Anthony Ludovici

Anfang wrote:

Russian women eat very little, calorie wise, and since the food in Russia is usually quite fatty, they eat very small volumes. It's a social norm in many parts of the country, similar to how they tell men in western countries to 'man-up', they tell their girls to stay thin, so that they have a better chance of attracting the right kind of man.
That's literally what they will say, not any other kind of pretense.

Tenable observations which sufficiently explain the phenomena there.

Case in point, I know these two best friends: one (a vegetarian) has a boyfriend and has put on some significant weight since, while the other, single, hardly eats at all.

I would add, just for supportive consideration, that the dishes are pretty bland. My mom joked the other day to give these raccoons Russian food so as to prevent them from coming back.
Then there is the prevalence of alcoholism there: alcoholics generally have a proclivity towards eating less.
Also, mode of transportation is a determining element and the activity level and season in accord with it.

It is after all a country of massive group think and when a fad kicks in, such as exercise, then most will dabble in it.

On the other end, vegetarianism is gaining some common ground there, where these subscribers tend to over consume on Starbucks lattes and sweets.

Russian women marry very early compared to Western Europe, often still in the teens. But they also get divorced in their twenties. There is a strong social pressure for women to stay fit. Usually it's other women who are telling them to toe that line - it's also a social status thing for women.

Why that is, I haven't thought about it but it's not necessarily a socio-economic incentive. These days social rules are often not in the best interests of people who follow them. Though i'm not saying that this is or is not the case with thin Russian women.

I don't know about the alcohol part. Alcohol usually contains quite a lot of calories and slows down fat-burning. I've heard that cocaine makes people feel less hunger.

Is he ugly or just not my kind?
Is he beautiful or just following the current fashions?

Ludovici in Choice of a Mate, Ch. 4 wrote:

A good proportion of the alleged "ugly" people of history, who were nevertheless estimable or desirable, probably fall under this head; that is to say, they were classed as ugly by their friends, enemies and biographers, probably because they either departed from a class ideal, without being necessarily morbid or disharmonious beings, or else departed from an ideal of a whole Age by being too fierce, too sensual, too hard or too soft. Lorenzo the Magnificent certainly comes under this head now as did probably Du Guesclin in his day. On the other hand, a really ugly and repulsive man, like Leo X, receives an embellished exterior from his biographers because of the high favour he enjoyed during his lifetime. A more recent, and presumably less-biased writer, however, is able to describe him as follows: "Leo X was of middle height, with a large head, a reddish complexion, and projecting eyes; he was so short-sighted as to be always obliged to use glasses . . . suffered much from a disease that made it unpleasant to approach him . . . and was very corpulent and unable to endure any prolonged fatigue."

Weininger, today, would sell red pills like mad in every book store...

Ludovici wrote:

When, therefore, Caroline Schlegel, in one of her letters, hastily concludes from Sophie's love of Mirabeau that "what women love in men is certainly not beauty," she is writing nonsense. If, as a rule, women fail to be sexually stimulated by the so-called "barber's model" sort of man, it is not because they are insusceptible to masculine beauty, but because such beauty as the barber's model possesses is frequently effeminate, and more rugged and more stern features in the male are often and quite erroneously regarded by an effeminate age as "ugly." To argue from this, however, that women are not concerned with congenital male beauty, denoting biological superiority, is fallacious*.

* See p. 35 supra. Schopenhauer too thought women indifferent to male looks, but adds, "they never love an unmanly man" (W.W.V., II, Chap. 44). Weininger, who raided Schopenhauer's works and stole from him his theory of the complete male (M.) and complete female (F.) necessary for "true sexual union" (cf. S.C, p. 29, with W.W.V. . II, Chap. 44), also believed women were not attracted by male beauty. Regarding Weininger's lack of originality, see G.K., I, pp. 484–485, where Hirschfeld says Weininger stole his theory from him (Hirschfeld). But Schopenhauer preceded them both.

