Cultural ideal

I ended the last article by saying that substantial freedoms are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for happiness. The reason that I say this is because substantial freedoms give us the capabilities to pursue our projects. What they don’t give us is the will, motivation, and perseverance to achieve those projects. This is where we need both an ethical and aesthetic ideal that see both excellence and beauty in human projects that center around health, art, and intelligence. If a person does not have an ethos that sees excellence in knowledge, and he does not see the sage or philosopher ideal as beautiful, no amount of substantial freedoms will promote this ideal. This is where I am “conservative”; this is where I side with people like Nietzsche and now the European New Right. This is where I see the most glaring error in Marxism, which believes that economic conditions alone will cause a society to thrive. It is not just the poverty in the inner cities which creates a vile type of human; it is also the ideals that are sought after. How can people thrive when pimps are the ideal type of man, and a whore is the ideal type of woman? The reality is that this cancerous culture has spread to all of America, and will only serve to degrade people further. I do agree that we need an economic system which is more just than the present one, and that consumer capitalism promotes this wretched ideal of a human, since this debased being tends to be a prodigious overall consumer, so he is good for the economy. It is just as important, if not more so important, no! I would say definitely more so important that we embrace the ideals that core to the Indo-European / Aryan Weltanschauung! The overall meaning that is derived from us being in the world needs to be grounded in the ethics, aesthetics, and religious sentiments of the ancient Indo-Europeans.

Also, I know that some of you might be critical of me for asserting that substantial freedoms are necessary for the flourishing of man. You will base this upon Stoic morality which sees wealth and health as preferred indifferents, not absolutely necessary for virtue. Interestingly, this is probably the main point of contention between a Stoic and an Aristotelian. I don’t want to make this an imaginary debate between a Stoic and an Aristotelian.