If I ever win the lottery, which I never play, but if I did I would hire pollsters to hit the streets and discover the public’s answer to this question. If I were to describe someone as being Romantic, what five qualities would you ascribe to them? Take a moment and answer that question for yourself.
I suspect most of the answers would involve love, emotion, being out of touch with reality, and pertaining to the feminine. I am confident that I can demonstrate this very common perception to be utterly and completely false, and have done so on many occasions. What I am more interested in what people actually perceive to Romantic.
In a previous article I introduced a concept of mine that I call the scarecrow. Basically it is when you take a person, group, or ideology and create a false image of them constructed of strawman “facts” and ad hominem arguments for the purpose of scaring people away from the belief. In the article I used Glenn Beck and the Tea Party Movement as examples.
In a previous article I introduced a concept of mine that I call the scarecrow. Basically it is when you take a person, group, or ideology and create a false image of them constructed of strawman “facts” and ad hominem arguments for the purpose of scaring people away from the belief. In the article I used Glenn Beck and the Tea Party Movement as examples.
This video is an example of how it is done today...
Many of these clips featured I have seen in full. In each one the Tea Party is presumed to be racist as a given and obvious fact and therefore there is no need for evidence to support the accusation. Doing so would be like taking the time to prove the Ku Klux Klan is racist. The uncritical viewer then takes this on-board as fact and incorporates it into their worldview. They may even spread it as a meme to others despite the fact that it is not true.
By painting the Tea Party as racists, radicals, dangerous, violent, and anti-American, people who might otherwise support their core principles and objectives are scared away by the scarecrow. Others might leave the group because they fear being associated with such things. This reduces the people power of group and in essence defeats them. It’s a coward’s battle tactic well used in American political propaganda.
Every person will act rationally given their worldview. Therefore you can control behaviour by controlling how a person perceives reality. I call this presumptive cognition. It is how you think about the reality that you presume exists. Controlling this is the key to manipulation.
I once presented this idea to a PhD student working on the subject of cults. She told me of an interview she had with a former cult leader who told her the same thing. He said, “What if I said that I could make you jump on that chair and scream?” She was doubtful. “Okay, what if I convinced you that there was a mouse at your feet?” Altering a person’s perception of reality affects how they act in reality.
I once presented this idea to a PhD student working on the subject of cults. She told me of an interview she had with a former cult leader who told her the same thing. He said, “What if I said that I could make you jump on that chair and scream?” She was doubtful. “Okay, what if I convinced you that there was a mouse at your feet?” Altering a person’s perception of reality affects how they act in reality.
This concept that I am sharing with you now has been existent for nearly a hundred years. It is used by marketers, public relations, political parties, activist groups, cults, churches, and advertisers; and they are masters of the art. This concept is central to life in the post-modern world and should be taught to every schoolchild as an important survival lesson. But alas it is not.
Your perception of reality is not reality. How you feel about your perception of reality, no matter how strongly, is not reality. The ideas you have about public figures, groups, products, ideologies, and even history is just your idea. As they say in the field of Neural Linguistic Programming, “The map is not the terrain”. In other words, your mental representation of reality is not reality. It is only your idea of it. We live in the real world and exist within the realm of our perceptions.
A belief is an idea with an emotional attachment. The stronger you believe something, the stronger you feel about it. The stronger you feel, the more identity you have invested in the belief. You in a sense become your beliefs. More so in that your beliefs drive your actions. Everything that you do or say is ultimately derived from your worldview, the culmination of your beliefs regarding reality and everything in it.
When that belief is proven wrong your reality literally comes crashing down. No where is this more apparent than when you are on the received end of an ending relationship. Therapist Paul McKenna postulated that the degree of heartbreak felt in the end of a relationship corresponds to the level of an imagined future together. So if your partner is your “soul mate” and one day leaves you after years of routine living together, then you will be more wounded than if your partner was perceived as a casual relationship. This all has to do with the level of belief you have invested in your conceptual reality.
