Although the average man has taken no part in manufacturing moral codes and statute laws, yet how he obeys them with dog-like submissiveness? He is trained to obedience, like oxen are broken to the yoke of their masters. He is a born thrall habituated from childhood to be governed by others.
Chinese civilization deliberately distorts its children’s feet, by swathing them in bandages of silk and hoop-iron. Christian civilization crushes and cramps the minds of its youth by means of false philosophies, artificial moral codes and ironclad political creeds. Deleterious sub-theories of good and evil are systematically injected into our natural literatures, and gradually (without serious obstruction) they crystallize themselves into cast-iron formulas, infallible constitutions, will-o-the-wisp evangels, and other deadly epidemics.
Modern “leaders of thought” are almost wholly wanting in originality and courage. Their wisdom is foolishness, their remedies poison. They idiotically claim that they guide the destinies of nations, whereas, in reality, they are but the flotsam and scum-froth that glides smoothly down the dark stream of decadence.
Mankind is aweary, aweary of its sham prophets, its demagogues and its statesmen. It crieth out for kings and heroes. It demands a nobility — a nobility that cannot be hired with money, like slaves or beasts of burden. The world awaits the coming of mighty men of valor, great destroyers; destroyers of all that is vile, angels of death. We are sick unto nausea of the “good Lord Jesus,” terror-stricken under the executive of priest, mob and proconsul. We are tired to death of “Equality.” Gods are at a discount, devils are in demand. He who would rule the coming age must be hard, cruel, and deliberately intrepid, for softness assails not successfully the idols of the multitude. Those idols must be smashed into fragments, burnt into ashes, and that cannot be done by the gospel of love.
The living forces of evil are to be found in the living ideals of to-day.
The Commandments and laws and moral codes that we are called upon to reverence and obey are themselves the insidious enginery of decadence. It is moral principles that manufacture beggars. It is golden rules that glorify meekness. It is statute laws that make spaniels of men.
A man may keep every one of the Ten Commandments and yet remain a fool all the days of his life. He may obey every written law of the land, and yet be a caitiff and a slave. He may “love Jesus,” delight in the golden rule and yet continue to the hour of his death, a failure and dependent. Truly the way to hell is by fulfilling the commandments of God. If the all-conquering race to which we belong, is not to irretrievably dwindle into multitudinous nothingness, (like the inferior herds it has outdistanced or enslaved) then it is essential that the Semitic spider webs (so astutely woven for ages into the brains of our chiefs) be remorselessly torn out by the very roots, even though the tearing out process be both painful and bloody.
If we would retain and defend our inherited manhood, we must not permit ourselves to be forever rocked to repose, with the sweet lullabies of eastern idealisms. Too long we have been hypnotized by the occult charm of Hebrew Utopianism. If we continue to obey the insidious spell that has been laid upon us, we will wake up some dread morning with the gates of hell — “of hell upon earth” yawning wide open, to close again upon us forever.
The idea of hell is in some respects a truthful conception, suggestive of actual fact. If we terrestrialize the location, there is nothing inharmonious about it. Many a race, many a tribe, and many a mighty empire has gone down into a grimly realistic sheol. Is it not right and just, that the vile, the base and the degenerate (that is to say the slave nations of the earth) should be punished pitilessly for their creeping cowardice? Is it not right that they should be, as it were, fried and toasted — should swim in pools of boiling blood, or dance sweltering satanic glees, with blistered feet and straining eye-balls on red-hot Saharas of gravel and sand?
In actual operation Nature is cruel and merciless to men, as to all other beings. Let a tribe of human animals live a rational life, Nature will smile upon them and their posterity; but let them attempt to organize an unnatural mode of existence an equality elysium, and they will be punished even to the point of extermination.
All ethics, politics and philosophies are pure assumptions, built upon assumptions. They rest on no sure basis. They are but shadowy castles-in-the-air erected by day-dreamers, or by rogues, upon nursery fables. It is time they were firmly planted upon an enduring foundation. This can never be accomplished until the racial mind has first been thoroughly cleansed and drastically disinfected of its depraved, alien, and demoralizing concepts of right and wrong. In no human brain can sufficient space be found, for the relentless logic of hard fact, until all pre-existent delusions have been finally annihilated. Half measures are of no avail, we must go down to the very roots and tear them out, even to the last fiber. We must be, like nature, hard, cruel, relentless.
Too long the dead hand has been permitted to sterilize living thought — too long, right and wrong, good and evil, have been inverted by false prophets. In the days that are at hand, neither creed nor code must be accepted upon authority, human, superhuman or ‘divine.’ (Morality and conventionalism are for subordinates.) Religions and constitutions and all arbitrary principles, every mortal theorem, must be deliberately put to the question. No moral dogma must be taken for granted — no standard of measurement deified. There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes. Like the wooden idols of long ago, they are all the work of human hands, and what man has made, man can destroy.
He that is slow to believe anything and everything is of great understanding, for belief in one false principle, is the beginning of all unwisdom. The chief duty of every new age is to up-raise new men to determine its liberties, to lead it towards material success — to rend (as it were) the rusty padlocks and chains of dead custom that always prevent healthy expansion. Theories and ideals and constitutions, that may have meant life and hope, and freedom, for our ancestors, may now mean destruction, slavery and dishonor to us. As environments change no human ideal standeth sure.
Wherever, therefore, a lie has built unto itself a throne, let it be assailed without pity and without regret, for under the domination of a falsehood, no nation can permanently prosper. Let established sophisms be dethroned, rooted out, burnt and destroyed, for they are a standing menace to all true nobility of thought and action. Whatever alleged “truth” is proven by results, to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage.
The most dangerous of all enthroned lies is the holy, the sanctified, the privileged lie — the lie that “everybody” believes to be a model truth. It is the fruitful mother of all other popular errors and delusions. It is hydra-headed. It has a thousand roots. It is a social cancer. The lie that is known to be a lie is half eradicated, but the lie that even intelligent persons regard as a sacred fact — the lie that has been inculcated around a mother’s knee — is more dangerous to contend against than a creeping pestilence. Popular lies have ever been the most potent enemies of personal liberty. There is only one way to deal with them. Cut them out, to the very core, just as cancers are. Exterminate them root and branch, or they will surely eat us all up. We must annihilate them, or they will us. Half and half remedies are of no avail.