In the first stage, the elite has a purely spiritual character, embodying what may generally be called "divine right." This elite expresses an ideal of immaterial virility. In the second stage, the elite has the character of a warrior nobility. At the third stage, we find the advent of oligarchies of a plutocratic and capitalist nature, such as they arise in democracies. The fourth and last elite is that of the collectivist and revolutionary leaders of the Fourth Estate.
The starting point should be a rejection of the principle formulated by Marxism which summarizes the entire subversion at work today: THE ECONOMY IS OUR DESTINY.
We must also uphold that beyond the economic sphere an order of higher political, spiritual, and heroic values has to emerge, an order that neither knows nor tolerates merely economic classes and does not know the division between "capitalists" and "proletarians"; an order solely in terms of which are to be defined the things worth living and dying for. We must also uphold the need for a true hierarchy and for different dignities, with a higher function of power installed at the top, namely the imperium.
The economic factor exercises a hypnosis and a tyranny over modern man. Modern man is making possible what every normal and complete civilization has always regarded as an aberration or as a bad joke - namely, that the economy and the social problem in terms of the economy are his destiny.
What must be questioned is not the value of this or that economic system, but the value of the economy itself.
In reality, true values bear no necessary relation to better or worse socioeconomic conditions...among these values are: being oneself, the style of an active impersonality; love of discipline; and a generally heroic attitude toward life.
Against all forms of resentment and social competition, every person should acknowledge and love his station in life, which best corresponds to his own nature; thus acknowledging the limits within which he can develop his potential.
Unless an ideological detoxification and a rectification of attitudes is carried out, every reform will be only superficial and fail to tackle the deeper roots of the crisis of contemporary society, to the advantage of subversive forces.
KEEP BACK BUT STAND FIRM.
The word to be used is action: action, not work, is what is performed by the leader, the explorer, the ascetic, the pure scientist, the warrior, the artist, the diplomat, the theologian, the one who makes or breaks a law, the one who is motivated by an elementary passion or guided by a principle.
A more open-minded outlook is able to recognize multiple and at times even contrasting possibilities in the history of a nation, possibilities that in some way reflect just as many "traditions." Such an outlook realizes the specific importance such an acknowledgment has from a practical point of view, as what is required is a choice of traditions, especially at turning points and in times of crisis (when it is necessary to react, command, and organize on the basis of a central idea the forces of a people who are wavering and falling apart. It is necessary to choose the ideas in one's past that are perceived as more congenial by the men who, at such times, are entrusted to begin a new cycle).
...the opposite of the soldier was the type of the warrior and the member of the feudal aristocracy; the caste to which this type belonged was the central nucleus in a corresponding social organization. This caste was not at the service of the bourgeois class but rather ruled over it, since the class that was protected depended on those who had the right to bear arms.
...love for hierarchy; relationships of obedience and command; courage; feelings of honor and loyalty; specific forms of active impersonality capable of producing anonymous sacrifice; frank and open relationships from man to man, from one comrade to another, from leader to follower...
Despite any antimilitaristic propaganda culminating in the shallow, spineless, and gutless "conscientious objectors," there is a heroic dimension in the Western soul that cannot be totally extirpated.
The civilization of the merchant and the bourgeois who extols only the "civic virtues" and who identifies the standard of values with material well-being, economic prosperity, a comfortable and conformist existence based on one's work, productivity, sports, movies, and sexuality causes the involution and extinction of the warrior type and the hero.
Mankind must come to terms with its creation and compete with it. This is impossible unless a new inner dimension is created, which, in the case of war, will manifest itself in the form of a cold, lucid, and complex heroism in which the romantic, patriotic, instinctive element is absent, and in which, beside a more specific technical presentation, we find a sacrificial disposition: man's capability to face, and even to love, the most destructive situations through the possibilities they afford. These possibilities, in their elementary character, offer him the chance to grasp what may be called the "absolute person."
It may be said that modern war will lead only to the transformation of the heroic disposition and that its increasingly technical nature will constitute a real test, so that this disposition may assume a quintessential form, be purified, and almost deindividualized, joining particular and complex forms of control, lucidity, and dominion. This purely spiritual and naked assumption of heroism is probably the only one that is still possible.
...We all possess a secret, wonderful ability to retreat from the vicissitudes of time into our innermost self, stripped of all outside influences, and there, in the shape of immutability, to contemplate the eternal in ourselves. This contemplation is the innermost and most unique experience, on which all and everything we know and believe about a supernatural world depends. Only this contemplation persuades us that something IS, while everything else to which we apply that term only APPEARS to be. It is different from all other sensual contemplation in that it can only be produced by freedom and is alien and foreign to all those whose freedom, overwhelmed by the thronging power of objects, barely suffices to bring forth consciousness. In this moment of contemplation, time and duration melt away from us:
We are not time, but rather time, or better yet, pure absolute eternity, is WITHIN US.
...Wither must we direct our hopes?
Toward new philosophers, we have no other choice; toward spirits strong and original enough to make a start on antithetical evaluations and to revalue and reverse "eternal values"...so as to make an end to that gruesome dominion of chance and nonsense that has hitherto been called "history" - the nonsense of the "greatest #" is only its latest form - for that a new kind of philosopher and commander will some time be needed...
-Julius Evola, from Men Amongst the Ruins
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