The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

For the barbarian is the man who regards his passions as their own excuse for being; who does not domesticate them either by understanding their cause or by conceiving their ideal goal. He is the man who does not know his derivations nor perceive his tendencies, but who merely feels and acts, valuing in his life its force and its filling, but being careless of its purpose and its form. His delight is in abundance and vehemence; his art, like his life, shows an exclusive respect for quantity and splendour of materials. His scorn for what is poorer and weaker than himself is only surpassed by his ignorance of what is higher.

It is characteristic of the barbarian … to insist upon seeing a thing “as it is.” The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.

The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, the pride of others. I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civilized place.

Nations are barbarian in their infancy but not savage. The barbarian is a proportional mean between the savage and the citizen. He already possesses no end of knowledge: he has habitations, some agriculture, domestic animals, laws, a cult, regular tribunals; he lacks only the sciences.

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph

The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.

[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.

BRITANNUS (shocked).
Caesar: this is not proper.

THEODOTUS (outraged).
How!

CAESAR (recovering his self-possession).
Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

The key feature of modernity, which makes it into a barbarism of a hitherto unknown kind, is precisely to be a society lacking any culture and existing independently from it. As ordinary and common as it might seem today, this situation creates an almost untenable paradox, if it is the case that life, as self-conservation and self-growth, is itself a cultural process. This is something that all past civilizations illustrate. Barbarism is thus a sort of impossibility. If it happens nonetheless, it is never through an inexplicable dulling of the powers of life. Instead, the powers of life must be turned against themselves, in the phenomena of hate and resentment. This happens because life, in a suffering that is coextensive with its being and that it can no longer bear, attempts to get rid of itself. Barbarism cannot exist without the emergence of Evil, which is a mad but wholly intelligible desire of self-destruction. Or rather, in every state of social regression, it is possible to discover, underneath the evidence of the features of stagnation and decline, the violence of the deliberate refusal of life to be itself.

"Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. "I ate civilization."

Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarism must ultimately triumph.

Barbarism has its vices, its sophistries, no less than civilization. Your cynicisms and sophistications are weak and childish beside the elemental cynicism, the vital sophistication of what you call savagery. If our virtues were unspoiled as a new-born panther cub, our sins were older than Nineveh.