"On the first point we must say that there does not exist in Italy today a Right worthy of this name, a Right as a unified political force that is organised and furnished with a precise doctrine. What is currently called the Right in political struggles is defined less by a positive content than by a generic opposition to the most extreme forms of subversion and social revolution that gravitate around Marxism and Communism. The Italian Right includes diverse and even contradictory tendencies. A significant sign of confused ideas and today’s narrow horizons is established by the fact that in Italy today liberals and many other proponents of democracy can be considered as men of the Right, a situation that would have appalled representatives of a real traditional Right, because when such a Right existed, liberalism and democracy were notoriously and justly considered as currents of revolutionary subversion, more or less as radicalism, Marxism and Communism appear today in the eyes of the so-called parties of order.
Do we really need to point out the absurdity of identifying any kind of political Right with the economic Right? Marxist polemics notoriously and fraudulently aim at this identification. For Marxists there is no difference between the Right and the capitalist, or the conservative and ‘reactionary’ bourgeoisie, which is intent on defending its interests and privileges. In our political writings, we have never grown weary of denouncing this insidious confusion and the irresponsibility of those who, by favouring this confusion to some degree, offer arms to the enemy. Between the true Right and the economic Right there is not only no common identity, but on the contrary, there is a clear antithesis.
Practically speaking, the Right defines itself in the framework of the democratic parliamentary party regime in opposition to a ‘Left’, and therefore in a framework rather different from the traditional one of the preceding regimes. Rather, it is an opposition within the system (or structure) which has the function of rectifying or integrating criticism, without of course questioning the idea of the state, which is in a certain way transcendent and inviolable. In principle, however, the Right represents, or ought to represent, a higher demand. It ought to be the recipient and affirmer of values linked directly to the idea of the true state: values that are in a certain sense central and superior to every practical opposition, according to the superiority inherent in the very concept of authority or sovereignty taken in its fullest sense.
We can therefore bring these preliminary considerations to a close by saying that, ideally, the concept of a true Right, what we mean by the Right, ought to be defined in terms of forces and traditions that acted formatively on a group of nations, and sometimes also on super-national unifications, before the French Revolution, before the advent of the Third Estate and the world of the masses, and before bourgeois and industrial culture, with all its consequences and its games, which consist of actions and concordant reactions that have led to the contemporary chaos and to all that threatens to destroy the little that still remains of European culture and European prestige.
From the point of view of principle, every socialist and democratic ideology was surpassed in Fascist political doctrine. The state was recognised as possessing pre-eminence in respect to people and nation, that is, the dignity of a single superior power through which the nation acquires a real self-awareness, possesses a form and a will, and participates in a supernatural order. Mussolini could affirm (1924): ‘Without the State there is no nation. There are merely human aggregations subject to all the disintegrations which history may inflict upon them’,[69] and ‘The nation does not beget the State […] On the contrary, the nation is created by the State, which gives the people […] the will, and thereby an effective existence.’
The formula ‘The people is the body of the state and the state is the spirit of the people’ (1934), if adequately interpreted, brings us back to the Classical idea of a dynamic and creative relationship between ‘form’ and ‘matter’ (body). The state is the ‘form’ conceived as an organising and animating force, according to the interpretation given to ‘matter’ and ‘form’ in traditional philosophy, starting with Aristotle. Therefore, this view rejects the hollow conception of a state which is supposed to limit itself to protecting the ‘negative liberties’ of the citizens as simple empirical individuals, ‘guaranteeing a certain well-being and a relatively peaceful communal life together’, in essence reflecting or passively following the forces of social and economic reality which are conceived as its basis. It is also the opposite of the idea of a pure bureaucracy of ‘public administration’, according to the bloated image of what can be the form and spirit of any individualistic society with purely utilitarian ends. When Fascism affirmed the trinomial of ‘authority, order and justice’ next to this basic conception, it is undeniable that Fascism renewed the tradition that formed every greater European state. We know then that Fascism recalled, or tried to recall, the Roman idea as the supreme and specific integration of the ‘myth’ of the new political organism, ‘strong and organic’. The Roman tradition, for Mussolini, was not supposed to be rhetoric and tinsel, but an ‘idea of force’ and also an ideal for the formation of the new type of man who ought to have power in his hands. ‘Rome is our starting point and our point of reference; it is our symbol or, if you prefer, our myth’ (1922).
A certain positive continuity, however, was established only to a limited degree concerning the significance of the state and authority (imperium, in the Classical sense) and also in relation to a virile ethics and a style of rigour and discipline that Fascism proposed to Italians. In official Fascism, however, there was no place for a deepening of the further dimensions of the Roman symbol — symbolic dimensions in the true sense, of a worldview — and the clarification of the Roman character to which it should properly be referred. The elements that could have undertaken this task were either non-existent or were not utilised. The general situation of the epoch, and the significance that Catholicism as a social force had in Italy, were bound to prevent Fascism from directly confronting the serious problem of the ultimate chrism of the state, although it ought to have been led to confront it, inter alia, also by the natural implications of a true, courageous revival of the Roman idea. So, in fact, it continued to oscillate back and forth.
The traditional state is organic, but not totalitarian. It is differentiated and articulated, and admits zones of partial autonomy. It coordinates forces and causes them to participate in a superior unity, while recognising their liberty. Exactly because it is strong, it does not need to resort to mechanical centralising, which is required only when it is necessary to rein in a shapeless and atomistic mass of individuals and wills, from which, however, disorder can never be truly eliminated, but only temporarily contained. To use a happy expression of Walter Heinrich, [87] the true state is omnia potens, not omnia faciens;[88] that is, it keeps at the centre an absolute power that it can and must use without obstacles in cases of necessity and ultimate decisions, ignoring the fetish for the so-called ‘rule of law’. It does not, however, meddle with everything, it does not substitute itself for everything, it does not aim at a barracks-style regimentation of society (in the negative sense), nor at a levelling conformism instead of free acknowledgement and loyalty. It does not proceed by means of impertinent and obtuse interventions by the public sphere and the ‘state’ into the private sphere. The traditional image is that of a natural gravitation of parts and partial unities around a centre that commands without compelling, and acts out of prestige with an authority that can, of course, resort to force, but abstains from it as much as possible. The evidence of the effective force of a state is found in the measure of the margin it can concede to a partial, rational decentralisation. Systematic state interference can be a principle only in the socialism of the technocratic and materialist state.
Where fascism presented a ‘totalitarian’ character, we should think of this as a deviation from its deepest and most valid demands. In fact, Mussolini could speak of the state as ‘a system of hierarchies’ — hierarchies that ‘should have a soul’ and culminate in an elite, an ideal that is obviously different from the totalitarian ideal. Since we have spoken of the economy — but we shall return to that subject — Mussolini disavowed the so-called ‘pan-corporatist’ tendency that really had a totalitarian character. The Fascist Charter of Labour openly recognised the importance of private initiative. In addition, we could refer to the very symbol of the lictors’ fasces, from which the Blackshirts took the name of the movement for anti-democratic and anti-Marxist revolution and, according to Mussolini’s phrase, was supposed to signify ‘unity, will and discipline’. In fact, the fasces are composed of distinct branches united around a central axis that, according to an archaic symbolism that is common to many ancient traditions, expresses the power from on high, the pure principle of imperium. Therefore it has unity and, at the same time, multiplicity, united organically and in synergy, in visible correspondence with the ideas we mentioned above.
Fascism restored, to a certain degree, a principle of the traditional legacy, the principle of the ‘corporation’ understood as an organic productive unity, not one fractured by the spirit of class and class struggle. In fact, the corporation as it existed in the context of artisan workmanship and before extreme industrialisation, and as it has often existed beginning with the best period of the Middle Ages (it is significant that abolishing the corporation was one of the first initiatives taken by the French Revolution), offered a plan that, adequately reorganised, could have served — and could still serve today—as a model for a general reconstructive action informed by the organic principle. Fascism, however, in fact performed this function only up to a certain point, mainly because of the remnants of the past that survived into the Twenty Years. Here we are dealing essentially with trade unionism, which continued to exercise a notable influence on Mussolini and the various elements close to him.
