John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

Alpha Moms

These sorts of people really horrify me: they are our nation’s our internal terrorists, wiping all that is best in our lives mercilessly and relentlessly because they are utterly sure of the righteousness of their beliefs.

Truly, all goodness demands that one be able to stop, clear one’s head of one’s thoughts and reconsider things from first principles. Such singleminded people as these women go far in this world because they never pause to reconsider anything and never doubt: such fanaticism is a very productive habit and its primary product is a dull, arrogant, ugly stupidity — with a slight admixture of inescapable misery. The horrors of consumerism are to be blamed upon such women as these, those monsters who everyone envies and yet admires.

And once again, the antidote to America’s horrors would be simply to appreciate the words of the most neglected part of that Bible Americans profess so much love for: Ecclesiastes.

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.¹

1. The Holy Bible : King James Version : Ecclesiastes : I, 14↩

Democracy, n: The recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.¹

If we take this as a favorable statement about democracy, it is easy to see why a weighted democracy in which the power of one’s vote is scaled in correlation with objective measures of one’s ability to think clearly such as IQ would be better: quite simply, one has the recurrent suspicion that the top ten percent of the people are right more than ninety percent of the time.

In America, one only needs to consider statistics about the religious beliefs of the National Academy of Sciences versus the religious beliefs of the population at large to be convinced that this suspicion is justified.

1. E. B. White↩

Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.¹

Everything is better when one has Ambrose Bierce at hand.

1. Ambrose Bierce : The Devil’s Dictionary↩

What is a man? An animal that breaks under the weight of temptation and wonder, then, having broken once, breaks again under the weight of a guilt he cannot bear, the burden of an atonement he cannot make. And so he finds a way to find good in his crimes, to deny their senselessness, their pointlessness — all to escape from the weight of his own conscience. And thus man is the only animal who has invented divine Providence, fatalism born of man’s great fragility. And he ultimately manages to stifle, strangle and finally slaughter his own conscience.

The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies upon before us, let’s not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let’s not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we’ve seen without changing one word. When that’s done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That’s work enough for a lifetime.¹

Over and over again for the last four weeks, I’ve thought that this ought to be my motto.

1. Louis-Ferdinand Céline : Journey To The End Of The Night : Third Section↩

A sentence, if possessed of any truth, is equally true when the word “ordinary” has been consistently substituted for the word “mediocre”. Whenever this does not work out, someone has attempted to disguise bland averageness using the euphemism “ordinary”.

It’s easy wanting something more.¹

So it is and so we suffer: everyone wants something more and so few want to be something more.

1. Life In Your Way : Waking Giants : Threads Of Sincerity↩

Americans compensate for being undersensual by being oversexual.

Religion is driven almost entirely by two forces: man’s profound need to feel guilty and his often equal need to find others guilty.

With words like fatherland and purity we scrub the blood of dead men off of our hands.