In a recent dialogue Carlos, after reading Evola’s Ride the Tiger, about navigating the ultimately corrupt temporal world of Modernity, yet cringed at the word aristocrat, as I do. For the aristocrat has been the social bugaboo we are taught to fear and hate from earliest childhood. This is fitting in a republican society purporting itself to be democratic, and this exploiting the tension between the Oligarchic evildoers and the democratic idiots. For the demos is the bulk of the people, the easily led, easily swayed, easily angered, easily affrighted and easily incited. The oligarchs need them. What they do not need is a true aristocrat.

Aristocrat means “best-person” and comes down to us as a symbol of corruption, for the sons and grandsons of the best people, succumbing to the ever present gravity of sloth that is the mire that glues the souls of the elite in a post-heroic society. Aristotle meant “best-purpose” placing him as a model of seeking and suggesting his name was assigned post-mortem. No human spent more focused energy seeking into the human condition. Aristocrat is a most ancient term, a term that has its root in the word Arуan, which most likely meant Man-of-the-war-bands, in other words a risk-taking seeker.

Why Aristotle was slain, [which most pie-in-the-sky academics deny he was], virtually as soon as his megalomaniac student Alexander died, might have had to do with Alexander’s death [for Alexander slew Aristotle’s son Callisthenes] or the fact that the Athenians hated him for being a Stagarite, or were persecuting him for honoring his teacher Plato with a ritual. He fled Athens just before his death—Athens, the city of thought that was now the city of non-thought, of the Demos and the demagogue, certainly thirsted for Aristotle’s demise for all of the reasons given above. For these reasons all amounted to jealousy over his status as a Seeker, a seeker after the truth, in the very city which had abandoned its founding premise and sought only mob rule—much like our own nation.

Let’s not forget that Plato’s teacher, Socrates, a seeker and a war hero, who did more to fight for Athens than any of its men of his generation, was pronounced a heretic for asking questions, for seeking. Socrates drank his poison cup and died at home rather than wander into exile.

Let’s step back earlier than the Arуan tradition, into a more primitive and less organized form of tribalism. Arуanism was essentially pan-tribalism, heroizing the risk-taking warrior as a band member among a large diaspora of Caucasian tribes. In a more pure and less organized setting—and we have every reason to believe this continued among the War Bands, there are two seeker archetypes, to risk-takers, personalities permitted to separate and rejoin the home group, and are preserved as advisors and crisis leaders—not given POWER.

First there is the war-chief, who has no domestic authority other than his ability to convince tribe members. His authority is like a wisp of hope—nothing but confidence that when a crisis arises he will take the first and the worst risks and that other men will be motivated to follow him in this tribe-saving endeavor. This might by a hunt, a battle, a migration. There is, in many societies, a separate home chieftain. The chief is the template for the king, and the habit of having two was reflected in the Spartan tradition of having two kings. The war chief is essentially an outsider but of the alpha type.

He has one natural ally, the shaman, who comes down to us through Arуan history as poet, bard, wizard, philosopher and prophet. Joshua and Moses might be seen as a war chief and a shaman.

The institutions of oligarchy on the war-side and of priesthood on the visionary side, are methods by which these natural social forms, are hijacked and corrupted by manipulating personalities into class-service institutions. Whenever this begins to happen in a warrior society, kingship becomes the answer to balance this and when it is maimed the priesthood and the oligarchy [today tech companies and media companies] gain the levers of power. The very people who have taught us to hate and fear the aristocrat have usurped his corrupt and manipulative function under another guise.

To back up to the point of Arуan success and crisis being one, let’s look at the slavish agrarian order, with a priesthood milking the very life from the suffering classes for promises to be fulfilled in another world. When this is conquered by the war band, corruption sets in right at the point of triumph. The best example is the extremely fast pace at which Asiatic nomads such as the Mongols were corrupted by the civilizations they conquered in the process of ease that historians call “assimilation.” As soon as social intercourse is stabilized enough that “heroic” activity actually threatens the ease, comfort and prosperity of the class monopolizing social influence, it will be rendered taboo—there will be ordinances against dueling for instance. Boxing will be outlawed, as it was in England and every state of the Union at some point, during times a peak social control.

Once heroics have been outlawed and regimented into purely military means calibrated to serve the controlling oligarchy, then the warrior’s risk-taking counterpart, the man who seeks with his mind rather than his sword, then he, wherever he exists outside of the priesthood of control, must be eradicated. People believe our society is post-religious, but it is not. The system of control has returned to its agrarian slave roots and just like its earlier iterations, will not be content to let the dreaming mind find a place on the periphery of society, but must extinguish it.

These seekers of the visionary type, those who seek God rather than blindly accept some priestly or oligarchic interpretation of God, are the people of whom Evola speaks when he uses the term “Aristocrat of the soul.” For under systems of mind control, the only connection with the Higher Powers that are acceptable, are those had through gate keepers such as priests and pastors and gurus.

As it is in heaven it will be on earth, is something that should be kept in mind here, when we consider our social plight.

For instance, try being insured for medical treatment by the best doctor available to you, even if he is willing, if you do not have a non-doctor, a “medical gate-keeper,” okay his activity, as if that dumb bitch knows a thing about treating your condition.

We may not be farmers anymore. But we are ruled by a priesthood just the same, guided and lied to and duped by the same evil types of manipulative souls that ruled Egypt and Sumer, like the pharaoh who would not let a deliverer’s people go, and like the elders of Uruk who pleaded for Gilgamesh and Enkidu not to seek.

When esoteric figures like Evola or Campbell speak of the hero and in this instance of the spiritual aristocrat, they are speaking of the seeker—of you, Carlos—surrounded by lie-sodden idiots and curious still.