In truth a nation is never formed. …the nation is always either in the making, or in the unmaking. It is either winning adherents, or losing them, according as the State does or does not represent at a given time. a vital enterprise. Excerpt The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset…
The State begins when groups naturally divided find themselves obliged to live in common. This obligation is not of brute force, but implies an impelling purpose, a common task which is set before the dispersed groups. Before all the State is a plan of action and a program of collaboration. The men [and women]…
Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something, an enterprise glorious or humble, a destiny illustrious or trivial. …in these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths… All imperatives, all commands, are in a state of suspension. Given over…
…we are unable to have directly complete knowledge of reality, there is nothing for us but arbitrarily to construct a reality, to suppose that things are happening after a certain fashion. This provides us with an outline, a concept or framework of concepts. With this, as through a “sight,” we then look at the…
Today violence is the rhetoric of the period, the empty rhetorician has made it his own. When a reality of human existence has completed its historic course, has been shipwrecked and lies dead, the waves throw it up on the shores of rhetoric, where the corpse remains for a long time. Rhetoric is the…
In a right ordering of public affairs, the mass is that part which does not act of itself. Such is its mission. It has come into the world to be directed, influenced, represented, organized … It needs to submit its life to a higher court, formed of the superior minorities. …but without them, humanity…
This morning I was moved by the description in the New York Times of the hundreds of criminal prosecutions in the aftermath of the January 6 uprising at the Capitol in Washington. This from the Times: If someone is being criminally prosecuted, there’s often some dysfunction in their past. But I’ve been struck by…
Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. p. 880 To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for…
Saturday morning dawns, sunny and temperate — a perfect mid-summer day for the Midwest. There’s no possible summation of the state of things, — no matter the iphone news feed. The extremes attract our attention as the fight or flight trigger is deep, encoded, that instinct for survival yet necessary, even if I cannot…
…the individual finds himself already with a stock of ideas. He decides to content himself with them and to consider himself intellectually complete. As he feels the lack of nothing outside himself, he settles down definitely amid his mental furniture. Such is the mechanism of self-obliteration. The mass-man regards himself as perfect. …it never…
