Friday, October 13, 2017

‘Twas ever thus …

 Isaiah's Job | Mises Institute.

As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, laboring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
Albert Jay Nock was born on this date in 1870.

4 comments:

  1. That has a distinctly Nockian sound, and I find it hard to find more than an esthetic judgment in Nock's distinctions.

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  2. I think our current political class fits his description perfectly. Our academic class as well. Of course, I am of the Nockian persuasion.

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  3. I ask, What has Theleme to do with Jerusalem? For Nock certainly speaks well of Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme, and one infers that he would have found it more congenial than Clairvaux or La Trappe.

    Nock's memoirs imply a preference for conducting one's adulteries with women advanced enough not to pitch a fit when the temperature of the relationship changes. That I can understand, and if he had chosen, like Stendhal, to speak of the happy few, well and good. But to bring Isaiah and the remnants of Israel into the discussion seems to me a failure at least of taste.

    (And I promise that this is the last time I will post a comment about Nock here.)

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  4. I don't recall anything about adulteries in Nock's memoirs. But I haven't read them in about 50 years. As for Theleme, its motto was "Do as you will." I presume that Rabelais, who was a priest, knew the distinction between that (which involves reflection) and doing as you like (which is just following your impulses). I guess Nock does rub some people the wrong. Which is fine. I don't think he'd object.

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