Holy War ~ Julius Evola, Metaphysics of War.

In this respect the greater holy war belongs to the spiritual order. The lesser holy war, in contrast, is the physical struggle, the material war, fought in the outer world. The greater holy war is the struggle of man against the enemies he bears in himself. More precisely, it is the fight of the supernatural element, innate in man, against everything which is instinctual, passionate, chaotic and subject to the forces of nature. This is also the idea that reveals itself in a text of the ancient Aryan warrior wisdom, the Bhagavad-Gita: ‘"Thus knowing oneself to be transcendental to the material senses, mind and intelligence, O mighty-armed Arjuna, one should steady the mind by deliberate spiritual intelligence and thus – by spiritual strength – conquer this insatiable enemy known as lust."

The necessary condition for the inner work of liberation is that this enemy is destroyed once and for all. In the context of a heroic tradition the lesser holy war – that is, external combat – serves only as something by means of which the greater holy war is achieved. For this reason ‘holy war’ and ‘Path of God’ are often treated as synonymous in the texts. Thus we read in the Qur’an: "So let those who sell the life of this world for the Next World fight in the Way of Allah. If someone fights in the Way of Allah, whether he is killed or is victorious, We will pay him an immense reward". And further: "As for those who fight in the Way of Allah, He will not let their actions go astray. He will guide them and better their condition and He will admit them into the Garden which He has made known to them."

This is an allusion to physical death in war, which corresponds perfectly to the so-called mors triumphalis – ‘triumphant death’ – of the Classical traditions. However, the same doctrine can also be interpreted in a symbolic sense. The one who, in the ‘lesser holy war’, has been able to live a ‘greater holy war’ has created within himself a force which puts him in a position to overcome the crisis of death. Even without getting killed physically, through the asceticism of action and combat, one can experience death, one can win inwardly and realise ‘more-than-life’. In the esoteric respect, as a matter of fact, ‘paradise’, ‘the celestial realm’ and analogous expressions are nothing but symbolic representations – concocted for the people – of transcendent states of consciousness on a higher plane than life and death.

These considerations should allow us to discern the same contents and meanings, under the outer garment of Christianity, which the Nordic-Western heroic tradition was forced to wear during the Crusades in order to be able to manifest itself in the external world. In the ideology of the Crusade the liberation of the Temple and the conquest of the ‘Holy Land’ had points of contact – much more numerous than one is generally inclined to believe – with the Nordic-Aryan tradition, which refers to the mystical Asgard, the remote land of the Aesir and heroes, where death does not reign and the inhabitants enjoy immortal life and supernatural peace. Holy war appeared as an integrally spiritual war, so much so that it could be compared literally by preachers to ‘a bathing which is almost like the fire of purgatory, but before death’.

Saint Bernard declared to the Templars, "It is a glory for you never to leave the battle [unless] covered with laurels. But it is an even greater glory to earn on the battlefield an immortal crown ..." The ‘absolute glory’ – attributed to the Lord who is above, in the skies – in excelsis Deo – is ordained also for the Crusader. Against this background Jerusalem, the coveted goal of the ‘lesser holy war’, could be seen in the twofold aspect of terrestrial city and celestial city and the Crusade proved to be the prelude to a true fulfilment of immortality.

The oscillating military vicissitudes of the Crusades provoked bafflement, initial confusion and even a wavering of faith. But later their sole effect was to purify the idea of holy war from every residue of materiality. The ill-fated outcome of a Crusade came to be compared to virtue persecuted by misfortune, a virtue whose value can be judged and rewarded only in the light of a supraterrestrial life. Beyond victory or defeat the judgement of value focused on the spiritual dimension of action. Thus, the holy war was worthwhile for its own sake, irrespective of its visible results, as a means to reach a supra-personal realisation through the active sacrifice of the human element.

~ Julius Evola, Metaphysics of War.

Julius Evola - European Decadence

The current “civilisation” of the West is due for a fundamental overhaul, without which it is doomed to collapse sooner or later.

It has carried out the most complete perversion of every rational order of things.

The realm of matter, of gold, of the machine, of number, there is no longer spirit, nor liberty, nor light in it.

The West has lost the sense of command and obedience.

It has lost the sense of Action and of Contemplation.

It has lost the sense of hierarchy, of spiritual power, of man-gods.

It no longer knows nature. It is no longer, for Western man, a living body made of symbols, Gods and ritual gestures—a splendid cosmos, in which man moves freely, like a microcosm within the macrocosm: it has on the contrary decayed to an opaque and fatal exteriority, the mystery of which profane sciences seek to ignore by means of their petty laws and their petty hypotheses.

The West no longer knows Wisdom: it no longer knows the majestic silence of those who have mastered themselves, the bright calm of the Seers, the superb solar reality of those in whom the idea has become blood, life, and power. Wisdom has been supplanted by the rhetoric of “philosophy” and “culture”, the realm of professors, journalists, and sportsmen—the plan, the program, the proclamation. It has succumbed to sentimental, religious, humanitarian contamination, and the race of chatterers who run around madly exalting “becoming” and “practice”, because silence and contemplation frighten them. 

The West no longer knows the State: the valorous State, the Imperium, as synthesis of spirituality and royalty, as a way to the “supraworld”, as known by the great ancient civilisations from China to Egypt, from Persia to Rome and to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, has been submerged in the bourgeois poverty of a trust of slaves and traders.

What might war be, war willed in itself, as a value superior both to winning and losing, as that sacred path to spiritual fulfilment— for whom the celestial seat of Odin, the Valhalla, is the privilege of the heroes fallen on the battlefield; for which in Islam, “holy war”, jihad, is synonymous with “way of God”; for which in Aryan India, the warrior is side by side with the ascetic and, in classic antiquity, mors triumphalis is conceived of as victory over death—these formidable European “activists” no longer know what such a war is. They no longer know warriors but only soldiers, for them a squabble is enough to terrorise and force them back to the rhetoric of humanism, pacifism, and sentimentalism.

