Ernst Junger, German War hero of World War One, who went on to be a prolific writer, seems to have written this in the 1950s. The web publisher credited Ernst with a November 3, 2010 copyright, making this quite a literary feat, written from beyond the grave as it was. Although the publisher, North American New Right, shows gross bibliographic neglect, they should be thanked for making this available to us.

This 2,182 word essay is on the modern middle-class culture of fear, the roots of fear, the middle-class rejection of risk as irrational, and the importance of danger to the man, and particularly the writer. Junger contends that rationality without morality is vapid, and that the ‘bourgeois world’ [the realm of cozy materialism we were born into, and which is typified by the American ‘middle-class’], through its dread of risk, confuses the State with culture, and ends up fueling such atrocities as the war he was wounded in 14 times. The fierceness of Junger’s intellect is as baffling in our sniveling context as his prescience of mind was to those of his brutalized generation. Despite somehow surviving the meat grinder that liquefied and shredded millions around him, he still invokes danger as a value to humanity and warns against the pitfalls of seeking a risk free life through the surrender of personal liberty.

“Through misfortune and danger late draws the mortal into the superior sphere of a higher order.”

Junger exposes himself as a perpetual apostate; man of physics and metaphysics. I recently saw one of our wisest men, Stephan Molyneux, commenting on slavery, the reality of which he could not grasp. He states that any slave in their right mind would do the math and continue as a slave rather than risk war. He was specifically pointing to the American Civil War, in which fewer than 30% of combatants were casualties. Even though over 90% of slaves were killed by the process of chattel slavery in the American South, this very learned and compassionate ‘bourgeois’ thinker, a modern libertarian that sees many things that liberals and conservatives are blind to, failed to do the math himself out of the knee-jerk tendency of his rationalizing kind to seek minimal risk.

But what of the higher question?

Should a man choose death in war over death as a slave?

Junger, who survived war, and later saw himself enslaved by an evil system, sided with death in war—as hideous as he knew it to be—over death as a slave. Ernst Junger, in this small essay, reminds us to not “escape into the utopia of security.”

Is there any chance we, collectively, will heed his warning?