Yet it is upon this idea, so obviously “asocial” and “apolitical,” that the liberal body politic was progressively constructed. The inhabitants of Western democracies have become every more “autonomous,” ever more “equal,” and have felt themselves to be less defined by the family and social class.
1354. There is no question of resisting change. The only question is what can and should be salvaged from “devouring time.” Conservation is a labor, not indolence, and it takes discrimination to identify and save a few strands of tradition in the incessant flow of mutability.
1355. The Left’s first principles are universalism, egalitarianism, totalitarianism and a belief in the linear interpretation of history.
1356. Being good consists in a creature (whether plant, animal, or human) acting according to its nature – its telos, or purpose. The telos for human beings is to generate a communal life with others; and the good society is composed of many independent, self-reliant groups. Moral behavior begins with the good practice of a profession, trade, or art. Through everyday social practices, people develop appropriate virtues. The virtues necessary for human flourishing are not a result of the top-down application of abstract ethical principles, but the development of good character in everyday life.
1357. People are called on by their very nature to be good, not merely to perform acts that can be interpreted as good. The most damaging consequence of the Enlightenment is the decline of the idea of a tradition within which an individual’s desires are disciplined by virtue. That means being guided by internal rather than external “goods.”
1358. That world view that gives birth to political correctness is liberalism, the belief in equality and non-discrimination as the ruling principles of society. Liberalism attacks all the larger wholes – natural, social, and spiritual – that structure man’s existence, because those larger wholes create differences and distinctions which violate the rule of equality and non-discrimination. Liberalism attacks God, truth, religion, objective morality, standards of excellence, social traditions, the family, parental authority, sex differences, nation, ethnicity, and race. It aims at a world of liberated, equal human selves, with no God above them and no country or culture around them, free to interact on a basis of total freedom and equality with all other human selves on earth. To achieve this universal freedom and equality, the ability of actual peoples to define and govern themselves must be eliminated. Democratic and constitutional self-government must be replaced by the regime of the global elite, a regime that is beyond criticism and democratic accountability because it represents and embodies the very principle of liberal goodness: the equality of all. Political correctness is one of the weapons by which this vision is imposed, it is not the vision itself.
1359. The opposite of piety is not unbelief; it is sovereign desire.
1360. A nation is inextricably intertwined with its majority constituency, their genetic behavioral predilections and their collective cultural narrative. This is opposed to globalist/diversity paradigm whereby the majority culture and demographic group simply don’t exist (or don’t have relevance to the nation) and thus are easily replaced by foreign cultures and peoples.
1361. Libertarianism undermines the right order of society from the bottom in a similiar way that statism crushes it from the top.
1362. Nothing vexes human beings more than efforts of thought.
1363. Love is the most beautiful of all frustrations because it is more than one can express.
1364. Science teaches how; faith teaches why. These are complimentary natures. Because God is divine rationality, much of the world is knowable. God is understood by understanding the world, including through scientific methods.
1365. The problem of liberalism is not just that it disguises power as freedom, but also that it blinds its exponents to the very existence of power. Its methodologies and assumptions tend to be blandly rationalistic and unreal.
1366. The topography of human culture is not flat, nor is it randomly rugged. There are broad cross-cultural patterns over time and space which exhibit surprising synchrony.
1367. Anarcho-tyranny and balkanization are the end result of a multiculturalist democracy, as the state gives up on primary responsibilities for being too difficult or distasteful and redirects its energies to petty harassment of the law-abiding.
1368. The mix of infinite ambitions for human transformation with corrupt, decadent public institutions is profoundly toxic.
1369. Right-liberalism (equality of freedom and procedural equality for all types of humans) leads to left-liberalism (equality of outcome and substantive privileging for all types of humans along with their behaviors and cultures).
1370. Reality – nature – can’t be denied. It may go underground, where it haunts in dark fantasies, but it’s always there, bubbling beneath the surface, only to erupt later, unfettered, in mysterious and terrifying ways.
1371. Human beings are social creatures that need communities, small and large. Communities are bound together by common creeds, or common beliefs. Beliefs are expressed in ideas and concepts, and the fundamental building blocks of these things are words. One foundation of all true community life is language. Human capacity for language is a function of our culture. They can be better or worse at communicating with one another. If words become increasingly subjectivized – that is, what each person means by a particular word is more and more idiosyncratic – they are less able to understand one another. And so humans perceive rightly that they have less and less in common with their fellows. The decline of language, understood in this sense, is a social disease. It slowly makes relations more and more incoherent, and as they become more and more incoherent, they become disorganized and isolated.
1372. Man needs more to be reminded than instructed.
1373. The institution of marriage exists to solve a problem that arises from intimacy between men and women but not from partners of the same gender: what to do about generativity. The norms of marriage – monogamy, fidelity, permanence – help bring about the foundations of a good society. To legally recognize this is to put the force of law behind such norms, thereby understanding the deep connection between intimacy, procreation, and civilizational development. To discriminate is to treat different cases differently. There is a strong intrinsic value in the facts of the generative act. To exist as a person involves a bodily dimension as well as a cognitive, vocational, and emotional one. It is a pre-legal fact as to what marriage is, namely a comprehensive union of two persons, and only the potentially reproductive can be comprehensive. What unites the organs of a single person’s body is their coordination toward achieving the biological purpose of the organism as a whole. Only acts that are reproductively oriented are potentially marital.
1374. History has its upward arcs, but most crises require weighing unknowns against unknowns, and choosing between competing evils.
1375. History shows people just as prepared to fight for honor and recognition as they are for less abstract concepts like food or territory.
1376. What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without restraint. Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as they are disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
1377. Modern liberalism is a senescent mode of an immanentism that has been present in the Western religious tradition since its very earliest days. In the Christian tradition, time and history point to something beyond themselves, and derive their final meaning from sources outside of time. Beyond worldly success and failure lies the supernatural destiny of man, perfection through grace in eternity. Yet from this beginning there has been an alternative tradition, attempting to put final significance into history. This gnostic speculation “overcame” the uncertainty of faith by receding from transcendence and endowing man and his intramundane range of action with eschatological final fulfillment.
1378. Majorities pushed to minority status do not always embrace violence but they always embrace tribalism.
1379. The moral life rests upon three pillars: value, virtue, and duty. A coherent account of the moral life must do justice to all the conceptions that support it by supporting piety, which is the disposition to acknowledge human weakness and dependence so as to face the surrounding world with reverence and humility.
1380. Circumstance and the structural realities of demography will dominate the ability of leaders to influence events.
1381. The conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character — with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at the highest.
1382. Marriage is a unique form of friendship, one comprehensive and inherently oriented to procreation. As a comprehensive union, it unites not merely minds and wills but also bodies as a single reproductive unit. Only coitus is per se marital and essential for marital love. Marriage, a matter of the will, is a commitment to act for the good of the other and to cooperate in ways specific to the love. There is no distinction between martial communion and marital activities – the inherent reference to organic bodily union, the orientation to procreation. Marriage of the conjugal view is a comprehensive union of two complementary persons through the generative act, activity by its very nature fulfilled by possible conception. Thus marriage is itself most oriented to and most fulfilled by the bearing and rearing of children. The procreative type of act distinctively seals and completes a procreative type of union. Such a union of procreative orientation in its essential structure is of great cultural value, the foundation of a good society of shared goods and cooperation. This unique form of friendship should be recognized by law, as only the conjugal view of marriage gives such a vital and distinctive view. The orientation to procreation through bodily union has many corresponding broader obligations; a comprehensive bodily union is more total and lasting. The comprehensiveness and exclusivity of this union is orientated to successive generations in ways all other human activities are not.
1383. Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.
1384. Civilization is based on people overcoming their base impulses.
1385. Men love youth and beauty; women love charisma and power. Sperm is plentiful and cheap; eggs are expensive and rare.
1386. Absent the anchor of a reasoned faith, and the accompanying notions of natural law and justice, one founders on nihilism, an outlook which in no time leads into the maelstrom of terror and chaos.
1387. Genuine democracy can only exist in a community with shared values and common historical ties. The larger the political unit, the stronger the type of government needed to hold it together. The liberal democracies of the West, governing over vast multicultural multitudes, are necessarily repressive and tend increasingly towards totalitarianism.
1388. Scientific inquiry is frequently cast aside for the matters of social-status assertion via moral one-upmanship and the outlawing of dissent from ideological dogmas.
1389. Tribal ideas survive in the modern world not merely because there are parts where they have never lost their hold on the collective imagination, but also because they provide an easy call to unity, a way of re-creating loyalty in the face of social breakdown.
1390. Conservatism should be based on a defense of a way of life, a concrete and historical manner of thinking and living, not an adherence to various abstract ideals and principles.
1391. Wishful thinking is a mighty force in public affairs.
1392. Humans know more than they can say.
1393. Culture is the means by which a people transmits those practices which have been useful to it in navigating through life. There is a strong biological component to culture.
1394. People and societies make mistakes; conservatism works because it cautiously looks at the failures and successes of yesterday instead of mindlessly “progressing” forward based on a reactive aversion to tradition.
1395. The anti-monarchical temper is ultimately artificial and unnatural, a triumph of theory over instinct and idealism over human nature. In their hearts, most people want a king and queen. Royalty is the most venerable embodiment of tradition. Tradition is the lifeblood of identity. Identity generates social cohesion without resort to force. Social cohesion is the sine qua non of a viable polity. Having a monarch as the head of state keeps elected officials in their place, provides an apolitical outlet for popular hero worship and the cults of celebrity, and satisfies the human hunger for ceremonial authority. If it’s an affront to democratic sensibilities, it’s also a safeguard for democratic institutions.
1396. The civilization that created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.
1397. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship – especially of the natural world – is not fundamentally conservative.
1398. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract. And beauty is more important than efficiency, yet the relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
1399. The institution most essential to conserve is the family.
1400. The only true progress consists in diminishing the marks of original sin.
1401. A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one.
1402. Ideology is a much-abused word. Many who bandy about this term are under the mistaken notion that ideology is synonymous with strongly holding to philosophical or theological truths. On the contrary – ideology is, instead, an intellectual system of ideas or rigid abstract formulas mixed with scientific jargon and some empirical facts that claims knowledge about reaching perfection in the temporal order. Ideologues attempt to mold reality into a scheme consistent with a posited or assumed idea. Proponents are convinced that when the tenets of one’s ideological world-view are properly administered by messianic-elites, society will be transformed into a harmonious secular paradise – in other words, heaven on earth.
1403. Persons of any reproducing species will behave most altruistically toward kin in proportion to the number of genes they share. This explains nepotism not only as a socially but as a biologically grounded reality.
1404. By becoming poor, by loving until it hurts, humanity becomes capable of loving more deeply, more beautifully, more wholly.
1405. The best thing for a human being is happiness, which is a specially good kind of life. Happiness is made up of activity in which humans use the best of their capacities, both ones that contribute to flourishing as members of a community and ones that allow contemplation.
1406. Ideology tends to claim to possess an absolute truth that can perfect human nature and attain a terrestrial utopia.
1407. Only human beings can make visible what it means to be a person. They are called to reveal God through bodies, which which the body great dignity and value. The body expresses the mystery and the image of God; it is more than the sum of its biological parts.
1408. Human beings are economic actors, but they are not merely economic actors. A human life is not the sum of a man’s economic actions, and a nation is not its economy.
1409. One of the major intellectual fallacies of our time, shared by people across the political spectrum, is that people of other beliefs from oneself don’t “really” believe what they profess to believe.
1410. Different peoples will never live together easily in the same space.
1411. To win the hearts and minds of people is not done with logical arguments, but with emotions and social proof.
1412. Human nature, and a true understanding thereof, precedes everything in the human world.
1413. The human norm is politics, or who gets what when, without much political philosophy.
1414. All are married to the wages of past sin, with no possibility of divorce.
1415. Sometime during the fifteenth century, the great and glorious project of modernity was launched in earnest. To put it briefly: whereas ancient Greek and Roman culture, with their extension and modification in medieval Christian culture, sought to understand the world and live according to that understanding, the modern project sought not to understand the world in its totality but to control it and use it. The ancient and medieval project issued in metaphysics, which attempted to reach a full understanding of a reality, part of which remained mysterious. The modern project issued in empiricism, which narrowed the focus of inquiry to the world which was available to the five senses and had the explicit intention of mastering it. It is not surprising that empiricism has produced a sense of meaning, for empiricism never promised to deliver meaning of any sort, let alone ultimate meaning. It had no use for those intuitions and visions and purported revelations that had been taken into account by metaphysics. Empiricism had nothing to say about the foundations of being or the structure of moral authority. Empiricism promised something else altogether, and speaking both metaphorically and literally, it delivered: material abundance and enhanced physical well-being through the progressive mastery of nature.
