tradition/history/politics
Writing for a cause
Full article with sources found here:
www.academia.edu/119142445/The_Brittle_Axis_Nietzsche_and_Evola_s_Influence_on_Fascism?source=swp_share In the present day, fascism and nazism as descriptors have become nearly interchangeable. Whether it be to lambast one of the many rising right-wing populist politicians springing up around Europe, or found within genuine histories of the mid-20th century, National Socialism and fascism have become nearly synonymous; however, the two movements were deeply disjointed and nuanced in their core philosophies when the exoteric similarities are brushed aside. All dictators are not Fascists – though many media outlets are keen to forget the distinguishing features – nor are all nationalist regimes; fascism is a movement tied to countless intellectuals and thinkers – hence why it presented such a pertinent danger to its contemporary world order. Mere politics could not have provided moral justification for the Italian gas campaign against the Ethiopians, nor could it have led to an entire nation becoming so distracted with the murder of Jews that it neglects its own war effort as was the case with Germany. Given to every Wehrmacht soldier was not a bible, nor a military manual, but a copy of the posthumously compiled Will To Power – a book that synthesized the most malleable components of Nietzschian philosophy for the Nazi regime's purposes. Giovanni Gentile, Alfred Baeumler, Julius Evola, and the Ur group all sprung from this fertile field of reactionary ideology infused with Hellenic classical ideals, all of whom fancied themselves “lookouts at the top of the mountain posted between today and tomorrow” – in fitting with a Platonic view of philosophies objective. These “firstlings and premature births of the next century” to whom the “shadows of European change became apparent” sincerely believed that the rise of alternative states – from Gibraltar to Hanover – would spell out a new golden age for European man. Political realities proved a daunting challenge for the patchwork group of esotericists, occultists, and philosophers: namely, race. The entire Nazi German Ethos had been predicated on the purity of the Aryan man and Nordic blood; myths rooted in paganism and obscure Greek writings recounting the mystical land of Hyperboria provided the nucleus of this alternative order and fed on the romantic revival of traditional German heritage. Italy on the other hand derived its spiritual core from Rome, an empire undeniably sustained by its profoundly cosmopolitan nature. Bridging this rift was attempting to unify the spirit of the Germanic tribes with the empire of Rome – ultimately destined for another Teuterborg forest. Nietzsche as the Cornerstone: It is necessary to clarify that neither movement was truly unified in a singular philosophical doctrine, rather, their very newness and foundation in the fundamental rejection of the old way opened the floodgates for fringe ideologies and intellectual figures to rise to prominence. Just as many concepts relating to fascism, the – albeit horrified – founding father was Nietzsche, who had embodied and coined the idea that it was, “philosophies mission to guarantee life’s future on earth by destroying old values and replacing them with new ones that have more promise to execute philosophies mission” (in this case, philosophies mission refers to the idea championed by both Hegel and Kant of the unification of man through the systematic rejection of antiquated forces, of which both Marxism and Fascism find their roots). Before Julius Evola and the contemporary attempts to unify the two seemingly irreconcilable national identities, their Nietzschian core must be understood. Nietzsche wished to tear down the tenets of Christian Europe to build anew, for in his period he found himself on the precipice of a new age with novel and potentially disastrous technological abilities; his muse came not in the form of Christ nor pure Science, but Greece. When analyzed esoterically, Nietzsche argues for an unapologetically Hellenic worldview shaped by the right of the aristocracy of the sword rather than adopting egalitarianism like many of his day. His analysis of concepts of aesthetic beauty which are inexorably linked to philosophical ability is one of his most pioneering concepts, where he attributes the rise of pre-Socratic and Socratic philosophy to the physical health and vitality of Athenian youths. The concept displayed here is heavily pertinent, considering the neoclassicism that characterized both national socialist and fascist art and architecture. Physical beauty and vitality were exalted above the virtues of the spirit and the warrior was once the ethos of civilization – evidenced in each rippling muscle fiber found on the sculptures produced by Arno Breker. The cult of aesthetics was key to the rejection of the present tenets of Europe, for physicality was regarded as the antithesis to the Semitic and life-rejecting philosophy of Christianity. Nietzsche – infamously dubbed the ‘anti-christ’ – regarded Christianity as a means for the herd to abstract and distort the natural truth of ‘might is right’ to protect the herd: “The Genealogy of Morals claimed that morality was an invention of the weak (especially the Jews, and then the Christians) to weaken the strong. The sheep convinced the wolf to act like a sheep. This is unnatural, argues Nietzsche, and seeing morality's unnatural origin in resentment at inferiority will free us from its power over us”. The concept of Christianity’s Semitic roots – said to be almost gnostic in their indifference toward raw physical strength – would later be exploited to horrific extents and be used to directly support both antisemitism and the efforts to curtail the influence of the catholic church. Nietzsche additionally had – as evidenced by Costin Alamariu’s dissertation The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche – viewed tyranny as the natural antidote to a declining aristocracy, hence the brutal actions of the new European dictators could be justified using a novel interpretation of Platonic teachings. In the words of Peter Kreeft: “Beyond Good and Evil is Nietzsche's alternative morality, or ‘new morality.’ ‘Master morality’ is totally different from ‘slave morality,’ he says. Whatever a master commands becomes good from the mere fact that the master commands it. The weak sheep have a morality of obedience and conformity. Masters have a natural right to do whatever they please, for since there is no God, everything is permissible”. Just as Socrates was executed for his subversion of the Athenian democratic convention – a charge masked by the now famous story of his impiety that led to his execution – so too could Nietzsche be seen as the intellectual soil in which the amoral philosophy of Callicles was made manifest through Hitler and Mussolini. Italian Fascism and Julius Evola: However, the foundation rooted within broad neo-classical and Nietzschian ideals is where the definite philosophical unification ended and the tenuous foundations of the relationship put themselves on full display. Many similarities did exist: Italy was experiencing economic woes and dejected veterans returning from a hard-fought but ultimately fruitless war; Italy was in search of spazio vitale for its people and once more raise the standard of imperial Rome; Italian fascism was predicated on a simultaneous respect for tradition and path towards militarism and modernization; however, race proved the great ravine that would seem daunting to even the most dogged traveler. Though Nietzsche himself was deeply critical of a biological racial view – subscribing to a ‘race of the spirit’ as will be seen radicalized by Julius Evola in the following paragraphs – Hitler’s rebranding of fascism was inseparable from virulent racism and Nordicism; Nietzsche's concept of the ubermensch was racialized through the aforementioned brutal censoring and selectively quoting campaign. Such a highly racialized ideology did not find fertile fields in the markedly mixed-breed Italian soil. Besides the mountaineers of Sud-Tirol, few resembled the Germanic master race of the north, but more importantly, even fewer were sympathetic to any racial ideology that extended beyond late 19th-century justifications for the conquest of Africa. This is evidenced by Italy’s enthusiasm in flattening Ethiopia, but hesitation in dogmatically following Hitlerian anti-semitism. The roots of Italian fascism were based in the endemic poverty of Italy and the corruption that had taken hold within the political and military establishment. Just as many other European nations at the time, Italians came to see that their key to respectability and prosperity lay in the stripping of resources from colonial holdings; therefore, when given the essential ‘left-overs’ of the Berlin conference and cheated out of any advantageous colonial gains in the Balkans following the First World War, the powder keg of Italian discontent was ignited. However, few Italians desired a racial cleansing of their conquered territories, for most of their non-African colonial aims were efforts to reunite – albeit unwillingly on the part of the conquered territories – the ethnically Italian peoples of Dalmatia, Malta, Albania, and Corsica. The quintessentially Mediterranean ideology of Fascist Italy for much of its rule even rejected antisemitism, claiming that Jews were an integral member of a shared Mediterranean identity rather than a parasitic Semitic outsider. The respect for the Mediterranean and Semitic additionally made any attempt to quell the power of catholicism laughable, for such movements which had already proved futile in Germany would never take hold in the papal heartland of the Italian peninsula. Ever emulating Rome, Italy saw its mantle as the unifier of Italic peoples of the Mediterranean – most of which would be considered subhuman by the ideologues within the National Socialist ranks. The alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany was deeply ideologically disconnected, yet it was safe due to its practicality in the short term. The two totalitarian poles of Europe split the continent in half geographically, and their proximity allowed joint operations and coordinated efforts to be possible – a situation that especially aided in the Balkan campaigns of the Second World War. The efficacy of this combined war machine was put on full display in Spain, where nationalist forces under Francisco Franco – whom received air support, naval aid, weaponry, and manpower from both Germany and Italy – proved triumphant over soviet funded socialists along with other disparate leftist groups. However, with events across Europe swinging in the favor of the absolutist states during the 1930s, a burning question came to dominate relations: what would a hegemonic German state mean for Italy? Much had changed since Mussolini’s initial snubbing of the fringe and uncouth Hitler in the early years of his rise; now, Mussolini was the begrudging foot-soldier to the true daemon of European reactionism. As Germany’s position as the primary power in the relationship became apparent, heads began to butt: “Mussolini and Hitler were often rivals, and tensions over Austria and other points of Italian-German contention left relations between the two dictators particularly strained during the early years of Nazi rule”. However, one man would attempt to straddle the tenuous physical and ideological border between the two demagogic dictatorial states and attempt to unify the Mediterranean and the Nordic using a plethora of esoteric doctrines stretching from the mystical and the oriental to the historical and magical. Julius Evola – known to his followers as ‘Baron Evola’ – was certainly not the expected candidate for the job of philosophically unifying the dictatorial states of Europe. Born to a telegraph operator, he enjoyed a relatively comfortable upbringing in Sicily and eventually went on to university to study as an engineer. However, he would never finish his degree, and his life would take a dramatic spiral toward the fringe of academia and art. His service in the First World War as an Italian artillery officer etched its mark into him – though similarly to Hiter, he regarded the event as positively formative to his future militaristic character – and his involvement with the Dadaist art movement of 1920s Italy brought him into contact with a new wave of radical artists and philosophers. Through these circles, he encountered the work of Rene Guénon, the father of the perennialist school. Evola began as a long-distance disciple of Guénon, sharing many exchanges of letters with the Frenchman-turned-Sufi monk, yet soon the two found themselves at a crossroads; Guénon had taken the path of a total rejection of politics and modernity, yet Evola was young, vital, hungry, and in his eyes, he came to see his former master as belonging to a fundamentally irreconcilable spiritual caste. Evola, in his correspondence with Guénon, began to be chided for his seemingly contradictory actions of persuading Mussolini to abandon and persecute the Catholic Church, in Guénon’s words: “The ‘Mediator’, according to all traditions, is the ‘Universal Man’, which is also the Christ; whatever the name by which he is called changes nothing, and I do not see what difficulty there can be in regard to this”. Evola fancied himself a modern knight or Kshatriya, and his holy war was against the pillars of modern Europe, which he found chiefly rooted in Catholicism – hence he had no time for the ‘lunar spiritualism’ of Guénon’s strand of traditionalist philosophy. His founding of the Ur Group was the ultimate symbol of the assertion of his divergence from Guénon and the establishment of a unique philosophy that would blur the line between politics and religious mysticism. Later in Evola’s life, he would renege on his commitment to politics – an act of ‘masking’ such as Plato’s masking of his tyrannical sentiments in the Gorgias – famously advocating for apolitical spiritualism, yet his early career was undeniably that of considerable political importance. Fascism in many regards represented an upheaval of society; elements that once found themselves on the periphery now saw themselves sewn among fertile ground to become leading strains of thought. This had occurred in Nazi Germany with Himmler installing Karl Willigut – another former soldier turned occultist – as an official