A foreword is usually written when a book is finished. This book is still being written, so instead of a preface, it is prefaced by a brief explanation of what it is about and why it is being written.
As the title implies, this book is more about ideas than people. Ideas live longer than we do and determine our behaviour. Ideas make up worldviews. What is a worldview? A picture of the world in its past and present, a view of the reasons and purposes of our lives that can be the basis of our actions. A worldview is not the same in scope as philosophy; it is closer to ‘wisdom’ than to ‘science’.
An independent worldview is a great luxury. Man does not always have the opportunity to so break away from the tyranny of the majority and general opinion that he can begin to develop his own, unearned views. This has always been the case, and especially in our own day. Rich in worldviews was the Ancient World before the advent of forced Christian uniformity. The Middle Ages demanded much more mental uniformity — roughly like the revolutionary era in Russia (their similarities do not stop there). The chief virtue of the medieval (and Soviet) mind was obedience to majority opinion. Not everyone knows how to fight off the herd.
The homeland of most of the ideas in which you and I live and act — in the seventeenth century. Waves of thoughts generate new waves, counteracting them, and so, by layers of mutual affirmations and denials, worldviews pile up on top of each other — through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reaching the century of universal destruction, the twentieth… These worldviews are mostly known to us by hearsay, in forms picked up and distorted by propaganda (the most powerful force of our days). It would be useful to return to their origins, their meanings, not their names (to which the modern mind, which thinks in words and not in essences, is reduced). Let us take a closer look at the worldviews that are alive today in their original state, not yet distorted and flattened by propaganda and ‘higher education’, i.e. knowledge of the names of things. We see the twilight of these worldviews today. The modern observer sees both the ends and the beginnings of the ‘progressive ideologies’ from which so much was expected.
I had yet another motivation. I wanted to show the modern reader what ‘pure’ thinking is, not driven by the need for new weapons or artificial dyes. This thinking is unfamiliar to the modern man, it must be learnt anew, not even ‘learnt’, but at least believed that it is possible and that it takes thought to heights and depths that are not measured in megabytes or megatons.
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2024, 2025
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