social theory

The problem of the modern world, as also of the degradation of the environment, isn’t technology or a way of life or an ideology, but the ubiquity and rule of a certain kind of human….

noble peoples do not endure slavery, they’re either free or they die out. There is no “adaptation” to slavery for some types of life. What is that people, who has chosen survival at any price? The price they paid was monstrous and such a people becomes monstrous and distorted if it accepts this.

monotheism overreached. It made such grand claims… and when these claims were abandoned it left people with the impression that there really is nothing besides “science,” which of course, nobody really understands, because it’s nothing but a method.

there is one path that drives for the production of a supreme specimen. It is the path that governs higher life; survival and reproduction are only side effects of this path. Life is at most basic, struggle for ownership of space.

Everything for oneself, everything for personal utility: a pleasure in cruelty toward the weak and toward animals. This is the end-result of thousands of years of “civilization.”

when you look at life of true nomads who are always on the move and in open space, they never engage in the kind of depressive introspection and questioning of life that you only see in settled and civilized peoples.

If there can be any defense of civilization it is this, that historically it gave a class the full or nearly full benefits of the free life of the steppe and forest and mountain while ridding them of some of its inconveniences—at the price, of course, of misery for the vast majority.

the American Presidency has become very much more personal and monarchical than any European monarch ever could be.

Toynbee expounds the principle that times of trouble or rapid change produce militarism, and it is militarism that produces empire and expansion.