Irresponsibility

The enforced irresponsibility has itself become a factor in pathology, for a burden of responsibility is, after all, the best means of getting anyone to think straight.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Nature and Purpose

... a look at the nature of things is imperative, for our conception of metaphysical reality finally governs our conception of everything else, and, if we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our lives.  Indeed, the assertion of purpose in a world we felt to be purposeless would be a form of sentimentality.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Free and Equal

An American political writer of the last century, confronted with the statement that all men are created free and equal, asked whether it would not be more accurate to say that no man was ever created free and no two men ever created equal.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Of the Ox and the Lion

It is generally assumed that the erasing of all distinctions will usher in the reign of pure democracy.  But the inability of pure democracy to stand for something intelligible leaves it merely a verbal deception.  If it promises equality before the law, it does no more than empires and monarchies have done and cannot use this as a ground to assert superiority.  If it promises equality of condition, it promises injustice, because one law for the ox and the lion is tyranny.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

Temporally Temporary

The worship of comfort, then, is only another aspect of our decision to live wholly in this world.  Yet here man encounters an anomaly: the very policy of living wholly in this world, of having no traffic with that other world which cannot be "proved," turns one's attention wholly to the temporary and so actually impairs his effectiveness.

 Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Plato's Cave

Seen from another point of view, the "monopoly of mainstream media" is a translation into actuality of Plato's celebrated figure of the cave.  The defect of the prisoners, let us recall, is that they cannot perceive the truth.  The wall before them, on which the shadows play, is the screen on which press, motion picture, and radio project their account of life.  The chains which keep the prisoners from turning their heads are the physical monopoly which the engines of publicity naturally possess.  And is it not pathetically true that these victims, with their limited vision, are "in the habit of conferring honors among themselves to those who are the quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before and which followed after, and which were together"?

 Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Lessons

Yet, the painful lessons we would like to forget are precisely the ones which should be kept for reference.  Santayana has reminded us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and not without reason did Plato declare that a philosopher much have a good memory.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

Men at Work

An employer was recently heard to remark that we have plenty of persons today who can tell us why a machine will not work but none will tell us why men will not work.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Spoiled Child and Consumption

The spoiled child is simply one who has been allowed to believe that his consumptive faculty can prescribe the order of society.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

What the World Owes

If cities encourage man to believe that he is superior to the limitations of nature, science encourages him to believe that he is exempt from labor.  In effect, what modern man is being told is that the world owes him a living.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Entitlement

Demagogic leaders have told the common man that he is entitled to much more than he is getting; they have not told him the less pleasant truth that, unless there is to be expropriation ... the increase must come out of greater productivity.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

Threat to the Spoiled

[The castigation of profitable, hard workers] looks alarmingly like a dull hatred of every form of personal superiority.  The spoiled children perceive correctly that the superior person is certain, sooner or later, to demand superior things of them, and this interferes with consumption and, above all, with thoughtlessness.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Starvation

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation.

Source: Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Ch11 1936
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

On Sacredness

It is likely ... that human society cannot exist without some resource of sacredness.  Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

A Reminder for this Member of Bourgeois

The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetites.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Spirit of Reverence

Let parents, then, bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence

Source:  Plato, Laws Book V
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Whatever Happened to Voluntary Military Service?

The attempt of the United States to make military service attractive by offering high pay, free college education, and other benefits looks suspiciously like bribing the child with candy.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

On Time Preference

[The] point here is that no society is healthful which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

Justice

There is bitterness in the thought that there may be no hell; for ... if there is no hell, there is no justice.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

Realism, War and Justice

There is an unforgettable scene in Lincoln Steffens' Autobiography which tells of a proposal made by Clemenceau at the Versailles Peace Conference.  The astute Frenchman, having listened to much talk that this was a war to end war forever, asked Wilson, Lloyd George, and Orlando whether they were taking the idea seriously.  After obtaining assent from each of the somewhat nonplussed heads of state, Clemenceau proceeded to add up before them the cost.  The British would have to give up their colonial system; the Americans would have to get out of the Philippines, to keep their hands off Mexico; and on and on it went.  Clemenceau's colleagues soon made it plain that this was not at all what they had in mind, whereupon the French realist bluntly told them that they wanted not peace but war.  Such is the position of all who urge justice but really want, and actually choose, other things.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948