Progress in the modern sense cannot be considered anything other than a satisfaction of increasingly inferior needs in an increasingly superior way

What is usually interpreted as archaic stasis is in fact an unbelievably dynamic force, which was more or less able to fix into stability the world that was thrown into and diffusing with time. In a river with a strong current, for example, it is not the one who surrenders to and lets himself be taken by the current who should be considered dynamic, but rather the one who is able to remain in one place against the current. Such an achievement is not static, but a supremely dynamic deed, even if from the outside he seems to remain in the same place.

Such striving for the stability represented by the archaic world actually represents the permanence of eternity in the temporal world: archaic man aimed at triumphing over time via slowing down and halting time—using the direct means of the cyclical concept of time; since linear time, which is flowing away, periodically returns to the beginning and thus loses its historicity by being compelled into cycles. Modern man is also at war with time, but has chosen an utterly different strategy: he tries to overcome time not by slowing down, but rather through ever-increasing speed. The modern world’s real symbol is therefore speed.

Time, however, cannot be overcome by ever-increasing acceleration and speed, as is aptly demonstrated by the modern man’s constant lack of time: despite his better and better time-saving devices and procedures, he remains ab-normally and eternally pressed for time.

Between the two eras, however, there is an insurmountable distance not only in the outward-manifested aspect, but in the inner aspect as well—and this is exactly metaphysics and what is most closely connected to it: spirituality. In its attempt to meet the demands of the age, the re-ligiosity of today’s man—if it can still be called religiosity at all—has sunk to a miserably low level on one hand, and has become a religiosity serving that type of man who is no longer in the least interested in transcendence; and on the other, this same scanty religion has lost its influence on man and his world to such an extent that it can practically be regarded as an appendix: the modern world’s appendix, whose loss would no longer incur any kind of conflict given that it amounts to nothing more than the loss of something superfluous (which is moreover potentially dangerous). It is thus a mere ornament on the modern world’s façade.
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The second cardinal point in András László’s Weltanschauung is the kali-yuga, the present dark age, or in a wider sense the doctrine of cyclic descent. The standpoint of metaphysical Tradition is that history is characterized by a continuous decline, and that this decline has recently reached its nadir. The reason for the decline lies in the superiority of the beginning; and the reason for the superiority of the beginning is the superiority of the Source, that is, God—for the farther something gets essentially and ontically from its ultimate Source, the Non-manifested Manifestor, the lower it descends. Hence, decline is a universal law of Being which pertains just as much to the totality of the world of becoming as to each of its particulars (for sooner or later everything perishes, deteriorates, disintegrates …); and against which free and conscious will alone might initiate a countermove. This is the reason why Tradition turns in the direction of the past: not to the past, but through the past to the Source, for Tradition regards not that which is old as the norm, but perceives the norm manifesting in the old. It goes without saying that modern men radically refuse this concept—and it is the refusal of this same concept that makes them modern. This is because the essence of modernity is antitraditionality, that is opposition to Tradition, and the basis of this agressive praxis is the theory that “the old” is necessarily less valuable than “the new.” This approach—that is, the irrational belief in evolution and progress—is in fact structurally atheistic because it implies that the beginning is inferior, and thus if there were something that was the source of the beginning, it would be even more inferior. The logical correlate— or, rather, counter-image—of the Metaphysicum Absolutum of Tradition is therefore the hypothetic Physicum Nihilum of modernity, that is the substantial root of our world, the materia prima, the potentia passiva pura. The god of modernity is Nothingness.

When modern man says, “How can we speak about descent when the modern age has witnessed incredible progress with respect to both science and technology?”, by this same assertion he proves what he wanted to refute: for he regards mere material development (science, technology) as the standard for human progress; that is, he regards as a standard something purely instrumental, which in turn acquires its value only from that purpose whose instrument it is. Therefore, progress in the modern sense cannot be considered anything other than a satisfaction of increasingly inferior needs in an increasingly superior way—and, as Béla Hamvas puts it, “… if we spiritually valorize a hundred-seat jet plane, we have to concede that it is worth no more than a merry-go-round. Rather less.”

It is certainly not our business to question progress in the fields of science and technology, but the traditional school treats these same fields as something of an inferior order with respect to the true object of mankind, and hence it does not grant them a crucial role in deciding the question of progress. This is because the real object of mankind is not horizontal expansion in human existence, but the vertical transcending of human existence: developing from the human towards the suprahuman and the divine—and society should be ordered according to such principles as do not hinder the individual’s vertical existential development, but support it. On the contrary, modern man—to quote Werner Heisenberg—increasingly resembles the ship whose compass no longer points towards the North Pole, but towards its own “iron hull” (cf. humanism)—and we know that for Tradition the North Pole, the boreal region, and the North Star representing the hyperboreal region with its immobility and axiality represent that same extra-saṁsāraic Archimedean fulcrum whereby the world can indeed be turned inside out.

