CHAPTER VIII
1. There Is a Counter-Revolutionary Process
It is evident that, like the Revolution, the Counter-Revolution is a process, and therefore its progressive and methodical march toward order can be studied.
“For example, as adolescents, they have a severe opinion about indecent fashions, according to the environment in which they live.”
Nevertheless, there are some characteristics that profoundly differentiate this march from the movement of the Revolution toward complete disorder. This results from the fact that the dynamism of good is radically different from the dynamism of evil.
2. Typical Aspects Of The Revolutionary Process
A. In the Rapid March
When discussing the two speeds of the Revolution, we saw that some souls arc gripped by its maxims in a single moment and at once draw all the consequences of error.¹
“Later, as customs “evolve” in a more dissolute direction, these persons adapt themselves to the successive fashions.”
B. In the Slow March
We saw also that others accept the revolutionary doctrine slowly, step by step. In many cases, this process develops continuously down through generations. A “semi-counterrevolutionary” who is strongly opposed to the paroxysms of the Revolution has a son who is less opposed to them, a grandson who is indifferent to them, and a great grandson who is fully integrated in the revolutionary flux.
“As they grow old, they applaud styles of dress that in their youth they would have strongly condemned.”
The reason for this, as we have said, is that certain families have in their mentality, subconscious, and ways of feeling a remnant of counter-revolutionary habits and leaven that holds them partly bound to order. In such families the revolutionary corruption is not as dynamic, and therefore error can only advance in their spirits step by step, as it were, disguising itself.
“They reached this point because they have passed slowly and imperceptibly through the nuanced stages of the Revolution.
This same slowness of rhythm explains how many people change their opinions enormously in the course of their lives. For example, as adolescents, they have a severe opinion about indecent fashions, according to the environment in which they live. Later, as customs “evolve” in a more dissolute direction, these persons adapt themselves to the successive fashions. As they grow old, they applaud styles of dress that in their youth they would have strongly condemned. They reached this point because they have passed slowly and imperceptibly through the nuanced stages of the Revolution. They had neither the perspicacity nor the energy required to perceive where they were being led by the Revolution, which was acting within and around them. Gradually, they ended up going perhaps even as far as a revolutionary of their own age who in his adolescence had opted for the first speed. Truth and goodness lie defeated in these souls, but not so defeated that, in face of a grave error and a grave evil, they might not suffer a start that at times, in a victorious and salvific way, will make them perceive the perverse depth of the Revolution and lead them to take a categorical and systematic attitude of opposition to all its manifestations. To avoid these wholesome shocks of the soul and these counter-revolutionary crystallizations, the Revolution moves step by step.
“Gradually, they ended up going perhaps even as far as a revolutionary of their own age who in his adolescence had opted for the first speed.”
3. How To Destroy The Revolutionary Process
If this is bow the Revolution leads the immense majority of its victims, by what means can one of them separate himself from this process? Is this means different from that by which persons dragged by the high-speed revolutionary march convert to the Counter-Revolution?
¹ See Part I, Chapter 6, 4.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Ch. VIII, Pg. 96-98.
