Category: Quotes & Commentary

“The French Revolution is still with us in every way. Not only are its ideas ever-present, but there is much in its historic evolution that can teach us — in North America no less than in Europe. Its initial period began with the undermining of traditional values and ideas, coupled with the demand for moderate reforms. With Voltaire a whole series of scoffers, facile critics, and agnostics in the literal sense of the term made their appearance. They subverted religion, convictions, traditions, and the loyalties on which state and society rested. The process of decomposition and putrefaction always starts at the top — in the royal palace, the presidential mansion, among the intellectuals, the aristocracy, the wealthy, the clergy — and then gradually enmeshes the lower social layers. In this process it is interesting to notice how the high and mighty develop a sense of guilt and with it a readiness to abdicate, to yield to expropriation, to submit to the loss of privileges, in other words, to commit suicide politically and economically. For this masochist act, however, they are well prepared by the ideological propaganda coming from their own ranks…. The members of the nobility who took active part in the intellectual or political undermining of the ancien regime and then participated in the Revolution are very numerous, without their support the French Revolution is well-nigh unimaginable…. One is inevitably reminded of the fact that, statistically speaking, the natural death of states and nations as well as of classes and estates, is not murder but suicide. However, this act of suicide is usually preceded by a period of delusions and follies. Quen deus vult perdidi prius dementat.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Lefism — pg. 88

I would only add here that before political and economic suicide can be committed that theological suicide must first be committed, since politics and economics descends from Theology. I would also observe that when Leddihn speaks of “ideological propaganda,” as Christians we should understand that such ideological propaganda is but a form of theological propaganda.

Leddhin’s observation in this quote supports Christopher Lasch’s, inked 20 years after Leddihn, in his book, “Revolt of the Elites.” In that book Lasch lays the deterioration and decline of the West squarely at the feet of the cultural elite. Lasch cites chapter and verse on how the cultural elite had become the cultural despisers of Western tradition and values. Lasch contends that the overthrow of the West was not orchestrated by the masses, contra Ortega y Gasset’s, “Revolt of the Masses,” but that we have been damaged from within by our cultural gatekeepers.

Morris Berman’s book, “The Twilight of American Culture,” also factors into this theme. Berman, like both Lasch and Leddihn, sees the unraveling of American culture although Berman is inclined to lay the fault at the feet of mass-produced cutlure. Still, that mass-produced culture that Berman speaks of, I would contend, comes from those elites that Lasch excoriates and that Leddihn puts in the dock.

Our problem in the West today is that our best and brightest no longer believe in what made the West the West. Leddihn teaches us that the “Un-Westing” of the West began with the French Revolution and has continued unchecked as Biblical Christianity has lost its power to challenge the various incarnations of the French Revolution that have propelled its agenda of “anti-Reformation,” for each subsequent generation.

Berman, in his book mentioned above, believed it was too late for the West to recover.

I hope he was wrong. I fear he is right.

“Egalitarianism, as we have already intimated, cannot make much progress without the use of force: Perfect equality, naturally, is only possible in total slavery. Since nature (and naturalness, implying also freedom from artificial constraints) has no bias against even gross inequalities, force must be used to establish equality. Imagine the average class of students in a boarding school, endowed with the normal variety of talents, interests, and inclinations for hard work. The power and dictatorial principle of the school insists that all students of the class should score B’s in a given subject. This would mean that those who earned C, D, or E would be made to work harder, some so hard they would collapse. Then there would be the problem of the A students whom one would have to restrain, giving them intoxicating drinks or locking them up every day with copies of Playboy or The New Masses. The simplest way would probably be to hit them over the head. Force would have to be used, as Procrustes used it. But the use of force limits and in most cases destroys freedom.

A “free” landscape has hills and valleys. To make an ‘egalitarian’ landscape one would have to blow off the tops of mountains and fill the valleys with rubble. To get an even hedge, one has to clip it regularly. To equalize wealth one would have to pay ‘equal wages and salaries,’ or tax the surplus away — to the extent that those earning above the average would refuse additional work. Since these are usually gifted people with stamina and ideas, their refusal has a paralyzing effect on the common weal.

In other words there is a real antagonism, and incompatibility, a mutual exclusiveness between liberty and enforced equality.”

Leftism
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Leddihn brings out what we need to realize as a culture and that a social order must choose between Liberty and Equality because it can not have both. Liberty and equality are antithetical to one another. Equality requires standardization and so someone (an elite class) to be the standardizers. A social order, given over to equality, can not allow the individual the liberty to move beyond the expected standardization for such a move beyond the standardization as set by the egalitarians would threaten the egalitarian order.

Egalitarianism is often driven by envy and is embraced by many because of the promise that it holds out to people who, if the egalitarian social order is built, then they will no longer have any reason to have envy for the talents and skills of those whom are superior in giftedness in some area. It delivers people from the insecurity, accompanied by Liberty, that someone else might actually excel above and beyond them in some area. And so the plea for an egalitarian social order is supported and championed by those who, being envious of the gifted, and insecure over their real or perceived lack, believe that what they lack can be nullified by insuring that everyone else is required to share in their real or perceived lack since all are required to be equal.

Of course the cult of the equal, as it pertains to social orders, always means the least common denominator equality. In egalitarian orders, the equality does not lift the slightly talented and marginally gifted person up but instead pulls the significantly talented and the greatly gifted person down. A prime example of this is the “The No Child Left Behind” programs in the schools which leaves no Child behind at the cost of insuring that no Child excels. No Child is left behind because all children are left behind. This is what the cult of equality always yields.

I’ve just started Leddhin’s book. The insights here I’ve culled from the first few chapters as combined with what I learned from the book “Egalitarian Envy,” by de la Mora.

“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”

Opening Lines from Harrison Bergeron
|Short Story — Kurt Vonnegut