abolir a pobreza

Chesterton, aqui citado por Bonald

The trouble with out society is that the ideal is more wrong than the real.  Old Tories used to insist on teaching to the poor the principles of respect for private property, lest they should revolt and despoil the rich.  As a fact, it is the rich who have to be taught about the existence of private property, and especially about the existence of private life.  No ragged mob is likely to storm the nurseries of Mayfair, or steal the perambulators from the French nurses, or the pupils from the German governesses, parading in Kensington Gardens.  But philanthropists, under various excuses, really do raid the playgrounds of the poor.  They regard such a raid as a reform; and, in truth, it is a revolution.  Modern writers are very ready to cover great historical events with sweeping denunciations of crime; to say that the Great War was murder on a large scale or that the Russian Revolution was theft on a large scale.  They hardly realize how much of educational and philanthropic reform has been kidnapping on a large scale.  That is, it has shown an increasing disregard for the privacy of the private citizen, considered as a parent.  I have called it a revolution; and at bottom it really is a Bolshevist revolution.  For what could be more purely and perfectly Communist than to say that you regard other people’s children as if they were your own?

O Contrato Social

(imagem retirada do Firmus et Rusticus)

Relembrando isto:

Sobre a Teorização Contratualista das Origens do Estado

"Uma sociedade não se constitui pelo acordo das vontades. Pelo contrário, todo o acordo das vontades pressupõe a existência de uma sociedade, de gentes que convivem, e o acordo não pode consistir senão em determinar uma ou outra forma dessa convivência, dessa sociedade preexistente. A ideia da sociedade como reunião contratual, portanto jurídica, é o mais insensato ensaio que se fez, para deitar o carro adiante dos bois. Porque o direito, a realidade direito (não as ideias do filósofo, jurista ou demagogo acerca dele), é, se me permitem a expressão barroca,secreção espontânea da sociedade, e não pode ser outra coisa"

A Rebelião das Massas - Prefácio aos Franceses, Ortega y Gasset

Coisas dos Monárquicos

Com todos os monárquicos que me disseram

"Eu até concordo contigo, mas nós somos tão poucos que eu prefiro juntar-me aos constitucionalistas da Causa Monárquica"

já eu, ou outro qualquer, poderia ter organizado três ou quatro Movimentos Integralistas.

Reacções à manifestação da Geração sem rumo

Escapando às declarações pouco amistosas de alguns dos típicos Velhos do Restelo, bem instalados pelo regimezinho, heis alguns pontos que me levam a repudiar a manifestação de dia 12 de Março:

1- A mesma manifestação persegue um objectivo aparentemente inócuo: pretende unir todas as forças políticas num acto de crítica colectiva.

2- Esse objectivo falha pela simples razão de que as forças políticas reunidas à volta desse protesto são de natureza individualista, partidária ou meramente sectária: pretendem ver na sua causa a principal solução dos problemas.

3- Daí advém todo o falhanço do objectivo principal da manifestação.

A ideia de que a presença de várias opiniões exaltadas num espaço apertado ou num local designado é sinónimo de discussão produtiva de opiniões continua a ser o apanágio do revolucionariozinho da esquerda. Discussão alguma é produtiva em clima de paródia e excitação. Isto é verdade para parlamentos democráticos e para greves ou manifestações. Quem parte para estes tipo de coisas parte já com uma agenda bem planeada a defender, pronta para aproveitar o calor da situação, pronta para a demagogia das massas - e é sempre a "esquerda fracturante" quem melhor se move por este lamaçal de espíritos incomodados.

O mesmo se passou nesta grandiosa romaria que atravessou o país inteiro. As soluções ficaram-se pelos urros de entusiasta - na sua maior parte, espalhou-se a mensagem de que seria o Governo a tratar de empregar os jovens em necessidades. No final de contas, a profecia de Salazar mantém-se: uma vez entregues ao socialismo, os portugueses encostar-se-ão ao Estado.

As mesmas forças que gritam pelo igualitarismo económico e pela destruição de tudo o que conhecemos com nome português em nome dos amanhãs que cantam usam agora os jovens para protestar contra os abusos de uma nação de gerações que, desde a década de 70, pensa exactamente da mesma maneira, com as mesmas aspirações de vida recostada e recursos ilimitados.

Este país é uma proveta de experiências socialistas desde 1974. Não é pelo mesmo caminho que isto vai melhorar - e é exactamente isso que os jovens portugueses têm de compreender.

