Ragnar Redbeard - Might Is Right

When the Church triumphed, the Dark Ages began, and when it is finally rooted out (together with all its social antenæ) the Heroic Age dawns once more. True heroes shall be born again as of old, for our women may yet be something more than rickety perambulating dolls and drug-stores in spectacles.

The ‘Church’ is the idol of the priestly parasite — The ‘State’ is the idol of the political parasite. Beware, O, America! that in escaping from the holy trickery of the monk, you fall not an easy prey to ‘the loving kindness’ of the politician. Even if the ‘reformer’ succeeds in re-establishing upon majority-votes, the dark tyranny o£ the ‘greatest number;’ we have this consolation to fall back upon, such organization must ultimately tumble down of its own weight, and then re-divide up into warring fragments. Nothing that is unnatural can last for long.

The Universal Church is no more; all we see of it now is jealous remnants. And the Universal State, the Social Democracy, the Economic Republic, the Brotherhood of Man, should they take practical form, are pre-ordained to similar failure. All they could do, would be to postpone the operation of the survival of the fittest — drugging nations in temporary sedatives.

No matter how eagerly madmen may try to do it, there is no known process whereby they can jump out of their own skins. Christian or socialist churches, paternalisms, schools, governments, administrations, ethics, and moralisms (even if genuinely Christian and Fraternal) would be wholly impotent to change the natural course of things and therefore powerless to command the survival of mental and physical cripples; even although those cripples were as canonized saints for ‘goodness,’ and as the sands of the sea shore for number. Shrieking sentimentalism is indeed a feeble lever wherewith to overturn the immutable order of the Universe. It cannot do it. No! not if it were whooped till the crack of doom! Not even if it had a Lamb of God in every city, ready to be butchered each Friday afternoon, in order to make a Christian Holiday.

‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ those three great lights of Modern Democracies are three colossal Falsehoods, ignoble slave-shibboleths; impossible of actualization even if proclaimed by some superhuman Satan, followed by armed hosts of un-killable demons, all armed to the teeth with flaming swords, Greek-fire, and dynamite cannon.

You may trace Equality in letters of silver on tablets of burnished gold, but without engineering a perpetual miracle, you cannot make it — true.

You may write Fraternity in blazing diamonds on walls of enduring granite, but without reversing the mechanism of the Universe, you cannot make it a fact.

And, though you enscroll Freedom on countless sheepskins and rivet statues of Liberty on every harbor-rock, yet with ‘all the kings horses and all the kings men’ one being born to be a hireling and a subordinate — no power can free.

Can you build up a marble palace with mud and slime O! ye drivelling bedlamites? Can you raise up a conqueror from the dunghill, or make the stupid great? Can you manufacture heroes out of hogs O! ye snuffling ‘Educated’ swine?

‘We can! We can! We can!’ shrieketh the raging rhetoricians of the market place and the editorial mill. ‘We can! We can!’ bellows the herd as it stupidly pours through the slip-rails to the pithing pen. ‘Yes, O! Yes! with the love of Jesus and our collection plate, whines the soft-skinned preacher as he turns over the sibylline leaves of his Black-Art. ‘Of a certainty, we can,’ hisseth the plastic politician, the rattlesnake! — the hungry basilisk! — whose law making is more blighting than the breath of a simoom.

Thereupon, toward you, O! America! they, one and all, point the finger of pride! Towards you!

America! Where the politicians rage and the people imagine vain things! — and the dogs in the alleys are — baying at the moon!

Then, turn I away! Sadly! Sadly! Sadly! And I brush against a slave in copper-riveted overalls, hurrying to his mill; and against another in gold chain and silken hat, hasting to his money-changing — and a lean woman in sordid rags, with a pile of lumber balanced upon her crown; and a splendid harlot in diamonds and brilliant plumage rideth slowly by.

And the cattle in the slaughter-yard are lowing for their hay; and a draught mare, with a galled shoulder, lieth swollen and dead on the frozen paving blocks. How nauseous it all is?

Loathsome! Loathsome! O, how loathsome?

Man is part and parcel of the animal kingdom and (not withstanding Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln — Karl Marx, La Salle, and Liebknecht — Christ, Robespierre, and Rousseau — Hyndman, Tennyson, and Mazzini — Dr. Adler, Bebel, George and Isaiah — Bellamy, Gronlund, and W. T. Stead) he cannot escape from the draconic ordinances that despotically govern that kingdom and environ his being like an atmosphere on every side.

Altruism, meek and lowly self-abnegation, upon any extended scale is among predatory organisms (and all organisms are predatory) impossible of practice on pain of wholesale felo-de-se.

Every man is under an obligation to fight and bear his own burden. If he cannot do so, others cannot do his fighting or his burden-bearing and their own at the same time with reasonable safety to themselves. He therefore who finds it impossible to carry his own burden, had better sink down and die in his tracks than impose an additional load upon the shoulders of his kind-hearted fellow strugglers. For then, they would be overloaded and consequently unable to fight successfully; so all might perish together.

Practical fraternal sympathy (upon any universal scale) has always had in the end a most destructive effect upon the internal structure of communities. Men will always love and cherish those that are near and dear to them; but when it is proposed to extend the circle of their ‘near and dear ones’ to all mankind, that is going rather too far. Indeed all must perish ignominiously if that foolish idea prevails. ‘ All ’ are even now enervating themselves, undermining their strength, by futile overexertion in that very direction. They are straining themselves to death, by endeavoring to carry an impossible load. The majority of men are born far too weak constitutionally for their conditions; and the few who do possess the necessary stamina and grit, will have quite enough to do in proving by deeds their fitness to survive, propagate, and possess. Many are projected — few are selected.

Yet altruism, wholesale self-renunciation — wholesale burden-bearing, for the sake of ‘Outraged and Suffering Humanity,’ is the maddening basis upon which ‘our good Lord Jesus,’ and his demented imitators have erected their sporadic sociology — their Magnificent Satanism.

Does not simple business acumen whisper to us that every man’s chief occupation upon earth is to sustain himself. ‘I mean subsist at any cost; you shall want ere I shall — business is business.’ If men had sufficient personal initiative to think along these stern lines, there would be little use on earth for the theologian and ‘the reformer;’ those twin Mephistos who find their renown and grandeur, in the abasement of mankind. The battle of life would then be so grim, terrible, and realistic; (so Trojan in fact) that those holy dissimulators and crafty deceivers, would rapidly die off, or be eaten off; for in the clash of naked interests, the Best and Bravest only could possibly survive; and no one would ever dream of including them among the Best or Bravest.

Count Leo Tolstoi, undoubtedly the ablest modern expounder of primitive Christliness, in a much translated volume, entitled: — “Work While Ye Have Light,” writes thus: — ‘Our Faith tells us that bliss is to be found, not in resistance, but in submission; not in riches, but in giving everything away; we have not quite succeeded in casting off every habit of violence and property.”