Julius Evola

The social bond assumes a utilitarian and economic character; it is an agreement based on convenience and material interest — a type only a merchant would accept.

Julius Evola (19 May 1898 – 11 June 1974) was an Italian esotericist and occult author, who wrote extensively on matters political, philosophical, historical, racial, religious. He considered himself a representative of Traditionalism.

Quotes

• Christianity is at the root of the evil that has corrupted the West. This is the truth, and it does not admit uncertainty.
  • Imperialismo Pagano (1928) · Excerpts

• As a social bond, now one does not find even a faith of the warrior kind, that is, relationships of loyalty and honour. The social bond assumes a utilitarian and economic character; it is an agreement based on convenience and material interest — a type only a merchant would accept.
  • Gli Uomini e le Rovine (1953), p. 34

• The enormous and spontaneous spread of jazz in the modern world shows that meanings no different from those of the physico-cerebral "classical" music, which superseded nineteenth-century bourgeois melodrama and pathos, have in fact thoroughly penetrated the younger generation. But there are two sides to this phenomenon. Those who once went crazy for the waltz or delighted in the treacherous and conventional pathos of melodrama, now find themselves at ease surrounded by the convulsive-mechanical or abstract rhythms of recent jazz, both "hot" and "cool," which we must consider as more than a deviant, superficial vogue. We are facing a rapid and central transformation of the manner of listening, which is an integral part of that complex that defines the nature of the present. Jazz is undeniably an aspect of the resurfacing of the elemental in the modern world, bringing the bourgeois epoch to its dissolution.
  • Ride the Tiger (1930)

• The good fighter does "what has to be done" and does not let himself be troubled by any scepticism. [...] Given the ineptitude of the existing political groups, which, as is well known, have often forced qualified elements to move away from them, and given that what would have been desirable did not occur, which is to say, a political party as a mere force of manoeuvre in the present time, but absolutely disciplined and controlled by a superordinated group, owner of a precise inner doctrine not to be paraded in the common political struggle—given these things, the only possibilities seem to me to be those of more diffuse activity : to win, and influence with direct contacts, personalities, if possible, holding a post of command, not so much in the world of the political schemers as in that of the army, of officialdom and of business.
  • Interview with Julius Evola, in Ordine Nuovo (1964)

Civilta Americana (1945; 1983)

• The Americans' "open-mindedness", which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their "individualism". Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American "mind", puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.
  • American "Civilization" (1945) · Excerpts

• In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste (in the original meaning of the word), not even that of servant or shudra, would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over the entire world.
  • American "Civilization"

• There is a necessary correspondence between the most advanced stages of a historical cycle and the most primitive. America is the final stage of modern Europe. Guénon called the United States "the far West", in the novel sense that the United States represents the reductio ad absurdum of the negative and the most senile aspects of Western civilization. What in Europe exist in diluted form are magnified and concentrated in the United States whereby they are revealed as the symptoms of disintegration and cultural and human regression. The American mentality can only be interpreted as an example of regression, which shows itself in the mental atrophy towards all higher interests and incomprehension of higher sensibility. The American mind has limited horizons, one conscribed to everything which is immediate and simplistic, with the inevitable consequence that everything is made banal, basic and leveled down until it is deprived of all spiritual life. Life itself in American terms is entirely mechanistic. The sense of "I" in America belongs entirely to the physical level of existence. The typical American neither has spiritual dilemmas nor complications: he is a "natural" joiner and conformist.
  • "The Young American Nation"

Quotes about Evola

• Our Marcuse, only better.
  • MSI leader Giorgio Almirante [1]

External links

• JuliusEvola.net Text Archive
• Remembering Julius Evola (May 19, 1898–June 11, 1974)