The Catholics can find consolation in the fact that Catholicism is the only conscious negation of our ailing and perverted modern world, and therefor… - Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Once Europe could boast of a large class of craftsmen — free people with the opportunity for artistic creation; but now everything is manufactured by mass production and the result is an incredible shrinkage in the variety of forms due to standardization. There is probably a greater variety of goods in Timbuctoo or in the Sooks of Marrakesh than in Frankfort or Los Angeles. The artifacts are thus "democratized." (Mr. Gray and Mr. Green get an identical product for an identical price.) […] The defenders of mass production emphasize the fact that modern manufacture makes more goods accessible to a greater number. They are not aware psychologically that the gain is nil. It is true that a book used to cost during the Middle Ages the equivalent of two to five hundred dollars whereas Gone With the Wind can be bought in editions of $1.49 and even less. Libraries were the privileges of a very few. But on the other side people enjoyed books far more, and the purchase of a book was a greater event in life than today the acquisition of a Cadillac. Nowadays one walks nonchalantly into a bookstore, pushes two and a half dollars over a counter, reads the book and forgets it sometimes in the suburban train.

The horizontalist is tied down and cannot rise above himself. In his antagonism toward all hierarchy he even finally opposes the idea of God as a superior to himself, as a Supreme Being, and therefore also the conceptual images of Popes, emperors, kings, and fathers.

[T]here are in America about a hundred different types of "democracy," each held to be "real democracy, democracy as it was meant by the Founding Fathers, democracy as we all understand it." But the Founding Fathers, although they had very clear and concise ideas, wanted personally no democracy, and the only way out of the chaos is to go back like good children to the giants of the past, be they theologians like St. Thomas, philosophers like Plato, or statesmen like the authors of the Federalist. Confusion of words and meanings leads to the confusion of minds, and the confusion of minds breeds upheavals and revolution, as a well-known American once rightly pointed out.