Europe has lost its simplicity, it has lost its centrality, it has lost its life. The democratic sickness and the Semitic poison corrode it in all its roots—right down to its law, sciences, and speculative thought. As for leaders—those beings who distinguish themselves, not by violence, greed for profit, their ability as exploiters of slaves, but, on the contrary, by unwavering and transcendent qualities of life—there are none. Europe is a big anodyne body, possessed and shattered by an anxiety which no one dares to express, whose blood is gold, whose flesh is machines, factories and arms, whose brain is a newspaper page—a shapeless body which tosses restlessly, driven by obscure and unpredictable forces which implacably crush anyone who tries to oppose it or even just to avoid its mechanism.

The highly extolled “civilisation” of the West has been able to do all this. This is the vaunted result of the superstition of “Progress”—beyond Roman imperiality, the Doric Greece, and all the other exemplary forms of the great Aryan primordial civilisations.

And the noose tightens everyday around those who are still capable of great loathing and great rebellion.

- From part 1, chapter 1 of Heathen Imperialism, first published as Imperialismo Pagano, 1928.

Julius Evola - The Concept of Holy War

Historically, in order to comprehend what concerns us here, it must first be understood that the Islamic tradition, rather than having such a unique metaphysical point of origin, is essentially dependent upon its inheritance of the Persian tradition - Persia, as is well known, having possessed one of the highest pre-European civilizations. The original Mazdaist conception of religion, as military service under the sign of the 'God of Light', and of existence as a continuous, relentless struggle to rescue beings and things from the control of an anti-god, is at the centre of the Persian vision of life, and should be considered as the metaphysical counterpart and spiritual background to the warrior enterprises which culminated in the creation by the Persians of the empire of the 'kings of kings'. After the fall of Persia's power, echoes of such traditions persisted in the cycle of medieval Arabian civilization in forms which became slightly more materialistic and sometimes exaggerated, yet not to such an extent that their original elements of spirituality were entirely lost.

We bring up traditions of that kind here, above all, because they introduce a concept which is very useful in clarifying further the order of ideas set out in our latest articles; namely, the concept of the 'greater' or 'holy war', as distinct from the 'lesser war', but at the same time as related to the latter in a special manner. The distinction itself derives from a saying of the Prophet, who, returning from a warrior expedition, declared: "I return now from the lesser to the greater war."

The lesser war here corresponds to the exoteric war, the bloody battle which is fought with material arms against the enemy, against the 'barbarian', against an inferior race over whom a superior right is claimed, or, finally, when the event is motivated by a religious justification, against the 'infidel'. No matter how terrible and tragic the events, no matter how huge the destruction, this war, metaphysically, still remains a ‘lesser war'. The 'greater' or 'holy war' is, contrarily, of the interior and intangible order - it is the war which is fought against the enemy, the 'barbarian', the 'infidel', whom everyone bears in himself, or whom everyone can see arising in himself on every occasion that he tries to subject his whole being to a spiritual law. Appearing in the forms of craving, partiality, passion, instinctuality, weakness and inward cowardice, the enemy within the natural man must be vanquished, its resistance broken, chained and subjected to the spiritual man, this being the condition of reaching inner liberation, the 'triumphant peace' which allows one to participate in what is beyond both life and death.

Some may say that this is simply asceticism. The greater, holy war is the ascesis which has always been a philosophical goal. It could be tempting to add as well: it is the path of those who wish to escape from the world and who, using the excuse of inner liberation, become a herd of pacifist cowards. This is not at all the way things are. After the distinction between the two wars there is their synthesis. It is a feature of heroic traditions that they prescribe the 'lesser war', that is to say the real, bloody war, as an instrument in the realization of the 'greater: or 'holy war'; so much so that, finally, both become one and the same thing.

Thus, in Islam, 'holy war' - jihad - and 'the path of God' are interchangeable terms. The one who fights is on the 'path of God'. A well-known and quite characteristic saying of this tradition is: "The blood of heroes is closer to the Lord than the ink of scholars and the prayers of the pious."

Once again, as in the traditions already reviewed by us, as in the Roman ascesis of power and in the classical mors triumphalis, action attains the value of an inner overcoming and of an approximation to a life no longer mixed with darkness, contingency, uncertainty and death. In more concrete terms, the predicaments, risks and ordeals peculiar to the events of war bring about an emergence of the inner 'enemy', which, in the forms of the instinct of self-preservation, cowardice, cruelty, pity and blind riotousness, arise as obstacles to be vanquished just as one fights the outer enemy. It is clear from this that the decisive point is constituted by one's inner orientation, one's unshakeable persistence in what is spiritual in this double struggle, so that an irresistible and blind changing of oneself into a sort of wild animal does not occur, but, instead, a way is found of not letting the deepest forces escape, a way of seeing to it that one is never overwhelmed inwardly, that one always remains supreme master of oneself, and, precisely because of this sovereignty, one remains able to affirm himself against every possible limitation. In a tradition to which we will dedicate our next article, this situation is represented by a most characteristic symbol: the warrior is accompanied by an impassive divine being who, without fighting, leads and guides him in his struggle, side by side with him in the same war chariot. This symbol is the personified expression of a duality of principles, which the true hero, from whom something sacred always emanates, maintains unceasingly within himself.

[...]

As if by a circular path the reader is thus brought back to the same ideas which were examined in our previous writings on the subject of tradition, whether classical or Nordic-medieval: that is to say, to the idea of a privileged immortality reserved for heroes, who alone, according to Hesiod, pass on to inhabit symbolic islands, which image forth the bright and intangible existence of the Olympians.

