Tea at Trianon: So Easy to Trick

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

Thursday, October 29, 2020

So Easy to Trick

From Circe Institute:

It is characteristic of us as fallen humans to want to dodge responsibility and to shift blame to others while preventing clarity from approaching our minds. We are most effective at this when we rob language of its meaning or confuse it. Consequently, in ages when Human-diabolical rhetoric is ascendant, language loses its integrity and power to reveal and becomes a tool for manipulation and control. It breaks down souls and societies and it doesn't take very long to do so.

Why then are we more easy to fool than to deliver from a folly?

I contend that it is quite simple: we are not created to be lied to.

We are created to hear the word of God, receive it, and do it.

But now that we are broken and we don't have ears to hear, we have to practice a form of rhetoric or reasoning that we never should have had to use: we need to learn to evaluate the truthfulness of something we hear.

Because it is so hard to do so, we usually begin by determining whether we trust the person speaking to us. Unfortunately, we usually trust him more for saying what we want him to say than for speaking truth.

The application is perhaps surprising: we have to change the perspective. Instead of asking who can be trusted, we must first make ourselves trustworthy. I don't think there is any other way to learn how lies work. The person who has removed lies from his soul and who wants only to walk in and live by the light of truth is the only person who can actually see reality and identify when somebody else is lying to him. (Read more.)