The Revolutionary Personality

Am reading a biography, "The Godwins and the Shellys" by St. Clair. It helps us to understand the mind and origin of the English Revolutionary Personality.

Many revolutionaries or proto revolutionaries, I am discovering, are children or grand-children of, for example, strict Calvinists or strict Jansenists. Historians, applying the theories of Freud, claim that they adopt unitarianism, liberation, and other revolutionary ideals as a way of unleashing the repressed.

What then, would be their penchant for revolutionary acivity? It would be another form of unleashing of the repressed. They tend to arrive at a point when they deny the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, original sin, and other fundamental doctrines. They only accept what is "rational" from the Bible, assuming that whatever is Catholic cannot be rational.

In effec, they become like the revolutionaries of early Christianity. The Arians come to mind. What do they repress? In the interest of pursuing their passions, they repress God, Redemption, authority, and sacrifice. So, when they advocate revolution, they are advocating temporal redemption, human authority (that becomes totalitarian), and instead of sacrificing themselves, they sacrifice the blood of others.

John Adams, Conservative Revolutionary

In 1773, responding to the machinations of the local govenor, Adams argued for rebellion. Rebellion in the sense that Adams conceived of it , amounted to “a public confession of a wish for power” which is followed by guilt and “aggression against society.” In other revolutions these emotions show a desire for “the destruction of patriarchal values” (Shaw, 73-74). The governor, rather than the king, would play the role of father, while the King was the deistic image of God. This dichotomy between governor and king explains how Adams at the same time could be a revolutionary (one who is angry at the patriarchal governor) and a conservative (one who respects the king and tradition).

John Adams, Lover of Aristocracy

I have re-read my notes on John Adams and the French Revolution. He thinks that there will always be an aristocracy in society, the question is, on what will this Aristocracy be based?

In the Old regime, it was based on land and birth. He thinks that in the United States, it will be based on talent, genius, and merit. He fears that anyone who is blind to the fact of aristocracy will fail to see and check the aristocracy of wealth, or oligarchy. Over time, the wealthy are able to insinuate themselves into and control the political system.

This is why Putin has governed the way he has over the past eight years and why the US is trying to demonize him. Putin has expelled from Russian society or put in jail the oligarchs who were in the process of taking over Russia throughout the 1990s. For this, he is being demonized by the West. He is being demonized by the West, especially because the US is effectively run by the aristocrats of wealth, who control both parties, the media, the music industry, and sports. Any country that opposes this oligarchy is percieved as an enemy.

Finally, Adams was perhaps unwilling to disuss what seems to accompany oligarchs and revolutionaries, the unleashing of the lust for pleasure which results in the lust for power. The children of oligarchs tend to be democrats, which means equal access to all the passions. Democrats become blind to the demagogue, who appeals to the passions as a way of installing himself as a brutal tyrant.

The passions always present themselves as liberators, but when they rule in the soul, they rule with despotic tyranny.