Autarchy comes to us from Classical antiquity, especially from the Stoic schools that professed an ethics of independence or the sovereignty of the individual. In order to guard this value, where it was necessary, one had to follow the strict principle of abstine et sustine. The Fascist principle of autarchy can therefore be considered as a kind of extension of this ethic to the plane of the national economy. An orientation of which we can completely approve is that of, if necessary, holding the general standard of living relatively low, adopting what the English call ‘austerity’, which, even in a different context, has had to be practiced here and there by different nations after the Second World War, but assuring ourselves a maximum of independence. In the case of a nation with limited natural resources, like Italy, a certain regime of autarchy and austerity was, in fact, the right direction. As for the course of the national life, we hold the normal situation to be the complete opposite of everything we are witnessing today: apparently generalised prosperity and thoughtless living from day to day beyond one’s means, along with a frightening state debt balance, leading to extreme economic and social instability, growing inflation and an invasion of foreign capital which brings with it many important visible and invisible influences.
Naturally, it is not right to go overboard in the opposite direction. In every respect, we can be guided by the analogy offered by the behaviour of a man worthy of the name. He can promote the development of his body and bodily health, but not become its slave. When it is necessary, he reins in the corresponding impulses and makes them obey a higher will, even at the cost of sacrifices. He does the same thing every time he wants to or must confront tasks that demand particular strain. In order to make possible what, on the national level, corresponds to a similar line, adequate relations have to be established between the political principle of an organic national state and the world of the economy, which corresponds to its corporal part. In Fascism, on the one hand, the creation of a strong state was envisioned in which all the possibilities of the nation were activated, but it cannot be denied, on the other hand, that by autarchy Fascism did not envision a sort of ‘splendid isolation’ (as the French say) of the nation, rendered self-sufficient as far as possible. It was also preparing and collecting the nation’s forces in anticipation of an armed encounter between states, with the experiences of the campaign in Ethiopia serving as a warning. Mussolini’s statements quoted above also undeniably emphasise this aspect. Still, apart from all this, and understanding the principle of autarchy in terms of a challenge to the economy and its presumed iron laws that create ‘our destiny’, it cannot be said in this regard that the results of experience have been negative. In Italy and also in Germany before the Second World War, internal economic affairs could go on more or less as usual despite the virtual international boycott suffered by the two nations and, especially, the devaluing of their currency abroad.
So from autarchy as scandal and economic heresy, we can move on to considerations of a more general character. The Marxist formula ‘the economy is our destiny’, with the corresponding interpretation of history as a function of the economy, is well-known. But economic determinism has also been acknowledged by currents other than Marxism, some of which are even opposed to it. Here we can say that, if taken in itself, this formula is absurd, but unfortunately not if we take into consideration the modern world, because the modern world has caused it to become a reality to an increasingly greater degree. The pure homo oeconomicus is an abstraction but, like many abstractions, it can become a reality by means of a process of hypertrophy and the absolutising of one part in respect to the whole.
At the point in which the economic interest becomes dominant, it is natural that man becomes the subject of the laws of the economy, which acquire an almost autonomous character, until other interests are reaffirmed and a superior power intervenes. That ‘economic man’ did not exist was also Mussolini’s point of view, who opposed his idea of ‘integral man’ (1933) to ‘economic man’.[176] His idea was that ‘politics has dominated and will always dominate the economy’, mentioning in this context that what gets conceived as man’s destiny ‘is, at least three quarters of it, created by weakness or strength of will’ (1932). Here we can mention Spengler’s perspectives. In his examination of the forms with which a cycle of cultures comes to an end, with the descent to the level of a Zivilisation, he considered the level at which the economy becomes dominant and creates a certain connection between democracy, capitalism and finance. This connection demonstrates, moreover, the illusory nature of the ‘liberty’ claimed in this last period.
Obviously ‘political liberties’ are nothing without economic liberty or autonomy, in the individual field as well as the collective one: in the collective field because it is the groups in possession of wealth who control the press and all the other means of shaping ‘public opinion’ and disseminating propaganda in a democratic regime; in the individual and practical field, because access to the various ‘conquests’ of modern technical and economic civilisation, with its apparent prosperity, are paid for with just as many constraints on the individual, with an increasingly rigorous integration into the collective gears set in motion by the economy and in front of which ‘political liberties’ are something derisory.
Spengler, however, predicted a successive phase, which he called the phase of ‘absolute politics’ and which was related to the appearance of those new leaders of a problematic type. While we hold to the reservations we have made concerning this last subject, from the perspective of the whole it is, however, possible to imagine a change in the situation so as to create a strong state, based on the detached principle of authority. The strong state can be given the task of reining in the ‘blind giant’ of the economy as destiny. Werner Sombart coined the expression ‘blind giant’ with reference especially to high capitalism and its immanent determinisms. This specific reference can be taken into consideration: beginning with the principle of the pre-eminence of politics over the economy, and with a return to the idea of the true state. With its sovereignty and authority realised in a system of adequate social structures, even the monstrous development of capitalism in the direction of unfettered productivity can be limited, with the ultimate end of restoring the economy, and everything that is economic, to the subordinate position in which it becomes only a means to an end, and a circumscribed dominion within a much vaster hierarchy of values and interests.
To complete these considerations, it is possible to specify this ultimate end in regard to its content, and say that, from our point of view, the essential thing would be to reach an equilibrium, a stability, and put a stop to unlimited change. There could be no question of this in Fascism, which still had before it the hard work of getting the nation into economic, industrial and social shape. This was enough of a task, even apart from its expansionist projects which were tied to a certain aspiration toward ‘greatness’, rather than to the ‘splendid isolation’ of autarchy, as we have called it. Under these conditions, an active and dynamic orientation was only natural, a drive forward. The formula ‘anyone who stops is lost’ could even be enunciated, despite its problematic character, indicating the obviously anti-autarchic implications of accepting one’s entrance into a general process of conditioning without defensive measures.
So no one asked the ultimate question, namely that of the ideal culture to strive for, definitely or in principle. That would mean wondering how far we felt ourselves called to go against the current of the general movement that was carrying the modern world towards what was predicted to be progress but, in relation to its genuine internal sense, should rather be called, as by Bernanos, a ‘retreat forward’. How far, at a particular time, would it be appropriate to consider an orientation that could be called ‘opposition to progress’ by people who confuse stability and a willed, positive limit with immobility and inertia, and who do not acknowledge that stopping, a break on the ‘horizontal’ direction, the direction of change and evolution in a material, technical and economic sense of processes that end by escaping from man’s control. This will always be the precondition for progress or movement in a ‘vertical’ direction, for the realisation of higher possibilities and the true autonomy of the person, and finally, to use a well-known formula, for a realisation of ‘being’ beyond ‘wellbeing’.
The fact is that we ought to distinguish between a representative system in general and a representative system that is egalitarian, which has a levelling effect on society and is based purely on number. The state of the type that we call traditional recognised the representative principle, but in an organic context. It was a question not of representation or of individuals, but of ‘bodies’, where individuals were significant only insofar as they were part of a differentiated unity, and each individual had a different weight and quality. As a representation of bodies, the parliament, or another analogous institution, had an undoubted value, because it embraced the interests of the nation in all their richness and diversity. Thus, along with the representative principle, the hierarchical principle was affirmed, because the merely numerical force of the groups, bodies or partial unities that had their own representatives in parliament was not taken in account, but instead their function and dignity. The fact that the climate and values of a traditional state are different from a democracy’s means that it automatically excludes the pre-eminence, which is imposed by number, of interests of a lower order, as takes place today and will always take place in the modern, absolute democracies, because mass parties will always necessarily prevail in them. The States-General, or parliament as it existed in Hungary and Austria, which was based on the plan of the Ständestaat, a characteristic designation for the system of a unity where representation was qualitative, articulated and graded, was close to the structure we are alluding to. The corporations, the nobility, the scholars, the army, and so on were represented as bodies that corresponded to the nation, which was qualitatively differentiated so as to treat the interests of the nation and the public in concert.
Therefore the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations was supposed to be a place, not of ‘debates’, but of coordinated labour, where criticism was admitted not on a political basis, but on a technical and objective one. Nevertheless, it was precisely this delimitation of scope inherent in representation by competences, with the inevitable emphasis that was placed on the productive economic sphere, which required an adequate institutional proclamation of the hierarchical principle in the sense of a higher request linked to the realm of ultimate ends. Once the parties were eliminated and representation was depoliticised, the purely political principle should have been concentrated and exercised on a distinct and superior level.