Additionally, in the Islamic tradition, there are frequent references to the idea that some warriors fallen in the 'sacred war' are in reality not dead, in a sense which is not symbolic in any way, and which need not be referred to supernatural states cut off from the energies and destinies of the living. It is not possible to enter into this domain, which is rather mysterious and requires the support of references which would ill befit the present article. What we can say definitely is that, even today, and particularly in Italy, the rites by which a warrior community declares its most heroically fallen companions still 'present' have regained a special evocative force. He who begins from the belief that everything which, by a process of involution, retains today only an allegorical and, at best, moral character, whereas it originally possessed the value of reality, and every rite contained real action and not mere 'ceremony' - for him these warrior rites of today could perhaps provide material for meditation, and he could perhaps approach the mystery contained in the teaching already quoted: that is, the idea of heroes who really never died, and the idea of victors who, like the Roman Caesar, remain as 'perpetual victors' at the centre of a human stock.

- From 'Metaphysics of War'.

For more of Evola's views on this subject see here and here.

Evola On Holy War: The Nordic Tradition

Åsgårdsreien, Peter Nicolai Arbo (1872)

Considering that in the traditional view of the world every reality was a symbol and every action a ritual, the same was true in the case of war; since war could take on a sacred character, "holy war" and "the path to God" became one and the same thing. In more or less explicit forms, this concept is found in many traditions: a religious aspect and a transcendent intent were often associated with the bloody and military deeds of traditional humanity [...] 

The Nordic-Aryan mythology conceived Valhalla as the seat of heavenly immortality reserved for the heroes fallen on the battlefield, in addition to nobles and free men of divine origin. This seat was related to the symbolism of "heights" (as Glitnirbjorg, the "resplendent mountain," or Hmninbjorg, the "heavenly mountain," the highest divine mountain on whose peaks an eternal brightness shines beyond the clouds), and was often identified with Asgard, namely, with the Aesir's seat located in the Middle Land (Mitgard); the Lord of this seat was Odin-Wotan, the Nordic god of war and victory. According to a particular myth, Odin was the king who with his sacrifice showed to the heroes the path that leads to the divine dwellings where they will live forever and be transformed into his "sons." Thus, according to the Nordic races, no sacrifice or cult was more cherished by the supreme god and thought to bear more supernatural fruits than the one celebrated by the hero who falls on the battlefield; from a declaration of war to its bloody conclusion, the religious element permeated the Germanic hosts and inspired the individual warrior as well. Moreover, in these traditions we find the idea that by means of a heroic death the warrior shifted from the plane of the material, earthly war to the plane of struggle of a transcendent and universal character. The hosts of heroes were believed to constitute the so-called Wildes Heer, the mounted stormtroopers led by Odin who take off from the peak of Mount Valhalla and then return to rest on it. In the higher forms of this tradition, the host of the dead heroes selected by the Valkyrie for Odin, with whom the Wildes Heer eventually became identified, was the army the god needed in order to fight against the ragna-rokkr, the "twilight of the gods" that has been approaching for a very long time. It is written: “There is a very large number of dead heroes in Valhalla, and many more have yet to come, and yet they will seem too few when the wolf comes."


Julius Evola, "Revolt Against the Modern World" (1934)

Evola On Holy War: Greater and Lesser Jihad

In the Islamic tradition a distinction is made between two holy wars, the “greater holy war” (el-jihadul-akbar) and the “lesser holy war” (el-jihadul-ashgar). This distinction originated from a saying (hadith) of the Prophet, who on the way back from a military expedition said: “You have returned from a lesser holy war to a great holy war.” The greater holy war is of an inner and spiritual nature; the other is the material war waged externally against an enemy population with the particular intent of bringing “infidel” populations under the rule of “God’s Law” (al-Islam). The relationship between the “greater” and “lesser holy war”, however, mirrors the relationship between the soul and the body; in order to understand the heroic asceticism or “path of action”, it is necessary to understand the situation in which the two paths merge, the “lesser holy war” becoming the means through which a “greater holy war” is carried out, and vice versa: the “little holy war”, or the external one, becomes almost a ritual action that expresses and gives witness to the reality of the first. Originally, orthodox Islam conceived of a unitary form of asceticism: that which is connected to the jihad or “holy war”.

The “greater holy war” is man’s struggle against the enemies he carries within. More exactly, it is the struggle of man’s higher principle against everything that is merely human in him, against his inferior nature and against chaotic impulses and all sorts of material attachments. This is expressly outlined in a text of Aryan warrior wisdom: “Know Him therefore who is above reason; and let his peace give thee peace. Be a warrior and kill desire, the powerful enemy of the soul.” (Bhagavad-Gita 3.43)

The “enemy” who resists us and the “infidel” within ourselves must be subdued and put in chains. This enemy is the animalistic yearning and instinct, the disorganized multiplicity of impulses, the limitations imposed on us by a fictitious self, and thus also fear, wickedness, and uncertainty; this subduing of the enemy within is the only way to achieve inner liberation or the rebirth in a state of deeper inner unity and “peace” in the esoteric and triumphal sense of the word.

In the world of traditional warrior asceticism the “lesser holy war”, namely, the external war, is indicated and even prescribed as the means to wage this “greater holy war”; thus in Islam the expressions “holy war” (jihad) and “Allah’s way” are often used interchangeably. In this order of ideas action exercises the rigorous function and task of a sacrificial and purifying ritual. The external vicissitudes experienced during a military campaign cause the inner “enemy” to emerge and put up a fierce resistance and a good fight in the form of the animalistic instincts of self-preservation, fear, inertia, compassion, or other passions; those who engage in battles must overcome these feelings by the time they enter the battlefield if they wish to win and to defeat the outer enemy or “infidel”.

