Science vs. Wisdom

    

Just as power, depersonalizing and socializing, has become gold, capital; likewise, wisdom, depersonalizing and socializing, has become “concept,” “rationality.” And this is the second root of the European evil.

Both Western philosophy and positive science, in their essence, are fundamentally socialist, democratic, and anti-hierarchical. They present as “true” only what can be universally recognized and accepted by anyone with a certain level of education, regardless of their individual life experiences. Like the “majority” rule in political democracy, they assume equality and apply the standards of quantity and number, rather than recognizing qualities, unique attributes, or the privilege of exceptional qualities.

It is useless to proclaim individualist or even relativist doctrines when, in the very way of proclaiming them, which is the conceptual manner of profane philosophy, one demonstrates adherence to these democratic, impersonal, universalist presuppositions that lie at the base of that very philosophy. The path is entirely different — those same presuppositions must be contested first if one does not want to commit the same absurdity of an imperialism that, instead of imposing itself through the hierarchy from above, as mentioned, sought its justification in popular recognition. Here one begins to realize the nature of the enemy we have to fight, how frightfully the very “culture,” not just the “society” of Europeans, is an active democratism — and what renunciations they must demand of themselves to regain health.

Just as money is a reality indifferent to the quality of the individuals who possess it, so is the “knowledge” of Europeans. More precisely: driven by a will for equality, an anti-hierarchical intolerance, and therefore a socialist concern, European knowledge has necessarily focused on something where the effectiveness of individual differences and the condition, for knowledge, of active individual differentiation, is minimized. Hence, it refers either to physical experience, which is roughly the same for all humans as animals (positive science), or to the world of abstraction and verbal conventions (philosophy and rationalism).

The push for socializing and universalizing knowledge has inevitably led to its abstraction, creating an unbridgeable gap between knowledge and life, between knowing and being, and between thought and “metaphysical reality.” This is why, in the West, thought often becomes a creator of unrealities, of “reified” words, and of empty logical frameworks when it is not reduced to merely transcribing the most external, general, and uniform aspects of material things. This intellectual sport becomes even more ridiculous when done sincerely.

From this stems all the unreality of the modern spirit: separated from life, man today is almost a shadow moving among schemes, programs, and intellectual superstructures incapable of mastering reality and life itself, while becoming increasingly dependent on a science that adds abstractions to abstractions, enslaved as it is by phenomenal laws that are observed but not understood, all exhausting themselves in mechanical exteriority without any of the resulting possibilities also holding value for the inner being of man.

Given the limitations of the present discussion, we certainly cannot delve deeply into the matter here. However, one should not think that it is unrelated to the problem of the empire: as we pose it, the problem of the empire is the problem par excellence, relative to which particular problems cannot separate themselves and constitute a domain of their own. The particularism, the mutual indifference of the various forms of human activity — here politics, there science, here practice, there religion, and so on — is another already noted aspect of European decadence and an unequivocal symptom of its inorganic nature.

The foundations of the imperial hierarchy must rest on knowledge: “The wise must govern,” as Plato already said — and this is a central, absolute, definitive point in any rational order of things. But nothing would be more ridiculous than to identify such knowledge with any positive science or philosophical speculation: instead, it coincides with what we initially referred to, using a traditional expression common to both classical Western and Eastern traditions, as wisdom. And wisdom is something as aristocratic, individual, effective, substantial, organic, and qualitative as the knowledge of the “civilized” is democratic, social, universalist, abstract, and quantitative. Here again, there are two worlds, two perspectives, two different visions to be placed against each other without dilution.

According to wisdom, knowing does not mean “thinking,” but being the thing known: living it, realizing it. One does not truly know a thing unless one can transform one’s consciousness into it. Hence, what results from direct and individual experience alone will count as “knowledge.” Contrary to modern mentality — which labels what immediately appears to the individual as a “phenomenon,” a “subjective” appearance, and posits something else behind it, which is merely thought or supposed (the “thing-in-itself” of philosophers, the “absolute” of profane religion, the “matter” or “ether” or “energy” of science) as the “true reality” — wisdom is an absolute positivism that calls real only what can be grasped through direct experience, and considers everything else unreal, abstract, and illusory.

From this perspective, one might argue that all knowledge is reduced to finite and contingent things perceived by the physical senses. And indeed, this is the case for the vast majority of people, who can only truly understand this finitude and contingency, which remains as such despite all pseudo-scientific explanations. However, we assert the possibility of experiencing forms of knowledge beyond the sensory experience of ordinary people — experiences that are not “given,” not normal, yet achievable through certain active processes of inner transformation. These transcendent experiences are as direct, concrete, and individual as sensory experiences, but they perceive reality beyond the contingent, space-temporal aspects inherent in all sensory perception. While science attempts to transcend these aspects, it often does so by reducing true knowledge — vision, living individual evidence — to mere probabilities, incomprehensible “uniformities,” and abstract explanatory principles.

The meaning of all this might not be immediately clear to everyone, and that is natural. However, it is essential to understand that our focus is solely on experience; that for us, there is no distinction between finite reality and absolute reality, but rather a finite and absolute way of experiencing reality. There is a finite perspective or an absolute perspective. The entire so-called “problem of knowledge” is thus contained within the interiority of man, depending not on “culture” but on his ability to identify freely with different forms of experience along a hierarchy. This hierarchy culminates in a state of perfect identity, spiritual vision, and full realization of the unity between the self and the thing, achieving a state of power and absolute clarity regarding the thing itself. When this state is reached, further questioning becomes unnecessary, and all reasoning, much more talking, is rendered superfluous.

Such is, in very brief lines, the sense of that wisdom which constitutes the core of metaphysical teaching and the spiritual science of the East, and which was equally known to the West, both in the ancient mystery schools (where the initiation rite precisely operated the transformation of consciousness necessary for “knowing” and “seeing” metaphysically) and in other more well-known currents, such as the Alexandrian, Neoplatonic, and Pythagorean traditions, as well as in Hermetic, Gnostic, Theosophical, Illuminist, and Kabbalistic traditions that persisted even in the post-Christian period.

The key point is that sacred and sapiential science, unlike ordinary science, is not about “knowing” but about “being.” It cannot be taught through books or universities or conveyed in words. To acquire it, one must transform oneself, transcending common life into a higher existence. This type of knowledge precisely measures the quality and reality of individual life, becoming an inviolable privilege and integral part of it, rather than being a mere concept or notion that can be stored in the mind without any personal transformation or inner change.

Hence, the natural aristocracy of wisdom and its decisive non-popularization and non-communicability. Europeans often confuse “communicability” with understanding, assuming that what can be spoken can also be understood equally by all. They fail to see that while this may apply to intellectual abstractions and conventions based on sensory experiences assumed to be more or less equal for everyone, this uniformity breaks down when qualitative differences reassert themselves. In such cases, discursive communicability is no longer a valid criterion.

Wisdom, founded on the evidence of experiences beyond those of common men, leaves only one path open: to attempt, through a free and creative act, to reach the same level as the one imparting the teaching, thereby knowing through experience what the other knows or says with a word, which otherwise would remain just a word. Against the socialization, depersonalization, and conceptualization of knowledge, against the democratic inclination to “popularize” and dilute the superior for the benefit of the inferior so that the greatest number can participate without changing and ceasing to be inferior, we unyieldingly oppose the contrary attitude: there must be hierarchies within knowledge itself. There must be many truths separated by deep, vast, impassable chasms, corresponding exactly to various qualities of life and power, to many distinct individualities. There must be an aristocracy of knowledge, and the “universality” understood as communicable, democratic, and uniform must cease to be a criterion. We must not lower ourselves to them; rather, they must elevate themselves to us, dignifying themselves and genuinely ascending according to their abilities along the hierarchy of beings, if they wish to partake in the higher and metaphysical forms, which serve as criteria unto themselves and to the inferior and physical ones.

Thus, wisdom also results in freedom, openness, and breadth. At the core of socialized knowledge, there is always a “must,” a hidden, intolerant moral imposition. What is deemed “scientific” or “philosophical” truth must be universally recognized; no other attitude is allowed. As an expression of collective despotism, it seeks to reign despotically over all individuals, making them equal before it. It has organized itself, built its weapons, proofs, methods, and violence on this very will.

In contrast, wisdom dissolves, reintegrates, and returns the individual to himself. Each person has his truth, which precisely and profoundly expresses his life. This truth is a unique way of experiencing and expressing reality, which does not contradict or exclude other different ways. These diverse ways are equally possible within the differentiation that forms the basis of the hierarchy of wisdom.

This is sufficient regarding the second root of European decay and its remedy, justifying the principle that “the wise must govern.” In the realm of wisdom, the hierarchy of knowledge aligns with the hierarchy of power and individual superiority. Knowledge is being, and being is power, which naturally attracts the dignity of imperium.

In contrast, all of Europe stands with an organization nearly two millennia old. There is, as we said, the reign of professors, “intellectuals,” and eyeglasses without eyes — the academic, “cultured” world. By arrogating the privilege of knowledge and spirit, this world only demonstrates the extent to which the decadence and abstraction of the post-Christian world have advanced.

Julius Evola 

Pagan Imperialism 

Scientific Racism’s Mistake

The debate on racism has recently been revived. This has stemmed less from a sincere desire to contribute to an objective clarification of the problems, however, than from the ambitions of certain groups. In it, a false note has been sounded that should be pointed out. We are referring to people who today insist on ‘scientific racism’. They never tire of repeating that the problem of race should be expressed in terms that are ‘purely scientific’ and biological, and have chosen as a false target an undefined ‘spiritual racism’, against which they fight like Don Quixote against the windmills.

