Individualism is the only ideal possible; and if individuals are subordinated to the state, it is only that they may fulfill their devotion to things rational and impersonal, a higher individualism. For a time, democracy and individualism exhibit a parallel growth; but presently democratic legislation presumes to regulate all things, and industrial liberalism, supported by democracy, aspires to replace individuality by efficient standardization; thus the man who loves beauty and variety will endeavor (like Socrates in Dialogues in Limbo) to puncture the bubbles of social planners who have forgotten the real aim of society, the life of mind and art.
“If you refuse to move in the prescribed direction, you are not simply different, you are arrested and perverse. The savage must not remain a savage, nor the nun a nun, and China must not keep its wall.”
“A man without traditions, if he could only be materially well equipped, would be purer, more rational, more virtuous than if he had been an heir to anything. Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist! Blessed are the orphans, for they shall deserve to have children; blessed the American!”
“Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.”
Source: “George Santayana Buries Liberalism.” The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays (2006) by George A. Panichas [editor].
The text in quotes are the actually thoughts of George Santayana about the Left believes.
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