EUROPEAN
DECADENCE
from Imperialismo pagano by Julius Evola
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
(uomini-idii). 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 speciality
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 (stato-valore) crystallized in the Empire. Synthesis of the sort of
spirituality and majesty that shone brightly in Chinaa,
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 fulfilment exalted by the god Krishna
in the Baghavad Gita. They know not warriors, only soldiers. And a crummy
little war (guerricciola) 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.
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