RENE GUENON 16

Rene Guenon, Initiation and Spiritual Realization (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1952, 2001) (From "Against Popularization": "Perhaps the most difficult thing in the world to bear is the foolishness of a great number, and even the majority of men, especially in our time, a foolishness which grows ever greater in the measure that the intellectual decline characteristic of the last cyclic period becomes more general and accentuated. To this must be joined ignorance, or more precisely a certain kind of ignorance that is closely linked to it, one wholly unconscious of itself and asserting itself all the more audaciously in the degree that it knows and understands less, and as a result is an irremediable evil for those afflicted by it. Foolishness and ignorance can in short be united under the common name incomprehension; but it must be understood that to endure this incomprehension in no way implies that one must make any concessions to it, nor even abstain from correcting the errors it give rise to and doing all that is possible to prevent it from spreading, which, moreover, is very often a most unpleasant task, especially when the obstinacy of some people obliges one to repeat many times what normally it should suffice to say only once. This obstinacy which one thus comes up against is, furthermore, not always exempt from bad faith; and, to speak the truth, bad faith itself strongly implies a narrowness of view which is after all only the result of a more or less complete incomprehension; thus real incomprehension and bad faith, or stupidity and malice intermingle in such a way that it is sometimes very difficult  to determine the part each plays." Id. at 1, 1-2. Does not this capture the state of discourse--especially political discourse and, specifically race discourse--in twenty-first century America?).