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Aug. 30, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:07:01
Navigating the Ruins
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All right, everyone, welcome back to Left, Right, and White.
I'm your host, Gregory Hood.
I'm here with my colleague, Henry Wolfe, and today we will be talking about Julius Evola.
Julius Evola was born in 1898.
He was an Italian aristocrat, a baron, and he died in 1974.
We really probably shouldn't go into a lot of the details about his biography.
I think he'd be the first one to say that those details belong to the realm of the contingent, and that we'll be talking about his thoughts and his ideas, which are eternal.
That's right.
I mean, he is probably, aside from René Guénon, best known as the foremost exponent of traditionalism.
Traditionalism with capital T.
When looking at Evelys Thaw, because he did incredible work on a whole series of things in terms of occultism, in terms of magic, in terms of art, history, contemporary politics, but really he was talking about ideas that are eternal and traditionalism presupposes the existence of an absolute metaphysical order.
That's right.
And the traditionalist world is Which essentially every society was until quite recently and some remnants of it still remain.
It presupposes that there's a universal order.
It presupposes in a realm of the ideal, a realm of the absolute, a realm of total being as opposed to becoming.
And the purpose of living in this kind of society is because you essentially know your place.
You know what you are.
You know how to pursue who you are to the foremost excellence that you can achieve.
This is, I guess, sort of the hidden meaning of the phrase, become who you are.
Right.
It can only be understood in a traditionalist context because you're not self-created.
You're not the product of accident.
There is no you other than the you that exists now and you're part of something that has always been and so your job is essentially to live out your role and do what you have to do to the greatest extent possible.
Yeah, I've always thought on a broad basis is a contrast to the relativism.
Of modernity.
And materialism too.
And materialism too.
It's complete anti-materialism in the sense that for Evola, things that are mere matter, the biological aspects of things, the material aspects, the physical aspects, are of the lowest importance.
Right.
What matters is what's really beyond sight.
What matters is qualities of character, qualities of societies, of civilization.
beauty, aesthetics, ideals, things that are not belonging to the realm of the contingent.
So he posits a metaphysical realm of tradition and being, which he says animates all true, proper, upright societies throughout all of human history.
Right.
And once you lose that, that's when the period of decline begins.
It's important to note here, he says that people understood this as knowledge.
As something that they knew was real.
It's not pretend there's an ideal and then pursue it because conditionally this is going to allow you to lead the best life.
Right.
He was saying this exists objectively and people knew it and understood it and could see it and experience it and that's what has been lost and once that is lost that's when you get the decline.
And then what we're left with is basically his project which is trying to reconstruct and Reintuit and understand the things which, to ancient man, Evola thinks were, they weren't even things.
They were self-evident.
It was just the water you swam in.
It was the society.
It was your lifestyle.
It was who you were.
You understood all these things.
And his project is trying to reconstruct what it was that ancient man understood about himself, about God or the gods, about Metaphysics about politics about society about Empire all of these things.
How was it that ancient man thought and Evelyn is trying to Recapture that so that we can then tap back into it right one of the key things to understand This was also his critique of evolution.
It wasn't so much a scientific critique, but Pre one of the premises of tradition is that it's a decline in a fall so that man was once At an almost God-like capacity and has been declining ever since because he has lost touch with the real, with the absolute, with the sacred.
And so, to put it in revolt against the modern world, which I would say is arguably his masterpiece.
I mean, if you're going to read one book, that's the one to read.
Certainly for people who are interested in the political aspects of his thought.
Right.
By way of introduction, I will argue that no idea is as absurd as the idea of progress, which together with its corollary notion of the superiority of modern civilization, That's a term I'm going to have to use more often.
of the world.
For this is how we should regard the perspective that refuses to view modern and new man as decrepit, defeated, and crept-succulent man, but which rather glorifies him as the overcomer, the justifier, and as the only really living being.
Our contemporaries must truly have become blind if they really thought they could measure everything by the standards This is where, I mean it's become almost a meme at this point, but the idea of the Kali Yuga.
He's drawing on basically the Vedic Hindu tradition and, but he's also talking about other traditions.
Very early on in Vortigaunt's modern world, there's the doctrine of the four ages and essentially As you might guess, the initial age is the golden age, but it's not just, oh, things are good, people are prosperous.
It's their spirituality is oriented in the correct direction.
It's that people understand and accept and glory in their social roles.
The idea of political legitimacy is firmly established and unquestionable.
And sacralized.
And sacralized, right.
I mean, one of the big things that he has a problem with in terms of the Western tradition is he thinks the political leadership should always have a sacral character.
Oh yeah, there's no separation of church and state.
No.
In what he posits is the traditional realm.
And the legitimate form of political organization is, of course, the empire, the imperium, and all imperiums have a sacral core, a central characteristic.
Right.
To kind of bring this into what we're talking about today, I would argue that a lot of what he says, it still applies today, it's just sort of in an inverted mirror form, or a demonic type form, if you look at what some call the globalist American empire.
There is a sacral core to that.
There is kind of unquestioned spirituality.
There are certain values that our government tries to spread to the rest of the world and It's taken as a moral imperative.
It's taken as a holy calling.
I think it's not... to give that the title spiritual is, I think, to degrade the term, but it's ideological, for sure, and it's faith-based.
It's non-irrational.
Well, politics has become religion to the modern left in the way they look at it.
It's certainly assumed the utmost importance.
Right.
It is the highest calling.
It is their reason for living.
Right.
When he points out these things, these are things that have existed, exist now, and will always exist.
And if you don't have it in the correct way, it's just going to emerge in a perverted way and lead to ever further degradation.
Right.
I mean, he only is talking about not just the third estate, but also the fourth estate, maybe even a fifth estate as things get worse and worse and worse.
Yeah.
Well, I think we could take a moment here and kind of backtrack a little bit and say, why do we care?
Why do we care?
Yeah.
Why do we care about Evola and this idea of radical traditionalism and why do we
care what ancient man thought and why do we why do we care?
