I have never met a virtuous man. I have met an abundance of men of great conceit who mourned the absence of virtue in the world.
The logical end product of any ideology is totalitarianism.
Nobody ever believed in God, not one. If they did, they would trust him. But all the frantic effort to protect themselves, the church and society as a whole reveals the hollowness of their faith, their dependency on the very mundane instruments of rhetoric, legislation and force.
When it comes to authoritarians, they are possessed by a perverse spirit. You cannot just comply with them to stay safe. They are perpetually discontented, offended by the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and not at rest until they can somehow ensure you do not even harbor a seditious thought.
Political science is a science, albeit not a hard science. There are hard facts, there are hard political imperatives. Unfortunately, it is a science everybody has some sort of popular opinion about. Whenever I talk to Westerners, who have that unwavering, almost fanatical belief in the Western project to remodel the world in its own image, I feel like those evolutionary biologists who are forced to butt heads with creationists from time to time. It's the same frustration.
Under American leadership humans revered the bold and the brutish, the vain and the impudent. People scorned intellect and refinement, mocked the arts and distrusted classical education. It was vulgarity as a lifestyle, as an art form and a political system.
All peaceful revolutions rode on the back of violent protests.
I know of no more outrageous lie than the manipulative statement that states, If you feed the starving, they will become dependent and unable to learn to provide for themselves
"There is not, nor has there been, a philosophical movement to fundamentally question all assumptions about reality as the feminism of the 20th Century."
We are only in the early stages of discovering the danger of fascism in its multitude of forms and the vast potential for horrifying totalitarian oppression latent in human culture and amplified through technological means. Barbarism will prevail alongside humanism in the 21st century, and totalitarian ideologies of the most brutal kind compete for power with just and egalitarian principles. Atrocities will take new horrifying shapes. Abuse of power will become the overarching cultural challenge.
Having one good eye in the land of the blind may qualify you to be king, but seeing on both eyes in the land of one eyed midgets puts you at risk of being lynched.
Liberal democracy is more convenient to its citizens; that is its essential virtue.
The satiety of modern man is superfluous, its joys short-lived, its achievements illusory. Modern man has not conquered life. In the total sum of events on Earth random and horrifying death is more real than prosperity and peace. What the wealthy have done is to create protected islands of affluence, from which they can watch the rest of the world drown in decay and spin into destruction.
Radicals don't like men of premeditation and strategy. It keeps their movements safer from usurpery, but also hampers their effectiveness.
If you really care about human beings, don't tell people how to organize their societies. They will take what you wrote or said and use it to justify cruelty.
Most people would say that my view of our culture is too pessimistic. I don't need to bother defending my view. After all, every scheduled day is a reminder they are merely servants to a machinery.
It is bizarre how companies glorify their Corporate Social Responsibility in a day and age, where most cannot even take responsibility for the life and well-being of their own employees. The About pages should rightly say: Our goal is to make money any way we can. Our mission is to make people contribute to our goal. Our vision is a world in which all customers willingly embraces this mission.
Liberalism without forethought is its own worst enemy and the engine driving the ever threatening comeback of traditionalist sentiments.