By Their Very Fear (Update)

The community is inhuman, and less than human. It becomes at last the most dangerous because bloodless and insentient tyrant. for a long time, even a democracy like the American or the Swiss will answer to the call of a hero, who is somewhat of a true aristocrat: like Lincoln: so strong is the aristocratic instinct in man. But he willingness to give the response to the heroic, the true aristocratic call, gets weaker and weaker in every democracy, as time goes on. All history proves it. Then men turn against the heroic appeal, with a sort of venom. They will only listen to the call of mediocrity wielding the insentient bullying power of mediocrity: which is evil. Hence the success of painfully inferior and even base politicians...

So today. Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bring the evil into being.

This is the Christian community today, in its perpetual mean thou-shalt-not. This is how Christian doctrine has worked out in practice.

There is no doubt that Lawrence is troubling...that his deep insights into the mind of man and the mind of the collective (not woman per se, though woman is lost in the collective) will often spill over into some very distasteful thinking. But baby/bathwater; wheat/chaff.

There is a clear understanding here of the weakness of humans in general. We fear for our very existence (we are small and soft as predators go) and so we have created systems for protection from the natural world and from each other.

Lawrence believes in the strong, brave aristocrat--where strength shepherds the weak--and believes that the religion of the masses, which is Revelation (as he propounds) and not that of Jesus, exists only to destroy all worldly power with the only "good" being the power yielded by the elect in another world (yet to come, but never arriving). Apocalypse is the theology of those who are already "left behind".

And those who feel this deep sense of denigration in their very soul have a singular desire to "equalize" through violence, to be "tough" in their fear.

UPDATE: Digby details some Tea Party plans regarding budgets, teachers, churches and armed employees of the state.