Here we have a misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up; cleared up, of course, before a public in good faith, and not before those who created it — people who almost always know perfectly well what the real situation is, but who are the first not to believe what they say. The relevant explanation is necessary because we are dealing essentially with intellectual integrity and honesty.  When writers fail to demonstrate these elementary qualities of character, we think it is futile for them to proclaim themselves racists and to boast of their Aryan body type, which could even be quite true, and thus make themselves out as ready to eat Jews alive. We just used the term ‘false note’. There is no other way to characterise the fact that, in a climate replete with spiritual, ethical, and heroic forces such as Fascism’s, they make use of the superstition of ‘scientism’ in order to make an impression on the naïve. They have nothing but the idol of ‘science’ at their disposal, a fetish belonging to the toolbox of the age of democracy and the Enlightenment, and of the more or less Masonic and rationalist progressivism of the nineteenth century. This is really ‘speaking the people’s language’, but in the worst sense of the expression. 

Ideologies, which the more serious culture of a country has surpassed, often survive for a long time by the force of inertia in the less cultivated levels of a nation. We know well the drunken rampages of the ‘Enlightenment’ and its Jacobin consequences. People no longer believed in God, tradition, or blood, but only in Science with a capital S. Only with Science — and by this they naturally meant materialist and ‘positivistic’ science — would begin the age of truth and certainty, and the obscurantism and superstition of earlier times would be overcome.  Science would create prosperity and happiness for humanity. The more extreme forms of these ideological aberrations think that the peoples will be led into the future not, of course, by dynastic, spiritual, or heroic aristocracies, but by groups of technicians and scientists. According to this kind of radicalism, these progressivist and Enlightenment ideas have long since disappeared. Only Bolshevism is silly enough to believe that science and technology will open the doors of a new earthly paradise to the depersonalised and materialised masses. 

Remnants of this same mentality, however, survive in less educated circles. The superstition of ‘science’ survives. People have been persuaded that it is only with science that we ‘get serious’; that only science imposes itself on everyone with the language of facts, offers precise certainties, and establishes solid knowledge. They believe that everything else is fog and arbitrary ideas, more or less as Marxism calls everything that transcends the level of the brute economy ‘superstructure’. Anyway, people who today are agitating so loudly for a ‘purely scientific racism’ are absolutely ‘speaking the people’s language’. Instead of helping to liquidate these remnants of an obsolete myth that survive in the less educated classes, they repeat them as a solid basis for ‘making an impression’, and to confer a false authority by means that are authoritative in their exterior affirmations, but which are incoherent and confused before every serious investigation conducted with sound thought. If we were dealing here with the natural sciences on a purely physical or abstractly classificatory level, the evil would not be fundamentally serious. In this field it is not possible to correct overnight mental deformations that date back centuries, and to convince everyone that the modern ‘scientific’ knowledge of nature is a crippled and inorganic knowledge that concerns only one sector of reality and, indeed, the least interesting sector. What it calls ‘facts’ do not exist in themselves, but are the artificial products of an arbitrary abstraction, and acquire different meanings according to the system which is used to interpret them. In the modern critique of science, all this is a commonplace.

There is no need to consult a Boutroux,[1] a Guénon, a Pavese,[2] or a Poincaré.[3] Every honest scientist, if taken in camera caritatis,[4] will of course acknowledge the relativism and contingency of the modern scientific ‘knowledge’ of nature. The myth of its ‘indisputable facts’ and its indisputable certainty belongs only to the grossest forms of vulgarisation and are related to the ideological remnants of the ‘Enlightenment’ that we have already mentioned. Since, however, we are still far from the restoration of a traditional, qualitative, and living knowledge of nature, the illusions that befuddle the general public about the actual range of the physical sciences do not have great consequences. Matters begin to proceed differently when we are no longer dealing with the physical and classificatory sciences, but with the domain of life, that is, the biological sciences. Here the consequences of the scientistic superstition could be absolutely deleterious. It is precisely to this field that the persons to whom we are alluding refer dogmatically, when they proceed to claim that this legendary ‘objectivity’ exists in the field of biological science, this language of ‘pure and indisputable facts’, this ipse dixit,[5] that modern epistemology has denied even in the domain of the physical sciences. In the area of social applications it has provoked these words from Mussolini: ‘There is nothing truly scientific in the world. Science explains the How of phenomena, but it does not explain their Why.’[6]

There is also a question here of a special ignorance. Because of a misunderstood patriotism, the people we are talking about, who proclaim scientific racism without, however, possessing any scientific competence, are basically referring to Italian biology and anthropology. Italian biology and anthropology are areas that do not, unfortunately, stand at the forefront in the overall context of world research because of the simple fact that they reflect the general climate, both materialist and positivist, of nineteenth century Italy. On the contrary, many recent currents in biology and genetics have been compelled to assume working hypotheses and criteria that lead rather far afield from ‘positivism’ and scientism, from the narrow confines in which they find themselves. It is enough to cite Driesch[7] and Dacque.[8] In the Italian circles we are discussing, all this counts as non-existent. The biology that they make into a myth is essentially an outdated biology in the field of technical scientific research. They probably do not know this. Even if they did know it, it would probably change nothing, because for them it is not a question of explaining and working through the truth, but rather of spreading simple propaganda in a mistaken direction. And why is this? If we leave aside personal interests, it is essentially from fear. These people are well aware that, whenever the problem of race has not been discussed on a simply ‘scientific’ and ‘biological’ level, but rather in a totalitarian fashion, as happens in Germany, serious difficulties have arisen. We run into various tendencies, and headaches and complications are created, which, despite the outward appearance of polemical activism, they very much prefer to offer easy lies about, sparing the ‘headaches’.   These people do not notice that they are abdicating and playing the enemy’s game. In fact, what more could those who would like to monopolise spiritual values, everything that is ‘tradition’ and worldview, ask for than to limit the problem of race to the material, biological, and ‘scientific’ level so as to have a free hand before such a castrated racism? The scientistic direction of racist propaganda is mistaken, because if the idea of race is really to become a force in Italy, it must be understood in primis et ante omnia[9] in the ethical and political field as spiritual and heroic. All the rest could only be working out the details. 

This consideration is not only the indispensable premise for coherence between the racist idea and Fascist ideals, but is also the necessary condition to avoid a series of absurdities that are obvious. For instance, the people we are discussing hold the myth of the ‘Italian race’ dear. It is well-known that from the scientific and purely biological point of view, an Italian race does not exist. The biological and anthropological races are unities that have nothing to do with the historic nations, in which more or less all races are found, distributed in different ways.  And so we would end up with a result that is quite the opposite of the solidarity at which these people are confusedly aiming, by talking improperly and unscientifically of an ‘Italian race’. If, then, there is no common race on the biological and anthropological level, on what basis can we ‘scientifically’ found a myth like the one to which we have just referred? The theory of internal races, or races of the soul, which might come to our aid here, is exactly what has the effect of a thorn in the side of the people we are talking about — for mysterious reasons that will end by becoming clear.  And on the purely scientific, biological, and anthropological level, what about the Jewish problem? Do they not notice the absurdity of insisting on dealing exclusively with it from the purely scientific point of view, while the Jewish problem in Italy has been imposed not on a biological basis, but on an essentially political and spiritual one? The banning of Jews from public life in Italy did not take place because their lips and noses and cranial indices were actually radically different from those of some ‘Mediterranid’ racial components, which are also present in our people. It happened rather on the basis of their works, their lifestyle and actions, and their spirit. Anyhow, from the ‘purely anthropological’ point of view, I find talk of a ‘Hebrew race’ rather risky. It is well-known that modern Israel does not constitute a race according to the prevalent opinion in modern racism, but rather a people comprised of rather diverse racial components.

Another point: on a ‘purely biological’ and positivist scientific basis, even the means of individuating the unity of Israel would be lacking. It is, however, very real, but it is found on a rather different level. This is why Roberto Farinacci has correctly written, ‘Is it really necessary to justify our racism by resorting to differences in hair or noses, of hands and feet? Is it really necessary to entrust to analyses of blood and chromosomes what is a question of a political and spiritual nature? Of course not! We can follow a more certain path, which does not admit debates and removes every doubt, and persuades the most stubborn. We do not need the anthropologist and the biologist to prove that we belong to a different race.’  (Vita Italiana, July 1942) Farinacci is expressing what is immediately acknowledged by people who really feel the problem of race, but not by those who squeal about it because it suits them or because they have received their marching orders. If race is not experienced directly as a way of being and a spontaneous interior realty, dolls from an anthropological museum, cranial measurements, and racial laws will be of very little use.

Of course human beings also have bodies, but research conducted on bodily, somatic, and anthropological phenomena is conclusive and serious only when these phenomena can count as signs and symptoms of a corresponding interior reality, and after centuries of crossbreeding this does not always happen. Only by acknowledging this frankly and openly, and leaving behind once and for all the scientific myth, is it possible to speak the people’s language — now in the good sense of the expression — and to prepare in Italy, little by little, a reawakening of an Aryan racial consciousness. Since it is useless to hide the fact: especially today, it is the Italian people who are wondering whether, finally, Jews are not becoming a kind of scapegoat, since they see everywhere one hundred percent ‘Aryan’ types who brazenly hoard, force prices up and take unfair profits, social climbers, and — why not? — even journalists who do not hesitate to resort to the most twisted and unfair methods for polemical purposes.