Ludovici wrote:

Balzac says: "In order to incur the least possible amount of misery in marriage, the twofold prerequisite of success is that the woman should be very gentle and tolerably ugly."
The great novelist and psychologist is evidently thinking, like a typical Frenchman, chiefly of the dangers of cuckoldom. But, for once, Balzac reveals a lack of penetration. He seems not to have known of the theory of compensation in psychology, of the consequences of resentment, and of inferiority feelings. He did not sufficiently appreciate the fact that the ugly person, by being constantly aware, in spite of Socratic and Christian sophistry, of his or her inferiority, tries constantly to compensate for the defect, and this compensation takes any form and may be, and frequently is, at the expense of the immediate human circle.
        "Since I am so ugly," said Du Guesclin, "it behoves that I be bold."
        This is typical.
        The inferiority feelings of the ugly person also make him or her resentful, and resentful people are torn by conflicts. They long to "pay some one out" for what they resent, and their attachment to, and dependence upon, those about them often makes it difficult for them to do so. Like the kitten whose tail is pinched by accident, and who turns to bite the guiltless soft cushion at its side, so the resentful person will, if possible, annoy or ill-treat those closest to him or her, simply because they happen to be sentient creatures at hand, and "someone must suffer for what I am suffering."
If the sentient creatures near at hand happen to be powerful and the resentful person is dependent on them, then someone outside the intimate circle will be selected as a victim, as the "cause" of the resentful person's misery.

Now this makes ugly people difficult to live with, quite apart from the fact that their congenital ugliness in itself, as we have seen, presupposes mental discord and emotional conflict, hence instability of some kind. They are people not only at war with the world, but also at war with themselves. And Balzac was perfectly aware of the danger of living with people at war with themselves. "It is impossible," he says, "for a creature perpetually at war with itself, or in conflict with life, to leave others in peace, and not to envy their happiness." His dictum on marriage with a woman tolerably ugly may thus be regarded as a shallow lapse, and it is flatly contradicted by that other equally great psychologist, Heinrich Heine, who said: "Women are indeed dangerous; but I must say that the beautiful are not nearly as dangerous as the ugly ones."

Spiritually too, therefore, the congenitally ugly are to be avoided in mating, and all those who appear to hold views against this rule by saying, as so many modern people do, "He, or she, is frightfully ugly, but so charming "are really guilty of a confusion of thought. Having found somebody ugly, who happens to be charming, and being too lazy or ignorant to discover whether this person's alleged "ugliness" is anything more than a matter of fashion, class difference, or a difference of feeling about sternness, ferocity, passion or sensuality in a face, they too readily use the condemnatory value "ugly," as if it connoted biological inferiority, and then make a remark which seems to conflict with the rule that "ugly people are undesirable." The remark does not, however, conflict with any such rule. It is merely a frivolous abuse of a useful word. The particle "but" in the remark reveals the fundamentally sound instinct of the speaker. The word "ugly" is, therefore, simply misapplied, and if the person speaking had been wiser, the remark would have been suppressed and some such thought as the following would have taken its place:—
"At first sight that person struck me as ugly, and therefore undesirable. Closer scrutiny revealed that the ugliness was due simply to an uncustomary amount of severity, passion, sensuality, or what not, in his or her face. Now none of these things are necessarily 'ugly,' i.e. biologically inferior, consequently I ought not to have been surprised to find him or her really a charming or desirable person."

I read somewhere once - "The beautiful woman, the most dangerous creature..."
More like the contra-dicting woman, the most dangerous creature.

"So beautiful, but so stupid"
Ironically not because of the beauty itself but because of the relatively ugly social circle surrounding it.