1416. Philosophy is the attempt to understand the human condition, which means the attempt to rescue human understanding from pseudo-science and to show the role of religion, art, and culture in conveying knowledge.
1417. The human body is the expression of the human person.
1418. People like to form into competing groups. This natural impulse is encoded in every human being genetic code. It is a deeply embedded encoding and can’t be excised. It can only be controlled by authoritarian measures. Thus de facto internal borders based on race, ethnicity, religion, ideology, and social status, just as hard borders.
1419. Every successful revolution leads to a civil war. Revolution is the political manifestation of appetite.
1420. Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they per-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature. A successful marital culture depends not only on a general ideal of love and commitment, but on specific promises, exclusions and taboos. And the less specific and more inclusive an institution becomes, the more likely people are to approach it casually, if they enter it at all.
1421. Permanence is the illusion of an age.
1422. The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus to be a sign of it.
1423. Sexual morality is the first step out of cultural dependency.
1424. Modernity has frayed the bonds that once joined individuals to clan and communities quite beyond any ability to knit them back together. One consequence has been an increased reliance on the bonds to others that do remain in the hands of modern men and women — primarily, romantic bonds. And so romantic love is made to pull more weight than it ever had to before, or indeed than wiser souls ever would have assigned it. Modernity intensifies expectations and the quest for intimate relationships which, it is hoped, will compensate for the loss of community and a stable worldview.
1425. Liberalism holds the belief that there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences, and since there cannot be, it is a misleading way to approach politics.
1426. Human beings do not interact on the basis of contractual arrangements. The quality of human interactions – how one person treats another — depends largely on the degree to which individuals respect and trust each other. Respect and trust arise from a social bond – based on common interests and shared norms — not from contractual arrangements.
1427. Liberty requires devotion to the principles of conservation and correction or reform.
1428. The United States may be the only nation to pass from barbarism to decadence, without passing through civilization.
1429. The depressingly boring reason why most failing schools fail is because they are full of failing students.
1430. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.
1431. A great deal of human behavior can be explained by people trying to convince themselves that they are not losers.
1432. Suffrage is the poison pill that eventually destroys the body politic of a nation.
1433. Liberty and equality, whatever their status as ideal concepts, are social creations. They cannot be divorced from social reality and the context in which they are embedded. To consider them in the abstract is to lose meaning. Abstract perfection is practical defect; the shadowy world of abstract philosophy is inferior to the realms of ethics, politics, and history where the common good – the object of civil society – can be fostered by the exercise of prudence.
1434. Conservatism reenacts the past not as a past program but as a set of beliefs and values which are translated into the current idiom. The vernacular architecture of socio-political conservatism must be decentralized, organic, and rooted in past experience. This worldview is Roman; its political philosophy Aristotelien and Thomist; its concerns moral and ethical; its culture Christian humanist. It is free of metaphysical anxiety and alienation because it is communal with no hope for a utopian order. Sin and tragedy are not a consequence of inadequate social engineering, but a consequence of moral disorder.
1435. Liberalism involves the belief that there is no truth higher than the self and its desires, which practically comes down to, there is no truth higher than oneself and one’s desires. The liberal self is completely self-autonomous, choosing its own being, not conditioned by any factors that are simply “given” and outside our will, such as our sex, our race, our parents, the culture we are born into, etc. Both liberalism and imperialism reject the larger order of the world in which man lives and participates. Thus imperialism is also like the modern ideologies (Communism, Fascism, Libertarianism, etc.), which reject the larger order of thing and seek to reduce the world to a single idea and control the world through that single idea.
1436. History, which is objectified tradition, makes possible individual and collective self-awareness, and the distillation of self-hood possible. It is the sum of human trial and error. Humanity is its traditions, the formation of experiences in the written word. It is for this reason that when the past is lost, when tradition is abrogated, the individual and collective self are lost or distorted. Culture is impoverished and humanity diminished. Only by the necessity of killing a deity is mankind unfettered by traditional moral concerns, where, liberated by violence, everything is permitted.
1437. The belief that there is a temporal remedy, technical or human-manipulative, for every evil will not die easily.
1438. The problem posed by morality and ideals in politics stems from the fact that ethical and political ideals are often abstract, general, and without reference to conditioning historical factors and experience, rather than practical, specific, and derived from a particular historical and social situation. Neither political rights nor political obligations can be of a general and abstract nature.
1439. The exercise of prudence, the greatest of all political virtues, features considerations in politics and personal morality that deal with means, not ends. It is for this reason that the ideal and the moral as absolutes may be preserved intact even though the prudential solution may fall short of achieving the abstract ideal, may indeed be nothing more than the choice of the lesser of two evils.
1440. All political action is a species of “situational ethics,” just as all human action is contingent, in terms of rightness or wrongness, upon circumstance. Which is not to say that moral absolutes do not exist, but rather that they are poor guides to practical action.
1441. Only a man who has everything to lose and nothing to gain is to be trusted.
1442. The pornographic image is inherently de-personalizing; its function is to coldly “market” sexual gratification by attaching it to an impersonal surrogate. The focus is on the sexual act and the organs as detached from any personal relationship. Pornography effects a shift in focus – a shift downwards from the human person, the object of love and desire, to the human animal, the object of lustful fantasies – from the face which is to you to the sex which is everyone. As in the case of idolatry, the shift in focus is also a profanation. By focusing on the wrong things the right things are polluted and diminished. Desire is detached from love and attached to mute machinery. This is as much a profanation of erotic love as dancing around a golden calf is a profanation of divine worship.
1443. Logos, the moral order of the universe, is political and sociological only so far as politics and society are built by the humanity occasionally responsive to the moral order. Thus conservatism, a socio-political sentiment and movement, is founded in the traditional family which is a temporal representation of Logos.
1444. Egalitarianism is revolt against nature.
1445. Classical liberalism, by reducing society to individuals and their rights, progressively erases all larger social traditions and institutions including ultimately culture, peoples, and nationhood, and so leaves the society helpless to stop invasion by foreign peoples and cultures.
1446. One may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it.
1447. In philosophical terms today what is called the doubt which has been cast on everything holy, metaphysical or transcendent “Enlightenment.” Enlightenment as a philosophical project entails the dissolution or “emancipation” of man from God and in consequence from every authority, whether of church or state, under the recourse to isolated reason. In this process of annihilation which goes by the name of “progress,” there are many subjected to ever greater convulsions, explosions and revolutions.
1448. The great strength of the Left is that it constitutes both the system and the only permissible alternative.
1449. Society can’t be remade according to the leftist model because people differ in their abilities and their pathologies, which are largely hardwired.
1450. Declining prosperity means that people will fall back onto ancient loyalties, especially ethno-nationalism.
1451. Since culture flows from human nature, and it’s human nature to want to live in a nation that is controlled by people who share the most basic qualities – race, language, and religion, mainly – until the globalists abolish human nature or guarantee rising and universal prosperity, their project is in danger. Ignorance of human biodiversity results in a society full of lies.
1452. Humans live in a deranged age because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing. The Christian notion of man as a wayfarer in search of his salvation no longer informs Western culture. In its place, what most seem to be seeking are such familiar goals as maturity, creativity, autonomy, rewarding interpersonal relations. One can get all A’s and still flunk life.
1453. A true and lasting nation is one that is largely connected by ethnicity, language, and religion.
1454. In terms of the fostering of culture and the forming of good taste and character, liberal-democratism has been so great a failure that it is believed by most to have been a great success.
1455. Liberalism consists in the belief that there is no good or truth higher than the self.
1456. The art of persuasion rarely succeeds without a leap of imaginative sympathy.
1457. Culture defeats abstract universalism.
1458. As men lose social prominence and cultural leadership, particularly in their dealings with women, they lose the leverage to shape and push women’s child-like, solipsistic, and selfishly amoral political opinions in logical, just, and long-term oriented directions. Civilization requires restraint and shame of female hypergamy. A mating system where a large majority of men reproduce and are thus invested in the outcome of their society, and where women’s dangerously wild sexual and social impulses are partly constrained, has given humanity the pinnacle of civilization yet also contains the seed of its own demise.
1459. Free markets concentrate wealth in the hands of a market-capable ethnic minority. Democracy empowers the ethnic majority. When the latter begin to demand a larger share of the wealth, demagogues arise to meet those demands.
1460. The difference between mystics and saints is that the former stop at an inner vision, while the latter put it into practice.
1461. A man or a nation on the brink of death does not have a rational self-interest.
1462. Public policy can modestly improve choices and behaviors, but it can’t “remake” people. That requires an ingredient all too often missing from the poverty debate: marriage, virtue, and personal engagement and investment in the lives of the poor.
1463. The supposed equal treatment for all individuals turns into special and different treatment for the members of the newly “equally treated” group, transforming and ultimately destroying the very institution/culture/standards in which and under which the newly included individuals were supposedly being equally included. Thus right-liberalism (equal treatment of all individuals) turns instantly into left-liberalism (the unconditional opening of an institution or society to the unassimilable Other).
1464. Genes aren’t destiny, but they are significant constraints on destiny. Public policy should be that which encourages the construction and maintenance of a prosperous national environment that puts as few stressors on its citizens’ store of ability to adapt as possible.
1465. A nation defined only by freedom, and not by an actual culture, will inevitably lose its freedom as well.
1466. Humans are consistently in revolt against the limitations imposed by the moral order of Logos, genes, the social and physical environment, and chance.
1467. The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
1468. Those who elevate science as a way of knowing beyond its proper boundaries are engaged in a form of primitive religion.
1469. Liberalism posits a single human world ordered only by reason, based on pure (content-free) concepts. Freedom says you ignore the content of human goals and promote all of them simply as such, and equality says you ignore the content of human qualities so you treat all men as equal in value. Put them together and you get liberalism.
1470. Humans tend to overrate the effectual power of truth; ideas have very little persuasive power on those whose interests are served by ignoring them.
1471. Ideologies are systems of ideas mobilized by groups in their struggle to acquire or maintain power over others. They are a misuse of the faculty of human reason, whose proper end is the discovery of the true. Not being based upon upon knowledge, the content of ideologies change with the elites and counter-elites which champion them.
1472. Marriage is a strong and vital institution because the family has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are strong and vital because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the community does them. From such responsibility, an elaborate web of expectations, rewards, and punishments evolves over time that leads to norms of good behavior that support families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, the web frays and behavior deteriorates.
1473. The central and defining purpose of culture is to regulate the always-troublesome relation between the No-imposing voice of commandment and the Yes-seeking desires of the individual. The traditional approach to the felt difficulties of bringing personality into coordination with authority involves internalizing and intensifying cultural norms. Religious at their core, traditional cultures stamp our inner lives with their creeds and, in so doing, deliver the human animal from its slavery to instinct. Charisma, then, describes the gift of a “high” and “holy terror,” which installs the power of divine command so deeply in the soul that we can bear the thought “of evil in oneself and in the world.” A charismatic gives this gift with special force. He is an exemplar and virtuoso of personality fully governed by creedal authority.
1474. Racism is a sign of sexual decadence and demographic decline.
1475. Truth can only impose itself on the mind of man only in virtue of its own truth, which wins over the mind with both gentleness and power.
1476. To be traditionalist is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian falsehood.
1477. The subjective and the objective are fused because observations change what is perceived. Human knowledge of the world is inescapably participatory. Recognizing the participatory nature of knowledge means giving up the more grandiose modern ambitions, notably the dream that humanity can achieve a God-like rule of nature. This is liberating, since it frees humanity from the hubristic ideal of perfect objectivity.
1478. If maximizing and exercising freedom of choice is the telos of life, the life will be lonely and prone to manipulation by hyper-consumerism and the abuse of eros.
1479. Life is derived from and dependent on society.
1480. To be a radical is to be forever unsatisfied with the content of history, yet reconciled to the process of history.
1481. Truth, and goodness and beauty, are aesthetic judgments of the fitness of an object.
1482. Capitalism, when unconstrained by logistical, cultural, or legal obstacles, becomes cannibalistic of its host society.
1483. One cannot separate a culture and its attendant civilization from the genetic endowments of its founding people, nor can you expect to transfer it to another people.
1484. Primary threats to the Apostolic life include the complex of the state, monetized wealth, the consumerist ethos, and democratic culture. Democracy is protean, and not just a political process; it entails an elevation of popular will and mass culture which can be shaped by demagogues and not only politics. Money and liberal rights are transformative concepts that shape thought and behavior.
1485. Nowhere is warmth to be found among those afraid of losing their ground.
1486. One is not free when one sins, because sins necessarily enslave. Freedom understood as autonomy is an illusion.
1487. War among civilizations does not erupt because men are unreasonable, but rather because existential fear drives them to it.
1488. Data can bear on policy issues, but many opinions about policy are grounded on premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data.
