A Modest Defense of Hatred: “Where man is denied hatred, and he lacks any objective referent of meaning, he sinks into a lobotomized stupor. In such an age, the alternative to a vital hatred is the Last Man. It is in Nietzsche’s forecast of the logical consequences of nihilism where we see something remarkable—that the opposite of hatred is not love, but nothing at all. The state where man cannot hate is not the state where his love is infinite and pure—it is a state where he is comfortable, seeking nothing besides his enervating amusements, and so he blinks.”
On a Late Night Long Haul: “Man’s understanding of his own freedom, as engendered by the open road, is an essentially democratic disposition. It is hardly an accident that the nation in which democracy attains a sacred status, the United States, is the one in which the open road is an essential part of the social imagination. Cars, long drives, and open highways are mainstays of American film and music. More than any other nation on earth, the open road is celebrated in America. This is because the open road is the backbone of democracy. When a man relies upon public transit, he does not have the same acute awareness of his own freedom and agency. He is reliant upon the train, the bus, the ferry, not upon himself (via the automobile). The self-reliant spirit, of course, existed before the automobile, as in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson or the Founding Fathers. It was the automobile and the open road, however, which accentuated this idea and facilitated its spread.”
The Evola Warrior: “In Rome, war was ritual. Not madness. The augurs, the omens, the sacred moment — when to strike was divinely intuited. The general, in triumph, wore Jupiter’s mantle not as theater but as the mask of immanence. The devotio: when the leader gave his life like a chalice to be filled by gods.”
The Last Resort: “These days, lawyers are hard at work to replace civilized order with the terror and chaos of nature — which is to say, the seeking of raw power: this is what I can do to you! That primal despotism is the motivating engine of the Democratic Party in its terminal phase, a feral, power-seeking monster.”
The Sublime in the Oil Sands: “[Canadian photographer Edward] Burtynsky uses aerial photography to capture the grandeur of sweeping petrochemical vistas, emphasizing the scale and intricacy of oil sands projects. Industrial landscapes in his photographs are not dystopic hellscapes, but are enticing—or perhaps they are both. He captures pipelines at Cold Lake, tailings ponds from Fort McMurray, and refineries in Eastern Canada. Internationally, his work explores the oilfields of Texas, California and Azerbaijan, as well as scenes from ‘car culture’—motorways, racetracks, and bike rallies.”
