Politics
Out of context: Reply #10905
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"In America, the process, rather than expressing the vigour of a people which has remained in the pre-civilised state, follows an inflexible determinism according to which man, as he closes his mind to all forms of spirituality and gives himself over to the will of temporal things, ceases by this very act to belong to himself, and becomes a subordinate part of an irrational collective authority which he can no longer control. America, by the sanctification of the temporal and the secularisation of the sacred started by the Protestant heresy, has arrived at this exact point. By carrying through with thoroughness the ideal of the materialistic conquest of the world which Europe had first proposed, it has ended up - almost without realising it - with the materialisation in practice of every sense of power, sanity, activity and personality, thus building an even more dreadful form of barbarism. Here asceticism is considered a waste of time, and the ascetic an anachronistic parasite 'useless to society' ; the Warrior is considered a dangerous fanatic, whom opportune humanitarian-pacifist prophylaxes should eliminate, and replace, perhaps, with the boxer. The perfect type, the spiritual champion, is instead the 'man who works, who produces', and every form of activity, even spiritual, is assessed only in terms of 'work', 'productive work', 'social service' : nothing could show more typically that at the top of such a society is precisely the representative type of the last of the ancient classes, that of the slaves who work. "