In fact, from the mouth of Mussolini himself, Fascism explicitly proclaimed, ‘Corporations belong to the order of means and not to that of ends’ (1934). The corporation is the institution with which ‘the world of the economy, extraneous and disorganized until now, enters the state’ (1934), thus allowing the political discipline to associate with the economic one.
The entrance of the economy into the state should not be interpreted as introducing a ‘Trojan horse’. Corporatism was not supposed to be a form or cover by means of which the economy would succeed in taking over the state, and so lead to the degradation and involution of the very idea of the state. The conclusion has effectively been the tendency of so-called ‘pan-corporatism’ expressed especially by some intellectuals of a Gentilian orientation at the corporative conference that was held at Ferrara in 1932. In this line there were those who could conceive of a type of corporative Communism (‘proprietary corporatism’ more or less under the control of the state) and who favoured the dissolution of the Party as an institution, to be replaced by a purely trade union/corporatist state. All these, however, remained ineffectual ideological dreams.
On the other hand, the distinction between the political sphere and the corporatist sphere was not abolished even in the opposite direction, starting from above, with a ‘totalitarianism’ imposed by the state. In fact, Mussolini indicated ‘the totalitarian state’ as third among the conditions for developing a ‘full, complete, integral corporatism’, along with ideal high tension and ‘the introduction of political discipline along with economic discipline […] so there may be, beyond the opposition of interests, a bond that unites everything’. He also declared, ‘The corporatist economy has many forms and is harmonious. Fascism has never thought of reducing it all to a greatest common denominator, transforming all the nation’s economies into a state monopoly. The corporations discipline them and the state does not take them over, except in the defence sector.’ It was explicitly proclaimed that ‘the corporatist state is not the economic state’, which could be understood in a double sense: as opposition to the corporation’s functioning either as the instrument of statist centralisation or as a takeover of the state by the economy.
Even before Fascism’s racist turn, we had the opportunity to take a stance against racism that was of a biological and scientific character, on the one hand, and collectivising and fanatical, on the other, such as prevailed in Germany, opposing to it a ‘racism’ that, while maintaining a vision of the ideal we have discussed of human completeness and interest, particularly emphasised what we called the ‘inner race’, asserting on this topic a traditional, anti-materialist conception of the human being. Moreover, the ‘inner race’ could have been the base and fulcrum for the formative action we have talked about. Even if it were right to propose a ‘type’ as the ideal and centre of crystallisation, it was not appropriate for Italy to refer to the Nordic-Aryan type, following the Germans. The science of origins had ascertained that different groups differentiated from a common primal stock (‘Indo-European’, ‘Aryan’): on one side the Hellenic element (especially the Doric of Sparta), on another the basal Roman element, and finally the German element. Various typical traits of character, ethics, customs, worldview and culture shared by these three stocks attest this single, remote origin. Thus for this centre of crystallisation we could choose the ‘Aryo-Roman’ type with its characteristic gifts, which could constitute an adequate integration of Fascism’s bold ‘Roman’ vocation on a concrete level, while remaining completely independent of German racism. We expounded these ideas, along with many others, in a book, Synthesis of a Doctrine of Race. Mussolini read the book and invited me to meet him. It is symptomatic that he approved of its theses unconditionally, and finally agreed that we would undertake some rather significant initiatives based on the book. The crisis of events and certain internal doubts kept us from completing them.
Concretely it was a question of observing that a nation is not a ‘race’, and in every member of an historic nation there exist various components or possibilities. An adequate climate of high stress can create a situation where some of these possibilities get the upper hand and achieve a differentiation that can gradually reach the level of soma. As a particular case, some people have noted the delineation of a common physical type among members of particular bodies of men who have been assigned specific, demanding tasks (today, for instance, paratroopers and similar soldiers). A similar order of ideas obviously has nothing in common with a lower racism or with vulgar anti-Semitism, and we believe that it can play a role in the context of values which are compatible with the action of a state of a hierarchical and traditional character.
[NOTE: We recalled above that anti-Semitism has existed in all times. In the Christian era it had a religious character, but it would be difficult to explain the constant aversion the same peoples nourished for the Hebrew based only upon the religious factor, without also introducing the factor of character. Modern anti-Semitism, on the other hand, has had a social basis. It can be traced back to the reaction provoked by the fact that Jews, who stick together in tight solidarity, have succeeded in ensuring themselves a pre-eminent position in the intellectual, economic and professional fields in various countries according to ratios that have no relationship to the actual proportion of the Jewish group in relation to the whole ‘Aryan’ population of the nations concerned (see Notes on the Third Reich, Chapter IV). If we want to be impartial, however, it is not fair to assert the simplistic social situation with which the appeal to ‘race’ could be reduced to a pretext for ‘Get up! I want to sit there.’ We would first need to define what it means to be Jewish (Judaism as an inner or spiritual race) and, aside from their numerical proportions in key positions, demonstrate that in individual cases, this way of being gives a special, undesirable direction to the relevant activity, perhaps even without the person in question being aware of it. Naturally ‘race’, in this sense — Judaism — has nothing to do with religion. Conversion to Christianity changes it as little as a similar conversion could change the constitution, heredity and innate dispositions of a Negro. This consideration explains the importance of the concept of inner race, that is, to prevent every one-sidedness. With reference to this, however, we have had the opportunity to state that today, anti-Jewish polemic makes little sense, given that the qualities that can be, perhaps, deprecated in Jews are found in the so-called ‘Aryans’ to no less a degree, without having the excuse of hereditary precedents. Speaking of American capitalism and considering the traditional relationship of Jews with trade, money and interest, Werner Sombart could say, similarly, that to the degree that the Jew emancipated himself and rose in the modern epoch, to the same degree he transmitted his own mentality to the non-Hebrew.]
While we acknowledge the factors we mentioned and their related situations, and in particular remembering the arbitrary nature of a one-sided identification of racism with anti-Semitic fanaticism, we should not therefore consider the racist (if we insist on using this term) aspect of Fascism as an aberration, as imitation, or as a ‘foreign body’.
(We should not forget that Mussolini had done his best to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War at the last moment with an initiative that found no good will, especially from France. We should not forget, in addition, that Mussolini had earlier proposed the formation of the ‘Quadripartite Pact’ — an understanding involving Germany, England, Italy and France — a formula that could have had a fundamental European importance, but which clashed with the ideological biases and the narrow horizons of the proposed partners.)
Remembering all that we have said about possible later corrections and normalisations of the system, we can say that no price would have been too high, supposing the war had proven victorious by some miracle (given the enormous disproportion of the material forces that decided it) and had the following results: breaking the backbone of Soviet Russia and very likely provoking the crisis of Communism itself (instead of the Communist takeover of all the European countries on the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ and the current Cold War between ‘East’ and ‘West’ that, for good or ill, is still going on); humiliating the United States and expelling it from European politics (instead of a Western Europe that, in its own defence, is more or less at the mercy of the United States and its presidents); crippling British power but certainly, despite the probability that some of its colonies would have fallen into other hands, to a much lesser degree than happened to ‘victorious’ England, which has seen its empire broken up (exactly the same thing that happened to ‘victorious’ France); preventing, when it was still possible, the Communist takeover of China as a result of the victory of Japan, instead of the rise of a new, powerful and very dangerous home in Asia for worldwide subversion; impeding the insurrection of coloured peoples and the end of European hegemony, because never — and again never — in the ‘New Order’, under the banner of the ideas defended by the peoples of the Axis, would there have been a place for the self-destructive psychosis of anti-colonialism, nor could that revolt have counted on help from the Soviet Union. All people with sentiments that are not necessarily ‘Fascist’, but who are of the Right, when they allow their imagination to dwell on such possibilities and overcome their current prejudices, have no choice but to draw up a balance sheet and adequately measure the distance that separates them from what instead presents itself to our eyes as the current world situation.
The clear stance against every form of democracy and socialism is the first characteristic of the state of which we spoke. It will put an end to the stupid infatuation, cowardice and hypocrisy of those who today chatter of ‘democracy’, who proclaim democracy, who exalt democracy. Democracy is only a regressive, crepuscular phenomenon.
