John Carroll Quotes

For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires.

Education is the strongest weapon available for restricting the questions people ask, controlling what they think, and ensuring that they get their thoughts ‘from above’.

The Inquisitor is the forgiving father, the scientific materialist, and the social engineer. He is the most compassionate, and honest, of politicians; he takes on great burdens of responsibility in order to protect his subjects from ethical doubt. But he also suppresses any attempt to expand their self-consciousness: he is the ‘great simplifier’, the shepherd to a flock of carefree children.

Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.

Stirner and Nietzsche … reveal how prone morality is to being used as a means of rationalization, a cloak for concealing violent and brutish passions, and making their sadistic expression a virtue.

[Marx] explicates ideology as socially determined, [Stirner] as psychologically determined: both accuse it of remaining oblivious to its own determinations.

Unless the fundamental categories of economics such as ‘property’ were to be redefined in a radically personal way the liberal rationalist curse which had established economics as a scientific discipline cut off from human interests would proliferate. Economic models … have failed to incorporate any meaningful index of individual benefit other than the original utilitarian one, … the index of increasing income or an increasing flow of commodities.

Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype—the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy.

The enemies of Christ … could not bear his independence; his “Give the emperor that which is the emperor’s” showed a contempt for the affairs of state and its politics—for the moral order—that their self-respect would not let them tolerate.

The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress.

Nietzsche … combines, in effect, Christ’s harsh sayings: ‘let the dead bury their dead’ and ‘narrow is the way which leadeth unto life’.

Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative—the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom.

Man is more than an animal only in that he finds expression for the beautiful.

What stands most explicitly as critique in Nietzsche’s late work in not a development from earlier interests but a return to two problems of enduring personal involvement for him, those of Wagner and of Christianity. Der Antichrist, to take one case, is not a response to a resuscitating public interest in Christian religion; it is primarily a renewed attempt to resolve for himself the question of piety.

Dostoevsky’s underground man … observes his contemporaries striving to establish false goals where there are no naturally generated ones. … He argues they should be conscious and honest enough to recognize that the goal itself is not an absolute, and probably not even important. A strong attachment to the telos indicates that the spontaneous enjoyment the child once took in road-building has waned.