1489. For libertarians, laissez faire means the cementing of intractable human hereditary differences into antagonistic classes and milieus. For traditionalists, prosperity means the erosion of commonality and shared values and the means with which to argue for them. For liberals, nonjudgmental individualism means a collapse of social capital and a surrender of any moral or aesthetic authority.
1490. Conservatism involves prudence and temperance and the cultivation of virtues in all aspects of life.
1491. Nature is not something to be fought, conquered and changed according to any human whims. To some extent, of course, it has to be used. But what man should seek in regard to nature is not a complete dominion but a modus vivendi: a manner of living together, a coming to terms with something that was here before our time and will be here after it. The important corollary of this doctrine is that man is not the lord of creation, with an omnipotent will, but a part of creation, with limitations, who ought to observe a decent humility in the face of the inscrutable.
1492. For responsible government, the responsible must rule. The rights of the irresponsible must be respected, but not their voices.
1493. Most people are intuitive Aristotelians: they know that character is important, that is formed by activities, and that having good character is in the long run the only route to such happiness as people can achieve through their own efforts.
1494. Rights are not abstractions or axioms, but derive from concrete realities.
1495. By atomizing, depersonalizing, and homogenizing the very substance of human life, mass society withers the roots of humanness, and thus it withers the roots of community and religion. It in fact leaves no room for religion and the church except as another large enterprise in mass society.
1496. The Enlightenment claimed that science could illuminate society, that the solitary search for truth could be democratized and put in the service of the betterment of humankind. Yet the “rights” of “individuals” are less important and true than the duties of persons to be what they ought to be.
1497. Women want what every other human being wants, which is to be unique, and to be loved for their uniqueness. With rare exceptions, human beings become unique by bearing and raising children: a child can have only one mother. Women are unique as mothers, and men are lifted above their animal instincts by their attachment to the mother of their children. The moment there is separation of sexuality from child-bearing, women are turned into generic sexual objects, which makes it impossible for them to obtain what they want, because sexual objects are generic.
1498. The prime motivations of action and interaction are money, status, religion, and blood tribalism. Blood tribalism, or race, is the most powerful and primal means of human organization because humans will always be most altruistic toward blood relatives. This concept begins with immediate family, and then moves outward to extended family, region, and finally society or nation. For these prime motivations, humans tend not to be rational but rationalizing.
1499. Over time, elites will come to believe, falsely, that the interests of the organization or institution they lead are identical with their personal interests.
1500. The best of human flourishing follows the habits of familial and local socialization.
1501. It is human nature that people are more likely to be appalled at the crimes of their enemies, and excuse or ignore those of their allies.
1502. Preserving one’s people and culture is a virtual human universal.
1503. There is no such thing as absolute genetic determinism. Genes are probability, not destiny, even as they comprehensively explain. Human genetic heritage has imbued with a talent for adaptation in the face of environmental flux and everyday challenges. Stressing the genetic component should not be construed as denying any environmental influence.
1504. The fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of motivated ignorance.
1505. Good manners determine good democratic function.
1506. For humans, up-front, near, tangible incentives trump downstream, far, less tangible disincentives.
1507. Mankind has been endowed with free will, but only to use for good – that which corresponds with Truth – and not to do evil. Thus error never has any rights.
1508. Liberalism argues that humans are by nature free, autonomous and independent, bound only by positive law that seeks to regulate physical behavior that results in physical harm to others (and, increasingly, selves). Liberal people should not be bound by any limitation upon their natural freedom that does not cause harm (mainly physical harm) to another human; otherwise, the State should be indifferent (“neutral”) to any claims regarding the nature of the “the Good.” Liberalism seeks to secure legal structures governing “right” – procedures ensuring fairness with an aim to protecting (and expanding) the sphere of individual liberty while balancing claims regarding the “harms” of some individual practices (e.g., liberalism seeks to limit some harmful activities of the market at the edges while leaving its basic structure intact). Liberalism understood from the outset that it could not abide any religious tradition that sought to influence the order of society based upon its conception of “the Good.” “Private” belief could be tolerated: such belief would extend only to the immediate adherents of that faith; its adherents had to personally choose their allegiance to that faith; and any faith commitment would be the result of voluntarist choice and thus, a chosen self-limitation on the part of the faithful. This vision is false and harmful. Catholics represent a threat to the liberal order, which demands that people check their faith at the door and acknowledge only one sovereign in the realm of proscribing public behavior – the State.
1509. Humans are not by nature “free and independent;” they are, rather, members of the Body of Christ. In the natural law understanding, humans are by nature political and social animals requiring law, culture and religion for our flourishing and right ordering. The law does not simply seek to regulate and prevent bodies from committing harm; rather, the law necessarily derives from, and seeks to advance, a positive vision of human good and human flourishing. The law reinforces the Divine law, seeking the restraint not only of practices that will harm others, but which will tend toward a condition of sin and self-destruction. Even where the law is “silent,” humans are not at leave simply to act as they wish; rather, they are admonished to live in accordance with and by the practice of virtue necessary to human flourishing. A polity based upon securing “right” is radically insufficient; rather, the polity is understood to be a reinforcement of efforts to orient people toward “the Good.” While the Church and State necessarily operate in different spheres, the State’s activities should be oriented by the vision “the Good.”
1510. Liberalism holds that the State must be indifferent to the personal choices of individuals; yet some choices are not only inherently wrong (even if they do not result in the immediate and evident harm of others), but over time and cumulatively, socially destructive. The cumulative decisions of individuals – not intended to “harm” anyone – will lead to manifest and extensive social ills. Liberalism is finally incapable of “indifference” toward the choices of individuals, particularly when those choices involved the limitation of individual autonomy, and particularly when any such limitation occurred in the context not of organizations that stressed individual choice, but rather asserted the preeminence of conceptions of the Good that commended practices of self-limitation. In short, liberalism will finally reveal its “partiality” toward autonomy by forcing institutions with an opposing worldview to conform to liberalism’s assumptions. Liberalism will seek to actively” liberate” individuals from oppressive structures, even at the point of requiring such liberalism at the point of a legal mandate and even a gun.
1511. One cannot have a society in which all authority is radically suspect. Things will fall apart. At some point, most people have to suspend their disbelief.
1512. A movement starts as a cause, becomes a business, and ends as a racket.
1513. Notions of human dignity are more central to being authentically human than impersonal notion of rights by themselves alone.
1514. It is a delusion that the disharmony of the world is fundamentally curable by cautious and correct ‘tactics.’
1515. The preferred human method for dealing with unpleasant social realities is to keep as faraway from them as possible.
1516. A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
1517. What’s most interesting about the world is not politics, really, but the human flourishing that occurs outside it, or rather in the shadow of state sovereignty: from the mother and father to the warrior to the monk to the businessman to the aristocrat to the artist.
1518. Ideology, properly understood, is the imposition of a philosophy upon the world. Philosophy in this sense is to be understood as a set of beliefs and principles which may or may not be true. Because ideological philosophy (or beliefs) is imposed upon the world, it can be used to explain everything in the world. Ideologues know everything, and can explain anything that happens. Ideology can be contrasted with true knowledge. True knowledge is much more limited than ideology. It is more humble. True knowledge, rather than being imposed upon the world, comes out of our experience in the world. True knowledge comes from nature, reason, and revelation. It comes “from without” rather than “from within.” True knowledge imposes itself.
1519. The notion that political conversation and discussions about morality and mores are nothing but the competition of ideologies is a self-defeating skeptical point of view, but a very democratic point of view. This position is normally coupled with a belief that the most-powerful always end up ruling.
1520. In relationships, humans feel intense chemistry with partners who remind them of aspects of their parents they have the most unresolved, open issues with. And in relationships, humans become those aspects of their parents they most identified with.
1521. Ancient writers are new and fresh this morning, and nothing, perhaps, is so old and tired as today’s newspaper.
1522. He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.
1523. Notions of human dignity are more central to being authentically human than impersonal notion of rights by themselves alone.
1524. The inviolable dignity of every single person is present from conception.
1525. Seeking responsible leadership from a massive unaccountable bureaucracy that is insulated from the upsides of providing good government and the downsides of providing bad government is a waste of everyone’s time. Bureaucrats don’t want to exercise their own discretion because governing is hard and has consequences. There is no glory of success and the consequences of failure are nothing.
1526. The well-being of any society turns not just on its capacity to procreate but on its ability to transmit a tradition of moral reasoning and the values that attend it to future generations.
1527. The good life is safeguarded by a good society, an indelible connection that bestows obligations on persons to invest in the acculturation of future generations.
1528. The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal.
1529. That world view that gives birth to political correctness is liberalism, the belief in equality and non-discrimination as the ruling principles of society. Liberalism attacks all the larger wholes – natural, social, and spiritual – that structure man’s existence, because those larger wholes create differences and distinctions which violate the rule of equality and non-discrimination. Liberalism attacks God, truth, religion, objective morality, standards of excellence, social traditions, the family, parental authority, sex differences, nation, ethnicity, and race. It aims at a world of liberated, equal human selves, with no God above them and no country or culture around them, free to interact on a basis of total freedom and equality with all other human selves on earth. To achieve this universal freedom and equality, the ability of actual peoples to define and govern themselves must be eliminated. Democratic and constitutional self-government must be replaced by the regime of the global elite, a regime that is beyond criticism and democratic accountability because it represents and embodies the very principle of liberal goodness: the equality of all. Political correctness is one of the weapons by which this vision is imposed, it is not the vision itself.
1530. Humans wish to be free, but don’t know what to do with freedom. They think freedom is the absence of limits, but in conceiving of freedom in that way they deny understanding how freedom ought to be used, which is for the good. Freedom is to be used for good, which corresponds with truth, and thus error never has rights.
1531. Frantic days are primarily just a hedge against emptiness.
1532. A rhetorical diet infused with market-fundamentalist metaphors into the social and intellectual life by a range of technological innovations depletes the stock of social capital. Individualism has come to mean no limits on freedom to maneuver, no obligations arising from a shared history, no community, no culture. Yet humans are they are because of their elders, which raises uncomfortable questions about the responsibility to future generations.
1533. In great undertakings there is glory even in failure.
1534. All government collections are penalties; they penalize some persons for the benefit of others.
1535. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic “progress” leads only to the abyss and the power of evil.
1536. Ideology is a unifying vision as practiced through a rigid, systematic political program (meaning, who / whom gets what when).
1537. The excess of liberty, whether in states or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.
1538. Traditional civilization is threatened with extinction because pleasing but destructive illusions have become part of the way in which most people view the world and their own lives. The hold on society of those who created and fed these illusions cannot be broken mainly through practical politics.
1539. Individualism, and with it the belief in subjective emotion as a guide to truth, has led inevitably and irretrievably to a loss of a common culture, and a common reference point, or set of reference points, for strong community. This has moral, religious, social, and economic effects.
1540. Trust is a perishable quantity vital to an orderly, wealth-generating society. It does not grow with persuasion, coercion, sloganeering, or after-school specials. It is organically emergent and intimately tied to relatedness: cultural, moral and biological.
1541. There is no such thing as a proposition nation, only a future sociopolitical fracture.
1542. High-minded ideals must fall when they are proven unworkable, or millions will die, soul or body, in service to their continued justification.
1543. Man pursues desire and only captures nostalgia.
1544. Great stupidities do not come from the people. First, they have seduced intelligent men.
1545. Democratic politics is always tribal in some way. Communities can only thrive when trust and high social capital are present – meaning, a lack of diversity. Democracy is flawed because the masses, taken as a whole, are like children. Children must be forced to submit to painful medical treatments that can save their lives. They must be told to eat their vegetables, do their school-work, get to bed at a reasonable time, take a bath. So too must the instinctive kindness of the masses be controlled so that it doesn’t lead to the destruction of the nation.
1546. Family structure weakens of its own accord in a culture that makes personal gratification the highest good. There is only one freedom that the vast majority of people, male and female, long for: The Freedom From Responsibility.
1547. Without the institution of marriage, alpha male cads have a disproportionate share of children, which means each subsequent generation becomes significantly more alpha than the previous one; and in just a few generations humanity will wipe out centuries of breeding for beta qualities, and it’s the beta qualities which are necessary for civilization. Men feel powerful lust from dominating attractive women, the same lust women feel from submitting to the domination of powerful men. Men value women for their sexual intimacy, while women value men for the emotional intimacy. Men don’t want a relationship with a woman who is promiscuous with her sexual intimacy as it either indicates she has low value, or potential for cuckoldry. Women don’t want relationships with emotional/sensitive guys as these men are promiscuous with their emotional intimacy. And their emotional promiscuity indicates they are either low value or have a potential for abandonment. A “niceguy” is to women what a slut is to a man. Telling men to be more sensitive is a ploy to make it easier for women to use men, just as telling women to be more sexually open would be a ploy to make it easier for men to use women.
