Daniel Schwindt > Quotes

“When we refer to Liberalism, then, we must be understood as referring to the continuous and wide-ranging tradition of the Enlightenment, a tradition which has gone to form the political and social consensus of the modern world, for there is no developed nation that is not a child of this original Liberalism. It informs and dictates the positions and goals of both the American Right and the American Left. If the former seems by its rhetoric to despise it, we must simply remember Davila's observation: "Today's conservatives are nothing more than Liberals who have been ill- treated by democracy.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“We have to be willing to dig to the subterranean depths of the psyche, but also willing climb to the celestial heights of the soul.”
― Daniel Schwindt, Holocaust of the Childlike: The Progress of a Spiritual War

“Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man—as distinguished from man’s end—had become that center or origin.”   ~ Leo Strauss”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The specifically adult faculties, like the outer layers of the tree, serve to guide and protect the innocence, openness, and life of the soul. He who uses those faculties to destroy his innocence ends by destroying himself.”
― Daniel Schwindt, Holocaust of the Childlike: The Progress of a Spiritual War

“To call a people ‘barbaric’ is, in one sense, to describe the state of their soul, condemning their mentality or philosophy as godless. It may have nothing at all to do with superficial material conditions. A rich man can be a barbarian as easily as anyone else.”
― Daniel Schwindt, This Dark Age - 2024 Edition - Volume 1: Introduction to the Modern World

“The great philosophical traditions know nothing of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ in the modern sense. They spoke rather of ‘the good life’ which is to say, the pursuit of virtue and truth. These two ends are as different as night and day.”
― Daniel Schwindt, This Dark Age - 2024 Edition - Volume 1: Introduction to the Modern World

“Because the attainment of the level of competence described above (knowledge of a political candidate as a person and an understanding of the job itself) is obviously impossible for the average man who works and maybe even has a family, and because democracies like the United States are predicated on the notion that this same man can and should choose the president anyway, then democracy itself can be said to be predicated on the reinforcement of Augustinian ignorance. It not only suggests but demands that a man pick and choose between a thousand things he knows nothing about, and which he may have never even considered.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The truth is that it is impossible to bestow a right. Only duties can be placed on a man, and anyone pretending to offer you a right is trying to smuggle "the last of all oppressions" right under your nose. But this is how it has always gone, for Liberalism is a flatterer.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“In the ancient world the higher forms of knowledge were supra-individual: the sacred books of the Hindus, for example, have no author, are not expected to have had an author, and this fact is not considered to present any problems for the Hindu mind. In the West, this simply would not do—we must know the author, and it must be demonstrably proven that authorship is correctly attributed. There is no better illustration than this of the difference between an individualist, rationalist approach to knowledge and one that is supra-individual and supra-rational one. The East has retained the latter, while the West has settled inflexibly into the former.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The rule of St. Thomas More in his Utopia, although openly utopian, had a rationale which anyone can admit as sound: Anyone who campaigned for a public office became disqualified from holding any office at all. The obvious reasoning here is that men who seek most fervently after a public office are often of precisely that character most prone to corruption by power; that is to say, the man whose desire is strongest for wine is probably the man with whom you'd least want to drink it. A man who so passionately believes himself worthy of an office that he is willing vie for it in the shameless fashion that we see in every electoral campaign, is a man in whom the virtue of humility is only tenuously active. By allowing the holding of offices to become the prizes of popular competition, those men of moderate temper whose constitutions will not allow them to participate are automatically excluded, and in their place a category of most undesirable candidates is ushered in.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“One could well imagine that if seven out of ten cavemen wanted to do a thing collectively in one way and the three others decided differently, the majority of these cavemen (assuming that they are of about equal bodily strength) could force the rest to accept their decision. The rule of majorities in combination with the employment of brutal force, is likely be the most primitive form of government in the of mankind.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“When we select a candidate for any office we are not selecting a leader—in fact we are not looking at character traits at all—we are merely selecting a mirror, and the man who can best function in that reflective capacity is the victor. Unfortunately, since this requires the politician not only to try to "mirror" my desires, but also a thousand others, the one who wins is not simply a mirror, but a complex "prism" of sorts, attempting to "represent" a thousand wills at once. The last person he is actually allowed to be is himself. Needless to say, no authentic man—much less a great leader—would subject himself to such degradation. And yet we demand it of all politicians.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Instead of a President whom he'd never see and or representatives he'd never meet, the peasant had a single lord. This lord was a local master whom he knew by sight even though he had no television or newspaper. This proximity allowed for an organic familiarity between ruler and ruled. They were not "on a first name basis," of course, but they were acquainted in the sense that they could be rightly considered "neighbors," even if they were not equals. This organic familiarity meant that the peasant paid his taxes in person, complained in person, and if need be he hung the lord from a local tree in person.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Whether we are speaking of the philosophical history of the concept (universal suffrage) or the contemporary reality of its application, everyone stops somewhere. They all set a limit, even if that limit is the requirement of adulthood (a completely arbitrary classification if there ever was one). This unwillingness to apply the principle completely tells us something: First, it tells us that almost everyone knows that there ought to be some sort of qualification for electoral participation; and second, it tells us that no one knows exactly what this qualification ought to be. Because everyone agrees, even if unconsciously, on the first point—that qualifications there must be—then we can consider this an implicit acknowledgment that universal suffrage, even where it is preached, must be considered a purely sentimental notion which no one is actually willing to implement. We may then set about examining the second point, concerning the necessity and nature of the qualifications that ought to be set before the voting citizen.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Because great leaders are differentiated—that is to say, they are inherently unlike the common man, in that they surpass him in wisdom and virtue and boldness— democratic societies immediately run up against a conundrum: either they demand that these differentiated men pretend they are not what they are, that is to say, they demand hypocrisy; or else they drive these men out of their midst and choose "leaders" who are not leaders but are simple experts in mediocrity.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Spiritual love will not resemble worldly love since it desires first and foremost the spiritual perfection of the beloved. Spiritual love wants the beloved to live free—which is to say, free from sin, since virtue is the only true liberty. This is the opposite of the liberty the modern world would have us pursue, which amounts to the freedom to live in whatever sin we feel like. This is a loveless pursuit of liberty, liberty in the context of spiritual blindness.”
― Daniel Schwindt, This Dark Age - 2024 Edition - Volume 2: The Confrontation Between Man and Evil

