Posted on 05/07/2010 2:13:19 PM PDT by Noumenon
There are some who are born evil. I’ve met them and seen
an emptiness in their souls that puts a fear into me for I
realized that the only way to combat them is to eliminate them
which would make me as evil as they are.
I wonder If I’m right.
I believe that Goldhagen is correct in this regard. Human beings are not automatons, as much as the Left would like to have us believe. Think about it - if we accept that an individaual has no choice in his actions, then we've just written a blank check to the monsters who would rule like cattle.
....so willingly and with energy and enthusiasm.
Agreed. However, just because they do so willingly does not
mean they weren’t born evil. Evil takes many forms, and
one born that way might take different paths to satisfy cravings that we would consider outside moral and ethical
boundaries.
To: Gaffer
"We are witnessing the return of the Gestapo - because that madman Weather Underground sympathizer Eric Holder hates white people. While the FBI is under control of Holder, its sister agency the DHS is under control of a lesbian that hates America as much as Eric Holder and Hussein Obama. We are in for some very nasty sh!t if this halfrican is reelected. "
Sort of makes 1998 (or so) look like a "golden era" for freedom & liberty...
Of course, at that time many here thought it couldn't get much worse than klintoon, hitlary, alnotbright, Janet, and albore.
Unfortunately that was the last period of time in which heroic action might have saved the few existing remnants of the former Republic and one-or-two of the freedoms that we still had.
I would strongly recommend reading (or re-reading) this excellent post by Noumenon as he continued to build on central premises that he has posted since those early FR years: "Killers Without Conscience"
Needless to say...."Something wicked" no longer "comes"..It has arrived to stay!
Posted on 10/15/2011 10:11:52 PM PDT by SuperLuminal (Where is another agitator for republicanism like Sam Adams when we need him?)
Thanks for the bump. The book’s moving along in fits and starts as my day job work load and ranch work allows. I’ve had to answer a couple of key questions:
Why, for example is today any different from, say the days of the Roman Empire or medieval with respect to the exercise of power by individuals?
And above all, what is the nature of the antidote, the anti- will to power society and Man’s role in it? How do we go forward?
I’ve found some intriguing answers...
At least one example is the orders-of-magnitude advantage that today's tyrant has in the amount of dynamic information he has about each and every serf with which to enable, strengthen, and perpetuate his control.
In their wildest dreams, Dzerhzinksy, Stalin, Wolf, Hitler, Goebbels, Malenkov, and Khrushchev couldn't have imagined the top-to-bottom control of every aspect of the serf population's life that is now a simple reality.
The history of the entire 20th century would have significantly different.
Reagan's 1964 warning of "...the last step into a thousand years of darkness." has certainly come to pass.
...Marked...
Yes, it’s true that modern technology is a force multiplier, so much so that it “generates its own weather”, so to speak. The monarchs, despots and tribal leaders of pre-World War 1 times were largely content to enlarge and otherwise rule over their own empires. Modernity has seen the rise of malignant megalomaniacs driven solely by the will to power; they use that power in pursuit of their savage, murderous Utopias. What they demand is not mere loyalty or economic surrender, but the very extinction of that which makes you human. This requires the elimination of even the smallest hint of dissent and thus - the slaughter of millions. It is the ultimate exercise of power, and it is absolutely irresistible for some. We see their handiwork everywhere today. The abyss beckons, and they are only too willing to plunge headlong into it.
Nice piece. I’m glad I finally discovered it.
That was a great read, Thank you. I could not find anything there to disagree with!
When I finish the book based on this essay, it’ll connect a lot of dots.
The commentary’s pretty good, too - reminiscent of what we used have here on a regular basis. Now - not so much.
Please let me know when you get the book ready. Thanks.
Dig it. I miss the good ol' days, too. These were 200+ of some of the most insightful things I've read on FR in a long time.
Question for you: your stuff on the will to power I found quite compelling, and I think your argument for the vacuum left behind by the decline of the church is fairly water-tight, but I wonder what you think of the "will to power," if you will, of the earlier church?
