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Common life is so miserable that the most unfortunate man can be a victim of his neighbor’s envy.
More than the masses that insult them, we must defend our truths against the defenders that bring them down to the masses’ level.
For centuries the common people have borne the burden not only of those who exploit them, but also of those who liberate them.
Their backs bend under the double weight.
The people do not rebel against despotism, but against a slavery in which they are poorly fed.
It is enough that a few are thoughtful for the social environment to change.
The gestures the people imitate, the symbols they copy, the attitudes they mimic, are subaltern but authentic products of the type of subtle and abstract notions they will always ignore.
Behind the “will of the people” looms the “general will.” A will that is not a choice, not really, but a program. The program of a party.
Perhaps individually men are our neighbors, but massed together surely they are not.
The near future will probably bring extravagant catastrophes.
Yet what most certainly threatens the world is not the violence of hungry crowds, but the weariness of the bored masses.
What the democrat calls “Mankind” is no more than the spectral projection of his pride.
The intellectual who is outraged by the “embourgeoisement of the proletariat” never thinks the he himself ought to renounce those things whose enjoyment by the proletariat horrify him as proof of their embourgeoisement.
“The People” is the sum of the defects of the people.
The rest is campaign rhetoric.
The common people have never been celebrated except at the expense of another social class.
No one praises the people except the man who means to sell them something or rob them of something.
As the world becomes gentrified and bourgeois, I miss the dead Aristocracy less than I miss the vanished Folk.
The proletariat tends toward the bourgeois life, just as gravity pulls bodies toward the earth.
The vulgar opinion is not the opinion of the simple commoner, but of the one who pretends not to be.
Everything can be sacrificed to the misery of the common man.
Nothing should be sacrificed to his greed.
The people will adopt even refined opinions if they are preached with crude arguments.
Folk art is that art of the people that they do not regard as “art.” (That which they do regard as art is merely vulgar art.)
The people, after a few years, would forget the names of illustrious demagogues, if their successors did not oblige the taxpayers to pay for their memorial rites.
The people’s memory only welcomes the names of kings.
Populist agitation remains irrelevant until it become an ethical issue for the ruling class.
The taste of the masses is characterized not by a hatred of what is excellent, but rather the passivity with which they equally enjoy the good, the mediocre, and the bad.
The masses do not have bad taste. They simply do not have any taste.
The public today is the first to eagerly buy what it neither needs nor desires.
In order to oppress the people, it is necessary to suppress in the name of the people that which distinguishes itself from the people.
The phenomenon of the degradation of the public into rabble is the same, whether it is rich rabble or poor rabble.
I appreciate the pedestrian gait of certain poetry, but prefer the hard rhythm of rising song.
A certain disdainful way of speaking of the common people reveals the commoner in disguise.
What is vulgar is not what the common man does, but what pleases him.
There are the vices of a fallen archangel, and then there are the vices of the simple, infernal masses.
The people never believe that those who speak emphatically may be speaking nonsense.
During its years of hegemony, the bourgeoisie has failed to make a single gesture of generosity. Everything it has granted to the people, it has yielded reluctantly and only when the masses have been strong enough to demand it. It has always refused to make those concessions a minimum of political sense would have advised.
The ruler in shirt sleeves first excites the public, then even they become disgusted.
True elegance, at all times, has consisted in avoiding what the general public of the time considered elegant.
The most fascinating phenomenon in the Catholic church since the 1800s has been the sudden importance of the religious thoughts of the laity. The mind of the church, its intellectual ferment, has become that theologian with no hierarchical mandate, the lay doctor.
There is no longer an upper class, and no people; there is only poor commoner and rich commoner.
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.
Featured image: Antique book cover from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. source
