Ironically said, not to be unfair quoted:  For the young man who wishes to make his way in the world, as we understand the matter today, the most important advice one can give him is that he should studiously cultivate the art of “rhetoric”, or in plump words,  lying skillfully. Hatred and envy in the lower classes, intense egoism and the exclusive cult of wealth in the over classes, pessimism among thinkers: such are the general modern tendencies.  At first sight Socialism would appear to draw the greater number of its recruits from the popular classes, and more especially from the working classes. However, socialism is today more a question about lifestyle than social class.  The new ideal presents itself in the elementary and comprehensible shape: less work and more pleasure.

Socialism as a Religion
As soon as we penetrate a little into the mechanism of civilizations, we quickly discover that a society, with its institutions, its beliefs, and its arts, represents a tissue of ideas, sentiments, customs, and modes of thought determined by heredity, the cohesion of which constitutes its strength. Socialism is becoming a belief of a religious character rather than a doctrine. Socialism, whose dream is to substitute itself for the ancient faiths, proposes but a very low ideal, and to establish it appeals but to sentiments lower still. What, in effect, does it promise, more than merely our daily bread and that at the price of hard labor? With what lever does it seek to raise the soul? With the sentiments of envy and hatred which it creates in the hearts of multitudes? To the crowd, no longer satisfied with political and civic equality, it proposes equality of condition, without dreaming that social inequalities are born of those natural inequalities that man has always been powerless to change.
In order that the Socialism of the present day might assume so quickly that religious form which constitutes the secret of its power, it was necessary that it should appear at one of those rare moments of history when the old religions lose their might (men being weary of their gods), and exist only on sufferance, while awaiting the new faith that is to succeed them.

Socialism = Collectivism
Modern Socialism presents itself in a number of forms greatly differing in detail. By their general characteristics, they rank themselves under the head of Collectivism. All would invariably have recourse to the State to repair the injustice of destiny, and to proceed to the re-distribution of wealth. Their fundamental propositions have at least the merit of extreme simplicity: confiscation by the State of capital, mines, and property, and the administration and re-distribution of the public wealth by an immense army of functionaries. The State, or the community, if you will - for the Collectivists now no longer use the word State - would manufacture everything, and permit no competition.

Individualism
Only the strong can support isolation, and rely only on themselves; the weak are unable to do so. To isolation, and the absence of support the weak prefer servitude; even painful servitude.

From the philosophic point of view, then, Socialism is certainly a reaction of the collectivity against the individual: a return to the past. Individualism and Collectivism are, in their general essentials, two opposing forces, which tend, if not to annihilate, at least to paralyze one another. In this struggle between the generally conflicting interests of the individual and those of the aggregate lies the true philosophic problem of Socialism.

All that has gone to make the greatness of civilizations, sciences, arts, philosophies, religions, military power, etc., has been the work of individuals and not of aggregates. It is by favored individuals that the most important discoveries and advances, by which all humanity profits, have been realized. The peoples among whom Individualism is most highly developed are by this fact alone at the head of civilization, and to-day dominate the world.

Individualism vs. Collectivism
The crowd may become cruel, but it is above all altruistic, and is as easily led away to sacrifice itself as to destroy others. Dominated by the subconscious, it has a morality and a generosity that are always tending towards activity, whilst those of the individual generally remain contemplative, and most frequently are limited to his speeches. Reflection and reasoning most frequently lead to egoism; and egoism, so deeply rooted in the isolated individual, is a sentiment unknown to the crowd, simply because the crowd cannot reason and reflect. No religions, no empires could ever have been founded if the armies of their disciples been able to reason and reflect. Very few soldiers of such armies would have sacrificed their lives for the triumph of any cause. Despite their momentary outbursts of violence, the masses have always shown themselves ready to suffer all things. The tyrants and fanatics of all ages have never had any difficulty in finding crowds ready to immolate themselves to defend whatever cause.

Socialism and Government
Government is always a power absorbing everything, manufacturing everything, and controlling the least details of the citizen’s life. Socialism is only the extension of this concept. It would be a dictatorship; impersonal, but absolute. By Individualism, man is abandoned to himself; his initiative is carried to a maximum, and that of the State to a minimum. By Collectivism a man’s least actions are directed by the State, that is to say, by the aggregate; the individual possesses no initiative; all the acts of his life are mapped out.

Under the domination of the capitalist, the worker can at least dream of becoming, and sometimes does become, a capitalist in his turn. What dream could lie indulge in under the anonymous and brutally despotic tyranny of a leveling State, which should foresee all his needs? Would it not resemble rather the organization of the negroes on the old slave-plantations?

