**
Incurious, self-satisfied,
self-conceited, believing oneself to be great when downtrodden, loving of
equality as equality prevents excellence, and excellence breeds resentment in
those without it.
One looks to his superiors, with resentment and
wish of failure; one looks to his inferiors, with satisfaction and contempt.
From the superiors does he fashion his image, adopting the dress and manners
and etiqette; the superior in his excellence breeds resentment from the
mediocre, every day growing. The mediocre wants to be the superior, but deigns
it too much work; after all, duty calls, and the calls of the day are the
duties of the life of comfort.
The wretched desires prestige, and looks for inferiors over which to lord
himself, assuring himself that he is not as small as he assumes. Inferiority is
about honor, and honor is the rank of one in a society, for society's members
are unequal to one another. Those without honor are outside of society, and
society has no rank for them. They can be neither superior nor inferior to
anyone else.
Pride before the fall, and a haughty spirit
before the destruction. And after the fall, alas! The trauma, the anguish and
the loneliness; the realization, the guilt and the resolution, to stand up once
again and be counted before the other nations; the hatred of the old, a shrug
of shoulders and why-nots to try the new; it may work, it may fail, but what do
we have?
**
The joyous anger the miserable who wish that everyone around them succumb
to the lovely poison of misery; the determined frighten the helpless, because,
in their helplessness do they find their comfort in averting pain and fear; who
in helplessness shared by commonality with comrades, wish so desperately and so
alacrously to silence the roar, by terror or intimidation or mockery; finding
themselves in vain, they are humiliated, and resent deeply the man of sharp
determination; too cowardly to suffer the hammer of legal justice, they call
out to that one depraved man who will take care of this rabble-rouser, who
wishes to trample on their silent peace of misery, who has de-genified himself
from the brotherhood of misery, wishing instead to be free and preserving of
his dignity; screaming and wailing do they, in a scandalous outpouring of their
unrefined feelings, that this rabble-rouser should be put to death, for how
dare he!
Once the rabble-rouser gone, once his disciples
terrified and exiled, they can – in peace – live in denial of the bloodletting
future, whose portent leaves signs and omens seen only by the sharp of sight,
and whose arrival is like the gathering of a storm, not seen until either: it
is too obvious to deny, or until all has been said and done, after the corpses
have been cleared from the streets, after chests tightened from weeping and the
eyes dried of tears.
And so, people must change their ways, when
Nature comes back for a vengeance - after decades of withdrawal, after leaving
in liberty those slavish dolts who sought unnatural living – and strikes out
the unnatural and degenerate, leaving behind the one who found his place in her
violent rearrangements.
And so, before the fall, one must seek to land more gracefully, but only if
he knew how magnanimous the impact of the fall will be, and how quickly will
the cobwebs that held back the restless raptures of society's discontents be
blown away by the attrition of restlessness and rapture; those cobwebs of
security and order that reassure stubbornly, the weak and withdrawing tyrant,
and the disloyal wealthy. And soon will the tyrant flee, and soon will the
wealthy flee to their master's dens, and soon will the self-deceptive be robbed
of their comforting lies.
And so, unswerving dedication to truth,
abandoning falsehood once shown and abandoning the society that holds it;
appreciation of true beauty, and not the beauty of vulgarity; to set everything
in order, so that everything may be satisfied in its place, so that everything
may be reached in convenience; to administer justice, to give everyone his due,
to give the guilty a fair listen, to know the full guilt of the guilty, to
assume he is innocent until proven guilty, to arrive the innocence of the un-guilty,
to give everyone what he has earned and not to take it; is what makes a society
so glorious and so magnificent, that even the most bitter adversaries must pay
homage to it, as their due to their own dignity in the face of the wise, who
would otherwise deride them as bitter or pathetic.
TRUTH
BEAUTY
ORDER
JUSTICE
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