The Mage thinks and wills; he loves nothing with desire; he rejects nothing in passion. ~ Eliphas Levi
Although Dostoyevsky wrote the The Idiot in 1868, his depiction of human characters is so accurate, it could have been written yesterday afternoon. There are only a limited number of types of people; certain archetypes are incarnated, and prototypical situations are repeated ad nauseum in history.
There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called “ordinary” and accounted as the “majority”.
Of course, political parties praise the ordinary and the “silent” majority. And rightfully so. In a well- organized society, the ordinary provide for the needs and servicing of economic life. When there is harmony in a hierarchic arrangement, the ordinary may be inarticulate, but they have an animal faith and sound instincts, particularly if they are insulated from the ideologies of the pseudo-intelligentsia. A leader, who knows what the ordinary believe, is able to articulate and make conscious that faith and instincts, that is, he awakens what had previously lain dormant in the masses.
When, for example, the very nature of certain ordinary persons consists precisely in their perpetual and unvarying ordinariness, or better still, when in spite of their most strenuous efforts to lift themselves out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, then such persons acquire a certain character of their own — the typical character of mediocrity which refuse to remain what it is and desires at all costs to become original and independent, without having the slightest capacity for independence.
In an attempt to find their own voice, they will latch on to a religion, ideology or naïve faith in science. Yet, here they remain dependent on the authority of the leaders in each of those fields.
There are a great number of such people in the world, far more than it appears. Like all people, they may be divided into two categories: some are mentally limited, others, much cleverer. The first are happier. For the ordinary person of limited intelligence nothing is easier than to imagine himself an exceptional and original person and to take delight in this delusion with no misgivings. It has been enough for some of our young ladies to cut their hair short, put on blue eyeglasses, and call themselves Nihilists for them to persuade themselves that, in putting on their spectacles, they immediately acquired convictions of their own. It is enough for a man to feel in his heart a droplet of humanitarian and benevolent emotion to be immediately persuaded that no one feels so deeply as he and that he stands at the very vanguard of civilization. It is enough for another to pick up some thought he has heard, or to read a page at random somewhere, to believe at once that it was “his own idea,” engendered in his own brain.
These types of characters are amazingly still with us. The pseudo-rebellion just based on changing appearance; the “highly-evolved” free spirit who cares for humanity, animals, and nature. The autodidact who latches onto an idea isolated from its larger context. I don’t want to heap unnecessary scorn on those of a sincere nature who oppose the status quo. The problem is that it is all done horizontally, to oppose one conformist group with another. It is all emotionally driven. Only a very few will move in a vertical direction, that is they will transcend the ordinary, not oppose it. These are the Initiates. The emotional and inconclusive battles between ideologies, or religious and political beliefs, are no longer of interest to them.
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