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RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship
#1

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

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No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

In September we read The Peloponnesian War. We saw how great societies can fall. Many of us see our own society falling right now, though we are not at war with a powerful neighbor who has gotten the best of us. We seem to be destroying ourselves, willingly, with great enthusiasm.

What can we do to stop it? Is there some law we could pass to return to greatness? Should a change in party be voted for, or even a new party all together? Surely there must be something we can do.

Thomas Carlyle, writing in the 19th century, had his answer for Great Britain. He doubted that some new law, a change in parties, or anything of the like that could help Britain. He thought that the true problem affecting them stemmed from personal problems, and had only a personal solution.

He saw a society enamored with quacks, and full of problems. He saw a society which no longer valued the heroic in men. His solution is not a law or a change of party, of religion, but a change in the soul of men. To start valuing the heroic, to strive towards the heroic themselves. To cast off quackery and falsehoods and stand up for truth with bravery. Only then could a society become great, to be led by great men; when its citizens would accept nothing less. The cry for change in a land full of quacks replaces one quack with another, but in a land where men truly value the heroic, they cannot be lorded over by quacks and frauds.

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He thinks that Hero-worship, done differently in every
different epoch of the world, is the soul of all social business among
men; that the doing of it well, or the doing of it ill, measures
accurately what degree of well-being or of ill-being there is in the
world's affairs. He thinks that we, on the whole, do our Hero-worship
worse than any Nation in this world ever did it before
: that the Burns
an Exciseman, the Byron a Literary Lion, are intrinsically, all things
considered, a baser and falser phenomenon than the Odin a God, the
Mahomet a Prophet of God. It is this Editor's clear opinion,
accordingly, that we must learn to do our Hero-worship better; that to
do it better and better, means the awakening of the Nation's soul from
its asphyxia, and the return of blessed life to us,
...

'Hero-worship,' if you will,--yes, friends; but, first of all, by
being ourselves of heroic mind. A whole world of Heroes; a world not
of Flunkies, where no Hero-King _can_ reign: that is what we aim at!
We, for our share, will put away all Flunkyism, Baseness, Unveracity
from us; we shall then hope to have Noblenesses and Veracities set
over us; never till then.
Let Bobus and Company sneer, "That is your
Reform!" Yes, Bobus, that is our Reform; and except in that, and what
will follow out of that, we have no hope at all. Reform, like Charity,
O Bobus, must begin at home. Once well at home, how will it radiate
outwards, irrepressible, into all that we touch and handle, speak and
work; kindling ever new light, by incalculable contagion, spreading in
geometric ratio, far and wide,--doing good only, wheresoever it
spreads, and not evil.

By Reform Bills, Anti-Corn-Law Bills, and thousand other bills and
methods, we will demand of our Governors, with emphasis, and for the
first time not without effect, that they cease to be quacks, or else
depart; that they set no quackeries and blockheadisms anywhere to rule
over us, that they utter or act no cant to us,--it will be better if
they do not. For we shall now know quacks when we see them; cant, when
we hear it, shall be horrible to us! We will say, with the poor
Frenchman at the Bar of the Convention, though in wiser style than he,
and 'for the space' not 'of an hour' but of a lifetime: "_Je demande
l'arrestation des coquins et des laches_." 'Arrestment of the knaves
and dastards:' ah, we know what a work that is; how long it will be
before _they_ are all or mostly got 'arrested:'--but here is one;
arrest him, in God's name; it is one fewer! We will, in all
practicable ways, by word and silence, by act and refusal to act,
energetically demand that arrestment,--"_je demande cette
arrestation-la!_"--and by degrees infallibly attain it. Infallibly:
for light spreads; all human souls, never so bedarkened, love light;
light once kindled spreads, till all is luminous;--till the cry,
"_Arrest_ your knaves and dastards" rises imperative from millions of
hearts, and rings and reigns from sea to sea. Nay how many of them may
we not 'arrest' with our own hands, even now; we! Do not countenance
them, thou there: turn away from their lacquered sumptuosities, their
belauded sophistries, their serpent graciosities, their spoken and
acted cant, with a sacred horror, with an _Apage Satanas_.--Bobus and
Company, and all men will gradually join us. We demand arrestment of
the knaves and dastards, and begin by arresting our own poor selves
out of that fraternity. There is no other reform conceivable. Thou and
I, my friend, can, in the most flunky world, make, each of us, _one_
non-flunky, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin
with:--Courage! even that is a whole world of heroes to end with, or
what we poor Two can do in furtherance thereof!

