Evola’s brief essay on “the decline of races” puts forward a theory on biological-metaphysical ideals of racial identity, exulting racism as good, his definition racism being internal to a race. Evola is in line with Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson and the Book of Genesis in terms of seeing Man as fallen, with “primitive” men having fallen the furthest. He rejects the idea that the lesser might evolve into the greater and sees modernity as a pit of degeneration with. In is view totemic systems are animalistic and degenerate, not the seedbed from which higher forms of spirituality spring.

Evola defines three degrees of racism:

Biological

Moral

Spiritual

He seems to have been looking at epigenetics in mystical terms.

He recognizes a process of inner extinction, an expanding and deepening apathy which may emerge internally in the untested being of ease and comfort-obsessed greed, a state of “passive abandonment” in which “moral tension” is lost. Granted, this concept is heretical to modern concepts of body-worshipping and weakness-heroizing ethics. However, to a man who has trained in combat, or has conditioned his body to strenuous risk of a harsh sort, it is well-known that lack of tension and stress, the absence of being tested, weakens a being, so why not a people?

Below are some of his more pressing arguments, which never diverge far from his contempt for modernism and materialism:

“…for cross-breeding to have a really, fatally, inexorably degenerate outcome for a race, it is necessary without exception that this race already be damaged inwardly to a certain extent, and that the tension of its original will be lax as a result.

“When a race has been reduced to a mere ensemble of atavistic automatisms, which have become the sole surviving vestiges of what once was, then a collision, a lesion, a simple action from outside, is enough to make it fall, to disfigure it and to denature it.”

Evola expresses approval for strictly limited cross-breeding for hybrid vigor, almost as a shock to a racial system to threaten its continuity and wake it up. More importantly he speaks to events, wars and other forces that might wake up a sleeping race, “In the case of a positive reaction, new potentialities come from deep inside to again saturate the racial circuit. A new ascending cycle begins for the race.”

He promotes war and combat as means for reawakening racial awareness and virility, with pacifism and humanitarianism being the pitfalls of a race. Finally he warns that heroism is degraded when seen as a means to an end, that heroism in the Arуan tradition is method of spiritual transformation and attainment of a higher plane, a more lofty perspective, warning that peace is an essentially deracinating state of being, which leaves the reader ruminating about the commercialization of war and its graduating mercenary character.