“Non-resistance becomes tolerance, tolerance becomes acceptance, acceptance becomes approval, and approval becomes cooperation. We cannot stress this enough—he who preaches non-resistance to evil necessarily becomes its accomplice.”
― Daniel Schwindt, This Dark Age - 2024 Edition - Volume 2: The Confrontation Between Man and Evil

“The problem that faces us today is that contemporary political systems deny the universal responsibility (of persons and of public authorities) to pursue the good. Rather, they propose to limit the purpose of government to the enforcement of certain liberties, which is just as contradictory as it sounds. This reduces the whole purpose of government to that of ‘rights referee’, and how terrible it would be to play referee in a game wherein the rules are always changing and with players who each think they are playing a different game.”
― Daniel Schwindt, This Dark Age - 2024 Edition - Volume 2: The Confrontation Between Man and Evil

“In a family where the father is considered the "head" and actually functions in that role, the mother technically does not have any "rights" explicitly stated, much less do the children have any sort of "suffrage." However, although the child does not have a vote, he has his father's ear. He knows his father, and his father knows him and is intimately familiar with the life and situation of the realm where he so governs. In this patriarchal arrangement, the "subjects" do not have any of the rights and safeguards of the modern citizen, but they have infinitely more sway within that patriarchal sphere. It is an "organic" political power and is therefore far more reliable that any abstract legal measure.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Universal suffrage enfranchised everyone and, in doing so, reduced everyone's power to the smallest share possible. While this was acceptable when it was conceived as impotence over others, it becomes intolerable when we realize that our power over ourselves is included in the bargain. The individual in a regime of universal suffrage has an absolute minimum of influence.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Modern man is an island, in a historical sense. Every society born of revolution is an island, and it is an island that floats, like a thin film on the surface of history. He is always moving, disconnected from all that came before him, and never holding still long enough to strike the roots necessary to pass something on to those who will come after.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“We do indeed live in an 'information age," but we tend to forget that the sheer availability of information may or may not have any impact on whether or not that information can be distributed effectively, much less utilized properly. In fact, we could say that the greatest lie of the information age is that, just by piling up trillions of bits of data, we perpetually increase the intelligence of the human race as a collective whole. This optimistic assumption about the human mind has been almost universally accepted since the rise of humanism, and is completely false. There is a very rigid limit on the amount of knowledge that an individual can absorb and utilize, and it is never very much. We all live and die in ignorance of almost everything there is in the world to know. To say this is not pessimism, but is simply an honest acknowledgment of the vastness of our reality, its laws, and its mysteries.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“All of our systems will inevitably fall short, accumulate errors, and crash. And this remains true whether the crash is immediate and obvious and leads to a great depression, or whether it is monotonous, laborious, and even perpetual.”
― Daniel Schwindt, Catholic Social Teaching: A New Synthesis