1548. The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.
1549. There is a revolutionary moral relativism camouflaged in the language of natural rights and consent, a critical difference between the articulation of existing rights and duties and a contract that creates a portion of society from human will. It is vital to distinguish between contracts as creating society, justice, law, and principles, and that which specifies.
1550. Almost all recognized creative accomplishment is male, occurs during the prime reproductive years, and declines gradually with age. Violent crime, athleticism, and creative output follow the same age curve for men due to shared purpose and origin in the male sex hormones. Violence, athleticism, and creative display are all competitive male drives which work to attract female sexual partners. Then as men age or enter committed relationships the male sex hormones abate, so paternal traits increase and these mating traits decrease.
1551. Without transcendent standards there are two possibilities: man is determined by sub-rational and in the end physical forces, or man is determined by arbitrary human choice. Modern natural science, which defines rationality and reality, supports the first possibility. That’s intolerable, though, so the result is fanatical commitment to the second becomes a human necessity. That leads to the question of whose choice it will be. Is it going to be the triumph of the will of the Leader, or the triumph of the choices of every individual within the limits of a system that promotes the equality of those choices?
1552. Credentialism stifles innovation and risk-taking, and solidifies a de facto corporate, academia and government aristocracy preferred by women. Credentialism is a natural outgrowth of feminism and equalism, which themselves are natural outgrowths of the feminine sensibility.
1553. Modern, liberal society has professionalized, externalized, commercialized and industrialized nearly everything that was once domestic, local, part of a commons or private space.
1554. Good philosophy cannot easily convert a soul but bad philosophy can damn one.
1555. Women are biologically compelled to follow, but only behind a man worthy of their relinquishment.
1556. The only things that consoles humans for miseries is diversion. And yet that is the greatest of miseries.
1557. Elections are tribal.
1558. The collapse of certainty is a constant.
1559. Since man’s essence consists being in being-from, being-with and being-for, human freedom can exist only in the ordered communion of freedoms.
1560. It is necessary for elite institutions to discriminate against non-elite whites in order to expose elites to diversity, because if elites are not exposed to diversity it would undermine their ability to attack non-elite whites for being racist.
1561. A woman’s principles are like an impressionistic painting – beautiful to contemplate from afar but all over the place up close.
1562. Women love to feel like they have to struggle to get a man to admit his emotional core, and dislike having men dump a bucket of their emotional core all over them. As women perceive it, the struggle is an irrefutable sign that the man is non-needy, has options with other women, and will give her the challenge she subconsciously craves.
1563. Political freedom is unimportant by definition when government is stable and effective.
1564. Modernity is a culture addicted (literally so) to the dreams (not the actuality) of un-constrained / evolving and self-defined / self-policed sexual identity and relations.
1565. Virtue, abstracted from common humanity and a sense of common sinfulness, can become unspeakable vice.
1566. Women are naturally redistributionist because women are naturally self-aggrandizing and self-entitled, as befits their higher reproductive worth. But politically, the perpetual expansion of the electorate is one of the primary reasons why Western societies constantly move leftwards. Good government is incompatible with universal suffrage and diversity.
1567. Humans cannot have it all, and they cannot reconcile all possible sources of pleasure.
1568. A person who does not read books is a mental barbarian, a man who confines himself to his own experience, necessarily an infinitesimal proportion of all possible experiences; he is an egotist. Humans should engage the printed page to distract from themselves – a distraction and a consolation.
1569. An intellectual is someone who elaborates justifications from his own tastes and preferences, as metaphysics allows for finding reasons for what is believed on instinct.
1570. The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
1571. Traditionalists are natural pessimists, based on realism about fallible human nature that fuels opposition to the coercive utopianism of the left.
1572.  All great revolutions within modernity begin with a search for dignity. Revolutionaries may articulate different issues at different times, but they are inspired by a longing for “respect.”
1573. Change is constant, and the wise man learns to maintain balance and harmony. But he also knows that nothing is permanant, and that to yield today may in time lay the foundation for triumph. Almost everything has within it its opposite. Today’s liberator may be tomorrow’s tyrant. The prudent man, which is to say the virtuous man, is one who senses the currents of events and adjusts to stand atop them. This is not a moral code but a method. This is a philosophical conservatism in that it recognizes the possibility that things humans actively do to deal with an evil may lead to worse evils. Hence there is prudence, caution, and patience to deal with life’s tragic sense.
1574. It is easy to mistake politics for religion, emoting for thinking, and wisdom and prudence for political weakness.
1575. Liberalism says that all desires are equally good, except for those desires which imply that all desires are not equally good. Such desires are prohibited or at least disapproved. All desires are equal, subject to the coherence and efficient functioning of the liberal system itself. So when desires conflict liberals favor self-regarding desires that are easy to manage and satisfy without conflict, and also desires that are at odds with residual non-liberal authorities like religion or particular cultural tradition.
1576. The primary problem with libertarianism is (human) anthropological. People are inherently tribal by blood and religion, and sovereignty is intractable and uncontrollable.
1577. Most artists think they are a fraud, and live in fear of being exposed.
1578. When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label.
1579. A good society is one that makes it easier to choose to be good.
1580. Feminism is a political and cultural movement to remove all taboos and restrictions on female sexuality, so that hypergamy may be unleashed, while also stigmatizing and regulating, particularly through force of law, male sexuality.
1581. Narrowly pursuing the national self-interest is better than trying to save the world. The latter claim justifies heinous action and the knowledge problem makes it impossible.
1582. Political lives, unless offed in midstream at a happy juncture, end in near total failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.
1583. Politicians lack the ability to imagine what it is like to be someone else.
1584. Jealousy is nature’s way of telling a man he has assigned too high a value to a particular person or event.
1585. Conservatism lends itself to considerable linguistic legerdemain. One can use the word to refer to a temperament, an ideology (or ideologies), an objective tendency, or simply an unwillingness to heed the forces of progress as fashion dictates.
1586. Rhetoric is the process of justifying decisions under conditions of uncertainty.
1587. Autocracy is universal and cannot be repealed, only concealed. Always, strong minorities rule weak majorities.
1588. Persons and positions are closely related, with little insistence on keeping personal identity separate from the questions or issues under discussions.
1589. An intellectual might be defined as those that elaborate justifications for their own tastes and preferences.
1590. The dullest of minds works at the speed of light when a rationalization is needed.
1591. Humans are driven by instincts and emotions, with only a veneer of reason.
1592. Passion short-circuits reason and provides the simplest form of control.
1593. The constitution of a country is a mockery and a sham unless it reflects the real structure and possession of power in the country.
1594. Compelling moral truths cannot be deduced from a contemplation of the principles of cosmic and human nature, quite apart from special revelation, and within the context of the modern conceptual world.
1595. Expressive individualism has become a main theme in Western culture and civilization since the Enlightenment.
1596. Tradition is the living faith of the dead and traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.
1597. Men do not make laws, but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority; they must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. The state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of laws.
1598. Conservatism should offer insight into human nature, the relationship between citizen and state, and how to achieve a more just social order. A conservative disposition is appreciative the complexity of human society and the importance of human experience in shaping approaches to challenges, and recognizing that politics involves prudential and imperfect judgments, not as an ideology but as a grounding in principle, an openness to evidence and a search for truth, anti-utopian and modest in expectations.
1599. Every political movement faces the danger of elevating certain policies into catechisms and failing to take into account new circumstances, which harms the capacity for self-correction.
1600. Only by strict sexual taboos and regulations do civilizations emerge.
1601. Conjugal marriage is permanent and comprehensive, as opposed to an emotional bond which may dissolve quickly and is convenient for lovers but catastrophic for children. Marriage is ordered to family life because the act by which the spouses make love also makes new life; one and the same act both seal marriage and make children. This is why marriage alone is the loving union of mind and body fulfilled by the procreation and rearing of new human beings. The love relationship of the beloved mirrors the one with God.
1602. Capitalism must be complemented by strong institutions with a different ethos, which cannot come about in a benign process of social evolution but only when governments understand that not every institution has to be a business, the whole of life.
1603. What is chosen and how it is chosen matters; not everything is about the liberation of self through freedom of choice.
1604. Westerners have become the ultimate refugees, lost at home, refugees in their own countries, wanderers in their own cities. The same processes that have turned their countries into superpowers are now drowning them in their own effluvia. And the citizen of the first world often finds that he seems to belong less in his own country than the refugees flooding it. He has become a displaced person, a familiar enough feeling to many of his new neighbors who are also victims of ethnic and religious conflicts. But while the conflicts they have fled are official, his conflict is not. He is the victim of a nameless conflict that cannot be named, of a colonization that cannot be described as such and of the ethnic cleansing of his national identity and the theft of his future.
1605. Democratic man is caught between his desire to participate and his inability to contribute wisely, which he refuses to accept.
1606. It is through children that sexual relations become important to society, and worthy of awareness of by legal institutions.
1607. The question of the good is at the heart of real life.
1608. A boot stamping on the human face of a social inferior forever is nirvana for modernity.
1609. Culture and economics, ideas and incentives, are entangled deeply, working in cycles and feedback loops rather than in causal arrows.
1610. Most people are incapable of holding an unfashionable opinion.
1611. Conservatism is the preservation and reinforcement of the preconditions for the emergence of goodness in a society of highly imperfect humans; politics is only very crude way to strengthen and protect those preconditions.
1612. The nature of desire is without limit, and it is with a view to satisfying this that the many live.
1613. There is a messianic determinism of the sociopolitical left, a declaration of absolutist thinking.
1614. Biology is not a trifle easily subverted by wishful thinking and sophistry.
1615. The root cause of alienation is not intolerance or discrimination; it is diversity.
1616. When God is invisible to the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.
1617. Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
1618. Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
1619. Eggs are expensive and rare; sperm is cheap and plentiful. Women always want better, and men always want more. Conflict ensues. Hence the saying love is war. The normal, healthy solution to this problem is that society, meaning the patriarchs, enforce good behavior, restricting the choice of their daughters directly, and thus male choice indirectly. They also restrict male choice directly, such as shotgun marriage, and through taking reprisals against males who fail. Sex is constrained to be solely within explicit confines, in which both parties make socially and legally enforceable promises to behave well. Daughter may well be attracted to bad boys, but not, however, by the prospect of being disposable, attached to the clothesline and thrashed like a rug.
1620. Deep heritage is a coherent set of practices and beliefs, rites and rituals, customs, manners, mores, folkways, and taboos peculiar to a society that, taken together, are widely observed, with or with or without explicit religious assent, in a locality and that promote social harmony. The development of deep heritage is a natural cultural development centered primarily upon group trust and cooperation.
1621. There is a difference between truth and consensus in narrative and discourse. The revelation of Logos in nature to understand the mind of God and live in its accord asks of narrative and discourse not to be clever but to be honest and searching. Consensus within an interpretative community, in the service of of power and status, matters little by comparison to Logos.
1622. For liberalism, for Enlightenment, man is at the center of the universe, and the individual seeks happiness through material progress. Politics, who/whom gets what when, is primary as the means of power. Yet this is a false human anthropology because it is anti-Logos and anti-telos.
1623. There are moral and political dilemmas for which there are simply no solutions.
1624. The human spirit cannot sustain itself by denying an instinct as basic as the craving for aesthetic pleasure.
1625. Destroyers of family and tradition and social order, primarily war, harm kinship and religion, that which gives people roots. Thus weakened, the state takes over many of the functions previously resident in family, religion, and guild to become an economic, social, moral, and intellectual Leviathan.
1626. Instead of man rooted in a community of relationships in a particular place, the permanent revolution which flows from war and finds its expression in social engineering, envisions the state as an aggregate of individuals bound together only by the ties of contract and the will of the sovereign, with the social order as a kind of heap of legally discrete individual particles.
1627. Values – love, protection, courage, honor, loyalty – are nourished originally in the small contexts of human association: family, neighborhood, small community. They begin to become invisible when those intermediary groups disappear.
1628. Democracy must be founded not on the alleged inalienable rights of rootless individuals, but on citizenship, which sanctions one’s belonging to a folk – a culture, history, destiny – and to the political structure within which it has developed. Liberty results from one’s identity as members of the same national and folk community. The abstract egalitarian principle “one man, one vote” must be replaced with the more realistic and concrete principle of “one citizen, one vote.” A democracy based not on the idea of rootless individuals or “humanity” but on the folk as a collective organism and privileged historical agent might be termed an organic democracy. It would represent the logical evolution of Greek democracy, and of a current of thought that places at the center of social and political life notions such as those of mutual aid, the harmony of opposites, analogy, the dialectic between authority and consent, political rights and participation, and the mutual identification of governments with those governed. However, the stability is less the result of democracy than the result of homogeneous society with an involved citizenry that exhibits a strong sense of belonging.
1629. Prior to the development of the idea of popular sovereignty, man had never imagined that any human power could truly be absolute. Far from having replaced a powerful authority with a weaker one, modern democracies have, on the contrary, set up popular sovereignty as a theoretically unlimited power.
