Motus Mentis

Please forgive me for the scanty output here of late — I am deeply distracted with work and family matters, so much so that I have had very little to say.

But I will direct you to two sharp posts at The Orthosphere, by J.M. Smith and Thomas Bertonneau, on the nature of the frustrated malcontent — who is, it seems, the same in every age.

Mr. Bertonneau’s essay, which is here, quotes Gustave Le Bon on the characteristics of the socialist uplifter:

Social failures, misunderstood geniuses, lawyers without clients, writers without readers, doctors without patients, professors ill-paid, graduates without employment, clerks whose employers disdain them for their insufficiency, puffed-up university instructors ”” these are the natural adepts of Socialism. In reality they care very little for doctrines. Their dream is to create by violent means a society in which they will be the masters. Their cry of equality does not prevent them from having an intense scorn of the rabble who have not, as they have, learned out of books. They believe themselves greatly the superiors of the working man, and are really greatly his inferiors in their lack of practical sense and their exaggerated egotism.

The common denominator here is lack of traction, of humbling and instructive contact and friction with the actually existing world.

Mr. Smith’s post gives us the ambitious mediocrity, the “restive subaltern”, who in normal times is held in his place by the density of the social network around and above him, but who can worm his way up through the rotting net in times of “social decomposition” (the stench of which fills our nostrils today). Such men are cauldrons of resentment, pressurized by long humiliation, and if they get loose upon the world can explode with destructive force.