1972, Inner Traditions, Rochester Vermont, 310 pages, reading the actual work from page 110-286

A man who was arrested for what he believed, a spiritual voice living the life of a pariah in a materialistic world—that is my estimation of Evola. However, Julius Evola will not appeal to the anatomically incorrect women that rule the written world, or find favor with the anatomically correct women who fuel the political world with their shrill cries for blood, money and vengeance.

A friend of mine just leant me this book, written by a man proclaimed by the New Right as being to the right of Nietzsche saying, “It is amazing that you have organically arrived at the same conclusion as to what is wrong with the world as this man, an aristocratic European mystic—and you’re this working class American boxing coach!”

Okay, that set this read up as an exercise in soul searching, especially since I have held the highest level of antipathy toward the traditional moneyed classes of Europe. Not a history book turns page by page before my eyes where I do not hope against hope as a reader that the heretical European, the feral pirate, the mutinous Sepoy, the naked Zulu, the man-eating Polynesian, the savage American Indian, the Tasmanian, or even the Neanderthal skulking in his people’s last cave, might somehow rip a sharp object through the entitled hide and guts of the highbrowed cult of pillaging money grubbing ‘aristocrats’ that have conquered Europe and this vast world.

I’ve read with sorrow of the deaths of a hundred honorable savages just to be able to savor the death of the one rich European bastard going gun against stick into the unknown on his kind’s quest to make it not worth knowing. And my friend is telling me that this entitled European arrived at the same vision of Man as I have? On top of that the man believed in magic and wrote about meditation, tantric love, and all manner of other dreamy spunk!

I countered my friend with, “Well, there is no reason why a barefoot knucklehead could not arrive at the same conclusion as the medical doctor, that stepping on a nail is damaging to the foot.”

And here I sit, considering a work by a man who died when I was 11 years old and embraced the academic traditions that I grew up despising… But wait, he wrote Revolt Against the Modern World, I see on the jacket, so I read on, skipping the egg-headed commentary of the editors, and trying to get right to the man’s own point.

I read the first half of Men Among the Ruins while a drunk retarded man pleaded with me to speak with him about the mysteries of caramel doughnuts. I read the second half of the book with my left hand while my son’s two puppies waged a titanic battle against my right hand and my soon to be shredded shirt sleeve.

Evola writes to the reader as if he is the wizard instructor of some medieval kingdom educating the Prince upon the fundamentals of human life before he gains the throne, in hopes of cultivating a just ruler. When reading Evola you are Author to his Merlin, Alexander to his Aristotle. I would have liked this old cosmic oatmeal cookie and am glad to have gotten to know some part of him so long after his passing.

I do not see, in this work, a blueprint for ordering a polity, but an underlying ethos for decently ruling men [Evola does point out that many people lack even the most basic discipline and someone is duty bound to provide it from above.], which begins with becoming a man. Evola makes the point that I have believed since I decided I had suffered enough to become a man; that few males in modern—and even more so in postmodern society—fit the primal definition of a man. Evola defines the best forms of government as merely the means for counterfeiting what it is to be human, and holds particular contempt for democracy and socialism as emasculating and feminizing forces.

He correctly identifies the Left’s power as being based on dominating the terms of discourse, the terminology itself, and the use of political labeling as a stigmatizing force. I don’t converse much on politics even as an exercise for this very reason. I have never met a person interested in politics that has not been seduced by the absolutist authority of some of the terminology and the demonic detection ability of other terms.

Evola adopts dignity and transcendence as a necessity for involvement in politics that will not be harmful to the humans who live under that system—which means the very characteristics that define the successful politician are to him seeds of societal doom. It seems that for an esoteric thinker politics is a cyclic purging mechanism that produces nothing of value, of human consequence, but just expands the Wasteland.

I am sure some will embrace Evola as an inspiration for some type of political movement. However, for the serenity of his ghost, I hope it does not happen. For those on the Right I think the most beneficial point he makes is that by aligning with capitalists, the cultural Right has forsaken itself and foredoomed its cause. For capitalism is no different from any of the other political ideologies that have plagued the 20th Century and beyond. As Evola points out quite softly, as an esoteric would, all of these political ideologies are based on material good not humanity, and that the worst of these systems reduce the human to a material good.

Evola makes the case that tradition is misused as a tool for conformity, that it is meant to be a spiritual reference, and inspirational, not stifling, which comes from the esoteric tradition and cannot really be fathomed by a committed protestant, modern liberal Hebrew or Atheist. Let me close with and suggestion that multiple reads of Evola are in order if you seem to be inspired to some political action based on his writing.

From 126-129 Evola charts the material-feminine order as ‘society’ and the spiritual-male order as the State, which have fallen into imbalance, resulting in a lopsided political polarity as the political idea of the State has given way to the material idea of the society to coalesce as a regressive entity skewed toward material and maternal concerns, a ‘Motherland.’ As he points out, “A brief overview will clarify the regressive meaning of the myth of the nation.”

Evola’s base premise is that transcendent men are necessary for a world of decency and dignity, and that psychological death and rebirth must be accomplished if one is to be a man, as in the universal primal tradition. Since no political systems encourage or achieve this—and tend to order life in such a way as to suppress that desire in all but their elite military combatants—they are therefore dark spiritually corrosive forces.

Below are some quotes:

“[the revolutionary is] part of history’s demolition squad. Those who are still standing upright in this world of ruins* are at a higher level; their watchword is Tradition.”

“…totalitarianism merely represents the counterfeited image of the ideal.”

“…the economic order should never be anything more than an order of means…as a foundation what must be implemented here is the above-mentioned principle of the depoliticization of the socioeconomic forces.”

If Julius Evola’s hermetic formula for understanding the essence and workings of society is correct, the 21st Century looks to be shaping up as a spiritually ruinous time.