Obviously the spiritual orientation and the “right intention” (niya), that is, the one toward transcendence (the symbols employed to refer to transcendence are “heaven”, “paradise”, “Allah’s garden” and so on), are supposed as the foundations of jihad, lest war lose its sacred character and degenerate into a wild affair in which true heroism is replaced with reckless abandonment and what counts are the unleashed impulses of the animal nature.

It is written in the Qu’ran: “Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter fight for the cause of Allah; whether they die or conquer, We shall richly reward them.” (Qu’ran, 4:76) The presupposition according to which it is prescribed “When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads, and when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly” (Qu’ran 47:4); or, “Do not falter or sue for peace when you have gained the upper hand” (Qu’ran 47:37), is that “the life of this world is but a sport and a past-time” (Qu’an 47:37) and that “whoever is ungenerous to this cause is ungenerous to himself” (Qu’ran 47:38). These statements should be interpreted along the lines of the evangelical saying: “Whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it: but whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25). This is confirmed by yet another Koranic passage: “Why is it that when it is said to you: ‘March in the cause of Allah.’ you linger slothfully in the land? Are you content with this life in preference to the life to come?” (Qu’ran, 9:38) “Say: ‘Are you waiting for anything to befall us except victory or martyrdom?’” (Qu’ran, 9:52).

Another passage is relevant as well: “Fighting is obligatory for you, as much as you dislike it. But you may hate a thing although it is good for you, and love a thing although it is bad for you. Allah knows but you do not.” (Qu’ran, 2:216). This passage should also be connected with the following one:

“They were content to be with those that stayed behind: a seal was set upon their hearts, leaving them bereft of understanding. But the Apostle and the men who shared his faith fought with their goods and their persons. These shall be rewarded with good things. They shall surely prosper. Allah has prepared them gardens watered by running streams, in which they shall abide forever. That is the supreme triumph.” (Qu’ran, 9:88 – 9:89)

This place of “rest” (paradise) symbolizes the superindividual states of being, the realization of which is not confined to the post-mortem alone,as the following passage indicates: “As for those who are slain in the cause of Allah, He will not allow their works to perish. he will vouchsafe them guidance and ennoble their state; He will admit them to the paradise He has made known to them.” (Qu’ran, 47:5-7). In the instance of real death in battle, we find the equivalent of the mors triumphalis* found in classical traditions. Those who have experienced the “greater holy war” during the “lesser holy war”, have awakened a power that most likely will help them overcome the crisis of death; this power, having already liberated them from the “enemy” and from the “infidel”, will help them avoid the fate of Hades. This is why in classical antiquity the hope of the deceased and the piety of his relatives often caused figures of heroes and of victors to be inscribed on the tombstones. It is possible, however, to go through death and conquer, as well as achieve, the superlife and to ascend to the “heavenly realm” while still alive.


Julius Evola, "Revolt Against the Modern World" (1934)

* 'Triumphant death'.

Julius Evola: The True Antithesis

Nowadays it is possible to speak of a demonic nature of the economy, because in both individual and collective life the economic factor is the most important, real, and decisive one. Moreover, the tendency to converge every value and interest on the economic and productive plane is not perceived by Western man as an unprecedented aberration, but instead as something normal and natural, and not as an eventual necessity, but as something that must be accepted, willed, developed, and praised.

As I have said before, when the right and primacy of interests higher than those of the socioeconomic plane are not upheld, there is no hierarchy, and even if there is one, it is only a counterfeit; this is also true when a higher authority is not accorded to those men, groups, and bodies representing and defending these values and interests. In this case, an economic era is already by definition a fundamentally anarchical and antihierarchical era; it represents a subversion of the normal order. The materialization and the soullessness of all the domains of life that characterize it divest of any higher meaning all those problems and conflicts that are regarded as important within it.

This subversive character is found both in Marxism and in its apparent nemesis, modern capitalism. Thus, it is absurd and deplorable for those who pretend to represent the political "Right" to fail to leave the dark and small circle that is determined by the demonic power of the economy—a circle including capitalism, Marxism, and all the intermediate economic degrees.

This should be firmly upheld by those who today are taking a stand against the forces of the Left. Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical; both of their ideals are qualitatively identical, including the premises connected to a world the centre of which is constituted of technology, science, production, ''productivity'' and ''consumption.'' And as long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, and as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, and that, generally speaking, human progress is measured by the degree of wealth or indigence—then we are not even close to what is essential, even though new theories, beyond Marxism and capitalism, might be formulated.

Das Eisenwalzwerk, Adolph Menzel (1875)

The starting point should be, instead, a firm rejection of the principle formulated by Marxism, which summarizes the entire subversion at work today: The economy is our destiny. We must declare in an uncompromising way that in a normal civilization the economy and economic interests—understood as the satisfaction of material needs and their more or less artificial appendices—have always played, and always will play, a subordinated function. We must also uphold that beyond the economic sphere an order of higher political, spiritual, and heroic values has to emerge, an order that neither knows nor tolerates merely economic classes and does not know the division between "capitalists" and "proletarians"; an order solely in terms of which are to be defined the things worth living and dying for [...]

But where is the battle waged today in these terms? The "social question" and various "political problems" are increasingly losing any higher meaning, and are being defined on the basis of the most primitive conditions of physical existence, conditions that are then made absolute and removed from any higher concern. The notion of justice is reduced to this or that system of distribution of economic goods; the notion of civilization is measured mostly by that of production; and the focus of people's attention tends to be on topics such as production, work, productivity, economic classes, salaries, private or public property, exploitation of the workers, and special-interest groups. According to supporters of capitalism and to Marxists, nothing else exists or matters in this world […]

All this is proof of the true pathology of our civilization. The economic factor exercises a hypnosis and a tyranny over modern man. And, as often occurs in hypnosis, what the mind focuses on eventually becomes real. Modern man is making possible what every normal and complete civilization has always regarded as an aberration or as a bad joke—namely, that the economy and the social problem in terms of the economy are his destiny.

