Wit & Attitude Quote by Francis Parker Yockey

Yockey rigs the game by defining both poles as moral failures: pessimism collapses into “despair,” optimism into “cowardice and stupidity.” It’s a classic rhetorical squeeze play. If you accept his terms, any ordinary emotional posture becomes contemptible, and the only remaining option is whatever he’s about to sell as “realism” or “will.” The question at the end isn’t an invitation; it’s a trapdoor. “Is there any need to choose” performs sophistication while quietly foreclosing dissent.

The subtext is less about mood than about permission. When optimism is framed as cowardice, hope becomes collaboration with decadence; when pessimism is framed as despair, critique becomes self-indulgent paralysis. The reader is nudged toward a third stance: cold resolve, severity, action unsoftened by sympathy. That “third way” pose is rhetorically seductive because it flatters the audience as tougher and clearer-eyed than the masses who “cope” with optimism or “whine” with pessimism.

Context matters because Yockey wasn’t tossing off a self-help aphorism. As a postwar extremist intellectual, he wrote in the shadow of fascism’s defeat, trying to repackage reactionary politics as hard-nosed cultural diagnosis. The line reads like a small piece of that project: delegitimize liberal faith in progress as stupid, delegitimize resigned fatalism as weak, and carve out room for authoritarian “necessity” to sound like maturity. The nastiness is the point. By making hope shameful and despair contemptible, he tries to recruit readers to a politics that prides itself on being beyond consolation.