A reminder of what’s at stake: The world we may lose

Bravo Kevin! Excellent example.

For me The Ring is the greatest work of art ever created by a single individual. To pull it off he had to create a new kind of singer, a new kind of orchestra and conducting, a new kind of theater (the best ever built) and a new kind of financing, the festival. Not only that, but he had to convince his king and get the cooperation of the people of the city, who weren’t always cooperative. But he did it.

You’d think that’d be enough. But the work itself, though not incomprehensible, is definitely inexhaustible. Like life itself no one has yet exhausted it. That doesn’t mean that what it has to teach can’t be discussed. Of course it can.

And for me one takeaway from The Ring that is very relevant to our times is it’s one of the major works by an artist after the failed uprisings of 1848-49. After that all of our major thinkers and artists had given up on the idea, or illusion, that mankind’s social and economic problems could be reduced to one solution that could work. Even Marx knew that much. Which explains why he couldn’t finish Das Kapital and could only leave fragments.

And it’s why Wagner, a more honest and penetrating thinker than Marx ever was, actually changed the ending of The Ring to something that was both realistic and triumphant. He didn’t succumb to despair. Get it?!

He took from Goethe’s Faust the idea that our only adequacy is in facing our inadequacy. THAT to me is the greatness of European man (which includes its geographical extensions, USA, etc).

He is capable of self-criticism and sees that as a sign of honesty, integrity, and maturity. And self-criticism is NOT self-castigation. That’s a sickness that many Whites suffer from, true. But it’s a defective form of self-analysis. The flip side of sentimentality. It’s a poisonous cynicism that isn’t at all sincere. It’s fake and opportunistic and, obviously, deadly.

No. Self-criticism means we’re dedicated to living in reality. That we’re capable of learning, change and growth. And, above all, acceptance of unpleasant facts. At no point does it mean that we can’t accept what is best in us. Not at all. In fact, that’s the point.
We can. But only to the extent that we’re honest about ourselves and life and everything in it.

It’s exactly because “The Real Owners” of our country today and their many proxies are constitutionally incapable of grasping a manner of living that requires rigorous honesty (about anything) that they will lose whatever power they get as soon as they get it. And, in fact, that’s what is happening. I mean, just look around you.

The Ring is also useful as a source of inspiration. As such, it, like all of our major masterpieces of that terrible and difficult century, offers infinite and incalculable riches.