Talk:Alain de Benoist

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• One who criticises capitalism while approving of immigration, of which the working class is its first victim, would do better to remain silent. One who criticises immigration while remaining silent regarding capitalism should do the same.

• To deny man’s biological determinants or to reduce them by relegating his specific traits to zoology is absurd. The hereditary part of humanity forms only the basis of social and historical life: human instincts are not programmed in their object, i.e., man always has the freedom to make choices, moral as well as political, which naturally are limited only by death. Man is an heir, but he can dispose of his heritage. He can construct himself historically and culturally on the basis of the presuppositions of his biological constitution, which are his human limitations. What lies beyond these limitations may be called God, the cosmos, nothingness, or Being. The question of ‘why’ no longer makes sense, because what is beyond human limitations is by definition unthinkable. Thus, the New Right proposes a vision of a well-balanced individual, taking into account both inborn, personal abilities and the social environment. It rejects ideologies that emphasize only one of these factors, be it biological, economic, or mechanical.

• The highest measure of democracy is neither the 'extent of freedom' nor the 'extent of equality', but rather the highest measure of participation.

• Beware the god who cannot laugh.

• All society, in so far as it takes the form of a social body, is ‘fascist.’ The State is a ‘fascist.’ The family is ‘fascist.’ History is ‘fascist.’ Form is ‘fascist.’ It is but a small step to admit: the human phenomenon is ‘fascist,’ since always and everywhere, it imposes meaning, form, order, and strives to make them endure.

• Liberalism considers men interchangeable because it only conceives of them in an abstract, generic manner, as beings unattached to the Earth, free of all community, and detached from all belonging, this break being in liberalism’s eyes the very condition of their “emancipation.” Similarly, it only concerns itself with their “freedom of choice,” not the empirical consequences of these choices (even a bad choice is always justified if it has been taken freely). For liberals, the notion of the common good has no meaning since there is no entity capable of benefiting from it: a society being composed only of individuals, there is no “good” which could be common to these individuals. The “social good,” in other words, can only be understood as a simple aggregate of individual goods, the result of individual choices.

• Decadence in modern mass multicultural societies begins at a moment when there is not longer any discernible meaning within society. Meaning is destroyed by raising individualism above all other values because rampant individualism encourages the anarchical proliferation of egotism at the expense of the values that were once part of the national heritage, values that give form to the concept of nationhood and the nation state, to a state which is more than just a political entity, and which corresponds to a particular people who are conscious of sharing a common heritage for the survival of which they are prepared to make personal sacrifices. Man evolved in cooperating groups united by common cultural and genetic ties, and it is only in such a setting that the individual can feel truly free, and truly protected. Men cannot live happily alone and without values or any sense of identity: such a situation leads to nihilism, drug abuse, criminality, and worse. With the spread of purely egotistic goals at the expense of the altruistic regard for family and nation, the individual begins to talk of his rights rather than his duties, for he no longer feels any sense of destiny, of belonging to and being a part of a greater and more enduring entity. He no longer rejoices in the secure belief that he shares in a heritage which it is part of his common duty to protect - he no longer feels that he has anything in common with those around him. In short, he feels lonely and oppressed. Since all values have become personal, everything is now equal to everything; e.g., nothing equals nothing.

Biohistorian15 (talk) 07:36, 8 April 2024 (UTC)