1630. In a republic there is popular sovereignty, yet the purposes of the constitution place restrictions on it and imply reliance on an authority that is greater than human because of the restriction on the power of the majority. If popular sovereignty is absolute, the constitution has no right to frustrate a majority. The only basis for a polity to accept restriction on popular rule is the conviction that the founding constitution derives its power from a higher form of sovereignty than the voters. To place restriction on popular will is to impose the theological.
1631. What is good for human beings, as for all living things, is defined in terms of the ends they must realize so as to flourish as the kinds of creatures they are.
1632. Liberalism in the name of freedom imposes a kind of unacknowledged domination, and one which tends to dissolve traditional human ties and to impoverish social and cultural relationships. Liberalism, which imposing through state power regimes that declare everyone free to pursue whatever they take to be their own good, deprives most people of the possibility of understanding their lives as a quest for the discovery and achievement of the good, especially by the way in which it attempts to discredit those traditional forms of human community within which the liberal project has to be embodied.
1633. There is a teleology embedded in the Logos of nature, including human nature, and persons should shape morality around it.
1634. War is the health of the state.
1635. A nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered.
1636. The natural arrangement of society is that which is conducive to human flourishing – not only the perpetuation of the species, but also the virtue of persons.
1637. The power of ethnic nationalism will drive global politics because it corresponds to enduring propensities of the human spirit, which often manifests in the need for each people to have its own state.
1638. Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.
1639. The most important obligations governing human life as social and political beings, including those to family, country, and state, are non-contractual and precede the capacity for rational choice. They transcend the capacity to rationalize them in contractual or negotiable terms. They have an absolute and immovable character.
1640. Democracy itself puts the majority of the body politic at risk. Maintaining majority rule as the state polestar inevitably drags into relativism. Rulers don’t lead by truth or virtue, but are instead representatives of an uninformed mass. To gain authority in a democracy is to play on the vanities of the lowest common denominator. The blind lead the blind and the truth is irrelevant.
1641. One must encounter beauty, and have their hearts and imaginations captured first by it, before they can pursue truth and goodness in a serious and worthy manner. Truth, the ultimate goal, involves habits of mind and life, an initiation into beauty: of music, visual art, architecture, nature, poetry, dance, calligraphy, many things. Through the experiences of beauty, one gains a sense of wonder and then a passion for truth.
1642. If one does not live for something other than the self, the self becomes its own god.
1643. The democratic illusion can fail in two ways the voters could actually take power or they could learn they cannot take power. Either way, the sole virtue of democracy, that it pacifies the mob with the illusion of power, will be lost.
1644. There is not much value transference an economy sustains before it implodes from lack of substantive underpinning.
1645. The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
1646. Community is a gift that is fostered over time; it takes patience and forgiveness, small acts of sacrificial kindness. Most important, it requires presence.
1647. The elevation of tactics to the level of principle means that there will always be new turncoats to purge.
1648. A misogynist is a man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
1649. The moment a man assumes a woman is his linear, logical equal is the moment he loses her emotional subservience.
1650. The Enlightenment opposed the idea of identity, tradition, ethnic solidarity, and rootedness. The myth of individual rights against the rights of society as a whole do not recognize capitalism and democracy as radical, destructive forces – that which believes itself to be universal and endless. Tradition and a feudal order do not rely on cheap labor and debt-driven consumerism to form society, and capitalism is more effective than communism because since its system is even more universalist and materialistic. Capitalism can only offer a caricature of a social bond; in fact, all it can do is carry out the commodification of humans that is inherent to its logic.
1651. Those who fight in the name of humanity only do so in order to deny the humanity of their enemy, rendering him into an absolute evil that must be destroyed.
1652. As society becomes more atomized, as the bonds that tie man to man are severed, the lifeblood of places is drained. Persons may associate idiosyncratic feelings and meanings with a location, but they are not shared and thus they contribute little to the communal understanding, based on shared experiences, memories, and lore, on which a place is based. Therefore meaningful places don;t just die; they never come into being.
1653. If borders are arbitrary, then so are rights. The purpose of borders is to demarcate polities that have irreconcilable differences in values.
1654. Both sexes have methods of control.
1655. Not everyone has the same level of agency, and the lesser the agency, the greater need for externally enforced boundaries.
1656. Forced diversity decreases social capital and reduces interpersonal trust; it increases violence and causes alienation, increasing collection problems due to free riding.
1657. Technical progress tends to mask societal decline.
1658. The concentration of power is not easily or quickly lessened. High degrees of power asymmetry tend to be stable.
1659. Persons must be socialized into independence, and freedom imposes responsibilities; the inability to exercise those responsibilities should entail a limiting of that freedom.
1660. The innate qualities of humans explains much of society.
1661. Terror follows when human life is reduced to a commodity of the state.
1662. Most people read to confirm their prejudices rather than to learn something new or change their minds; they recall what confirms their opinions much better than what contradicts them.
1663. The main incentive of regulatory agencies is to produce more regulations.
1664. Society cannot withstand the simultaneous decimation of wages, limiting of average male sexual opportunity, and increasing of ethnic diversity.
1665. Very seductive is the concept of false mutual exclusivity.
1666. Homosexual “marriage” can only exist in a society that has severed the connection between marriage and fertility.
1667. The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, nor the various categories of men, nor are women equal to men; these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, and society is just as religious as ever it was with an official state religion of progressivism, a new religion, and an evil one. The priests of this cathedral, media-academic-public bureaucratic, form a self-organizing consensus, regulating discussion and enforcing a set of norms for acceptable discourse. According to the modernist zeitgeist, the principle of tolerance and diversity is good when used to dislodge the hegemony of orthodoxy.
1668. Sexual “liberation” is a system in which behavior dictates reason, and once reason is no longer the light according to which man acts, force takes its place, and force means the exploitation of women. The inner logic is might makes right; the truth is the opinion of the powerful; the good is the desires of the powerful; such liberation is therefore a form of control.
1669. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
1670. Humans should combine a longing for grace and redemption with a deep sense of human imperfection and sin. Evil exists, but the physical world is not evil. Nature is sacramental, shimmering with signs of sacred things. All reality is mysteriously charged with the invisible presence of God. Suffering can be redemptive, when borne in emulation of Christ’s passion and death.
1671. A person would rather be important enough for persecution than be ignored.
1672. Reason can serve as a veil over the raw exercise of power.
1673. Consciousness of the mystery of life, the existence of good and even as well as the infinity of love, is a powerful hope.
1674. Impeded cognitive function is a leading cause of poverty.
1675. Mass immigration is a conscious elite effort to destroy community and turn citizens into atomized government clients.
1676. Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.
1677. The spirit is the brain of the mind and the mind dominates the body.
1678. Rationalism is not enough, because people are motivated emotionally, physiologically.
1679. A primary feature of a corrupted, decadent state is numerous laws.
1680. Democracy hides the distinction between ruler and ruled.
1681. Always and everywhere, people are attached to their ethnic groups.
1682. Progressivism is a nontheistic Christian sect. One can go from religion to idealism and back simply by subtracting gods, angels, demons, saints, ghosts.
1683. Culture is the framework which one carries in the head that explains the world and instructs how to act upon it.
1684. The Enlightenment and its demon gods liberty, freedom, and equality promote mass culture, atomization and individualization, bringing about the Corporate State, a people enslaved by usury, and assumptions that gross national product is more important than culture and life quality.
1685. To serve one’s own ego can only lead to sterility and damnation. For an artist to be a fruitful creator, he must serve higher truths, realities beyond his own self-interest. The greater the artist’s talent, the greater the temptation.
1686. For social standing, best is charisma before silence and silence before self-incrimination.
1687. Women who are unmarried mothers aren’t simply attention junkies; they’re affirmation addicts. Their self-esteem is so poor, their souls so empty, that they can’t go any length of time without having a man tell them how smart or beautiful they are.
1688. No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is prepared for execution.
1689. By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.
1690. The power of art is that it speaks to the fullness of one’s humanity.
1691. It is perfectly possible to reconcile the spiritual and moral equality of humanity with what science dictates is true about human biological variability.
1692. Options facilitate instability.
1693. There are four conditions that determine the health and creativity of a society: ethnic homogeneity in the broadest sense, with strong anthropological kinship, values, a culture, a shared historical consciousness without inner communitarianism – that is to say, the unity of society and state, internal solidarity beyond economic class differences, a sense of belonging more carnal than intellectual, its own genius, that is to say, intrinsic qualities, innate creativity in a large proportion of members. This is not the prerogative of all peoples.
1694. An approach to life does not have to be calculated to be effectively self-interested.
1695. Political correctness is a war on noticing and pattern recognition.
1696. Egalitarianism cannot accept the natural hierarchy of ability, and that equality should be moral and legal.
1697. Social atomization undermines marriage.
1698. All social problems are, at root, religious problems.
1699. At the heart of liberalism is an unconstrained vision of human nature.
1700. Faith makes certain what reason finds uncertain or absurd.
1701. The blessed have peace because they do not envy.
1702. Hedonistic adaptation operates relentlessly.
1703. Faith, family, community, and work are the primary foundations of happiness.
1704. The materialist metaphysics that emerged from the mechanical philosophy has endured not because it is a necessary support for science, or because the sciences justify its tenets, but because it determines in advance which problems of interpretation one can safely avoid.
1705. For some, the existence of God would pose a serious limitation upon human autonomy.
1706. Catholicism and liberal democracy are not compatible because liberalism is premised on a competing theology. Liberalism holds that humans are essentially separate, sovereign selves who cooperate based upon grounds of utility. Catholicism holds that humans humans are by their nature relational, social, and political; social units such as the family, community, and Church are natural and not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements, that liberty is not a condition in which humans experience the absence of constraint, but rather the exercise of self-limitation, and that both the social realm and the economic realm must be governed by moral norms such as virtue. Humans, in sum, are more than material and the laws of physics.
1707. Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.
1708. Hope is memory plus desire.
1709. Feminism began as a grievance, mutated into a conspiracy theory, devolved into jargon, and was reinvented as a career path.
1710. Order must be discovered, not designed. There is no such thing as successful, fulfilling political engineering.
1711. Democracy is a process for turning over sovereignty into a vast commons.
1712. Institutions are processes, structured by tradition and grounded by knowledge and norms.
1713. Race egalitarianism is the noble lie that is neither noble nor benevolent.
1714. The dark triad of male attractiveness to women is narcissism, charisma and slyness, and impulsivity.
1715. The experience of living in a fast-moving, chaotic information environment destroys the capacity to conceive of life as stories with a beginning, middle, and end.
1716. The art of successful living depends on changing those things that must be changed, and restraining the things that ought to be restrained.
1717. The abolition of monarchies was just a transition mechanism for the creation of new elites.
1718. Monarchy allows freedom of association; democracy does not.
1719. Originality is the art of hiding sources.
1720. Human differences are so profound it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate all inequalities, hierarchies, and distinctions.
1721. To look back means to go back again.
1722. There are rival goods that can exist in tension.
1723. The family is the primary transmitter of social capital – the values and character traits that enable people to seize opportunities. Family structure is a primary predictor of a person’s life chances, and family disintegration is the principal cause of the inter-generational transmission of poverty.
1724. Humans shape their buildings, and afterwards their buildings shape them. One tinkers with beautiful places only at one’s great peril, particularly when the shaping has been done by many hands over the years. Not only does it rattle the bones of the dead, but it may undermine the prospects of those yet unborn, and weaken us by burying memories that deserve to live.
1725. What is lacking in modernity is a precondition of making space a shared metaphysical realist view of the world embodied and transmitted by institutions. The world is real, and reality is what it is and is fundamentally sacred. It is possible for human beings to have true knowledge of the world, with this qualification: that all true human knowledge is necessarily partial, individually and collectively perspectival, and mediated to us through narrative tradition. Human beings can only flourish by conforming ourselves to reality, but again with a qualification: that as artisans, human beings order found reality into a specific human reality that, so long as it accords with and participates in the larger reality of which human beings are a part, enables us to flourish both individually and collectively.
1726. History is nearly biography.
1727. Society has lost sight of what sustains humanity which is their humanity. Humans are not naturally free, rational, and autonomous. They are social and rationalizing.
1728. So-called democratic man emerged from ruins of aristocratic society, a society firmly linked to family, land, kingdom, and cosmos. With the advance of “freedom” and “equality,” these links dissolved, leaving a lonely and weak “liberation.” Therefore, absent civic association, religion, and family, the anxiety of isolation feeds the growth of the state to resolve his problems. Where Aristocratic Man is remembered, this supposed freedom and equality is a source of terror.
1729. Organic local variation is superior to the imposition of progressivism, liberalism, and democracy. Progressive universalism, a sub-category of enlightenment universalism, insults, condemns, and destroys any culture not in accord with it.