Ludovici wrote:

For the last two thousand years and more, living in a human environment growing every century more and more predominantly ugly, the beautiful in Europe have often found things too easy, too smooth. Trading on the profound and ineradicable instinct in mankind, present even in the ugly, though frequently stifled by them, that beauty is a visible sign of general desirability, the fair and the handsome have found in their own appearance a too easily acquired passport into the hearts and good opinion of the majority — a passport not striven for, not paid for and not begged for. Their path has always been strewn with roses, and this tends to make some of them careless about everything except appearance. These elements among the good-looking, by neglecting to cultivate what the ugly cultivate, by allowing to rust what the ugly polish, and by losing what the ugly find, procure for the handsome and the fair a bad name.
When once human life had become a hard struggle, particularly of wits, many of the beautiful were thus handicapped; because, leaning on their beauty, they frequently neglected other, particularly intellectual weapons. Hence the common remark, "So beautiful but so stupid!" which leads scores of superficial people in every European circle to believe that a connexion exists between beauty and stupidity.
But, truth to tell, there is an inconsistency here; for a beautiful face must have good proportions, and since good proportions mean that a face has its quota of breadth and height in the brow (the usual morphological counterpart of a normal intellect), a beautiful face cannot be a stupid face.
The beautiful person thus probably starts with an advantage in brains over the ugly person; but whereas many beauties yield to the temptation to be idle and easy-going, the ugly person, spurred on, as we have seen, by his sense of inferiority, often overtakes and passes the beauty intellectually, just as the tortoise beats the hare.
Of course, it may and often does happen that a superficial person calls "beautiful" or "handsome" a face which is not well-proportioned or harmonious, and has only a few of the "properties" of beauty — a fair skin, curly hair, good eyes, or what not. In such cases, it may well be that this "pseudo-beauty" is a hopeless fool. But the mistake is not with the theory advanced in this book, but with the superficial person who uses the epithet "beautiful" indiscriminately.
The connexion of beauty with immorality, or wickedness, or slyness, or falsity, as for instance, in Shakespeare's "But there is never a fair woman has a true face," has, of course, no foundation whatsoever, and is merely part of the consistent slander leveled at the beautiful in our Christian culture.

When we appreciate what beauty is — namely, harmony, sound proportions, and the health that these guarantee — it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that it is the best endowment a human being can receive. And if in our plain and generally ugly communities, a beautiful person finds himself or herself so much the cynosure of all eyes as sometimes to get a swelled head and to neglect other parts of his or her excellent equipment, this is not an argument against the possession of beauty, but against our modern communities, too full of ugly and therefore biologically inferior or degenerate people.

Sorry for abandoning this thread. I've been offline for a while.

I'll reupload the ebooks and join the discussion soon. I've read all of Ludovici's books once or twice since starting this thread so I'll have much to contribute.

Glad to be back.

Laconophile wrote:

Who else is familiar with him? I can't recommend him highly enough. He's probably my favorite philosopher.

His 'Who is to be Master of the World?' should be read by everyone who thinks they understand Nietzsche.

I have started reading him on your, and the others in this thread, suggestion.


He is quotable, for sure, but this struck out most with me as I had never understood it - and even gotten explained to me how wrong Nietzsche was on evolution:

Ludovici , Who shall be master wrote:

"Mankind does not manifest a development to the better, the stronger, or the higher in the manner in which it has at present believed. 'Progress' is merely a modern idea, i.e. a false idea. The European of the present day is, in worth, far below the European of the Renaissance; onward development (progress, as it is understood to-day) is by no means, by any necessity, elevating, enhancing, strengthening." *         The law that "the fittest" survive in a given environment, does not by any means imply that the stronger or the better will survive, and our authorities for this apparently heterodox doctrine are no less than Prof. Huxley and Herbert Spencer, † I say "heterodox doctrine," because I am speaking popularly, and because I know that a very large number of people (the         * C.W., p. 243, ¶ 4.         † See also George J. Romanes' paper on "Darwin's Latest Critics," Nineteenth Century, May 1890. - p. 91 - late Dr James Martineau was among them), who have not gone below the surface of the Evolution Hypothesis, believe most fervently that the survival of the fittest must mean the survival of the better and stronger. But perhaps it would be as well to make the matter quite clear by referring to Herbert Spencer's and Huxley's actual words.         The former tells us in Vol. I. p. 379 of his Collected Essays, where he is replying to an attack made by Dr Martineau, upon the hypothesis of General Evolution:—         ". . . The law is not the survival of the 'better' or the 'stronger,' if we give to those words anything like their ordinary meaning. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival. Superiority, whether in size, strength, activity or sagacity is, other things equal, at the cost of diminished fertility; and where the life led by a species does not demand these higher attributes, the species profits by decrease of them, and accompanying increase of fertility. This is the reason why there occur so many cases of retrograde metamorphosis — this is the reason why parasites, internal and external, are so commonly degraded forms of higher types. Survival of the 'better' does not cover these cases, though survival of the 'fittest' does; and, as I am responsible for the phrase, I suppose I am competent to say the word 'fittest' was chosen for this reason. When it is remembered that these cases outnumber all others — it will be seen that - p. 92 - the expression 'survivorship of the better' is wholly inappropriate."

