THREE SHOCKING AND HONEST QUOTES FROM THREE POWERFUL AUTHORS
This is one of my all-time favorite Zadie Smith quotes (from her essay collection “Feel Free,” 2018, the essay “Fences: A Brexit Diary. Think of Trumpers here in the USA.). What I love most about this quote is how real, raw, authentic, and intellectually honest it is. It brings to my mind the absurd contradiction of the far-left feeling that White America is privileged and racist, while tens of thousands of them, mostly in Trump counties (where many voted for Obama twice) are dying in droves from the opioid crisis. She doesn’t play identity politics. She’s one of the few remaining serious contemporary writers alive, in my opinion. She’s not an ideologue; she’s purely interested in truth and aesthetics and style. In other words, dare I say this is 2022: She’s an actual artist.
“Extreme inequality fractures communities, and after a while the cracks gape so wide the whole edifice comes tumbling down. In this process everybody has been losing for some time, but perhaps no one quite as much as the white working classes who really have nothing, not even the perceived moral elevation that comes with acknowledged trauma of recognized victimhood. The left is thoroughly ashamed of them. The right sees them only as a useful tool for its own personal ambitions. This inconvenient working-class revolution we are now witnessing has been accused of stupidity—I cursed it myself the day it happened—but the longer you look at it, you realize that in another sense it has the touch of genius, for it intuited the weaknesses of its enemies and effectively exploited them. The middle-class left so delights in being right! And so much of the disenfranchised working class has chosen to be flagrantly, shamelessly wrong.”
THOMAS MANN
This is from Mann’s 1927 magnum opus “The Magic Mountain” (the John E. Woods translation). Mann was a German Nobel Prize winner and genius writer. This book was long, and the journey was profound. This is from the end of the book, page 681, the section titled “The Great Petulance.” I particularly love this juicy quote because of the comment on liberalism. This makes me think of how both the extreme right and the extreme left in 2022 are illiberal.
“Justice—was that a concept worthy of our adoration? Something divine? An idea of the first order? God and nature were both unjust, they had their favorites, chose to be gracious at random, adorned one man with precarious honors and the next with an easy, but ordinary fate. And for the man who would act? For him justice was, on the one hand, a paralyzing weakness, the very essence of doubt, and on the other hand, it was a trumpet call to reckless deeds. In order to remain within the sphere of morality, man was constantly correcting one meaning of ‘justice’ with the other—so how could there be anything absolute and radical about the concept? And in any case, one was ‘just’ either on the basis of one given standpoint or on the basis of the other. The rest was liberalism, and no one was going to fall for that nowadays. Justice was, of course, one more empty husk of bourgeois rhetoric, and in order to act one first had to know, above all else, which justice was meant: the one that gave every man his due, or the one that was meted out equally to all.”
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
This really needs no explanation, description or additional commentary. This quote is taken from “The Will to Power” (translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann) note #258, from “Book Two: Critique of Highest Values” (1885-1886).
“Applied to the specific Christian-European morality: Our moral judgments are signs of decline, of disbelief in life, a preparation for pessimism. My proposition: There are no moral phenomena, there is only a moral interpretation of these phenomena. This interpretation itself is of extra-moral origin. What does it mean that our interpretation has projected a contradiction into existence? Of decisive importance: behind all other evaluations these moral evaluations stand in command. Supposing they were abolished, according to what would we measure then? And then of what value would be knowledge, etc etc???”