Tyrants Disguised
Social failures, misunderstood geniuses, lawyers without clients, writers without readers, doctors without patients, professors ill-paid, graduates without employment, clerks whose employers disdain them for their insufficiency, puffed-up university instructors — these are the natural adepts of Socialism. In reality, they care very little for doctrines. Their dream is to create, by violent means if necessary, a society in which they will be the masters. Their cry of equality does not prevent them from having an intense scorn of the rabble who have not, as they have, learned out of books. They believe themselves greatly the superiors of the working man, and are really greatly his inferiors in their lack of practical sense and their exaggerated egotism. The middle classes help the downfall by their indifference, their egotism, their feeble will, and their absence of initiative or political perception. The lower classes act in a revolutionary manner by seeking to destroy, as soon as it shall be sufficiently undermined, the edifice that is tottering on its foundations.

Karl Marx
There is not a Socialist who does not constantly invoke the work of Karl Marx “Das Kapital”, but I very much doubt if one in ten thousand has even turned over the leaves of this indigestible volume. The obscurity of such works is, however, a fundamental condition of their success. Like the Bible for the Protestant clergy, they constitute a sort of prophetic conjuring book, which one has only to open at random to find - provided that one possesses faith - the solution of any question in the world.

The Plan Backfires
The Socialists imagine that they will easily carry the masses with them. They are wrong; they will very quickly discover that they will find among the masses, not their allies, but their most implacable enemies. The crowd may, doubtless, in its anger of a day, shatter, furiously, the social edifice; but, on the morrow, it will acclaim the first-come Caesar of whose plume it shall catch a glimpse, and who shall promise to restore to it what it has broken. The actual dominating principle of crowds, among nations having a long past, is not mobility, not fickleness, but fixity. Their destructive and revolutionary instincts are ephemeral; their conservative instincts are of an extreme tenacity.

Evil of the Universities
The indoctrinators and malcontents manufactured by the universities act above all by attacking ideals, and are, because of the intellectual anarchy, they give rise to, one of the most corrosive factors of destruction. Why is socialism so popular in Universities? The private sector employ the best students even before they have finished the studies and the theoretical talkers stay in University. Roughly spoken, in no manner addressed to the really skilled and interested professors with real interest in some science.

Latin vs. Anglo-Saxon
When I speak of the Latin peoples, I speak of the peoples which may, perhaps, have no Latin elements in their blood, and which greatly differ from one another, but which for centuries and centuries have been subjected to the yoke of the Latin ideals. They are Latin by sentiment, in their institutions, their literature, their beliefs, and their arts, and their education continues to maintain the Latin ideals among them.

The social ideal of the Anglo-Saxon culture is very clearly defined. It consists in reducing the functions of the State to a minimum, and increasing the functions of the individual to a maximum, precisely the contrary of the Latin ideal. It is only in our days, and above all, since the Revolution, that Individualism, at least under certain forms, has at all developed among Latin people.
The Anglo-Saxon people succeeded long ago in ridding themselves of an ineffective educational system, and it is in part because they have done so that they are now in the front rank of civilization, and have left the Latin nations so far behind them. The principles of Anglo-Saxon education are as different from those of the Latin system of education as the principles, which form the bases of instruction.

The revolutionary ideal was to shatter the classes and corporations, to reduce every individual to a common type, and to absorb all these individuals, thus dissociated from their categories, into the guardianship of a strongly centralized State. Nothing could be more strongly opposed to the Anglo-Saxon Individualism, which favors the banding together of individuals, obtains everything by it, and confines the action of the State within narrow limits. The work of the Revolution was far less revolutionary than is generally believed. By exaggerating the absorption and centralization of the State, it only continued in a Latin tradition deeply rooted through centuries of monarchy, and followed by all governments alike. By dissolving the industrial, political, religious, and other corporations, it has made this absorption and centralization still more complete, and by so doing, has obeyed the inspirations of all the philosophers of the period.
The strength of the Anglo-Saxons consists in this: that while accepting the influence of the past they understand how to escape its tyranny in the necessary degree. The weakness of the Latins, on the contrary, is that they desire entirely to reject the influence of the past, and entirely to rebuild, without ceasing, all their institutions, beliefs, and laws. For this sole reason they have been living, for a century in a state of revolution and incessant upheavals, from which they do not appear to be emerging.

