Egregoros

Sadly, I don’t see much of a future for genuine intellectualism in these United States, at least not in the near term. The culture simply won’t sustain it anymore - between the social atomisation and the anti-whitism and the long-term progressive grip on culture creation, there’s nothing there to encourage genuinely intelligent approaches to ideas, whether we’re talking about their creation, comprehension, or dissemination. Sadly, our library system won’t be of any help. What was once a valuable resource for helping low-income-but-high-IQ young men overcome barriers to entry are now basically just holding pens for homeless people to watch porn all day while being overseen by pink-haired activists with master’s degrees in library science. The dissident Right - the only folks who are really, consistently playing with ideas, are tiny in comparison to society at large. But like the bookleggers in A Canticle for Leibowitz, it may be up to us to keep the flame alive until the next cycle begins.

https://neociceroniantimes.substack.com/p/on-reading-and-its-discontents

Accentual-syllabic meter seems to be fashionable during ages interested in classical rhetoric and distinguished by commitments to the sense of human limitation and order. Of all metrical systems possible in English, the accentual-syllabic is the most hostile by nature to impulse, irregularity, and unrestrained grandiosity. It seems all but impossible to transmit impressions of hysteria or the frantic within a strict accentual-syllabic versification: a weighty judiciousness appears to be the tone most commonly associated with accentual-syllabism.

I’m reading Paul Fussell’s book Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. Here, after giving a couple examples of attempts at purely syllabic metre in English, he concludes, “But accent, like passion and murder, will out, and it will out the moment the poet, arrived at a climax, seizes all the techniques of prosodic reinforcement offered him by the conventions of the English language.” He has the same conclusion later about quantifiable verse; stress/accent is just too much a part of English for either of these to work.

A leader the people must have. The state of the human race is such that the vast majority of all people will always be passive until roused to action by someone with a more powerful spirit than theirs. There is no kingdom without a king, there is not even a republic without a president. Even assemblies with no fixed positions have, by influence, their chief men informally, because there is no case where the talent of bringing others into action is distributed equally.
To take the negative perspective, even more than positive virtue guiding a good ruler, it is trivial to note that a bad ruler who gives a poor example will inevitably cause destruction, corruption, and rot in an organization. In my private life I am an accountant, and when one is taught to perform financial audits and consider a company’s internal fraud risk, one of the key items one looks for is the ‘Tone at the Top.’ Is the boss a lush? Is he abrasive? Is he honest? Does he pass blame? Even in the dilute systems of government and leadership present in our society it is the visible top of a system which receives our greatest attention because the head of a corporate body commands a spiritual influence on the rest before even entering into any question of explicit command.

https://ulrichkessler.substack.com/p/comments-on-book-ii-of-the-analects