About these things, you know, we're we have a pressing we're in an existential crisis. We're in a race against time. We
have demographic problems that are dire and
Probably within this century will be decisive Yes.
And those are immediate concerns that have to be addressed.
And really, the project of American Renaissance is to strictly address those things.
Right.
It's a narrow project.
We focus a lot, you know, I think unjustifiably, actually.
We get kind of pigeonholed as being these statisticians and so on who are, you know, studying crime rates and riding the bell curve wave and comparing population differences and IQ and so on.
Which of course have a low B.
Completely against, because that's pure materialism and everything else.
Exactly.
He would consider that kind of the lowest order of analysis.
We should pause here, then, and talk about whatever I had to say about race, because this would be one of the things... I think we should get there, but if I could just finish that.
The reason that I think it is worth talking about, Evel, is because there is, even though all of that stuff is essential, and obviously that's what we do, that's our job, is the project of American Renaissance, there is so much more to consider.
There's American Renaissance.
We don't talk about political organization, you know, in the sense of how society should be structured.
We don't talk about spirituality.
We don't talk about these things, but there's no question that those are incredibly important things to consider.
And if you're trying to truly understand European man and his heritage, And understand what it was that went wrong that got us to this sickly state of affairs where not only are we being demographically possessed, we're willing that dispossession.
You and me personally, obviously, but our race more broadly is lighting its own funeral pyre.
Right.
And how can you get to such a sick and twisted state of affairs?
Well, studying differences between, you know, allele frequencies is not going to give you the answers to that.
Understanding how civilizations lose confidence in themselves and how things went wrong, understanding where things were correct, these are really crucial and important Things to consider that, you know, American Renaissance might not specifically focus on as a project, but are tremendously important.
I think we both agree.
And that's really where Evlos focuses is on spiritual matters.
It's on matters of grand civilizational scale, political organization, all these things are crucial to understand and consider and really There's also a deeply individual aspect to his project, which is he is interested in spirituality, in the occult, in achieving personal levels of heroism and enlightenment.
Transcending one's humanity in a way, life beyond life, as I said.
Right.
This is obviously something that our ancestors were extremely preoccupied with.
And and extremely interested in.
And so even though we have these pressing existential concerns, just as as European men, it is important for us, I think, to to be fully human, to consider these things as well as thinking people.
Right.
It's not so simple as to just say, take your own side, or act the same way as all these other groups.
There's a question of orientation.
There's a question of what you're going to define as the absolute good, and how to conduct yourself accordingly.
And this applies to peoples, this applies to civilizations, and also applies to individuals.
I think especially in his later works, I mean, Evola had seen combat in World War I, although apparently not too much, but he served in World War I in the Italian Army as an artillery officer.
But then obviously he went through World War II and he saw the destruction of the European continent, beginnings of the Cold War, and what he considered the destruction of all our higher values.
And so the question becomes, how do you conduct yourself as a man amongst the ruins?
Right.
How do you... The answer basically was by living individually in such a way where you represent these eternal principles.
Right.
And by so doing it, you provide Sort of a rallying point around which someday some sort of resistance can be gathered, but he had no illusions about any political organization taking power or we're going to Redo the foundation of the entire state which is basically what he was arguing for early on in his life in the 1920s with pagan imperialism and things like that.
He was much more idealistic and much more Yeah, we can actually do this.
We're gonna remake the Roman Empire and nobody can stop us.
And he actually was, you know, people at the highest levels of government in Italy and Germany.
We're considering his ideas, and he was a very influential intellectual.
I mean, he was involved in quasi-political roles.
He was never a member of any party or anything like that.
He was never a member of any party.
He was tried after the war, but that's of course when he had the great line, which is, That which any sane normal man would have had before 1789, before the French Revolution.
He was basically put on a kind of Socrates-style trial for corrupting the youth.
It's almost hilarious the way that it mirrors Socrates.
And he was acquitted.
He was acquitted.
He didn't have to drink the Hemlock.
He did not have to drink the Hemlock.
But yeah, he was actually paralyzed from the waist down when he was in Vienna during a Soviet bombardment.
And he was out, I think, walking about pondering his fate.
That's right.
Which is the correct thing to do.
That's right, during a bombardment because he said... I'm not joking, that is the correct thing to do.
To not take a walk and to not do what you feel inclined to do is to be influenced by the contingent.
That's right.
And because there was a bombing raid going on you couldn't possibly change your course of action.
You must hold the position even without hope of relief.
That's it.
So yeah, he saw the horrors of war, and he saw the decline after the war, and the kind of self-immolation that Western societies took up.
Well, Europe specifically, because he saw Europe as essentially being trapped between two anti-European forces, the Soviet Union and America.
What he wanted was essentially Europe for itself, and European civilization to be reorganized as having a Essentially, I mean you can even see aspects of Evel Estad in the European Union, of course, he would just say that this is the perversion of it because it has no spiritual core, or whatever spiritual core it has is completely perverted.
But in terms of the political organization, it's always empire, it's always imperium.
By no means was he a Ethno-nationalist.
He was very critical, in fact, of the unification of Italy, the way that was done, because that was done as a liberal nationalist movement against the monarchies and against the idea of the Holy Roman Empire controlling certain territory and everything else.
So, to him, the way Italy was unified discredited almost the entire project.
And then, of course, after the war, when they got rid of the monarchy, now it's even worse.
It begs the question, okay, he's got this viewpoint, he's got this idea of traditionalism, he's got this idea of orientation.
What is it that he actually believes?
Like, what kind of thing should we be looking for?
And he essentially posits two kinds of spirituality.
I think this is sort of the way to approach it.
Evolo 101.
There's the solar path.
Hyperborean path where in he describes a myth, a myth that, and again a myth doesn't need to be true literally, but it can be true literally.
It's bigger than truth.
It's truer than truth.
