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Unfortunately the European concept "massman" came to America not from its great originators, Burckhardt and Nietzsche, but via its popularizer, the b… - Peter Viereck
" "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.
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About Peter Viereck
Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006) was an American poet and professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for the collection Terror and Decorum. In 1955 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Florence.
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Alternative Names:
Peter Robert Edwin Viereck
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Peter R. Viereck
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Peter Robert Viereck
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Additional quotes by Peter Viereck
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.
Compare two photographs: Charles Baudelaire and this angular, harsh-faced professor of the Union Theological Seminary, who for years was pastor of a congregation of automobile workers in Detroit. The eyes of both have the same intensity, the same bitter integrity. Like Kierkegaard, Niebuhr is not merely "painfully sincere" but downright cadaverously sincere. The spiritual demands of his outspoken sermons indict not only the dead rottenness behind a godless hedonism but also the self-deception behind a facile, overconfident idealism.
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