Anyone who has come to reject the rationalist myth of "progress" and the interpretation of history as an unbroken positive development of mankind will find himself gradually drawn towards the world-view that was common to all the great traditional cultures, and which had at its centre the memory of a process of degeneration, slow obscuration, or collapse of a higher preceding world. As we penetrate deeper into this new (and old) interpretation, we encounter various problems, foremost among which is the question of the secret of degeneration.
In its literal sense, this question is by no means a novel one. While contemplating the magnificent remains of cultures whose very name has not even come down to us, but which seem to have conveyed, even in their physical material, a greatness and power that is more than earthly, scarcely anyone has failed to ask themselves questions about the death of cultures, and sensed the inadequacy of the reasons that are usually given to explain it.
>>788206
We can thank the Comte de Gobineau for the best and best-known summary of this problem, and also for a masterly criticism of the main hypotheses about it. His solution on the basis of racial thought and racial purity also has much truth in it, but it needs to be expanded by a few observations concerning a higher order of things. For there have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands. An example quite close at hand is the case of the Swedes and the Dutch. These people are in the same racial condition today as they were two centuries ago, but there is little to be found now of the heroic disposition and the racial awareness that they once possessed. Other great cultures seem merely to have remained standing in the condition of mummies: they have long been inwardly dead, so that it takes only the slightest push to knock them down. This was the case, for example, with ancient Peru, that giant solar empire which was annihilated by a few adventurers drawn from the worst rabble of Europe.
>>788207
If we look at the secret of degeneration from the exclusively traditional point of view, it becomes even harder to solve it completely. It is then a matter of the division of all cultures into two main types. On the one hand there are the traditional cultures, whose principle is identical and unchangeable, despite all the differences evident on the surface. The axis of these cultures and the summit of their hierarchical order consists of metaphysical, supra-individual powers and actions, which serve to inform and justify everything that is merely human, temporal, subject to becoming and to "history." On the other hand there is "modern culture," which is actually the anti-tradition and which exhausts itself in a construction of purely human and earthly conditions and in the total development of these, in pursuit of a life entirely detached from the "higher world."
From the standpoint of the latter, the whole of history is degeneration, because it shows the universal decline of earlier cultures of the traditional type, and the decisive and violent rise of a new universal civilization of the "modern" type.
>>788218
Secondly, it is not only a matter of explaining the possibility of the degeneration of a particular cultural world, but also the possibility that the degeneration of one cultural cycle may pass to other peoples and take them down with it. For example, we have not only to explain how the ancient Western reality collapsed, but also have to show the reason why it was possible for "modern" culture to conquer practically the whole world, and why it possessed the power to divert so many peoples from any other type of culture, and to hold sway even where states of a traditional kind seemed to be alive (one need only recall the Aryan East).
In this respect, it is not enough to say that we are dealing with a purely material and economic conquest. That view seems very superficial, for two reasons. In the first place, a land that is conquered on the material level also experiences, in the long run, influences of a higher kind corresponding to the cultural type of its conqueror. We can state, in fact, that European conquest almost everywhere sows the seeds of "Europeanization," i.e., the "modern" rationalist, tradition-hostile, individualistic way of thinking. Secondly, the traditional conception of culture and the state is hierarchical, not dualistic. Its bearers could never subscribe, without severe reservations, to the principles of "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" and "My kingdom is not of this world." For us, "Tradition" is the victorious and creative presence in the world of that which is "not of this world," i.e., of the Spirit, understood as a power that is mightier than any merely human or material one.
based Evola
Yeah, man...we were born in the wrong era....take the red pill... I will show you things you've never even imagined...
I will show you how us enlightened traditionalist gentlemen can free ourselves from the degeneracy...reject the modern world, rebel against rebelling, so to speak...buy the ticket, take the ride...from this world of modern filth, back home...
>>788475
memes and fedora-clad gentleman aside, i kind of agree with what you said, at least partially, that's why Evolas writing appeals to me.
>>788206
What then is generate?
>>788581
Wearing a fedora, growing a neckbeard and bitching on the internet how being a nice guy doesn't get you laid
>>788581
When people try to give examples of 'functional egalitarianism', it is always things in extreme contexts. Frontiersmen, wartime economies, barbarian tribes, et cetera et cetera.
What all of these things have in common is that they are all *intimately grappled with being*. They are in contexts where A. Praxis is in many ways simplified, the direction obvious. And more importantly B. *the consequences of failure* are both swift, and often final.
In other words, they could *afford* not to consider such things, get away in spite of it, because when they didn't, *reality took care of it for them*.
Civilization, however, insulates man from reality. And so man must step in to consciously apply the rules of nature, in natures stead.
>>788603
Man often fails in this endeavor though; people make bad choices if they can afford them, and civilization provides much surplus capital. When man is not in fear of his life, he is usually next in fear of his reputation. Man is a social animal, he desires validation. One of the easiest sources of validation is the appearance of holiness, and one of the easiest ways to appear holy is to mouth reprobrate platitudes of 'universal love', and appear concerned with garbage in human guise.
The kind of life that defies entropy on a local level is so often offensive to modernized sensibilities. In truth, it was often offensive to man sensibilities in past times too, but in past times they had the benefit of reality taking more of the choice out of their hands. That hoary phrase, 'Nature, red in tooth and claw,' was coined by the poet alfred lord tennyson, it was not a term of endearment.
The old law of gnon: 'the penalty for stupidity is death.' It is actually a very neat trap; man evolves only just enough intellect inorder to start civilization in the environment he finds himself in. After that, the selection pressures change, he thinks himself the master of his world, the old laws over-turned forever. He who would be devoured by red toothed nature now finds himself subsidised; "When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins." Indeed, it is his very defiance of nature that sets the stage for its riotous return; civilization eats that which makes civilization possible.
In time the house of cards topples, the great empire defeated not by war, but by peace. Prolonging the end through clever artifice, raising the malthusian limits ever higher, oft means the eventual fall is that much more spectacular. So as always the universe tends towards the more stable point, and the cycle continues; from the cradle of the old law a new nobility emerges, and thinks to themselves: 'this time is different.'
>>788475
t. self-proclaimed teenage marxist-leninist
>>788206
I'm a traditionalist/monarchist myself but i think Evola is simply overrated
>>788206
not really. Some high cultures were really degenerate.
But still, progress is bullshit and we are "degenerating" from our previous status in the near past.
>>788526
It might appeal on an emotional level, but actually reading it makes it clear that he was in large part writing nonsense
>>788206
I think anyone capable of critical thought has to realize that human history is made up of cycles.
The very sheltering civilization's provide is what cause them to fall.
This is why a society must be maintained in the "cultural" tribal level with a low populated group.
The weak, feminine, and meek seek and create higher populations to compensate for their shortcomings. This is why they must be culled, lest they infest the whole earth with their "love".
The social contract was said to be made to avoid a war of all against all but what hobbies didn't know that the only thing worse than a war is an orgy.
>>789638
>I don't get it so it must be nonsense
ok kid
>>788606
I understand the appeal of "End of Civilization" scenarios, but people have been predicting the end of western civilization for longer than you've been alive and the end just never comes.
http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-apocalypse-never/all/1/