He posits a hyperborean civilization that looked to Transcendence and becoming more than human and becoming heroes in the sense of asceticism or as warriors or as explorers or as conquerors and that's the solar path of spirituality.
And then there's what he would consider the catonic, earth-based spirituality, which he would identify with the feminine, where it's more about celebrating the harvest, mere life, staying in your place, not really striving to do anything extraordinary, and more than that, actually cutting down anybody who wants to achieve something.
It's all about groupthink, it's all about collectivism, it's all about What was the friend though?
Longhouse mentality I think that gets thrown around now.
Yeah, being part of the herd.
Right.
This is very significant because the big problem that Evola had with Germany and Italy, it was that they were collectivist projects.
And they were, it was all about targeting the masses.
And he was very clear about the need for a differentiated human personality.
You have to do these things to essentially realize who you are, your true self, your fullest self.
And to be simply a number in a society is repugnant to him.
Even if there are parts of that society they think is a good thing, let's say I don't know, Mussolini took all his advice and recreated the Roman Empire, did whatever he was going to do.
It's still not going to satisfy Evola because if you're stuffed into a uniform from the time you're five years old until the time you die, can you really call that life?
There's no potential, there's no adventure, there's no individuality, there's no possibility to do something different.
I mean, the artistic thing that he was involved with was Dadaism.
Which normally is considered like the most left-wing, the most extreme, the most modernistic and avant-garde because it was questioning the idea of art altogether.
Right.
But you have to explore these things in order to understand who you are and how you're different from all this.
That's also part of the message of Ride the Tiger, which I guess it's probably the most comprehensive and complicated self-help book ever written.
It's a spiritual New Age self-help book.
Basically, after World War II, he assumed a real, we could call it a pessimism, in the In the sense of how he felt that society was going to proceed.
He had no positive hopes for the advancement of society.
He certainly didn't believe in progress or anything like that.
Much the opposite.
He thought that we were in a death spiral and that basically everything would have to be consumed in flames in order for there to be any kind of rebirth.
Right.
And so anyone who's trying to resist this is engaged in That can be a path to transcendence.
Now, engagement in it, he would say, and concede, could itself be valuable.
That can be a path to transcendence.
A path to transcendence, engaging in heroic action, even in a losing fight.
Especially in a losing fight.
Especially in a losing fight, it's even better because if you're fighting with the winners,
you have that psychological...
One must fight without regard to the outcome.
I mean, this is like the Bhagavad Gita, and this is also the doctrine of the Greater and Lesser Holy War, which essentially The lesser holy war, I mean obviously there's the military aspect, but let's speak more broadly.
Political action or even any kind of competition or whatever it is you're doing that you're dedicating your life to, external success in that is less important than how it's remaking you as a person.
That's the greater holy war.
Even heroic things like, I don't know, let's say you wanted to go explore the Arctic or climb a mountain.
Mountain climbing would be the ultimate thing.
Evola wrote a great deal about mountain climbing.
It's interesting to note all of the things that Evola talks about has passed the transcendence like mountain climbing.
They're all individualistic.
Things.
It's never, hey guys, let's form a group together and go do something.
It's always, how can I individually transcend?
Now later he does write about the idea of a Mannerbund.
About the idea of this potentially being the basis of a new order of things.
But he had no real world expectations that such a new order was going to come.
At least not in his lifetime.
So he's not saying, don't do these things.
But he's saying, do these things but have no illusions.
Yeah, do them as one possible path of action.
Right.
Well, the path of action is one possible path.
The other is the ascetic path, which is the path of achieving enlightenment and transcendence through contemplation.
Basically, so either contemplation or action are passed to transcendence and both are valid.
And so he writes later in his career about the different ways in which that could be accomplished in our age.
And so for that reason, For people who are interested in, like, how should I live my life?
Those sorts of questions.
Evola has his own advice there.
And it's good advice.
I mean, look, either way.
To kind of open up to everybody here, I mean, the darkest, people are like, oh, you know, in the darkest moments of life, where do you turn?
Actually, Evel has been remarkably helpful at these types of things.
When you're on the absolute suicidal, like, this, what's worth living for, this, everything is horrible, how do I go on?
Because he gives you a path where it's not just, well, bucko, you know, keep going and clean your room, or everything's going to work out.
And it's like, the answer is, why are you even asking these questions?
These questions don't matter.
You have this, you transcend this by pursuing your mission, and you remake yourself.
And frankly, that works.
Yeah, he's interested in having people stand upright in a world of ruins.
That's right.
And so achieving a kind of spiritual transcendence, even in the face of modern decay, is... Even in the face of personal catastrophe.
I think tremendously important for anyone who considers themselves a kind of political warrior, not in the violent sense, but in the sense of activists, people who are engaged in our project.
Of trying to affect a good political outcome for our people.
If people are always asking, what should we do?
What should we do?
What should we do?
There's the obvious answers.
You can donate to organizations that are doing stuff that's necessary.
You can try to start your own group and everything else.
But really you have to take a step back and say, who am I?
That has to be answered before you can start formulating what is the world that I want to see.
Exactly.
And you need a sacred center.
You need something to orient yourself towards and Evola provides that.
You have to be the change you want to see in the world.
Yes.
But it's true.
We are the ones we're waiting for.
It's true.
You have to be a fully developed man or woman.
You have to be in tune with your own values, with your own spirituality.
to attempt to achieve transcendence in this world, which is compromised.
Right.
Right.
Which doesn't, you know, historically, this would have been given to you.
You know, you- That's the biggest problem.
You would be born and raised and going through a spiritual initiation by the time you hit adulthood.
All the rites and rituals and all of that would still have meaning and not be hollow and empty
Yeah, it's not just purely symbolic.
Right.
Deracination is, I would say, is at the root problem of everything we face, going back to your original thing where we say, well, why?
Why care?
Yeah.
Why is the white race in the situation it's in?
If it was just about race, if it was just purely about demographics, there would be no problem, because this was basically a 90% white country not that long ago.
