I need to put in at the very start, however, that no one I know personally who ever called themselves a “neo-con”, in jest or otherwise, had ever heard of Leo Strauss before pundits started accusing us of worshiping him about 10 years ago.
I still haven’t read him (life is too short) and really have little idea what he was supposedly on about.
Anyway, Steve Sailer writes:
There’s virtually no evidence in Melzer’s quotes of antiauthoritarianism or egalitarianism in the great philosophers. Hierarchy was seen as a self-evident virtue. The people’s right to know is a relatively recent notion, probably traceable to Martin Luther’s insistence that every man should read the Bible for himself.
Today, the extremism of our culture’s demands for attestations of faith in equality and transparency is a mask for the movement back toward censorship and esotericism. We live in a society in which the fundamental truths—such as, that talents are distributed unequally by genetics—are increasingly considered unfit for public discussion, and careers as eminent as that of as James D. Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, are destroyed for letting slip a lack of fidelity to the reigning taboos.
Our modern culture is not based on esotericism – esotericism requires that the commoners are allowed comfortable platitudes while philosophers revel in The Real Truth. Instead we have a culture of Orwellian Crimestop and Newspeak where people are forced to humiliate themselves through the cant of evident falsehoods, the opposite of comfort. Virtue is marked by the ability to believe in contradictory falsehoods through effort of will.