Ludovici wrote:

Now what implied fact is common to the three passages I have just quoted from Nietzsche, Spencer and Huxley respectively? Nietzsche says:—         "Progress is by no means, by any necessity, elevating, enhancing, strengthening." Spencer says, "the survival of the fittest under the conditions in which they are placed, does not by any means necessarily signify that the better and the stronger will survive," and Huxley tells us, we look in vain to the struggle for existence, and the consequent survival of the fittest, to help us towards perfection.         Is it not quite clear from these three statements that the environment is the determining factor? If the environment is best met by mean, emasculated, puny and rickety beings, it follows that those men will be the         " See the Romanes Lecture, "Evolution and Ethics," by T. H. Huxley, Ed. 1903, p. 32. - p. 93 - fittest to survive who are mean, emasculated, puny and rickety.         The parasites in all their loathsomeness, we are told, are examples of the survival of the fittest, but were not those creatures much nobler, from which they were derived, and who unlike them were overcome in the struggle for existence? Is this point quite clear? Is it quite understood, that we may be the "fittest" and yet still degenerate, provided our environment be such that only degenerate beings may survive in it?

Well, then, it was understood over 100 years ago the importance of avoiding degeneracy in the population, and why it occured. The solution might also be given, by promoting the Superman, and working towards that goal. And the arguments are sound, so sound, in my opinion, I dont know why they are not always used and are fundamental. I remember from my school years that ,literally, the opposite was taught.

This alone gives new meaning to what a state ought to be doing...

Could links be refreshed? Specifically looking to read Will to Power, The four pillars of health and Health and Education Through Self-Mastery but they dont seem to be working anymore.

A link to a site where I get many of my e-books
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This is the link to the texts of Ludovici that I know of:
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Anfang wrote:

In the first chapter of "Enemies of Women", Ludovici finds the philosophical root of femininsm (among other modern phenomena) to be Socrates. His dualism, the separation of body and mind, into two distinct things. And the gradual dismissal of the body in favour of the pure soul, the 'invisible' qualities. How physical, reality and all its manifestations became, over time, meaningless, later, rendered un-pure under Christianity - something vile. That either/or phenomenon - body/mind - a split.

Good reading.

Some philosophers have let the misery begin with Socrates or, because Socrates himself left nothing in writing, with Plato (as Martin Heidegger did, for example) or even with Parmenides and Democritus (as Hermann Schmitz did, for example).

Anfang wrote:

Ludovici in EoW wrote:

It was the old hoax of the fox that had lost its tail. But, strange to say, he got away with it and, by so doing, established for over 2,000 years the principal beliefs of the White Man concerning human nature.
The best men in Greece — men like Aristophanes — despised and ridiculed him and his doctrine. The merely conventional hated him. Hence, ultimately, he was charged with corrupting the youth of the country and perverting its faith, and he was condemned to death.
Unhappily for posterity, two of his apprentices, Xenophon and Plato, survived him. Both were taken in by his attacks on the healthy old Greek belief in the oneness of Man, and both had a scribbling and preaching mania which enabled them to transmit to the generations that followed them their master's unwholesome doctrine.
What, in fact, were the positions Socrates established? They were:—
(a) The Duality of Man, i.e. his two-sided existence. The one side being his body and the other his soul or mind.
(b) The soul's independence of the body.
(c) The soul's superiority to the body.
(d) The worthlessness and despicableness of the body.
(e) The immortality of the soul.

