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Civilized ages are those in which the values of the average, everyday man do not contradict the highest values, and where his traits and characteristics can be nurtured toward greatness.
In a barbarous age, greatness, to assert itself, has to reject what the average man represents and believes.
When individual envies join together, it is custom to christen them “noble popular aspirations.”
Ideas become frightened and flee from where people have resolved to think as a group.
Whoever feels he is the spokesman of public opinion has been enslaved.
The fool is disturbed not when he’s told his ideas are false, but that they’ve gone out of style.
Each person places his incredulity in a different place.
Mine gathers where no one has any doubt.
For modern man, the voice of God does not echo among the jagged rocks; it thunders among percentages in public opinion polls.
True glory is the resonance of a name in the memory of idiots.
To induce us to adopt them, stupid ideas point out that they have already been adopted by the general public.
Collective action, now, leads man to collaborate in the low and the vile. It will only allow him to handle his authentic duties with a roughness and a selfishness that increases his sense of isolation.
The tragedy of modern man is that he yearns to collaborate with his fellow man, but to yearn for that now is to risk his own dignity and nobility.
Having failed to convince men to practice what she teaches, the modern Church has resolved to teach what they practice.
The modern State manufactures those opinions it later respectfully collects and calls “public opinion.”
Capability in social life is nothing more than familiarity with the trivia of the day.
There is a practical way to know if an idea is intelligent: find out if it is unpopular.
Nothing remains of Christianity where the Christian is trying to prove to the world he is not foolish.
Whatever is said to “belong to its time” only happens to be favored by the largest number of fools at the time.
The public does not begin to welcome an idea until intelligent contemporaries begin to abandon it.
No light reaches the masses but that of dead stars.
The volume of the applause does not measure the value of the idea. A prevailing doctrine can be the most pompous stupidity.
The effusive satisfaction of the public regarding a stupid film is enough to cure any reformist of his utopian ideas.
Modern man will never admit that a stupidity shared by many does not make it respectable, only appalling.
Participating in collective enterprises allows the appetite to be satiated, even as it is disinterested.
Atop the bell-tower of the modern church, the progressive cleric, instead of a cross, places a weathervane.
What are called the “decisions of the human conscience” are a clandestine echo of the current trend.
The public wants what it is told it should want.
We reactionaries are fortunate, in that we inevitably escape the vulgarity of conforming to the current trend.
Only religion can manage to become popular without necessarily becoming vulgar.
To think like our contemporaries is the recipe for prosperity and for stupidity.
Those things the general public proclaims to be “natural” are what the noble soul rebels against above all.
The only man who is saved from intellectual vulgarity is the one who ignores what is fashionable to know.
The whims of the incompetent crowd are called ‘public opinion,’ and any well-informed judgment called ‘private opinion.’
The common man does have a personality in his day to day life. But the effort to express it transforms him into an exponent of fashionable topics.
The public accepts truth or lies with indifference, so long as they are aligned with prevailing intellectual trends.
When reason takes flight to escape history, it is not in the absolute where it perches, but in the fashion of the day.
“Public opinion,” today, is not the sum of personal opinions.
Personal opinions, on the contrary, are the echo of public opinion.
The modern Christian does not regret that others don’t agree with him, but that he does not agree with everyone else.
Until yesterday, man could believe in the mythos of common action, in efforts that allowed him to part with himself and join with other men to accomplish tasks necessary for life and spirit.
But what can be done today, when all common action, all collective effort, only serves to create scenarios in which the greatness of man and his potential for nobility are rendered impossible?
Swimming against the current is not foolish if the waters are running toward a waterfall.
To feign knowledge of a topic, it is best to adopt its most recent interpretation.
Modern man believes he lives amidst a plurality of opinions, when what prevails today is a suffocating unanimity.
The public is sometimes right when it is frightened, but it is always wrong when it becomes enthusiastic.
Demographic pressure brutalizes.
After excluding the intelligent opinions of an age, what is left over is “popular opinion.”
Far from being a criterion of truth, universal consensus is usually a sign of error.
The democratic man holds as sacred texts the polls of public opinion.
Arguments descend over time, from intellectual class to intellectual class, until they reach the ground. In speeches, rotten arguments are consumed.
Success can be a sure indication of the personal failure of the artist.
Talent tends to flee when honors are bequeathed.
The glory of the truly great writers is artificially imposed on the public, an academic and subsidized glory. Authentic, popular, spontaneous glory crowns none but mediocre men.
Individual egoism believes it is absolved when joined into collective egoism.
The contemporary church prefers the enthusiasm of large crowds to individual conversions.
Conformity and nonconformity are symmetrical expressions of a lack of originality.
The fool does not trust what public opinion does not endorse.
Only the reactionary escapes the temptation to be fashionable.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