So the question is, how did it come to be like this?
And you could say, It was the economy, or they were tricked by this group, or something like that.
But you still have to explain, well why were they open to these things?
If they had the proper spiritual orientation.
Why did the WASP elite give it all away?
Which really is the question of the last century.
How could an elite that was in such The grips of such power, how could they have given it all away?
And in some cases, work to destroy what they had created.
Now they've turned completely inward on themselves, and why are they suiciding themselves?
Right.
Evola is probably the only philosopher who really takes this head-on, and it's important to note, too, that it's not that he was So focused on the ideal and the abstract that he was blind to what's going on in the real world.
I was pretty overjoyed to see that one of the people he supported the most and that he gave really incredible praise to was Pareto, who of course is one of the great philosophers of the Machiavellian tradition.
And so even Evola in a book called Recognitions, which is a collection of essays on various people and ideals, is talking about something that our national media talks about now, which is the problem of elite overproduction and the circulation of elites.
What happens when you have all these people who have been schooled in such a way that they think they should get to run the society, but essentially there's no room for them.
Right.
And so they go creating a crisis to justify their existence.
That's arguably what's happening with, you know, I hate using the term just because it's already played out, but social justice warriors, your typical one who has a PhD but doesn't make any money and has no role in life.
Right.
Again, they went through certain rites, certain rituals, They came out on the other end, expecting to have a role to be fulfilled and there's nothing waiting for them.
So what happens?
You get disaster, you get self-hatred, you get hatred of the larger society, you get the conscious attempt to tear these things down.
What Evola is telling us is that in the world of tradition, you have a certain way of living your life, but if you don't have it, you're still going to follow that pattern.
It's just going to be in a perverted form, and instead of leading to transcendence, it's going to lead to destruction.
The loss of initiation is one of the biggest things, because Evola writes that in the East, at the time that he was writing, I don't know if it's so much true now, You could still point to traditions that were more or less unbroken.
But in the West, that had already been severed.
So you're trying to rediscover something from the ground up.
And this, of course, will lead to the accusation that you're simply LARPing.
I mean, you're basically, oh, I'm living like I'm playing Dungeons & Dragons or whatever, and I'm creating my own character, and I'm going on quests to do this stuff.
And you could say this is stupid.
Well, it doesn't help that a lot of the societies that he looks to as exemplars are like Skyrim, basically.
Fantasy worlds, but that is reality.
The difference between LARPing and pursuing heroic action is danger.
It's a game if you can walk away from it without consequences.
But if you're going forward on this path and there are consequences, it's not a game anymore, it's life.
And especially as more people join you and you start engaging in a collective quest, then it becomes real.
Then it also becomes, as he said, the foundation of a new order.
And this is essentially the only path forward because Because the chain of initiation has been severed, we have to basically go back to first principles.
And this is why he writes so much about a lot of the mythos that sounds frankly crazy when you first start reading it.
The idea of a polar homeland, the idea of Hyperboreans, the idea of, oh, you know, there was this civilization and that civilization and it was all lost.
And he's basing this all on his readings of mythology.
But when you take a step back, it's valuable in two ways.
One, Why do all these mythologies all around the world have these same stories over and over again?
This idea of a northern homeland, this idea of a migration from there, this idea of who the gods were and what they looked like and everything else.
It's like a civilization, a caste system.
Right, right.
Things like this are recurring principles throughout all of the great mythology.
And that itself is a great comfort when you realize that civilization is cyclical.
I mean, this is why he's against the idea of progress.
Things don't just go on forever, getting better and better all the time.
You have a cycle of strength to weakness to decadence to destruction and then out of that destruction comes strength.
But the second thing that I wanted to say is providing you with a mythos where you are acting in a sacralized world again, when you're acting in a world where everything is not just about plastic garbage from China, where you're not just a consumer, where you're not just some schmo in this giant shopping mall that we call the United States of America, where you actually are operating like, no, I am connected to something bigger.
And it's important to think of this connection and to experience this connection, not as, oh, I'm tricking myself into following this path, but I know this to be true.
I've experienced it.
Right.
I want to touch a little bit more on like his methodology.
Yeah.
Because that's, I think, kind of critical to understanding what it is that That he has to say about things.
I mean, he's not just saying that, you know, this is the way that I personally believe things ought to be.
Right.
He's making normative claims.
He's making claims that he's looking back at history.
It's not just mythology that he looks at, although mythology is very, very important.
He does bring in contemporary evidence.
Contemporary for the best evidence he had at the time.
That's right.
So he looks at archaeological evidence.
He looks at historical evidence.
And he tries to synthesize what are not the lowest common denominators, but certainly common denominators between higher human civilizations, higher European, especially civilizations, but he does look to the East as well, into India, and he's saying what What is it that is there that is not contingent?
What is it that's there that's not particular to those societies, to that particular myth or whatever?
What are the universals there?
And those universals belong to, for him, the realm of tradition, this overarching metaphysical realm of being to which societies are More or less tapped into.
Right.
And animated by.
And this is something that... The extent to which they are is the extent to which they're higher or lower civilization.
And just to interject for a section, this realm of tradition, this realm of being, objectively exists.
Right.
It's not mind games.
That's right.
It's a real thing.
He is making that claim.
Right.
And so he's interested in You know in terms of his prescription for society is to not
go back Not to return with a v in it. Yeah, it's not to recreate
something Like the holy roman empire or something because it's to
take those eternal principles and that being to which he believes the empire was tapped into and animated by
right and to Rekindle those flames in our own time and new institutions
and these will express themselves in new forms But the ideas are eternal right it's because they're
reflections of an objective existing truth. He wants a true revolution
Which is not a subversive He wants a revolution, a communist revolution, a going under, a going down.
He wants revolution in the sense of its original Latin meaning, which is rolling back to eternal forms.
Rolling back to something which is permanent and unchanging and having our society and ourselves and our own path and our own spirituality and so on be animated by these things.