high-ranking member of the SS; however, Evola was disappointed with the low tolerance of Italians to these radical new avenues of thought. In his 1932 book Pagan Imperialism, he attempted to found a new and quintessentially Roman doctrine for Italians to unite around – one free of the pesky moralism of the Catholic church. In direct emulation of Nietzschian sentiment around Christian doctrine: “In the Semitisation of the Greco-Roman and then the Nordic world, attributable to a large extent to Christianity, we have in fact the revolt of the lower strata of those races, by whose domination the Nordic-Aryans had obtained their splendid civilizations. The spirit of Israel, which had already created the collective sense of ‘sin’ and ‘expiation’, and which emerged mainly in the so-called "prophets" after the defeat and enslavement of the "chosen people", buying the residues of the aristocratic spirit of the Pharisees, re-evoked the lower forces of Aegean-Pelasgian tellurism which the Achaean stocks had subdued”. Evola presented Mussolini with an alternative to his current balance of Catholicism and Hellenism, namely, the possibility of an anti-clerical rebranding of Fascism. However Mussolini, whom famously admired many of his works, outright rejected the proposals made toward him by Pagan Imperialism; the publishing additionally left Evola labeled as satanic by the Vatican-backed right-wing Catholic journal Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes in its article, Un Sataniste Italien: Julius Evola. Evola however arose from this abject failure, battered yet unbeaten, and his contributions to the goal of unifying the two nations would come primarily in the form of his racial doctrine. Because of the overly compromising nature of Italian Fascism – which he witnessed in the poor reception to Pagan Imperialism – he sought solace in Nazi Germany. Just as with Italian Fascism, Evola despised the plebian aspects of Nazism and the overtly biological nature of Nazi racism, however, he found his home among the more radical and well-established groups of the German ‘Conservative Revolution’. Much of his 1934 magnum opus, Revolt Against The Modern World, became focused on a new hybrid ideology of race, one which would unite the two states and allow him to mold his new world order he dubbed ‘the world of tradition’. In the aforementioned book, he wrote: “Blood and ethnic purity are factors that are valued in traditional civilizations too; their value, however, never justifies the employment, in the case of human beings, of the same criteria employed to ascertain the presence of ‘pure blood’ in a dog or in a horse—as is the case in some modern racist ideologies”. Essentially, he foresaw the unification of Italy and Germany into a system resembling the Holy Roman Empire – which for him represented the last genuine appearance of ‘the world of tradition’ in Europe. He attributed the success of that Empire of old to a neo-pagan interpretation of Chivalry, stating: “Chivalry was like a "race of the spirit" in which the purity of blood played an important role as well; the Northern-Aryan element present in it was purified until it reached a universal type and ideal in terms that corresponded to what the civis romanus had originally been in the world”. As early as 1934, Evola began his work of creating a Third Reich that was not purely German, but rather, one that was based on the unification of the Roman and Germanic spiritual forces – just as was the case for the Second Reich. As the 1930s progressed, Evola’s tether to Germany became more and more concrete, and his increasing closeness with the high-ranking officials of the Nazi Party became more established. During 1937-38, he gave a lecture tour through Germany; at the time, he came to the view that Nazi Germany, though imperfect, was more fertile for his militaristic dreams of a pan-European imperium than his own homeland. With his newfound popularity in Nazi Germany– breaking from his former position which marched in lock step with official Fascist policy – he began his tangible effort of realizing his dreams of a unified imperium based on a shared racial ideology. In the words of Peter Staudenmair: “His April 1942 lectures on race in Hamburg and Berlin, depicting a shared Aryan heritage that bound Italians and Germans together, received particular praise” with respect to the nazi press, which soon took a keen interest in the enigmatic Sicilian. His lectures had their intended effect of galvanizing enough support for him to receive an official position in 1941– albeit acting through his associate, Luchini – within the ‘race office’ of the Ministry of Popular Culture of Mussolini’s regime. Once more according to the Staudenmaier study: “The group around Evola seized the chance to shape formal policy. Among their most important initiatives was the establishment of a series of antisemitic institutes in cities across Italy. The ‘Centers for the Study of the Jewish Problem’ published a journal titled Il Problema Ebraico (‘The Jewish Problem’)”. After the abject failure of Pagan Imperialism, his new sway over official party doctrine was exactly the political success he had envisioned when he first broke from Guénon; invigorated by success, he went on to publish a synthesis of racial doctrine, which was read and praised by Mussolini himself. It seemed that his goal of “erecting a united Aryan front between the two axis powers,” was within reach at long last. However, the intellectual disunity innate to Fascism which allowed for his seismic rise was to be the very foundation of his undoing. Despite the image of a state of absolute order and omnipotence portrayed by the Nazi party through their massive rallies at Nuremberg, the reality was starkly different. Different groups within the SS had differing opinions of the Sicilian ‘Baron’, not to mention the polarizing effect he instilled in his own nation. Providing validity to his positive reception among the Nazi elite, “A January 1938 SS evaluation remarked on his ‘astonishing knowledge of Aryan matters’” as well as his aforementioned amiable relationship with Heinrich Himmler given the two men’s kinship over the esoteric streams of Fascist thought. Additionally, the relations cultivated with the pinnacles of totalitarian power are undeniable; both Hitler and Mussolini read his work and spoke with him personally – all three met at Hitler’s ‘Wolf Lair’ to discuss the details of the Italian Social Republic puppet state – so most would conclude that his philosophical influence was gargantuan. However, the nature of the two states resembled more of a large game of ‘king of the hill’ as opposed to any ordered ‘divine civilization’ – with different factions and individuals soaring to the heights of power mere moments after the depths of decline and vice versa. Intellectuals, Bureaucrats, and military officials found themselves embroiled in a ceaseless battle, fighting tooth and nail, to attain one of their respective demagogue's ears for a fraction of time. While some within the SS praised him, others lambasted him, as was the case with the dossier document number AR-126 report: “The ultimate and secret goal of Evola's theories and projects is most likely an insurrection of the old aristocracy against the modern world, which is foreign to the idea of nobility [...] His overall character is marked by the feudal aristocracy of old. His learnedness tends toward the dilettante and pseudoscientific. Hence it follows that National Socialism sees nothing to be gained by putting itself at the disposal of Baron Evola. His political plans for a Roman-Germanic Imperium are utopian in character and moreover likely to give rise to ideological entanglements [...] It is therefore suggested: [...] To stop his public effectiveness in Germany, after this lecture series, without deploying any special measures [...] To have his propagandistic activity in neighboring countries carefully observed”. The report was laid on Himmler's desk, and in response, Himmler affirmed the analysis by his staff: Evola was dangerous, and such ‘ideological entanglements’ of unifying the two Fascist nations were not to be desired. Evola throughout the rest of the war would spend considerable time pried away from his Roman homeland, for as Fascism began to plummet in popularity, so did tolerance for the esoteric philosopher with dreams of a new age of Feudalism. Italians, now with German soldiers quartered in their towns, had finally snapped; what had begun as a movement most supported for economic alleviation had turned Italy into exactly what it had sought to avoid: a servile state. Now an exiled wanderer, Evola found himself in Vienna in 1945 – the former seat of his much-idolized Holy Roman Empire. Just as he dubbed one of his most widely read books, he was truly a man standing among the ruins of a civilization that was never to come to fruition. Ever keen to draw a historical parallel, in his eyes he truly came to represent Maximilian I, the last knight who became unhorsed and ended an era of esoteric revival and health, opening the gates to the Kali Yuga; however not by the tip of a lance in Evola’s case, but by a soviet bomb while ‘pondering his existence’ in the streets during one of the relentless raids carried out against the ancient and gleaming city. After receiving treatment, he returned to Italy to stand trial; the warrior – whom so resented the sedate intellectuals of his day and so enjoyed meditating on philosophy while climbing the titanic peaks of the Alps – was now paralyzed from the waist down, so no cruel nor unusual punishment could be devised capable of heightening the spiritual suffering he certainly experienced in this condition. On trial – a modern ‘Trial of Socrates’ in the eyes of his followers – he famously denied the charge of Fascism, rather, he proclaimed himself as a ‘Super-Fascista’ – placing himself above the plebian, disorganized, modern, and worldly aspects of Fascism that had deprived him of realizing his utopian dream of the ‘world of tradition’. Conclusion: The Third Reich ended twelve years after first emerging into the world, yet crucially never adopted Evola’s views of Romanism, feudalism, and traditionalism; the age of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens began in 405 under the leadership of Critias – a man who would become infamous for his representation of purest tyranny – and ended in 404 BCE, with the subsequent execution of Socrates in 399 BCE. Costin Alamariu bluntly described Critias – at least in the eyes of the Greek world – as follows: “Critias, Socrates’ student, was the Hitler of the ancient Greek world. He and his friends established a regime based on atheistic biologism so to speak; on ‘Sparta radicalized,’ a eugenic antinomian dictatorship". Just as in classical Greece, the spiral into dictatorship created an indelible mark on philosophy, namely, if philosophy should adopt a markedly pre-socratic identity (non-political), Socratic identity (overly political), or post Socratic identity (covertly political) in order to further its goals and install Plato’s ‘philosopher king. The shift from Socratic political affiliations to post-Socratic ‘hidden’ political allegories is best demonstrated by an excerpt from an Athenian court case decades after the infamous execution of Socrates: “Socrates the sophist who you executed for being the teacher of Critias and Alcibiades who tried to put down the Democracy”. Philosophy, as can be seen from the quotation, had shed its previous state of being entirely divorced from politics, now, “Philosophers and tyrants were both perceived by the cities of the time as kindred criminal spirits” – hence why Socrates was executed despite his posthumous portrayal as a harmless questioner of traditional Nomos. As has been hinted throughout the analysis of Evola, he in many ways represented the attempt at philosophy to once more become a primary force in overtly political matters. Rather than merely providing the foundations of dictatorial ideology – such as Nietzsche, who now possesses plausible deniability – Evola was actively involved and attempted to shape official doctrine and policy, albeit unsuccessfully. While Nietzsche may have resembled Socrates in his identity as a ‘teacher of tyranny’, Evola was the young student, Plato. To save himself, he was forced to divorce himself from the sins of his teacher, and abstract his teachings to the point of utter allegory, making any untrained reader completely unaware of the true sentiments behind his work. Plato wrote the Gorgias as a means to protect himself, and if read as Nietzsche did, it can be seen as an older, more mature Plato speaking to his younger self – who is embodied by the character of Callicles – who violently proclaims his tyrannical sentiments with little true political and practical maturity. Following the war, Evola did the same. Through his books Fascism Viewed From the Right and Notes on the Third Reich, Evola created a fundamental distance between himself and the political institutions he had once been so keen to involve himself in; just as reflected in his admission of being a ‘super fascista’, he abstracted his true political leanings to the point of pure speculation and mysticism, which can be seen as a carefully constructed veil. Plato urged his followers to rise in the ranks of society, to hide their views, and influence from the shadows. Evola has done the same. Steve Bannon has admitted to being an avid reader of Evola; Alexandr Dugin, described as ‘Putin’s Brain’ is an intellectual scholar of the Sicilian philosopher; youth around the world have begun buying copies of his work, directly marketed towards them through titles such as A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth. Evola has rightly been described as the most prominent figure contributing towards the rise of the Italian radical right following the collapse of the Fascist regime, and his urge to operate in the shadows outlined in his book Ride The Tiger has been taken to heart by many leading figures of the modern populist right. Philosophy is far from harmless, just as it is far from apolitical, and as Plato and Nietzsche discovered before him, Evola following the war found the greatest impact of philosophy’s political teachings was within allegory and abstraction – hidden from untrained prying eyes. The full article with images and citations is available on Academia.com, I encourage you to search it up for a more academic view.