Let us add that if today there is so much talk of race, the reason is that people have finally noticed the fact of our effective decadence in Europe. Where race was really alive and strong, no one talked about it. A secure instinct sufficed as a guide. This instinct silently conferred an unwritten authority with very precise norms and laws. Scientific racism is following the wrong path, because it almost wants to repeat the attempt to create the homunculus. It seriously believes (or at least lets it be understood) that, when race is in trouble, it can be reconstructed and rescued, as it were, with laboratory procedures on the basis of ‘positive’ acquired knowledge, almost as how artificial mushrooms are grown when there is a shortage of natural ones. The undoubted and integral sentiment of race and blood which is found in the ancient Aryan cultures of the East such as Sparta, the old Roman aristocracy, and certain parts of Europe’s nobility, did not need these shenanigans. It was secure without these pseudo-scientific excuses, which, let us say it once more, can make an impression only on the rabble and rustics of the world of our middle class and intellectuals. Awakening the sentiment and dignity of race directly, by essentially spiritual means, is what really matters. Biology, genetics, anthropology, Mendelian laws, and whatever else you may desire are all useful things, but are subordinate, like accessory tools and sources of knowledge to be used cum grano salis,[10] while always being aware of the demands of a superior ethical and political character. This is to say, there must be an integral conception of race, one that is especially ethical and spiritual in order to fix the measure and means by which certain scientific ‘knowledge’ can be accepted and incorporated as auxiliary elements. Here the contributions will never be very many, because, as we have said, biology and anthropology bear birth defects, always and indelibly. This is to say, they are founded on premises of a materialist and evolutionary character which are incompatible with what is needed for any truly superior sentiment of race.

We wonder, in fact, what will come of a sentiment taken from disciplines in which people continue to seriously believe in man’s having descended from the monkey, more or less implicitly, and where, with the predominance of the theory of a single origin for life, it is necessary to resort to a materialistic determinism. Otherwise they may have recourse to the miraculous idea of ‘scientifically’ inexplicable mutations, in order to ‘explain’ the differentiation of species and races from one hypothetical homogenous original substance. Try to touch similar scientistic superstitions, or try to recall the testimony of all ancient peoples concerning the earliest races, which were not animals but almost ‘divine’, and you will suddenly see yourself accused of an anti-scientific mentality and even of…magic. This is exactly the charge levelled at us by Canella,[11] for instance, addressing we do not know what innocent souls, in a typically inconclusive work which was supposed to treat racial psychology, in his words, ‘scientifically’.

We concede that, despite the ideological deformations that proceed from their premises, some results of genetic and biological research can be useful, but always, as we have said, with the proper reservations, must always be checked by super-scientific principles which will constitute the final court of appeal. An example is the Mendelian laws and their development into the so-called ‘higher Mendelism’.[12] They are true and accepted, or not, depending on the reference point. Pavese has very appropriately distinguished race as ‘fact’ — that is, a spontaneous naturalistic effect produced by a process that is over and done with — from race as ‘becoming’. For the first aspect of race, the laws are roughly exact. For the second, instead, there are no longer precise laws. Those who fail to acknowledge this distinction end up turning Mendelism into a kind of fate, which can be used, for instance, as an accessory tool in the anti-Jewish campaign, by demonstrating the inadequacy of all legislation that does not take the element of heredity into account. At the same time, however, we shall find ourselves paralysed before the essential tasks of a selective and active racism. In fact, there would be very little to do, if these laws are supposed to control race as ‘becoming’ (that is, what counts the most politically), if what is present in a people because of crossbreeding that took place centuries ago constitutes a fatal heritage, and if the ‘dominant’ and ‘recessive’ characteristics are supposed to remain such ad infinitum in everyone’s body and mind. This is not the place, however, to go into technical details. It is essentially the central thesis that matters. Racists who defend the exclusive claims of the scientistic point of view, and who can coherently boast only of the gorilla and the pithecanthropus as their glorious ancestors, should be able to persuade themselves that we in Italy do not find ourselves in a Soviet regime, nor in the times of the Jacobin Enlightenment, which would mean that the adjective ‘spiritual’, when added to the noun ‘racism’, would signify shame and disrepute. We naturally prefer to define our terms, by saying that spirit, for us, does not mean either philosophical deviation or ‘theosophy’, or a mystical, devotional evasion, but simply what well-born people always understood by race in better times: that is, rectitude, internal integrity, character, dignity, manliness, and an immediate and direct sensitivity for all values, virtues that stand at the foundation of all human greatness and that tower over, and so dominate, the level of all contingent and material reality.

The view of race as a ‘scientistic’ construction and a mannequin from an anthropological museum we leave to those parts of a pseudo-intellectual middle class who are still dominated by the idols of the positivism of the nineteenth century. This is assuredly the last thing that can propitiate the awakening of that force and dignity which, in terms of racism, could only be attained in a heroic and spiritual vision of the world such as Fascism’s. (...) 

(1942)

Julius Evola

A Traditionalist Confronts Fascism Selected Essays

Evola - A Message to the Youth

(1950)

The age we find ourselves living in clearly suggest what our primary watchword should be: to rise again, to be inwardly reborn, to create a new order and uprightness within ourselves. Those who harbour illusions about the possibility of a purely political struggle and the power of this or that formula or system, with no new human quality as its exact counterpart, have learned no lessons from the past.

We find ourselves in a world of ruins — we should not forget this. And just how much may still be saved depends only on the existence or lack of men who are still capable of standing among these ruins, not in order to dictate any formulas, but to serve as exemplars; not by pandering to demagogy and the materialism of the masses, but in such a way as to reawaken different forms of sensibility and interest.

Not letting oneself go is what is crucial today. In this society gone astray, one must be capable of the luxury of having a character. One ought to be such that, even before being recognised as the champion of a political idea, one will display a certain conduct of life, an inner coherence, and a style consisting of uprightness and intellectual courage in every human relationship. All this, in a straightforward manner, with no exhibitionism, big words, or puritanical attitudes. To the impudent ‘why bother?’ of others, let us clearly and staunchly reply: ‘We cannot act otherwise — this is our life.’ If anything truly positive, like a new order, is ever to be attained, it will not be through the craftiness of democratic agitators and petty politicians, but through the natural prestige and recognition of men — of yesterday and even more so of the new generation — who are capable of as much and can vouch for their ideal.

Uprightness, however, implies adequate knowledge. Young people in particular must become aware of the intoxication which has spread across a whole generation through the many concurrent forms of a false view of life, and which has disintegrated this generation and deprived it of the inner strength to defend itself at the very moment it needed it the most. In one form or another, these poisons continue to operate within contemporary culture, science, sociology, and literature: these breeding grounds of infection must be identified and vanquished. Most prominent among them are Darwinism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism. These ideologies convey the same degrading influence, the same attack against true man.

Against Darwinism, let us assert the fundamental dignity of the human person and its unique place. This is not the place of a particular, if more evolved, animal species among many others that has differentiated itself through ‘natural selection’ while always remaining connected to its beastly and primitive origins; rather, it is such that it is clearly removed from the biological level.

Against Marxism and socialism, let us affirm that the economy and economic interests in all their forms have always exercised — and always will exercise — a subordinate function in normal humanity; that history and every healthy sociopolitical structure are determined by forces of a different sort; and that the fundamental fallacy is to believe that material, environmental factors and conditions of affluence, wealth, or poverty play a decisive role for real human progress.

Against psychoanalysis, let us uphold the ideal of a personality which does not relinquish its role; an aware and autonomous personality which retains its sovereignty over the nocturnal and subterranean part of its soul and the demon of sexuality — a personality that is neither ‘repressed’ nor psychotically split, but which attains a healthy balance of all its faculties by subordinating them to a higher meaning of life and action.

Finally, at the basis of existentialism, one must only acknowledge the truth of a fragmented human being, who has come to identify existence itself with its lowest and most irrational levels, with its darkest and most senseless expressions, wallowing in a sort of self-sadism. Against all this, let us clearly perceive that ‘existence’ is not the last resort, that existence actually only reaches fulfilment in those who cast their gaze beyond it, those who are capable of subordinating mere living to something more than living.

Such are the lines of overcoming, which ought not to be intellectual and dialectic, but experienced first-hand, and realised in their direct significance for one’s inner life and conduct. It is impossible to rise as long as we remain under the influence of such false and deviant ways of thinking. Once free from the poison, we can attain clarity, uprightness, and real strength. Let us repeat this: inner action must precede all other action. Let this especially be perceived by those youths who retain a spark within themselves, so that they may pick up the torch from those who have not yet fallen. When a front of this sort will emerge, no confusion with what is stirring in the world of public squares and ‘democracy’ will be possible any longer. If we may hope for a future, it will belong to such men: a path will then be found even for political, national reconstruction. But whatever may happen, we shall hold our positions, as an essential aspect must be the ideal heritage of those men who not so long ago stood their ground and fought, even knowing that the battle was lost. In any event, without sinking to a lower level, without confusing the essential with the accidental, what may be done will be done.

Julius Evola

A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth

Evola - The Mountain and Spirituality

 In the modern world there are two factors that, more than any others, are responsible for hindering our realization of the spirituality that was known in the most ancient traditions: the first is the abstract character of our culture; the second is the glorification of a blind and frantic obsession with activity.

On one hand, there are people who identify the “spirit” with the erudition acquired in libraries and university classrooms, or with the intellectual games played by philosophers, or with literary or pseudomystical aestheticism. On the other hand, the new generations have turned athletic competition into a religion and appear to be unable to conceive anything beyond the excitement of training sessions, competitions, and physical achievements; they have truly turned accomplishment in sports into an end in itself and even into an obsession rather than as means to a higher end.

