Rinzai Did Nothing Wrong.

We live within an age wherein the poor oppress the wealthy. How? By force of envy. Only look upon the bygone eras. Up until the 1600's, class was thought synonymous with character, except within the subtlest of dramas Shakespeare wrote. Yet character was of the utmost weight, and class was secondary, though essential to that social order which required character, and character itself required social order. In the centuries that followed, class and character became divorced from one another, and with decent reason. As the matter showed, the world was not without its share of noble-hearted peasants nor of wealthy bastards. Thus, the modern moral play was born as a response to the oppression of the noble poor by poor nobility, and audiences cheered for those whose wealth was in the spirit rather than in moneys, as the protagonists of such a quality upon the stage strove to ascend above the ruin of the slums, in opposition to the vile and perverse aristocrats who lorded over them. The ...

Tolkien was not a Fascist, but his anti-Fascist politics were nonetheless as playful and escapist as his stories, and I can’t imagine that the irony of his own contradictions had been lost on him. There cannot be an abolition of control, since abolition is control. One cannot be arrested for professing what is in the interest of State, since only States can make arrests. (A “citizen’s arrest” is nonetheless a *legal* possibility.) There is no friendship without loyalty to common goods and expectations; there can be no noble aspirations without class distinctions, and a monarchy without a constitution is a tyranny. If all are born with evil in their Souls, then any has the obligation to control it, both in Self and Others; this especially is true if only some are evil and the others good, for any innocence must be protected. Men cannot defend those worthy of protection if there is no rational consensus in between them about who is worthy. All of our moral aspirations strive to the fulfi...