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As I woke early on a sublime Sunday morning, I yearned for a good walk and more importantly, a good talk. After a Saturday rife with action, scarcely finding a singular moment of rest, the day volunteered itself for contemplation; however, contemplation was worth little without the flame of competition. For the task, I drafted a worthy adversary and set off to find a suitable destination, not merely for its physical value but also to be the spark to the laid kindling. “Now my friend,” I began assertively. “The day awaits with open arms. The sun is high, and the wind is still; let us walk through the woods into the adjacent farmland. Bear witness, my friend, to man and nature as God intended.” The spark was lit – I knew from his face – and I could see the competitive spirit germinating within him. “On a fine day, why would we go see such drab sights that remain unchanging whether it rain, snow, or hail? The grass and trees remain rooted, indifferent, and at the absolute mercy of their surroundings, yet man has a choice. What demarcates us from the tree is just that choice: our facility to react and ultimately master. Let us venture into the city, for on days such as these, throngs of people emerge and realize their will. Their faces adopt a new countenance, their step quicken to a new cadence; bear witness, dear friend, to that which represents man in nature as he intended.” “You find us admirable for our susceptibility to warmth and cold? While the city dweller needs a fine day to ‘realize his will’ as you say, the farmhand has no choice but to do so each day or he will surely starve. Just as a noble tree, he is far less infantile than we. He does not merely avoid the trying weather due to the challenge it confidently poses to our fragile figures, rather, he stands unwavering though he is made of flesh and blood, not wood. You say that the tree remains undaunted by the hard times, yet you infer that it does not do so through will; so I ask you, have you never seen a tree contort as the wind howls through her branches? The tree that remains rigid breaks; the tree that is weak snaps; the tree that has become susceptible to disease shatters under such conditions; pure will and strength keep the remaining generation ‘undaunted’ as you say. The man of nature is much the same. He is the product of the unwavering generations, the ones who were both malleable and durable. It is he, not us, who possesses a will worthy of separating man from beast. As he accepts the struggle, his flesh comparable to our own begins to take on the countenance and strength of living wood; in essence, he yearns for the hardship as we yearn for the comfort of days of warmth and leisure. Our assertion of our distinctly human nature is not purely distinguished through outright differences to the beasts of the forest – such as the choice you mention to abstain from participation in our due hardship – but the careful balance of our higher capabilities with what is true for both ourselves and our enduring companions. The only definite connection man has with God is the created natural world – anything more is speculation and the fallibility of the human mind – a creation of his the same as our own being, so would not reaching him require a holistic pursuit of his essence through his two knowable creations in tandem? Was not Chiron symbolically the teacher of many a Grecian hero exactly for his union of the world of man and beast? Through him, the greatest heroes of old learned their craft – that being the craft of true human excellence found within the upper echelons of heroism – so it is to the world of beasts, symbolized by Chiron’s equine body, that the greatest men owe at least half of their excellence.” At this, my companion laughed aloud. “You never cease to amaze me; a man will rarely advocate for reverting to mere building material rather than becoming the builder themselves! Your ideal man is jaded and calloused, not admirable. He has no sensitivity – unlike the man of the city – for the cold wind has frozen his senses and the hard earth has dulled his edge. How can a man appreciate the true warmth of spring when his exterior is more scar and burn than skin? Just as a babe experiences the first breath of life with all its immense stimulation – often eliciting tears of pain and joy simultaneously – we civilized men do the same with the sensations of life. We do not let the sting of cruelty tarnish our view of man, because we hide and extinguish it whenever it arises through our means to create institutions far surpassing the will of a single man in power and morality. We do not let the sting of winter wind hide the full caress of a spring day because, just as with the evil of man, we purge it from our experience through homes of comfort and warmth. The man you idealize is nothing more than a victim to the innate evils of the world, while I have risen above and can appreciate this day upon us with clarity and excitement. My appreciation is that of a wide-eyed child, in fact, it is the very same wonder, for my sword has been left sharp in idleness and comfort, while you are rusted over from years of abuse at the hands of the unforgiving elements. You merely wish to see fellow victims of nature in your ‘stoic trees’ and ‘resilient’ grass. It is not I who idealize the victim and revile the strong, but you.” I now understood why I had been so adamant about inviting him specifically. We both believed in the virtue of strength, yet differed so completely on where that strength was derived from or how it should be cultivated. “My friend, it seems as though you have not once stepped into the woods on a spring or winter day. While her bark may well protect her during times of trial and tribulation, does it stop her from blooming with lush leaves and flowers at the first subtle touch of spring’s hand? No, my friend – she feels this subtlety for the very reason that she has a comparison to distinguish it by. After the long, hard winter, the melt of snow from her flexed branches certainly feels as sublime as the breath of life taken by the fragile newborn. It is untrue that the tree with the thickest bark is unable to feel intensely, rather, that tree is simply able to experience a wider range of stimulation without collapse. The exotic flower may be beautiful – it is within its very fragility and impermanence that it is so – however, it can never compare in strength and value to the majesty of a fully formed oak. The sweetness of a ripe peach only becomes exquisite when the taste of the bitterness of an unripe one is known – just as spring is to winter. Unfortunately, man is fickle, and no experience can be felt ‘objectively’, rather, its beauty, value, and intensity are only felt when comparison can be made. The man of the city is not satiated by merely sitting idle in the warmth of spring, rather, the stimulation is of such minimal importance that presently drama or the allure of international travel trump it at the first suggestion. The bar for his pleasure and satisfaction has been set so high, that he is perpetually deprived of common joy. He constantly seeks more stimulation, more pleasure, more of the newness you yourself have expressed yearning for, yet by the day's end the actions taken that once offered the key to joy now serve as a mere benchmark as to what must be achieved tomorrow. How can a man not feel he is a failure when each day he must exceed the victories of the last? No, my friend – it is exactly the man who keeps himself a babe that is joyless. A babe grows for the very reason that he must, and in growing with challenge, his necessity for overcoming becomes satiated from surpassing trial and experiencing the same events as a stronger, larger, and more capable being. The satisfaction of a toddler with the ease of movement after enduring the difficulty of navigating the unwieldy body of a newborn for so long is evidenced as they run ceaselessly through life; would he feel that joy if he had never had to learn to walk, run, and skip arduously? When the farmhand is young, the harvest is hard. He does not know how much food will last him the winter; he does not understand the temperament of his moody plow-ox; in essence, his first years are characterized by challenge and are the most likely to get him killed. However, as the years go by, the ox becomes a friend and co-worker, and the necessary food can be estimated to the day with a mere glance at the shed full from the harvest. The actions are precisely the same as when he first began his career, yet, his satisfaction is derived from the ease with which now they are completed. The bar for him remains set, for the challenge that he has overcome creates a ‘new’ experience from events that have transpired before. When one grows as a person from hardship, he is born again, and each experience he takes is like the first step of a newborn for he inhabits a new soul just as the babe inhabits a new body. On the other hand, a man whom experiences physically new events in the same body and soul will, inevitably, run out of the former before the latter.” As I turned, the smugness that characterized the facial expression of my adversary had shifted from smugness to a furrowed brow and a flexed jaw. “Your point is intriguing, yet I relegate it to mere rhetorical skill and wit – both of which I regretfully conceded you possess – than true soundness and truth expressed by your argument. Philosophizing and analogies to flora and fauna are all well and good, yet neither can satisfy the empirical evidence that lies firmly in my camp. Fine, the woods and farmland we shall traverse, yet do not think you have won; I can beat you on your territory as cleanly as if it were my own.” -E.S. “Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians. Rowing is a sport for gentlemen played by gentlemen,” (altered Oscar Wilde quote). Though Wilde never wrote the last sentence of the opening quote, I find it a fitting continuation, for the stereotype of rowing as deeply aristocratic and gentlemanly is well-earned. I originally heard this additional extension to the quote yesterday from a friend of mine before we embarked on the much dreaded 2K test – for those who do not know, a 2K is the primary gauge of a rower's strength on the water – and I am proud to say that with these words ringing in my ears, I was able to shatter two previous personal bests within the span of one week. Though squarely third on the team of around thirty, I still take considerable pride in what I have accomplished over my four years; however, who would believe me if I told them rowing drove my burgeoning interest and work surrounding philosophy? If you are browsing my writing, you will likely have a general understanding of my philosophical convictions, which to summarize, are a cohesive but tenuous mixture of traditionalism, Catholic thought, and a healthy dose of Nietzsche, which are all traditionally lauded for their abstraction and lack of tangibility. However, through my own experience, I seek to pluck these philosophies from the clouds and show that their metaphysical teachings are firmly translatable into even a modern man’s life. I am sure you are already groaning; no one wants to hear another rehash of some bland college application essay or a rehearsed speech by an uninterested student about sports’ impact on character, yet I promise you this dive into my experience with rowing falls in neither of those categories. To illustrate my thesis that rowing shaped my traditionalism and philosophical work, I will draw on my personal journey over my four years with the sport, as well as the overall history of rowing and athletic practice as a whole, and clearly show the undeniable tether between the two seemingly unrelated disciplines. Man is a fickle creature, and his interests ebb and flow dramatically year by year, decade by decade, and century by century; yet some of his interests extend beyond the exoteric and dip into the primordial, one such example being sport. Great civilizations have always engaged in sport, and there has been much speculation as to why this is the case. Despite the pages upon pages of intellectual jargon that beat around the metaphorical bush eternally on this topic, the answer is painfully simple: sport is a simulation of war. Many may find this analysis juvenile, yet in every period excluding our own, such a simulation has dual interconnected purposes. For one, a great society is characterized by order and stability (stability of structure, not necessarily stability through perpetual peace unless it is peace by absolute domination) yet the youth are naturally predisposed to violence, vitality, and rash physicality. The foremost problem through most of history for sophist lawmakers has been what to do with Hebe (youthful vigor), for there is nothing a gluttonous nature-rejecting bureaucrat disdains and fears more than vitality – a quality in himself which has been left underdeveloped or actively stifled to pursue his decadent path. Here we come upon the famously nihilistic and lamenting quote: “Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt,” (attributed to the poet Juvenile). Juvenile is lamenting the decline of a vital aristocratic regime – what Spengler would call a ‘culture’ – into the empire of hegemony and decadence – in Spenglerian terms, ‘civilization’. Across the globe, we can see the tangible effects of youthful dissatisfaction, whether it be the rise of alternative politics in the West or the emergence of young male Jihadist movements in Africa and the Near East, such as Boko Haram. These movements comprised of young, uneducated, ill-equipped men have shaken the global order to its foundations rather than the seemingly titanic feuds between great powers. Just as the fascists rose to power on the tide of dissatisfied male ethos; just as the bronze age collapsed as a result of vital and nomadic sea peoples; just as Rome – a city of rouges and outlaws – dominated the Etruscans surrounding them; so will increasingly radical groups of young men come to shake our present age of rigid convention. The concept I laid out has been fairly well established by both the academic works of Costin Alamariu, such as Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, and his popular (though admittedly unacademic) exhortation Bronze Age Mindset, and is the fundamental foundation of Nietzschian aristocratic political philosophy. In essence, the nihilistic view of sports is merely that it is a means for sophists to channel youthful vitality in highly controlled and sterilized situations, yet as an athlete, this answer is unsatisfying and represents only an accurate reflection on the adulteration of sport, not its true essence. Sport can be an opium, or it can serve as a highly influential demarcation of virtue and worthiness. In Nietzsche’s view, an aristocracy will arise through a pastoral conquest of a settled, agrarian society. From that point of initial contact, some semblance of a social contract can be found. The resources of the masses flow toward the cultural pursuits of the distinct aristocratic class, and the military prowess of the ruling class establishes security beyond the primeval rule of custom through law; this is the essential symbiosis that founded civilization as we know it, not merely that of the West. Once the aforementioned marriage of forces created such a civilization, the noble task of cultivating an ever-complex cultural identity and upward-oriented state begins. During this process, relative peace becomes more common, and Thomas Hobbess’ requirement for a noble state to overcome the state of nature, in his words: “I demonstrate, in the first place, that the state of men without civil society (which state we may properly call the state of nature) is nothing else but a mere war of all against all; and in that war all men have equal right unto all things,” (Præfatio (Preface) of De Cive), becomes satiated through a rigid hierarchy. However, the fundamental power and vitality that allowed for the initial spark of excellence in these nomadic populations arose from their hyper-militaristic primal roots, so civilization, luxury, and peace posed a distinct risk to their ruling spirit. Edward Gibbon, through his groundbreaking history of the decline of Rome, reflects the basis for such a profound fear. His thesis states that Rome’s fall was due to a fundamental shirking of duty and weakness within their formerly vital patrician class, not external factors. Unfortunately for the Romans, though they borrowed much of Hellenic culture, they were unsuccessful in the primary Greek ideal of a physically vital ruling class. Of course, my statement is somewhat dramatized. Greece also went through periods of aristocratic decadence and decline, which eventually led to its dissolution as an independent civilization, yet the fundamental truth of their physical notions remains poignant. The primary term to associate with this cult of physicality is Kalokagathia, essentially equating the beauty of the body with the virtue of the soul. Additionally, the term was essential to the concept of a vital aristocracy, not merely an individualistic standard. Coined in Athens, the term was used among the aristocracy to communicate the standard that each aristocrat was expected to live up to; unlike modern ideals, it was an expectation rather than a detached hope that one would become an almost intermediary being to the realm of the Gods. Based on the previous paragraphs, it is clear why this ideal – so flagrant in its refutation of the modern ‘don’t judge a book by its cover' mentality – became the ruling philosophy of Hellenic civilization and ultimately cared for the already sewn seed of the original nomadic domination. The Greeks fundamentally understood the connection between civilizational survival, greatness, and retaining the original spark of vitality that allowed pastoral people to conquer a more numerous agricultural group, which was often only preserved through war. Here we stumble upon the dilemma of empires: ever-expanding the borders of one’s holdings will allow for a constant honing of the physical and military character of their aristocracy – the beating heart of any civilization – however, what happens when those ever-extending plains cease to be unknown; when there is no step left to fight for; when the entire store of fuel the civilization was predicated on, conquest, runs dry? Look to modern Greece, Italy, and England; you will find the once-raging torrents of civilization frozen over in indecision and mediocrity – desperately looking towards their past while not having the courage to embark on the deeply turbulent path to escape from the mire that their mythical forefathers arose from. However, not all civilizations took the path of insatiable conquest and survived with thriving noble classes despite lacking the riches and spiritual benefits of perpetual conquest. Civilizational survival lies in another Aristotelian value, eudaimonia, which expresses that the true heights of man are only reached through the cultivation of balance. For an aristocracy, balance is essential: balancing military commitments with artistic ones, balancing heavy-handed justice with civil content and self-determination among the peasantry, balancing readiness for combat with religiosity, and finally, balancing their