“ There is a complete difference between simply expounding the truth as one has understood it -with the one care not to disfigure it-, and wishing at any price to make others share one’s own conviction. Propaganda and popularization are not even possible except to the detriment of the truth.

The pretension of putting truth “within everyone’s grasp,” of making it accessible to all without distinction, necessarily involves diminishing and deforming it, for it is impossible to admit that all men are equally capable of understanding anything. It is not a question of the greater or smaller extent of education, it is a question of ‘intellectual horizon,’ and that is something which cannot be modified, which is inherent in the very nature of each human individual.

‘Equality’ is the negation of all natural hierarchy and the debasement of all knowledge to the level of the limited understanding of the mass

The chimerical prejudice of ‘equality’ goes against all the best established facts, in the intellectual order as well as in the physical order; it is the negation of all natural hierarchy, and it is the debasement of all knowledge to the level of the limited understanding of the mass; people will no longer admit anything which passes common comprehension.

The scientific and philosophic conceptions of our epoch are -most lamentably- mediocre: modern ‘authorities’ have succeeded only too well in wiping out all that might have been incompatible with the concern for popularization.

The methods of teaching in use have the effect of replacing intelligence almost entirely by memory; facts are substituted for ideas, and scholarship is commonly mistaken for real knowledge.

Indeed, the claim that the representatives of Western science advertise of being able to teach it to all without any reserve is a sign of clear mediocrity; In the eyes of the Orientals there can be no great value and no true depth of contents in something whose study calls for no particular qualification.

Whatever anyone may say, the constitution of any elect cannot be reconciled with the democratic ideal, which demands that one and the same education shall be given to individuals who are most unequally gifted, and who differ widely both in talents and temperament.

The indiscriminate diffusion of scraps of knowledge is always more harmful than beneficial, for it can only bring about a general state of disorder and anarchy. It is such a diffusion that is guarded against by the methods of traditional teaching as it exists throughout the East, where there will always be far more conviction of the very real inconveniences of ‘compulsory education’ than of its imagined benefits.

The indiscriminate diffusion of scraps of knowledge is always more harmful than beneficial

Of course ‘scientist’ propaganda is not carried on only within the West under the double form of ‘compulsory education’ and popularization; it is rife also outside, like all the other varieties of Western proselytism. Everywhere that the Europeans have installed themselves, they have wanted to spread these so-called ‘benefits of education,’ always following the same methods, without the least attempt to adapt them and without it entering their heads that there may be already some other kind of education there.

Everything that does not come from them is to be considered as null and void, and ‘equality’ does not allow different peoples and different races to have their own mentality; moreover the chief ‘advantage’ that the imposers of this education expect from it is probably -always and everywhere- the blotting out of the traditional outlook. ”

René Guénon — East and West 1924