As I’ve already pointed here, I’m reading a very good biography of one of my favourite authors, Cioran; and I came upon the following quotes:
Since time immemorial people have yearned for freedom, and then rejoiced whenever they lost it. And that’s not all. They actively sought, they made desperate efforts to relinquish it. Otherwise, how could we account for the frantic desire to annihilate liberal regimes and the passionate pursuite of dictatorship. Bordedom with freedom is one of the most serious and exasperating points a man can reach….Even under a terrorist regime people feel safer than amid the phantasms of democracy. The reluctance to think and the fear of finding themselves in monadic isolation make people gladly and resignedly accept the imperatives and the commands of dictators. An endless era of infinite freedom, of “sincere” and extreme democracy would mark the invitable downfall of humanity….The crowds want to be ruled.
[Emphasis added and footnotes omitted.]
And here’s another Romanian intellectual, Crainic, making a similar observation:
After all, Adolf Hitler has restored natural order in the field of government. The crowds like to be ruled; the crowds like to be commanded. The system of military hierarchy applied in the organization of the single party — which is one and the same with the nation — reflects the great instinct for subordination and superordination, a fundamental law of social life.
[Emphasis added and footnotes omitted.]
Your “intellectual”, Cioran is incredibly specious in his statement that “since time immemorial….” I highly doubt that his scope of experience extends very far beyond his own limited cultural & perceptual reality tunnel.
His “logic” assumes that: 1.) since time immemorial human socio-political groupings essentially have changed little and the modern day incarnations we see today are as true 5000 years ago globally as it is now. 2.) all culture groups are monolithically determinable by their universal desire to be ruled by dictatorships.
I don’t think I need to go further into a wholesale refutation of the inherent weakness and pathetic “scholarship” of such incredibly asinine declarations.
I think it is especially grievous that you can endorse the unfounded extrapolation that all people have a desire to be ruled based only on the limited observations based on a specific regional and cultural “study”.
Very disappointing.
How deep is your familiarity with Cioran?
Cioran, like Nietzsche, was first and foremost an aphorist. His excessive language and aphoristic style served to express his passionate nature. Cioran exaggerated in order to better simplify.