The List War Did Not Take Place

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Yes, thanks a lot, but 
He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits
and seeming
pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet
prefer
that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring
Christian.
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue,
unexercised and
unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary
but
slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be
run
for, not without dust and heat.  Assuredly we bring not
innocence
into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which
purifies
us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.  

			---Areopagitica

Oh the ironies! This kind of thought has enjoyed great
success in all the concerns of Western Man. Western Man has
his origin in an evolutionary Agon, his psyche is the
battleground of conflicting forces, he orders his economic
and political relations agonistically, his sports have
become all contest. TRP, unlike the dialecticians  Brown,
Marcuse (thanks Dave M. that Political Introduction, that
little book), he is an agonist. So in his luddite essay, for
example,  he simply states the agonistic truth,  that when
and if man destroys himself, it will because he has lost the
struggle against his own agonistic nature.