“We shall confine ourselves to the ethical field and refer to a special and central attitude, calculated to bring about a radical change of meaning in the whole field of values, and to raise it to a plane of manliness, separating it completely from all bourgeois attitudes, humanitarianism, moralism and limp conformism.”

[I read Evola’s view of the ethical plane as the same as Campbell’s, that the ethical plane occupied a middle ground between the materialistic and the spiritual, or higher plane.]

In that last phrase, Evola elegantly depicted modernity, that social cancer which had overtaken many areas of endeavor in his day, but now, nine decades later, stands as a veritable god worshipped by the conformist masses.

He goes on to structure a view of the world along military lines, bringing the mind’s eye into a most ingenious analogy, with the individual facing life like a soldier does war, not privy to all of the many causes, origins or designs of the great forces that buffet body and mind, but looking to himself as a soldier in a struggle in some distant outpost doing his duty. This man, to remain sane and potent, must regard the world as “not his fatherland,” for it is not but a corrupted order raised to erase him. He is to see himself as “he who comes from afar,” meaning a man bringing the ineradicable strength of ancient, inner traditions within him, welling out of the past, beyond the past, rejecting the corrupt notions of the present.

Looking back to Indo-European prehistory through the prism of classical authors, Evola paints a picture of a cult of masculine solidarity based in dignity, honor and affinity, with betrayal and dishonesty being punished more severely than murder. The currency of honor is to the fore and the concerns such as ease, leisure, comfort, carnal pleasure and the state of constant satiation deified in the degenerate modern society are submerged beneath the tidal values of warrior-kind.

A telling example of how far we have fallen is the fact that genetic scientists have marked an African gene which predisposes one to poor impulse control and weak deferral of gratification and named it “the warrior gene,” when the people who carry this gene are not exceptionally notable warriors and that those soldiers who overcame them from Europe did so according to the stoic principles of the ancient Indo-European warrior cult, which was an entire society devoted to dynamic action enabled by internal discipline.

Just as honor has degenerated into sportsmanship, which nevertheless preserves its ideal, soldiering in the western sense has degenerated from warriorhood, yet preserves its ideal, if corrupted by submission to managerial manipulation. This dynamic has long been and remains a common theme in war movies and police dramas, in which the action hero is constantly being thwarted by his own handlers.

Where the soldier has discipline forced upon him from above and the athlete has sportsmanlike conduct likewise forced upon him, the warrior draws his sense of discipline from his state of alienation—from his taboo core—and his sense of honor from this shared sense of apartness from the mundane society of women, children and money whores. Therefore, the warrior is necessarily alone unto himself in humanitarian terms. But in heroic terms his existence, his function is dependent upon his affinity with circumstantially like souls—with the warriors of his ancestral past, the members of his own cult and also his enemy, but most importantly his successors.

As Evola wrote:

“…a warlike vision of life in the aforementioned full sense, must constitute the precondition for any reconstruction: when the world of the masses and of the materialistic and sentimental middle classes gives way to a world of warriors.”

Every time a young man seeks experience in combat arts of ancient type, he is attempting, and sometimes achieving, a reconnection with his heroic ancestors who live on in the higher sense.