I am becoming increasing of the belief that over the past 100 years Western civilization has been in the midst of a counter-revolution against the Romantic Revolution that created the modern world. This has been accomplished by altering the common perception of the Romantic to render the concept weak, irrelevant, fantasy, entertaining, or evil. A scarecrow of Romanticism and Victoriana has been created in the minds of the general public, a false representation of reality.
My tagline, “When virtue becomes evil, then only the evil are virtuous” was inspired by this paragraph taken from the book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff:
“In our culture, every moral requirement of intelligence is relentlessly attacked. Rationality is castigated as heartless, intellectuality as arid, egoism as exploitative, independence as antisocial, integrity as rigid, honesty as impractical, justice as cruel, productiveness as materialistic. The sum of this approach – the crown of the creed of death worship – is the tenet that pride is evil.”
Following the same pattern with the 7 Romantic Virtues, I might say wisdom is seen as relative, pride is arrogance, magnanimity is manipulative, passion is a sin or mindless indulgence, enterprise is exploitation, self-reliance is rebellion, and chivalry and gallantry are wishful fantasy while grace and charm are duplicitous.
When making a persuasive speech the pattern is to first show the problem and the extent of it, then show why something must be done about the problem, and finally offer solutions and a course of action.
So for example, the problem is man-made global warming...oops; I mean “climate change”. If we don’t do something about it then all our coastal cities will be under twenty feet of water, there will be drought and pestilence, millions of people will die. The only solution is a concerted effort from global governments to reduce carbon emissions through higher taxation and possibly a global government body if necessary. So to save the planet you must sacrifice to the government. If you don’t, then you are foolish, selfish, and generally a bad person.
If we hold to the belief that the purpose of government is to promote the general welfare, then it can be considered within its brief to take necessary action in preventing the catastrophes predicted by the theory of man-made climate change. However, the government would not have that mandate from the people unless the people perceived the threat to be a real and present danger. So those in favour of giving the necessary powers to government must alter public perception in order to elicit the desired action. Remember that belief drives action, whether that belief is true or not.
So by creating a negative idea of the Romantic you essentially are making the first stage of the persuasive speech. The Romantic is a problem, an ideology that is nonsense, fantasy, or a Valentine's Day indulgence. It is not real life. Once you believe that, then you are lost to Romanticism.
Belief is not only important in how you perceive the world today but also how you perceive your past experiences. “I won’t touch a stove. I did that once and it hurt, so I won’t be doing that again.” Yes, but you are forgetting that it was the hob that was hot, not the stove itself. And the hob was turned on. So it is okay to touch the stove. Just do not touch the hob when it is on. This simple example illustrates how our perception and interpretation of past events influences future action, whether or not our interpretation is correct.
The same applies to out interpretation of our cultural history. The first American colony was Jamestown, Virginia. However after the American Civil War the North wanted to shore up its cultural dominance so the holiday of Thanksgiving was established to commemorate the “first” colony in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s all about common perception and not necessarily truth.
Take something like British and American imperialism. Once they were perceived as bringing the light of civilization to the world but today these people are “evil” imperialists who exploited and murdered the natives. When one actually studies these empires, it looks very much like the scene from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, “All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
The modern equivalent to the British Empire and the building of the United States is commonly called globalisation. In Asia, particularly Viet Nam, people are eager to move from the subsistence living of the farms and into the factories. It means better wages and a better lifestyle. However, people in the West look upon the menial factory work, just as Friedrich Engels looked upon British factory workers in the Nineteenth Century, and arrogantly project their values onto the workers. They protest to close the very same factories that people are queuing to be employed at and if they succeed, then for the people it is back to the farm or in some cases prostitution. But this reality is not important, only the feelings of self-important pity for the sweatshop workers and the righteousness of their own political ideologies.
