When it comes to those who delight in telling others how to lead their lives, the self-appointed and anointed elites of our big cities and various capitols have no competition. Marcus Tullius Cicero understood this 2,000 years ago. His advice regarding such people warrants repeating today: Avoid them. Do not let their honeyed logic and endless parsing of words beguile you: “If the worst comes to the worst and solitude is unattainable, better the society of countryfolk than of these hyper-sophisticates.”[i]
Bernanos, twenty centuries later reinforced this understanding when he wrote, “Man’s nerves have their contradictions, their weaknesses, but the logic of evil is as strict as hell. The devil is the greatest of logicians, or perhaps, who knows, he may be logic itself. The devil is the greatest logician. No logic is comparable to the logic of hell. The poor souls of the damned in hell are eternally arguing with themselves—with the greatest of logicians, whose name is the devil.”[ii]
These progressives and their issue, political correctness, reject Cicero’s advice out of hand, and they damn people like Bernanos as unsophisticated half-wits. They are too smart for what they view as childishness (a favored epithet); too sophisticated; too tied to the immanent to even consider the possibility of anything transcendent, like God. And… they want everyone, you and I, everywhere, and always to bow to their lead, which is no less a religiously secular fervor than its spiritual counterpart.
Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election because the hyper-sophisticates’ grasp exceeded their reach, pure and simple. The American people called them out on it, and that’s that.
The result? Progressives stew in their own bile, contemptuous of the middle class as always, then, now, and forevermore.
Cicero, 106-40 BC
[i] Cicero, Letters to Atticus, Volume I, Letter 35, The Loeb Classical Library (LCL7), Edited by G. P. Gould, Page 177, year 1999.
Georges Bernanos
[ii] Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence, by Hans Urs Von Balthasar, A Communio Book, © 1996 Ignatius Press, San Francisco, Location 6528, Kindle.
