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Fidelity to Finance
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

The author argues that the shift from warrior-based honor to merchant-based utility allowed plutocracy and high finance to seize control behind the facade of democracy.

...the militia, priesthood, or consulship. In later times what occurred was the rebellion of the communes and the rise of the various medieval formations of mercantile power. The solemn proclamation of the "rights of the Third Estate" in France represented the decisive stage, followed by the varieties of "bourgeois revolution" of the third caste, which employed liberal and democratic ideologies for its own purposes. Correspondingly, this era was characterized by the theory of the social contract.
At this time the social bond was no longer a fides of a warrior type based on relationships of faithfulness and honor. Instead, it took on a utilitarian and economic character; it consisted of an agreement based on personal convenience and on material interest that only a merchant could have conceived. Gold became a means and a powerful tool; those who knew how to acquire it and to multiply it (capitalism, high finance, industrial trusts), behind the appearances of democracy, virtually controlled political power and the instruments employed in the art of opinion making. Aristocracy gave way to plutocracy, the warrior, to the banker and industrialist.
The economy triumphed on all fronts. Trafficking with money and charging interest, activities previously confined to the ghettos, invaded the new civilization. According to the expression of W. Sombart, in the promised land of Protestant puritanism, Americanism, capitalism, and the "distilled Jewish spirit" coexist. It is natural that given these congenial premises, the modern representatives of secularized Judaism saw the ways to achieve world domination open up before them. In this regard, Ka...
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Julius Evola

Revolt Against the Modern World

Merchant Kings

This excerpt directly extends the parent's claim by detailing the shift of power from the warrior caste to the mercantile class, emphasizing the rise of capitalist oligarchies that replace traditional aristocratic rule.

...ant loyalty, faithfulness, honor. This was essentially the age and the cycle of the great European monarchies. Then a second collapse occurred as the aristocracies began to fall into decay and the monarchies to shake at the foundations; through revolutions and constitutions they became useless institutions subject to the "will of the nation," and sometimes they were even ousted by different regimes. The principle characterizing this state of affairs was: "The king reigns but he does not rule."
Together with parliamentary republics the formation of the capitalist oligarchies revealed the shift of power from the second caste (the warrior) to the modern equivalent of the third caste (the mercantile class). The kings of the coal, oil, and iron industries replace the previous kings of blood and of spirit. Antiquity, too, sometimes knew this phenomenon in sporadic forms; in Rome and in Greece the "aristocracy of wealth" repeatedly forced the hand of the hierarchical structure by pursuing aristocratic positions, undermining sacred laws and traditional institutions, and infiltrating the mil...
In later times what occurred was the rebellion of the communes and the rise of the various medieval formations of mercantile power. The solemn proclamation of the "rights of the Third Estate" in France represented the decisive stage, followed by the varieties of "bourgeois revolution" of the third caste, which employed liberal and democratic ideologies for its own purposes. Correspondingly, this era was characterized by the theory of the social contract. At this time the social bond was no long...

Arthur Schopenhauer

The Wisdom of Life

Knightly Honor's Minotaur

Schopenhauer challenges the parent's valorization of knightly honor by calling it a 'solemn farce' that makes society stiff and timid, undermining the idea that warrior-based bonds were inherently superior.

...poisoned arrows have been found in Cupid's quiver, an estranging, hostile, nay, devilish element has entered into the relations of men and women, like a sinister thread of fear and mistrust in the warp and woof of their intercourse; indirectly shaking the foundations of human fellowship, and so more or less affecting the whole tenor of existence. But it would be beside my present purpose to pursue the subject further. An influence analogous to this, though working on other lines, is exerted by
The principle of knightly honor,--that solemn farce, unknown to the ancient world, which makes modern society stiff, gloomy and timid, forcing us to keep the strictest watch on every word that falls. Nor is this all. The principle is a universal Minotaur; and the goodly company of the sons of noble houses which it demands in yearly tribute, comes, not from one country alone, as of old, but from every land in Europe.
It is high time to make a regular attack upon this foolish system; and this is what I am trying to do now. Would that these two monsters of the modern world might disappear before the end of the century! Let us hope that medicine may be able to find some means of preventing the one, and that, by clearing our ideals, philosophy may put an end to the other: for it is only by clearing our ideas that the evil can be eradicated. Governments have tried to do so by legislation, and failed. Still, if...

