Quotes & Notes

All despotisms have an uncanny and superior intuition for that which maintains human independence and dignity, and it is curious to see our radicals pontificating just like our Prince-President. It is equally strange to observe realistic teaching everywhere serving to choke under a compilation of “facts” the freedom to examine applied to moral problems. Materialism is the auxiliary doctrine of every tyranny, be it that of a single man or of the masses. To crush the spiritual, moral, general human being, if I may say so, by turning him into a specialist; to create no longer complete human beings, but wheels of the great social machinery; to give them not conscience but society as a centre, to make the soul subservient to material ends, to depersonalize man—that is the dominant tendency of our epoch. Moral atomism and social unity, substitution of the laws of moral nature (persuasion, constancy, faith); equality, the principle of mediocrity, becoming a dogma; unity through uniformity, numbers becoming “reason”; always quantity instead of quality; a negative liberty which has no internal laws, and finds its limitation only in brute force.

The final general result of the dissolution of spiritual power is the establishment of that type of modern autocracy which has no exact counterpart in history and which, in the absence of a better label, one might call ministerialism or administrative despotism. Its basic character is the centralization of power extended more and more beyond all reasonable limits. Its general medium of action is systematized corruption.