It's not role-playing the Middle Ages, Baron Evola notwithstanding.
It's not just the Middle Ages, it's all time for him.
But his work is light on references, it's light on Much in the way of like concrete proof if you're looking for all some of its there.
It's it is but it's not like a facticity That's not his approach.
No.
Well, and he says that very clearly early on he describes in revolt against the modern world He gives you his method.
He says look I'm going to take these things, I'm going to take this evidence, I'm going to take this mythology, but I'm going to go forward saying, this is true.
Right.
And that's the methodology, take it or leave it.
Yeah.
So it's not like he doesn't warn you, like in chapter one.
It's not true in the sense that this is my opinion.
Right.
This is true in the sense that this is true.
Right.
And you're either on board or you're not.
And that's it.
This train has no brakes.
Yeah.
There is no relativism in his work.
No.
There's nothing that says, whoa, what's true for you?
It's true for you.
It's not.
This is eternally true.
You're either you either accept it or not, right?
And this is also something that's important when you talk about Perennialism where essentially it's the argument.
This was more Renee going on But Renee going on was obviously probably one of his biggest influences right this idea that all religions have made a religion anyway have a glimpse of a central truth right and therefore that you can profit from all of them and This can get perverted pretty easy into just, oh, believe whatever you want, type thing.
Exactly.
Evola is not saying that.
What he's saying is that maybe different religions had a glimpse of a certain truth, but the point is to get to that certain truth.
It's not to be like, oh, you can believe whatever you want.
Everything's fine.
For him, it wouldn't be surprising.
Utterly predictable that religions would have these common elements because they're tapped into tradition.
Right.
And so any religion that's been around for a long time is going to be inflected by this stuff.
Right.
And then it'll become more or less perverted over time.
Right.
Because there is the idea of the fall.
Right.
The Golden Age was at the beginning.
It's not something that's going to be down the line once we master AI or something like that.
It's down the line once there's Ragnarok.
But it's only after that we'll come back again.
It is cyclical, so it's not perpetual.
It's not like a Christian teleology where it's starting from Eden and going to the Return and then the Millennial Kingdom and all that.
Yeah, that's an important point.
He is challenging... his relationship with Christianity is complicated, especially with the Roman Catholic Church.
As you might expect, considering where he was born, his time he was raised as a pretty strict Roman Catholic.
But in his youth, you know, he's dabbling in all this occult stuff.
His writings on magic are considered to be very solid for people who are into that kind of thing.
He wrote that book, of course, Pagan Imperialism.
His big break with Mussolini was over the Concordat.
The reason Vatican City exists today is because of Mussolini, which is kind of funny.
And that was how you stopped the problem between the Vatican and Italy, which basically had been festering since Italy was united.
Mussolini solved that problem.
Evelo regarded this as almost a betrayal and this is why he didn't align himself is because he was saying no no no no we need to bring back these older forms of spirituality and everything else but then if you read him later on especially talking about Catholicism he recognizes the remnants of authentic tradition that could be found in the faith and he rejects attempts to tear it down and to make it even worse and I think pagan imperialism he does It's not that he repudiated it so much, but he definitely writes about it the way an older man writes about one of his younger enthusiasms, and it was just like, ugh, well that was kind of embarrassing, you know?
Yeah, he basically has lost faith at that point that the Roman Church can be revived in any kind of way.
Meaningful sense right, but he's also lost faith that there's gonna be you know, we're gonna worship Jupiter or something.
Yeah Yeah, he doesn't have faith in any institution at that point either so No, no particular offense to the Roman Catholic Church.
Well, yeah, I mean he saw my guess my main point is that he was more respectful and You valued the Roman Catholic Church more at the end than you did at the beginning.
Well, I think for the purposes of this podcast we'd be remiss not to focus on his racial views.
And this is going to be something that is... I think we're probably going to hit him pretty hard because this really goes against what the American Renaissance mission is.
Let's take a step back.
Again, I'm advancing this as a normative claim.
This can be proven or disproven with evidence.
Race has a biological reality.
That's fundamental.
It's not just a social construct.
You can do whatever you want, and you can argue about which races there are, how you define them, this and that, but at the end of the day, those test scores are going to be those test scores, and that's how it is.
And you can throw as much money you want at it, but that's how it is.
Evola, and I think he basically created the more or less official position of the Mussolini regime's position on race, saw it as a spiritual thing.
It was not purely a biological thing.
He was not an ethno-nationalist.
He would be firmly opposed to that.
It was not purely a biological thing.
He would say it was a factor.
He would concede that race is biological, that race is a fact, a material fact, but as with anything else that he talked about or looked at, it was the least important part in some ways.
Because it's just pure materialism.
The bigger questions were, what is the soul?
What is the spirit of the race?
And he quotes a lot of writers from ancient times.
It's sort of like when they say, oh, you know, race was invented by capitalists to justify exploitation.
It's like, what about all these guys talking about thousands of years ago?
He sort of does the same thing here with this idea of not just the existence of different races, but the idea of, I guess, a folk soul, if you want to call it that, where you can find in the Greeks and Authors all along millennia of history people saying there are certain national types right even people like Montesquieu are talking about this, right?
And there's a certain spirit that defines an entire people obviously there are individuals within that but there's still a larger collective spirit right and that you have to maintain that spirit for What he would consider the least important thing, the material people, the actual ethnos, to be preserved.
Exactly.
Because if you lose the spirit, you're going to lose the race in the biological sense.
And that's the thing that he would say is like, even you people who are strictly focused on the biological realm, you people who want everyone to do a 23andMe test to get admittance to society and so on.
If you aim strictly at that level, if you're strictly thinking in terms of public policy, and you're strictly thinking in terms of what percentage constitutes you as a white person or something like that, you're going to miss the mark.
Because what's critical in the self-preservation of a people is not these really kind of mundane questions.
It's what self-confidence does the people possess?
What spirit is the people animated by?