1730. The “American dream” is an aggressively egalitarian concept. It liquidates consideration of community ties, religious obligations, and traditional ideals in favor of an unrestrained individualism grounded in “equality.” This ideological egalitarianism, paradoxically, enables increasing economic inequality and entrenchment of the financial system.
1731. The doctrine of equality of race, gender, culture, and human quality enables the permanent entrenchment of a power structure elite that denies its elitism, a ruling class that is secure precisely because it denies any hierarchical basis of its lordship.
1732. Political institutions grow from customs and conventions cultivated through long generations.
1733. A too confident sense of justice leads to injustice.
1734. Race, extended family as partly inbred over geographic isolation, features inherited biological group differences, as found in any widely-distributed species of creature practicing sexual reproduction. Humans mate mostly with partners from the same geographical region. Iterate that for a few hundred generations, and there are group differences in all heritable characteristics. If iterated for tens of thousands of generations, the groups would become so different they wouldn’t be able to cross-mate. That is the origin of species. Broad patterns of behavior, intelligence, and personality are significantly inheritable. It follows that in a multiracial society, different races will precipitate out differently on all indices of behavior, intelligence, and personality. Musicality, athleticism, introversion, criminality, academic achievement – different races will show different overall profiles, with overlap.
1735. A stable nation with a healthy culture must have a single ethny in confident, unapologetic, super-majority.
1736. All true art is art that reveals what is, and opens the nous – the soul and its rational, sensing capacity – up to communion with God. The ascent to God begins through the shock of beauty, which reorients the mind away from the senses and into the depths of itself toward its source. It is a spontaneous movement toward absolute purity and renunciation, a knowing that is a stirring of love so intense that the soul becomes love, willing to renounce everything, to surrender all self-definition, to retain nothing of itself, in its thirst to be all, to rest in the One.
1737. Self-sacrifice is self-knowledge; self-knowledge is wisdom; wisdom is love; love is God; God is sweetness or bliss. Unity is divinity, purity is enlightenment: humans can know what they inalienably are, or are from, only by surrendering what they contingently are, with all its concomitant desire and fear. Wisdom or understanding expands with love: a mind willing to be nothing, no longer petrified by its obsessive self-identification with the body, memories, expectations, family, and other attachments, is freed to experience itself as all, to recognize itself in, and as, each thing that exists; such an intelligence awakens to its own immortality and transcendence. Knowing itself as (one with) all things, as nothing in itself, it craves nothing, seeks nothing, rejects nothing, fears nothing: it loves unconditionally and absolutely. The Christian path to this love is epitomized in the Passion: hear all and say nothing; bear all and do nothing; give all and take nothing; serve all and be nothing. That the path is anything but passive has been demonstrated by its difficulty, and by its effect when practiced.
1738. As the vessel sex, women must be filled with the life force of another – a powerful man, or a child — to fully experience sublimation of their souls. It is surrender encoded in the gristle of woman.
1739. Servitude to a technocratic elite, financial oligarchy and its enslavement to consumerist urges and sexual impulses means devolution into a rootless mass of consumers disconnected from natural attachments – family, organic nation, and the divine.
1740. The division of authority is simply the destruction of order. There is no balance between competing authorities; they will fight until one kills the others, and collaboration is as partners in crime.
1741. A weak government is a large government. Unified authority is smaller government; bigger government is big because it competes with itself.
1742. No objective account of a subject can capture its subjectivity.
1743. Clusters of networked power are dominated by interlocking elites who create self-serving arrangements, and society is split between those bred into the networks and those not.
1744. In the fostering of culture and the forming of good taste and character, liberal democracy has been so great a failure that it is believed by most to have been a great success.
1745. Religion is the rule-governed search for that which one lacks. Reason, therefore, stands as the religion of the moderns.
1746. Humans cannot make the world sufficient, they can only kill the perception that the world is insufficient.
1747. True democracy is not liberal democracy, in which a plurality of groups are treated equally under a single state, but a unified, homogenous state in which leaders’ decisions express the will of the unified people. Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second the eradication of heterogeneity.
1748. Right-wing liberalism and libertarianism is “conservative” only in the Anglo-American Whig sense, accepting of Enlightenment revolutionary principles such as consent of the governed, which is to say hardly conservative at all. Continental Europe conservatism is throne and altar – including the Orthodox Tsars – and those sympathetic to these notions within the democratic regimes. This more authentic view of conservatism – centered in Orthodoxy and Catholicism, such as Carlism – is far more accurate than the Enlightenment-centric definition. In fact, parallels between modern Libertarianism and classic Marxism-Leninism are striking: the utopianism, belief in interchangeable human nature, the emphasis on the “cash nexus” above all, economic determinism, “withering away of the state,” the materialism. These are right-liberal, old Whig principles, and not conservative.
1749. The fact that parenting style makes little measurable contribution to the finished adult personality is perhaps the most counter-intuitive result in the human sciences. It is beyond dispute that all the interesting traits of human behavior, intelligence, and personality are heritable to a large degree.
1750. Autonomy and morality are incompatible with each other. While morality is about
      being bound by and to some standard other than one’s own will, autonomy as self-rule could easily slide into self-expression and authenticity, aspirations governed by aesthetic rather than moral criteria.
1751. If choice itself is the highest value, a self-justifying one, then there no independent standard on the basis of which humans can distinguish between good and evil, noble and base, or better and worse choices.
1752. The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
1753. Few people complain of their judgement but a thriving civil society depends upon a people’s customs, habits, and ethics. No society can stable unless there is a core of value judgments that are widely accepted.
1754. Few are as thoroughly superstitious as the godless.
1755. Nominalism feeds off the moral capital of realism. The problem with the nominalist/emotivist position is it leads to a subjectivism that, while being defensible in its own way, really doesn’t do anything to counter objective replies. Modern liberalism co-opts the moral language of realism while being utterly detached from the definitions that lend the words their meaning and coherence.
1756. An economy must be understood to be subordinate to the human telos, and so ought to be organized with a view of supporting ends the family, stability of communities, self-direction and widespread ownership, subsidiarity and solidarity.
1757. There is no logical Problem of Evil, because it is impossible in logic for God to create any sort of thing that is not extremely likely to Fall, and so suffer. God knows perfectly, and so wills, the way that everything should be in order to be best. His existence is necessary, so if he were the only entity, things would necessarily be best. But God is not the only entity. Because he is necessary, all the other entities that exist must – logically must – be contingent; for, there can be at most one unmoved mover. And contingent beings as such, by definition, are at risk of evil.
1758. Without a sense of the sacred, reality becomes meaningless, senseless, and incomprehensible; the human condition becomes one not of citizenship and duty but of imprisonment and injustice. Rebellion against that order results, with predictable consequences.
1759. Caritas is the highest form of love, a love that is active, and communal. It may be said to combine eroswith agape, and to transcend them both. Caritas is the love that unites heaven and earth, and that makes faith and hope real.
1760. The promptings of conscience are a sign of the moral law written on human hearts.
1761. Unity is not as uniformity, but as harmony. Humans become true selves not by speaking the same language – an artificial outer unity – but by speaking the inner language of faith, hope, and above all, love. Love is a language for which there are no adequate words, or sounds, or images.
1762. A text will reveal being only if it is in some sense transparent to (embodies) what is, pure love/awareness: the text in this sense will not be other than the reality that spawns (dictates) it.
1763. Pornography is a trance of death. In its ominous nothingness, pornography familiarizes with humiliation and humiliation with despair and loss.
1764. With the passage of time, ungoverned desire corrupts.
1765. The ultimate foundation and standard of order must be concrete and actual in some substantial entity; the principle of all order must be the order, first, of a first principal. Behavior is a commitment to the truth of an idea. Behavior presupposes the truth of theism.
1766. A sense of satisfaction with and gratitude for one’s blessings is the way to peace. It’s also just about the only way to make peace with one’s limits.
1767. Holiness does not consist of the absence of sin, but of the infilling of goodness, which presumes the absence of sin.
1768. Libertarians are moral free-riders. They want to enjoy the stability, trust and cohesion that legislated Christian morality provides without being culpable in its upkeep.
1769. Art should point beyond itself, and make the transcendent world accessible to the community.
1770. The goal of female inclusion in male space is a policing of the thoughts and attitudes of the men in that space.
1771. The human element in politics is the mystic chords of memory, the sense of solidarity and shared history and common purpose that makes nations something more than just arbitrary boundaries drawn for the purposes of enlightened political administration.
1772. All sin comes from disordered passion. To be truly free is to master passions by making them subject to reason. Sin comes from disordered desire – that is, loving the wrong things, or loving the right things in the wrong way – then to be delivered from the power of sin requires re-ordering desire. That means renouncing the control desires have.
1773. There are good things, such as family and place, that are only good relative to the ultimate good, who is God. They should be rightly ordered.
1774. Nothing mortal lasts, and to place one’s hopes in things of the world, even in the “highest beauty,” is to lash oneself to the passions, and ultimately to damnation.
1775. It requires an unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
1776. Feminism encourages women to do what they always felt like doing: interpret everything personally and subjectively.
1777. The root of civilization is patriarchy. Patriarchy with monogamy gives men posterity, and civilization is what men build for posterity. In a society where most men do not have children or do not know who their children are, do not raise their sons, they have no reason to work, to save, to invest, to build, nor to fight, to defend, to conquer, so their society leaves behind nothing for future historians to remember them by.
1778. To be wise, one must be under an authority and testing existing authorities, for they make contradictory claims.
1779. Humans can gain access to the truth only because the human mind has been shaped by a divine mind.
1780. The first rule of sexual politics is that he who controls the sexual mores of women controls the state.
1781. No matter what their native predilections, and no matter the vagaries of their intellectual peregrinations as they proceed through life and are by it educated, all thinkers seek the same ultimate, elusive, alluring end: comprehension of the Truth. Arrival at that comprehension must satisfy any thinker. What this satisfaction must mean is that the Truth must somehow agree with their fundamental impression of reality, and with their basic attitude, provided that these are viewed from and corrected by the proper perspective – from, i.e., the perspective of Truth.
1782. To disconnect marriage from sexual complementarity is to redefine it so that other principles are lost.
1783. All political things come to an end. All regimes fall.
1784. Liberties are not given; they tend to be taken instead.
1785. The common good is not “maximal individual liberty.” In fact, individual liberty is a necessary condition for achieving the common good, and for that good to have meaning (because freely chosen). All politics is about balancing the rights of the individual against the community. Too much collective power is oppressive; too much individual power is anarchic. But above all one must consider the common good.
1786. In a capitalistic society man preys on his fellow man.
1787. The masculine and the feminine are cosmological.
1788. A chief cause of problems are solutions.
1789. Liberalism is an attempt at a spare political language, one that cuts through problems by eliminating words and the ideas that go with them. Politics is indeed simplified when one is not allowed to talk about anything other than equal preference satisfaction. Scholasticism attempts openness to the whole of reality – even though it means dealing in subtleties – while demanding the sort of clarity needed for the laws of logic to operate. It attempts to do this by making very fine distinctions, even at the risk of being cumbersome.
1790. The confining form liberates the content. This is a universal principle in the humn arts. Within the Apollonian confines of the sacred dance, Dionysian energies can safely be released. Only because the children play inside the playground fence can they play wildly, safe from running into cars or over cliffs.
1791. A nation needs a sense of the sacred. Men cannot bear mortality without the hope of immortality.
1792. A conversion should be of the heart, or it won’t be real. The heart is the seat of the will.
1793. When studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem.
1794. Anything that reduces reality to the material realm, or tries to find ultimate causes and principles within, is incomplete and a partial, fabricated version of reality.
1795. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
1796. There are few modest talents so richly rewarded – especially in politics and the media – as the ability to portray parasites as victims, and portray demands for preferential treatment as struggles for equal rights.
1797. Personal freedom must be reconciled with civic virtue and the insight that rights can be exercised effectively only in a particular place with shared customs, traditions, virtues, loyalties, and beliefs, orientated to the Good.
1798. The gospel of self-fulfillment, “liberation” through the satisfaction of desire, is devoid of lasting content.
1799. The only salvation that can come is reached by accepting suffering.
1800. Patriarchy and families are the foundation of society. The natural and unmolested course of selection and elimination must be allowed to occur in economics and society. Hierarchy is the natural and right way for people to cooperate. Different people are different. Equality of talent and outcome is a lie.
1801. Freedom cannot be permission. License is not simply a false version of liberty. It is the death of liberty. Man’s liberty is for his perfection. To abuse free judgment and turn to vice, one will have a will that is to the soul no better than the torn and crushed arms are to the body.
1802. Humans are animals with a soul, with the potential to be lights upon the earth.
1803. Libertarianism would be an excellent ideology for a community of robots programmed with sophisticated utility-maximizing algorithms. It is a terrible fit for frequently irrational and highly emotional biological organisms like human beings.