“An ideology is an assortment of "common sense" answers to complex problems, forcibly pressed into a contradictory reality.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“When man becomes the origin of morality, the external moral imperative, which traditionally tethered his actions to a standard outside himself, giving him an external and objective aim, evaporates into thin air. He has freedom, yes, but it is like being liberated from one's natural atmosphere, like being flung into space, or into a desert. You are free, you have become the autonomous source and measure of the good, and you may go whatever direction you like—but you find yourself in empty space, in an infinite vacuum: you can go anywhere, but there is nowhere to go, and so you are not really free.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Love does not pursue pleasure or enjoyment or wealth or even happiness. If these are experienced as byproducts of the pursuit of love, we may be grateful, but true love of the highest order yearns for the spiritual perfection of ourselves and others.

Spiritual perfection is often acquired at the cost of happiness, at the cost of comfort, and in spite of suffering and inconvenience. In other words, it is possible to cause someone suffering out of love for them, and it is possible to make someone very happy while degrading them.

We do not wish suffering on anyone, and we live in fear of the possibility that those we love might suffer, but fear of their spiritual debasement must always be stronger than the fear of their suffering.”
― Daniel Schwindt, This Dark Age - 2024 Edition - Volume 2: The Confrontation Between Man and Evil

“Free speech, rightly understood is a lesser form of combat intended to preserve peace, which is to say, a form of invasive coercion that cannot be otherwise. It is combat with purpose, with social utility, and its value is social. In other words it is a contingent liberty designed to have a social benefit. But in the modern context it is reinterpreted individualistically, so that it becomes a special prerogative of individuals which they claim for themselves alone without regard to any social good. Free speech is ‘my right’ and is defended not because it is better for everyone in the long run but because it is something I am allowed to do and no one can stop me.”
― Daniel Schwindt, This Dark Age - 2024 Edition - Volume 2: The Confrontation Between Man and Evil

“The limit of spiritual love is that it loves persons but cannot love evil in persons.”
― Daniel Schwindt, This Dark Age - 2024 Edition - Volume 2: The Confrontation Between Man and Evil

“It is a fact of history that no king could push his people into war as rapidly and as fluidly as George Bush or Barack Obama. And this cannot be dismissed as a technological issue brought about by progress. It stems directly from the configuration of power structures. Here we must emphasize the difference between a stratified society and the modern egalitarian regime. In the latter, the state has direct authority over each individual or group, and this is true primarily because all have been reduced to one dead level. Access to one member on any single level implies access to all. In the stratified framework, however, the authority of a man at the uppermost level does not imply access to any other level beyond that which happens to be immediately adjacent to his own. He does not subsume command of all that falls below him in the vast hierarchy. He sits on the top rung, indeed, but his arms aren't any longer than yours or mine, and so he can only grasp at the next rung down from his own. The medieval king could command his dukes, but he could not command their knights. He could draw taxes from the peasants who lived on his own estate (which was not much larger than a duke's), but he could not draw taxes from the peasants who lived on his dukes' estates. In this way the monarch had no effective way of exercising direct dominion over anyone but the dukes themselves. Any influence on the peasantry was indirect, as a result of convincing the nobility of the justness of his cause. It was open to them to refuse in a way that no American governor can refuse mobilization of his population for a military engagement.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The common man was aware of the king, or the emperor, but the more distant the ruler the further removed was he from the peasant's own life. In short, his relationship to his authorities was the inverse of what ours is today, where those who impact our lives the most are those furthest from us. The peasant and his patriarch formed a more or less autonomous sphere, although this sphere existed in conjunction with concentric or intersecting circles. Because of this subsidiarity, what little sway the peasant had in the eye of his superior had more in common with that of a son to his father, and it would be anachronistic to imagine him to be as impotent as a modern American would be if deprived of voting rights. The peasant's voice was incomparably louder because the ratio of ruler to ruled was so much smaller within in the jurisdiction where he fell.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought