"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy his own heart?"
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn †
The Gulag Achipelago
Motto
In our days, when the monstrous state of confusion that has engulfed humankind seems to have thrown individuals and societies in complete disarray, one feels almost embarrassed to bring into discussion lofty spiritual matters which may be regarded as inconsequential and naïvely idealistic compared to the grave human problems that our terrestrial existence raises every day. Two thousand years ago, the Bible foretold these circumstances for which René Guénon provided a more recent account: “... the inferior judges the superior, ignorance sets bounds to wisdom, error prevails over truth, the human is substituted for the divine, Earth has priority over Heaven, the individual sets the measure for all things and claims to dictate to the Universe laws drawn entirely from his relative and fallible reason (from “Individualism”, in “The Crisis of Modern World”).
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Politics
As far as the opposition, politicians feel compelled in principle to contradict everything that comes from that side, no matter how reasonable it may be. After all, the total amount of stupidity and wickedness in the political dialogue needs to be kept constant at all times.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Moral Sense
All men have the sense of evil, at least subjectively — that is insofar as they suffer from its effects — the majority of men have the sense of good, either subjectively or objectively, the latter being commensurate with moral character; furthermore, there are men who do not have the sense of evil — this is the quality of being “poor in spirit” or the naiveté that the Gospels mention, finally, in our times, more and more men mistake evil for good and this is a sin to which ignorance may or may not provide extenuating circumstances.
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