Things happen randomly, but collecting aphorisms is a foundational thing here at Patriactionary. Was reading in Warrior Politics the other day when I found this gem by Jose Ortega y Gasset:
“Romper la continuidad con el pasado, querer comenzar de nuevo, es aspirar a descender y plagiar al orangután.”
Oops, that’s not it! Who imagines that anyone speaks anything other than English. Rendered into proper language we have:
“Man’s real treasure is the treasure of his mistakes, piled up stone by stone through thousands of years… breaking the continuity with the past, wanting to begin again, is a lowering of man and a plagiarism of the orangutan. It was a Frenchman, DuPont-White, who around 1860 had the courage to exclaim: ‘Continuity is one of the rights of man; it is a homage of everything that distinguishes him from the beast.'”
However, that merely provides a good idea of WHY we face the future, looking firmly to the past. Nassim Taleb quotes the following bit of Mediterranean thought in his new book, The Antifragile: “Whoever has no past, has no future.” I asked a couple of Mediterraneans, and they offered another version of it: “A tree without roots will not grow.”
In that spirit, we elevate this comment by Oogenhand to Motto 2013 Status: Culture War can be waged back.
Patriactionary 
Will S.
December 8, 2013 at 1:44 am