And if it has lost that spirit, then immolation happens.
Right.
Inevitably.
And it did.
And that's what is happening.
I won't hit him for his conception of race.
I'll say that I think, actually, he has a lot to tell us about race, because particularly, let's say, with the work we do with American Renaissance.
I mean, we're looking at the biological realm, primarily.
A lot of your writing, though, is about rekindling That spirit, the spirit of self-confidence and victory and stuff like that you're writing in particular.
Other work we published as well.
But looking at demographic trends and percentages and all of this stuff, you can lose sight of some of the most important aspects of peoplehood, which are not quantifiable.
You can't put them down.
It's very hard even to describe them with words.
You kind of have to experience it and feel it.
But I think people intuitively understand it.
You know, quantitatively, you could say that, okay, why don't we just bring in, uh, have our population be 50% Asian or hell, 90% Asian, because Asians have low crime and high IQs and they're good workers.
And, uh, they have, you know, on paper, a lot of the, a lot of the traits that, you know, bourgeois man would be concerned with.
They're there.
If you're interested in living a middle-class lifestyle, you should go ahead and have all Asian neighbors.
Like they'll, they'll leave you alone.
You'll be safe, you'll have good schools, you'll have good teachers, you'll make money, your material life will be prosperous, but at some level...
Nobody wants that.
There are very few people.
There are some people who are like, that would be fine with me.
I'm thinking of particular people in our comment sections.
But really, intuitively, we understand, no, I don't want to go live in Japan.
Or I would just do that.
Like, I could just go.
I'm concerned with my homeland.
I want it to reflect my people.
What does it mean for it to reflect your people?
Well, it's everything.
The texture of life changes based on these higher qualities of a people that are not quantitative.
You know when you're in a European city versus when you're in an Asian city.
You know when you're listening to European music versus Asian music.
I can tell sometimes when I'm hearing an Asian playing Beethoven.
To me, there are slight differences.
And the texture of life and thought and all of that is changed by the spirit and the folk soul of the people.
And that reflects itself in really the most important parts of society.
In the religion, in the rights, in the architecture, the music, the art, culture.
All of that belongs to the realm of stuff that is not Statistical.
It's not quantitative.
And for Evola, it's this obsessiveness with strictly biological and statistical and quantifiable stuff is missing that.
Right.
If you are a race realist, that doesn't tell us anything about whether you're a conservative.
Well, it does most of the time, but I mean, you can be a liberal race realist.
I've even, you know, people who are race realists, and because they're race realists, that's why we need affirmative action.
Like, you can make that argument.
It's important to do the statistical stuff and talk about just the materialist facts because That's how most people learn about things, and public policy matters.
It affects our lives.
We can't just be in our own world.
But it's not enough.
And for Evola, this idea of race, and really the idea of a sacred order and being a man of tradition and living It's not about like traditionalism.
It's not like an ideology.
It's a way of being and it has to be part of the texture of everyone's life such that really your entire life becomes one giant ritual.
Right.
You're operating the way you should be within this realm in accordance with the divine law and that leads to you being, you know, not happy.
Man does not strive for happiness, only the Englishman seeks that.
But being the most excellent that you can be.
Being the most superlative that you can be.
Transcending your limitations.
Living a life that's beyond mere life, as he says repeatedly.
Well, what does that mean in terms of Europe?
One of the things that he wrote about was, does the West have its own idea?
Now, this is a big problem for us now because it used to be the Empire, of course.
And I think Evola, I don't think I'm mischaracterizing him here when I say that for him the ideal situation was the Roman Empire, the original Roman Empire.
The original Imperium was the ideal form of political organization.
Then you had Christendom.
And you had the Holy Roman Empire, and that was how Europeans defined themselves.
And now, it's a bit up in the air.
I mean, you can say where white people are, there is Europe.
But, as you point out, without that spirit, without that guiding principle, that falls apart very quickly.
Right.
Because it doesn't let people give something real that they can kind of grab onto and fight for.
No, he this is quoting from recognitions and he's quoting from.
Another author named Walter Heinrich.
According to Heinrich, the European idea corresponded to an organic order that of a civilization of a society articulated in particular bodies or unities which were well differentiated and hierarchical, and to which the single individual pertained in a living and direct way.
The whole maintained transcendental references, What he means by this is that you would have an empire where you'd have a great deal of local autonomy.
and the spiritual, the sacred, the super mundane, in the positive forms of the grand tradition,
which was singular in essence, but rich and multicolored in its diverse expressions."
What he means by this is that you would have an empire where you'd have a great deal of local autonomy.
Different peoples, different ethnic groups would be able to retain those things
that made them who they were, but they would be united in a larger imperium
that had a sacral ideal behind it.
Right.
And everybody lived their life in this way where you are not a number.
You're not part of the masses.
You're not a mere consumer.
You have a differentiated personality.
You're an individual, but you're not a deracinated individual.
You're an individual that's part of a larger community and part of a larger imperium.
That's about right.
I mean, one of the concepts that have been floating around in IR lately is this idea of the civilization state.
This is more or less what China is pursuing now, I would argue, with great success.
Russia has sort of spoken about this.
There's this idea of the Russian world.
I heard some of that when I was in Donbass.
This idea that there's a civilizational order that is almost sacred, that comes from Moscow and which encompasses all these huge areas and everybody within that will have a place in this larger hierarchy.
You look at the EU, you look at the United States, this idea of sort of deracinated atomization.
I mean, what does it even mean to be an American now?
You essentially have this bundle of abstract rights, I guess, and a passport, and that's about it.
We don't even really have the rights anymore either.
I mean, we don't even get the liberal democracy part.
Yeah, because we were talking about when you said rights, I was thinking RIT.
I was like, yeah, we don't have any of those.
But yeah, we're losing the other ones too.
Yeah.
I mean, even just that's what we have left is just like, oh, you've got the right to bear arms and you've got freedom of speech.
It's like, This is a very thin gruel.