Here’s a word for you, diminutivisation. I just made that one up. In the old Celtic folktales, the faerie folk were big, fierce, and frightening. According to the Bible so are angels. In Arabic mythology the djinn were terrifying. The devil is not someone to mess with either. However, in each of these cases as belief in these beings decreased so did their ferocity. Faeries became Tinkerbell, angels became chubby winged babies, the djinn became “I Dream of Jennie” and the devil that red-horned baby with the pitchfork. These are all examples of diminutivisation. Something powerful becomes some juvenile when we no longer take it seriously.
The enemies of Romanticism have succeeded in altering the public perception of the Romantic, its foundational principles, and its history to either create a diminutive version of itself or the relic of a by-gone age thankfully forgotten.
A child who dreams big is told to “give-up his Romantic notions”. A man who panders to a woman’s whims is called a Romantic. Anyone advocating a return to Victorian values (ie Romantic) is perceived as either a prude or a conservative. The hippie engaging in free love and drugs with flowers in his hair is oft associated with the Romantic. These perceptions of the Romantic are entirely false.
As for those who do follow the true path of the Romantic we have these pejorative qualities: selfish, arrogant, elitist, out-of-touch, eccentric, materialistic, misogynous, sociopathic, weird, insane, and even interesting, which I have always found to be condescending. A common one for Dark Romantics, aka Goths, is melancholy. For those women who choose sexy clothes, they are considered sluts. Then you have a sort of reverse negative. There are people who do possess a number of these negative qualities, or want to, and so they are drawn to one of the Romantic subcultures to fit-in and thus perpetuate the negative stereotypes through their involvement.
Probably one of my greatest frustrations to do with the diminutivisation of the Romantic pertains to the notion of fun. One tenant of the Romantic is living life to the full, enjoy yourself, and looking for new sensations. However, there are those, apparently in the majority, who are drawn to the Romantic not as a lifestyle but as a bit of fun in itself.
I am reminded of Elijah Price in the film “Unbreakable”. He is an art dealer who specializes in comic book art. In this particular scene a customers is preparing to purchase a very expensive piece and then says that it would look great in the room of his newborn son, Jeb. Elijah refuses to sell the item saying...
So for example, the problem is man-made global warming...oops; I mean “climate change”. If we don’t do something about it then all our coastal cities will be under twenty feet of water, there will be drought and pestilence, millions of people will die. The only solution is a concerted effort from global governments to reduce carbon emissions through higher taxation and possibly a global government body if necessary. So to save the planet you must sacrifice to the government. If you don’t, then you are foolish, selfish, and generally a bad person.
If we hold to the belief that the purpose of government is to promote the general welfare, then it can be considered within its brief to take necessary action in preventing the catastrophes predicted by the theory of man-made climate change. However, the government would not have that mandate from the people unless the people perceived the threat to be a real and present danger. So those in favour of giving the necessary powers to government must alter public perception in order to elicit the desired action. Remember that belief drives action, whether that belief is true or not.
So by creating a negative idea of the Romantic you essentially are making the first stage of the persuasive speech. The Romantic is a problem, an ideology that is nonsense, fantasy, or a Valentine's Day indulgence. It is not real life. Once you believe that, then you are lost to Romanticism.
Belief is not only important in how you perceive the world today but also how you perceive your past experiences. “I won’t touch a stove. I did that once and it hurt, so I won’t be doing that again.” Yes, but you are forgetting that it was the hob that was hot, not the stove itself. And the hob was turned on. So it is okay to touch the stove. Just do not touch the hob when it is on. This simple example illustrates how our perception and interpretation of past events influences future action, whether or not our interpretation is correct.
The same applies to out interpretation of our cultural history. The first American colony was Jamestown, Virginia. However after the American Civil War the North wanted to shore up its cultural dominance so the holiday of Thanksgiving was established to commemorate the “first” colony in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s all about common perception and not necessarily truth.
