2/25/2023 0 Comments Stronghold kingdoms castellation![]() ![]() ![]() It is our great prejudices which produce humanity’s greatest single acts, songs are sung on fearlessly brave warriors not calculating commanders, on love struck couples not Darwinist sexual partners and on long bloody feuds not well-ordered debates. How often do you laugh at a well-reasoned action? How often can you solve the jigsaw of love? You cannot, thus it is our humanity which gives life its colour as well it’s violence, not the robotic dry lecturing of reason, it is the song of love that moves man not the words of logic. Our irrationality holds much of life’s wonder love, friendship, loyalty and humour are all based in emotion. The multitude of human history records countless irrational wars and actions, where man is the warlord and nothing else: how many men have been slaughtered for power? how many women raped for lust? Man’s irrationality is fallen and flawed, however it is not solely evil and there is no dialectic between the bad irrational and the good rational as the Manichaeist would have you believe, far from it. Man is also bound to this one riding principle, “he kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills in order to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills to kill, proud and destructive tyrant he wants everything and nothing resists him.” So how can a creature so consumed by violence ever be ruled by reason or indeed be reasonable? The answer presents itself he cannot. The brutish instinct is also evidenced in nature, as man is king of all and like any king he in some ways represents his subjects, Nature is a stage of kill or be killed, where one animal is constantly devouring another. He is a paradox: he desires stability and war community and individualism at once he can be the meek servant the next the hate filled murderer at once the dutiful communal husband, the next the lonely hermit in his mountain home at once the most steadfast of friends, the next Brutus himself man is ruled by these bestial paradoxes which his reason can never puzzle and to which he is forever enslaved. Man is a hideous thing and, from the background, peers demoniacal hints of truth which make him more hideous. There is a sadistic fury within him which at any time can reduce the most gracious of gentleman to nothing more than the tribal savage what was once hidden can burst forth from prison like a Levanter to sweep the earth with their hurricane and to break up the fountain of the great deep to overwhelm us. ![]() ![]() Man is, in short, the least brutish of the animal kingdom but he is brutish all the same: he is irrational he desires blood, war, hate and love. Yet, the very fact it isn’t based on reason is its great strength, as it understands and represents human nature far better than any philosophical government. The monarchy is not reasonable what in fact could be more unreasonable than the presumption that the son of a king, even a good king, would necessarily make a wise ruler in turn? For even the greatest of men may have the most foolish of sons: one only needs to look at the glorious Henry V and the impotent Henry VI to comprehend this. ![]()
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