John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

Human history is the enragingly repetitive story of inefficacious good intentions.

Humanity is the shadow of a parody of its ideals, a clumsily written, derisory attempt at a mockery of its dreams.

Rather than feel that he is a disappointment, a man tends rather to lower his standards to the point at which he can meet them reliably.

This is the problem with our democratic society: our cultural standards are the product of the most mediocre members of our society, rather than a product of our aristocracy.

Of course, there is also the inverse problem: the perpetuation, based on the myth of equality, of the mistaken belief that all men can achieve great things if only they work hard enough — and the despair this plunges our society’s Willy Lomans into when they, predictably, fail.

Both unhealthy dynamics modify our values over the course of time in America.

While earlier generations of Europeans thought that self-love was the root of all evil, Americans today assume that the path to goodness begins with learning to love oneself. The truth is rather that one needs to learn to distrust oneself.

The most important thing to me in a woman is that she be someone I can argue with. I do not mean someone I will fight with — I have no tolerance for fighting –, but someone that I can debate with rationally and yet also intensely passionately. Four things are required for this: she must be intelligent enough to be able to not only keep up with my points, but find fault with them; she must be passionate enough to not relent when I keep pushing harder and harder; she must have enough self-respect to not concede to me because she thinks that I know better; and she must be someone whose behavior merits my respect such that the noble words coming out of her mouth do not sound hollow and self-indulgent to me. Give me these four things in any woman that I do not find ugly and I will fall in love. Take away even one from a person I love and my love dies.

Astoundingly, I think there may be nothing more to be said on the topic than this one paragraph.

“Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you — that is what has distressed me.” –¹

1. Friedrich Nietzsche : Beyond Good And Evil : Part IV : Section 183↩

My progressive disillusionment with liberal politics summed up:

Los “ideales” son síntoma de narcicismo larvado. La patología del egoísmo reserva un capítulo al “idealista”.

Sólo la persona concreta y carnal que amamos, es más que nuestro yo disfrazado.¹

1. Nicolás Gómez Dávila↩

No hay victoria espiritual que no sea necesario ganar cada día nuevamente¹

We can never fully rest and we will never truly succeed, yet knowing all this we press on.

1. Nicolás Gómez Dávila↩

Liberal, n. A man who laments the absence of compassion and sense of duty to the lower classes on the part of the upper classes, but fails to show even basic decency towards his friends, family and the others he comes across in his personal life; a man who feels deep compassion for those he does not know, but little sympathy for those he does; a man who deifies the abstract idea of morality, but shows little interest in its practical application; a Tartuffe.

Burguesía es todo conjunto de individuos inconformes con lo que tienen y satisfechos de lo que son.¹

If I had to choose a single passage to describe all that I felt about the world, I think I might choose this one.

1. Nicolás Gómez Dávila↩