Yeah.
On which to base an identity.
Right.
Very, very thin.
Especially when your own leaders are telling you, we actually prefer foreigners to you.
Yeah.
They're more American than you are, and it's like, okay, then what are we?
Yeah.
But it's because America, and because really our Tawasp elite, lost their spirit.
And it wasn't just In America.
I mean, it's been across New Zealand, Australia, Western world.
When, when Evola writes, I think very instructively about how, how it was that.
The West, Europe, came to dominate the globe.
And he says, what was it?
Was it numbers?
Because you guys are saying that sheer numbers are important.
That if you, you know, and we have this almost like a mythical attachment to the idea of when whites become a minority in America.
Right.
That this is some kind of pivotal moment.
That this will be a turning point.
That this is something that's significant.
And Evola would say, absolutely not.
Right.
That's just numbers.
Conquered the world and and really we conquered the Americas with tiny numbers, tiny numbers.
If you look at what Pizarro did, if you look at what any of the conquistadors did or what these colonialist regimes did in Africa or in India.
Relatively tiny, tiny numbers of extremely self-confident and extremely, Evelyn would say, spiritually attuned white people came and their aura was so powerful.
This is how he interprets it.
This is how he interprets it.
Their spirituality, their aura, their essence was such that people submitted.
They had the grandeur and so on.
And it was only as time went on and these colonialist projects became more mercantile
and trying to justify yourself on liberal grounds.
It's like, oh, it's actually better off for them.
When it became more commercial, actually.
So when the military, instead of having fighting, going on the warrior's path
and having this higher justification and feeling like Christendom
was being spread throughout the world and they had this kind of divinely ordained mission,
they were instead protecting trade routes.
And that's essentially what the British Empire devolved into.
And at that point, the peoples who are being ruled lose respect and you no longer have their reverence.
And so- You lose the mandate of heaven and you're just someone who's exploiting them.
And that's actually true.
Right.
That's what you are.
So it was losing these non-quantifiable traits that is what led to the downfall of The European Global Project, which, you know, a colonialist project.
I mean, now, arguably, we're engaging in a kind of neo-colonialism on supposedly human rights grounds, and maybe that's just all window dressing for... but if it is window dressing for stuff, it's still economic stuff.
We are no longer interested in spreading our civilization.
Well, I push that back a little bit, just because I would say that There is a sacral character to what we're doing now in the United States.
Specifically, it's just a perverted one.
I mean, if you look at some of the programs that were backing in Afghanistan, I mean, it was as it was the kind of thing that if I made it up, it would sound too stupid.
But like the US government was literally trying to push like.
It's not just like, oh, you have to have an idea.
You have to have a sacred character.
It has to be the right one.
were on on people in the middle of nowhere and it didn't take.
I mean the sacrality in the eye, it's not just like oh you have to have an idea,
you have to have a sacred character, it has to be the right one and it has to be
oriented in the right direction.
They're not positing that feminism comes from any metaphysical realm though.
There is a kind of different character to it.
It is deeply humanist.
It proceeds from the very aspect of being human like women should be able to read and not have to wear burkas and so on.
But yeah, what we were doing in Afghanistan was a kind of neo-colonialist project, and it's kind of amazing that people don't see it that way.
We were literally overthrowing their government, installing a new military, trying to subvert their values, their religion.
That was our project.
That was our project, and it failed.
And now they're using that language.
I have tapped into some of these people on Twitter now, because all of this is going on, and they're saying, you know, get the colonialists out.
It's a different kind of colonialism.
It's just, it's very degraded.
And it's not the product of a self-affirming people, it's the product of a self-hating people.
Right.
Really not a people at all.
Yeah, who really are probably ultimately mostly interested in the economic aspect of things.
I think that a lot of their ideology that they were pushing on the Afghans is Has a lot to do with commerce, ultimately, more so than their particular, deep, sincerely held desire to see Afghan women read.
Right.
I think there's a lot going on there with the drug trade and a lot that we won't go into.
But anyways.
But that's important because Evola would recognize this for what it is and say because it is coming from a commercial and mercantile spirit, it's doomed to failure.
Which of course it did.
Yeah, it's doomed to failure and it's not anything that's worth support.
Or certainly dying for.
Definitely not worth dying for.
And this should be taken as sort of a ray of hope for us because it doesn't come down to mere numbers.
It doesn't come down to, oh, you're out, it's worth 49%, so it's all over, guys.
No, I mean, it really does come down to do you have a group of people?
Who are tapped into tradition, who are tapped into a sacred order, who are oriented in the right direction and have the self-confidence and self-affirmation to go forward as a people.
Exactly.
And as a people operating, you know, in alignment with divine law.
And the difference between the two forms of spirituality here in terms of earth-based spirituality and the more solar thing is critical because If it is a more solar thing, I mean, a lot of times you'll hear these defenses of religion where it's like, oh, it's necessary because it gives like a sacred character to human rights or it has, you know, it lets liberal democracy, it's what led to liberal democracy being created and everything else.
I mean, I would kind of argue that's missing the point.
I mean, if your religious denomination is the same thing as what you get in the New York Times editorial section, Why bother going to church?
I mean, you want something that says, actually, you're trying to transcend what you are now.
Actually, we're trying to get beyond this world.
We're trying to either serve the absolute or become heroic.
And I think the latter would be more what Evola is saying.
We truly lack that in terms of established religions in this country now.
I mean there are certain people, I don't want to start a religious war here, but there are certain people who are looking for something Looking for meaning and looking for purpose and they're
going to the churches and the churches are basically giving them the same
Message as you would get in vice right and then you get these articles
Why are all the churches empty? It's like what you're not offering people anything. That's right. And if you don't
offer people something They're just gonna revert back to their lowest
Right.
And what Evola is saying more, I mean, if you could say one thing in terms of how your personal conduct, what he's saying over and over and over again, it really is a mission of self-conquest.
And once you conquer yourself, all your external, the external accomplishments that accompany that, that's almost secondary.
