“All true needs—such as food, drink, and companionship—are satiable. Illegitimate wants—pride, envy, greed—are insatiable” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 107).
And It Encounters a Lot of Realities
“Envy cannot be assuaged any more than cancer can be; they are both pathologies whose very being requires expansion to their neighbor’s territory. There is no fence that will ever be respected, no limitation that will be recognized as legitimate, no sense of proportion or humility sufficient to smother a sense of inferiority. By its …
Repentance Is Not Scooting Your Shelf Idol to Face Right for a While
“Those pathologies cannot simply be subsumed under such labels as liberal, conservative, or radical. The ideologies common to American politics all have a share in them; none has clean hands . . . . political rhetoric, the media, and the educational establishment have badly distorted the political and economic landscape, making it appear that the …
Ah. Just Some Men. I See It All Now.
“Humanitarianism is saviorhood, an ethic perfectly suited to the theology that divinizes man. But the theology that divinizes man, it turns out, only divinizes some men” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 87).
Reverse Dehumanization
“If we look at the villains instead of the victims — the police, politicians, social workers, businessmen — we find that the humanitarians have given them free will. They do not speak about the industrialist’s tyrannical father, the loan shark’s miserable childhood in an orphan home, the politician’s neurotic mother. Those people are responsible for …
And Eventually These Big Checks Will Bounce
“The culture of Western nations in which humanitarian thinking is dominant is a rentier living off the moral capital accumulated by its predecessors and giving no attention to replenishing it. When it runs out, the horrors begin in earnest . . . Humanism is a philosophy of death” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, pp. 81-82).
A Floating Poverty Line
“Sentimentality, as we have seen, finds expression in autonomous, pragmatically based decisions on right and wrong, and in the refusal to declare absolute standards on all matters, including poverty. What sometimes seems to be an intellectual vacuity in humanitarian polemics is associated with this trait, which we may think of as the propensity to define …
Just Say It
“The culture of the West, infused as it is with Christian values, is superior to any other, and all the valid charges against the West are indications that it has betrayed its own heritage. It is not superior because it is wealthy; it is wealthy because it is superior, because it believes that work is …
Ressentiment
“The twisted path from humanism’s soaring tributes in honor of the human divinity to the consequences of modern humanitarianism is best explained by the concept of ressentiment. When Nietzsche wrote his celebrated attack on Christianity, he transliterated this word from the French because he could find no German equivalent . . . When Scheler’s book …
And That Means Nobody
“Nobody who rejects the first four commandments’ call to reject idols and worship the true and living God can be expected to recognize any ultimate significance in the last six commandments’ ethical requirements” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 47).