1804. To know God is not to philosophize about God, to reason about God, but to see God, and to love the sight with all the heart. Perception perceives love, and love is essential to knowing.
1805. The human condition is poorly described by a primarily cognitive model (thinking entities thinking thoughts) and better described by a liturgical model (feeling bodies feeling the world).
1806. Feminism’s greatest achievement was the repackaging of vices as virtuous self-discovery.
1807. Race is not a social construct; society is a racial construct.
1808. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
1809. A community’s health is a reflection of the people who call it home.
1810. Armageddon is an idea, a powerful moral intuition, that has finally broken free from its old theological constraints to wander, isolated and alone. It is the last, the greatest, simplification of all the messiness of life.
1811. Women get their power from men. And then they use it against them. Women are born fascists, because everything is filtered through an emotional framework via female solipsism; and they have an innate capacity to discard logic to favor self-flattering doublethink. This is why they have a natural tendency to thrill in petty authoritarianism, whether bossing other children around in schoolyard games with cries that things need to ‘be fair’; reinforcing acceptable behavior to teenage peers via slut-shaming; running an association with an iron fist; or thrilling in the petty power of middle-management.
1812. When institutions repudiate revelation, which is the same as the Order-of-Being, they repudiate their own raison-d’être, which is to constitute a meaningful human response to reality.
1813. Expansions of the federal state tend to be ad hoc, ill-conceived, and full of unfortunate side effects – poor institutional design. Second, they become breeding grounds for clientelism: private interests draw a benefit from public policy; they dedicate a portion of that largesse to the political process to ensure their revenue streams persist; the government cannot resist such pressure; and ultimately interests – public-private factions – dominate what was supposed to be public, national policy.
1814. It is not only upon interpretation of the meaning of history, but also upon the formation of the very category of the historical, that messianism has its bearing. History is created by the expectation that in the future there will be a great manifestation, and that this manifestation will be a disclosure of Meaning in the life of the nations. Messianic consciousness is born in suffering. When suffering does not crush man it is changed into a terrible power.
1815. There is an inseparability of theology and politics. The reason that it is so hard to distinguish “real” religion from the religion of nationalism, or the religion of “neutral” social science, is people treat all sorts of things as sacred. Political theory and theology are inseparable. There has never been a society or a nation without God, and history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died.
1816. Pornography is what the end of the world looks like. It eroticizes sadism; and human imperfections are hidden, as “performers” become de-humanified, commodified plastic. It is the opposite of eros, love.
1817. Only insofar as men are themselves internally ordered by a true common cult can their society be a culture ordered by a way, an order, a tradition, that aligns with the Order of Being, so that their political and economic institutions actually work as they should, to help men live well, and virtuously. Only thus may the way of men be a fit subsidiary of the Way of Heaven, durable and indeed prosperous under the tremendous relentless assaults of the sky, as being rightly reckoned and meekly ordered thereto.
1818. Unless a strategic forecast captures an opponent’s mindset as well as the reality that underlies appearances, it is useless for making effective policy.
1819. One cannot change the world, but they can change their own heart. The passions – especially anger – will blind the power to change. One can only overcome the passions through asceticism (that is, through self-denial). There is a reality beyond what one can immediately sense. God exists, and He is love. He does not promise to deliver from suffering, but to show how, and to help, redeem suffering through love. But He can do nothing without letting go of ego and trusting Him. The hidden order of the world is one of Harmony. Humans are not made to do the same thing, to have the same things, to live the same way. They are made to dwell in Harmony with God, the natural order, and each other. Seek harmony to find happiness. Humanity is discovered through contemplation and the aesthetic sense; it is not engineered.
1820. The idea of indissoluble monogamous marriage and other ideas related to it (modesty, purity, continence) are linked to the idea of tradition, which in turn presupposes (since tradere means to hand down) the idea of an objective order of unchangeable and permanent truths (the Platonic True in itself and Good in itself).
1821. A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones.
1822. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.
1823. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
1824. For secular modernity, that desire, if not fulfilled, will lead to pathology makes self-indulgence man’s highest goal. It is a kind of treason to the self, and possibly to others, to deny desire of self. Thus virtue is not manifested in one’s behavior, always so difficult and tedious to control, but in one’s attitude to victims.
1825. Traditional sexual morality and sex roles agree with the order of being.
1826. Sin is not simply a matter of breaking the moral law, but rather is about loving in a disordered way. Humans love the wrong things, or we love good things too much or too little, or otherwise wrongly. This is a subtle point, because it helps to appreciate the nuances of sin, and how it works its way down into character, often by masquerading as good.
1827. As empires collapse they turn inward and subject their own populations to the same treatment they subjected others.
1828. Bad metaphysics functions as a philosophical foundation for quite lethal social policy. Bad politics can arise from all sorts of errors; but bad metaphysics means bad politics are inescapable. Politics expresses the culture, and culture expresses the cult. The cult is the root of everything. So it is important to get the cult right.
1829. If there is no God, then there is no image of God. In that case, men are not made in that image, or for that matter in the image of any other universal – such as the universal, “human nature.” There is then nothing to man but whatever we happen to call man, for whatever reason, or no reason.
1830. Feminism is, basically, Jewish women’s resentment of Jewish men for chasing shiksas, but projected outward so that dumb, guilt-prone gentiles feel responsible for, somehow, oppressing these rich but incensed women.
1831. The male-female union is normative, surpassed only by the sublime, supernatural vocation of the celibate life dedicated to divine service.The body has an inherent moral meaning.
1832. A misogynist is a man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
1833. Exile is the human condition. Man is a wayfarer and a pilgrim in this world.
1834. There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much hostility, or meets with so little benevolence, as when he challenges fashionable perceptions of race.
1835. Ethnos – blood, language, soil – matters more than modernism, liberalism, and democracy for the health and solidarity of a people.
1836. The alternative to belief in a transcendent God, or to a transcendent source of absolute value, is toward nihilism.
1837. Virtues of patience, endurance, sacrifice, selflessness, generosity, kindness, steadfastness, loyalty, and other such qualities are impossible without the presence of suffering.
1838. One’s very biological roots are suffused with an interpersonal narrative. To lose this “grammar” would be to compromise the deepest sense of humanity, and risk a handing over of power to market and state tyrannies supported by myths of human nature and technocratic artifice.
1839. Justice is the harmonization of what is legal and what is right and what is actual. Order itself is not justice, but justice can only emerge from a condition of order. Justice is the right ordering of the world, which does not mean an equal distribution of goods, but a harmonious society in which each person fulfills his natural end, in love. The law without love is unjust. Love without the law is incoherent. The model of justice as an expression of love, and of harmony.
1840. Secular cultures must tend toward chaos and death because at bottom they are guided and governed by disordered passions and desires, and are careless of this danger.
1841. It is false that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” and that there is no truth but the truth one chooses to believe in, and that it is all inert matter upon which a will is imposed our will. The Lockean liberal state cannot tolerate traditional religious claims because ultimately, they conflict with its metaphysics – a metaphysics that liberalism denies it holds. Liberalism conceives of the human person as a radically free agent who defines himself by what he freely chooses. This means that ultimately, the metaphysics of liberalism, which denies that it even exists, will dominate rival metaphysical claims.
1842. The dominant set of ideologies of the West – equality, multiculturalism, consumerism, individualism, and cosmopolitanism – combine to halt reproduction and limit population, not unlike wars and diseases.
1843. The naive belief that history is linear, that moral progress accompanies technical progress, is a form of collective self-delusion. Wisdom is not knowledge. Knowledge deals with the particular and the actual. Knowledge is the domain of science and technology. Wisdom is about transcendence. Wisdom allows one to see and accept reality, no matter how bleak. It is only through wisdom that one is able to cope with the messiness and absurdity of life.
1844. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope. They are assuredly not, other than in very exceptional cases, from truth to truth.
1845. How small, of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
1846. Gender complementarity and fertility are built into the nature of ultimate reality, which is God. The role of human beings is to strive to harmonize olives with that reality, so to dwell in harmony with God.
1847. A worldview that believes in nothing real, except the will to power, is intrinsically diabolical. It scatters, it disintegrates, and makes the song of the world into senseless cacaphony.
1848. Because sex is inerasably graven in the logos of man, ipso facto is it graven in the nature of whatever man does, from liturgy to marriage; that worship, being the quintessentially human activity, in which humans can reach the sublimity of all special capacities (for thought, word, deed; for art, music, argument, prayer; and so forth), is the font and archetype of all subsidiary activities, to which it lends them form; so that when humans upend or confuse the sexes in church, they must perforce do likewise in marriage, and everywhere else.
1849. An icon is an image for contemplating a reality that transcends the specific image; the image leads the mind, through the sense, to direct communion with the intelligibles. An idol is an image to which humans are attached for the sake of the image per se. One and the same object can be an idol or an icon – the approach to it is what makes the difference.
1850. The gnostic heresy has proven remarkably durable, reasserting itself across the centuries. Its most distinctive mark is the denigration of matter and the tendency to set the spirit and the body in an antagonistic relationship. So a wedge between spirit and matter, between the res cogitans (thinking thing) and the res extensa (thing extended in space), is supposedly places the former in a higher and more privileged dimension with the latter legitimately the object of manipulation and re-organization. Hence the purpose of philosophy and science is to “master” nature, rather than to contemplate it. Therefore, “the right” to change the body to bring it in line with “true identity.” The mind or the will, the inner self, is casually identified as the “real me” whereas the body is presented as an antagonist which can and should be manipulated by the authentic self. The soul and the body are in a master/slave relationship, the former dominating and re-making the latter. Yet the body can never be construed as a prison for the soul, nor as an object for the soul’s manipulation. Moreover, the mind or will is not the “true self” standing over and against the body; rather, the body, with its distinctive form, intelligibility, and finality, is an essential constituent of the true self.
1851. The Right in philosophically liberal countries should present itself as an alternative to the bipartisan status quo and stand for social traditionalism combined with local government and a non-missionary approach to foreign policy, the necessarily improvised character of any right-wing restoration. “Traditions” are often selected or exaggerated contributions drawn from the past. All the same, the Right cannot operate without them.
1852. Rights and obligations are correlative.
1853. The logic of the witch hunter is simple – to invert the reality of power.
1854. An increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline.
1855. Humans prefer uplifting lies to demeaning truth.
1856. A socio-political belief in the possibility of a more rational organization of society and the thought that not just society but human nature itself could be regenerated through collective endeavor, are false.
1857. Hope is memory and rightly-ordered desire.
1858. Nature is not mere stuff for humans to fashion as they like, and impose their own meaning onto it, but rather in some mysterious nature way reflects things as they actually are. To deface nature by denying that there is intrinsic, metaphysical meaning in matter is lamentable. Nature is to be discovered in communion with its Creator, not an object upon which human will is to imposed.
1859. Marriage exists as a sacred union to regulate the behavior that can produce children, to channel that behavior toward the best interests of children.
1860. Humans are born to die. To meditate on death is to mediate on a helplessness only known in dying.
1861. The expansion of bureaucracy is a form of eating for politicians, rent seekers, public parasites, and the deep state.
1862. Blood only smells like blood.
1863. Death is the death of explanation. One learns to die by dying.
1864. Most forms of governance free vice from restraint, subjecting virtue to persecution.
1865. All men may be created equal, but they differ greatly in the sequel.
1866. Envy will make humans crave the power to make others wretched.
1867. The only eternally vigilant citizens in a democracy are factions whose ceaseless demands cause a state of agitation justly terrible.
1868. Conquering parties rarely content themselves with half the fruits of victory.
1869. Most countries are too large for union, too sordid for patriotism, and too democratic for liberty.
1870. For most people, genuine enthusiasms are confined to themselves.
1871. Nothing that is good and true and good is lost.
1872. One must take the side he is on.
1873. Humans tend to be a guide to their own self-destruction.
1874. The allegedly autonomous self who acknowledges no authority but himself is captive to a deformed tradition of supposed rationality that collapses into incoherence.
1875. The power of the state should be limited by the dignity and inalienable personhood constituting a local community, pervaded by a ethic and culture orientated toward the good.
1876. Deception is a quick method to gain little things and lose big things.
1877. The life of the spirit is either a sublime reality or an illusion.
1878. Perpetual war brings the illusion of peace.
1879. Some things are meant to be known, not understood.
1880. For some, it is the faux pas, not the sins, that matter in the world.
1881. For a woman who does not know whether to be hot or cold, temper tantrums are a convenient compromise.
1882. Oppressed people are treacherous for the simple reason that it is both a means of survival and a way to curry favor with the powerful.
