Asceticism of Gold
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

A critique of modern capitalism, arguing that the drive for wealth has regressed into a form of 'secular asceticism' where managers are enslaved to their fortunes rather than using them for aristocratic magnificence.

...s upon these new slaves as a more fearful threat than the threat of the whip in ancient times. In any event, it is possible to distinguish a general phase in which the yearning for profit displayed by single individuals who pursue wealth and power is the central motif (the phase that corresponds to the advent of the third caste) from a further phase that is still unfolding, characterized by a sovereign economy that has become almost independent or collectivized (the advent of the last caste).
In this regard, it is interesting to note that the regression of the principle of "action" to the form proper to the inferior castes (work, production) is often accompanied by an analogous regression with regard to the principle of "asceticism." What arises is almost a new asceticism of gold and work, because as it is exemplified by representative figures of this phase, to work and amass a fortune become things that are yearned for and loved for their own sake, as if they were a vocation. Thus we often see, especially in America, powerful capitalists who enjoy their wealth less than the last of their employees; rather than owning riches and…
Rich though they may be, they pursue an increasing number of activities; it is almost as if they were impersonal and ascetical instruments whose activity is devoted to gathering, multiplying, and casting into ever wider nets (that sometimes affect the lives of millions of people and the destinies of entire nations) the faceless forces of money and of production. Fiat productio, pereat homo , Sombart correctly remarked when noticing that the spiritual destruction and emptiness that man has creat...
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The Rite's Absent Environment
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

A somber assessment that modern man has lost contact with metaphysical reality, rendering any effort by a spiritual elite futile without a total reorientation of life toward the sacred.

...Tradition has always existed in this subterranean sense and it still exists today; it will never get lost because of any contingency affecting the destinies of people. And yet the presence of Tradition in this sense has not prevented the decline of Western civilization. Somebody has correctly remarked that Tradition is a precious vein, but only a vein. There is a need for other veins; besides, all the veins must converge, although only the central and occult vein dominates by going underground.
Unless the right environment is present, there is no resonance. If the inner and outer conditions that allow all human activities to acquire again a meaning are lacking; if the people do not ask everything of life and by elevating it to the dignity of a rite and an offering do not orient it around a nonhuman axis—then every effort is vain, there is no seed that will bear fruit, and the action of an elite remains paralyzed. Today, these conditions do not exist. Man, like never before, has lost every possibility of contact with metaphysical reality and with everything that is before and behind him.
It is not a matter of creeds, philosophies, or attitudes; all these things ultimately do not matter. As I said at the beginning, in modern man there is a materialism that, through a legacy of centuries, has become almost a structure and a basic trait of his being. This materialism, without modern man being aware of it, kills every possibility, deflects every intent, paralyzes every attempt, and damns every effort, even those oriented to a sterile, inorganic, artificial construction. The followi...
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The Absurdity of Progress
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

The author rejects the idea of progress as an absurd myth of modern civilization, viewing the 'new man' not as an overcomer but as a decrepit product of historical involution.

...ook hopes to be a contribution to such a task. Its main thesis is the idea of the decadent nature of the modern world. Its purpose is to present evidence supporting this idea through reference to the spirit of universal civilization, on the ruins of which everything that is modern has arisen; this will serve as the basis of every possibility and as the categorical legitimization of a revolt, since only then will it become clear what one is reacting against, but also and foremost, in what name.
By way of introduction I will argue that no idea is as absurd as the idea of progress, which together with its corollary notion of the superiority of modern civilization, has created its own "positive" alibis by falsifying history, by insinuating harmful myths in people's minds, and by proclaiming itself sovereign at the crossroads of the plebeian ideology from which it originated. How low has mankind gone if it is ready and willing to apotheosize a cadaverous wisdom? For this is how we should regard the perspective that refuses to view modern and "new" man as decrepit, defeated, and crepuscular man, but which rather glorifies him as the overcomer, the justifier, and as the only really living being.
Our contemporaries must truly have become blind if they really thought they could measure everything by their standards and consider their own civilization as privileged, as the one to which the history of the world was preordained and outside of which there is nothing but barbarism, darkness, and superstition. It must be acknowledged that before the early and violent shakings through which the inner disintegration of the Western world has become evident, even in a material way, the plurality...
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Exasperated Sensations as Drug
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

A reflection on how modern man uses frantic action and 'existential fever' as a drug to mask an inner emptiness characteristic of the 'Dark Age.'

...hysical will as an absolute reference point and assails the external "phantasm" by opposing to it the phantasm of his own self. It is ironic that when confronting this contaminating insanity, he who realizes what game these poor and more or less heroic individuals are playing, recalls Confucius' advice according to which every reasonable person has the duty to safeguard his own life in view of the development of the only possibilities by virtue of which a man truly deserves to be called a man.
The fact remains that modern man needs these degraded and desecrated forms of action as if they were some kind of drug; he needs them to elude the sense of his inner emptiness, to be aware of himself, and to find in exasperated sensations the surrogate for the true meaning of life. One of the characteristics of the Western "Dark Age" (Kali Yuga) is a sort of Titanic restlessness that knows no limitations and that induces an existential fever and awakens new sources of elation and of stupefaction.
Before continuing, I need to mention an aspect of the traditional spirit that is related to the Law and to the views expounded so far. I am talking about various ordeals of character and so-called divine judgments. Quite often the test of truth, right, justice, and innocence was made to depend on a trial that consisted of a decisive action (experimentum crucis). Just as the law was traditionally believed to have a divine origin, likewise injustice was considered to be a violation of the divin...
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The Secular Conquest
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

The author argues that post-medieval Western secularization represents a spiritual impoverishment characterized by a refusal to recognize any reality beyond the human condition.

...al structures and the unified public powers that were created during the previous, antifeudal phase. The struggle that had most characterized the Middle Ages, that of the "heroic" virile principle against the Church, ended. From now on, Western man would yearn for autonomy and emancipation from the religious bond only in the forms of a deviation, in what could be characterized as a demonic distortion of Ghibellinism that was foreshadowed with the taking up of Lutheranism by the German princes.
Generally speaking, after the Middle Ages, the West as a civilization became emancipated from the Church and from the Catholic weltanschauung only by becoming secularized under the aegis of naturalism and of rationalism, and by extolling as a sign of conquest the impoverishment proper to a perspective and a will that do not recognize anything beyond man and beyond what is conditioned by the human element.
One of the commonplaces of modern historiography is the polemical exaltation of the civilization of the Renaissance over and against medieval civilization. This is not just the expression of a typical misunderstanding, since this mentality is the effect of one among the innumerable deceptions purposely spread in modern culture by the leaders of global subversion. The truth is that after the collapse of the ancient world, if there ever was a civilization that deserves the name of Renaissance, t...
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