social theory

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.

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….

how do whole communities act when conquered and enslaved? The same strategy serves them as it does the lame individual in a society of warriors. They specialize and become indispensable to their masters.

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

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.

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.

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.

Men seek in play the difficulties and demands—both intellectual and physical—they no longer find in work.