Man’s obsession with trinitarian concepts has lasted for thousands of years. Indeed, when presented with two distinct choices – both of which are considered inadequate – we often look for a third alternative. In the late sixth century BC, the famous Buddhist sage, Prince Gautama, rejected a life of opulent complacency and experimented with self-disciple and denial. Consequently, after driving himself to the very brink of starvation the Prince realised that there was -a middle way- beyond both luxury and asceticism. In this case, it was the path of meditation and detachment, a process in which both lifestyles were transcended and overcome.
An interesting parallel can be drawn between the example of Gautama’s rejection of hereditary privilege and the search for an alternative to Capitalism during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The solution, as we know only too well, was Communism. In fact the last century may be rightly perceived as having been a furious historical battleground for two highly adversarial and bitterly-opposed ideologies. But as Hilaire Belloc observed in The Restoration of Property over sixty years ago, the differences between the two are not as distinct or clear-cut as their supporters often like to contend: The only economic difference between a herd of subservient Russians and a mob of free Englishmen pouring into a factory of a morning is that the latter are exploited by private profit, the former by the State in communal fashion. The motive of the Russian masters is to establish a comfortable bureaucracy for themselves and their friends out of the proletariat labour. The motive of the English masters is to increase their private fortunes out of proletariat labour. But we want something different from either. Thus Communism is considered, not as the antidote, but as a symptom and a product of Capitalism. Belloc-s own quest for a genuine alternative to both Capitalism and Communism was represented by The Distributist League, which he founded in 1936 with G.K. Chesterton. Both were famous converts to Catholicism and were inspired by Rerum Novarum, a timely encyclical in which Pope Leo XIII replied to the challenge of atheistic Communism by proposing that property be distributed more fairly and workers treated with more dignity. As we shall see below, Belloc and Chesterton were to become two of the chief ideologues of the new Third Position.
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by Prof. Arnold Keyserling and his American student, Ralph
The subject of race and racial difference is something a lot of people avoid. Some consider it bad manners or impolite. Others say it is offensive and discussion of it should be suppressed by legislation. One spin-off from that category goes as far as to deny the existence of races, claiming any number of religious, philosophic, scientific (sic) and moral theories in support of the proposition. Then, some fellow travellers might conclude that races exist in some narrow, almost meaningless sort of way and may conclude that, for ‘human-universalist’ reasons – they should be abolished.