vitality with cool-headed rationality to administrate a state while stimulating cultural development. Medieval Feudalism and Greek aristocracy are the systems that best exemplify such self-sustaining civilizations of balance, which bred stability and noble cultivation like none other. The similarities, differences, and eventual dissolution of these two civilizations would require multiple books, so in the spirit of sport, I will focus on athletic competition as a heightening institution as opposed to the sophist pacifier it could, unfortunately, mold into. To comprehend the importance of sport and non-military physical arts to these people, one must look to their art, for our purposes, sculpture. The first category of Greek sculpture that heralded the emergence from the Grecian Dark Ages was the Kouros, which became the primary cultural output of archaic Greece. These statues have been cited as not holding a religious connotation, however, through their embodiment of Kalokagathia and Hebe, they served as an essential representation of the intermediary between the divine and the tangible found through the symmetry of the athletes rippling muscles. These statues were used primarily to commemorate not great warriors – though much of Greek civilization at the time was structured around honoring military prowess – rather, they honored athletes. As can be seen from the emergence of the Olympic games early in Grecian history, sport would often take primacy over war and internal conflicts, evidenced by the ékécheiria (Olympic truce); in the Greek vision, the physicality of war and sport were indistinguishable from each on an esoteric level. Even the renowned crowning ceremony, which saw victorious athletes crowned with olive branches, represented the unshakable tether between the strength of the body and the virtue of the soul, for the elevation of athletes to near-divine figures honored both qualities in conjunction. Julius Evola famously said: “The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers or the prayers of the faithful,” (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World), yet Evola was a medievalist and scholar of the classical world, so I have no doubt the quote could be extended to encompass the ‘sweat on the athlete’s brow’. In the case of Classical Greece, we find sport used for the heightening and honing of an aristocratic civilization: a way for the spiritual fortitude engendered by athletic prowess to translate into a noble caste without necessitating the blind instability and Faustian pursuit of constant warfare and conquest. By this point in the essay, I am sure my stance on the state of modern sports is evident. Rather than heightening the ideals of classical civilization and nobility, modern sports seek only to distract – hence why it has become so corporatized. The foremost industries in the modern day are all characterized by their capitalization on the distraction of the masses, and sport has been instrumental in serving as one of these cultural anti-depressants. As mentioned before, the path of modern sports is far from uncharted; such a path leads to ultimate civilizational decay. How long did the Roman bread and circuses ploy last until the great columns erected by the early patricians crumbled to dust under vital barbarian hordes? The mentality is not hard to understand, for it is the mentality of every bureaucratic secular government (though pioneered by the Enlightenment). The primary goal of government fundamentally shifted, initially predicated on elevating the spiritual state of a culture, yet now focused merely on suppressing vitality and discontent. When scientifically assessed, it is only logical; measuring societal success by lifespan is a far easier task than taking the time to analyze closeness to the divine through artistic output and spiritual vitality. When sport becomes a science on how to distract and entertain, its original function of channeling youthful vitality and heightening the highest echelons of society is tossed to the wind. In the modern day, sports from grammar school to the professional leagues fundamentally separate the physical, intellectual, and spiritual elements of athleticism; symbolic of most evils of modernity, in our scientific pursuit of categorization and isolation, we have lost the nobility of harmony that even the ancients had a fundamental understanding of. We can see the effects of this daily; society is controlled by men whom have neither the courage nor the discipline of the past, and lack the duty to the divine that physical excellence once cultivated in an aristocracy. They promote technological progress, restriction, and separation from nature, for they fear nature – whereas the athlete has mastered her. The society we reside in was crafted by urban intellectuals who fear, reject, and destroy nature, hence why they seek to relegate sport to a secondary role. They are much the same as the primeval farmer, ruled by custom and fear, unable to separate the inventions of their manipulative shaman from natural, divine realities. The time we live in spiritually is far less advanced and natural than it once was, no matter how many veneers of technological advancement are placed in front of our eyes to distract us. Man’s goal of discovering the divine through his own ‘nature’, pioneered by the athlete, has been entirely subverted. These last few pages have been both impersonal and exceedingly academic, yet I find a rigorous and thorough analysis warranted for such an important topic. Sport is not merely a means for distraction or keeping the general population healthy through elevated children's games: sport is a profound means of preserving cultural, moral, and intellectual cohesion and prowess. For much of my childhood, I, unfortunately, rejected these fundamental truths, not only because I was lazy but also because our society so radically shifted what it meant to be an athlete. Crew, however, changed that, because though it is a team sport like none other – requiring perfect timing with those on your boat – the relationship each man cultivated with the oar and the boat differs wildly. When I am cranking the faded blue handle, caked in the blood and sweat of countless athletes before me, it is what I tell myself in those excruciating moments between the 900-meter and 500-meter mark that hold the power to make or break my workout. Those who never hear that voice within are relegated to perpetual mediocrity; they constitute the meat and potatoes of the team that provide a foundation for the few to build off of. However, those who find that voice calling out to them in the wilderness are a breed like no other, and in cultivating that voice, they can turn a whisper into a cry capable of triumphing over all primal instincts. The connection to aristocratic morality is apparent, for they too master their nature. Rather than living for sustenance, they reject the mere primacy of life and chase metaphysical ideals; a rower scoffs and his fatigue and physical pain to achieve much the same glory. The aristocrat does not find pleasure or release in mere work but rather in excellence to a level as biological as trained; a rower is never satiated by achievable goals. A nobleman must devote his life to martial training, where even the minute movements decide life or death; a rower’s hands dropping an inch can lead to a sizable defeat in the heat of a race. Just as a duel, a race is only mere minutes, and once it begins, there is no going back. If the rower lacks the mental fortitude to cultivate perfection for six minutes, he loses, and the nobleman, in turn, loses his life. There are no substitutions, no breaks, and no lulls in the action; each second demands an absolute commitment that most cannot muster. The question as to why rowing was and still is a staple of the British aristocracy is quite simple: it is the complete synthesis of all they stand for. Sport, though bastardized at the high levels, still retains its deeply traditional foundations, and rather than rejecting the lot because of the few adulterations, we should instead seek to purify the noble institution to cultivate mastery, not subversion or distraction. -E.S. Fitting with my character and philosophy, there are two phenomena I markedly dislike: modern cinema and science fiction. Though it may simply sound as though I hate the thought of anyone having fun, I have avoided and disdained both due to their escapist nature rather than just due to the sheer sight of smiling people. Modern cinema needs no elaborate analysis to pick it apart, for it has universally become disdained. Rehashing the same superheroes in the same situations as well as massacring loved characters in order to waterboard an audience with progressive nonsense is simply the antithesis to creativity; hence why before Dune I was on the precipice of fully turning away from the medium of film. Science fiction on the other hand has always represented a different variation of escapism in an extreme form. Just like ‘Disney adults’, science fiction fans have fully earned their portrayal as infantile dregs of society, for those people are naturally the most susceptible to escapism due to the poor choices that have made their true existence unlivable. As you can tell from my previous articles, I am a huge proponent of accountability, self-sufficiency, and discipline, so these people have always gained more of my pity than ire. You would be right to challenge me by pointing out the political symbolism in Star Wars or Star Trek – after all, are Fascism and Cold War politics not deeply profound subjects to analyze creatively; however, neither can be truly labeled as revolutionary in their analysis. Is ‘Fascism bad’ really a groundbreaking opinion? For the Soviets, did we not have enough fear-mongering over the half-century of ideological squabble? It should be said that I simply may not be interested in such symbolism because I regard all three major political experiments of the last century (liberalism, fascism, and socialism) as symptoms of a larger malady, and therefore have no vested interest in pitting one against the other. For these reasons, when the first Dune movie was released in 2021 I had no interest in watching it. Just another Star Wars rip-off – I thought – haven’t we had enough of that? Yet today, I regard the decision I made to halfheartedly watch the first movie in my dorm room to be undeniably positive toward my life and philosophical understanding. When I read an article critiquing the movie stating: “In my previous essay, I argued that the Bene Gesserit are villainous and white supremacist — but are the world-building and story itself white supremacist? I think they are — perhaps unintentionally or by omission. Cultural appropriation and racist stereotypes are integral to Dune’s world-building,” (Grace Lapointe, The Apotheosis of Paul Atreides), I not only laughed aloud, but knew I had stumbled on a film that must have done something right. Cinema that does not offer a challenge is no better than pornography, for it is merely a self-soothing reinforcement rather than true timeless art. Of course, those labeling Dune as ‘orientalist’, ‘white-supremacist’, and ‘far right’ are the same people who call Julius Evola, “Dungeons & Dragons for racists,” (Benjamin Teitelbaum) as a form of dismissal – people who rather than rise to a challenge, instead sink further into a pseudo-intellectual shell of protective dismissals. Why have both been labeled as such? Because they fundamentally challenge the foundational pillars of modernity, which gains them the most universal harbinger of true success: hatred. Dune's reception of course has been overwhelmingly positive, and rightfully so, however, I fear that most are enraptured by the stunning score and cinematography, and ignore the real gem found in its intense symbolism. Though I fundamentally disagree with Herbert's deep conviction that Nietzsche’s übermensch and traditional heroism are inherently evil, I found such differences stimulating as opposed to frightening like the writer I cited above. The most ‘on the nose’ of these symbolic challenges falls is Dune's political critiques of modernity – which already blows Star Wars out of the water – but additionally, its mystical elements demonstrate an acceptance and simultaneous distrust of Guénonian perrenialism serve to make it a work that appeals to both the plebeian masses and the patrician few. To understand if Dune can fit with a traditionalist perspective, let us first dive into the points where the most concrete agreement can be found. Herbert’s work can be defined definitively as anti-modern and ecologically focused, which upon further review seems markedly aligned with traditionalist principles. At its core, Dune is a work of eco-fiction as opposed to science fiction, which is where we first come to grasp Herbert's anti-modern tendencies. A foundational piece of the backstory to the Dune universe is an earlier revolt against ‘thinking machines’, reminiscent of H.G. Wells’s War Of Worlds. In the words of Lorenzo DiTommaso: “The Butlerian Jihad brought Imperial technology to a specialized and codified halt. By forcing human minds to develop, the Revolt ultimately promoted religion over science and technology, and humanness over machines and artificial minds,” (Lorenzo DiTommaso, History and Historical Effect in Frank Herbert’s Dune). Though Herbert does not adopt a cyclical theory of history in his novel like many among the Traditionalist school – as also mentioned in DiTommaso’s article – he diagnoses the same fundamental issues with modernity found in the reign of quantity and the exploitation of dogmatically religious cultures with inferior technological ability. Spice – as a resource not religious hallucinogenic – is a symbol serving for oil in the modern day, allowing for intergalactic travel while simultaneously coming at the expense of an entire native people. The Butlerian Jihad is seen as a historical model for the later Paul Atreides in his quest to shake off the shackles of imperial rule over Arrakis, clearly demonstrating that the events we witness in the movie are essentially an extension of the previous divine crusade against a technological order; at least initially until the protagonist falls into the trap of Ceasarism. The allegorical significance is not that these Jihads are a positive phenomenon; rather, they are the bloody result of extreme tension being placed upon the natural order. In essence, Herbert is warning the West that its continual exploitation of natural resources and native people will sew their own violent demise. Not only does Herbert seem skeptical about ‘ai’ (the favorite boogieman of modern media), but he additionally holds a skepticism of technology as a whole, especially the idea that technological progress can be equated with human progress. As a conservative libertarian himself, he certainly found sacrificing technology the lesser of two evils when confronted with the alternative of continued exploitation. His use of ‘jihad’ to describe both the Buttlerian struggle as well as the one showcased in the first novel further serves to demonstrate faith’s primacy over technology, clearly as a means to shatter Western notions of smug supremacy and misplaced sense of security. To circle back to the ecological kinship between Herbert and the traditionalist school, he takes the time to show first the reality of divine truth in the universe, but also how technology perverts its acquisition (the central dogma of perrenialism). Although many have been quick to label the ‘spice’ in Dune as metaphorical for Herbert’s experiences with psychedelics, I believe this is merely a way analysts attempt to stifle the truly thought-provoking implications of the novel. The Bene Gesserit order (the primary religious institution of the Dune universe) uses the spice to induce divine revelation – just as the indigenous Freman – so the spice is patently metaphorical for the divine truth only attained through solace with nature rather than merely an attempt for the author to justify his own drug abuse. Interestingly, the Bene Gesserit order symbolizes Catholicism while the Freman serve as a similar symbolic representation of Islam, so it seems Herbert once more accepts the central Perrenialist premise that both religions draw from the same well of esoteric truth. Though he accepts the reality of both group's connection to divine truth, he does not infer that the exoteric manifestations practiced by each are equal. Herbert finds nobility in the Freman, who naturally experiences the beneficial effects of spice, while also demonstrating his distrust of the Bene Geserite order – a fitting contrast to highlight his own institutional distrust. Thus far Dune has proved to march in lockstep with a traditionalist diagnosis of the “crisis of the modern world”, however, its political symbolism is where Herbert and I fundamentally diverge. One of the primary issues the series currently faces is that the movie adaptations have yet to be resolved, which has led to a phenomenon described by Joshua Pearson when he wrote: “Some have decried Dune as an exemplar of the most toxic tropes lurking in science fiction, calling the novel an orientalist fever dream, a pean to eugenics, and a seductive monument to fascist aesthetics; others look at the same text and see an excoriation of hero-worship, a cautionary tale of revolutionary dreams betrayed, and a warning about Indigenous sovereignty subverted by a charismatic charlatan,” (Joshua Pearson, The Contested Politics of ‘Dune’). I’ll be the first to admit that I was a viewer who placed my own bias onto the movie and left the theater feeling very smug that Dune reinforced everything I previously believed; unfortunately while writing this painstaking article, I found it not to be the case. To understand what Herbert is critiquing, we must understand why I saw such a bright beacon shining from the character of Paul. To put it simply, Paul is the pinnacle of the aristocratic worldview. Not only is he the son of a duke, but he is a warrior, a product of relentless selective breeding, and has a direct tether to divine truth due to these inherited factors. Paul Atreides is exactly the half-political half-religious monarch of Evolian philosophy; he is the exact definition of the individualistic and aristocratic Nietzschian übermensch; he is everything loved by an aristocratic order, and by extension, everything I personally profess. When seen this way, Paul represents the future I myself yearn for, which is why I identified myself with him so profoundly. When the old aristocracy had decayed in a Spenglerian fashion, a new and vital nomadic aristocrat swept in and reestablished fervent religiosity and cleansed corruption through holy war; a story as old as time – I draw the primary connection with Octavian after the death of Ceasar – and a story that most pre-french revolutionary conservatives such as myself fully embrace as fundamental and divine. However, Dune is unfortunately not the traditionalist masterpiece I hoped it would be; in fact, it is a scathing refutation of the worldview I laid out above. In an interview with NBC, Herbert answers these questions definitively and puts to rest my overactive speculations: “I think we do have a sense of the mindless animal within the depths of all of us,” (0:50 minutes into the interview) and, “Don’t