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Dallas YIMBY Former USMC USNA Grad St. John’s College Grad Pod host: Combat & Classics

We must return once more to this subject, already touched upon in Chapter Three of Book Two1 since the moral elements are among the most important in war. They constitute the spirit that permeates war as a whole, and at an early stage they establish a close affinity with the will that moves and leads the whole mass of force, practically merging with it, since the will is itself a moral quantity. Unfortunately they will not yield to academic wisdom. They cannot be classified or counted. They have to be seen or felt. Clausewitz, On War
The total surrender of a distinct self is a prerequisite for the attainment of both unity and self-sacrifice; and there is probably no more direct way of realizing this surrender than by inculcating and extolling the habit of blind obedience. When Stalin forces scientists, writers and artists to crawl on their bellies and deny their individual intelligence, sense of beauty and moral sense, he is not indulging a sadistic impulse but is solemnizing, in a most impressive way, the supreme virtue of blind obedience. All mass movements rank obedience with the highest virtues and put it on a level with faith: “union of minds requires not only a perfect accord in the one Faith, but complete submission and obedience of will to the Church and the Roman Pontiff as to God Himself.”45 Obedience is not only the first law of God, but also the first tenet of a revolutionary party and of fervent nationalism. "The True Believer," Hoffer
Book cover of “you’re stepping on my cloak and dagger”
The Social Conquest of Earth Edward O. Wilson We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology
Photo cover of the book “the Nuremberg Trial”
The God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson About 1560 or 1570, Etienne de la Boetie, the friend of Montaigne, filled with despair by the Wars of Religion, wrote: "What think you of the dire fate that has brought us to birth in these times? and what are you resolved to do? For my own part, I see no other course than to emigrate, forsake my home and go wherever fortune bears me. Long now the wrath of the gods has warned me to flee—showing me those vast and open lands beyond the ocean. When, on the threshold of our century, a new world rose from the waves, the gods—we may well believe—destined it as a refuge where men shall till free fields under a fairer sky, while the cruel sword and shameful plague doom the ruin of Europe. Over there are fertile plains awaiting the plough, a land without bourne or master—it is there I will go.
But whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent. And that is precisely what modern subjects, in their will to empower themselves, do not do. Instead they “prattle on,” in the process becoming ever more desensitized to perception with the effect, albeit only dimly, of grief.
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly. There are natures, too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics. The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.
Everything that charmed me reminded me of someplace else, someplace where I could walk and talk, someplace where I was freer than I was at home, someplace where I could live without the stifling mask—made me homesick for a liberty I had never tasted here, and without which I could never live or work. In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest—and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle. No Name in the Street, James Baldwin
With Ivan, however, the tone changes. God, in His turn, is put on trial. If evil is essential to divine creation, then creation is unacceptable. Ivan will no longer have recourse to this mysterious God, but to a higher principle —namely, justice. He launches the essential undertaking of rebellion, which is that of replacing the reign of grace by the reign of justice. -The Rebel, Camus
Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor When the forlorn woods that lay all about me were no-man’s-land still, betyárs infested them: affable highwaymen and brigands who held travellers to ransom, drove away flocks and herds and levied tribute from noblemen islanded in their castles. It was a region of hazards, legends and fierce deeds.
The confident system of his youth – universal reform, universal changes, universal happiness and freedom – had ended in something very like universal tyranny and oppression. The ancient generations were not to be despised; and the seamen’s firm belief that Friday was unlucky was perhaps less foolish than the philosophe’s conviction that all the days of the week could be rendered happy by the application of an enlightened system of laws.
Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy. Everybody can see the joke that is lodged within this entry: The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right. Mortality, Hitchens
The total surrender of a distinct self is a prerequisite for the attainment of both unity and self-sacrifice; and there is probably no more direct way of realizing this surrender than by inculcating and extolling the habit of blind obedience. When Stalin forces scientists, writers and artists to crawl on their bellies and deny their individual intelligence, sense of beauty and moral sense, he is not indulging a sadistic impulse but is solemnizing, in a most impressive way, the supreme virtue of blind obedience. All mass movements rank obedience with the highest virtues and put it on a level with faith: “union of minds requires not only a perfect accord in the one Faith, but complete submission and obedience of will to the Church and the Roman Pontiff as to God Himself.”45 Obedience is not only the first law of God, but also the first tenet of a revolutionary party and of fervent nationalism.