I mean, you do those things in order to conquer yourself and live the heroic lifestyle.
And you know, again, it can be The heroic path does not necessarily need to be a little warrior path.
Maybe, I mean, in some ways I think he does believe that it would have to be a little
warrior path, but in terms of where we are now, it has to be seen more as, I'm going
to live my life in this sort of way because it's going to give me an inner transformation,
which is more important than anything else.
And if enough people do that, I mean this is ultimately where I said in some sense he's a pessimist in the sense of he's very down on current institutions, the current state of society, he doesn't think the future is looking great.
In terms of, if you're looking at this world 100 or 200 years from now, he doesn't think it's going to be great.
Right.
It's not going to be better in any sense that he thinks, according to traditional values.
I mean, we haven't been at Kali Yuga since about 3000 BC.
Right.
But there is an optimistic Element to it very optimistic deeply optimistic in that there's a personal project Yes that people of a certain caliber and quality and cut and race men of a certain race right can undertake whereby
Through their own personal transformations, through their own heroic action, they can achieve a kind of transcendence, and that a small group of such people, a very small group of such people, could change the world.
Right.
It could be the foundation for an entire new way of society.
He would 100% endorse that.
That's what he intends to do.
That's how he thinks history has proceeded, and that's how he thinks history will continue to proceed.
The Masked Man does not.
Decide things.
Things will not be decided.
The fate of the world will not be decided at the ballot box.
Right.
And it won't be a contest of numbers.
It won't be decided by heroic individuals banding together and finding common cause and pursuing things that are in line with tradition, ultimately, is what he thinks.
And so I think, I think it's, Evola is definitely worth reading.
To say the least.
I mean, I think he in some ways.
I mean, I ultimately I'll just.
Say, I ultimately agree that that is the correct path.
I'm not going to disguise it, yeah.
You can take this quote, print it wherever.
Yeah, I agree.
That's the guy I look to.
That is the correct project.
I mean, does that mean that we shouldn't talk about public policy?
No.
Obviously, look at how you and I live our lives.
This is what we do from, you know, not even 9 to 5, well beyond that.
But also, there is a deeper spiritual project.
That is both individual and collective, you know, our people need a spiritual revival.
They need to achieve new and greater heights.
Not just simply trying to recreate the old ones, but to take what was essential In the old heights.
Yes.
Breathe new life into them and achieve even greater.
Right.
And that is... Not the preservation of Ashens, but the tending of fire.
Yes.
And that is the concern of Evel Estad.
And really, regardless of what you think about his particular conclusions about the organization of society, about religion, about whatever, it's worth reading him because He will stimulate your thought along these lines and even if you come to your own conclusions that are separate and you know, let's say maybe you're a Catholic traditionalist.
Definitely worth reading.
Definitely worth reading, even though you'll disagree with stuff, but you should read things you disagree with.
That'll give you insight into the tradition you're following that you probably never thought of before.
He's exploring avenues of thought that you really can't find explored elsewhere, and that are extremely rich, extremely And extremely relevant to everyday life.
Yeah, essential to the very texture of society, of our individual lives, of our careers even.
Everything is touched on by Evola to one extent or another.
And it's just stuff that we don't often think about because it's not quantifiable, it's not materialistic, it's not statistical.
And that's the easiest stuff to grasp and talk about with certainty.
And you're journeying into more ethereal ideas when you read Evola, but I think there are also, and he would agree, the most essential areas, and the ones of the utmost importance.
And so for that reason, thinking people ought to read Evola.
And this is also extremely practical in terms of the political project.
I mean, as we're recording this, this is when What was it?
One of these science journals threw out all of Rushton's papers, J.P.
Rushton, who wrote a lot about race and intelligence.
And they threw it out not on the grounds that they just kind of vaguely were like, oh, it's discredited.
And it's like, by who?
How?
I mean, like Stephen Jay Goon, who's like faked all his own research and stuff.
It was tossed.
And you should take a step back and be like, all right, here is the materialist case.
But feelings trump your facts.
Right.
Because ultimately it does come from something deeper.
Right.
And so if you're trying to defeat that by just providing more facts, it's not going to work.
Yeah.
You do have to connect into something deeper.
And this is also practical in terms of when Eva was talking about Pareto and other modernists, in a weird way to be pragmatic you have to be the most Abstract and idealistic right because if you're trying to be like, oh I'm gonna scheme and I'm gonna like somehow take over the American government We're gonna fund this and now it's gonna lead to X Y & Z. It doesn't work that way.
It's not it never has worked Instead it's small groups of people holding to a tradition that they're willing to give everything for who totally transform the world.
The example I always give is like in the late Roman Empire.
I mean if you were close to one of the Caesars and you're scheming and trying to arrange a marriage so someday you'll be a part of the imperial family or be governor of whatever province or whatever else.
A hundred years from now, that whole empire is going to be Christian because a small band of people were like, no, we're holding for this no matter what.
So in the end, who was more practical?
Who delivered the results?
That's right.
And who changed the course of history.
Right.
And history will not be won by the people who are making the best arguments.
It's not going to be won by the people who are scheming and organizing.
Well, it will be won by the people who are organizing, but it's not going to be won by On the material realm, it's going to be won by individuals who band together, bound by tradition, bound by higher ideals, and who are willing to fight, and if need be, die for them.
So in terms of the collective approach, and also if you're looking for a path individually, you can't neglect Evola.
No, definitely worth reading.
A lot of his books have been released by Arctos, some have been released by Inner Traditions, and more esoteric, kind of non-political actually, publishing houses.
But I find his Reading very accessible.
It's not like reading Hegel or something like that where you have to have some esoteric knowledge, deep jargon or something.
I mean, his method of argument, his writing and all that I think is very clear and lucid.
Really, really a pleasure to read and stimulates very fertile thoughts.
So on that note, we will close.
Thank you for joining us, guys, and we'll see you next week.
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