State and Society

Portland Declaration

10. Society has a composite character and must beware of two dangers: of becoming totally one with the State (as happened in the rather oppressive Greek polls); and of developing a conformist herd spirit destroying originality, hampering the development of the person, and thus creating a totalitarianism of its own through horizontal rather than vertical pressures. A healthy society is not a monolith but a natural organism of many layers with different functions, all necessary and indispensable, needing, respecting, and also loving each other, each with its own pride, its own characteristics, its own functions. This, however, does not imply a closed, but an open society, without a caste system and with free movement from layer to layer. Talent, achievement, dedication, personal discipline, character must be honored. Envy, group arrogance, resentment, lack of charity, are cancers in the body of a society, but the formation of elites in a constant process of crystallization (and elimination) ought to be encouraged. There is no healthy society without leadership, without guiding lights. And if these are of a negative order, the whole society will decay and collapse. Neither caste societies nor "classless" societies have been productive for any length of time.

It should, however, be remarked that Society no more than the State should ever become an absolute. Socialism, which inevitably results in statism, tries to make society absolute also. Nor should Society (in the sense of "human environment") be made into an alibi for moral faults. The fairy tale that man, by nature, is good and that only Society can make him wicked must be rejected. We are called upon to make our stand against all collectivist forces and powers, be they political, social, or economic.

11. The State is partly the result of Man's frailties and incompleteness. It cannot be dispensed with, but neither should it be deified and made an end in itself. Its job is to protect all persons against an overpowerful Society, against evil individuals or groups, and against the foreign enemy. It represents the bone structure of the nation; its legitimacy rests primarily on authority and, owing to the fallen nature of man, also on power. Within its domain there should be as much freedom as feasible, as much force as necessary.

All free nations are by definition "authoritarian" in their political as well as in their social and even in their family life. We obey out of love, out of respect (for the greater knowledge and wisdom of those to whom we owe obedience), or because we realize that obedience is in the interest of the Common Good, which, needless to say, includes our own interest. These motivations are not mutually exclusive. For the ruler, or for our parents, we might have love and respect; so also for our teachers. The manager might be respected rather than loved. To obey the traffic policeman "makes sense." There is only one alternative to authority (which is lodged in us and is therefore an interior power), and that is fear, which comes from the outside. We then conform merely because we fear brute force. Fear is the lifeblood of tyranny. A Society which lives by fear alone is an unnatural Society in an unnatural State. Yet, we must never forget that, owing to Man's fallen nature, the State has the right, even in a free country, to use fear and punishment --not as daily fare, but as a medicine, as a necessary sanction.

A Religião do Latéx

Statistics bear out the fact that the wide distribution of condoms as a prevention strategy does not succeed. It does not bring down the rate, and this is what the Holy Father said. He didn’t deny that a condom might be useful sometimes. What he denied was that the promotion of condoms, as a primary prevention strategy, does not succeed. It does not achieve its objective. It does not bring down the average rate of HIV in the population. But people got very agitated because they didn’t study and listen carefully to what he said and because they are not well informed and because there is a lot of ideology and emotion and interest behind this whole issue, and so there was a lot of controversy

in Zenit

In 2003, Norman Hearst and Sanny Chen of the University of California conducted a condom effectiveness study for the United Nations' AIDS program and found no evidence of condoms working as a primary HIV-prevention measure in Africa. UNAIDS quietly disowned the study. (The authors eventually managed to publish their findings in the quarterly Studies in Family Planning.) Since then, major articles in other peer-reviewed journals such as the Lancet, Science and BMJ have confirmed that condoms have not worked as a primary intervention in the population-wide epidemics of Africa. In a 2008 article in Science called "Reassessing HIV Prevention" 10 AIDS experts concluded that "consistent condom use has not reached a sufficiently high level, even after many years of widespread and often aggressive promotion, to produce a measurable slowing of new infections in the generalized epidemics of Sub-Saharan Africa."

in Washington Post

Sobre a Teorização Contratualista das Origens do Estado

"Uma sociedade não se constitui pelo acordo das vontades. Pelo contrário, todo o acordo das vontades pressupõe a existência de uma sociedade, de gentes que convivem, e o acordo não pode consistir senão em determinar uma ou outra forma dessa convivência, dessa sociedade preexistente. A ideia da sociedade como reunião contratual, portanto jurídica, é o mais insensato ensaio que se fez, para deitar o carro adiante dos bois. Porque o direito, a realidade direito (não as ideias do filósofo, jurista ou demagogo acerca dele), é, se me permitem a expressão barroca, secreção espontânea da sociedade, e não pode ser outra coisa"

A Rebelião das Massas, Ortega y Gasset