Sublime

In the city of constant stimulation, we had failed to give them the opportunity to develop strong inner lives for those occasions when they would find themselves sitting through the second act of The Nutcracker.

No one in our town came off looking great. “This is the great tragedy of California,” he wrote in the last paragraph, “for a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death—the greatest leisure of all.”

One book that feeds into New Right thought is The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris. Unlike the left-wing premise that we are all malleable by society, Harris points out that much of the development of the individual is genetic, innate, and internal.

“A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, i

Back in 1989, the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama already noted that we had arrived in an era where life has been reduced to “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

The ostensible democratization of consumerism obfuscated inequality and essentially lulled society into thinking everyone had a slice of the pie and would mask real issues of wealth disparity.

free society—that precarious balance between the conflicting principles of liberty and order—exists not through the rule of law alone, but through a system of education that allows every individual to internalize the law and thus become its master, not its slave.