Thus, in order to posit a new principle, what is needed is not to oppose one economic formula with another, but instead to radically change attitudes, to reject without compromise the materialistic premises from which the economic factor has been perceived as absolute.  What must be questioned is not the value of this or that economic system, but the value of the economy itself. Thus, despite the fact that the antithesis between capitalism and Marxism dominates the background of recent times, it must be regarded as a pseudo-antithesis. In free-market economies, as well as in Marxist societies, the myth of production and its corollaries (e.g. standardization, monopolies, cartels, technocracy) are subject to the ''hegemony'' of the economy, becoming the primary factor on which the material conditions of existence are based. Both systems regard as "backward" or as "underdeveloped" those civilizations that do not amount to "civilizations based on labour and production"—namely, those civilizations that, luckily for themselves, have not yet been caught up in the feverish industrial exploitation of every natural resource, the social and productive enslavement of all human possibilities, and the exaltation of technical and industrial standards; in other words, those civilizations that still enjoy a certain space and a relative freedom. Thus, the true antithesis is not between capitalism and Marxism, but between a system in which the economy rules supreme (no matter in what form) and a system in which the economy is subordinated to extra-economic factors, within a wider and more complete order, such as to bestow a deep meaning upon human life and foster the development of its highest possibilities. This is the premise for a true restorative reaction, beyond "Left" and "Right," beyond capitalism's abuses and Marxist subversion. The necessary conditions are an inner detoxification, a becoming "normal" again ("normal" in the higher meaning of the term), and a renewed capability to differentiate between base and noble interests. No intervention from the outside can help; any external action at best might accompany this process [...]

The pure homo economicus is a fiction or the by-product of an evidently degenerated specialization. Thus, in every normal civilization a purely economic man—that is, the one who sees the economy not as an order of means but rather as an order of ends to which he dedicates his main activities—was always rightly regarded as a man of lower social extraction: lower in a spiritual sense, and furthermore in a social or political one. In essence, it is necessary to return to normalcy, to restore the natural dependency of the economic factor on inner, moral factors and to act upon them.

Once this is acknowledged, it will be easy to recognize the inner causes in the actual world (which have the economy as their common denominator) that preclude any solution that does not translate into a steeper fall to a lower level. I have previously suggested that the uprising of the masses has mainly exist between mere economic classes and by the fact that under the aegis of antitraditional liberalism, property and wealth, once free from any bond or higher value, have become the only criteria of social differences. However, beyond the strict limitations that were established within the overall hierarchical system prior to the ascent of the economy, the superiority and the right of a class as a merely economic class may rightly be contested in the name of elementary human values. And it was precisely here that the subversive ideology introduced itself, by making an anomalous and degenerative situation into an absolute one and acting as if nothing else had previously existed or could exist outside economic classes, or besides external and unfair social conditions that are determined by wealth alone. However, all this is false, since such conditions could develop only within a truncated society: only in such a society may the concepts of "capitalist" and "proletarian" be defined. These terms lack any foundation in a normal civilization, because in such a civilization the counterpart constituted by extra-economic values portrays the corresponding human types as some-thing radically different from what today is categorized as "capitalist" or "proletarian." Even in the domain of the economy, a normal civilization provides specific justification for certain differences in condition, dignity, and function.[...] 

I am not espousing an "obscurantism" for the benefit of the "ruling classes"; as I have stated previously, I dispute the superiority and the rights of a merely economic class living in a materialistic fashion. Nevertheless, we need to side against the idea or myth of so-called social progress, which is another of the many pathological fixations of the economic era in general, and not the legacy of leftist movements alone. To this effect, the eschatological views of Marxism do not differ very much from the "Western" views of prosperity: both Weltanschauungen [worldviews] essentially coincide, as do their practical applications. In both Marxism and free-market economies we find the same materialistic, antipolitical, and social view detaching the social order and people from any higher order and higher goal, positing what it is "useful" as the only purpose (understood in a physical, vegetative, and earthly sense); by turning the "useful" into a criterion of progress, the values proper to every traditional structure are inverted. In fact, we should not forget that the law, meaning, and sufficient reason for these structures have always consisted in references for man to something beyond himself and beyond the economy, wealth, or material poverty, all these things having only a secondary importance. Thus, it can legitimately be claimed that the so-called improvement of social conditions should be regarded not as good but as evil, when its price consists of the enslavement of the single individual to the productive mechanism and to the social conglomerate; or in the degradation of the State to the "State based on work," and the degradation of society to "consumer society"; or in the elimination of every qualitative hierarchy; or in the atrophy of every spiritual sensibility and every "heroic" attitude. Hegel wrote, "Happiness is not to be found in the history of the world [in the sense of material comfort and social prosperity]; even the few happy periods found here and there are like white pages." But even at an individual level, the qualities that matter the most in a man and make him who he is often arise in harsh circumstances and even in conditions of indigence and injustice, since they represent a challenge to him, testing his spirit; what a sad contrast it is when the human animal is granted a maximum of comfort, an equal share in a mindless and bovine happiness, an easy and comfortable life filled with gadgets, radio and TV programs, planes, Hollywood, sports arenas, and popular culture at the level of Reader's Digest.

