This lecture continues and improves upon a previous one on NIkolai Berdyaev back in 2010 which can be found HERE. Berdyaev's main thesis is that freedom is an aristocratic trait. Mixing persons and classes is pure chaos. It is the lowest form of plebianism that destroys all boundaries. The personality is qualitative, not quantitative. The “social scientists” of academia, he says, are “all in the power of the Dionysian elements, tormented by demons of chaos; you do not know the person and you do not know freedom.” Revolutions bring about the total state and the reduction of the person to an ego. This is the primordial darkness of sin. The person becomes part of the mass by force and thus what makes a man a man is destroyed as he says “The spiritual principle is aristocratic, not democratic.” Democratic thinking is darkness. The aristocratic is the result of the struggle between person and individual. It was the spirit forcing itself away from the static mass. Revolutionary Leftists force everything to be standardized and the person is lost, Even back then he was talking about the change in the definition of “freedom.” The fact that it is used without referent either to ends or to the subject is shows how vulgar things had become. “Freedom” for the masses is merely the enslavement to passion. If this is unchecked, then reason is effaced. Freedom is the liberation from chaos and thus, freedom from the passions. “That is why truly philosophical people understood that true liberation involves a struggle of penance, self-discipline and self-restraint.” When the will is spontaneously empowered, it becomes a slave to its desires. He becomes exhausted by his own irrationality. He spits at the revolutionaries, “You, the “liberators” of man, who unchain the elements, have long to consider the problem of the individual more deeply. Why are there no personalities in your revolutions, why is it given to the destruction of [what seems to be] natural storms? Why do we see the image of a person drowning in the elements about which you sing praises?” Berdyaev says that the “revolution” they romanticize is nothing more than vulgar nominalism. Presented by Matt Johnson The Orthodox Nationalist: The Aristocratic Existentialism of Nikolai Berdyaev – TON 062718