Tea at Trianon: A Crisis of Devotion

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, December 21, 2015

A Crisis of Devotion

From Council of European Canadians:

The ideal is no longer the forefather but rather the lone innovator. Although living entirely as an individual, his place is expendable within the greater structure of society. There is no room for the heroic, any other person can consume as well as the other. He has ultimately lost his ability to identify himself when placed outside of the ancestral order and only fills the empty moulds destined for him by the market.

Society lies to him with promises of fulfilment that only serve to neutralize his potential. Even things that would benefit his wellbeing are repurposed towards vain pursuits. He no longer exercises to realize the full potential of his body but to accumulate false social attention. He only builds so he can sell. He is told to pursue knowledge for the sake of employment. And yet the world wonders why young European men drift astray; only to point blame on every other institution but itself.

To live in this society is to live by the rule of the Demiurge — it sets no God before itself and remains ignorant to the higher nature that fashioned it. Such is the young European male and his higher nature. He is taught only to confront his baseness and to stare into that abyss without ever looking up and seeing the evening sky — the sky that constantly calls upon him and pulls him up to reach it.

Society sets before him a phantasmagoria of delusions and tells him that they are worth striving for. The antihero is set as the ideal, the psychopath is to be admired and the effeminate is now the brave. The current way is schizophrenic in its deconstruction of an ordered system, evident in the postmodern manifestation of the arts. Combinations are made outside of their natural consequence and the multitude of meanings abstracted from meaningless forms send the interpreter on a neurotic quest towards nihilism and self-destruction. (Read more.)