Posted on by Jeff Nyquist

Olavo’s Aristotle: Plus Interview with Man in America

People get into this condition [i.e., ignorance] through their own fault, by the slackness of their lives; i.e., they make themselves unjust or licentious by behaving dishonestly or spending their time in drinking and other forms of dissipation; for in every sphere of conduct people develop qualities corresponding to the activities they pursue.”

Aristotle [i]

Plato and Aristotle were philosophers of Classical antiquity. Those who can read these ancient philosophers in the original Greek are better able to understand the fundamentals of art and science. To understand Plato and Aristotle is to hold a decisive intellectual advantage in all forms of discourse. The value of the ancients is hard to explain to the desiccated modern mind – which is often unable to place facts in their proper context. Modern life is very busy, very distracted. Modern man is trapped in the news cycle, unable to synthesize or unify his knowledge. The ancient science of seeing, weighing, and ordering has largely been lost to us. A modern thinker with access to the ancients, however, is like a man looking down from the top of a mountain. Those who know nothing of the ancients, having journalistic predilections, are only looking down from the foothills. It never occurs to them that there is a mountain to climb. Unlike his journalistic critics, Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho is someone who climbed that mountain.  

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Posted on by Jeff Nyquist

Our Schizoid Ochlocracy

The nominalism of a dogma that has separated from experience … has become the dominant form of the West because it was, beginning with the eighteenth century, adopted as the intellectual form of ideologizing.

Eric Voegelin [i]

The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn….

Richard Weaver [ii]

Psychopathic individuals generally stay away from social organizations characterized by reason and ethical discipline.”

Andrew M. Lobaczewski

To paraphrase Richard Weaver, this is another essay about the dissolution of the West. It is an account of dissolution not based on analogy but on psychiatry and philosophy. It argues that we have given in to the defective thinking of defective people in an Age of Ideology; that is, an age of political lying. The result is an ochlocracy[iii] cut into two warring halves.[iv] 

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Posted on by Jeff Nyquist

Esoteric Leninism

…the USSR was designed and developed as (1) a resource base for the world revolution and (2) its military mobilization apparatus. And, if we consider its subsequent history on the basis of these goals and objectives, then all the actions of the Soviet authorities in the 1920s-50s, which sometimes seem insane, acquire an exhaustive logical explanation….

Dmitri Savvin [i]

Marxism-Leninism in Russia can best be understood as having an exoteric and esoteric side. The exoteric Marxism-Leninism was for export. The esoteric was what the leaders of the regime actually thought and how they operated. [2] Because the regime did not work so well in economic terms, and they were falling behind in technology, they initiated a New Economic Policy under Gorbachev along the lines set down by Lenin in 1922. They were compelled, for various practical reasons, to give up their exoteric Marxism-Leninism in 1991. Only a stupid minority believed that nonsense anyway, and what good are stupid people? Of course, the soft West was full of people who were willing to believe in that sort of thing. After all, they had never lived under it. And Moscow was sure to take advantage of them as before. By promoting feminism and abortion, to kill population growth, economic arguments could be made for importing Muslims and Africans to Europe. This would disorganize the West and bring ruinous consequences in the long term. Add global warming “science,” and naïve policies regarding China, and the West would be doomed to its own existential crisis. At the same time, the special services’  infiltration of Europe and America would continue at an accelerated pace.

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