The Bridge of Montaigne; and The Roots of Our 21st Century Crisis

What a delightful bridge Montaigne has been, and is: not only between the present modern world and the Renaissance, which is stupendous treasure enough, but also, in another short span, to the ancients. And he takes us over the bridge with such immediacy that in an instant we are there!

(Modernity has forgotten more, and more important things, than it has learned. Talk about hubris! And blinders! Mind-forged manacles, and mental prisons and chains!)

And even if he was only a bridge to himself and his own thought, that would be treasure enough to make him more than worthwhile to read. He speaks to us with relevance and timeliness that the internet-addicted, cell phone glued and media-addled can scarcely imagine.

Moreover, he pricks the bubbles of our delusions with such deftness – and lightness, and wit, and charm – that I almost feel I am reading Thoreau, Emerson, Blake, or Chuang Tzu. And he is as refreshing and thoroughly enjoyable as they, as well. Read him and weep – with joy!

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The political class today, and for a long time, like the majority of academics, the major media, the senior bureaucrats and the technocrats, and the business elite which rule them all, is steeped in a quagmire of the mind – a veritable rotting bog.

That bog is a strange mixture of post-modernist/existentialist/Nietzschian nihilism; combined and conjoined and bizarrely fused, like the dead parts of Frankenstein’s monster, with a kind of modernist secular fundamentalism, which is neoliberal corporatism, which should be recognized as the rationalization and justification of the corporate take-over of the democratic process, the society and the state: which means, the full merger of business and the state; which, as Mussolini defined it himself, is the proper term for fascism.

It is  a self-serving philosophy, which is essentially a bastard philosophy justifying Machiavellian power-lust, deceit, thievery on a mass scale, and grandiose delusions supporting elist fantasies of a self-justifying class rule of the new oligarchs. Caligula might be proud of their accomplishments – we should reasonably take a different view.

Worse, the 99.9% who are not among the ruling elite, and who do not typically or in general share such convenient delusions and rationalizations, are wedded to illusions of powerlessness and fatalism. (They have the psychology of peasants; and if they don’t snap out of it, they soon will be slaves.)

It is the illusions of the many, who always hold the greater power – the illusion of powerlessness above all – which are more the root of our problems; not the shared delusions of the elite few, heinous and hideous as they may be, and are.

All of the writers and thinkers mentioned here, along with Montaigne, and the beautiful bridge that he provides, could help us greatly now, at this, our darkest hour.

I suggest we have ears to hear, and eyes to see.

The money changers have taken over; and the Sophists are defending them. This is as old as time. But it is more dangerous than ever. It is time for the people to wake up. They are in great danger, yet they remain passive, divided and distracted. This must change, and now.

If we want treasures, ideas, tools to work if, we need only lift our heads. Step away from the internet, the newspapers and TV. Go to the library – when the fascist mass house arrest ends, if it does.

We have 5,000 years of history, knowledge, experience and acquired wisdom to work with. If that is not enough, then we truly are destitute – of spirit and mind – and we are the blind following the blind. A ditch will be the least of our worries if we don’t lift our heads and look around, and look up to see where we are going.

We must pause briefly, to find our bearings. Clearly, we have lost them entirely.

JTR,

April 18, 2020