The true state will then be oriented against both capitalism and Communism. At its centre will stand a principle of authority and a transcendent symbol of sovereignty. The most natural incarnation of such a symbol is the monarchy. The need to confer a chrism on this transcendence is of fundamental importance.
Monarchy is not incompatible with a ‘legal dictatorship’, more or less as it was in ancient Roman law. The sovereign can confer exceptional unitary powers on a person of special stature and qualification, still on a legal basis, when there are special situations to overcome or exceptional tasks to confront. We can accept the formula of ‘authoritarian constitutionalism’. It entails overcoming the fetish and mythology of the so-called ‘rule of law’. Law is not born from anything perfectly formed, nor with characteristics of eternal, immutable validity. At the origin of every law stands a relationship of force. This power that is at the origin of every law can intervene, suspending and modifying the current structures when the situation demands it, attesting with this action that there still exists in the political organism a will and a sovereignty, that it is not reduced to something abstract, mechanical and soulless.
The state is the primary element that precedes nation, people and ‘society’. The state — and with the state everything that is properly constituted as political order and political reality — is defined essentially on the basis of an idea, not by naturalistic and contractual factors.
Not a social contract, but relations of loyalty and obedience, of free subordination and honour, are the bases of the true state, which does not acknowledge demagoguery and populism. The true state is organic and unified without being ‘totalitarian’. The relations we are discussing allow for the possibility of a large margin of decentralisation. Liberty and partial autonomy stand in relation to loyalty and responsibility according to a precise reciprocity. When these relations are broken, the power that is concentrated at the centre, manifesting its own nature, will therefore intervene with a severity and harshness in proportion to the liberty that was conceded.
The true state does not acknowledge the system of parliamentary democracy and party rule (partitocrazia). It can admit only corporative representations that are differentiated and articulated through a Lower or Corporative House. Above that will stand an Upper House as an extraordinary tribunal to guarantee the pre-eminence of the political principal, and having higher goals which are not only material and short-term. It will be necessary to take a resolute stance against the aberrant system of indiscriminate universal suffrage and ‘one man, one vote’ which now includes the female sex. The formula of ‘politicising the masses’ should be rejected. The majority of a healthy and ordered nation should not be involved in politics. The Fascist trinity, ‘authority, order and justice’, retains its unshaken validity for the true state.
The political party, which is a necessary organ for a movement in a period of transition and struggle, should not be replaced by a ‘single party’ once power is conquered and the system is stabilised. Its quite different task will be to establish something like an Order, which will participate in the dignity and authority concentrated in the centre, and assume some of the functions that in earlier, traditional regimes belonged to the nobility as a political class in key positions of the state (for example in the army and the diplomatic corps). The premise of this class was a stricter ethic and a special lifestyle. This nucleus will also act as the guardian of the idea of the state, and will prevent the ‘caesarean’ isolation of whoever exercises the supreme authority.
The sphere of politics and power should be, by its very nature an function, free from economic influences, influences by economic groups or special interests. It is appropriate to recall the statement of Sulla, who said that his ambition was not to possess gold, but to hold power over those who possess it. The corporative reform should take place within the concrete world of labour and production, that is, in the businesses, through a new, organic structuring of them and a decisive elimination of class spirit, class struggle, and the different mentalities that call themselves ‘capitalist’, proletarian or Marxist. The trade union movement must be rejected. It is the greatest tool of all the subversive movements of recent times, and is the real cancer of the democratic state. As in the Fascist conception, it will be the state’s task to act as referee, moderator and decider in the case of conflicts and disruptions. The objectivity and rigour of this higher court, which needs to be made concrete in adequate structures, will allow the abolition of the tool of the strike. The abuses of strikes, their use for blackmail and the other purposes for which they are used, which are more often political than social and economic, have become increasingly obvious and indefensible.
The defence of the principle of true justice will entail denouncing what is today continually promoted as ‘social justice’, a justice that serves only the lowest classes of society (the so-called ‘working classes’) and works to the detriment of other classes, effectively leading to injustice. The true state will also be hierarchical, especially because it will be able to acknowledge and create respect for the hierarchy of true values, giving primacy to values of a higher order, not material or utilitarian ones, and admitting relevant, legitimate inequalities or differences of social positions, opportunities and dignity. The true state will reject as aberrant the formula of the state of labour, whether or not this state is presented as ‘national’.
The vital condition of every true state is a well-defined climate: the climate of the highest possible tension, but not of forced agitation. It will be desirable that everyone stay at his post, that he takes pleasure in an activity in conformity with his own nature and vocation, which is therefore free and desired for itself before considering utilitarian purposes and the unhealthy desire to live above one’s proper condition. If it is not possible to ask everyone to follow an ‘ascetic and military vision of life’, it will be possible to aim at a climate of concentrated intensity, of personal life, that will encourage people to prefer a greater margin of liberty, as opposed to comfort and prosperity paid for with the consequent limitation of liberty through the evitable economic and social influences.
Autarchy, in the terms we have emphasised, is a valid Fascist formula. A course of virile, measured austerity is also valid and, finally, an internal discipline through which one develops a taste and an anti-bourgeois orientation of life, but no schoolmarmish and impertinent intrusion by what is public into the field of private life. Here, too, the principle should be liberty connected with equal responsibility and, in general, giving prominence to the principles of ‘great morality’ as opposed to the principles of conformist ‘little morality’. In essence, the climate of the true state should be personalising, animating and free. An inner force should produce a potential orbiting of individuals, groups, partial unities and men of an Order around a centre. This orbiting is one of which we should acknowledge the ‘anagogic’ and integrative character. It is integrative also in relation to the fact, which is not at all paradoxical, that true personality is realised only if it is affected by references to what is more than personal. Ultimately on this plane, through the rise and life of the true state, ‘imponderables’ come into play, as though predestined, because no oppressive and direct initiative can create and maintain this kind of climate.
In the context of a similar state, and under the sign of a relevant conception of life, a people can develop and achieve a calm, an internal force and a stability which does not mean stasis or stagnation, but rather the equilibrium of a concentrated power that, when the call is made, can cause everyone to rise immediately to their feet and makes them capable of absolute commitment and irresistible action.
A doctrine of the state can only propose values to test the elective affinities and the dominant or latent vocations of a nation. If a people cannot or does not want to acknowledge the values that we have called ‘traditional’, and which define a true Right, it deserves to be left to itself. At most, we can point out to it the illusions and suggestions of which it has been or is the victim, which are due to a general action which has often been systematically organised, and to regressive processes. If not even this leads to a sensible result, this people will suffer the fate that it has created, by making use of its ‘liberty’." [Fascism viewed from the Right]
"This present "civilization," starting from Western hotbeds, has extended the contagion to every land that was still healthy and has brought to all strata of society and all races the following "gifts": restlessness, dissatisfaction, resentment, the need to go further and faster, and the inability to possess one's life in simplicity, independence, and balance. Modem civilization has pushed man onward; it has generated in him the need for an increasingly greater number of things; it has made him more and more insufficient to himself and powerless. Thus, every new invention and technological discovery, rather than a conquest, really represents a defeat and a new whiplash in an ever faster race blindly taking place within a system of conditionings that are increasingly serious and irreversible and that for the most part go unnoticed. This is how the various paths converge: technological civilization, the dominant role of the economy, and the civilization of production and consumption all complement the exaltation of becoming and progress; in other words, they contribute to the manifestation of the "demonic" element in the modem world." [Revolt against the Modern World]
"Communism cannot be a danger other than in the brutal and catastrophic form of a direct seizure of power by communists. On the other hand Americanization gains ground by a process of gradual infiltration, effecting modifications of mentalities and customs which seem inoffensive in themselves but which end in a fundamental perversion and degradation against which it is impossible to fight other than within oneself.
...Forgetting their own cultural inheritance they readily turn to the United States as something akin to the parent guide of the world. Whoever wants to be modern has to measure himself according to the American standard. It is pitiable to witness a European country so debase itself. Veneration for America has nothing to do with a cultured interest in the way other people live. On the contrary, servility towards the United States leads one to think that there is no other way of life worth considering on the same level as the American one.
The recently deceased John Dewey was applauded by the American press as the most representative figure of American civilization. This is quite right. His theories are entirely representative of the vision of man and life which is the premise of Americanism and its 'democracy'.