trust leaders to always be right,” (1:44 minutes into the interview). These are just a few of the most notable quotations from the interview, but they serve to showcase that Paul is not the hero nor the villain as many claim, but rather an embodiment of the instability and impossibility of truly benevolent leadership. Within the same interview, he states that his goal was to create a truly great leader by every metric (this is where we find the Nietzschian and Evolian influence) who has the nobility of spirit, birth, sword, and every other form of aristocratic justification. Yet in creating a great leader, Herbert does not aim to sound the trumpet of a revival of the West on the horizon, but rather of a fall into dangerous Ceasarism. It is important to note that Herbert identifies himself as in alignment with the foundational values of the United States – which he believes that the modern nation has strayed from – so the feudalist system he creates with the barons, dukes, and galactic empire is symbolic of his distaste for liberal ideas perverted which have regressed to a dark period; starkly contrasting the traditionalist notion of a feudal primacy over liberalism. The Baron Harkonnen, a nobleman in the truest sense of the word, is perverted and corpulent, and his progeny are no better. Baron Harkonnen is symbolic of Herbert’s distaste for power and authority, and how though an aristocratic elite claims to possess heightened vitality and value, in practice they deteriorate into sub-human leeches (additional evidence for this claim is symbolized in how the Atreides' bloodline upon coming to power undergo a literal process of morphing into sand-worms). The Baron however is a clear villain, so his symbolism can be explained away as a mere literary device to create an interesting antagonist, however, Paul and his family are criticized in much the same way. His father is blinded by pride, and he himself is fueled by revenge despite his direct knowledge that his actions will lead to immeasurable suffering; a nobleman who even with divine sight acts on impulse rather than with Apollonian virtue. To put it simply, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and no level of virtue, fitness, and genetic superiority can alter that eternal fact. As discussed above, this view is not one Herbert and I share, however, I would be remiss to dismiss the novel or recommend like-minded readers avoid his work. Even as a Catholic, many of his most pointed criticisms of what I hold dear ring true. For example, the amorality of the Bene Gesserit in their position as kingmakers not only echoes the moral ambiguity and corruption of the medieval church, but also during the fascist period. Although they in the end favor the winning side, Paul, they exhibit no qualms in allowing Feyd Rautha to be considered an equally worthy candidate for the imperial throne. Their settlement with the sadist Feyd Rautha draws inspiration from how the church knowingly turned a blind eye to Mussoli’s exploits in Ethiopia and initially did the same with Hitler before the invasion of Poland. Though I take issues with aspects of this critique, it certainly contains valuable kernels of truth, just as Herbert's larger criticism of modernity and even aristocratic principles. Rather than dogmatically rejecting Herbert's work or misinterpreting it for sheer convenience, it is better to use it as the masterfully crafted thought experiment that it truly is. I may not see eye to eye with Herbert, but I am more than willing to support an author who diagnoses the great malady of modern society and causes me to hone my core principles, which Dune certainly inspired me to do. As alluded to in the introduction, I appreciate any writer who can offer a pointed and shameless challenge to both society as a whole and myself, and by God, Herbert and the movies his book inspired have achieved that goal tenfold. -E.S. ![]() In the words of Dr. Peter Glomset, “Americans have thrived in the arts – from musical to visual – but lag behind our European counterparts in the literary field,” and if not for one man, I would whole-heartedly agree. Cormac McCarthy certainly needs no drawn-out introduction, nor does his most prolific book Blood Meridian. Filled to the brim with classic ‘cowboys vs injins’ style gunfights and grotesque imagery of severed heads and shrunken ears stripped from enemies of all creeds and races, Blood Meridian has repelled as many critiques as it has captivated. As is not uncommon, some will attempt to relegate it to a teenage boy's violent fantasies while others will critique the long and supremely descriptive sentences woven by the despotic overlord of the English language. For the former, I say grow a pair; for the latter, I say set aside your jealousy, for any artist must learn to recognize when they have encountered a superior caliber. In devaluing McCarthy’s work (in calling McCarthy adolescent, they simply display their own infantile nature), these individuals lose the ability to engage with a profoundly philosophical work – one on the level of Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment. Of course, I am not the first to pick up on Blood Meridian’s philosophical backbone – which is only amplified in its embroidery of grotesque passages and depravity – however, oversimplification has plagued this work just as it has for every reasonably complex novel. Just like McCarthy’s own character of the Judge, they seek to extract one central point from the novel and subsequently destroy the rest; his coffin must be worn with many convulsions his corpse has suffered upon each bastardization of his work! As a simple search on YouTube would demonstrate, many have been quick to liken McCarthy to Thomas Hobbes, which holds considerable validity. It is impossible to argue that the novel is anything but a horrific depiction of mankind and his capability for cruelty and violence, however, unlike Hobbes McCarthy poses us with a question and a reality, not a solution. The closest he comes to providing a Hobbesian solution of civilization and control is when he depicts the Judge pontificating on a native tribe that once inhabited the region that the Glanton Gang is currently moving through. He reflects: “All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us,” (McCarthy, p. 127). For context, this anecdote is part of a three-part scene concerning the raising of children, which in this case is symbolic of the progress and decline of civilizations. In a sense, this is a Spenglerian view of an age of barbarity following a golden age of civilization, and like Spengler, the Judge sees it as an inevitability. Unlike the traditionalist view, however, the quest for civilization is not seen as a noble pursuit, but rather that of attempting to stop the ocean tides with a wall of sand. The Judge, as an agent of chaos and representative of human barbarism, laughs at this attempt to subvert natural will and is ready to arise at every opportunity, for he never truly leaves. He is the resentment and rage that envelops a declining society, just as he is the spirit of progress in the age of expansion and enlightenment. Where McCarthy differs from Hobbes is exactly in this aforementioned duality, for the judge is a supremely cultured being; civilization and progress have only allowed him to flourish on a scale equally swollen as his own bloated figure. While for Hobbes, strength in centralization and control would provide a mediating effect towards the universal evil embodied by the Judge, in Blood Meridian the Judge games bureaucracies, militaries, and governors with ease. He is a bottle that cannot be corked, and if anything is a way in which McCarthy spits in the face of Hobbes and his hubris in attempting to formulate a cork that inevitably would not hold. On a philosophical level, McCarthy is dooming man and his civilizations to futility (a topic which I will attempt to offer a counter for later) however beyond the strike at Hobbes, McCarthy bases philosophical his diagnosis on theology. McCarthy’s religiosity is up to considerable debate, however, his astute conviction in a pessimistic and cursed world makes some variation of Gnostic Deism seem fitting. For evidence, we must look to his renowned epilogue – as compelling as it is confusing – for there do we see man’s ultimate condition through the eyes of the author. As man travels forth through life, “He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there,” (McCarthy, p. 284). The noble man, separated from the scavengers McCarthy describes following these enkindled holes, trudges through life lighting the fires which God has laid out for him. God does not reach into this world, rather, he has left a path that we follow, a path that allows us to shed light on an intentionally dark plane of existence. Nobility, in the eyes of McCarthy, is in creation; he reviles those that linger behind the man lighting the holes. Here he provides the foundation of the solution for man that I shall soon discuss, but also demonstrates that though God has cursed mankind, he has still provided him a path of creation and a path towards greater achievements. Most of Blood Meridian’s theology stems from the biblical story of Adam and Eve as well as the Poem of Paradise Lost by John Milton. Many times has it been argued that the Judge is indeed Satan, and using both these religious accounts, that analysis is proved mostly sound. From the very first pages of the book, a Reverend calls out upon encountering the Judge: “This is him, cried the reverend, sobbing. This is him. The devil. Here he stands,” (McCarthy, p.2). The symbolism in the reverend's cry needs no explanation, but far more subtle justifications for the satanic identity of the Judge arise as the story progresses. Just as Satan in Paradise Lost fashions gunpowder and cannon to wage his futile war against God, So too does the Judge. When the Glanton Gang is about to receive divine justice, the Judge fashions homemade gunpowder from the belly of the volcanic earth and the urine of men, bathing himself in it as he mixes what is described as the “Devil’s batter” (McCarthy, p.116): the gunpowder. Though much later, in the second encounter with the edge of St. Michael's sword, the judge wields the muzzle of a Howitzer as though it was a mere rifle and escapes his fate once more: the cannon. From these accounts, it is clear that the Judge wages an active and brutal war against fate (clearly what McCarthy believes is an implement of God) which demonstrates why the Judge is wholly consumed by warfare in all its brutal forms. In his own words: “War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god,” (McCarthy, p. 210). What God is to Satan is indeed war, not only because of Satan's act of outright revolt against the heavenly kingdom, but also of the curse God simultaneously lays upon the serpent and mankind. According to Genesis 3, 15-16: “So the LORD God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, ‘Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring [1] and hers; he will crush [2] your head, and you will strike his heel." (Genesis 3, 15-16). A state of war is what God sentences Satan and man to eternally; bloody, perpetual, War. The Judge does not revel in war because he sees it as a ritual as he says or because he has the power of choice over the matter– though he attempts to use Nietzsche’s will to power to feign self-determination in his bloodlust– but because he is cursed to do so. Lastly, Judge Holden has been generally accepted as a personification of imperialism – an interpretation that has become almost ubiquitous among casual readers and intellectuals alike – but additionally serves a stark counter to modernity. It has been said that the story of Blood Meridian is a sequel to mankind’s banishment from Eden, showing exactly the extent of God’s curse on Satan in the not-so-distant past, which upon further analysis proves to be correct. The interpretation of Judge Holden as a metaphor for imperialism has unfortunately been taken in directions that stray far from the actual purpose of McCarthy’s character, even if my specific traditionalist interpretation is to be discounted. There have been extensive studies of Holden’s position as a representative of American misogyny coupled with racism and all other sorts of progressive buzzwords, however, that interpretation loses the actual poignance of his character. Holden is one thing: indiscriminate. Like all the other members of the Glanton gang, he has no values or morality, only what suits him best in the given moment. If my interpretation is to be accepted, Judge Holden’s position as the embodiment of Imperialism and post-Christian Western society is horrifyingly accurate. The foundations of liberalism and modernity are built off of Holden’s exploits of categorization; his learnedness spurs his evil rather than curtailing it. As mentioned briefly above, the proximity to our own time adds a sense of universality to the story, for the Garden of Eden may feel distant and antiquated, but the founding of the American West is only just outside living memory. Additionally, Satan has not diminished in strength due to technological advancement as Western society deludes itself to be the case, but rather has swelled in size and power. While once Satan was handsome (as mentioned in the previous religious accounts discussed) he now appears fat, childlike, spoiled, and corpulant. Why is this? Because his task has become easy, man is playing right into his child-murdering hands. Holden is spurring on a secular world of categorization, domination, and disdain for God and nature – not unlike our own. In the words of Jihan Zakarriya: “Judge Holden establishes a secular order, with the workings of God or religion suspended, declaring an order of hierarchy, of exclusion, of identity conflicts, and of a monolithic white power,” (An Ecocritical Reading of Blood Meridian, paragraph 7). Though the last point concerning a racial view of Judge Holden’s exploits can be debated, in this case, progressive academia and I march in lockstep. You have journeyed with me through the pages of Blood Meridian; on this journey, we have uncovered that he is a philosophical, religious, and historical allegory that warns mankind of his future and his very nature, but I promised you a counter and I shall deliver. Cormac McCarthy portrays the horror of inevitability and fate masterfully, however, I believe that he additionally drops a covert trail of breadcrumbs to my ultimate prescription of the universal malady he has so eloquently diagnosed. When the madman in the mud hut is speaking to the unnamed protagonist of the novel, he tells him: “You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that?” (McCarthy, p.17). The connection to technology is evident, and the madman describes man’s unparalleled evil through not his increased propensity for it internally – in his own words even the least of animals has the capability – but through the means by which he can perpetuate it. Here, McCarthy and I find agreement. I too hold that man’s technological progression does not stamp out the evil from his heart, but rather only provides him the tools with which he can act on the deep, primal, bloodlust that was engendered into him by his banishment from Eden. Once more, we see Hobbes handily refuted. Governments throughout the novel are shown to be weak, hypocritical, and untrustworthy; after all, a modern government is merely a gang that succeeded in taking power. Hobbes was right that man needs civilization and society to protect against our primal evil, but where true society derives its power is not in technological domination – which Blood Meridian handily shows is not a viable solution – but in a hierarchy held by natural law and angled upwards. Ultimately, the world of tradition is where we find an escape from the Judge’s ever-present figure. For example take the kid and his origin, startlingly similar to the condition of modern man. He is born in blood, it is all he knows, for he has no connection to his family and no set path to follow. Like each member of the gang excluding the Judge, he is a man immersed in nihilism. There is no nobility, there are no values – for values get one killed – only ruthless competition reigns supreme. War can never be irradicated, as the Judge says: “As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?” (McCarthy, p.280). He is that single dancer, and in denying him we give him strength. The beauty of traditional structures is found within their balance, for man does not deny war, but relegates it to a limited position. By doing so, man acts in accordance with the natural order, but uses it as a means to strive towards man's ultimate goal: self-sustaining stability and cultivation of higher men. What McCarthy describes is the natural state, defined by Heraclitus as perpetual flux, which is shown to be the embodiment of hell. In keeping with biblical tradition, we find that our only path to salvation is to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth. If Earth is cursed by perpetual flux, heaven must by extension be the polar opposite. This means that just as the angels are categorized into classes – with the Cherubim, Seraphim, and thrones presiding over this celestial hierarchy – so too should man. Additionally, as God is the undisputed sovereign, so too should his chosen man be the undisputed sovereign of man on earth. McCarthy is right that the hand of God can be elusive in this world, so we must be active in creating a society that acts in accordance with his will. In Hindu tradition, a man because deplorable and shunned only when he has attempted to revolt against the celestial structure he was born to be a part of, just as satan was banished from Heaven after attempting to subvert the celestial kingdom's rigid hierarchy. Therefore, to escape the influence of the Judge, we must end our journey through the war torn deserts of Mexico and return to our land, to act in accordance with our purpose, and not chase the illusive specters of wealth and sovereignty, of which only God can be true master of. -E.S. Recently, I was deeply troubled to learn of Harvard’s Gilbert and Sullivan performances indefinitely ceasing, however this event is emblematic of far more dire issues facing men in the arts. For as long as I can remember, my great Uncle would kindly take multiple other family members and I to the spectacularly produced performances: an experience which certainly strengthened an important relationship that I still hold dear. Not only did it buttress personal relationships, but also my burgeoning interest in music. Being raised around truly great music is an invaluable resource, and coupled with exposure these singers were still young, which added to the relatability of the experience. Currently, I have been a part of a choir since elementary school, and have been lucky enough to go on a musical tour of Quebec – singing in two of their cathedrals – and I owe much of it to the powerful role models I saw take the stage at Harvard. As I am sure you can tell by now, I found these performances the highlight of my year, and the news certainly came as a shock (as evidenced by the long chain of emails shared between my family upon reception). To add insult to injury, the reason for the abrupt suspension of performances was most troubling: they had no men.
