It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically everything else that lays claim to being "modern" and "progressive." We have already cited the most striking forms of Nihilist Vitalism, whose cumulative effect has been to uproot, disintegrate, and "mobilize" the individual, to substitute for his normal stability and rootedness a senseless quest for power and movement, and to replace normal human feeling by a nervous excitability. The work of Nihilist Realism, in practice as in theory, has been parallel and complementary to that of Vitalism: a work of standardization, specialization, simplification, mechanization, dehumanization; its effect has been to "reduce" the individual to the most "Primitive" and basic level, to make him in fact the slave of his environment, the perfect workman in Lenin's worldwide "factory. Seraphim Rose
About This Quote

There is nothing more horrifying than the idea of the human race's destruction. It leaves many people wondering if there is any hope or reason to continue on this path of self-destruction. This quote by Max Horkheimer, a German philosopher who lived during the early years of the 20th century, points out that there is something in all of us that makes us want to destroy ourselves. We are in constant competition with each other and with the world around us.

We are fighting for survival, for power and wealth. However, in order to maintain our position in this world, we must destroy ourselves. There are some things that are so basic, so essential that if they are not done, we will fail in our goal of survival.

Source: Nihilism: The Root Of The Revolution Of The Modern Age

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More Quotes By Seraphim Rose
  1. What, more realistically, is this “mutation, ” the “new man”? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue’s dream; the “free-thinker” and skeptic, closed only to the truth but “open” to each new intellectual...
  2. It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically everything else that lays claim to being "modern" and "progressive."...
  3. A government must rule by the Grace of God or by the will of the people, it must believe in authority or in the Revolution; on these issues compromise is possible only in semblance, and only for a time. The Revolution, like the disbelief which...
  4. Why is the truth, it would seem, revealed to some and not to others? Is there a special organ for receiving revelation from God? Yes, though usually we close it and do not let it open up: God’s revelation is given to something called a...
  5. More profoundly, Nihilist "simplification" may be seen in the universal prestige today accorded the lowest order of knowledge, the scientific, as well as the simplistic ideas of men like Marx, Freud, and Darwin, which underlie virtually the whole of contemporary thought and life. We say...
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