The essence of such theories is this: that everyone can become what he wants to, within the limits of the technological means at his disposal. Equally, a person is not what he is from his true nature and there is no real difference between people, only differences in qualifications. According to this theory anyone can be anyone he wants to be if he knows how to train himself.
This is obviously the case with the 'self-made man'; in a society which has lost all sense of tradition the notion of personal aggrandizement will extend into every aspect of human existence, reinforcing the egalitarian doctrine of pure democracy. If the basis of such ideas is accepted, then all natural diversity has to be abandoned. Each person can presume to possess the potential of everyone else and the terms 'superior' and 'inferior' lose their meaning; every notion of distance and respect loses meaning; all life-styles are open to all. To all organic conceptions of life Americans oppose a mechanistic conception. In a society which has 'started from scratch', everything has the characteristic of being fabricated. In American society appearances are masks not faces. At the same time, proponents of the American way of life are hostile to personality.
The Americans' 'open-mindedness', which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their 'individualism'. Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind', puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.
In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste (in the original meaning of the word), not even that of servant or shudra, would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over the entire world." [Civilta Americana]
"Present western "civilization" awaits a substantial upheaval (rivolgimento), without which it is destined, sooner or later, to smash its own head. It has carried out the most complete perversion of the rational order of things. Reign of matter, gold, machines, numbers; in this civilization there is no longer breath or liberty or light. The West has lost its ability to command and to obey. It has lost its feeling for contemplation and action. It has lost its feeling for values, spiritual power, godlike men. It no longer knows nature. No longer a living body made of symbols, gods, and ritual act, no longer a harmony, a cosmos in which man moves freely like "a kingdom within a kingdom", nature has assumed for the Westerner a dull and fatal exteriority whose mystery the secular sciences seek to bury in trifling laws and hypotheses. It no longer knows Wisdom. It ignores the majestic silence of those who have mastered themselves: the enlightened calm of seers, the exalted reality of those in whom the idea becomes blood, life, and power. Instead it is drowning in the rhetoric of "philosophy" and "culture", the specialty of professors, journalists, and sportsmen who issue plans, programs, and proclamations. Its wisdom has been polluted by a sentimental, religious, humanitarian contagion and by a race of frenzied men who run around noisily celebrating becoming (divenire) and "practice", because silence and contemplation alarm them.
It no longer knows the state, the state as value crystallized in the Empire. Synthesis of the sort of spirituality and majesty that shone brightly in China, Egypt, Persia, and Rome, the imperial ideal has been overwhelmed by the bourgeois misery of a monopoly of slaves and traders.
Europe's formidable "activists" no longer know what war is, war desired in and of itself as a virtue higher than winning or losing, as that heroic and sacred path to spiritual fulfillment exalted by the god Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. They know not warriors, only soldiers. And a crummy little war was enough to terrorize them and drive them to rehashing the rhetoric of humanitarianism, and pathos or, worse still, of windbag nationalism and Dannunzianism.
Europe has lost its simplicity, its central position, its life. A democratic plague is eating away at its roots, whether in law, science, or speculation. Gone are the leaders, beings who stand out not for their violence, their gold, or for their skills as slave traders but rather for their irreducible qualities of life. Europe is a great irrelevant body, sweating and restless because of an anxiety that no one dares to express. Gold flows in its veins; its flesh is made up of machines, factories, and laborers; its brains are of newsprint. A great irrelevant body tossing and turning, driven by dark and unpredictable forces that mercilessly crush whoever wants to oppose or merely escape the cogwheels.
Such are the achievements of western "civilization". This is the much ballyhooed result of the superstitious faith in "progress", progress beyond Roman imperiousness, beyond radiant Hellas, beyond the ancient Orient - the great Ocean.
And the few who are still capable of great loathing and great rebellion find themselves ever more tightly encircled." [Imperialismo Pagano]
"A new phase has begun in the United States where there has been an upsurge of interest in so-called labor relations. In appearance it would seem to signify an improvement: in reality this is a deleterious phenomenon. The entrepreneurs and employers have come to realize the importance of the 'human factor' in a productive economy, and that it is a mistake to ignore the individual involved in industry: his motives, his feelings, his working day life. Thus, a whole school of study of human relations in industry has grown up, based on behaviorism. Studies like Human Relations in Industry by B. Gardner and G. Moore have supplied a minute analysis of the behavior of employees and their motivations with the precise aim of defining the best means to obviate all factors that can hinder the maximization of production. Some studies certainly don't come from the shop floor but from the management, abetted by specialists from various colleges. The sociological investigations go as far as analyzing the employee's social ambience. This kind of study has a practical purpose: the maintenance of the psychological contentment of the employee is as important as the physical. In cases in which a worker is tied to a monotonous job which doesn't demand a great deal of concentration, the studies will draw attention to the 'danger' that his mind may tend to wander in a way that may eventually reflect badly on his attitude towards the job.
The private lives of employees are not forgotten - hence the increase in so-called personnel counseling. Specialists are called in to dispel anxiety, psychological disturbances and non-adaptation 'complexes', even to the point of giving advice in relation to the most personal matters. A frankly psycho-analytic technique and one much used is to make the subject 'talk freely' and put the results obtainable by this 'catharsis' into relief.
None of this is concerned with the spiritual betterment of human beings or any real human problems, such as a European would understand them in this "age of economics". On the other side of the Iron Curtain man is treated as a beast of burden and his obedience is maintained by terror and famine. In the United States man is also seen as just a factor of labor and consumption, and no aspect of his interior life is neglected and every factor of his existence is drawn to the same end. In the 'Land of the Free', through every medium, man is told he has reached a degree of happiness hitherto undreamed of. He forgets who he is, where he came from, and basks in the present." [Civilita Americana]
"Coming back to liberalism, I wish to say that it represents the antithesis of every organic doctrine. Since according to liberalism the primary element is the human being regarded not as person, but rather as an individual living in a formless freedom, this philosophy is able to conceive society merely as a mechanical interplay of forces and entities acting and reacting to each other, according to the space they succeed in gaining for themselves, without the overall system reflecting any higher law of order or meaning. The only law, and thus the only State, that liberalism can conceive has therefore an extrinsic character in regard to its subjects. Power is entrusted to the State by sovereign individuals, so that it may safeguard the freedoms of the individuals and intervene only when these freedoms clash and prove dangerous to one another. Thus, order appears as a limitation and a regulation of freedoms, rather than as a form that freedom itself expresses from within, as freedom to do something, or as freedom connected to a quality and a specific function. Order, namely the legal order, eventually amounts to an act of violence because, practically speaking, in a liberal and democratic regime a government is defined in terms of a majority; thus, the minority, though composed of "free individuals," must bow and obey.
The specter that most terrifies liberalism today is totalitarianism. It can be said that totalitarianism may arise as a borderline case out of the presuppositions of liberalism, rather than out of those of an organic State. As we shall see, in totalitarianism we have the accentuation of the concept of order uniformly imposed from the outside onto a mass of mere individuals who, lacking their own form and law, must receive one from the outside, be introduced in a mechanical, all-inclusive system, and avoid the disorder typical of a disorganized and selfish expression of partisan forces and special-interest groups.
Thus, not only ideally, but historically too, liberalism and individualism are at the beginning and at the origin of the various interconnected forms of modern subversion. The person who becomes an individual, by ceasing to have an organic meaning and by refusing to acknowledge any principle of authority, is nothing more than a number, a unit in the pack; his usurpation evokes a fatal collectivist limitation against himself. Therefore, we go from liberalism to democracy: and then from democracy to socialist forms that are increasingly inclined toward collectivism.
There is a saying from Tacitus that summarizes in lapidary style what has happened since the "liberal revolution": Ut imperium evertant, libertatem praeferunt; si perventerint, liberatem ipsam adgredientur—that is, "in order to overthrow the State (in its authority and sovereignty: i.e., imperium) they uphold freedom; once they succeed, they will turn against it too." Plato said: "Probably, then, tyranny develops out of no other constitution than democracy—from the height of liberty, I take it, the fiercest extreme of servitude." Liberalism and individualism played merely the role of instruments in the overall plan of world subversion, to which they opened the dams.