This excerpt is in fact not from the book I propose we read this month, but from Carlyle's book Past and Present. I think this excerpt does a wonderful job of framing Hero Worship though.

Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History outlines the lives of many of the great heroes in history. It, to me, was the best intellectual explanation of religion I have ever read.

It outlines how Mohammed was able to take the Arab people, hitherto unremarkable on the world stage, and like a strike of lightning ignite them into a force capable of conquering from Spain to India. How Luther, a poor monk was able to rise up, lead an insurrection against The Church and ultimately win. What was it about these men who were able to accomplish so much with really nothing but their sheer force of will? Carlyle goes on to deeply delve into the essence of the heroic, linking it to the religious, seeing that tapping into the true nature of God's reality provides men with a power to do on this earth a task that seems far beyond the capability of mere mortals.

True heroes fought against great systems, great empires and won. Carlyle explains this and illustrates it beautifully. I hope you will all enjoy reading it. It was quite easy to get enthusiasm for Thucydides, since he is a well-known classic. Carlyle is a bit more obscure today, though surely he is among one of the great writers of the English language. I hope for those of you who have never read him, or perhaps not heard of him, you will give him a chance. The fact that he is not read widely today is more a sign of our hatred of the masculine virility he stands for than the quality of his writing, which is first-class.

Here it is in various ebook formats for free:

https://archive.org/details/thomascarlyleson00carl

Here on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/On-Heroes-Hero-Wor...1481142666

Your local library will hopefully have a copy as well.

I will leave you with some excerpts from the text:

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Cannot we understand how these men worshipped Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, worshipping the stars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism. Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit or measure; that is worship.

But now if all things whatsoever that we look upon are emblems to us of the Highest God, I add that more so than any of them is man such an emblem...

The young generations of the world, who had in them the freshness of young children, and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think that they had finished off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man and Nature; they, without being mad, could worship Nature, and man more than anything else in Nature...

What I called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out of many roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object, was a root or fibre of a root; but Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown...

No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life...

But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own.
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#2

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

Late to the party, but I'm a big fan of this idea. I've been reading books posted in the deep forum for a while now. I'm going to read both The Peloponnesian War and On Heroes and Hero Worship in October. Thanks Sonsowey for organizing this.
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#3

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

I live in a country with no decent bookshops, and the one half-decent bookshop doesn't have this book. It's expensive for me to have it sent by Amazon from USA. I have a Kindle, but I couldn't find a Kindle version of this book. However, I have found a text version of it here, but I would prefer not to read it on the computer. Is there any way to convert a text file into something I can transfer to my Kindle?
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#4

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

Quote: (09-27-2015 11:45 AM)Horus Wrote:  

I live in a country with no decent bookshops, and the one half-decent bookshop doesn't have this book. It's expensive for me to have it sent by Amazon from USA. I have a Kindle, but I couldn't find a Kindle version of this book. However, I have found a text version of it here, but I would prefer not to read it on the computer. Is there any way to convert a text file into something I can transfer to my Kindle?

http://calibre-ebook.com/

In the ebooks link mentioned in Sonsowey's OP, you will find a Kindle format file.

In other situations, Calibre can convert various formats to Kindle-ready files.
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#5

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

Quote: (09-27-2015 12:01 PM)Tigre Wrote:  

Quote: (09-27-2015 11:45 AM)Horus Wrote:  

I live in a country with no decent bookshops, and the one half-decent bookshop doesn't have this book. It's expensive for me to have it sent by Amazon from USA. I have a Kindle, but I couldn't find a Kindle version of this book. However, I have found a text version of it here, but I would prefer not to read it on the computer. Is there any way to convert a text file into something I can transfer to my Kindle?

http://calibre-ebook.com/

In the ebooks link mentioned in Sonsowey's OP, you will find a Kindle format file.