As evidenced by most of my writings, I am a huge proponent of traditional masculinity, so you may be surprised by my deep care for Gilbert and Sullivan's performances of all things, yet that is masculinity. I wish to also be clear, Harvard, for all its issues, is not uniquely at fault in this regard. During my time in high school choir, the stark difference in the number of female to male students was shocking, not to mention the deep fissure between the levels of participation between the sexes. However, I also saw the phenomenon extended to the orchestra and even the visual arts during my time, which importantly was not as extreme when I first arrived during my freshman year. Even the men who remained in the choir felt uneasy (as did I), which sapped much of the joy found in performing in front of large groups. The second we would all stand up, the robes we wore seemed to morph from cloth to lead, and our previous confidence to hit notes deemed ‘unmasculine’ would evaporate. This uneasiness manifested in antisocial tendencies within the group – such as paltry participation and performative apathy – for each man seemed to be locked in a competition to prove their masculinity as if it was under mortal threat. A healthy amount of unproductiveness is good for a young man, in fact, one of the chief classical ideals was a confident lack of care, however, it cannot be confused with the weakness driving what I witnessed. I am ashamed to say it, but I would bet a significant amount of money that my former choir will become exclusively female within the next year; in fact, they would be better for it! I lived through this slow decline of the masculine arts for four years, and the Gilbert and Sullivan debacle has simply caused it to bubble up inside me like a fit of unshakable and deeply unpleasant indigestion. What I wish you to take away from this anecdote is not that my four years of choir were miserable – for I cherish them despite the drawbacks – but rather, the central point is found in the universal phenomenon of wounded masculinity. The lens has widened from Harvard’s Gilbert and Sullivan performances to high school art as a whole, and now, we will twist our lens once more to gaze at the masculine creative output as a whole. To preface, homosexual and effeminate expression has become quite common, but for our purposes only attempts at traditional masculine representation are relevant. The chief masculine cultural contributions recently have been in rap and sports, a pitiful lineup but it is the unfortunate reality. It seems odd how young men, many (if not most) white, have latched onto a musical tradition that originates in the deepest corners of the African American ghettos and was designed to speak for those facing challenges unimaginable to most modern listeners. Personally, I regard it as an expression detrimental to those involved and society, but I know too little to speak for black Americans. What does interest me however is the fact that music which speaks to senseless violence and the depravity of man (to be fair to rap, it is often critical of the perpetrators of these acts, however, there are countless examples of the opposite) which in all honesty is what many of the creators of this music experienced during their time in the depths of poverty, appeals to most modern young men. The media is partially to blame, but we must remember that the media is simply sewing a plowed field. The black community that coined rap late last century faced similar spiritual challenges as the modern man – of course in conjunction with tangible poverty, hunger, etc – which has ironically created a new generation of spoiled white half-men singing along to lyrics about the depths of racial injustice and the senseless violence many in poverty suffer at the hands of. They had little control over their own destiny, they were nihilistic after years of hardship, they fell short of the standards an increasingly media-heavy society pumped down their throats, they were poor in education and social mobility, and they were detached from natural expressions of humanity, not to mention masculinity. Anti-social behaviors – such as desensitization to crime and violence – are merely reactionary impulses manifesting due to the severity of masculine degradation in the modern age. Sports obsession is much the same; men’s lives lack a necessary level of vitality and release so they instead pour their time and money into emotionally tethering themselves to others living their hyper-masculine dream. Sport formerly was used as a simulation of war, and by extension, was a way to pacify a warrior class in times of peace (ie. jousting, Native lacrosse, fencing, etc), and now we find ourselves – exactly like the plebian Roman – neutered by bread and circuses. Now I ask, was Mozart an effeminate man? Was Wagner an inoffensive softy? Neither, of course, is true. What has always defined the greatness of a high culture is duality. Just as the two paths to cultivate a connection with the divine (or esoteric depending on your doctrine) are through action and contemplation, so is the path to solar masculinity. Since modern life has reduced men to only being valuable in the latter, they feel unsatisfied in the former, manifesting in what we see today. Since they will likely be a doctor, lawyer, or accountant, they cannot assert their masculine vitality in the areas that really matter, but rather massage their sickly vital urge through purging themselves of the higher arts which they see as feminine. Unlike the elderly, I am not worried that rap will make the young violent, rather, I am worried that it will further stifle their natural vitality. It is true that – as Nietzsche lays out – all civilizations of a higher type begin with a barbaric aristocratic class storming in on their horses and massacring the local farming population, yet no high culture has been sustained that way. When a culture matures, just like a young man, it comes to appreciate the path of the warrior and the path of the aesthetic. Golden age civilizations, such as classical Greece or the mature years of the European Middle Ages, adopted doctrines that fostered a higher type of masculinity: divine masculinity. The Codes of Chivalry, Kalakogathia, Bushido, and many more serve to meld a man’s natural strength with his abilities of care, restraint, and delicacy. Frederick the Great – one of the last truly chivalric monarchs – was a skilled flutist and unlike his father ushered in a golden age of Prussian arts and cultural output. The system of spiritual advancement had been honing a perennial idea of masculinity for centuries, and industrial society threw it to the wind. We are now like Frederick Wilhelm the First (father of the aforementioned Frederick the Great): old, sick, fat, and hyper-fixated on war because we lack the ability to participate in it. My hope, therefore, is that out of our decrepit state, we can bear a son who can realize what we never dreamed of grasping. My brief historical and philosophical analysis of the problem has now been made clear, but to conclude, I want to offer you a kernel of hope. Male participation in the arts is fledgling, but I have been proud to participate in one of the few exceptions to that trend. In my first year of Acapella, our group was starkly different from the choir. Most of us were varsity sports players, our chemistry together was unmatched, and we embodied (admittedly too much so) the Greek virtue of vitality and acedia (carelessness). Most of us had little singing experience, and I had to coach my fellow bases significantly, but I was unsurprised to see the skills learned playing sports correlated directly to the stage. As an all-male group, there was a genuine fear of mine going in that it would be a group of effeminate micro-managers that would limit the group to the notes on the page, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it an entirely different community. We may have not sounded the best at our regional performance, but I cannot overstate how much of a good time I had that year. We made music together, hell Acapella, the chief of the feminine musical arts, and we did so without insecurity. I stood on stage, with people I cared about and cultivated a willingness to try, to achieve something I would not otherwise; I only realize now that this was the same divine passion that allowed some of the most masculine and warlike civilizations to produce the highest and most delicate art. Plato’s idolization of the philosopher king was neither a play at his own ego nor arbitrary, but instead the true union of the poles of masculinity into one greatly productive being. We signed up because our friends did, because they encouraged us, and because we never felt lesser for approaching the art form in this manner. I remember joking with some friends at the time that we were likely the most muscular acapella group to ever take the stage, and I would not be shocked if that were true, but that is what the arts should be at their core. I find it a tragedy that the artistic sports-player archetype has been relegated to the cinema, it should be within each of us. -E.S. I am an environmentalist, and recently I have been proud to witness a sizable shift within the right towards a new and far superior version of environmentalism. Finally, there is an alternative to the environmentalism founded upon eating synthetic meat and throwing orange paint at works of art, one that holds profound respect for our closest contact with the celestial world: nature. Though this new nature-conscious right has often been labeled as reactionary (the current ruling class’ favorite term to immediately dismiss any valid criticism) as well as being equated with sub-cultures glorifying terrorism, both are merely a way for those that fear its power to sensationalize and discredit the most genuinely revolutionary movement of our times. In this regard, I see my environmentalism as less of an empirical sentiment – though there are extensive logical arguments supporting the curtailing of man's exploitation of God’s natural world – but rather on a spiritual plane, where the natural world should be seen as both a gift and a channel in which mankind is able to digest and receive the touch of the creator. The original traditionalists such as Guenon and Evola felt the truth only nature was able to reveal – though they distrusted the matriarchal and ‘base’ religions founded on nature worship – through their propagation of spiritual beliefs that directly view technological progress as a force of further separating man from the esoteric ‘tradition’. I am inclined to share their view, for technology’s crimes are certainly not only severely detrimental in terms of its profound physical effects, but rather because technology serves to sever our tether with spiritual fulfillment (see my story “tethered” on the creative page of the website for more on this idea). Man, in their eyes, is united by many shared qualities, qualities only realized when he understands the metaphysical hierarchy and truth through the theophany of that truth within the physical world. For example, the male and the female are shown to us (in Evola’s view) through the solar and lunar, as well as through the feminine earth and the masculine heavens. His critique of industrial society is direct and pointed, asserting: "In modern man, the consciousness of 'being' is replaced by that of 'having' and especially 'making,' that is, of manipulation and possession. This tendency can be called 'techne,' and it represents a fundamental change in human civilization," (Revolt Against the Modern World). To any who have felt the fall of snow on their reddened cheek or felt the powerful yet benevolent ray of the sun on your pale and sickly back, you have certainly felt the touch of the creator in a form so pure that you must find it hard not to turn away from for fear of tarnishing its idyllic purity. In recent years, such beliefs have skyrocketed in subscription and relevance, ranging from articles fear-mongering about Steve Bannon’s crackpot philosophical ramblings to young men revolting against the world they have inherited through a deep and new-found connection to the natural world and catholicism. King Charles is among this school of thought, and his environmental efforts have always been coupled with his attempts to revive mystical tradition within religion and find alternative medicines, a man truly worthy of his long-awaited kingship! In Evola’s eyes, the natural order would reveal the inner monarchical nature of the universe, so it is fitting that a king finally sits on the throne who knows his worth and seeks to revive his status as a “personification of the ‘life beyond ordinary life,’” (Revolt Against the Modern World, p.7). However, this movement has yet to go mainstream, which can primarily be blamed on two factors. The first is merely the pig-headedness of the modern right and how far they have strayed from truly conservative principles. In the words of the recently deceased Theodore Kaczynski: “The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently, it never occurs to them that you cannot make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and economy of the society as well, and that such rapid changes will inevitably break down traditional values,” (Industrial Society and its Future, p.11). I do not cite Kaczynski as a hero, nor do I endorse his actions, however, his work undoubtedly contained many of the most sober criticisms of both sides of the political spectrum. What made people community-oriented, divinely connected, and virtuous? The answer is nature, to put it simply, for she naturally engenders strength, independence, and a dogged work ethic through rewarding the higher types with plentiful children and survival. It may seem heartless, but it is the very principle that science has established. As a side note, it is important to recognize that modern society is not propelled forward by “logic” or “reason” – both in fact would tell us that the best course of action for man’s development and the earth’s ecosystem would be to act per natural will – rather, modernity is based in fear; it uses man's base instincts and emotions to wrangle and stifle his higher qualities. A living and youthful culture will be held in check by its own vitality and its ability to instill vigor in its cells – the people create its very existence – however, a dying and senile civilization will need to scare, drug, and grip its population firmly in order to hold onto its last shreds of life. That is exactly why rather than seeing society as a living and breathing being, modernity has mechanized and simplified it, requiring it to increasingly strip natural freedoms to continue the facade of benefit to the common man. Modern conservatism’s idealization of the nineteen fifties is highly symbolic, for just like their forefathers, their individualistic self-centered nature has stripped them bare, leaving their only goals being temporary financial success and a can of beer in their right hand to sip whilst the world of their children burns to the ground. However, conservatives are not the primary concern of this article, for the second reason relating to the niche nature of this movement can be pinned on those to the left. I want to preface this scathing critique by saying that I have no animosity towards the people whom subscribe to left-wing environmentalism, many close to me do, rather I see them as misguided by the very people spurring on environmental tragedy. These are people of fine intentions, infantile yes, but in an endearing way, and if they were not so damaging I would be inclined to ‘live and let live’. The key word is infantile, for one of the many tragedies of industrial society is that it stunts mental and emotional growth as a means of control. The system makes you fearful of nature, fearful of autonomy, and fearful of others to make the overreaching policies it enforces seem benevolent: a process which began with the likes of Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. Instead of infantile, Kaczynski in his criticism uses the work ‘over-socialized’, describing how, "The leftist of the over-socialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually, he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society," (Industrial Society