Take something like British and American imperialism. Once they were perceived as bringing the light of civilization to the world but today these people are “evil” imperialists who exploited and murdered the natives. When one actually studies these empires, it looks very much like the scene from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, “All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
The modern equivalent to the British Empire and the building of the United States is commonly called globalisation. In Asia, particularly Viet Nam, people are eager to move from the subsistence living of the farms and into the factories. It means better wages and a better lifestyle. However, people in the West look upon the menial factory work, just as Friedrich Engels looked upon British factory workers in the Nineteenth Century, and arrogantly project their values onto the workers. They protest to close the very same factories that people are queuing to be employed at and if they succeed, then for the people it is back to the farm or in some cases prostitution. But this reality is not important, only the feelings of self-important pity for the sweatshop workers and the righteousness of their own political ideologies.
Here’s a word for you, diminutivisation. I just made that one up. In the old Celtic folktales, the faerie folk were big, fierce, and frightening. According to the Bible so are angels. In Arabic mythology the djinn were terrifying. The devil is not someone to mess with either. However, in each of these cases as belief in these beings decreased so did their ferocity. Faeries became Tinkerbell, angels became chubby winged babies, the djinn became “I Dream of Jennie” and the devil that red-horned baby with the pitchfork. These are all examples of diminutivisation. Something powerful becomes some juvenile when we no longer take it seriously.
The enemies of Romanticism have succeeded in altering the public perception of the Romantic, its foundational principles, and its history to either create a diminutive version of itself or the relic of a by-gone age thankfully forgotten.
A child who dreams big is told to “give-up his Romantic notions”. A man who panders to a woman’s whims is called a Romantic. Anyone advocating a return to Victorian values (ie Romantic) is perceived as either a prude or a conservative. The hippie engaging in free love and drugs with flowers in his hair is oft associated with the Romantic. These perceptions of the Romantic are entirely false.
As for those who do follow the true path of the Romantic we have these pejorative qualities: selfish, arrogant, elitist, out-of-touch, eccentric, materialistic, misogynous, sociopathic, weird, insane, and even interesting, which I have always found to be condescending. A common one for Dark Romantics, aka Goths, is melancholy. For those women who choose sexy clothes, they are considered sluts. Then you have a sort of reverse negative. There are people who do possess a number of these negative qualities, or want to, and so they are drawn to one of the Romantic subcultures to fit-in and thus perpetuate the negative stereotypes through their involvement.
Probably one of my greatest frustrations to do with the diminutivisation of the Romantic pertains to the notion of fun. One tenant of the Romantic is living life to the full, enjoy yourself, and looking for new sensations. However, there are those, apparently in the majority, who are drawn to the Romantic not as a lifestyle but as a bit of fun in itself.
I am reminded of Elijah Price in the film “Unbreakable”. He is an art dealer who specializes in comic book art. In this particular scene a customers is preparing to purchase a very expensive piece and then says that it would look great in the room of his newborn son, Jeb. Elijah refuses to sell the item saying...
Do you see any Teletubbies in here? Do you see a slender plastic tag clipped to my shirt with my name printed on it? Do you see a little Asian child with a blank expression on his face sitting outside on a mechanical helicopter that shakes when you put quarters in it? No? Well, that's what you see at a toy store. And you must think you're in a toy store, because you're here shopping for an infant named Jeb. This is an art gallery, my friend, and this is a piece of art.
That is how I feel about the Romantic. It is all about enriching your life, like art. It is all about pleasure, sensation, and yes, fun, but it is not a joke, a game, a fad, or a phase. I am reminded of a Scottish-American I knew once who put on a kilt for the first time and then pranced about joking about wearing a skirt. I found it insulting as a Scottish-American. It is possible that he felt uncomfortable wearing a kilt and we laugh at things we find uncomfortable. Likewise many people find true Romanticism uncomfortable because it goes against all our post-modern social programming.
The central tenant of the Romantic is I. I am. I am an individual. I think. I feel. I act. You are also an individual. You think. You feel. You act. We are all individuals. We make our individual choices that either propel our lives to greatness or send us tumbling into the gutter. These are the consequences of our freely chosen actions. I am responsible for my own thoughts, my own feelings, and my own actions. I have no claim on the life, liberty, or property of another nor do they have any claim on mine. The enemies of the Romantic say otherwise.
