Nicolás Gómez Dávila: The Nietzsche From the Andes

I was on the new social media site Social Galactic, and someone posted a wonderfully thoughtful quote from someone named Nicolás Gómez Dávila.  I like quotes, and I have many posted throughout my classroom, many of them boldly in front.  Good aphorisms have a way of distilling thought into a digestible chunk, easily understood yet generating complex thought.

Dávila's aphorisms stood out.  I had never heard of him and when I looked him up I saw that he was classified as a conservative, but in the Latin American mold.  He is also seen as a reactionary, someone who had an innate sense that 'new' doesn't always mean better.  From the tone of Dávila's writings, he would say that 'new' never means better.  I can only imagine him looking at what is going on now, particularly here in America.  There are small armies of people who want to destroy established institutions, while not only never asking why they were there in the first place, but also while enjoying the benefits of said institution / system.

It's a caricature, but the Social Justice Warrior Progressive railing against capitalism while on his iPhone is the perfect image.  The self identified liberal who is constantly upset about the situation on the US - Mexican border, but only after 2016: Dávila would have had the perfect words to explain such people and the movements they are a part of.

"Whoever says that he "belongs to his time" is only saying that he agrees with the largest number of fools at that moment."
These words fully explain, in a sentence, much of the political thought among Americans today, particularly among the Progressive Left.  Dávila would have skewered them in a way that few people are able to do today.

I will be reading more of his work.