And I'm not really trying to present an argument, but bring up a topic of conversation, to wit: though the Christian church was singular in the foundation of western morality (good & evil), there's no doubt that a great deal of violence was also done in the name of the church . . . often Christian on Christian violence. Because I'm part Acadian, I'm thinking, of course, of the diaspora in which protestant New Englanders used religion as an excuse to commit a version of genocide (albeit a "light" version of genocide, if there is such a thing) on the Acadians because, nominally, they were Catholic; although what they really had in mind was controlling the land that was then the breadbasket of North America.
Seems to me the "will to power" can exist in any institutional schema designed to govern, direct, or control the mind and the body of man, even in such a noble and august institution of a church. And while we conservatives are quick to point out the flaws of the institutions we look upon with a jaundiced eye - and rightly so, of course - we have to be careful to be fair across the board.
In any event, just a thought. Thanks again for the excellent piece, and the very best to you and yours.
Nice piece. I miss this type of writing.
Part of the answer lies here: Don't Converge the Streams. The essence of the idea is that modern times saw the convergence of some uniquely toxic ideas and memes. Taken together, that convergence gave those who who are driven by the will to power the environment (in all respects), the ideas and the means to embark on the road to slaughter, ruin and atrocity - and I say that it is slaughter, ruin and atrocity for its own sake - beyond anything the world had seen. And, it continues unabated to this day. Somewhere, everywhere.
That's only part of the answer. Power's tough for some to resist. The power to harm others without consequence is more intoxicating than any drug to a particularly evil subset of humanity. The are other convergent factors that have combined to make modernity, for all of our technology and vaunted sophistication, one of the most barbaric episodes in human history. Consider Quigley's Pakistani-Peruvian Axis in the light of those convergent factors. I'm exploring another 'axis' - what I'm calling for now, the Scandinavian-Slavic axis. Loosely rendered, the Scandinavian-Slavic axis is composed of he following elements. First, the two-class warrior culture of the Vikings, who dominated far more of the post-Roman world than most people realize. The Vikings eventually came to conquer and to dominate the pastoral Slavs with their two-class (conqueror and conquered) militaristic culture. The combined nascent culture greatly admired and were dazzled by the power and the relative prosperity of the extant Byzantine culture, who in turn got their notions of totalitarianism from the old Roman Empire.
Byzantine Christianity also took a very different path with respect to its outlook - amounting to a Platonic view of Man and his place in the universe vs the more Aristotelian view.
The upshot is that the Western Christian outlook - so eloquently summarized by Quigley - never took hold in that part of the world. The outlook that eventually developed was totalitarian in the sense that the state essentially owned its subjects, nihilist in the sense that the world was viewed as an un-knowable and corrupt place and that death was the only respite from an evil existence, and that the core essence of Teutonic tribalism in all of its arrogance, savagery and lack of regard for human life never went away - it merely submerged itself in Teutonic sensibility until it was awakened by the monsters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beaten into submission in WW II, it still exists today.
Also recall that the Byzantine Empire eventually fell to one just as cruel and sadistic in its outlook (if not more so) - Islam.
That severing of the Byzantine connection left us with what I’m calling the Scandinavian-Slavic axis. It’s funny, isn't it, what happens to your outlook when you start looking at human history in terms of culture and ideas AND events rather than the conventional “one damn thing after another” event-only approach. Because “one damn thing after another” - a series of empty correlations - is all one can come up with absent an acknowledgement of the roles of culture and outlook - as embodied by those two great currents of human culture, custom and outlook.
Against those currents, we here in America stand very much alone.
BTW, a tip of the hat to fellow Acadian. I’m a Millet on my mom’s side, she born in Baton Rouge, LA. Lived in New Orleans until I was 9 years old. Still remember the old street cars and the flooded streets in hurricane season.
Hey, Nita - long time no see. Hope you’re doing OK.
Regards...
Excellent thoughts, well-presented. Please do add me to any list you might have so I can be notified when your book comes out. I'd love to read it.
Our dit name is Poitiers: generation upon generation upon generation of small-time farmers, laborers, and people of no historical consequence whatsoever . . . but people who lived in the grand Acadian tradition of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Our USA branch started in the 1920s.
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