Again, spiritual values and the higher degrees of human perfection have nothing to do with either the presence or the absence of socioeconomic prosperity. The notion that indigence is always a source of abjection and vice—and that "advanced" social conditions represent its opposite—is the fairy tale told by materialistic ideologies, which contradict themselves when they up-hold the other myth, according to which the "good guys" are on the side of the people and the oppressed workers and all the "bad guys" are to be found on the side of the wealthy classes, which are corrupt and exploitative. Both of these are fairy tales. In reality, true values bear no necessary relation to better or worse socioeconomic conditions; only when these values are put at the forefront is it possible to approximate an order of effective justice, even on the material plane. Among these values are: being oneself; the style of an active impersonality; love of discipline; and a generally heroic attitude toward life. Against all forms of resentment and social competition, every person should acknowledge and love his station in life, which best corresponds to his own nature, thus acknowledging the limits within which he can develop his potential; and should give an organic sense to his life and achieve its perfection, since an artisan who perfectly fulfils his function is certainly superior to a king who does not live up to his dignity. Only when such considerations have weight will this or that reform carried out on the socioeconomic plane be conceived and implemented without any negative consequence, according to true justice, without mistaking the essential for the accessory. Unless an ideological detoxification and a rectification of attitudes is carried out, every reform will be only superficial and fail to tackle the deeper roots of the crisis of contemporary society, to the advantage of subversive forces.

It has been reported that in a non-European country, which could boast an ancient and rich past, an American company, upon realizing the scarce participation of local inhabitants who had been hired for a certain project, believed that the right way to motivate them consisted in doubling their pay. The result was that a majority of the workers cut their working hours in half. Believing the initial pay was enough to satisfy their natural and normal needs, those people thought it was absurd to spend more time than necessary to procure their pay. It has also been reported that Renan, after visiting an industrial exposition, left, saying: "There are so many things in life that I can do perfectly well without!"

Compare these two views with contemporary Stakanovism, economic "activism," "civilization of wealth," and "consumer society" and its applications. These two examples, better than any abstract consideration, supply us with the criteria to distinguish between two fundamental attitudes, the former healthy and normal, the latter deviant and pathological.[...]
 

Sharing Stakhanovite Experience, A. P. Levitin (1951)

Prior to the advent in Europe of what textbooks call ''mercantile economy'' (the term is very appropriate, because it describes the tone given to the entire economy by the figures of the merchant and the moneylender), from which capitalism rapidly developed, the fundamental criteria of the economy were that the acquisition of external goods had to be restricted and that work and the quest for profit were justifiable only in order to acquire a level of wealth corresponding to one's status in life: this was the Thomist and, later, the Lutheran view.

The ancient corporative ethics shared this perspective: in this ethics the values of personality and quality were given priority, and the amount of work was always in relation to a specific level of natural needs and to a specific vocation. The fundamental idea was that work was meant not to bind man, but to free him and allow the pursuit of worthier interests, once the demands of existence were satisfied. No economic value was cherished enough to sacrifice one's independence to it, nor was the quest for the means of subsistence deemed worthy to consume one's entire life. Overall, the above-mentioned truth was acknowledged—that human progress must be defined not on an economic and social level, but rather on an inner plane; in other words, progress does not consist in leaving behind one's ranks "to become successful," or in increasing the amount of work in order to gain a position that one is not qualified for. At a higher level, the formula substine et abstine ["keep back, but stand firm"] was an axiom of wisdom that echoed through the Classical world; one of the possible interpretations of the Delphic saying "Nothing in excess" could also be applied to this order of considerations.

Therefore, all these were Western views too: they were the views of European man when he was still healthy, before he was bitten by the tarantula, so to speak, or not yet dominated by an insane restlessness that was destined to distort every criterion of value and to lead to the paroxysms of contemporary civilization. The "demonic nature of the economy" has developed from this distortion, following a chain of processes: thus, morally speaking, the responsibility falls squarely on the shoulder of the individual. The turning point was the advent of a view of life that, instead of keeping human needs within natural limits in view of what is truly worthy of pursuit, adopted as its highest ideal an artificial increase and multiplication of human needs and the necessary means to satisfy them, in total disregard for the growing slavery this would inexorably constitute for the individual and the collective whole. The limit of this deviation consists of the inner situation out of which the forms of industrial capitalism have developed: here the activity aimed at profit and at production has turned from a means to an end, ensnaring man's heart and soul, condemning him to a nonstop race and an unlimited growth of frantic activity and production. This race is imposed from the outside, because to stop, in the economic system, means to regress or even to be undermined and swept away. In this race, which is not "activism" but pure and senseless restlessness, the economy puts thousands of workers in "chains" just as it does the ambitious entrepreneur, the ''producer of goods, and the ''owner of the means of production,'' occasioning concordant actions and reactions that in turn generate increasingly wider spiritual destruction. The background of the "selfless" love of that American politician who put as the basis of his international political program the "economic improvement of the most underdeveloped countries of the world" can be seen in this light: its meaning consists of completing the new barbaric invasions (the only ones worthy of this name), and generating an obsession with economic concerns in some peoples whom so far have been spared the "tarantula's bite"—all this because the growing amount of capital seeks to be utilized and invested and the degenerated productive mechanism seeks wider and new markets for its overproduction. Lenin saw clearly through all this and how, in such upheavals, one of the traits of "dying capitalism" consists of digging its own grave, being forced by the mechanism it set in motion to unleash (through industrialization, proletarianization, and Europeanization) forces that eventually will react against it and against the white man's societies: the representatives of "progress" are not aware of it, and so the process snowballs. In the socialist systems that claim to be the rightful heirs of a capitalism doomed to perish because of its inner contradiction, the enslavement of the single individual is reaffirmed rather than alleviated; it is sanctioned no longer simply de facto, but de jure as well. In socialist regimes this enslavement obeys a collective imperative. If the great entrepreneur devotes his entire self to economic activity, turning it into some kind of drug that has a vital importance to him—the consequence of an unconscious self-defense mechanism, for he suspects that if he ceased the activity he would see the emptiness surrounding him and feel the utter horror of a life devoid of meaning—in the ideologies of the opposing side an analogous situation is made to correspond to an ethical imperative. This imperative is also accompanied by anathemas and repressive measures against those who intend to raise their heads and reclaim their freedom from everything that is work, production, productivity, and social ties.

