Core questions I always ask myself is: what are you trying to accomplish, and how will you know when you are there? As I have said often, there are four principle cultural tasks: the creation and distribution of meaning, truth, power, and wealth. Art, it seems to me, ought properly to be pursuing the first two tasks. It should inspire people, and teach them deep truths about life and humanity.
In the last century, under the thrall of complete failure in meaning formation, “truths” have been distributed which are anything but. We are told the permanent point of human existence is economic and political equality. Nothing more. This has led to the subordinatin of art to, what? Supporting change in the political and economic spheres.
The essence of the Fabian idea is slow internal subversion, not just by suggesting new ideas–I will note that Socialists do not HAVE any new cultural ideas, being in a formal sense nihilists–but much more by undermining old ideas, by attacking notions of God, and Goodness, and common sense morality; by undermining notions of beauty and transcendance, and by denigrating traditional ideas of social roles and responsibilities, as seen outside the direct control of an ubiquitous State.
This has not happened yet in Muslim (whose radicalism is both a reaction to and internalization of the Fabian project of moral subversion: reaction to, in that they hew to their traditions; internalization of in that they reject in their methods their own actual traditions, and adopt instead the amoral, unprincipled terroristic methods of Leftists) and other nations, to the extent they would like, but it is their goal to eradicate all difference whatever, the world over. We are to be interchangeable cogs, managed by ruthless lunatics.
I use the Franklin-Covey planner pages. Every day has a new quote. The quote for today is from Sidney Webb: “The inevitability of gradualness cannot fail to be appreciated”.
Given the Mormonism of the owners of that company–as least Stephen Covey–it is highly ironic that they would include a quote from a man who very much wished to see the Soviet model duplicated around the world, and who dedicated his life to spreading the lies necessary to make that idea palatable to silly people.
The essence of their project is aggregating power. I see historical ignorants act from time to time as if there were any fundamental difference between Nazism and Bolshevism. Was there a complete abrogation of legal rights? Yes, in both cases. Mass terror? Yes in both cases. Mass murder? Yes in both cases. Did Webb approve of both systems? Of course.
One gets the sense reading about Webb, his wife, and his pal George Bernard Shaw, that in their ideal society a person could be sent to the gas chambers for failing to provide stimulating dinner conversation, or for wearing an unsuitable tie. They would of course laugh it off over tea the next day, and plan their next murder, all in very cultivated accents.
This facade of civility is what we see to this very day in large sections of our creative communities (note: business requires a lot of creativity, so I am here referring only to those who have arrogated to themselves the right to speak about general cultural issues in academic and creative works of art of all sorts), in which the most horrific crimes–real crimes, involving real people having the bones in their bodies broken, being raped, being burnt alive, being buried alive–are glossed over, in favor of focus on the minute and accidental crimes of the civilized West.