There are those who believe that the purpose of government is to govern. The rulers make the rules and you must follow those rules whether you agree with them or not. If you do not obey, then the government will use force to make you obey. First the state will take your property, then your freedom, and perhaps even your life as an example to others. Your life is only yours own within the guidelines dictated to you by the government and you may only act according to those rights given to you by the government. Anything else is off limits. You may not do anything with this permission.
When given the choice between the Romantic and the non-Romantic, most people will choose the Romantic. In dreams actions have no consequence. Likewise in fiction. Our popular narrative fiction for the past several centuries has largely extolled the Romantic. But that is just make-believe and anyone who believes it is living in a fantasy world – or so they say.
They also say that people cannot be trusted to do the right thing. Therefore we need government to control people to keep them in check. Without drug laws people will become addicts, without prostitution laws people will constantly be fornicating, without forced charity the poor will starve and suffer. Without government control society will be turning back the clock to the horrors of the Victorian Era. Progress is about moving forward and we cannot move forward when we are pining for some “Romantic” notion of the past.
So who are the enemies of the Romantic? During the Nineteenth Century the political and social orientation that best typified the Romantic philosophy was called Liberalism. They favoured a small, decentralized government and emphasised the principles of Natural Rights as set forth by John Locke and the American founders. The ultimate goal of the Liberals was freedom for the individual and this meant a gradual process of incorporating as many people as possible into the state of liberty in mind, heart, and action.
The Liberals were eventually eclipsed by a new ideology called Socialism in Europe and Progressivism in America. Where Liberalism offered freedom and the responsibility that goes with it, the Socialists offered freebies. The state was to become the benefactor of the people in exchange for the power to govern.
The Romantic Revolution wrested the power from the state and put it in the hands of the people, by which I mean the mass of individuals. The counter-revolution has succeeded in wresting power from the people, in the name of the people, to re-empower the state. For the Romantic it makes little difference if the state is a monarchy, aristocratic parliament, or a social democracy. Each represents the violation of the right of the individual to govern himself.
I know that this may sound like a conspiracy theory but it makes sense. You have two political ideologies. One wants a strong central government, but they are held in check by the other group that wants a small central government. If you represent a third group that wants a strong central government, then who do you challenge for position?
If you succeed in toppling the traditionalist big government party then you have to still contend with the anti-government group. However if you can infiltrate and become the anti-government group you are free to take on the establishment. That is what happened.
The central tenant of the Romantic is I. I am. I am an individual. I think. I feel. I act. You are also an individual. You think. You feel. You act. We are all individuals. We make our individual choices that either propel our lives to greatness or send us tumbling into the gutter. These are the consequences of our freely chosen actions. I am responsible for my own thoughts, my own feelings, and my own actions. I have no claim on the life, liberty, or property of another nor do they have any claim on mine. The enemies of the Romantic say otherwise.
There are those who believe that the purpose of government is to govern. The rulers make the rules and you must follow those rules whether you agree with them or not. If you do not obey, then the government will use force to make you obey. First the state will take your property, then your freedom, and perhaps even your life as an example to others. Your life is only yours own within the guidelines dictated to you by the government and you may only act according to those rights given to you by the government. Anything else is off limits. You may not do anything with this permission.
When given the choice between the Romantic and the non-Romantic, most people will choose the Romantic. In dreams actions have no consequence. Likewise in fiction. Our popular narrative fiction for the past several centuries has largely extolled the Romantic. But that is just make-believe and anyone who believes it is living in a fantasy world – or so they say.
They also say that people cannot be trusted to do the right thing. Therefore we need government to control people to keep them in check. Without drug laws people will become addicts, without prostitution laws people will constantly be fornicating, without forced charity the poor will starve and suffer. Without government control society will be turning back the clock to the horrors of the Victorian Era. Progress is about moving forward and we cannot move forward when we are pining for some “Romantic” notion of the past.