The Latins are guided above all by individual egoism; the Anglo-Saxons by collective egoism.
Instead of being carried to a maximum, the role of the Latin State is reduced to a minimum, while the political or social part reserved for private initiative reaches, on the contrary, a maximum.
English Socialist writers (Herbert Spencer, for example), are partisans of the liberty of the citizen and the limitation of the role of the State. The Socialist writers of Latin origin profess, on the contrary, a perfect disdain of liberty, and invariably clamor for extended action on the part of the State, and the utmost State regulation. One must run through the works of all the Latin theorists - those of August Comte, for example - in order to see to what extent the disdain of liberty and the desire to be governed may be carried.

Old United States
It would never enter a traditional American’s mind to require the State to establish railways, ports, universities, etc. Private enterprise alone suffices for all such matters, and is shown above all, and to a most remarkable degree, in the construction of the immense railroads that enmesh the great Republic. Nothing could better show the gulf that separates the Latin from the Anglo-Saxon mind in matters of enterprise and independence.

New United States
It is today especially in the United States that the Socialists possess an immense army of disciples; an army which grows every day more numerous and more menacing, recruited from the increasing flood of immigrants, without resources, without energy, and without adaptability to the conditions of existence in their new country, who to-day form an immense social drain.

Discipline
Civilized man cannot live without discipline. This discipline may be internal - that is to say, in the man himself. It may be external, or outside the man himself; and in that case, necessarily, enforced by others. The Anglo-Saxon, having, amongst his hereditary characteristics, which are confirmed by his education, this internal discipline, is able to direct and control himself, and has no need of the direction of the State. The Latin man, having, through his heredity and his education, very little internal discipline, requires an external discipline. This is imposed on him by the State, and it is for this reason that he is imprisoned in a network of regulations, which are innumerable, because they have to direct him in all the circumstances of his life.
The principle of Anglo-Saxon education is this: the child goes through his school life not to be disciplined by others, but to learn to make use of his own independence. He has to discipline himself, and by these means acquire self-control, from which self-government is derived. The young man may possibly leave college knowing little of theoretical science; but he leaves it like a man, able to guide himself in life and to rely on himself alone.

The Latin system of education has a precisely contrary object. Its dream is to crush the initiative, independence, and will of the pupil by severe and minute regulations. His only duty is to learn, to recite and to obey. After seven or eight years of this lack of discipline all traces of initiative and will-power are eradicated. Then, when the young man is left to himself, how will he be able to do what he has never learnt to conduct himself? Can we be astonished that the Latin peoples understand so ill how to govern themselves, and show themselves so incapable in the commercial and industrial struggles that the modern development of the world has engendered? Is it not natural that Socialism, which will merely multiply the fetters with which the State envelopes them, should be cordially welcomed by all those who have been so well prepared for servitude by their college training? Words and dialectic have always been the most terrible enemies of the Latin peoples. “The French,” said von Moltke, “always take words for facts.” This is equally true of the other Latin peoples. An Anglo-Saxon complies with facts and necessities, never throws the responsibility for what happens to him on the Government, and cares very little for the obvious indications of logic. He believes in experience, and knows that men are not conducted by reason.

The system of education imposed on the young of the Latin nations is gradually destroying what remains of these qualities. Persistent will-power, perseverance, and enterprise are vanishing one by one, and, above all, that self-control is vanishing which allows a man to dispense with a master.

Catholicism
Thus, we see that three conceptions - those of religion, politics, and education - have contributed to the formation of the Latin mind. Without suddenly breaking with the beliefs of the past, the Anglo-Saxons have been able to create a broader religion, able to adapt itself to every modern necessity. All too inconvenient dogmas have been softened down; have taken a symbolic character, a mythological value. Religion has thus been able to exist on good terms with science; at most it is not a declared enemy that has to be contended with. The Catholic dogma of the Latins, on the other hand, has preserved its rigid, absolute, intolerant form, which was useful, perhaps, of old, but which to-day is extremely pernicious. It remains what it was five hundred years ago. Without it is no salvation. It attempts to impose the most ridiculous historical absurdities on its faithful. No conciliation is possible; one must submit to it or fight it.
Victims of their hereditary conceptions, the Latin nations turn towards Socialism, which promises to think and act for them, but in coming under its rule they will only be submitting to new masters, and will thus still further retard the acquisition of the qualities they lack

Utopia or Dystopia?
The Socialists announce uproariously, every day, the approaching triumph of their Utopias. However, we were the victims of them long before they were born. The belief and march to Utopia can only lead to Dystopia.