Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

(Who directed me to look at Don Calcho’s aphorisms?)

Monarchs, in almost every dynasty, have been so mediocre that they look like presidents.

A bureaucracy ultimately always ends up costing the people more than an upper class.

The so-called prejudices of the upper classes tend to consist of accumulated experiences.

A noble society is one where obeying and exercising authority are ethical behaviors, and not mere practical necessities.

The golden rule of politics is to make only minimal changes and to make them as slowly as possible.

History clearly demonstrates that governing is a task that exceeds man’s ability.

In addition to civilized societies and semi-civilized societies, there are pseudo-civilized societies.

The modern metropolis is not a city; it is a disease.

Man’s full depravity does not become clear except in great urban agglomerations.

The majority of new customs are old behaviors that western civilization had shamefacedly confined to its lower-class neighborhoods.

The modern world resulted from the confluence of three independent causal series: the demographic expansion, democratic propaganda, the industrial revolution.

The reactionary’s ideal is not a paradisiacal society. It is a society similar to the society that existed in the peaceful intervals of the old European society, of Alteuropa, before the demographic, industrial, and democratic catastrophe.

The progressive Christian’s error lies in believing that Christianity’s perennial polemic against the rich is an implicit defense of socialist programs.

Envy tends to be the true force behind moral indignation.

Envy differs from the other vices by the ease with which it disguises itself as a virtue.

Educating the individual consists in teaching him to distrust the ideas that occur to him.

Unjust inequality is not remedied by equality, but by just inequality.

Society until yesterday had notables; today it only has celebrities.

The modern clergy, in order to save the institution, try to rid themselves of the message.

Religion is socially effective not when it adopts socio-political solutions, but when it succeeds in having society be spontaneously influenced by purely religious attitudes. (CD: Poorly stated in my opinion, but an important insight, is that myth and ritual must inspire moral action, not provide a means of deciding which actions are most moral.)

The greater part of an age’s political ideas depends on the state of military technology

Marxism and psychoanalysis have been the two traps of the modern intelligence.