Let me begin with one of Bloy's Histoires désobligeantes. It is called
'Propos digestifs', 'Table Talk', and is at once a superb introduction to Bloy and to his affinities with Lacan. The scene is a salon of the intellectual bourgeoisie, whose leading denizen is called the Psychologist, and whose habitués, after dinner, are debating just how to do away, once and for all, with the poor - 'la classe guenilleuse'. Massacres, penal colonies are topics.
Berdyaev: What does the word bourgeois actually mean? It has remained unexplained, though it has been so much used and so often misapplied. Even when superficially used it is a word with a magic power of its own, and its depth has to be fathomed. The word designates a spiritual state, a direction of the soul, a peculiar consciousness of beings. It is neither a social nor an economic condition, yet it is something more than a psychological and ethical one—it is spiritual, ontological. In the very depths of his being, or nonbeing, the bourgeois is distinguishable from the not bourgeois; he is a man of a particular spirit, or particular soullessness. The state of being bourgeois has always existed in the world, and its immortal image is for ever fixed in the gospels with its equally immortal antithesis, but in the nineteenth century it attained its climax and ruled supreme. Though the middle-class society of the last century is so spoken of in the superficial social-economic significance of the term, it is bourgeois in a deeper and more spiritual sense. This middle-class mentality ripened and enslaved human society and culture at the summit of their civilization. Its concupiscence is no longer restricted by man’s supernatural beliefs as it was past epochs, it is no longer kept in bounds by the sacred symbolism of a nobler traditional culture; the bourgeois spirit emancipated itself, expanded, and was at last able to express its own type of life. But even when the triumph of mediocrity was complete a few deep thinkers denounced it with uncompromising power: Carlyle, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Leon Bloy, Dostoievsky, Leontiev—all foresaw the victory of the bourgeois spirit over a truly great culture, on the ruins of which it would establish its own hideous kingdom.
(Hertzen) on the inevitable victory of bourgeoisie in Europe, Hertzen refers to one of the noblest representatives of European culture, to one of its “knights beyond fear or reproach”—to John Stuart Mill. “Bourgeoisie,” says Hertzen, “is no other than the sovereign mob of John Stuart Mill’s “conglomerated mediocrity,’ which reigns over all things, the mob without ignorance, but without education Mill beholds everything around him becoming vulgar, small; he looks with despair upon these crushing masses of some prolific spawn, com pressed out of the myriads of bourgeois shallowness. . . . He does not at all exaggerate when he speaks of the contraction of intellect and energy; of the obliteration of personalities; of the constant degeneration of life; of the constant exclusion from it of all universally human interests; of its resolving itself into the interests of the counting room and the well-being of the bourgeoisie. Mill proclaims plainly that by following this course England will become China—we will add: and not England alone. “It may be that some crisis may even save it from the Chinese marasmus. But whence will it come, and how?—this I do not know, and even Mill does not know.” “Where is that mighty thought, that passionate faith, that fervent hope, which can steel the body, bring the soul to an ecstatic rapture, which feels neither pain nor privations, and with a firm step marches on to the heads man's block and the burning stake? Look around you—what is capable of elevating the nations?” “Christianity has grown shallow....
“Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want that on my business card.” – Bill Gates