and its Future, p.6). To create a helpful analogy, imagine a dog unhappy that its handler has decided not to lead it towards one of his companions. To display his frustration that the owner has not led him to the desired destination, he pulls on his leash, barks, and creates an overall nuisance of himself. However, he knows that if the handler dropped the leash for a second, the German Shepherds, Dobermans, and Malenois of this word would devour him instantaneously. The leftist is a collectivist for the very reason he is over-socialized; he has been broken in by the handler more fully than the Doberman. Because he has been left with so much self-doubt, he resents even the autonomy he does have and wishes to further nestle himself under the government's wing, while at the same time wanting the illusion of freedom. Unfortunately for our little doxen, he cannot have his cake and eat it too, and the second his pulls risk the leash falling from his handler's hand, he will regain his composure and submit himself more fully than before. Once more, we see the inherent contradictions that our little doxen’s existence is brimming with. I would like to circle back to an earlier point about “logic”, “science”, and “reason”. The leftist has stolen the word liberal, and portrays himself as the standard bearer of the enlightenment ideals, but this is merely not the case. I have already displayed the profound juvenile roots of leftist environmentalism – which admittedly do not take a great mind to understand – yet their constant claims to have science behind them do not cease to enrage me. Has man caused unimaginable harm to the natural world? Yes, the leftist and I agree. Unfortunately, that is where all agreements stop. At one point organizations did have a scientific basis, for example: “As is well known, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist organizations used to oppose mass immigration, in part quietly for this reason, but also because population increase will on its own place unacceptable strains on nature,” (Bronze Age Mindset, p.63) yet now that understanding seems as lost as Roman concrete was to the dark-age peasant. Because the left wishes to rebel by opposing all that the conservatives support, they mire themselves in a mountain of contradictions such as the example I just provided. Their solution to this is to propose further technologies, further advances, and further toleration. It should be abundantly clear why injecting more of the Yersinia Pestis bacterium into a plague victim will not cause him to be cured, but once more, the leftist is not interested in a real solution. Their commitment is lukewarm, a cause to get up-in-arms about and discard when it stops serving the same purpose as a confessional. The hard truth is that our Faustian society has been on its deathbed for some time, and rather than preparing to rise once more from the ashes, they wish to hook the dying leviathan to an iron lung and a pacemaker. If they loved, respected, and revered nature, they would revel at the sight of dogs being clawed to pieces by eagles while yipping tragically, but they do not. Nature’s hierarchy and the high standard of greatness that she holds us to is not their goal, rather, they want an outlet akin to a teenage boy wearing a hammer and sickle shirt to annoy his parents without having read a single page of Marx. So is it worthwhile to find common ground with these people? To put it simply, no. The easiest possible way to discredit a genuine environmentalist movement is to associate it with those who do not even hold its core tenets. The reason that they participate in performative acts such as lying in the road and harassing farmers attempting to go about their lives is that they do not care about finding realistic solutions, rather they derive their pleasure from grandiose acts that prove their moral high ground to only themselves. To clarify, many do not actually know this, for it is far easier for a removed viewer to recognize someone's psychological state than it is for the individual themselves, which has been evident in conversations I have had with such people. After they finish explaining basic views of ‘companies are bad’ and such, I present them with an – albeit watered down – version of traditionalist environmentalism. They are resistant and put off, but they have yet to succeed in finding how they can effectively argue against it; usually, they opt merely to half-heartedly agree or say “That’s interesting” and change the subject. Their mind tells them that they must agree with me wholeheartedly, but at their core, they know that they revile my words. Again, this is not intended to slander my opponents, but simply display that our opposition has to do some serious soul-searching to find what they truly value before an effort of reconciliation can be made. A true traditionalist movement would neither participate in the performative statements nor the reprehensible (not to mention futile) terrorist campaigns of Theodore Kaczynski. For a long time, the goal of traditionalists as a whole has been to stay quiet about their beliefs (something I seem to have utterly failed at) and slowly influence academia and politics to gradually ready the solid for a new season of planting. Our environmental aims should be much the same. The end of Faustian civilization is not the end of mankind, and we should be enveloped by a wave of excitement rather than moping about. We can imagine what great virile and youthful civilization will arise out of the West in the coming decades, a light at the end of the dark tunnel in which we are about to embark. In our excited and forward-looking state, our goal should be to make our own sputtering Leviathan comfortable in his last days, while simultaneously cutting his life support. To avoid the inevitable, he lashes out, he seeks to drain the earth and the population of their life force to preserve his own, so we must consciously put a stop to this. We are the caretakers of a dying, senile old man, and for our own safety and future survival, we must take his weapons so he cannot lash out in his decrepit and clouded state. -E.S. Last week, Vladimir Putin took part in his first interview with a Western journalist in years. The significant gap is anything but surprising considering the multiple journalists currently detained in Russian prisons as well as the ongoing war in Ukraine, but Tucker Carlson was seemingly undeterred. After losing his position at Fox News, an agency that skyrocketed him to fame and infamy, he has been looking forward to a large story—a welcome change from his participation in “zyn” ads—and this was certainly that breakthrough moment. Over various platforms, the two-hour interview has been viewed many millions of times over. None of the previous interviews with Putin done by Western journalists—Christiane Amanpour (2019), Megyn Kelly (2017, also a Fox News host before Tucker Carlson), and Oliver Stone (2017)—attracted as much attention as the current one. Yet, there has been no consensus as to what it all means. Journalists and citizens alike have taken to the internet to express their reactions, and it seems the interview has once more further divided Americans; this time whether the interview was a groundbreaking success or merely a rehashing of the same old Russian propaganda. On the one hand, it has been labeled a conservative victory over the corrupt Western nations, while also labeled as a great opportunity for the West to galvanize support against Russia led by a deranged leader. To most, creating a well-formed view is near impossible given the countless directions the media have taken this story, so today a Ukrainian friend of mine and I seek to create a nuanced analysis of what the world witnessed last week. One of the most commonly ‘memed’ moments took place within the initial half-hour of the interview, which saw Putin take the roots of a question about Western aggression back nearly millennia. As someone who closely watched the full half-hour (not to mention the full two-hour interview), I too found it quite comedic, but it certainly raises interesting debates. Foremost, Putin has chosen the wrong direction for the attack. Bringing the ancient history of Russia-Ukraine relations is a mistake. Not only does an average American probably not seriously take historical arguments that took place somewhere in Eastern Europe in 1612 (the Bohdan Khemlnitskyi reference), but they also lack a national understanding of monarch politics due to the democratic nature of the U.S. Looking at this interview as a conversation between a prominent American and prominent Russian, I imagine that a person like Tucker might be able to carefully listen and, perhaps, even engage a little bit in a conversation about medieval Eastern Europe, but let's be honest there, on the following day there isn't much left in his head anymore. In fact, there wasn't even much left in his head before the interview even started. Tucker accurately represents his audience because he doesn't have an elementary knowledge of modern Russia, not even talking about history. He asked only a few questions during the interview, and despite not having much, it took only one of his statements to sign his illiteracy: "Russia is a Christian country." Quite a failure from Tucker's side. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism are four acknowledged religions in Russia. Furthermore, Russia's imperialistic intentions in Georgia and Chechnya show that this country doesn't care about preserving its spiritual identity anymore. Various sources say that Russia has from 6% to 18% of the Muslim population, with some regions being primarily Muslim. Tucker wanted to start talking about general topics that are close to the American right-wing public. Perhaps he planned to idealize Putin's image for U.S. right-wing groups. It's easy to fantasize that Russia is a white, traditional haven full of beautiful blonde women and strong Slavic men. What a contrast and a relief to a culturally shifted United States; a goal to strive for, right? That would be an excellent opportunity for Putin to spin his propaganda propeller on alt-right American viewers. However, this is one of the few moments where Putin does indeed give an honest answer. He says Russia has many religious groups and that being Christian is "not about going to Church every day or banging your head on the floor." It's a terrible answer for the Christian American audience. There are so many ways to gain support from right-wing groups in the U.S., especially if you are Putin and everything you say is taken for granted. Imagine a fat Drew from Alabama. He hates Mexicans, Muslims, abortions, furries, gays, rainbow flags, and everything that starts with homo. He wants to hear how wonderful Russia is. There are no ABCDEFG+ people, no migrants, nothing is imported, and taxes are minimal. I say, take all of these values, slap them on Russia (most of them will work if you try hard enough!), and achieve the support from republican Americans with minimal effort. Don't forget to criticize Biden, NATO, bureaucracy, and Western media on the way. Each method would lead to positive results. However, Drew hears some crazy stories about Kyiv Rus and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, receives some letters from Bohdan Khemlnytskyi to the Moscow Empire, and realizes that Russia decided to conquer Ukraine because of some bullshit from the 9th century. After attentively listening, Drew tosses his finished can of root beer into the trash bin and asks himself, "Hm... Isn’t Lithuania a city in Munich?" Putin and his media team did a terrible job, but Tucker also wasn't able to show off his favorite minion. His questions were too complicated and confusing for Putin, so he couldn't ride the same message he does in the inner politics of Russia. Hence, Putin struggled to identify the audience he was working for because, ultimately, his argument did not appeal to every single side of the issue. Slightly more specific and straightforward questions could have moved the interview into a more casual flow, where Putin would be comfortable contrasting the ideals of the U.S. to those of Russia and downplaying other factors. The intimidated Carlson must have been afraid to change the subject of Ruriks and territorial wars, and Putin must have really enjoyed talking about his dearest topic in history and decided to continue like that until the end of the interview. Additionally, Putin’s baffling claim surrounding Poland’s supposed collaboration with the Nazi regime quickly squashed any sentiments of respect that may have taken root in the audience during the first few minutes of the interview. For years the right has tried desperately to frame Putin as the strong antithesis to the West to highlight the West’s own decrepit and pitiful ruling class, and while this criticism is valid, Putin is certainly not a correct role model for a traditionalist nation. To summarize, his history lesson was not intended to answer the question provided by Carlson, but rather an attempt to drag the conversation into waters far out of Carlson’s depth in order to dominate the narrative. Carlson is no genius or historian, and this proved to be an easy task. Ultimately, just like Putin’s various “Are we having a serious conversation?” comments, the lecture was nothing more than a way for the leader to assert total dominance over his interviewer. Additionally, Putin is somewhat disappointed by the direction of the interview, seemingly expecting more engagement and follow-up questions from Carlson. However, there's a subtle acknowledgment, perhaps even by Putin himself, that his propaganda tactics may have fallen short. Therefore, Putin downplays the interview's significance to minimize attention and drive away from vulnerabilities in his narrative. Putin’s assertion of control leads cleanly into the next point, which is the unjust criticism of Carlson’s conduct. The media have been quick to lambast him for not ‘pushing’ Putin enough, which is laughable considering where he is. Do they forget he is literally in the heart of the Kremlin? On a personal level, I find that Carlson exhibited remarkable bravery in even suggesting the release of Russia’s American journalist prisoners. However, Carlson certainly understood this balance of power going in, and that is where much of his genuine criticism is drawn from. The main argument states: Carlson knew Putin would have total control over the conversation, so why would he even allow Putin the opportunity to speak through the interview? Of course, it was a foreseeable conclusion that Putin would simply rehash his nation's meticulously crafted propaganda for two hours, but does that mean he should not have the opportunity to do so? Similar to the points made in my last article about the death of liberalism, free media is essential to a nation that claims to be ‘liberal’, and that involves giving a voice to stories with weight. Most Westerners have no idea what Russian propaganda truly professes because it is not targeted at them, and now for the first time, it is. Putin planned to use this as an opportunity to sell himself to the West, and he did so. On the other hand, now the Western citizenry has more knowledge of the ideology and worldview they are up against, so it is certainly a double-edged sword for Russia. After the history lesson, Putin moved to the real meat and potatoes of the interview. Of all the topics spoken about, the most interesting points made by Putin were surrounding geopolitics and ‘how things are really run’. As an outsider to the West with a valuable first-hand understanding of the inner workings of a modern state, his points around the effectiveness of elected leaders were quite poignant. Though these facts were not new to me, I find that it is an ultimate net positive that the average American—especially with an election looming—once more has the depressing reality of modern democracy hammered through their skull. Of course, all his points surrounding these matters had an underlying goal of reaffirming the Russian Crusade against the West, yet a broken clock is right twice a day. Once more, however, the moment I began to have a spark of respect for the points made, that spark was just as quickly pinched out. For years, the most baffling part of Russian