Some people regard this opposition of lifestyles as some kind of dilemma. In reality, in the so-called scholarly type, we often find an innate strong dislike for any kind of physical discipline; likewise, in many sports-practicing people, the sense of physical strength fosters contempt for those in “ivory towers” who confine themselves to books and to battles of words they view as harmless.

These two lifestyles should be regarded as misguided and as the fruits of modern decadence because they are both foreign to the heroic vision of the spirit that constituted the axis of the best Western classical traditions which, in the context of the actual renovation of Italy, is being successfully evoked.

All too often people forget that spirituality is essentially a way of life and that its measure does not consist of notions, theories, and ideas that have been stored in one’s head. Spirituality is actually what has been successfully actualized and translated into a sense of superiority which is experienced inside by the soul, and a noble demeanor, which is expressed in the body.

From this perspective it is possible to appreciate a discipline which, although it may concern the energies of the body, will not begin and end with them but will become instead the means to awakening a living and organic spirituality. This is the discipline of a superior inner character.

In the ascetic, such a discipline is present in a negative way, so to speak; in the hero it is present in a positive, affirmative way, typical of the Western world. The inner victory against the deepest forces that surface in one’s consciousness during times of tension and mortal danger is a triumph in an external sense, but it is also the sign of a victory of the spirit against itself and of an inner transfiguration. Hence, in antiquity an aura of sacredness surrounded both the hero and the initiate to a religious or esoteric movement, and heroic figures were regarded as symbols of immortality.

However, in modern civilization everything tends to suffocate the heroic sense of life. Everything is more or less mechanized, spiritually impoverished, and reduced to a prudent and regulated association of beings who are needy and have lost their self-suffiency. The contact between man’s deep and free powers and the powers of things and of nature has been cut off; metropolitan life petrifies everything, syncopates every breath, and contaminates every spiritual “well.” As if that weren’t enough, faint-hearted ideologies foster contempt for those values that in other times were the foundation of more rational and bright social organizations. In ancient societies the peak of the hierarchy was occupied by the caste of warrior aristocracy, whereas today, in the pacifist-humanitarian utopias (especially in the Anglo-Saxon ones), attempts are made to portray the warrior as some kind of anachronism, and as a dangerous and harmful entity that one day will be conveniently disposed of in the name of progress.

Once it is suffocated, the heroic will seek further outlets outside the net of practical interests, passions, and yearnings, and that net becomes tighter and tighter with the passing of time: the excitement that sports induce in our contemporaries is just an expression of this. But the heroic will need to be made self-aware again and to move beyond the limits of materialism.

In the struggle against mountain heights, action is finally free from all machines, and from everything that detracts from man’s direct and absolute relationship with things. Up close to the sky and to crevasses—among the still and silent greatness of the peaks; in the impetuous raging winds and snowstorms; among the dazzling brightness of glaciers; or among the fierce, hopeless verticality of rock faces—it is possible to reawaken (through what may at first appear to be the mere employment of the body) the symbol of overcoming, a truly spiritual and virile light, and make contact with primordial forces locked within the body’s limbs. In this way the climber’s struggle will be more than physical and the successful climb may come to represent the achievement of something that is no longer merely human. In ancient mythologies the mountain peaks were regarded as the seats of the gods; this is myth, but it is also the allegorical expression of a real belief that may always come alive again sub specie interioritatis.

In life—as has been pointed out, since Nietzsche, by Simmel—humans have a strange and almost incredible power to reach certain existential peaks at which “living more” (mehr leben), or the highest intensity of life, is transformed into “more than living” (mehr als leben). At these peaks, just as heat transforms into light, life becomes free of itself; not in the sense of the death of individuality or some kind of mystical shipwreck, but in the sense of a transcendent affirmation of life, in which anxiety, endless craving, yearning and worrying, the quest for religious faith, human supports and goals, all give way to a dominating state of calm. There is something greater than life, within life itself, and not outside of it. This heroic experience is valuable and good in itself, whereas ordinary life is only driven by interests, external things, and human conventions. I use the word experience, because this state is not connected with any particular creed or theory (which are always worthless and relative); rather it presents itself in a most direct and undoubtable way, just like the experiences of pain and pleasure.

This profound dimension of the spirit, which perceives itself as infinite, self-transcending, and beyond all manifest reality, is reawakened and shines forth—even though not entirely consciously—in the “insanity” of those who, in increasing numbers and without a specific reason, dare to challenge the mountain heights, led by a will that prevails over fears, exhaustion, and the primitive instincts of prudence and self-preservation.

Feeling left with only one’s resources, without help in a hopeless situation, clothed only in one’s strength or weakness, with no one to rely upon other than one’s self; to climb from rock to rock, from hold to hold, from ridge to ridge, inexorably, for hours and hours; with the feeling of the height and of imminent danger all around; and finally, after the harsh test of calling upon all one’s self-discipline, the feeling of an indescribable liberation, of a solar solitude and of silence; the end of the struggle, the subjugation of fears, and the revelation of a limitless horizon, for miles and miles, while everything else lies down below—in all of this one can truly find the real possibility of purification, of awakening, of the rebirth of something transcendent.

It does not matter that the heroic symbolism of the mountain can only be experienced initially by a few people. When these meanings are duly focused upon, they will influence people. There is no real climber who is not able to experience mountain climbing, if only in a few occasional flashes, as something more than a mere sport. Likewise, there is no real climber who does not display, in the eyes or in the face darkened by the sun’s reflection on the snow, the mark of a race that has transformed beyond that of the people of the plains.

On this basis, we should save the mountains from the contaminating invasion of tourists who attempt to conquer them by building their “civilized” base camps. I am not just referring to those faint-hearted youths who bring with them to popular mountain resorts their vain, mundane city habits (such as discos and tennis courts), and who snobbishly display the colorful new equipment they’ve bought to use only for some harmless walk in the woods. I am also referring to those who tarnish silent and uncontaminated places with materialism and triviality, namely with a competitive spirit and a mania for that which is difficult and unusual, for the sake of setting new records.

The mountain requires purity and simplicity; it requires asceticism.

O sky above me! O pure, deep sky! You abyss of light! Gazing into you, I tremble with divine desires. To cast myself into your height—that is my depth! To hide myself in your purity—that is my innocence! And when I wandered alone what did my soul hunger after by night and on treacherous paths? And when I climbed mountains, whom did I always seek, if not you, upon mountains? And all my wandering and mountain climbing, it was merely a necessity and an expedient of clumsiness: my whole will desires only to fly, to fly into you! [Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (translated by Hollingdale, Penguin, 1961), 184]

These are words that Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who championed the will to power, wrote in the secluded mountains of Engadine. To some people these words may amount to nothing more than lyrical effusions. To others they may contain both the intimate sense of the heroic spiritual attitude, the spirit of which is action, and the discipline of ruthless self-control. The temple of this spirit is the primordial majesty of the peaks, the glaciers, the crevasses, and the boundless blue sky.

In this context the mountainous peaks and the spiritual peaks converge in one simple and yet powerful reality.

From Meditations On The Pick

Julius Evola

 Evola’s political, philosophical and historical teachings were motivated by his traditionalism as a manifestation of what he termed the “revolt against the modern world”. While adhering to the cyclic conception of history Evola added to this the concept of a duality of civilisations categorised as traditional and modern. Evola saw the end cycle of Western civilisation, the beginning of which he ascribed to the Late Medieval period, as the start of the super-cycle of the modern. All those civilisations that had come and gone before were still within the context of the traditional. Evola wrote of the cycles of decline:

“Recently in contrast to the notion of progress and the idea that history has been represented by more or less continuous upward evolution of collective humanity, the idea of a plurality of the forms of civilisation and of a relative incommunicality between them has been confirmed. According to this second and new vision of history, history breaks down into epochs and disconnected cycles. … A civilisation springs up, gradually reaches a culminating point, and falls into darkness and, more often than not, disappears. A cycle has ended….” 118Evola considered this revived cyclic approach to history as “a healthy reaction to the superstition of history as progress”, which was a product of Western materialism. He offered this added dualist dimension however, and cautioned that Spenglerian cyclicism did not offer the entire story. In addition to “a plurality of civilisations”, an historical “duality” should be recognised. “Modern civilisation stands on one side and on the other the entirety of all the civilisations that have preceded it.” For the Western civilisation he put the end of the traditional phase and the beginning of the modern super-cycle as the “late Middle Ages”, when the point of rapture with tradition was complete. Since that time, “modern civilisation” has completely cut itself off from the past. “For the great majority of moderns, that means any possibility of understanding the traditional world has been completely lost”.119In 1938 Evola wrote a synopsis on the traditional approach to history, where he defined traditional and modern civilisations:

“On the one hand there are the traditional cultures… The axis of these cultures and the summit of their hierarchical order consist of metaphysical, supra-individual powers and actions, which serve to inform and justify all that which is merely human, temporal, subject to becoming and to ‘history’. On the other hand there is ‘modern culture’, which is actually anti-tradition and which exhausts itself in a construction of purely human and earthly conditions and in the total development of these, in pursuit of a life entirely detached from the ‘higher world’”.120

While Evola joined the debate over the meaning of “race” in Fascist Italy, when racial zoology suddenly gained momentum as official policy with the publication of the “Manifesto of Race” in 1938, ironically the same year he wrote in a German (that is, “Nazi”) publication an article explaining the traditionalist approach to the question of why civilisations decay. He contended that the “degeneration” of civilisation is not caused by race-crossings, which Hitlerism regards as axiomatic, but rather through the spiritual corruption of the culture-hierarchy from the top down.121Evola begins by repudiating the modernist idea of “progress”, stating that man is not ascending (evolution) but descending from a primordial higher state. One does not go from lower to higher forms. Hence, as we have seen, the widespread belief – or memory - across times, places, and cultures, in the “fall” of man from a mythic “Golden Age”, ascribed to the arrogance of man in defying the Godhead.

“Anyone who has come to reject the rationalist myth of ‘progress’ and the interpretation of history as an unbroken positive development of mankind will find himself gradually drawn towards the world-view that was common to all the great traditional cultures, and which had at its centre the memory of a process of degeneration, slow obscuration, or collapse of a higher preceding world. As we penetrate deeper into this new (and old) interpretation, we encounter various problems, foremost among which is the question of the secret of degeneration”.122Of the theories that have been considered Evola, writing for the Germans, alludes to the classic work of Comte Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of the Human Races, pioneering the doctrine that civilisations collapse through race-mixing. Evola quickly disposes of this by giving a passing nod to the theory, proceeding with a consideration of “a higher order of things” than blood admixture. Evola in reality does more than “expand” de Gobineau’s race-theory with “a few observations”; he disposes of it by pointing out that race-impurity does not explain the unremarkable state of present day Nordic states that have retained their race-purity:

“We can thank the Comte de Gobineau for the best and best-known summary of this problem, and also for a masterly criticism of the main hypotheses about it. His solution on the basis of racial thought and racial purity also has much truth in it, but it needs to be expanded by a few observations concerning a higher order of things. For there have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands. An example quite close at hand is the case of the Swedes and the Dutch. These people are in the same racial condition today as they were two centuries ago, but there is little to be found now of the heroic disposition and the racial awareness that they once possessed. Other great cultures seem merely to have remained standing in the condition of mummies: they have long been inwardly dead, so that it takes only the slightest push to knock them down. This was the case, for example, with ancient Peru, that giant solar empire which was annihilated by a few adventurers drawn from the worst rabble of Europe”.123On the other hand there are cultures that Evola refers to as being outwardly motivated by modernism, yet retaining their inner traditional substance. Japan remains the prime example of such a state. One might also say that of Israel. There are also certain Buddhist states in South-east Asia that have materially prospered through the adaptation of modern techniques but have maintained a traditional nexus, as has India, despite these cultures having gone through the full cycles of rise and fall. A remnant lives, and might yet re-enter history in symbiosis with a post-Western civilisation.

Evola sees history unfolding within the great cosmic ages or yugas over vast expanses of time, and all the civilisations known to modern man as only decaying remnants of a long lost primordial civilisation. Hence, the history we know today is that of the fall of man over cycles of decline, interrupted by civilisations that have sought to maintain the cosmos connexion, but still subject to cyclic decay. Hence there are cycles of rise and fall within a great cosmic cycle; wheels within a great cosmic wheel. This outlook differs from the historical morphology of Spengler and others who work within more ordinary time-frames, yet both have broad features in common.

Evola sees “the whole of history as degeneration”, repudiating the notion of both historical and biological evolution, and the chimera of “progress”. Rather, the course of history is one of “involution”:

“From the standpoint of the latter, the whole of history is degeneration, because it shows the universal decline of earlier cultures of the traditional type, and the decisive and violent rise of a new universal civilization of the ‘modern’ type. A double question arises from this.”

“First, how was it ever possible for this to come to pass? There is a logical error underlying the whole doctrine of evolution: it is impossible that the higher can emerge from the lower, and the greater from the less. But doesn’t a similar difficulty face us in the solution of the doctrine of involution? How is it ever possible for the higher to fall? If we could make do with simple analogies, it would be easy to deal with this question. A healthy man can become sick; a virtuous one can turn to vice. There is a natural law that everyone takes for granted: that every living being starts with birth, growth, and strength, then come old age, weakening, and disintegration. And so forth. But this is just making statements, not explaining, even if we allow that such analogies actually relate to the question posed here.”

“Secondly, it is not only a matter of explaining the possibility of the degeneration of a particular cultural world, but also the possibility that the degeneration of one cultural cycle may pass to other peoples and take them down with it. For example, we have not only to explain how the ancient Western reality collapsed, but also have to show the reason why it was possible for ‘modern’ culture to conquer practically the whole world, and why it possessed the power to divert so many peoples from any other type of culture, and to hold sway even where states of a traditional kind seemed to be alive (one need only recall the Aryan East).”

“In this respect, it is not enough to say that we are dealing with a purely material and economic conquest. That view seems very superficial, for two reasons. In the first place, a land that is conquered on the material level also experiences, in the long run, influences of a higher kind corresponding to the cultural type of its conqueror. We can state, in fact, that European conquest almost everywhere sows the seeds of ‘Europeanization,’ i.e., the ‘modern’ rationalist, tradition-hostile, individualistic way of thinking. Secondly, the traditional conception of culture and the state is hierarchical, not dualistic. Its bearers could never subscribe, without severe reservations, to the principles of ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ and ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ For us, ‘Tradition’ is the victorious and creative presence in the world of that which is ‘not of this world,’ i.e., of the Spirit, understood as a power that is mightier than any merely human or material one”.124Although Evola was writing in 1938, this “modern world” is now a global hegemony, reaching every corner of the globe. The World War which came a year later resulted in the triumph of decadence over the remnants of tradition. Now we see the present “clash of civilisations”, as it has been called by American geopolitical theorists, where the remnants of a long fellaheen – historically passé - Islam trying to resist encroachments on what remains of their cultures. As we shall see near our conclusion, American policy-makers are overt in seeing America as having a world-mission in destroying all vestiges of tradition in the name of “progress”.

“This is a basic idea of the authentically traditional view of life, which does not permit us to speak with contempt of merely material conquests. On the contrary, the material conquest is the sign, if not of a spiritual victory, at least of a spiritual weakness or a kind of spiritual ‘retreat’ in the cultures that are conquered and lose their independence. Everywhere that the Spirit, regarded as the stronger power, was truly present, it never lacked for means - visible or otherwise - to enable all the opponent’s technical and material superiority to be resisted. But this has not happened. It must be concluded, then, that degeneracy was lurking behind the traditional facade of every people that the ‘modern’ world has been able to conquer. The West must then have been the culture in which a crisis that was already universal assumed its acutest form. There the degeneration amounted, so to speak, to a knockout blow, and as it took effect, it brought down with more or less ease other peoples in whom the involution had certainly not ‘progressed’ as far, but whose tradition had already lost its original power, so that these peoples were no longer able to protect themselves from an outside assault.”125The Late Western perspective of history is that of a line of evolution from primitive to modern, culminating in the “end of history” when the world adopts liberal-democracy and free trade. The traditional perspective sees history as the waxing and waning of civilisations, each self-contained, going through analogous life-cycles of rise and fall. The two outlooks are reflections of differences in perceptions of time; the “modern” linear, the traditional cyclic. Traditional societies are premised on maintaining a connexion with the divine. The modern outlook sees this as superstition, but “progress” has become as much a religion as any form of mysticism. The “modern” road to “utopia” is through universal happiness achieved by material prosperity, and man need look for no higher purpose, state apologists such as Fukuyama. The traditional society saw human purpose not as the achieving of an elusive “happiness” based on fads but the fulfilment of one’s cosmic duty (dharma) as an integral part of a holistic order.

Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton 

Evola - The Procedures of Modern Science

 One of the principal justifications for Western civilization believing itself, since the nineteenth century, to be the civilization par excellence is natural science. Based on the myth of this science, preceding civilizations were judged to be obscurantist and infantile; prey to superstitions and to metaphysical and religious whims. Apart from a few casual discoveries, they were ignorant of the path of true knowledge, which can be reached only with the positive, mathematical-experimental methods developed in the modern era. Science and knowledge have been made synonymous with experimental “positive science,” while the epithet “prescientific” has come to signify a disqualification beyond appeal of any other type of knowledge.

The apogee of the myth of physical science coincided with that of the bourgeois era, when positivist and materialist scientism was in favor. Then there was talk of a crisis of science, and an internal critique occurred, resulting in a new phase inaugurated by Einstein’s theory. As an offshoot of this, the scientistic myth has revived recently with an appraisal of scientific knowledge that in certain cases has had curious developments. Among them, it is claimed that the latest science, having now passed the phase of materialism and cleared the field of old, useless speculations, has reconciled its conclusions about the nature of the universe with metaphysics, presenting themes and views that agree with the certainties of philosophy, and for some, even of religion. Besides the popularizers of Reader’s Digest, certain scientists like Eddington, Planck, and even Einstein have made informal pronouncements of this kind. Hence there is a kind of euphoria, confirmed by the prospects of the atomic era and the “second industrial revolution,” whose very point of departure was modern physics.

All these are only developments of one of the great illusions of the modern world, one of the mirages of an epoch in which, in reality, the dissolving processes have besieged the field of knowledge itself. In order to realize this, it is enough to look beyond the façade. If it is not a matter of popularizers, but of the scientists themselves, and if it is not a case like the knowing smiles between mystifying augurs, which Cicero speaks of, it reveals a naïveté that only an unequaled limitation of horizons and intellectual interests could explain.

None of modern science has the slightest value as knowledge; rather, it bases itself on a formal renunciation of knowledge in the true sense. The driving and organizing force behind modern science derives nothing at all from the ideal of knowledge, but exclusively from practical necessity, and, I might add, from the will to power turned on things and on nature. I do not mean its technical and industrial applications, even though the masses attribute the prestige of modern science above all to them, because there they see irrefutable proof of its validity. It is a matter of the very nature of scientific methods even before their technical applications, in the phase known as “pure research.” In fact, the concept of “truth” in the traditional sense is already alien to modern science, which concerns itself solely with hypotheses and formulae that can predict with the best approximation the course of phenomena and relate them to a certain unity. And as it is not a question of “truth,” but a matter less of seeing than of touching, the concept of certainty in modern science is reduced to the “maximum probability.” That all scientific certainties have an essentially statistical character is openly recognized by every scientist, and more categorically than ever in recent subatomic physics. The system of science resembles a net that draws ever tighter around a something that, in itself, remains incomprehensible, with the sole intention of subduing it for practical ends.

These practical ends only secondarily concern the technical applications; they constitute the criterion in the very domain that belongs to pure knowledge, in the sense that here, too, the basic impulse is schematizing, an ordering of phenomena in a simpler and more manageable way. As was rightly noted, ever since that formula simplex sigillum veri (simplicity is the seal of the true), there has appeared a method that exchanges for truth (and knowledge) that which satisfies a practical, purely human need of the intellect. In the final analysis, the impulse to know is transformed into an impulse to dominate; and we owe to a scientist, Bertrand Russell, the recognition that science, from being a means to know the world, has become a means to change the world.

I will not dwell further on these commonplace considerations. Epistemology, that is, reflection applied to the methods of scientific research, has honestly recognized all of them already, with Bergson, Leroy, Poincaré, Meyerson, Brunschvicg, and many others, to say nothing of what Nietzsche himself had seen perfectly well. They have brought to light the altogether practical and pragmatic character of scientific methods. The more “comfortable” ideas and theories become “true,” in regard to the organization of the data of sensorial experience. A choice between such data is made consciously or instinctively, excluding systematically those that do not lend themselves to being controlled; thus also everything qualitative and unrepeatable that is not susceptible to being mathematized.

Scientific “objectivity” consists solely in being ready at any moment to abandon existing theories or hypotheses, as soon as the chance appears for the better control of reality. Thereupon it includes in the system of the already predictable and manageable those phenomena not yet considered, or seemingly irreducible; and that, without any principle that in itself, in its intrinsic nature, is valid once and for all. In the same way, he who can lay his hands on a modern long-range rifle is ready to give up a flintlock.

Based on the above, one can demonstrate that final form of dissolution of knowledge corresponding to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Only the profane, in hearing talk of relativity, could believe that the new theory had destroyed every certainty and almost sanctioned a kind of Pirandellian “thus it is, if you think so.” In fact, it is quite a different matter, in the sense that this theory has brought us even closer to absolute certainties, but of a purely formal character. A coherent system of physics has been constructed to keep all relativity in check, to take every change and variation into account, with the greatest independence from points of reference and from everything bound to observations, to the evidence of direct experience, and to current perceptions of space, time, and speed. This system is “absolute” through the flexibility granted to it by its exclusively mathematical and algebraic nature. Thus once the “cosmic constant” is defined (according to the speed of light), the so-called transformation equations suffice to introduce a certain number of parameters into the formulae used to account for phenomena in order to get over a certain “relativity” and to avoid any possible disproof from the facts of experience.

A simpleminded example can make this state of affairs plain. Whether Earth moves around the Sun, or the Sun around Earth, from the point of view of Einstein’s “cosmic constant” is more or less the same. One is no more “true” than the other, except that the second alternative would involve the introduction of many more elements to the formulae, thus a greater complication and inconvenience in the calculations. For the person unconcerned with one system being more complicated and inconvenient than another, the choice remains free; this person could calculate the various phenomena starting either from the premise that Earth revolves around the Sun, or from the opposite premise.

This banal and elementary example clarifies the type of “certainty” and knowledge to which Einstein’s theory leads. In that regard, it is important to point out that there is nothing new here, that his theory represents only the latest and most accessible manifestation of the characteristic orientation of all modern science. This theory, though far from common or philosophical relativism, is willing to admit the most unlikely relativities, but arms itself against them, so to speak, from the start. It intends to supply certainties that either leave out or anticipate them, and thus from the formal point of view are almost absolute. And if reality should ever revolt against them, a suitable readjustment of dimensions will restore these certainties.

It would be good to look further into the kind and presuppositions of this “knowing.” The cosmic constant is a purely mathematical concept; in using it to speak of the speed of light, one no longer imagines speed, light, or propagation, one must only have in mind numbers and symbols. If someone were to ask those scientists what is light, without accepting an answer in mathematical symbols, they would look stupefied and not even understand the request. Everything that in recent physics proceeds from that stronghold participates rigorously in its nature: physics is completely algebraized. With the introduction of the concept of a “multidimensional continuum” even that final sensible intuitive basis that survived in yesterday’s physics in the pure, schematic, categories of geometrical space is reduced to mathematical formulae. Space and time here are one and the same; they form a “continuum,” itself expressed by algebraic functions. Together with the current, intuitive notion of space and time, that of force, energy, and movement also disappears. For example, in terms of Einstein’s physics the motion of a planet around the Sun only means that in the corresponding field of the space-time continuum there is a certain “curvature”—a term that, to be sure, cannot have made him imagine anything, dealing again with pure, algebraic values. The idea of a motion produced by a force is reduced to the bare bones of an abstract motion following the “shortest geodetic line,” which in our universe would approximate an ellipse. As in this algebraic scheme nothing remains of the concrete idea of force, even less so can there be room for cause. The “spiritualization” alleged by the popularizers of modern physics, due to the disappearance of the idea of matter and the reduction of the concept of mass to that of energy, is an absurdity, because mass and energy are made interchangeable values by an abstract formula. The only result of all this is a practical one: the application of the formula in order to control atomic forces. Apart from that, everything is consumed by the fire of algebraic abstraction associated with a radical experimentalism, that is, with a recording of simple phenomena.

With quantum theory one has the impression of entering into a cabalistic world (in the popular meaning of the term). The paradoxical results of the Michelson-Morley experiment provided the incentive for the formulation of Einstein’s theory. Another paradox is that of the discontinuity and improbability discovered by nuclear physics through the process of expressing atomic radiations in numerical quantities. (In simple terms: it deals with the evidence that these quantities do not make up a continuous series; it is as if in the series of numbers, three were not followed by four, five, etc., but skipped to a different number, without even obeying the law of probability.) This new paradox has led to a further algebraizing of the so-called mechanics of matrices, used to explain them away, beside a new and entirely abstract formulation of fundamental laws, like the energy constant, action and reaction, and so on. Here one has not only relinquished the law of causality, replacing it by statistical averages, because it seemed to have to do with pure chance: in addition, in the latest developments of this physics one sees the paradox of having to relinquish experimental proofs because their results were found to be variable. The very doing of an experiment allows that one may have one result now and another later, because the experiment itself influences the object; it alters it due to the interdependent values of “position” and “motion,” and to any description of the subatomic phenomena another, just as “true,” can be opposed. It is not the experiment, whose results through this method would remain inconclusive, but rather the pure, algebraic function, the so-called wave function, that serves to provide absolute values in this domain.

According to one most recent theory, which integrates Einstein’s relativity, purely mathematical entities that on the one hand magically spring forth in full irrationality, but on the other are ordered in a completely formal system of algebraic “production,” exhaustively account for everything that can be positively checked and formularized regarding the ultimate basis of sensible reality. This process was the intellectual background to the atomic era’s inauguration—parallel, therefore, to the definitive liquidation of all knowledge in the proper sense. One of the principal exponents of modern physics, Heisenberg, has explicitly admitted this in his book: it is about a formal knowledge enclosed in itself, extremely precise in its practical consequences, in which, however, one cannot speak of knowledge of the real. For modern science, he says, “the object of research is no longer the object in itself, but nature as a function of the problems that man sets himself”; the logical conclusion in such science being that “henceforth man only meets himself.”

There is an aspect in which this latest natural science represents a type of inversion or counterfeit of that concept of catharsis, or purification, that in the traditional world was extended from the moral and ritual field to the intellectual; it referred to an intellectual discipline that, through overcoming the perceptions furnished by the animal senses and more or less mixed with the reactions of the I, would lead to a higher knowledge, to true knowledge. In effect, we have something similar in modern algebraized physics. Not only has it gradually freed itself from any immediate data of sense experience and common sense, but even from all that which imagination could offer as support. The current concepts of space, time, motion, and causality fall one by one, so to speak. Everything that can be suggested by the direct and living relationship of the observer to the observed is made unreal, irrelevant, and negligible. It is then like a catharsis that consumes every residue of the sensory, not in order to lead to a higher world, the “intelligible world” or a “world of ideas,” as in the ancient schools of wisdom, but rather to the realm of pure mathematical thought, of number, of undifferentiated quantity, as opposed to the realm of quality, of meaningful forms and living forces: a spectral and cabalistic world, an extreme intensification of the abstract intellect, where it is no longer a matter of things or phenomena, but almost of their shadows reduced to their common denominator, gray and indistinguishable. One may well speak of a falsification of the elevation of the mind above human sense-experience, which in the traditional world had as its effect not the destruction of the evidences of that experience, but their integration: the potentizing of the ordinary, concrete perception of natural phenomena by also experiencing their symbolic and intelligible aspects.

From Ride the Tiger

Evola on ascetism

 On the one hand, the pariah is a person without a caste, the one who has "lapsed" or who has eluded the "form" by being powerless before it, thus returning to the infernal world. The ascetic, on the other hand, is a being above the caste, one who becomes free from the form by renouncing the illusory center of human individuality; he turns toward the principle from which every "form" proceeds, not by faithfulness to his own nature and by participation in the hierarchy, but by a direct action. Therefore, as great as was the revulsion harbored by every caste toward the pariah in Aryan India, so, by contrast, was the veneration felt by everybody for a person who was above the castes. These beings, according to a Buddhist image, should not be expected to follow a human dharma, just as one who is trying to kindle a fire ultimately does not care what kind of wood is being employed, as long as it is capable of producing fire and light.

Asceticism occupies an ideal intermediary state between the plane of direct, Olympian, and initiatory regality and the plane of rite and of dharma. Asceticism also presents two features or qualifications that from a broader perspective may be considered as qualifications of the same traditional spirit. The first aspect of the ascetic path is action, understood as heroic action; the second aspect is asceticism in the technical sense of the word, especially with reference to the path of contemplation. Beyond complete traditional forms and in more recent times some civilizations have arisen that were inspired in different degrees by either one of these two poles. Later on we shall see what role the two aspects have played in the dynamism of historical forces, even on the plane that is related to the ethnic and racial factor. In order to grasp the spirit of an ascetical tradition at a pure state it is necessary to leave out of consideration the meanings that have been associated with the term asceticism in the world of Western religiosity. Action and knowledge are two fundamental human faculties; in both domains it is possible to accomplish an integration capable of removing human limitations. The asceticism of contemplation consists of the integration of the knowing faculty (achieved through detachment from sensible reality) with the neutralization of individual rationalizing faculties and with the progressive stripping of the nucleus of consciousness, which thus becomes "free from conditionings" and subtracts itself from the limitation and from the necessity of any determination, whether real or virtual. Once all the dross and obstructions are removed (opus remotionis), participation in the overworld takes place in the form of a vision or an enlightenment. As the peak of the ascetical path, this point also represents at the same time the beginning of a truly continuous, progressive ascent that realizes states of being truly superior to the human condition. The essential ideals of the ascetical path are the universal as knowledge and knowledge as liberation.

The ascetical detachment typical of the contemplative path implies "renunciation." In this regard, it is necessary to prevent the misunderstanding occasioned by some inferior forms of asceticism. It is important to emphasize the different meanings that renunciation assumed in higher forms of ancient and Eastern asceticism on the one hand, and in most of Western and especially Christian asceticism on the other hand. In the latter, renunciation often assumed the character of a repression and of a "mortification"; the Christian ascetic becomes detached from the objects of desire not because he no longer has any desire, but in order to mortify himself and to "escape temptation." In the former, renunciation proceeds from a natural distaste for objects that are usually attractive and yearned for; this distaste is motivated by the fact that one directly desires—or better, wills—something the world of conditioned experience cannot grant. In this case, what leads to renunciation is the natural nobility of one's desire rather than an external intervention aimed at slowing down, mortifying, and inhibiting the faculty of desire in a vulgar nature. After all, the emotional phase, even in its purest and noblest forms, is only found at the introductory levels in higher forms of asceticism; in later stages, it is consumed by the intellectual fire and by the arid splendor of pure contemplation.

A typical example of contemplative asceticism is given by early Buddhism in its lack of "religious" features, its organization in a pure system of techniques, and in the spirit that animates it, which is so different from what anyone may think about asceticism. First of all, Buddhism does not know any "gods" in the religious sense of the word; the gods are believed to be powers who also need liberation, and thus the "Awakened One" is acknowledged to be superior to both men and gods. In the Buddhist canon it is written that an ascetic not only becomes free from human bonds, but from divine bonds as well. Secondly, moral norms, in the original forms of Buddhism, are purported to be mere instruments to be employed in the quest for the objective realization of superindividual states. Anything that belongs to the world of "believing," of "faith," or that is remotely associated with emotional experiences is shunned. The fundamental principle of the method is "knowledge": to turn the knowledge of the ultimate nonidentity of the Self with anything "else" (whether it be the monistic All or the world of Brahma, theistically conceived) into a fire that progressively devours any irrational self-identification with anything that is conditioned. In conformity to the path, the final outcome, besides the negative designation (nirvāṇa = "cessation of restlessness"), is expressed in terms of "knowledge," bodhi, which is knowledge in the eminent sense of superrational enlightenment or liberating knowledge, as in "waking up" from sleep, slumber, or a hallucination. It goes without saying that this is not the equivalent of the cessation of power or of anything resembling a dissolution. To dissolve ties is not to become dissolved but to become free. The image of the one who, once freed from all yokes, whether human or divine, is supremely autonomous and thus may go wherever he pleases, is found very frequently in the Buddhist canon together with all kinds of symbols of a virile and warrior type, and also with constant and explicit reference not so much to nonbeing but rather to something superior to both being and nonbeing. Buddha, as it is well known, belonged to an ancient stock of Aryan warrior nobility and his doctrine (purported to be the "dharma of the pure ones, inaccessible to an uninstructed, average person") is a very far cry from any mystical escapism. Buddha's doctrine is permeated by a sense of superiority, clarity, and an indomitable spirit, and Buddha himself is called "the fully Self-Awakened One," "the Lord." 1The Buddhist renunciation is of a virile and aristocratic type and is animated by an inner strength; it is not dictated by need but is consciously willed, so that the person practicing it may overcome need and become reintegrated into a perfect life. It is understandable that when our contemporaries, who only know a life that is mixed with nonlife that in its restlessness presents the irrational traits of a "mania," hear mention of  nirvāṇa (in reference to the condition experienced by the Awakened One), namely, of an extinction of mania corresponding to what the Germans call "more than living" (mehr als Leben) and to a superlife, they cannot help but equate nirvāṇa with "nothingness": for non-mania (nir-vāṇa) means nonlife, or nothingness. After all, it is only natural that the modern spirit has relegated the values cherished by higher asceticism to the things of the "past."

A Western example of pure contemplative asceticism is given by Neoplatonism. With the words, "The gods ought to come to me, not I to them," 2 Plotinus indicated a fundamental aspect of aristocratic asceticism. Also, with the sayings, "It is to the gods, not to good men that we are to be made like," and, "Our concern, though, is not to be out of sin, but to be god," 3 Plotinus has definitely overcome the limitations posed by morality, and has employed the method of inner simplification (άπλώσις) as a way to become free from all conditionings in that state of metaphysical simplicity from which the vision 4 will eventually arise. By means of this vision—"having joined as it were center to center" 5—what occurs is the participation in that intelligible reality that compared to which any other reality may be characterized as more nonlife than life, 6 with the sensible impressions appearing as dreams 7 and the world of bodies as the place of radical powerlessness and of the inability to be.

Another example is given by the so-called Rhineland mysticism that was capable of reaching metaphysical peaks towering above and beyond Christian theism. Tauler's Entwerdung corresponds to Plotinus's άπλώσις and to the destruction of the element of "becoming" (or saṁsāric element) that Buddhism regarded as the condition necessary to achieve "awakening." The aristocratic view of contemplative asceticism reappears in the doctrine of Meister Eckhart. Like Buddha, Eckhart addressed the noble man and the "noble soul" whose metaphysical dignity is witnessed by the presence of a "strength," a "light," and a "fire" within it—in other words, of something before which even the deity conceived as a "person" (i.e., theistically) becomes something exterior. The method he employed consisted essentially of detachment from all things (Abegescheidenheit), a virtue that according to Eckhart is above love, humility, or mercifulness, as he explained in his sermon On Detachment. 8 The principle of "spiritual centrality" was affirmed: the true Self is God, God is our real center and we are external only to ourselves. Fear, hope, anguish, joy, and pain, or anything that may bring us out of ourselves, must be allowed to seep into us. An action dictated by desire, even when its goal is the kingdom of heaven itself, eternal life, or the beatific vision, must not be undertaken. The path suggested by Eckhart leads from the outside to the inside, beyond everything that is mere "image"; beyond things and what represents the quality of a thing (Dingheit); beyond forms and the quality of form (Formlichkeit); beyondessences and essentiality. From the gradual extinction of all images and forms, and eventually of one's own thoughts, will, and knowledge, what arises is a transformed and supernatural knowledge that is carried beyond all forms  (überformt). Thus one reaches a peak in respect to which "God" himself (always according to his theistic view) appears as something ephemeral, that is, as a transcendent and uncreated peak of the Self without which "God" himself could not exist. All the typical images of the religious consciousness are swallowed up by a reality that is an absolute, pure possession, and that in its simplicity cannot help but to appear terrifying to any finite being. Once again we find a solar symbol: before this barren and absolute substance, "God" appears as the moon next to the sun. The divine light in comparison with the radiance of this substance pales, just as the sun's light outshines the moon's.

From The Revolt Against the Modern World 

There is nothing to be understood from them

 The possibility that some positive suggestions may come from the vast majority of ‘young people’ in today’s Italy is definitely to be ruled out. When these people claim that they are misunderstood, the only answer they deserve is that there is nothing to be understood from them: if a normal order existed, it would only be a matter of curtly putting them in their place, as one might do with children, when their foolishness becomes annoying, intrusive, or impertinent. Just what their non-conformism, ‘protest’, or ‘revolt’ amounts to is all too clear. It has nothing to do with the sporadic anarchists of a few decades ago, who at least were capable of thinking, and were familiar with the likes of Nietzsche and Stirner; 159  or with those who, in terms of art or worldview, enthusiastically embraced Futurism, Dadaism, or the Sturm und Drang 160  promoted by the early Papini. 161  The ‘rebels’ of today are ‘longhairs’ and Beats whose non-conformism is of the cheapest kind, and no matter how banal it may be, it follows a trend, a new norm. It does so in a passive, provincial way, since the Beatnik or hipster movement is already a thing of the past in America. Besides, it had produced a few literary echoes, and had taken some dangerous, destructive turns; but this is hardly the case in Italy, where intellectual deficiency and illiteracy are paramount.

