The Organic State Concept

The idea of the organic State is a traditional one, and thus we can say that every true State has always had a certain organic character.

A State is organic when it has a center, and this center is an idea that shapes the various domains of life in an efficacious way. A central idea, a symbol of sovereignty with a corresponding, positive principle of authority was their foundation and animating force.

The main thing that emerges in ancient forms is that unity in them did not possess a merely political character, but rather a spiritual and quite often religious one, the political domain apparently being shaped and upheld by an idea or a general view that was also articulated in thought, law, art, customs, cult, and the form of the economy.

A unitary spirit was manifested in a choral variety of forms, corresponding to the various possibilities of human existence; in this context, organic and traditional are more or less synonymous terms. The spirituality of the whole was that which occasioned the terminal and twilight phases of a given cycle of civilization.

Totalitarianism, though it reacts against individualism and social atomism, brings a final end to the devastation of what may still survive in a society from the previous "organic" phase: quality, articulated forms, castes and classes, the value of personality, true freedom, daring and responsible initiative, and heroic feats.

An organism of a superior type includes multiple functions retaining their specific character and a relative autonomy, all the while mutually coordinating and integrating each other, converging into a superior unity that never ceases to be ideally presupposed.

Thus, in an organic State we find both unity and multiplicity, gradation and hierarchy; we do not find the dualism of center and formless mass typical of a totalitarian regime. Totalitarianism, in order to assert itself, imposes uniformity. In the final analysis, totalitarianism rests and relies on the inorganic world of quantity to which individualistic disintegration has led, and not on the world of quality and personality.

The organic view presupposes something "transcendent" or "from above" as the basis of authority and comman, without which there would automatically be no immaterial and substantial connections of the parts with the center; no inner order of single freedoms; no immanence of a general law that guides and sustains people without coercing them; and no supra-individual disposition of the particular, without which every decentralization and articulation would eventually pose a danger for the unity of the whole system.

Where the meaning of what an oath is all about has been completely lost, how can one be willing or required to swear such an oath, if the State is nothing more than what modern "enlightened" ideologies claim it to be?

In a corporation, to expect one of the stockholders to sacrifice himself to any degree for the common good and, worse yet, in favor of another stockholder would be regarded as absurd.

Bonapartism - in this trend new forms of government emerge in which a small # of rulers or a leader pretend to represent the people and to speak and to act on behalf of them.

The figure of the great politician as one who is a despot and at the same time a worshipper of the people, or simultaneously a pimp and a whore, which is something people instinctively perceive.

He ignores the traditional principle according to which the wider the base is, the higher the pinnacle should be.

When he rises to power, the prestige of the Bonapartist leader depends on the fact that the masses perceive him to be close to them or as "one of us."

The nature of the principle on which auctoritas is based is very important, and acts as the test of the elective affinities and as a determinant factor in the process of crystallization. The process has an anagogica character and causes the integration of the individual when the center of the system, or its fundamental symbol, is such that it appeals to the higher faculties and possibilities of the human being and awakens and moves these faculties, acting as a reference point for them, in the adhesion and in the acknowledgment of the collectivity.

Thus, there is a substantial difference between the adhesion on which a political system of a warrior, heroic, or feudal type is based (the foundation of which is both sacred and spiritual) and the adhesion found in movements led by a tribune of the people, a dictator, or a "Bonapartist" leader.

We are still in the domain of forms of individualism and naturalism that are unable to formulate any doctrine of true legitimate authority. And yet most people, even when they admit the notion of aristocracy in principle, ultimately settle for a very limited view of it: they admire an individual for being exceptional and brilliant, instead of for being one in whom a tradition and a special "spiritual race" shine forth, or instead of whose greatness is due not to his human virtues, but rather to the principle, the idea, and a certain regal impersonality that he embodies.

-Julius Evola, from Men Amongst the Ruins, Organic State - Totalitarianism