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When I went to college I was bitterly disappointed in the classes that I was channeled into. Always a voracious reader, the materials presented were sometimes interesting but always, well, plebeian. It seemed that, standing at the peak of 5,000 years of the development of western civilization, there would be something more ... something more substantial, something more timeless, something beyond the mundane material that was new to my classmates but elementary to me. At night I would go the library and read until they kicked me out. Somewhere in those enormous banks of books was the education that I come to find.

Each night I would choose a different stack and select the toughest, most intimidating and most opaque tomes I could find and read until my mind reeled. Even if they were beyond my ken, at least I understood that the ideas were there and that men, now the dust of the ages, had thought and pondered and written on ideas now nascent in my mind.

One evening I came across a container full of a little periodical called American Opinion , from the John Birch Society, mostly unread and gathering dust. I recognized the name and, mostly for s#its and giggles, I thumbed through a few copies. There were, as I expected, the most preposterous of conspiracy theories. But there was something else. Usually toward the back and written in the turgid prose reserved for those seeking to express ideas both profound and precise was a description of the education that I was not getting and a bemoanal of its demise. Here was brilliance, here was intelligence, here was the flickering flame of a civilization in decline.

The problem became how to reconcile the two, the brilliance running on a parallel track but separate from the world and the base fear of forces, ominous and conspiratorial, lurking in the darkness beyond. They were right in lamenting the loss of Classical Thought and the decoupling of our social strictures from the forces driving them for millennia. I think that they were wrong and giving too much credence to the power of conspirators and the sympathetic mutuality of their goals. The lesson I took was that good intentioned men can be brilliant, educated and wrong. Were they wrong or was I? Even in my dotage I recall the cautionary words of novelist Taylor Caldwell when she was asked how on earth she could possibly believe in such conspiratorial rot. Her retort: “How can you not.”

Thank you for that wonderful post. This is what intrigued me in your comment.

The problem became how to reconcile the two, the brilliance running on a parallel track but separate from the world and the base fear of forces, ominous and conspiratorial, lurking in the darkness beyond. They were right in lamenting the loss of Classical Thought and the decoupling of our social strictures from the forces driving them for millennia. I think that they were wrong and giving too much credence to the power of conspirators and the sympathetic mutuality of their goals. The lesson I took was that good intentioned men can be brilliant, educated and wrong. Were they wrong or was I?

A combination of negative and positive, balance so to speak. Maybe they present both sides of the coin.

Very interesting take on them. Thank you. I shall read them.

Even in my dotage I recall the cautionary words of novelist Taylor Caldwell when she was asked how on earth she could possibly believe in such conspiratorial rot. Her retort: “How can you not.”

Actually, the alternative is to believe in an amazingly improbable set of coincidences.