(...)

On the other hand, there is no doubt that as the years go by, and the need emerges for most of them to face the material and economic problems of life, these ‘youths’, as adults, will adapt to professional, productive, social, and matrimonial routines — simply switching from one form of nothingness to another. So no real problem emerges.

It would be unfair, however, to reduce all European youths to those just described. Apart from young people who are happy to go along with the bourgeois flow with little scruple or distress, in Italy there are young people whose revolt has a political aspect. They are rebelling against the current democratic regime and are even actively taking to the streets, with courage, when it is a matter of repelling the provocative demonstrations of Leftist factions. They attest to the presence of a different Italy and, what’s more, some of them are even receptive towards the ideas and disciplines which we usually refer to as ‘traditional’, in a particular sense of the word. Thus, in regard to these young people one can no longer speak of ‘rebels without a flag’, nor of foolish copycat non-conformism.

The main problem that emerges in the case of these young people concerns the distinction between purely biological youth and that of a spiritual nature, which is superior to the former. Youths of good stock often display positive attitudes in terms of what we would describe, not as ‘idealism’ — since this term is so misused nowadays — but as a certain capacity for enthusiasm and vigour, unconditional devotion, steadfastness, and detachment from bourgeois life and purely material, self-seeking interests, combined with an aspiration for higher freedom. It is important to realise that these inclinations are ultimately biologically conditioned, which is to say connected to age. The task, then, would be to assimilate these inclinations and make them one’s own so that they may become permanent qualities and counter the opposite influences to which one becomes fatally exposed with the passing of the years, and the need to face the concrete problems of contemporary life.

In this respect, it may be interesting to provide a reference drawn from the ancient Arab-Persian civilisation. The term futâva , from fatà = ‘young man’, was used to describe the quality of ‘being young’ precisely in the spiritual sense just noted, one defined on the basis not of age, but primarily of a special disposition of the spirit. Thus, the fityân or fityûh (= ‘the young’) came to be conceived as an Order whose members would undergo a rite connected to a kind of solemn vow always to maintain this quality of ‘being young’.

The above reference first of all suggests what task young people should set themselves, if they profess a positive form of non-conformism and rebellion: by our own personal experience, we know of far too many cases in which, after biological youth had faded, spiritual youth, too, with its higher interests, more or less ceased to exist and was replaced by a banal ‘normalisation’. Regrettably, by the age of thirty or thereabouts, very few people continue to stand their ground. Secondly, the above reference may also help to put an end to the myth of ‘youth’. The genuine quality of youth can in no way be attributed to that generation we mentioned at the beginning of the present essay (and that is why we have put the words ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ in inverted commas). Rather, in regard to that generation, one might speak of the childishness of its psychical retardation. And when what we are dealing with is not a human element, which from the beginning reflects the disease of a disintegrating civilisation, which is to say in the best cases, what Benedetto Croce once said holds perfectly true: a young person’s only problem is to grow into an adult. The rest is nonsense, and those concerned with serious matters ought to focus on the problem of taking a stance vis-à-vis our society and civilisation as a whole, in the name of a true, radical, reconstructive revolution.

The Tarantula's Bite

     According to an old Italian tradition, the bite of the tarantula leads to a condition of hysteria and extreme agitation bordering, by certain accounts, on madness. Accordingly the name tarantism was given to this condition, and it was a common condition in the south of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The tarantella dance takes its origin from this sickness, first because those who were gripped by tarantism felt a desperate need for frenetic physical activity, and later because this very need was formalized into a form of dance which was held to be therapeutic for the disease. In the present case, the furious contemporary desire to work, to be productive, to engage in commercial activity, is likened to this old malady.

Story has it that in the land of an ancient civilization far from Europe, an American expedition, bemoaning the poor competitivity of the native inhabitants who had been recruited for work, believed a suitable means could be found for spurring them on: the Americans doubled the hourly pay. Failure: following this raise, the better part of the workers came to work only half the hours of before. Since the natives held that the original reward was sufficient for the natural needs of their life, they now thought it altogether absurd that they should have to seek more for themselves than that which, on the basis of the new criterion, sufficed for the procuring of those needs.

This is the antithesis of what we have recently begun to call Stakhanovism.*   This anecdote might act as a testing stone for two worlds, two mindsets, two civilizations, by which one of them might be judged sane and normal, and the other deviant and psychotic.

* After Alexey Stakhanov, a Russian miner who became renowned throughout Soviet Russia for his remarkable stamina. He set the world record for coal mining, reportedly mining 227 tons of coal in one day. This record was later disputed by some who believed he had been aided by the Soviet authorities themselves in order to produce propaganda for the workers, but Stakhanov’s name remains to this day crystallized in the Italian language in the term staconovista, meaning a man of tireless work ethic.

From Julius Evola

RECOGNITIONS

Studies on Men and Problems from the Perspective of the Right

Otium. This term has undergone a change exactly inverse to that of the preceding one: almost without exception, it has acquired a pejorative meaning. According to modern usage, someone is idle58 when he is useless to himself and to others. To be idle is more or less the same as to be indolent, distracted, inactive, listless, and prone to the ‘dolce far niente’ of today’s mandolin-playing Italy for tourists.59 However, the Latin otium once meant a period of free time essentially corresponding to a meditative state of concentration, calm, and transparent contemplation. Idleness60 in the negative sense — which was also known in antiquity — indicated only what this can lead to when misused: only in such cases could the Romans say, for example, hebescere otio or otio diffluere, that is to become stupid or dissipated through idleness. But this is not the predominant sense. Cicero, Seneca, and other Classical authors chiefly understood otium as the healthy and normal counterpart to all forms of action, and even as a necessary condition for action to truly be action, and not agitation, business (negotium) or ‘work’.

We could also refer to the Greeks, as Cicero wrote: Graeci non solum ingenio atque doctrina, sed etiam otio studioque abundantes — ‘The Greeks are rich not only in innate gifts and learning but also in otium and diligence’.

Of Scipio the Elder it was said: Nunquam se minus otiosum esse quam cum otiosus esset, aut minus solum esse quam cum solus esset — ‘He was never less idle than when he was idle, and never less alone than when he enjoyed solitude’, which stresses an active (in a higher sense) type of ‘idleness’ and solitude. And Sallust wrote: Maius commodum ex otio meo quam ex aliorum negotiis reipublicae venturum — ‘My leisure will be more useful to the State than the busyness of others.’ To Seneca we owe a treatise entitled De otio, in which ‘idleness’ gradually takes on the character of pure contemplation.

It is worth mentioning some of the characteristic ideas expounded in this treatise. According to Seneca, there are two States: a greater State, without exterior and contingent limits, which encompasses both men and gods; and the particular, earthly State, to which one belongs by birth.

Now, Seneca says, there are men who serve the two States at once, others who serve only the greater State, and others that serve only the earthly State.

The greater State can also be served through ‘idleness’, if not better through idleness — by investigating what constitutes virtus, strength and virile dignity: huius maiori rei publicae et in otio deservire possumus, imno vero nescio an in otium melius, ut quaeremus quid sit virtus. Otium is closely linked to the tranquillity of mind of the sage, to the inner calm that allows one to attain the summits of contemplation. If understood in its correct, traditional sense, contemplation is not an escape from the world or a distraction, but an immersion within oneself and elevation to the perception of the metaphysical order that every true man must never cease to keep in sight when living and struggling in an earthly State.

Moreover, even in Catholicism (before the Church came up with Christ the Worker — to be honoured on May 1 — and before it ‘opened itself to the left’) one found the phrase sacrum otium, ‘sacred idleness’, which referred precisely to a contemplative activity. But in a civilisation in which all action has taken on the dull, physical, mechanical and mercenary traits of work, even when that work is done in one’s mind (‘intellectual workers’, who naturally also have their ‘unions’ and fight for the ‘demands of their professional sector’), the positive and traditional meaning of contemplation was bound to be lost. This is why in relation to modern civilisation we should speak not of an ‘active civilisation’ but of a restless and neurotic one.

As compensation for ‘work’ and a reaction against the strain of a life that has been reduced to a vain acting and producing, Classical otium — contemplation, silence, the state of calm and pause allowing one to return to oneself and find oneself again — is foreign to modern man. No: all he knows is ‘distraction’ (the literal meaning of which is ‘dispersion’);61 he looks for sensations, for new tensions, and new stimuli — almost as psychic narcotics. Anything, as long as he can escape himself, as long as he can avoid finding himself alone with himself, isolated from the noise of the outside world and interaction with his ‘neighbour’. Hence the radio, television, cinema, cruises, the frenzy of sports or political rallies in a regime of the masses, the need to hear things, to chase after the latest or most sensational news, ‘supporters’ of all kinds, and so on. Every expedient seems to have been diabolically brought into play in order to destroy any kind of genuine inner life, to prevent any internal defence of one’s personality, so that, almost like an artificially galvanised being, the individual will let himself be swept away by the collective current, which — naturally, according to the famous ‘meaning of history’ — moves forward according to an unlimited progress.

From Evola The Bow and the Club