On Piety

A youth is inexperienced, and hence, he will always either be an intellectual, or pious. A pious man can take advantage of the accumulated experiences of his forefathers, because he trusts and follows his forefathers. When he reaches such an age as the wisdom of his forefathers becomes evident, when he has enough accumulated experience of his own to rely on, at least, in the areas where his life has touched. An intellectual of advanced age is merely a weak-boned sophomore, since his theory is no more or less based on experience than that of a sophomore: in a debate, the aged intellectual has no more dignity than the sophomore; his word carries no more weight.

The confusion of the modern world springs from the success of the empirical sciences. Science, by definition, is intellectual: it is nothing but theory. The experiment of an old scientist and a young scientist are of equal weight, because, in science, prudence counts for nothing, only results count. So great has been the success of science, that eager intellectuals in Nineteenth Century Europe disregarded the accumulated experience of civilization, the accumulated precedent of law, the accumulates insights of economics, and erected vicious and empty intellectual models of human behavior: Marxism, Freudianism, Moral Relativism. They attempted to apply the luster of science to three areas not open to empirical methods: economics, the human mind, and the moral order of the universe. The results were collectivism, communism, Nazism, lawlessness, world war, mass-death, mass-lying, mass-starvation, and atrocities beggaring description.