That whole inconsistent spectrum of Goldwater intellectuals and right-radical magazines. Most of them are so muddled they don't even know when they a… - Peter Viereck

Something or other is certainly being revived in America today, judging by all these countless examples, but is it religion or religiosity? Religion is demanding, unglib; it combines the hardest spiritual discipline with the most shattering spiritual experience. Therefore, the Overadjusted man prefers religiosity; it is easy, painless, provides a warm, comfortable feeling. Such is ever the fate of values when made bourgeois.

The Athens of Pericles, a mere sixty thousand free voters, ill-housed, ill-clad, economically dependent on slavery and imperialist war, created a greater cultural flowering than all the prosperous free democracy of a thousand-times-more numerous America. The social democracy of Sweden does not have the world's highest cultural flowering; it does have the world's highest social progress, highest economic security, and highest suicide rate. Let us imagine a society whose ideal is not social progress but an ever-increasing poverty, with the poorhouse bed as the final, sweetly desired goal. Such a society would lack all social progress; it need not lack—consider the religious and literary achievements of Saint Francis—religious progress and cultural freedom.

Unfortunately the European concept "massman" came to America not from its great originators, Burckhardt and Nietzsche, but via its popularizer, the brilliantly learned but oversimplifying Ortega y Gasset. "Massman" is a valid enough term for the American Overadjusted Man but only on the condition that the middleclass nature of the American masses is first recognized and that "massman" is not made synonymous with workingman. Wealthy would-be conservatives, above all the prissy suburban "despisers of the mob," flatter themselves handsomely by assuming that "mass" means only manual worker and that they themselves are not massmen but rugged individualists. Hence the snobbish illusion that individualism is best protected from the mass by an anti-worker, narrowly commercialist politics and economics.