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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35571 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Charlie Manson was a man who believed in himself, right up to the end. To quote Chesterton from "Orthodoxy":

Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell." I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has ` Hanwell' written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus."

Manson was exactly that type; part criminal, part con man, but with a belief in his own unrecognised worth that if only he could get the attention of those in power, would give him the life on easy street that he deserved. So he naturally jumped on the counter-culture bandwagon, but what made him stand out was that he did have a philosophy, crazy as it was, which he believed in (though it was at its foundation a belief that 'I am the greatest') and which gave him that aura of conviction that gurus need.

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche

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