Tag: asceticism

4,386 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

4. The Ascetic Ideal

The third essay that makes up On the Genealogy of Morality is concerned with asceticism, as it has exhibited itself in religion and in philosophy. Nietzsche writes:

I can think of hardly anything that has sapped the health and racial strength of precisely the Europeans so destructively as [the ascetic ideal]; without any exaggeration we are entitled to call it the real catastrophe in the history of the health of Europeans. (more…)

3,604 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

1. Introduction: An Extremely Impious Book

Perplexed, as so many of us are, by the utter mindlessness and malevolence of today’s Leftists, I decided several years ago to undertake an ambitious project: developing a comprehensive theory of their psychology. I assembled an extensive reading list, including Dostoyevsky’s The Devils (which delighted me). When I reread Friedrich Nietzsche, however, I realized that I had almost nothing to add to what he had already said. (more…)

11,114 words

Mr. Reagan is not going to make it to the year 1987, I can tell you that much. Now you mark that down.

— Brother Stair, 1987

We don’t reckon time the same way, do we, Clarice?

— Silence of the Lambs

(more…)

From a manuscript of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.

1,638 words

I have never been to prison and I hope I never go to prison. In a perfect world, obeying the laws and refraining from illegal activity would be enough to guarantee a life without imprisonment. Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world. We are living in a world where propaganda, intimidation, and violence against white people is being promoted and encouraged. Yet when white people defend themselves, we are the ones who get arrested and sent to prison. For fear of their safety, many white people feel like prisoners (more…)

1,297 words

1. Steele Brand, Killing for the Republic: Citizen-Soldiers and the Roman Way of War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) 

This is an excellent work of military history that examines the tradition of civic militarism in the Roman Republic. Brand combines detailed analyses of battles with insights about Roman culture and society. His analysis of the Battle of Sentinum (295 BC), for instance, includes diagrams of battle formations as well as a discussion of the history of the devotio, (more…)

4,787 words

Milo Yiannopoulos recently interviewed Nick Fuentes because of his movement’s demolition of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA. Milo told Fuentes that “the purpose of this interview is to let you speak in your own words about what you in fact do believe,” but Milo must have spoken for at least five minutes to every 30 seconds Fuentes was allotted – (more…)

2,285 words

I’ve mentioned before on this site and elsewhere that being part of the Dissident Right is an initiatory experience, as far as I’m concerned. (more…)

2,382 words

Asceticism often has a bad reputation in vitalist circles. The idea of the sexless, passionless, passive, world-rejecting monk seems self-evidently maladaptive, an evolutionary dead end, as Nietzsche and Savitri Devi surmised. Yet the fact is that monks have often been warriors, and the monarchs of ascetic religions, such as Christianity and Buddhism, have often been great conquerors. (more…)

Bust of Epicurus

1,291 words

Trans. Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note:

The following is drawn from Pierre Hadot, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique ? (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 191-96. Some non-English secondary sources have been removed from Hadot’s footnotes. The title is editorial.

To achieve the healing of the soul and a life in accord with the fundamental [Epicurean] choice, it is not enough to have learned the Epicurean philosophical discourse. (more…)

Max Weber

2,008 words

Whites will become a minority within a few decades in all their main homelands. The question is no longer how to prevent becoming a minority but how to survive in order to regain majority status.

A few months ago I noted that easy going comfort is the main factor behind the decline of masculinity in the West and that only an atmosphere of conflict and hardship in childhood will strengthen Westerners to fight against the occupation of their lands. (more…)

E. R. Eddison, 1922

2,810 words

Part 3 of 4 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

E. R. Eddison
The Worm Ouroboros
Charleston, S.C.: BiblioBazaar, 2008

The blood which binds one to one’s family and to one’s people is treated throughout The Worm Ouroboros as one of the strongest and least questionable motivators of human action, and proves to be finally decisive in all the characters to whom we are presented. (more…)

3,870 words

Sayings of the Buddha
Rupert Gethin, translator
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008

Anyone who wishes to promote certain values is faced with the challenge of how to maintain those values over time: throughout one’s life, from one generation to the next, and across the centuries. A people’s adherence to values is likely to wane over time, overcome by lower drives, such as the desires for material comfort and personal self-indulgence. (more…)