So who are the enemies of the Romantic? During the Nineteenth Century the political and social orientation that best typified the Romantic philosophy was called Liberalism. They favoured a small, decentralized government and emphasised the principles of Natural Rights as set forth by John Locke and the American founders. The ultimate goal of the Liberals was freedom for the individual and this meant a gradual process of incorporating as many people as possible into the state of liberty in mind, heart, and action.
The Liberals were eventually eclipsed by a new ideology called Socialism in Europe and Progressivism in America. Where Liberalism offered freedom and the responsibility that goes with it, the Socialists offered freebies. The state was to become the benefactor of the people in exchange for the power to govern.
The Romantic Revolution wrested the power from the state and put it in the hands of the people, by which I mean the mass of individuals. The counter-revolution has succeeded in wresting power from the people, in the name of the people, to re-empower the state. For the Romantic it makes little difference if the state is a monarchy, aristocratic parliament, or a social democracy. Each represents the violation of the right of the individual to govern himself.
I know that this may sound like a conspiracy theory but it makes sense. You have two political ideologies. One wants a strong central government, but they are held in check by the other group that wants a small central government. If you represent a third group that wants a strong central government, then who do you challenge for position?
If you succeed in toppling the traditionalist big government party then you have to still contend with the anti-government group. However if you can infiltrate and become the anti-government group you are free to take on the establishment. That is what happened.
In the minds of the people, remember manipulating perception, the Liberals became the progressives and socialists. Now the people were left with only two options. A big government right and a big government left.
I once learned how to take over a church. Find a church with a dwindling congregation. Start filling the pews with your own people until they outnumber the natives. Once you have the majority, then vote out the existing minister and bring in your own guy. The church building, its name, its furnishings, and even its history is now yours to do with as you please, but the ideology within the church can be whatever you choose. That is what happened with liberalism as the political arm of the Romantic philosophy.
This same pattern of first infiltrating a group and then redefining it according to socialist ideology has been a recurring pattern throughout the Twentieth Century in America. First the Liberals, then the various ethnic and minority groups, then the anti-war movements, then the environmentalist movement, then charities and today they even lay claim to the Civil Rights Movement.
The image of the leftist radical is of someone fighting for the people against the oppressive governments and corporations. They believe this about themselves and they project that image to the world. They claim the banner of the Romantic.
The fact is that they stole that banner, that image, and that spirit. When you actually examine their philosophy, history, and political goals you find that they are not only the opposite of the Romantic. They are the enemy promoting dependency and slavery -- not freedom and certainly not the individual. They support the State, their ideal state.
The consensus is that the Romantic Era ended with World War I, to which I postulate that it did not end in America until The Stock Market Crash of 1929. Both are held as examples of Icarus moments where humans reached to far and paid the price. Both incidents empowered the enemy of the Romantics who assured us that we will progress beyond the failures of the past (Romanticism) and thus ensure that these horrors never happen again. And of course they did happen again, and again, and again.
The goal was to create a scarecrow of the Romantics and what is now called Classical Liberalism, put it safely in box somewhere to feel sentimental about but not take too seriously, to educate children so they did not become Romantics, to exaggerate Romanticism to a point of ludicrousy and call it camp, and more importantly, rewrite the entire Romantic Era into a negative stereotype as either fantasy or a cynical representation of reality. This is then pushed through the education system, academia, mass media, and popular culture all in an effort to distort perception.
When I proposed this theory to a friend he wrote me, “Oh, Logan, where do you get such ideas? I mean it's not as if the early 20th century progressives didn't completely take over publishing and get in bed with government educational systems in the US to produce "social studies" and history books slanted with their biases ongoingly for the last 75 years to this very day. It's not as if they haven't proven themselves time and again to be not only OK with historical revision, but strident believers in the rightness of such practices as a way to condition the 'right kind of citizens' into existence through the educational establishment. It's why they aligned with Marx in the assertion the state should control education and make it compulsory in the first place.” I could not have said it better myself.