The standard believe system nowadays. It's underneath most believes and accepted morality, though it's usually not explicitly formulated.

Yes. Exactly. And it is exactly what Hermann Schmitz criticizes above all, because for Hermann Schmitz psychologism began at the latest with Socrates, but most likely already with Parmendies and Democritus, and consequently the psychologist-reductionist-introjectionist wrongdoing, as Schmitz calls it (this is quite essential for his philosophy - unfortunately Schmitz was avoided more and more, but this is a positive sign in today's world).

Hermann Schmitz schrieb:

"Meine Neue Phänomenologie soll keineswegs das archaische Paradigma wiederherstellen, wohl aber die offenkundigen Mängel und Verkünstelungen der psychologistisch-reduktionistisch-introjektionistischen Vergegenständlichung der Welt beseitigen und dadurch eine Abstraktionsbasis bereitstellen, die in der Lebenserfahrung tiefer verankert ist als die seit Demokrit, Platon und Aristoteles die dominante europäische Intellektualkultur beherrschende."
Translation: "My New Phenomenology is by no means intended to restore the archaic paradigm, but rather to eliminate the obvious deficiencies and artificialities of the psychologist-reductionist-introjectionist objectification of the world, and thus to provide a basis for abstraction that is more deeply anchored in life experience than that which has dominated the dominant European intellectual culture since Democritus, Plato and Aristotle."

Anfang wrote:

Ludovici in EoW wrote:

Thus, for over two thousand years, the Socratic doctrine has been part of our atmosphere, soaking into our blood and bones, so much so that, today, even those who have never heard of Socrates — the charwoman, the postman and the coal-heaver — all speak on these matters of man's s visible and invisible aspects as if they had sat at his feet.
Now the Feminists of all times — whether in Hellenistic Greece or in Renaissance or 17th century Europe, naturally seized with alacrity upon the arguments Socrates offered them. For, if the body was negligible, if bodily differences did not matter, if the soul alone counted, the visible or physical differences between man and woman were also negligible. Indeed, the more one behaved as if there were no difference between man and woman, the purer one was, because the less one was considering the despicable body.

There is a common thread that runs - with interruptions - from (prepared by Parmenides and others) Socrates and Democritus and others to Marxism, (feminism, neo-Marxism such as Frankfurt School, Americanism. poststructuralism, postmodernism, genderism, bi- and homosexualism, trans(sexual)ism, anti-whiteism, BLM-ism, wokism, loxism, etc..

Anfang wrote:

Quote -

"My principal divergence from Nietzsche arises out of my attitude to Socrates.
For the reasons stated in the chapter on The White Man's Philosophy above, I regard Socrates as the greatest transvaluer of all time, the man who, out of resentment and inferiority feelings, was responsible for the fundamental demonetization of the old healthy values regarding man, and for the successful establishment of new principles which excluded biological considerations from judgments affecting human nature, which created a new and imaginary centre of gravity in man ? the soul, and which relegated the body to an inferior and despised rank.
My view is that the moment the old healthy biological attitude towards man, which regarded his visible aspects as essential factors in forming an estimate of him, was contradicted and invalidated by Socrates, every sort of degeneracy, and of apology for degeneracy, became possible. Every sort of nobility was made difficult of achievement, if not impossible. For nobility, like every other order of rank in the human hierarchy, is inconceivable without bodily components of a certain quality. So that Socrates, at one stroke, tried to make not only health but also nobility a thing of the past.
With the denigration of the visible, the body, in short, and the exaltation of the invisible, the soul, every kind of canaille, by making certain verbal protestations and adopting certain airs, could prove its worth.

The soul (psyche) is not only invisible, but does not exist at all, at least not in the body. It is just a placeholder for something to be able to control more effectively, e.g. nature and man.