Revolt Against The Modern World
By: Julius Evola

*Following the mixing of the castes or of analogous social bodies and the coming to power of the inferior social strata and races, it was unavoidable that their spirit triumphed even in this regard; that any relationship with the supernatural would the conceived exclusively in terms of “religion”; that any other higher form came under suspicion and was even stigmatized as sacrilegious and demonic. This feminization of spirituality was already foreshadowed in ancient times. Wherever it prevailed, it determined the first alteration of the primordial tradition in the races.

The object of the considerations I will articulate in the second part of my work is to analyze this process of decadence together with all those processes that have led to the collapse of primordial humanity; through these the genesis and face of the “modern world” will become manifest.*

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If the expired civilization is propped up so as to make it look alive, and if men are treated like rabbits or stallions, their unions being carefully and rationally planned, let no one be fooled; what they will generate will either be a civilization of very beautiful animals destined to work, or, if the individualistic and utilitarian element predominates, a stronger law will lead the races toward the path of regression or extinction according to the same inexorability of the law of entropy and the degradation of energy. What will then be registered by future historians is only one of the several aspects of the “decline of the West” that are today very much in evidence.

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higher caste, but in any event, it always remains the qualifying principle that bestows a form and that orders the feminine generating substance. This principle is related to the same supernatural element, to the power that can “make the current ascend upward” and of which “victory,” “fortune,” and prosperity of a particular stock are usually the consequences. Hence the symbolical association (which did not have an obscene, but rather a real and deep meaning), typical of ancient traditional forms, of the male organ with ideas of resurrection, asceticism, and energies that confer the highest powers. As an echo of superior meanings found even among savage populations, we find expressed in clear terms the idea that only the initiate is a true male, and that initiation marks in an eminent way one’s entrance into virility; this means that prior to initiation, the individuals, notwithstanding their physical appearance, “have not yet turned into men,” and even if they are old they belong to the same group of children and women and are deprived of all the privileges of the clan’s virile elites. When the superbiological element that is the center and the measure of true virility is lost, people can call themselves men, but in reality they are just eunuchs and their paternity simply reflects the quality of animals who, blinded by instinct, procreate randomly other animals, who in turn are mere vestiges of existence.

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This being the case, it is no wonder the superior races are dying out before the ineluctible logic of individualism, which especially in the so-called contemporary “higher classes,” has caused people to lose all desire to procreate. Not to mention all the other degenerative factors connected to a mechanized and urbanized social life and especially to a civilization that no longer respects the healthy and creative limitations constituted by the castes and by the traditions of blood lineage. Thus proliferation is concentrated in the lower social classes and in the inferior races where the animal-like impulse is stronger than any rational calculation and consideration. The unavoidable effects are a reversed selection and the ascent and the onslaught of inferior elements against which the “race” of the superior castes and people, now exhausted and defeated, can do very little as a spiritually dominating element.

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The modern world is far from being threatened by the danger of underpopulation; the cry of alarm some political leaders have launched in the past with the ab- surd slogan “there is power in numbers,” is totally unfounded. The truth is that we are facing an opposite danger: the constant and untrammeled increase of population in purely quantitative terms. The deterioration of the population affects only those stocks that should be considered the bearers of the forces that preside over the demos and the world of the masses and that contribute to any authentic human greatness. When I criticized the racist worldview I mentioned that occult power when present, alive, and at work constitutes the principle of a superior generation that reacts on the world of quantity by bestowing upon it a form and quality. In this regard, one can say that the superior Western races have been agonizing for many centuries and that the increasing growth in world population has the same meaning as the swarming of worms on a decomposing organism or as the spreading of cancerous cells: cancer is an uncontrolled hypertrophy of a plasma that devours the normal, differentiated structures of an organism after subtracting itself from the organism’s regulating laws. This is the scenario facing the modern world: the regression and the decline of fecun- dating (in the higher sense of the term) forces and the forces that bear forms parallels the unlimited proliferation of “matter,” of what is formless, of the masses.

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Painting by Arthur De Gobineau - unknown artists - unknown year

*This applied to both single individuals and to entire peoples. Any analysis of history will reveal that just like man, civilizations too, after a dawn and an ensuing development, eventually decline and die. Some people have attempted to discover the law responsible for the decline of various civilizations. I do not think that the cause or causes can be reduced to merely historical and naturalistic factors.

Among various writers, de Gobineau is the one who probably better demonstrates the insufficiency of the majority of the empirical causes that have been ad- duced to explain the decline of great civilizations. He showed, for instance, that a civilization does not collapse simply because its political power has been either bro- ken or swept away: “The same type of civilization sometimes endures even under a foreign occupation and defies the worst catastrophic events, while some other times, in the presence of mediocre mishaps, it just disappears.” Not even the quality of the governments, in the empirical (namely, administrative and organizational) sense of the word, exercises much influence on the longevity of civilizations.

De Gobineau remarked that civilizations, just like living organisms, may survive for a long time even though they cany within themselves disorganizing tendencies in addition to the spiritual unity that is the life of the one common Tradition; India and feudal Europe, for example, show precisely the absence of both a unitary organization and a single economic system or form of legislation on the one hand and a marked pluralism with repeatedly recurring antagonisms on the other.*

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All of the exterior life was a rite, namely, an approximation, more or less efficacious and depending on individuals and groups, to a truth that the exterior life cannot produce by itself, but that allows a person to realize one’s self in part or entirely, provided it is lived in a saintly way. These people lived the same life that they led for centuries; they made of this world a ladder in order to achieve liberation. These peoples used to think, to act, to love, to hate, and to wage war on each other in a saintly way; they had erected the one temple among a great number of other temples through which the stream of the waters ran. This temple was the bed of the river, the traditional truth, the holy syllable in the heart of the world.

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In those areas in which tradition retained all of its vitality the dynastic succession of sacred kings represented an axis of light and of eternity within the temporal framework, the victorious presence of the supernatural in the world, and the “Olym- pian” component that transfigures the demonic element of chaos and bestows a higher meaning to state, nation, and race. Even in the lower strata of society, the hierarchical bond created by a conscious and virile devotion was considered a means to approach, and to participate in, the supernatural.
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