Thus, it is of paramount importance to recognize the continuity of the current that has generated the various political, antitraditional forms that are today at work in the chaos of political parties: liberalism, constitutionalism, parliamentary democracy, socialism, radicalism, and finally communism and Soviet-ism have emerged in history as degrees or as interconnected stages of the same disease. Without the French Revolution and liberalism, constitutionalism and democracy would not have existed; without democracy and the corresponding bourgeois and capitalist civilization of the Third Estate, socialism and demagogic nationalism would not have arisen; without the groundwork laid by socialism, we would not have witnessed the advent of radicalism and of communism in both its national and proletarian-international versions. The fact that today these forms often appear either to coexist or to be in competition with each other should not prevent a keen eye from noting that they sustain, link, and mutually condition each other, being only the expression of different degrees of the same subversion of every normal and legitimate institution. It necessarily follows that, when these forms clash, the one that will prevail will be the most extreme, or the one located on the lowest step. The beginning of the process is to be traced to the time when Western man broke the ties to Tradition, claiming for himself as an individual a vain and illusory freedom: when he became an atom in society, rejecting every higher symbol of authority and sovereignty in a system of hierarchies. The "totalitarian" forms that are emerging are a demonic and materialistic counterfeit of the previous unitary political ideal, and they represent "the greatest and most savage slavery," which, according to Plato, arose out of formless "freedom."
Economic liberalism, which engendered various forms of capitalist exploitation and of cynical, antisocial plutocracy, is one of the final consequences of the intellectual emancipation that made the individual solutus—that is, lacking the inner, self-imposed bond, function, and limit that are found instead in every organic system's general climate and natural hierarchy of values." [Men among the Ruins]
"By denouncing everything in the economic world that was still inspired by the feudal ideal as a cruel regime based on privileges, the organic connection (displayed mainly in various feudal systems) between personality and property, social function and wealth, and between a given qualification or moral nobility and the rightful and legitimate possession of goods, was broken. It was the Napoleonic Code that made "property" neutral and "private" in the inferior and individualistic sense of the word; with this code, property ceased to have a political function and bond. Moreover, property was no longer subject to an "eminent right," nor tied to a specific responsibility and social rank and subject to a "higher right." In this context, rank signified the objective and normal consecration in a hierarchical system that the superior one, as well as the personality formed and differentiated by a supra-individual tradition and idea, receives. Property, and wealth in general, no longer had any duties before the State other than in fiscal terms. The subject of property was the pure and simple "citizen," whose dominant concern was to exploit the property without any scruples and without too much regard for those traditions of blood, family, and folk that had previously been a relevant counterpart of property and wealth.
It was only natural that in the end the right to private property came to be disputed; whenever there is no higher legitimization of ownership... Thus the so-called "social question," together with the worn-out slogan "social justice," arose in those conditions where no differentiation is any longer visible other than in terms of mere "economic classes" (wealth and property having become "neutral" and apolitical; every value of difference and rank, of personality and authority having been rejected or undermined by processes of degeneration and materialization; the political sphere having been deprived of its original dignity). Thus, subversive ideologies have successfully and easily unmasked all the political myths that capitalism and the bourgeoisie have employed, in the absence of any superior principle, in order to defend their privileged status against the push and final violation by the forces from below." [Men among the ruins]
"The various aspects of the contemporary social and political chaos are interrelated and there is no real way to effectively oppose them other than by returning to the origins. To go back to the origins means, plainly and simply, to reject everything that in any domain (whether social, political, or economic) is connected to the "immortal principles" of 1789, as a libertarian, individualistic, and egalitarian thought, and to oppose it with the hierarchical view, in the context of which alone the notion, value, and freedom of man as person are not reduced to mere words or excuses for a work of destruction and subversion." [Men among the Ruins]
"In Latin, the word denoting subversion was not revolutio (which had a different meaning) but rather seditio, or eversio, or civilis perturbatio, or rerum publicarum comnmutatio. Thus, the term "revolutionary," in its modern meaning, was rendered with circumlocutions such as rerum novarum studiosus, or fautor, namely one who aims at and promotes new things. According to the traditional Roman mentality, "new things" were automatically regarded as negative and subversive.
Thus, in regard to "revolutionary" ambitions it is necessary to clear the misunderstanding and to choose between the two aforementioned opposing positions, which determine two likewise opposing styles. Again, on the one hand there are those who acknowledge the existence of immutable principles for every true order and who abide by them, not allowing themselves to be swept along by events. Such people do not believe in "history" and in "progress" as mysterious super-ordained entities, but instead attempt to dominate the forces of the environment and lead them back to higher, stable forms: according to them, this is what embracing reality amounts to. On the other hand there are those who, having been "born yesterday," have nothing in the past, who believe only in the future and are committed to a groundless, empirical, and improvised action, deluding themselves that they are able to direct events without knowing or acknowledging anything that rises above the plane of matter and contingency; such people devise many systems, the end result of which will never be an authentic order, but instead a more or less manageable disorder. The "revolutionary" vocation belongs to this second line of thought, even when it does not directly serve the interests of unadulterated subversion. In this context, the lack of principles is supplied with the myth of the future, through which some dare to justify and sanctify recent destructions that have occurred, since in their view they were necessary in order to move ahead and to achieve new and better horizons (any trace of which, I am afraid, it is difficult to point out)." [Men among the ruins]
"Those who are still standing upright in this world of ruins are at a higher level; their watchword is Tradition, according to the dynamic aspect I have just made evident. When circumstances change, when crises occur, when new factors come into play, where the previous dams begin to crack, these people know how to retain their sangfroid and are capable of letting go of what needs to be abandoned in order that what is truly essential may not be compromised. These people know how to move on, upholding in an impassive way the forms that are proper to the new circumstances, knowing how to assert themselves through them; their goal is to reestablish and maintain an immaterial continuity and avoid a groundless and adventurous course of action. This is the method of the true dominators of history, which is very different from and more virile than that of the merely "revolutionary."" [Men among the ruins]
"What must be questioned is not the value of this or that economic system, but the value of the economy itself. Thus, despite the fact that the antithesis between capitalism and Marxism dominates the background of recent times, it must be regarded as a pseudo-antithesis. In free-market economies, as well as in Marxist societies, the myth of production and its corollaries (e.g., standardization, monopolies, cartels, technocracy) are subject to the "hegemony" of the economy, becoming the primary factor on which the material conditions of existence are based. Both systems regard as "backward" or as "underdeveloped" those civilizations that do not amount to "civilizations based on labor and production"—namely, those civilizations that, luckily for themselves, have not yet been caught up in the feverish industrial exploitation of every natural resource, the social and productive enslavement of all human possibilities, and the exaltation of technical and industrial standards; in other words, those civilizations that still enjoy a certain space and a relative freedom.
Thus, the true antithesis is not between capitalism and Marxism, but between a system in which the economy rules supreme (no matter in what form) and a system in which the economy is subordinated to extra-economic factors, within a wider and more complete order, such as to bestow a deep meaning upon human life and foster the development of its highest possibilities. This is the premise for a true restorative reaction, beyond "Left" and "Right," beyond capitalism's abuses and Marxist subversion. The necessary conditions are an inner detoxification, a becoming "normal" again ("normal" in the higher meaning of the term), and a renewed capability to differentiate between base and noble interests. No intervention from the outside can help; any external action at best might accompany this process.
The pure homo oeconomicus is a fiction or the by-product of an evidently degenerated specialization. Thus, in every normal civilization a purely economic man—that is, the one who sees the economy not as an order of means but rather as an order of ends to which he dedicates his main activities—was always rightly regarded as a man of lower social extraction: lower in a spiritual sense, and furthermore in a social or political one. In essence, it is necessary to return to normalcy, to restore the natural dependency of the economic factor on inner, moral factors and to act upon them."[Men among the Ruins]
"The qualities that matter the most in a man and make him who he is often arise in harsh circumstances and even in conditions of indigence and injustice, since they represent a challenge to him, testing his spirit; what a sad contrast it is when the human animal is granted a maximum of comfort, an equal share in a mindless and "bovine" happiness, an easy and comfortable life filled with gadgets, radio and TV programs, planes, Hollywood, sports arenas, and popular culture at the level of Reader's Digest.
