“Many believed Lord Acton when he quipped that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This throwaway line has become one of our governing principles, so much so that Australia, and much of the West, organize virtually everything by committee and quail in the face of individual thumos outside of sport. We are suspicious of it. We see in every Great Man the shadow of the slave master. Nonetheless, power must be wielded... The wise man recognizes that life has fullest meaning in service to a good master, and that we all serve something — if not something or someone noble, then our appetites. Wartime is the most direct and prime example of service to masters; it is antiegalitarian in their sense, but egalitarian in ours, and together bound by duty and service in the most primordial sense. Against this the pseudo-liberated contemporary person feels a degree of contempt, which is why they enjoy stories of soldiers committing massacres so dearly. Nothing confirms their deepest-held beliefs more sordidly. Good masters are few and far between, because we no longer cultivate this ethic in our technocratic managerial elite. The truth is that in fleeing good masters we have not fled masters, but have merely ended up with bad ones. In attempting to achieve a self-reliant anarchy we have left open the door to those who are in fact most corruptible by power.”

Christopher Jolliffe “The Attack on ANZAC Day” in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)

“Compromise, in its sound and noble sense, used to mean the ignoring of small points in order to combine upon a large point; now it means ignoring large points in order to combine on small ones.”

G.K. Chesterton in Black & White, Mar. 7, 1903, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say someone like Jeffrey Epstein could only be a well-connected insider rather than a depraved and marginal freak in the strange modern Big Brother at the Playboy Mansion ethos of endless laws and regulations restricting our liberty combined with libertine social and especially sexual permissiveness.

“A medley of spiteful mutants united behind a Leninist project can only be a wholly destructive force, and those of us who cleave to notions of Being with more permanence feel alienated and betrayed by our recently-elevated bad masters. We should not be surprised that they have the deculturalizing effect of rampaging orcs. They are barbarians, and as Chesterton said, the barbarian creates only by accident. Everything else they do is destruction.”

Christopher Jolliffe “The Attack on ANZAC Day” in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)

“The division now is between those who want Western Civilization to continue and those who don’t... this is the moment when the West will either pull itself together or go over the edge of the cultural cliff.”

Melanie Phillips in The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, quoted by Chuck Chalberg reviewing the book in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)

In my latest National Post column I expand on Chris Selley’s alarming insight that Canadian politicians and voters consistently act as if nothing mattered.

“If you leave your children a world where you never stood up, they’ll inherit one where they can’t.”

Emailed as an image and without attribution by a friend Sept. 8, 2025

“Sympathy for Mr. [poet, playwright, militant atheist and in 1909 suicide John] Davidson’s sincerity and admiration of his talents cannot disguise the very obvious weakness which is behind all this kind of philosophy – anarchism, appeals to absolute liberty, renunciation of limitations as such, advice to the young to ‘consider no thou shalt not,’ talk of ‘setting aside tradition, custom, creed’ – all this is incurably futile and childish, because it will not face a fundamental logical fact. This fact is that there is no such thing as a condition of complete emancipation, unless we can speak of a condition of nonentity. What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another. If I have a piece of chalk in my hand I can make either a circle or a square; that is the sacred thing called liberty. But I cannot make a thing that is both a circle and a square. I cannot make an unlimited square. I cannot draw an emancipated circle. If I wish to make anything at all, I must abide by the limitations and principles of the thing I make. I must heed the ‘Thou shalt not’ of the circle. I must observe the ‘tradition, custom, creed’ of the square. And any man who makes anything whatever, if it be with a piece of chalk, is doing exactly what a man does when he marries or enlists in an army. He is courageously selling himself into a splendid slavery. And, of course, in moral matters it is the same; there is no lawlessness, there is only a free choice between limitations. If Mr. Davidson finds himself with four other men on one side of a river in flood, the other men may propose to build a boat or a bridge. Mr. Davidson may say, ‘We will not be limited by such set tasks; we will not drudge at rules and measurements.’ The others will say, ‘Very well, then, we must stop on this side. If you are not limited by the work you are limited by the river. You can not have complete freedom either way. If we build a boat, then we are not free to idle. If we don’t build a boat, then we are not free to get across.’ Mr. Davidson’s mere anarchism therefore (and everybody else’s) I take the liberty merely of dismissing. I dismiss it not because it is impracticable (which would be quite a small thing), but because it is unthinkable, because it is in the most literal sense of the word insignificant, signifying nothing.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Adoration of Matter”, a review of Davidson’s The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and State, in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)