1883. The best poetry is that which is only generally, not specifically, understood.
1884. If a man has no order within him, he cannot spread order about him.
1885. Meaning does not finally reside in the world of events but in the submission of the will to charity.
1886. Houses may be haunted, but not by memories only.
1887. One cannot step in the same river twice.
1888. Adolescence is children’s menopause.
1889. An engaging view is distracting to a writer, but his discipline is self-directed.
1890. For some, to love their neighbor is to love without looking at him.
1891. Before humanity is a great nothingness, a great nothingness that is Something.
1892. Only through the ultimate exercise of free will is harmony, which is to, finally, abandon the concept.
1893. The poetry of a de-Christianized but puritanical Protestantism metastasized into the language of republican prophesy.
1894. The followers of liberalism have been content to worship at the altar of “progress” and have taken that dull fool for a god.
1895. The human propensity to slaughter is only remotely analogous to the erotic competition for life, with lust hard by hate in the struggle to survive and reproduce.
1896. In the Logos of poetry are conceits of existence beyond the reach of intellect.
1897. Few things provide so sweet a fragrance as corruption – for a time.
1898. All persons should examine their activating premises.
1899. Social sanctions should be preferred to legal ones.
1900. Living in community causes humans to rub the rough edges off of each other.
1901. They who forgive most are the most forgiven.
1902. Since humans have reasoning, it is their responsibility to protect their fellow creatures from themselves.
1903. Envy of men is at the core of feminist rebellion, and envy is an exceptionally powerful temptation for women.
1904. Where there is a will to convict, evidence is never lacking.
1905. Temptation is a woman’s weapon and man’s excuse.
1906. Before uniform mass education, end of hereditary privilege, and more equality of opportunity, smart and enterprising people could be found in all social classes. In the “fair” meritocratic system, high intelligence people will migrate to the upper classes and intermarry. Since intelligence is largely heritable, this new merit-based upper class will form a closed caste in a society more stratified than the old feudal one. The new aristocracy will feel confident that they have “merited” their privileged place. The more objective the exams, the more inequality will be legitimized.
1907. Men preserve their culture’s commons; women trash it when a stronger tribe marches into the town square.
1908. Humans are impersonators of themselves.
1909. If one wishes to change society, it can be done only as the gardner does it, not as the engineer does it.
1910. Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect.
1911. Ideal for a statesman is political realism, anti-democratic social and political criticism, Spenglerian gloom, and conservative cultural analysis.
1912. Capitalism wrecks revolutionary effects, and brings vulgarity of endless consumers and commodification.
1913. Democracy and capitalism transform themselves into secularized authoritarianism by a logic consistent and murderous.
1914. Cults of science and progress, religions of democracy, tend to believe only other peoples as sinful. Mass democracy is depressingly atomistic, messy, and leveling.
1915. Christianity recognizes tragedy in the human condition – while sins can be controlled, they cannot be overcome, being caught between innate goodness and animalistic, instinctive compulsions.
1916. Humans are social beings, who gain meaning and purpose from being socially embedded. So-called individual rights and utility extracted from the social context ignores this reality.
1917. There is a connection of aesthetic judgment to traditionalist politics.
1918. Humans – rationalizing, not rational – follow status, money, power, sex as the blood tribalism is a powerful motivator.
1919. Prayer is loving and listening, not only requesting. People of prayer are people of silence.
1920. Feminism is the politicization of envy.
1921. Marriage is based on the anthropological truth that men and women are complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the social reality that children deserve a mother and father. Indeed, there is no such thing as ‘parenting.’ There is mothering, and there is fathering, and children do best with both.
1922. Community is not founded upon law, though law is founded upon community.
1923. The death of a culture begins with its normative institutions fail communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.
1924. Social change can little be legislated.
1925. A beautiful object is one that is internally harmonious in its proportions, is harmonious with the world beyond itself (which implies does what it is supposed to do with respect to its ends), and expresses its own ontological reality with exceptional force.
1926. Human genetic disposition seeds and creates culture, unleashing a macro feedback loop where culture and genes interact in perpetuity.
1927. All revolutions have their gods.
1928. Conservatism and conservation are two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of husbanding resources and ensuring their renewal. Environmentalists and conservatives are both in search of the motives that will defend a shared but threatened legacy from predation by its current trustees.
1929. Not quality of the crimes, but the attitude of the age, determines the gruesomeness of its murders.
1930. Over time, all elites fall out of touch with their subjects.
1931. Human nature, part of Nature, is not mocked.
1932. The flourishing of the virtues requires and in turn sustains a certain kind of community, necessarily a small-scale community, within which the goods of various practices are ordered, so that, as far as possible, regard for each finds its due place with the lives of each individual, or each household, and in the life of the community at large. Because, implicitly or explicitly, it is always by reference to some conception of the overall and final human good that other goods are ordered, the life of every individual, household or community by its orderings gives expression, wittingly or unwittingly, to some conception of the human good.
1933. The sexual revolution was a radical shift of metaphysics. The assumption there is no order to ends and no meta authority of values proposed a world without purposes, so that what is left is a world without vital energy. An elimination of Aristotelian-Thomist teleology proposes sexuality as nothing more than drive, without purpose or ultimate value, and a limit to drive is supposedly an assault upon dignity.
1934. Leftist “purity” centers on the welfare of the self, while traditionalist “purity” centers on the in-group. Leftists care about personal hygiene and nutrition, but not about degeneracy that spreads disease, desecration of what is sacred, and maintaining populational purity. Because morality is about the regulation of behavior for the benefit of people other than the self, personalized leftist “purity” is not really a moral foundation at all, while traditionalist “purity” concerned with others is.
1935. Feminism rationalizes a culture of complaint no matter how contradictory the complaints.
1936. Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to living creatures cannot be a good man.
1937. The final aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of more importance than all other ends in human life. What it all turns upon is nothing less than the composition of the next generation.
1938. Modernity, driven by the logic of capitalism, is a “worldwide clearing operation” regarding historical memory. Modernity is a condition of deliberate forgetting. Under the conditions of modernity the celebration of recurrence can never be anything more than a compensatory strategy, because the very principle of modernity itself denies the idea of life as a structure of celebrated recurrence. The operation of this system brings about a massive withdrawal of credence in the possibility that there might exist forms of life that are exemplary because prototypical. The logic of capital tends to deny the capacity any longer to imagine life as a structure of exemplary recurrence.
1939. Programs are only as effective as the people in them allow.
1940. To start with a purpose becomes identity; to start with an identity becomes purpose.
1941. Biologically, the male is impelled toward restless movement; his moral danger is brutishness. Biologically, the female is impelled toward waiting, expectancy; her moral danger is stasis. Androgen agitates; estrogen tranquilizes.
1942. Marriage is not simply a representation of divine nature. Marriage also participates in divine nature. Complementary marriage (male-female) is real, in a way that same-sex interaction cannot be.This is not a legal distinction but a metaphysical one.
1943. In that society is confused in its structure of relations, to that extent is the idea of God poor and unstable in context. Social relations tell what a society thinks about God.
1944. Diversity crowds the mental space in which people live, a similar mental effect as overpopulation.
1945. Changing the rules of a game change the outcome of the game, especially in politics.
1946. The reason people are conservatives has little or nothing to do with economics, even if they are aware that economic prosperity is a good thing, and necessary for the support of other things that they value. The reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten their security and peace of mind.
1947. The demonic would make life horribly easy.
1948. Classical music is the presence of a highly learned, highly structured art form, in which human thought, feeling, and posture are explored in elaborate tonal arguments. In learning to play the music, one is acutely aware that one is being put to the test. There is a right and a wrong way to proceed, and the right way involves learning to express, to control, to respond in mature and persuasive ways. One is undergoing an education in emotion, and the skills do not remain confined. They penetrate the whole body and brain, to become part of the world. This kind of education is inseparable from the art of judgment. In learning classical music, one is learning to discriminate, to recognize the authentic examples, to distinguish real from fake emotion, and to glimpse both the depths of suffering and the heights of joy of which human beings are capable.
1949. In modernity, the market is god. It conditions what humans imagine to be possible. They can’t dream that life should be ordered by rituals that bound and define experience, and link it to the past, to a sacred order. There is no sacred order; there is only the here and now, the tangible. The world exists to be remade to fit desires. There are no ways of living to conform our lives to, no stories that tell how to live.
1950. Without inequality, there is no class. Without class, there is no manners and no beauty, and then a public and private ugliness.
1951. Discontent moves humanity.
1952. The goal of a polity should be the survival and enhancement of a particular people and its institutionalized cultural expressions.
1953. Lamentable is the veneration of the state, the admiration of power, bigness for its own sake, and enthusiasm for organization of almost anything and everything.
1954. The quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the most powerful needs of human nature – needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.
1955. The life of a Christian church is a perpetual mission festival.
1956. It is difficult for humans to face their complicity because the confession of sins does not come easily.
1957. God is God and cannot be captured in human philosophical inquiry, though incarnational entanglement provides glimpses.
1958. The activists against Logos tend to refuse to surrender their utopian vision, even as Logos is the answer to which every human life is the question.
1959. Any society with clear and strong moral standards breeds hypocrites.
1960. A traditionalist is guided less by absolutes than by presumptions.
1961. The obsession of modernity is to cast away mortality from human consideration, even as mortality is fundamental to the human condition.
1962. A wise lover values not so much the gift of the lover as the love of the giver.
1963. Homo sapiens, like any other widely-distributed species, comes in regional variants, that display different statistical profiles on all heritable traits. That includes traits of behavior, intelligence, and personality, all known to be heritable.
1964. The power of free inquiry rests upon the philosophy and institutions that guarantee free inquiry.
1965. In a world clamoring thoughtlessly for more freedom, the question is will it be used justly.
1966. Logos is the answer to which every human life is the question. The life of its church is a perpetual mission.
1967. Ethnos needs Logos, especially if it aspires, as every ethnic group does, to become a nation.
1968. Memory and hope, not pessimism, are the proper antidotes to optimism.
1969. Laws do not tell citizens what to do; they tell citizens how they must avoid acting regardless of what they choose to do.
1970. Advocates for an individualized, relativized morality fail to recognize how throwing aside traditional moral beliefs, practices, and structures accelerates dominance of the materialist ideologies, capitalism and collectivism.
1971. Recovery of a sacramental worldview is foundational to the project of recovering from modernity’s distortions.
1972. Masculinity is invasive; femininity is irrational and invitational.

John Adams, Ryan Anderson, Elizabeth Anscombe, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine, Marcus Aurelius, Lawrence Auster, Irving Babbitt, Josiah Bailey, Honore de Balzac, Ann Barnhardt, Jacques Barzun, Frederic Bastiat, Hilaire Belloc, Alain de Benoist, Nikolai Berdyaev, Robert Bisset, Patrick Buchanan, Edmund Burke, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, G.K. Chesterton, Cicero, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, R.G. Collingwood, Calvin Coolidge, Matthew Crawford, Anthony Daniels, Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Henri de Lubac, Augusto Del Noce, Francis de Sales, John Derbyshire, Gavrila Derzhavin, F. Roger Devlin, Philip K. Dick, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ross Douthat, Denis Dutton, T.S. Eliot, Epictetus, Julius Evola, John Finnis, Benjamin Franklin, Pier Giorgio Frassati, José Ortega y Gasset, Johann Goethe, Paul Gottfried, Pope St. Gregory the Great, Romano Guardini, Michael Hanby, David Bentley Hart, Jeffrey Hart, Václav Havel, Friedrich Hayek, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Hitchens, Aldous Huxley, Samuel Johnson, E. Michael Jones, James Kalb, Thomas à Kempis, George Kennan, Soren Kierkegaard, Florence King, Russell Kirk, Leszek Kolakowski, Carlo Lancellotti, Christopher Lasch, Peter Lawler, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Henri de Lubac, John Lukacs, Alasdair MacIntyre, Cormac McCarthy, Daniel McCarthy, Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Mahoney, Joseph de Maistre, Pierre Manent, Dennis Mangan, Harvey Mansfield, Marion Maréchal, H.L. Mencken, Metropolitan Philaret, Charles Murray, Bradley Nassif, Richard Neuhaus, John Henry Newman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Nisbet, Michael Oakshott, George Orwell, Charles Peguy, Walker Percy, Heinrich Pesch, Josef Pieper, Plato, Ezra Pound, Enoch Powell, Joseph Ratzinger, Philip Rieff, Jean-Francois Revel, Wilhelm Röpke, Steve Sailer, Carl Schmitt, Arthur Schopenhauer, Roger Scruton, Joseph Sobran, Socrates, Thomas Sowell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Thomas Sowell, Pyotr Stolypin, David Stove, Jonathan Swift, Tacitus, Thucydides, Alexis de Tocqueville, Leo Tolstoy, Stephen Tonsor, Mark Twain, Adrian Vermeule, Eric Voegelin, Evelyn Waugh, Richard Weaver, A.N. Whitehead, Karol Wojtyla