The best have no zest

America is not a Propositional Nation, according to Robert Locke. Locke, like Zmirak, is a writer whose opinions I both enjoy and hate, but the very appearance on the virtual scene of serious thinkers who are so profoundly conservative — so retrograde in a way — is refreshing: enough of the NY Times PC blandness, soured by drops of faux-patrician disdain. I once told a friend of mine (and a very close one), reproaching him for having voted leftist (in a parliamentary election in Russia): “We are the best people of Russia, and you…” (I’m not sure if I added “you’re shit”). I’ve used this phrase, “we’re the best people” many times since in my silent monologues — an expression once used to describe the noblest and occasionally the wealthiest. I’ve have no claim to hereditary “goodness,” nor to righteousness, but I still feel I was right in some objective sense.

Back to Locke, though. Yes, the Declaration was right in asserting the equality of mankind at creation; right in a sense, too (see above) — exactly in what sense must have been argued by multitudes — and anyone who does not feel it is devoid of moral intuition, and hence a “moral freak.”

(I meant to be ambivalent: the “moral freak” comes from the lexicon of Soviet pedagogy columnists, who used it to describe emotionally impaired, coldly calculating teenage products of wrong-headed upbringing.)

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