This is not the only field that demonstrates permanent descent. There is another field as well that exerts even more influence than scientific and technical achievements on contemporary man’s views and existential level (which is often inversely proportional to the standards of living)—and this is culture. It goes without saying that the value of culture cannot be defined by quantitative criteria: How many books does an average individual read yearly? How many theater performances can he afford? How many television channels can he access?—and so on. The value of culture— together with the cultural level of a given age—is defined by that inherent quality which dominantly characterizes the culture, and which inevitably brands the whole of society. If we examine the dominant influence of culture, we can obviously disregard that insignificant minority that chooses on the basis of superior criteria what they allow to play a role in their lives; we can disregard it all the more because the overwhelming majority of the cultural intelligentsia do not even belong in this category!

The decisive word is on the side of mass culture. Mass culture is a consumption-oriented ancillary culture, and this fact alone suffices to characterize its general level on one hand and its general tendency on the other. In this mass culture that strives to satisfy all levels of demand, even the cultural simpleton feeds on essentially the same things as the connoisseur, even if an almost unbridgeable distance separates these two cultural levels in the mode of formulation and in fastidiousness. For while the “popular” version of mass culture, that appeals to the lowest instincts, oscillates between stone-hard brutality and mawkish sentimentality—taking much care, of course, to always accomodate some form of sin or crime—the “high” version of the same in almost all its manifestations suggests the unreality, the non-existence, and the absurdity of the counter-world and counter-values of the world depicted by the “popular” version—and this with increasing efficacy, and at the same time and in some sense with increasingly firmer grounding. Since modern man does not know the beautiful and the noble in the classical sense of the words (because indeed, these cannot be accomodated in the pragmatical consumer-information world any longer), starting from himself he believes that such values in fact do not even exist, and have never existed, and descriptions informing us about such things in connection with past ages are nothing but fairy tales.

It is obvious that a consumption-oriented ancillary culture cannot fulfil the normal function of culture: it cannot be a preserving culture. On the contrary, it necessarily generates continuous inflation. And for those who are able to survey the cultural tendencies of millennia from above, there can hardly be any doubt that while archaic-traditional culture and art was of an exalting character, and the ensuing culture and art of a reflective character, modern and especially post-modern culture and art are already of a destructive character—and not only in their popular manifestations, but often even when their most excellent productions are considered.

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As Julius Evola has astutely observed, the modern Lefist has an essential affinity for slavery and an aversion to actual freedom. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that past ages are today regarded as ages of the yoke and servility for the simple reason that modern man identifies himself with the inferior ones and not with the free lords. And with surprising candour, the same has also been asserted by the celebrated theoretician of modern democracy, Francis Fukuyama, according to whom today’s liberal citizen is the spiritual descendant of the liberated slave—as can easily be detected in the “venality coupled with slave mentality” (Plato) of the modern democratized mass-man. The fact that it is not freedom which pervades the modern man’s form of life can also be clearly seen in his identification of “freedom” almost exclusively with freedom of choice or—in political terms—with free elections. This is because freedom of choice—whether it concerns political parties, products, or holiday resorts—is in most cases only means the choice that holds the greatest allure for people. In other words, in freedom of choice, man can “freely” choose the thing that is most attractive to him. As for “free” elections, the average man will almost always choose the greater slavery over the lesser one. The deluded masses “have their own desires: they invariably stick to the ideology by which they have been subdued,” according to Theodor W. Adorno, who certainly cannot be “accused” of Rightist sympathies. It cannot be called freedom when man merely yields to the strongest, most attractive choice among several others. Freedom of choice is therefore nothing more than the choice of that which is apparently the most favourable among the available possibilities—while a truly free choice should choose not only from among the offered alternatives, but one should also ready to reject the offered choices in order to create new ones.

The free choice of homonculi produced on the assembly line by the modern liberal ideology hardly surpasses the free choice of those who may—freely—choose between a thirty-day prison sentence and a thousand-dollar fine. And as for political elections, the control of processes in a liberal democracy is not in the hands of the parties and politicians representing the face, or so to say persona of politics, and are bestowed with very little freedom of movement. It is in the hands of powers behind the scenes, that often remain hidden—be they interest groups of varying rank and degree that are outside the parties and yet enforce their will “from above,” or be they the so-called “opinion makers” who do the same from below, by shaping public opinion. These therefore render those “democratic elections” a mere show that is intended to maintain the illusion of the disenfranchised man’s freedom.