In reality, true values bear no necessary relation to better or worse socio-economic conditions; only when these values are put at the forefront is it possible to approximate an order of effective justice, even on the material plane. 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; and should give an organic sense to his life and achieve its perfection, since an artisan who perfectly fulfills his function is certainly superior to a king who does not live up to his dignity. Only when such considerations have weight will this or that reform carried out on the socioeconomic plane be conceived and implemented without any negative consequence, according to true justice, without mistaking the essential for the accessory. Unless an ideological detoxification and a rectification of attitudes are 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." [Men among the Ruins]
"[T]he "personal equation" and the specific zone on which drugs, here including alcohol, act, lead the individual toward alienation and a passive opening to states that give him the illusion of a higher freedom, an intoxication and an unfamiliar intensity of sensation, but that in reality have a character of dissolution that by no means "takes him beyond." In order to expect a different result from these experiences, he would have to have at his command an exceptional degree of spiritual activity, and his attitude would be the opposite of those who seek and need drugs to escape from tensions, traumatic events, neuroses, and feelings of emptiness and absurdity.
I have already pointed out the African polyrhythmic technique: one energy is locked into continuous stasis in order to unleash an energy of a different order. In the inferior ecstaticism of primitive peoples this opens the way for possession by dark powers. I have said that in our case, this different energy should be produced by the response of the "being" (the Self) to the stimulus. The situation created by the reaction to drugs and even alcohol is no different. But this kind of reaction almost never occurs; the reaction to the substance is too strong, rapid, unexpected, and external to be simply experienced, and thus the process cannot involve the "being." It is as if a powerful current penetrated the consciousness without requiring assent, leaving the person to merely notice the change of state: he is submerged in this new state, and "acted on" by it. Thus the true effect, even if not noticed, is a collapse, a lesion of the Self, for all his sense of an exalted life or of a transcendent beatitude or sensuality.
For the process to proceed differently, it would go schematically as follows: at the point in which the drug frees energy x in an exterior way, an act of the Self, of "being," brings its own double energy, x + x, into the current and maintains it up to the end. Similarly, a wave, even if unexpected, serves a skilled swimmer with whom it collides by propelling him beyond it. Thus, there would be no collapse, the negative would be transformed into positive, no condition of passivity would be formed with respect to the drug, the experience in a certain way would be de-conditioned, and, as a result, one would not undergo an ecstatic dissolution, devoid of any true opening beyond the individual and only substantiated by sensations. Instead, in certain cases there would be the possibility of coming into contact with a superior dimension of reality, which was the intention of ancient, non-profane drug use. To a certain degree, the harmful effect of drugs would be eliminated.
An effective use of these drugs would presuppose a preliminary "catharsis," that is, the proper neutralization of the individual unconscious substratum that is activated; then the images and senses could refer to a spiritual reality of a higher order, rather than being reduced to a subjective, visionary orgy. One should emphasize that the instances of this higher use of drugs were preceded not only by periods of preparation and purification of the subject, but also that the process was properly guided through the contemplation of certain symbols.
In general, one must keep in mind that drug use even for a spiritual end, that is, to catch glimpses of transcendence, has its price. How drugs produce certain psychic effects has not yet been determined by modern science. It is said that some, like LSD, destroy certain brain cells. One point is certain: Habitual use of drugs brings a certain psychic disorganization; one should substitute for them the power of attaining analogous states through one's own means. Therefore, when one has chosen a path based on the maximum unification of all one's psychic faculties, these drawbacks must be kept firmly in mind."[Ride the Tiger]
"Already at this point in our investigations we have to undertake the task of separating the core of Buddhist teaching from its accessory elements and from its popular adaptations; and, furthermore, we have to contend with a terminology whose precise significance is extremely difficult to formulate in Western languages, particularly as the meaning of a term often changes even in the course of a single text. While the terms in Western languages have strictly precise meanings, due to their being based for the most part on verbal and conceptual abstractions, the terms of Indo-Aryan languages have, on the other hand, essentially variable meanings as they have to express the richness of direct express the richness of direct experience.
The term dukkha is frequently translated as "pain," whence the stereotyped notion that the essence of Buddhist teaching is simply that the world is pain. But this is the most popular and,we might also say, profane interpretation of the Buddhist doctrine. It is quite true that dukkha in the texts also refers to such things as growing old, being ill, undergoing what one wishes to avoid and being deprived of what one desires, and so on; all of which can in general be considered as pain or suffering. Yet, for example, the idea that birth itself is dukkha should make us pause, and particularly as the same term refers to nonhuman, "celestial", or "divine" states of consciousness that certainly cannot be considered as subject to "pain" in the ordinary sense of the word. The deeper, doctrinal, and nonpopular significance of the term dukkha is a state of agitation, of restlessness, or of "commotion" rather than "suffering". We can describe it as the lived counterpart of what is expressed in the theory of universal impermanence and insubstantiality, of anicca and annata. And it is for this reason that, in the texts, dukkha, annica, and annata when they do not actually appear as synonyms, are always found in close relationship. This interpretation is confirmed if we consider dukkha in light of its opposite, that is, of the states of "liberation": dukkha now appears as the antithesis of unshakable calm, which is superior not only to pain, but also to pleasure; it is the opposite of the "incomparable safety," the state in which there is no more "restless wandering," no more "coming and going," and where fear and anguish are destroyed. In order to really understand the implications of dukkha, the first truth of the Ariya, and therefore to grasp the deepest significance of samsaric existence, we must associate the notion of "anguish" with that of "commotion" and "agitation". The Buddha saw in the world: " A race which trembles"-men trembling, attached to their persons, "like fish in a stream that is almost dry." "This world is fallen into agitation" is the thought that came to him while he was striving to achieve illumination. "in truth, this world has been overcome by agitation. We are born, we die, we pass away from one state, we arise in another. And from this sorrow, from this decay and death, no one knows the escape." Therefore it is a question of something far deeper and larger than anything the usual notion of pain can designate." [The Doctrine Of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts]
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Self-discipline almost becoming like the limitlessness of a law;
Evola wrote:
"When love is developed into an objective intensity it may give rise to a magic force that is able to paralyze all unfriendly acts of which the other person may be capable. Thus it is said that one who practises and truly develops love, thereby freeing his mind, also develops a state such that fire, and poison, and weapons have no longer power over him. This same idea is expressed in various Buddhist legends. By irradiating with unlimited mind, full of love and compassion, vast as the earth, Prince Siddhattha is supposed to have halted the onrush of an elephant set upon him by an enemy. On being told of the death of a disciple from snakebite, the Buddha says that this would not have happened had the disciple irradiated the world of snakes with loving mind; and here we have the confirmation of the very idea we have just discussed: love creates a defense, paralyzes hostile beings, disarms them and makes them retreat, because it arouses in them the feeling that their limited selves are facing the limitless. Thus we read, in connection with the irradiant contemplation of love: "Infinite is the Awakened One, infinite is the the doctrine—you, instead, are finite beings. I have created my protection, I have sung my hymn of defense—let all living beings retreat." We can see from this how ignorant of Buddhism are those who practically deny to it the dignity of a proper "religion" since they understand it as a simple ethic of "love" and "compassion" in an adulterated, equalitarian, and humanitarian sense." [Doctrine of Awakening]
Let us now come to the fact of war and the experience of heroism. Both, we have claimed in our previous writings, are instruments of awakening. An awakening, however, of what? War, experienced, determines a first selection; it separates the strong from the weak, the heroes from the cowards. Some fall, others assert themselves. But this is not enough. Various ways of being heroes, various meanings, can arise in heroic experience. From each race, a different, specific reaction must be expected. Let us ignore this fact for now and follow instead the ‘phenomenology’ of the awakening of race determined by war, that is, the various typical modalities of this awakening, working theoretically on the distinction which has just been made (‘race of nature’ and ‘super-race’) and practically on the concrete aspect, that is to say the fact that, since it is no longer specialised warlike elites but masses which face war, war therefore to a great extent concerns the mixed, bourgeois, halfdegraded type, whom we have described above as a product of crisis. To put such a product of crisis to the test of fire, to impose upon him a fundamental alternative, not theoretical, but in terms of reality and even of life and death: this is the first healthy effect of the fact of war for race. Ignis essentiae, in the terminology of ancient alchemists: the fire which tests, which strips to the ‘essence’.