propaganda has been the idea of ‘de-Nazification’. I understand why this may work for many Russians—seeing as the ‘great patriotic war’ still stirs up fervent nationalism—yet watching Putin attempt to make the idea applicable to a Western audience was quite entertaining. His main issue is he has to appeal to the West, while also accusing them of supporting Nazism or even being Nazis themselves; a ravine in his argument that is never once bridged. His only two comprehensible points on the matter were the invocation of the Canadian parliament giving a standing ovation to an SS officer and the infamous AZOV battalion, yet the AZOV is a small extreme sect reviled by most Ukrainians, and the Canadian parliament debacle is nothing more than a lack of due diligence in research. The obvious counter comes with the fact Zelensky is Jewish, however, Putin foresees this counter-argument and offers a vaguely recalled conversation between the two leaders about how Zelensky was forced into compromising with the extreme right to hold power. Once more, knowledge is power, and a Western audience will be deterred by statements as ludicrous as these, no matter how watered down to meet their palate they become. So by this point, we understand what Putin was actually saying and what he intended to achieve, but what will be the outcome? In all honesty, nothing groundbreaking. It will certainly help the Trump campaign, for Americans have seen what they are up against in regard to foreign policy, and for all his faults, Putin certainly maintained a strong presence during the interview. This presence and mere ability to speak for an extended amount of time—a shallow bar I know however one that Biden has created through his own inability—certainly once more struck the jagged nail of reality into the American psyche. In truth, this interview coupled with his press conference fiasco has effectively sealed the Biden campaign's defeat this November; no longer can Americans sit back and allow themselves to be humiliated on the world stage. Besides the electoral impact, it achieved little else of substance. Americans already have a lukewarm view of the war, and Putin offered a lukewarm interview that many Westerners will find an utter bore or at best mildly interesting. On the one hand, Putin has not made himself any more likable and his small but vocal following in the West has suffered a serious blow from his utter unremarkably, however, Putin came across as little more than an average politician, not the fantastical villain he is usually made out to be. Effectively, this has led to the current balance of views on the conflict as well as Russia in their pre-interview trenches, which is increasingly staid and unlikely to shift. In short, I found the interview to be an interesting watch, but I highly doubt it will lead to any revelations in the West or breakthroughs in the ongoing war. Western Democracy is no longer liberal. I do not allude to the liberalism thrown around by American conservatives who simply have not discovered the word ‘progressive’, but rather the liberalism coined by the founders of the United States; a philosophy I have foundational issues with, but still one I hold a level of respect for. Though many within my audience are European – as will I be shortly when I fully relocate to that continent – this topic is of the utmost importance to all in the Western world. I call it supremely important for two reasons: the values of the original United States are fundamentally European, and a later beast masquerading as the original United States created the Western World we reside in today.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" (Benjamin Franklin). Franklin’s famous line is not only at the heart of the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment – even though that is where most cite its influence – but is representative of fundamental European values taken to an extreme. Since the dawn of time, Europe has been characterized by its freedom and vitality. The Greeks, whom commented on an expansive range of civilizations, showed disdain for nearly all other cultures; from the overly ordered and neutered city dwellers of the far and near east to the Africans they knew too little about to speak of definitively. The one true exception to their sense of pride in their own superiority was the civilization that lay to their north and west: Europe. Feared tribesmen with streaming red and gold hair streaking behind them coupled with wild whoops of war captured the Greek imagination so thoroughly that their markedly un-greek features were adopted into the depictions of their Gods. Though barbaric, there was respect for the freedom exhibited and the values that kept their lifestyle raw and warlike as well as keeping their bodies muscular and beautiful. I – and many other scholars from Nietzsche to Costin Vlad Alamariu – believe it is this example from the northwest that made Greece great in thought as well as aesthetics; as Aristotle described, Greek civilization toed the line between civility and barbarity to create true greatness. The Greek system of aristocracy became enthralled with these primal values, adopting them in the realms of physical fitness and thought, the two areas in which the original liberal notions of freedom and democracy were coined. Of course, the foundation of ancient Greek values is a nuanced topic, but the foundational principles of freedom, vitality, and individualism are innate to European aristocracy. One may argue that these values are anything but unique, but that could not be farther from the truth. East Asian cultures have always viewed order and security as the primary hallmarks of a great civilization, and do not cultivate the same connection with nature and the primal. Natural disconnection is a logical result of a civilization that orbited around huge and sprawling urban centers for over five thousand years; providing more than enough time for the physical and cultural effects of urbanism to set in and create a population with urban values and a markedly urban outlook. Lacking an agreement with nature can be cited as why these cultures – primarily India and China – do not have the same relationship with animals and are the largest exploiters of natural resources. In truth, no environmental progress can truly be made while these cultures remain as they are or retain their industrial capabilities, but that topic will be delved into in a later article. Additionally, arranged marriages and cultures that fear the physical are all too common in the third world, yet neither were the standards for (most) periods of European civilization. These two practices aid in stability, but do not heighten the population and cause it to inevitably fall into a vicious cycle of oppression and stagnation on a cultural level. The point of this comparison is merely that Europe created a new covenant with nature, one separate from the urbanism of Asia and the unpleasant customs of other parts of the globe, and liberalism was merely another step (though certainly an overstep) to the realization of those values. Europe's Faustian foundation made it great, but additionally sewed the seeds of its own demise through the introduction of liberalism and the enlightenment, which represented the foundational cracks that eventually expanded to see us modern folk reside in nothing more than a ruin. Because Europe gave herself so completely to freedom and threw off her necessary stable institutions of a well-founded aristocracy, monarchy, and powerful church, she set herself up to become even more constrained than the civilizations of Asia that the Greeks so disdained. To be clear, I am not denouncing Asian civilization as inherently evil or degraded, but rather one that works for Asia’s cultural base rather than Europe’s. Despite Europe’s fall into modern decadence and prey mentality, Europe had made a conscious attempt to resist some of the less pleasant symptoms of civilized life. I have read and written extensively about the survival of the British monarchy and aristocracy, and all my research has reaffirmed the central idea that the aristocracy actively resisted modernity by attempting to implement traditional European natural and free values into their rapidly deteriorating nations. A conscious resistance is clearly demonstrated in the British obsession with ‘good quality stock’ of their blood, their detachment from urban centers, along with their perpetual battle to preserve English rural lands. These attempts are admirable and in good faith, however, the constant pressures of modernity have cracked the last pillar of traditional Europe that remained standing in the UK. The effects of this great battle for Europeans to ‘have their cake and eat it too’ are clear in our cities, which have tried to reflect natural beauty and cultivate some simulated semblances of freedom. We must realize, “...that the West along with a couple of others has attempted, since its beginnings, to try to mitigate the evils of ‘pure civilization’ and to bring the benefits of free life within civilization, as far as was possible” (Bronze Age Mindset, p.62). However, as I am sure you have guessed, this was always destined to fail. As I alluded to in the introduction to this article, the United States of America is a complete aberration of what it once was, and only continues to mock the founding fathers with its laughably poor application of their revolutionary ideals. The Bill of Rights, for example, was intended to enshrine freedoms for United States citizens, and in the eyes of the government it does, but in taking these rights for their specific meanings, we lost the foundational values underlying them. These ideals were intended for a free, libertarian, and pre-industrial society, not an oligarchic state that deludes and drugs its own population to its overall detriment while squeezing its hard-working middle-class dry. Many jokingly reflect on this with comparisons of taxes that the British imposed to taxes in the United States now, but I regard this as anything but a laughing matter. We gave up key liberty, as Franklin says, for temporary security provided through an overreaching medical industry and a freedom-quashing police force. In the modern day according to the founders, we are undeserving of the freedom we hold so dear. However, this transition from a truly liberal state to one of a modern technological juggernaut bogged down by corruption and bureaucracy was slow enough to allow the population to be easily distracted by their perceived liberties under the guise of liberalism and democracy. Absolute democracy was never intended by the founders; rather, they were aristocratic on a level that would even make me blush. Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote: “…there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents” (Thomas Jefferson), was not ‘egalitarian’ in a modern sense, but rather represents a view of natural aristocracy similar to that of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. He did not mean every man could be an aristocrat, blood and natural intelligence were still at the forefront, but rather that his sentiments were based in a resentful depiction of European aristocracy finding it had become too far detached from natural aristocracy requiring a new one to form. Technology and governmental overreach are nothing new, and beginning with Woodrow Wilson the United States reached its tendrils out to Europe. Through their efforts, one after another European monarchies were toppled, constituting the systematic neutering of European potential. Now, under these new false governments, Europe was forced to face the same afflictions as their master, and today we see the results of this un-severed umbilical cord. Europe, just as the United States, has operated under the guise of Liberalism since its drastic shift from monarchy to democracy. By feigning public ownership of the government, the population had no single group to pin their very real gripes on and were forced to be complacent in their own subjugation. If a monarch had instituted taxes on this level or police forces of modern strength, they would be replaced within a day by hordes of free citizens. The great mistake of modern man is pinning true freedom on the inflated institution of a government, when in fact, true freedom is better protected by a small, centralized, and stable hereditary government that allows individuals to operate and solve property disputes without constantly dividing them with meaningless political matters. However, as I mentioned in my last article, the people were duped. Intellectuals solidified this false view of freedom, and justified the systematic stripping of public rights to preserve a ‘free democracy’. For decades, the government has been somewhat careful to continue its guise of liberalism in order to quell the people. If the entire Western cultural foundation of freedom was blatantly ignored by their governments, the population may be incentivized to open their eyes and see the reality of their situation. However, the people have begun to awaken and the elite is scrambling for a cork to jam into this fizzling bottle. Voter turnouts have been increasingly low, for now, the common man understands that he has no real choice. American conservatives are not conservative, nor are the progressives truly empathetic to the working man, and only in the last decade has this become abundantly clear. The people – somewhat misguidedly – have turned to populism as a solution; a phenomenon I empathize with but also look upon with pity in its simplicity. Recently, both the German AFD political party and the American presidential frontrunner, Donald Trump, have faced stiff resistance from legal systems and political establishments. Neither the AFD nor Trump are traditional by any means, but it is what they represent that scares the current ruling elite so thoroughly. Now, many on the progressive end of the spectrum seek to ban both, completely disregarding the liberal principles they formerly claimed to embody! Along with these two examples, sweeping cuts to free speech in the UK, Ireland, and all across the continent have shattered any attempt to mask the reality of the modern West. What has been proved is that these political establishments are not only anti-freedom but anti-western. For decades the left has sought to tear down the foundations of Western culture, in their own words for freedom’s sake, yet I hope I have succeeded in showing that their justification is nothing more than a flimsy paper mask. For over a century the West has been controlled by a political class that has no respect for the values of the people they rule, and by extension, has no respect for freedom. They, like Xerxes in Persia, cannot understand why we Greeks cannot accept their ‘stability’, their ‘life-span extension’, or their ‘quality of life’. They coerced us into seeing them as a civilizing force, one that respected our traditions, but they are against us and have been since the start. They are scared of nature, scared of freedom, and scared of beauty: they are weak. Following the example of the noble Spartans, I believe we can look forward to another Thermopylae. When the few that have awoken from their drugged vegetative state stand tall at a great mountain pass and are martyred by the brutal leviathan, I believe once more we can rouse the other city-states and realize the truly magnificent structure that our ancestors nobly provided us the foundation for. Just as Hobbes outlined in the 17th century, fear is the driving factor in creating this Leviathan, and primal European freedom will be the harpoon driven into its unworthy heart. -E.S.
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Notes from the Author:Welcome to the Underground Aristocrats website; before you dive in, let me aid you in navigating this site. On this page entitled Featured Works, you will find the most recent articles in order for you to keep up to date with my writing. However, do not merely scroll here; if you come for creative writing, check out the Creative Work Page, and likewise if you specialize in politics, philosophy, news, etc. I hope my short guide will aid your reading, and feel free to leave comments, both critical or positive. Archives
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