Julius Evola

Revolt Against the Modern World

Caste Power Shift

This text explains the transition as part of a cyclical historical process where power progressively shifts from sacred leaders to warriors, then to merchants, and finally to serfs, providing a deterministic mechanism for the change described in the parent.

...virile type and ordinary existence has reached its peak and wherever Protestantism has secularized and impoverished the religious ideal. Thus, the parallel is almost complete and the cycle is about to close. The Regression of the Castes As my intent was to offer a bird's-eye view of history, in the previous pages I have presented all the elements necessary to formulate an objective law at work in the various stages of the process of decadence, that is, the law of the regression of the castes.
A progressive shift of power and type of civilization has occurred from one caste to the next since prehistoric times (from sacred leaders, to a warrior aristocracy, to the merchants, and finally, to the serfs); these castes in traditional civilizations corresponded to the qualitative differentiation of the main human possibilities. In the face of this general movement anything concerning the various conflicts among peoples, the life of nations, or other historical accidents plays only a secondary and contingent role.
Ihave already discussed the dawn of the age of the first caste. In the West, the representatives of the divine royalty and the leaders who embody the two powers (spiritual and temporal), in what I have called "spiritual virility" and "Olympian sovereignty," belong to a very distant and almost mythical past. We have seen how, through the gradual deterioration of the Light of the North, the process of decadence has unfolded; in the Ghibelline ideal of the Holy Roman Empire I have identified the...

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spake Zarathustra

The Pathos of Distance

Nietzsche reframes the discussion by attributing the decline of aristocracy to Christian egalitarian values undermining the 'pathos of distance,' rather than focusing solely on economic or utilitarian factors.

...late with equanimity. Man shall now exploit chance, he says again and again, and make it fall on its knees before him! (See verse 33 in “On the Olive-Mount”, and verses 9–10 in “The Bedwarfing Virtue”). Chapter XLIX. The Bedwarfing Virtue. This requires scarcely any comment. It is a satire on modern man and his belittling virtues. In verses 23 and 24 of the second part of the discourse we are reminded of Nietzsche’s powerful indictment of the great of to-day, in the Antichrist (Aphorism 43):—
“At present nobody has any longer the courage for separate rights, for rights of domination, for a feeling of reverence for himself and his equals,—FOR PATHOS OF DISTANCE.... Our politics are MORBID from this want of courage!—The aristocracy of character has been undermined most craftily by the lie of the equality of souls; and if the belief in the ‘privilege of the many,’ makes revolutions and WILL CONTINUE TO MAKE them, it is Christianity, let us not doubt it, it is CHRISTIAN valuations, which translate every revolution merely into blood and crime!”
(see also “Beyond Good and Evil”, pages 120, 121). Nietzsche thought it was a bad sign of the times that even rulers have lost the courage of their positions, and that a man of Frederick the Great’s power and distinguished gifts should have been able to say: “Ich bin der erste Diener des Staates” (I am the first servant of the State.) To this utterance of the great sovereign, verse 24 undoubtedly refers. “Cowardice” and “Mediocrity,” are the names with which he labels modern notions of virtue...

Blaise Pascal

Pensees

Power's Imaginary Foundation

Pascal questions the objective basis of social hierarchies, suggesting that power is sustained by imagination and necessity, which casts doubt on our ability to definitively compare different forms of social bonds.

...those who do not invent, the latter will call them ridiculous names, and would beat them with a stick. Let no one then boast of his subtlety, or let him keep his complacency to himself. 303 Might is the sovereign of the world, and not opinion.--But opinion makes use of might.--It is might that makes opinion. Gentleness is beautiful in our opinion. Why? Because he who will dance on a rope will be alone,[120] and I will gather a stronger mob of people who will say that it is unbecoming. 304
The cords which bind the respect of men to each other are in general cords of necessity; for there must be different degrees, all men wishing to rule, and not all being able to do so, but some being able. Let us then imagine we see society in the process of formation. Men will doubtless fight till the stronger party overcomes the weaker, and a dominant party is established. But when this is once determined, the masters, who do not desire the continuation of strife, then decree that the power which is in their hands shall be transmitted as they please. Some place it in election by the people, o...
These cords which bind the respect of men to such and such an individual are therefore the cords of imagination. 305 The Swiss are offended by being called gentlemen, and prove themselves true plebeians in order to be thought worthy of great office. 306 As duchies, kingships, and magistracies are real and necessary, because might rules all, they exist everywhere and always. But since only caprice makes such and such a one a ruler, the principle is not constant, but subject to variation,...