What brought me to this epiphany was reading this is a passage from Matthew Sweet’s book, Inventing the Victorians:
The goal was to create a scarecrow of the Romantics and what is now called Classical Liberalism, put it safely in box somewhere to feel sentimental about but not take too seriously, to educate children so they did not become Romantics, to exaggerate Romanticism to a point of ludicrousy and call it camp, and more importantly, rewrite the entire Romantic Era into a negative stereotype as either fantasy or a cynical representation of reality. This is then pushed through the education system, academia, mass media, and popular culture all in an effort to distort perception.
When I proposed this theory to a friend he wrote me, “Oh, Logan, where do you get such ideas? I mean it's not as if the early 20th century progressives didn't completely take over publishing and get in bed with government educational systems in the US to produce "social studies" and history books slanted with their biases ongoingly for the last 75 years to this very day. It's not as if they haven't proven themselves time and again to be not only OK with historical revision, but strident believers in the rightness of such practices as a way to condition the 'right kind of citizens' into existence through the educational establishment. It's why they aligned with Marx in the assertion the state should control education and make it compulsory in the first place.” I could not have said it better myself.
What brought me to this epiphany was reading this is a passage from Matthew Sweet’s book, Inventing the Victorians:
We think of the Victorians as racists, yet they had no anti-immigration laws and elected Britain’s first Asian Members of Parliament. We think of them as religiose, yet church attendance figures fell just as dramatically in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth. We think of their society as violent, yet their crime figures were lower than ours. We think of them as misogynists, but the statute books describe a fairly linear narrative of female emancipation. We think of them as royalists, when the period was the zenith of British republicanism. We think of them as puritanical, and when mountains of evidence are produced to the contrary, we insist that they were forced to conduct clandestine sex lives and use it to amplify their reputation for hypocrisy. We can just about bring ourselves to give the Victorians the credit for building the houses in which we live, the railway tunnels through which we commute, the pubs in which we drink, the sewers which funnel away our excrement, the museums and galleries in which we spend our Sunday afternoons. We are less inclined to acknowledge their responsibility for an almost uncountable number of other important innovations: both for concepts which are often believed to be ahistorical – such as the inherent goodness of children, homosexuality and heterosexuality, notion that family members, ideally, should like each other – and for a huge roster of inventions usually assumed to be of more recent origin. Blame them, or thank them, for the suburban housing estate. For the fax machine. For the football league, political spin-doctoring, heated curling tongs, vending machines, the electronic iron, the petrol-driven car, feminism, the London Underground, DIY, investigative journalism, commercially produced hardcore pornography, instantaneous transcontinental communications networks, high-rise public housing, plastic, free universal education, product placement, industrial pollution, environmentalism, fish and chips, X-ray technology, sex contact ads, paper bags, Christmas crackers, junk e-mail (by telegram, but still just as annoying), global capitalism, interior design and Sanatogen – the stuff that surrounds us in the early twenty-first century world, both the good and the bad. Despite such evidence we have chosen to remember the Victorians not as our benefactors, but as sentimentalists, bigots, Jingoists and hypocrites. The Victorians invented us, and we in our turn invented the Victorians.
In reading this passage and the chapter in its entirety that Romanticism through Victoriana was the victim of a massive smear campaign to discredit its ideological validity and relevance.
Philosophy describes the process of establishing a worldview, acting on that worldview, and then projecting that worldview in the form of intellectual and political discourse. Romanticism was the dominant philosophy in the Victorian zeitgeist and it projected itself in the form of Classical Liberalism. Thus it is not merely the surface level political label that is important but the premise that lies beneath.
Therefore when I say that the enemy of Romanticism is Socialism/Progressivism, I am not merely pointing a finger at a political view but to an unspoken and largely clandestine collection of philosophical premises regarding the nature of reality. We might well call this a culture war between the Romantics and the Collectivists – be they socialists, fascists, corporatists, academic elitists, or just bureaucratic bullies, and like all bullies when you bite back they cower even as they pelt you with slander and derision.