 

At this point it is necessary to denounce another pathological fixation of the economic age, or one of its fundamental slogans: I am referring to the modern superstition of work that has become common to both left-wing and right-wing movements. Just like the notion of "the people," "work" too has become one of those sacred cows and intangible entities that modern man dares only to praise and exalt. One of the characteristics of the economic era, considered in its most plebeian and shallow aspect, is this kind of self-inflicted sadism that consists of glorifying work as an ethical value and as an essential duty, and in conceiving every form of activity as some kind of work. A future and perhaps more normal mankind will regard the notion in which the means becomes an end as a peculiar perversion. Thus, work ceases to signify something that is imposed only in view of the material needs of existence, and to which no more room should be given than is required according to the individual and the status of his rank; on the contrary, work is absolutized and seen as a value in itself, and is associated simultaneously with the myth of paroxysmal and productive activity. Moreover, we come to a real inversion. The term work has always designated the lowest forms of human activity, those that are more exclusively conditioned by the economic factor. It is illegitimate to label as "work" anything that is not reduced to these forms; rather, the word to be used is action: action, not work, is what is performed by the leader, the explorer, the ascetic, the pure scientist, the warrior, the artist, the diplomat, the theologian, the one who makes or breaks a law, the one who is motivated by an elementary passion or guided by a principle. But while every normal civilization, thanks to its upward orientation, intended to bestow a character of action, creation and ''art'' even upon work (see, for instance, the corporations in the ancient world), exactly the opposite is happening in the present economic civilization: even action (or what-ever is still worthy of the term) is increasingly attributed the character of "work (i.e., an economic and proletarian character), almost out of a masochistic pleasure in degradation and contamination.[...]

The proletarian spirit, the quality that is spiritually proletarian, subsists when no higher human type than the "worker" is conceived; when one describes "the ethical character of work"; when one praises "society" or the "State based on work"; when one does not have the courage to take a resolute stand against all these new contaminating myths.

An ancient image, taken from a Buddhist text, is that of a man running breathlessly under the burning sun. At a certain point this man may ask himself: "Why am I running? What if I were to slow down?" and then, walking more slowly, he asks: "Why am I walking in this heat? What if I paused under a tree?"—and in doing so he may come to see that his previous running was caused by a foolish and feverish state of mind. Such an image indicates the inner transformation, or metanoia, required to strike at the heart of the "hegemony" of work and to regain inner freedom: this, however, not in order to shift to a renunciatory, utopian, and miserable civilization, but in order to clear every domain of life of insane tensions and to restore a real hierarchy of values. 
 

Here the fundamental point is to be able to recognize that there is no external economic improvement or social prosperity worthy enough (and the temptations of which should not be absolutely resisted) when its counterpart is an essential limitation of freedom and of the space necessary for everyone to realize his possibilities beyond the dimension conditioned by matter and by the needs of ordinary life.

Moreover, this does not apply only to the single individual, but to the collective whole and the State as well, especially when its material resources are limited and foreign economic forces are pressuring it. Here autarchy may be an ethical precept, because what weighs more on the scale of values must be the same for a single individual and for a State: it is better to renounce the allure of improving general social and economic conditions and to adopt a regime of austerity than to become enslaved to foreign interests or to become caught up in world processes of reckless economic hegemony and productivity that are destined to sweep away those who have set them in motion.

The overall contemporary situation is naturally such that my considerations mean nothing less than swimming against the current; while this does not affect their intrinsic value, it must nonetheless be acknowledged that the single individual cannot react and subtract himself from the overall mechanism of the economic era other than in a restricted and limited way, and also given certain more or less privileged conditions. A general change may occur only if a super-ordained power intervenes. After acknowledging the fundamental principle of the primacy and sovereignty of State over economy, the State can then produce an action of limiting and ordering the economic domain; this action will be able to facilitate what derives from the essential and unavoidable factor, that of the detoxification, the change of mentality, and the return to normalcy for people who have learned anew what is sensible activity, right effort, values to he upheld, and loyalty to oneself.

Only on such a basis can one simultaneously be a “protester” in an integral and legitimate sense and an “achiever” in a higher sense.

I will again discuss the relationship between State and economy. Here I want to recall Nietzsche's words as a parting shot regarding the social question: "The workers shall live one day as the bourgeois do now—but above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants, the higher caste: that is to say, poorer and simpler, but in possession of power.'' A differentiation on this basis will act as the principle for the rectification of the inversion I have lamented, and as the principle for defence of the idea of the State and for the resurgence of a different type of dignity and superiority. Such dignity and superiority must be consolidated and validated beyond the world of the economy, through a continuous struggle, both inner and outer, through the confirmation of one's being and the conquest of each moment.

[From Men Among the Ruins, chapter six 'Work - The Demonic Nature of the Economy', Julius Evola, 1953.  English translation by Guido Stucco for the 2002 edition published by Inner Traditions]

Race, "Ethnos" and "The Fourth Political Theory" - Part 2

By Giuliano Adriano Malvicini 
Part 2 of 3

Since liberalism, as an ideology founded on the rights of the individual, calls for "the liberation from all forms of collective identity in general, (and is therefore) entirely incompatible with the ethnos and ethnocentrism, and is an expression of a systematic theoretical and technological ethnocide", "ethnocentrism" and the positive affirmation of "ethnic" identity are viewed by Dugin as a potential base for resistance to liberalism. This is why he argues that "ethnocentrism" can be viewed as a positive component of national socialism, if it is neutralised by purging it of any racial or national connotations. Dugin's notion of "ethnos" has nothing to do with race - he makes it very clear that it is a purely cultural, linguistic and sociological concept with no biological basis whatsoever. As we shall see, Dugin’s concept of “ethnocentrism”, which he says is derived from the German sociologist Wilhelm Mühlman (who, however, was a convinced racialist and national socialist), differs from the commonly accepted meaning of this term. As for the concept of the “ethnos” itself, in "The Fourth Political Theory" he only touches upon it in passing, defining it as "a community of language, religious belief, daily life, and the sharing of resources and goals". However, he develops it much more fully in a lecture series on "ethno-sociology" (a term that means the same as cultural or social anthropology, ethnology or structural anthropology), which can be viewed on Youtube.

