The Dark Enlightenment and neoreaction recommend reading old books, and taking them seriously as the works of civilizations whose knowledge we have lost and whose institutions and social order we no longer understand, reading them to find out what evils Chesterton’s fences once held back.

Thermidor has noticed a great gem in Seneca: That the modern conception of liberty is the liberty that the Romans allowed to slaves and small children, but not, however, to free adult male Roman citizens:

This needs to be added to the Canon:

It is perfectly natural, normal, and indeed, inevitable that those who studiously affect the manners and habits proper to slaves- whether they are self-aware of it or not- should get the type of rule they have coming to them, namely slavery. … In this respect, the blue-pill mytho-history of Progress, with its story of a historical ascent from darkness and despotism to an enlightened age of Liberty under the “rule of law” is a mirror-image in which the facts of modern history appear in reverse. From the red-pilled point of view, the historical trajectory runs in the opposite direction. What actually happened is that Westerners, much like the clueless teenage girl who runs away from the home of her firm but loving parents only to end up becoming tattooed as property by some outlaw biker and tricked out on the streets with an arm and a pimp to feed, quit a life of moderate subjection under the intrinsically lawful and just auspices of throne and altar for a perhaps more exciting, but perilously more dangerous and in any case, degraded and dehumanized life- one that additionally turns out to be rather less than perfectly liberating when it is already too late to go back.