In other situations, Calibre can convert various formats to Kindle-ready files.

Calibre is very easy indeed. Always use it when downloading books and converting it to Kindle files.
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#6

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

Quote: (09-27-2015 12:01 PM)Tigre Wrote:  

Quote: (09-27-2015 11:45 AM)Horus Wrote:  

I live in a country with no decent bookshops, and the one half-decent bookshop doesn't have this book. It's expensive for me to have it sent by Amazon from USA. I have a Kindle, but I couldn't find a Kindle version of this book. However, I have found a text version of it here, but I would prefer not to read it on the computer. Is there any way to convert a text file into something I can transfer to my Kindle?

http://calibre-ebook.com/

In the ebooks link mentioned in Sonsowey's OP, you will find a Kindle format file.

In other situations, Calibre can convert various formats to Kindle-ready files.

Great. Thanks.
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#7

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

Not my cup of tea, Plus I haven't finished the Peloponnese war. I might change my mind if the direction of discussion perks my interest.
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#8

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

This looks to be a very interesting and relevant choice, I'll try to follow along the best I can.
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#9

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

Finished the first lecture on Odin finally. I need to stop starting 6 books at a time.

I like towards the beginning when he explains what makes a hero and he calls out critics saying they were in the right place and right time for greatness. It plays down the achievements of great men. Carlyle mocks if only the critics were at that place in time it would've been them instead.

This happens all the time today. You can't discount someone's achievements because of their environment. Environment plays a huge factor but the individual is what creates the legacy. "Bill Gates happened to be a nerd in the right city and had access to the labs in the right year. Anyone else in his place would've build Microsoft too." Malcolm Gladwell points out in "Outliers". I liked the book but it is guilty of what Carlyle explains in that passage. A man is great because of his achievements, not because he was simply in the right place at the right time.

In Lecture One, he spends way too much time discrediting Paganism before jumping into Odin. It's annoying but a sign of the times in which he was living. While spending most of the lecture analyzing why the "simple" and "child-like" pagans worshiped their religion, he hit great points towards the end. Odin's creed speaks of honor and valor. Man's first step towards greatness is to subdue fear. One will always be a coward until he can rise above the feeling of fear. It seems as much as Carlyle detests the religion, he is forced to open the book with it due to its sheer raw and untamed masculinity.
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#10

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

I am a bit late to this book discussion. However, based on Sonsowey's recommendation, I have started reading Carlyle's Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History. So far, I love it.

I was immediately struck by the difference between Carlyle's vision of the "hero," to that of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Upon reflection, Campbell seems to have a more collectivist notion of heroism: i.e. all heroes, regardless of culture, share the same attributes. Thus, we are one human family sharing a common experience.

However, Carlyle seems to relate the term to an individual's sense of personal greatness: how the concept of the hero points to the God-in-man, thus giving the individual the idea of his unlimited potential.

I look forward to reading the rest of the book.

"Action still preserves for us a hope that we may stand erect." - Thucydides (from History of the Peloponnesian War)
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#11

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

I just finished Carlyle’s book—thank you again to Sonowsey for the recommendation.

Carlyle’s vision of the hero is one that every red-pill man should aspire to. According to Carlyle, a hero is somebody that burns with a desire for truth. A person that comes around every generation or so to elevate civilization. A giant amongst men. A leader. A Shakespeare, a Dante, to name a few.

His analysis is in clear opposition to the modern definition of the word: a word that has been reduced to nothing by culturally relativism. If there is no good or bad, then how can someone be a hero? Or, conversely, everyone is a hero; for example, note how people will say “My mother is a hero” when pressed for a definition of the word. While a mother might be a person of great worth to you, she is usually not a hero in the highest sense of the word—someone who has added to the greatness of civilization. Defining a mother as a hero actually cheapens the word, since it infers that there are roughly 3 billion heroes on the planet—simply because they reproduced. Plus, this plays into the skewed feminist idealology, since it elevates females that have no right being elevated.

I was an English major in college, but was never asked to read Carlyle. Instead, I read Kafka (a man turns into an insect); or Arthur Miller (The American Dream is a sham); or Toni Morrison (I still don’t know what the hell that was about). As Roosh pointed out in one of his postings, the college system has a unique way of wasting your time.