Thus, in the modern liberal world, freedom is all but unknown, since it is precisely freedom that only rarely becomes an issue at all. Man does not choose freedom, but whether he will get suntanned in Tahiti or Haiti by the Sun of God; whether he will drive a Mercedes or a Volvo; whether this or that political party will provide him with greater welfare—and so on. In short, he does not choose freedom against slavery, the lesser slavery against the greater one, or the greater freedom against the lesser one—but rather only that which he believes will satisfy his increasingly material desires and embeds him more and more deeply in the “being serviced = being at someone else’s mercy” system of dependency.

Actually, the problem is not that free elections are the freedom to choose among the “lords” (and usually, that “lord” gets elected who binds the “elector” to even deeper servility and thus enslaves him yet more), but that what came to master the voter through his election should rather serve him. One manifestation of this process is, as Gábor Czakó puts it, when man “proceeds” from subjugation to people to subjugation to things; or when, according to Adorno, he replaces the endowing of things with souls (animism) with making souls into things (industrialism). Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school, classified people—as opposed to the horizontal psychological typologies—along a vertical, that is, qualitative typology, and into two groups: the group of the worthless and that of the able, or, according to another translation, as the vulgar or the excellent.

And who are the worthless? In modern times the infallible sign of worthlessness is when one—rebelling against the tension between his own actual state and any superior state or possibility—he contests, lies against, and “misinterprets” the higher state’s superiority, lowering it to his own level (and hence depriving himself of the very possibility of ascending higher). In ancient times, the worthless—by this also proving their superiority to their modern successors— were quite able to live with this tension and their own inertia that prevented their ascending higher, but the modern worthless, proceeding from their democratic “dignity” (cf.“Dignity for all!”) and exercising a special form of the old revolutionary violence, pull all they can see above themselves down to their own level. But the real nature of worthlessness and vulgarity is exposed simply when comparing it to ableness: the able are not those who are experts in this or that, be it arts, crafts, or sports—but who are able and excellent in surpassing themselves ad indefinitum; indeed, ad infinitum. In short, the able are those who are able to win complete freedom for themselves. It is they who are spoken of by that glorious guide-of-the-river-ford, the Arrived, the Buddha: “Look at the happiness of the Arhats! There is no trace of desire lef t in them. They have hewn out the thought of ‘I am’ and torn asunder the net of illusion. They are motionless, beginningless, immaculate, real Persons; they are those who have become God, great heroes, and sons of Awareness; they are steadfast in all situations, free from the compulsion of reincarnation; they stand above their conquered ‘ego,’ they have won their own battle in the world, and they voice the ‘lion’s roar.’ The Awakened are truly incomparable.” [Not in a great contradiction with the Suttas, possibly some distorted quote from Dhammapada].

But is there any hope, not just of reaching freedom and surpassing oneself, but simply of surpassing one’s own vulgarity as one vulgarizes himself alongside millions of others every day? And is there a more effective means of vulgarizing oneself than by watching, listening to, reading, and doing the same as they do; that is, by accepting the same cultural nourishment as hundreds and hundreds of thousands of others?

Modern spirituality strays onto a very dangerous path if it is averse to and even looks down on all politics, feeling that spirituality and politics, the spirit and power are incompatible. This is because apoliticism—unless the undifferentiated denial of the political is preceded by a sharp differentiation (cf. aphorism 445)—almost inevitably leads to surrendering to the prevailing political background radiation. In the present historical moment in Hungary, this means the aggressive extreme-liberal “undifferentiationism” that aims at the disintegration of all values, and which permits radicalism only for its own use, hence depriving all other views of their own radix, of their own root, and at the same time of an authentic connection with their own source (which always results in the slow withering of the given organism). It goes without saying that the spirituality arising under the aegis of this particular political background radiation will completely bear the stamp of its characteristics— and in so doing will lose all those characteristics that made spirituality what it was in the traditional era, and which make it what it is under all circumstances. Accordingly, the man of modern pseudo-spirituality, instead of choosing a heroic spiritual battle, will instead surrender himself to the suction of obscure and intangible powers, and instead of aspiring for the higher, he gives himself up to something—to what exactly, he does not quite know himself. It is therefore not at all surprising that “meditation” in this thoroughly unmanly, self-service consumer-spirituality is not the “battle royal” (Ramaṇa Maharṣi) of ancient man treading the spiritual path, but is in fact considered relaxation. The “glory” of the modern age is that it has rendered meditation, which was once the privileged practice of the most prominent people, as one of the mental forms of relaxation available to anyone. And we know only too well that when a thoroughly materialistic—heavy-grown!—man, having been torn away from his higher, sustaining existential contexts by others, “lets himself go” according to the directive of Leftism appearing in the spiritual domain, then only the lowest point can set a limit to his sinking.

Ferenc Buji

From: András László
SOLUM IPSUM metaphysical aphorisms