There is a lot text where Evola is talking about 2 different books/authors, another one is a defeatist book "All Quiet on the Western Front", but I'm not going to paste everything here because there are like 4 pages of text.
....
Evola wrote:
Some years ago, a work by René Quinton was published in Italian translation: Massime sulla guerra. It represents another very singular testimony. Eight times injured in the World War, repeatedly decorated with the most coveted decorations, Quinton can obviously aspire to the generic qualification of ‘hero’. But what meaning has this ‘hero’ experienced in war? This book is the answer. War is conceived and justified by Quinton biologically, in close dependency on the instincts of the species and ‘natural selection’. Some quotations:
"There are, at the base of any being, two motives: the egoistic one which drives him to conserve his own life, and the altruistic one which leads him to forget himself, to sacrifice himself for a natural end which he does not know and which becomes identified with the benefit of the species. Thus, the weak, in the service of the species, attacks the more powerful, without prudence, without reason, without even hoping to win. The genius of the species commands him to attack and to gamble his life [...] The male and the female are created for the service of the species. The males are organised to fight each other [for the purpose of sexual selection]. War is their natural state, as for the female the sacred order is to conceive and then to nurture."
Hence this singular conception of heroism:
"The hero does not act from a sense of duty, but from love [meaning: according to race instincts, which the sexual function obeys]. In war man is no longer man, he is only the male [...] War is a chapter of love – males become intoxicated with tearing each other to pieces. The drunkenness of war is a drunkenness of love."
The instrument of the species, of the race of the body, in a primordial outburst, according to Quinton:
"Thus, there is nothing sublime about the hero, nor about the heroic mother who rushes towards a fire in order to save her child: they are the born male and female"."
To indicate the conclusion that all this leads to, we will quote these further excerpts from Quinton:
"Every ideal is a pretext to kill. Hatred is the most important thing in life. The wise men who no longer hate are ready for sterility and death. You must not understand the [enemy] peoples, you must hate them. The more man rises, the more his hatred for man grows. Nature has by no means created males, and peoples, in order for them to love each other. "
The joy of hurting the adversary constitutes, then, one of the essential elements of the hero.
"Socialized life is composed of merely artificial duties. War frees man from these and returns him to his primal instincts."
.....There is, despite several features of caricature and one-sidedness, a sign of real life. Actually, the lion can arise from the sheep precisely in this sense. Man reawakens and resumes contact with the deep forces of life and race from which he had become alienated, but in order to be no more than a ‘male’ and, at best, a “magnificent beast of prey”. In the realm of the ‘races of nature’, this may be normal, and the phenomena by which experiences of that sort are likely to be accompanied – horde solidarity, unity of destiny, etc. – may even have a healthy, reviving effect for a given organised ethnic group. But from the point of view of one who already belongs to a ‘race of the spirit’ this can only be his ordeal of fire turned into a fall.The catharsis, the amputation of the ‘bourgeois’ excrescence brought about by war, here, exposes not what is superior to the ideal of personality but what is inferior to it, marking the borderline point of the involution of the race of the spirit into that of the body.To use the terms of ancient Aryan traditions, this is pitr-yâna, the path of those who are dissolved in dark ancestral forces, not dêva-yâna, the ‘path of gods’.
The chapter ends on this note:
Evola wrote:
Let us now consider the other possibility, that is, the case in which the experience of war turns into a restoration, an awakening, of the race of the spirit, or ‘super-race’. We have already stated the normal relationship in the super-race between the biological element and the super-biological one, or, if we prefer, between the ‘vital’ element and the properly spiritual one. The former must be considered as an instrument for the manifestation and expression of the latter. Having this point of reference, the essentials of the positive solution can be expressed in a very simple formula: heroic experience and, in general, the experience of risk, of combat, of painful tension, must constitute for the individual one of those inner culminations in which the extreme intensity of life (qua biological element) is almost transformed into something more-than-life (the supra-biological element). This implies a freeing upwards from the confines of individuality and the assumption of the bursting upwards of the deeper side of one’s own being as the instrument of a sort of active ecstasy, implying not the deepening but the transfiguration of personality, and, with it, of all lucid vision,precise action, command and domination. Such moments, such culminations of heroic experience, not only do not exclude, but actually demand all the aspects of war that have an ‘elemental’, destructive, we could almost say telluric, character: precisely that which, in the eyes of the petty individuality and the petty ‘I’, the unwarlike ‘intellectual’ and the sentimental humanitarian, has a baleful, deplorable, deleterious character for ‘human values’, and shows itself instead here to have spiritual value.
Even death - death on the battlefield - becomes,in this respect, a testimony to life;hence the Roman conception of the mors triumphalis and the Nordic conception of Valhalla as a place of immortality exclusively reserved for ‘heroes’. But there is more:the assumptions of such heroic experience seem to possess an almost magical effectiveness:they are inner triumphs which can determine even material victory and are a sort of evocation of divine forces intimately tied to ‘tradition’ and the ‘race of the spirit’ of a given stock. That is why, in the ritual of the triumph in Rome, the victorious leader bore the insignia of the Capitoline divinity.
These remarks are sufficient to allow the reader to anticipate that what we say is not a mere ‘theory’ of ours, a philosophical position or interpretation thought up by us. This doctrine of heroism as a sacred and almost magical culmination, this mystical and ascetic conception of fighting and of winning, itself expresses a precise tradition, today forgotten but extensively documented in the testimonies of ancient civilisations, and especially of Aryan ones. This is why, in a subsequent article, we propose to express the same meanings by making ancient myths and symbols and rituals, Roman and Indo-Germanic, speak, which will clarify what, so far, we have had necessarily to expose in a synthetic and general form.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
In ancient Rome devotio did not mean ‘devotion’ in the modern sense of the meticulous and overscrupulous practice of a religious cult. It was, rather, a warlike ritual action in which the sacrifice of oneself was vowed and one’s own life was dedicated consciously to ‘lower’ powers, whose unleashing was to contribute to bringing victory, on one the hand, by endowing one with irresistible strength and, on the other hand, by causing panic to the enemy. It was a rite established formally by the Roman State as a supernatural addition to arms in desperate cases, when it was believed that the enemy could hardly be defeated by normal forces.
From Livy (8:9) we know all the details of this tragic ritual and also the solemn formula of evocation and self-dedication which the one who intended to sacrifice himself for victory had to pronounce, repeating it from the pontifex, clothed in the praetesta, his head veiled, his hand at his chin and his foot on a javelin. After that he plunged to his death in the fray, a hurled, ‘fatal’ force, no longer human. There were noble Roman families in which this tragic ritual was almost a tradition: for example, three of the stock of the Deci performed it in 340 B.C. in the war against the rebellious Latins, then again in 295 in the war against the Samnites, and once more in 79 at the Battle of Ascoli: as if this was ‘a family law’, as Livy puts it.
As pure inner attitude this sacrifice may recall, by its perfect lucidity and its voluntary character, what still happens today in Japan’s war: we have heard of special torpedo boats, or of Japanese aeroplanes, hurled with their crew against the target and, once again, the sacrifice, almost always performed by members of the ancient warrior aristocracy, the samurai, has a ritual and mystical aspect. The difference is certainly that they do not aim at a more than merely material action, a true evocation, to the same extent as in the ancient Roman theory of the devotio.
And naturally, the modern and, above all, Western atmosphere for thousands of reasons which have become, so to speak, constitutive of our being over the centuries makes it extremely difficult to feel and to move forces behind the scenes and to give every gesture, every sacrifice, every victory, transfiguring meanings, such as those discussed above. It is however certain that, even today, in this unleashed vicissitude one should not feel alone on the battlefields – one should sense, in spite of everything, relationships with a more than merely human order, and paths which cannot be assessed solely by the values of this visible reality can be the source of a force and an indomitability whose effects on any plane, in our view, should not be underestimated.
Metaphysics of war, the roman conception of victory
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"Thirdly, the love of novelty has to be considered. Just as a child is immediately attracted to anything that looks new, quickly abandoning a toy that has become familiar, directing his enthusiasm towards another, and leaving one thing half-done as soon as another attracts him, in the same way, modern man is attracted by newness as such, by everything that happens not to have been seen yet. The sensation is reducible, in essence, to the impression felt in catching sight of a novelty. But greed for mere sensation is one of the most characteristic features of the present era."
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