It’s now clear why a man like Carlyle is rarely taught in schools—his work challenges the individual to seek a higher level of greatness; in turn, he stands as a threat to the push for cultural Marxism in the education system.

"Action still preserves for us a hope that we may stand erect." - Thucydides (from History of the Peloponnesian War)
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#12

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

I'm glad a few of you read this book, or at least part of it.

The book is so foreign to most people, not taught in schools, but if you dig just a bit deeper, you will see that Carlyle was truly one of the great authors in our language's history.

Quote:Quote:

There is no other reform conceivable. Thou and
I, my friend, can, in the most flunky world, make, each of us, _one_
non-flunky, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin
with:--Courage! even that is a whole world of heroes to end with, or
what we poor Two can do in furtherance thereof!
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#13

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

Quote: (11-21-2015 10:02 AM)Sonsowey Wrote:  

The book is so foreign to most people, not taught in schools, but if you dig just a bit deeper, you will see that Carlyle was truly one of the great authors in our language's history.

True. Apparently he was highly thought of during his time.

"Action still preserves for us a hope that we may stand erect." - Thucydides (from History of the Peloponnesian War)
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#14

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

It is funny that, although now Carlyle is seen as a foundational reactionary author, at the time Frederick Engels wrote an adoring review of another one of Carlyle's publications, called Past and Present:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo...arlyle.htm

Of course, Engels disagreed with Carlyle's solution to the problems seen in England at the time, but all the same thought the book was: "Of all the fat books and thin pamphlets which have appeared in England in the past year for the entertainment or edification of “educated society,” the above work is the only one which is worth reading."

Ralp Waldo Emerson wrote the introduction to
Past and Present and that boiok too is highly recommended. Emerson said of it:

Quote:Quote:

Here is Carlyle's new poem, his Iliad of English woes, to follow his poem on France, entitled the History of the French Revolution. In its first aspect it is a political tract, and since Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with it. It grapples honestly with the facts lying before all men, groups and disposes them with a master's mind, -- and with a heart full of manly tenderness, offers his best counsel to his brothers. Obviously it is the book of a powerful and accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the dreadful political signs in England for the last few years, has conversed much on these topics with such wise men of all ranks and parties as are drawn to a scholar's house, until such daily and nightly meditation has grown into a great connexion, if not a system of thoughts, and the topic of English politics becomes the best vehicle for the expression of his recent thinking, recommended to him by the desire to give some timely counsels, and to strip the worst mischiefs of their plausibility. It is a brave and just book, and not a semblance. "No new truth," say the critics on all sides. Is it so? truth is very old; but the merit of seers is not to invent, but to dispose objects in their right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount, whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality than any other.
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#15

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

Sonsowey, I'm guilty of not finishing the book. I went on another round of buying 8+ books for two bucks each on amazon and put it on the back burner. I will finish it though. I'm always guilty of forgetting online books in favor of real pages.

It seems we missed a November reading. Let's decide a December reading as soon as possible so I can buy the hard copy. I have 3 books I'm currently reading online that I continue to skip over. I promised RedPillUK a review of Erectus Walks Amongst Us, but I still have eight chapters left. Anyone who isn't willing to spend four bucks on a used book won't be worth the discussion anyway. 9 days until December; I vote for a book I recommended in the Parisian thread: Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson. I have two chapters left but so far it is an excellent taste of history. Can't believe I randomly snagged it at a Barnes and Noble. Other suggestions include Felix Dennis, Napoleon Hill, and Milton Friedman.
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#16

RVF Book Club October: Thomas Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero Worship

Quote: (11-21-2015 11:42 PM)wi30 Wrote:  

Sonsowey, I'm guilty of not finishing the book. I went on another round of buying 8+ books for two bucks each on amazon and put it on the back burner. I will finish it though. I'm always guilty of forgetting online books in favor of real pages.

No worries, I know I've started some books, put them down, and come back later to finish them. If it's left any impression with you, you'll come back to it.

I've put up a December thread. This one is a much shorter read, you could conceivably do it in a day:

thread-51860.html
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