Kindle Notes & Highlights
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September 26 - September 26, 2017
if freedom is “deprived of its moral soul, if it is detached from the past and from its venerable tradition, if the continuous creation of new forms that it demands is deprived of the objective value of such creation” then liberalism is replaced by “activist libertarianism.”
sexual liberation is not desired per se but rather as a tool to break down the family.
One of the necessary features of totalitarianism is the persecution of all transcendent religions, because they propose an ideal of life that cannot be reconciled with ethical immanentism.
the real principle of utopian thought is not equality but rather “everything to all,” which implies the unstated but real presupposition that individual consciousness should be absorbed into a collective consciousness.
the two cannot be separated.
Another recognition of link between death & sex! Add to piece on this topic
end up making Christianity atheistic instead of making Marxism Christian
the essence of scientism is hatred for religious transcendence.26
at the political level this implies the negation of the very idea of Europe, since this idea is founded on the tradition of the Logos. It is pointless to talk about European unity once the perception of Europe as a moral territory has been lost and we can talk only of a unified “European market.”
the dangers of the permissive society cannot be overcome by political means alone. A religious reawakening is needed, because religion, country, and family are supreme ideals and not practical instruments.
the new Catholic Modernism: it wants to replace the agreement between Christianity and classical metaphysics with an agreement between Christianity and the philosophy of the primacy of action, which is intrinsically atheistic.
austerity and the severity of the revolutionary, which is literally a secularization of Puritanism.
because it depends on Fascism in the sense that it wants to be its radical antithesis, liberal-socialism must downplay the fact that Fascism was a historical phenomenon, and turn it into some sort of meta-historical category (the principle of radical barbarism),
Today the greatest threat to intelligence is posed by the inflation of printed materials.
without puritans there would be no pornographers;
the abolition of every meta-empirical order of truth requires that the family be dissolved.
the domain of free sexuality is the pure present, and this brings us back to the sub-human level, to animalism
“the Grand Inquisitor, so beautifully portrayed by Dostoevsky, is no longer a religious fanatic, but a scientist who has exclusive possession of the truth, in front of whom men must kneel in order to be no longer slaves to error.”12
Anybody who says “I am still attached to a certain type of traditional morality” may expect to be excused because it is just an affirmation of fact. But woe to him if he claims that this fact should be recognized as a value!
The demonic always creeps in by creating an opposition between certain truths and virtues that, when they are separated, become errors. In the case at hand, charity vs respect for the objective order of being.
The age-old enemy that today must be dispatched by the fullness of the Copernican Revolution is the Christian system which, supposedly, came together around the year 1000 “when the surviving elements of the Greek and Latin magisterium, of the Celtic and Frankish traditions, of the contributions by the Arabs and the Jews in the West, of the reflection of the doctors of the early Church and of the heretics of the first centuries and of an exoteric initiation that dates back to a time before the beginning of history, all fused together in an alloy so malleable that St Thomas Aquinas, working on
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“To bring forever to ruin the abominable Christian notion of sin, of original fall, of redeeming love, to replace them without hesitation with the idea of the divine union of man and woman… Morality based on the exaltation of pleasure will, sooner or later, wipe away the vile morality of suffering and resignation, preserved by forms of social imperialism and by the Church… The tyranny of man… must be replaced… by the reign of the woman.”25
The sexual revolution is indeed the point of arrival of “scientism.”
back then, morality tended to be identified with anti-Fascism, as if all evils had condensed in Fascism, and especially in Nazism.
the sexual revolution can agree very easily with the ideas of the theorists of the affluent society.
there is continuity in the history of radicalism, from anti-clericalism to anti-Christianity.
two souls live together within Social Democracy, one moralistic-Kantian and the other scientistic-positivistic. When Kantian morality went out of fashion, especially in its form as autonomous morality, which was dear to many Social Democratic intellectuals, it was unavoidable that scientism would prevail.
the decisive battle against Christianity could be fought only at the level of the sexual revolution.
the campaign of de-Christianization through eroticism is the more powerful the more it relies on feminine irreligion, and is the best way to produce it.
the sexual revolution is taking place not because today’s young people are “empty,” but on the contrary because they are “full” of the ideological themes that I have described.
it was Christianity that separated religion from eroticism, which, not by chance, comes back punctually in all forms of heresy. Today is the time when all heresies seem to have gathered together.
totalitarianism, considered in the aspect that makes it a new phenomenon irreducible to past forms of tyranny, is born precisely from the corruption of democracy, i.e., from the concessions that democracies make, because of a false idea of freedom, to those who manipulate the irrational.
(Forgive me for using these worn-out expressions. Progressivism is not accompanied by enrichment of language but by its banalization and, when it tries to be original, by its decomposition.)
the confusion between authority and power arises whenever the idea of authority is not linked to the metaphysics of the primacy of being over becoming and, as a consequence, the super-human foundation of authority is not taken into account.
he is the philosopher of a Restoration, without any trace of “reaction” in the sense of idolizing a past historical order.
The affirmation of the super-human is what frees man from dependence on other men.
the freedom of what is specifically human, the rational component, requires the subordination of instinctual freedom.
In this way, values are not respected – even if they are said to be supreme – inasmuch as they are considered only from the perspective of their civilizing function.
in the philosophy of the primacy of being, authority is the foundation of power, whereas in the philosophy of the primacy of becoming power absorbs authority within itself,
Because of pietas, Roman political thought was able to converge with Greek philosophical thought.
When Simone Weil speaks of the Romans as the “Nazis of antiquity,”21 she is certainly wrong from the historical point of view. But she is correct in interpreting Nazism as a sort of desacralized analogue of the Roman world view.
the eclipse of authority presents itself as the true result of the World War
We are not facing a theoretical proof of the non-existence of God, but an operation that leads to a moral prohibition to ask the question about God.
Therefore some scholars, above all Thomists,28 were correct when they emphasized the link between the Marxist option and Lutheran theology.
revolutionary atheism is the endpoint of a process that begins when in God the idea of power replaces the idea of authority
the progressive-Enlightened mentality faces insurmountable difficulties as soon as it tries to explain the phenomenon of totalitarianism (which has not disappeared at all; it is its nature to take new and previously unpredictable forms), in which the negation of authority and the negation of freedom go hand in hand. These difficulties, I believe, are due to the fact that totalitarianism represents the greatest expansion of power in conjunction with the greatest rejection of authority:
Between theocracy and totalitarianism there is the most radical possible opposition, like that between affirming that truth is absolute and denying it.
the crisis of authority does not undermine only religious-transcendent thought. It calls into question also the hopes of secular thought in the tradition of the Enlightenment, by raising a question that encapsulates why Nietzsche is still relevant today: whether nihilism might be the endpoint of the ascending line of the Western process of liberation.
The eclipse of the idea of authority casts doubt on the two fundamental categories of the philosophy of the Enlightenment: modernity and progress.
The West is the epicentre of the crisis of authority.
The present situation is characterized by the replacement of the idea of Europe by the idea of the West