The Romantic Era did not end in some grand ideological collapse. It suffered a slow haemorrhaging over generations and we watched as our enemies twisted our ideas, corrupted our virtues, and laid claim to mock representations of our values and all for show. They praise freedom even as they enact legislation to take it away. It’s all about manipulating your perception of reality to force your behaviour for or against.
We have now reached the line in the sand and all that remains is to fight back and reclaim what is ours. I’ll conclude with a quote from Iron Man 2. When appearing before a Senate Committee, Tony Stark is pressured by a state bully to turn his armour over to the government. To which Stark says in the spirit of a true Romantic, “Well, you can forget it. We're safe. America is secure. You want my property - you can't have it! But I did you a big favor. I have successfully privatized world peace”.
You want my life, my liberty, my property – you can’t have it! That is Romanticism.
Philosophy describes the process of establishing a worldview, acting on that worldview, and then projecting that worldview in the form of intellectual and political discourse. Romanticism was the dominant philosophy in the Victorian zeitgeist and it projected itself in the form of Classical Liberalism. Thus it is not merely the surface level political label that is important but the premise that lies beneath.
Therefore when I say that the enemy of Romanticism is Socialism/Progressivism, I am not merely pointing a finger at a political view but to an unspoken and largely clandestine collection of philosophical premises regarding the nature of reality. We might well call this a culture war between the Romantics and the Collectivists – be they socialists, fascists, corporatists, academic elitists, or just bureaucratic bullies, and like all bullies when you bite back they cower even as they pelt you with slander and derision.
The Romantic Era did not end in some grand ideological collapse. It suffered a slow haemorrhaging over generations and we watched as our enemies twisted our ideas, corrupted our virtues, and laid claim to mock representations of our values and all for show. They praise freedom even as they enact legislation to take it away. It’s all about manipulating your perception of reality to force your behaviour for or against.
We have now reached the line in the sand and all that remains is to fight back and reclaim what is ours. I’ll conclude with a quote from Iron Man 2. When appearing before a Senate Committee, Tony Stark is pressured by a state bully to turn his armour over to the government. To which Stark says in the spirit of a true Romantic, “Well, you can forget it. We're safe. America is secure. You want my property - you can't have it! But I did you a big favor. I have successfully privatized world peace”.
You want my life, my liberty, my property – you can’t have it! That is Romanticism.
Ovations!
ReplyDeleteGroundbreaking article. Your intellectual extravagance has once again transcended catharsis of enlightenment. You have deconstructed the entire composition of altered reality and in most artistically refined way cultivated the path to the Absolute.
Even in supposed underground literature, media or magazines I never read anything close to this intensity of truth. My hero
A friend and I often discuss the state of the world. He believes that we are witnessing the end of Western Civilization. I sometimes agree with him. But generally I am of the opinion that Romanticism is in our nature and once released you cannot put the genie back into the bottle. The is the Spirit of Man and I have faith in that.
ReplyDeleteI was watching the trailer for the new Robin Hood film and the Romantic themes are all there. For every anti-Romantic film like Avatar there are dozens of pro-Romantic films that reinforce these beliefs in the unconscious.
The goal of the anti-Romantics is to cut people off from identifying with these films and not take the messages to heart. "oh, that's just fantasy. You can play with it, but don't take it too seriously".
Or they twist concepts, like "the people". Such as "the people" rising against an oppressive government when what they are really saying is replacing a big government that does not give hand-out with a big government that does and the alleged "people" is really just a new group of oligarchs.
I believe if people are given the truth, then they will choose the Romantic every time over either big government option.
I believe in the Western Civilization, so much that I am deemed a radical.
ReplyDeleteCertainly Romanticism is in the spirit of the civilized man, and that spirit will never be passive.
And great that you pointed out this. People must not be referred as "the people" anymore. I do not want to be leveled to a amorphous mob. When they speak to me they must be aware that I am an artist, a scientist, a taxi driver with a dream, a thinking being with special potentials, views and needs. They must respect my intellect enough to understand that a Romantic will challenge mass politics.