The first part of Dugin’s course is a very summary overview of different national schools of social anthropology, which he sees as an important peripheral scientific discipline that has the potential to challenge and subvert Western cultural hegemony (i. e., Western “racism”). Those familiar with the work of Kevin McDonald and his book "The Culture of Critique" will be struck Dugin's very positive evaluation of figures like the Jewish-American anthropologist Franz Boas, who is famous for having tried to debunk the concept of race.
Dugin is especially interested in the French school of structural anthropology, founded by the Jewish-French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was a student of the Jewish-Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. This connection is important to Dugin, since Jakobson was not only one of the founders of the structuralist school in linguistics, but also a Eurasianist. Structuralist anthropology is also an important link between the study of pre-modern forms of rationality and poststructuralist thought, and between “holistic” conservative thought and postmodern relativism. The structuralist method - viewing a culture as a system of synchronic relations - is assimilated by Dugin to the holistic, organic view of society characteristic of conservative thinkers. Dugin also says that his concept of “ethnos” based on the work of the Russian ethnologist Sergey Shirokogorov, who studied archaic tribes living on the Siberian tundra.

Shirokogorov’s work also functions as a link between the concept of "ethnos" and the political ideology of Eurasianism.

Dugin has proposed the "ethnos" and “civilisation” as possible subjects of the "fourth political theory". For Dugin, the "ethnos", and not the individual, is the social "atom” (the simplest, most basic form of social being). The “ethnos” is only fully embodied by primitive hunter-gatherer societies and neolithic agrarian societies. The ethnos, again, is not a racial group. The essence of the "ethnos", as Dugin defines this term, is not a biological fact, but a social, symbolic and linguistic structure. He is always careful to emphasise that the ethnos is a cultural phenomenon, not defined by blood relations or race. It is similar to the phenomenological concept of a pre-logical "life world" (Lebenswelt). The "life world" is pre-logical in the sense that it is the shared horizon of understanding of a community. The notion of life world allows Dugin to link the concept of “ethnos” to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as being-in-the-world. This is important because Dasein is supposed to be the “subject” of the fourth political theory. The ethnos, then, is apparently a specific type of Dasein.

Although the notion of ethnos is only fully applicable to archaic societies, it continues to exist as a residual stratum in modern societies, in the form of the timeless symbols and archetypes of the collective unconscious. In modern society, the ethnic life-world has disintegrated and society is increasingly transformed into an economic system governed by instrumental, technological rationality. By taking the ethnos as a paradigm of interpretation, it is set up as the “normal” type of society, and modern society is viewed as a deviation from or distortion of this original standard. The methods of social anthropology, developed specifically for the study of primitive societies, can then be used as a critical tool in the interpretation of modern societies - something already attempted by semioticians like Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. The non-individualist, non-utilitarian gift economies of primitive societies, based on symbolic exchange and honour, are presented as a possible basis for an economic system that could be an alternative to modern liberal-capitalist economies.

The ethnos itself cannot be properly understood using historical methods. One of the characteristics of archaic, primitive societies is that they are ahistorical, or prehistorical. They lack written records. They live in mythical time rather than historical time - mythical time in Mircea Eliade’s sense, the time of the eternal return of the same. The ethnos (primitive society) is not an historical community but a social structure that reproduces itself indefinitely.  

This means that it must be studied using the methods of structuralism, which were initially developed within the field of linguistics but later applied to the social sciences. Structuralists view primitive societies as systems of oppositions that must be studied holistically and synchronically, like a language. They cannot be adequately interpreted in causal terms, whether as the result of biological evolution (Dugin rejects evolutionary interpretations of culture as tainted by the “racist”, modern doctrine of progress) or as arising from historical processes. The ethnos is simply a phenomenological given. Although it frequently seems to be a purely theoretical, artificial and utopian construct, Dugin insists that it is empirically validated by ethnological studies of archaic societies.

Instead of historical terms, the ethnos must be interpreted in spatial (synchronic) terms. The spatial structure of the ethnos, however, is first of all an expression of the specific landscape in which it dwells. The landscape should not be understood in simply material or naturalistic terms. The landscape of the ethnos is a sacred landscape. It is not just the natural environment of a tribal group, but the symbolic, mythical space into which the natural environment is inscribed. The concept of “nature”, even in its anti-modern, romantic form, already presupposes man’s separation and alienation from the cosmos as a primordial whole. The world of naive, primitive man, of the ethnos, is a whole prior to conceptual oppositions like artificial and natural, subject and object, symbolic and the real, language and things, thought and experience, the individual and society (and in this sense, it shares characteristics with the postmodern world, in which the boundaries between the virtual and the real, the natural and the technological are erased).

What Heidegger calls "a world” is a space of possibilities rather than a collection of objects observed from the outside. There is no independently existing, transcendental subject that subsequently crosses over into the world, no objective world that confronts a detached, abstract subject. Being-in-the-world comes first, and the subject and its “sense-data” are only abstracted out of it by philosophers. The opposition of subject and object conceals the primordial unity of being-in-the-world, which is irreducible to the subject-object relation. Concrete being-in-the-world is studied phenomenologically, uncovering its temporal and spatial structure.

The fundamental polarity of the ethnos is not that between the subject and object, but between the sacred and the profane. The polarity between the sacred and the profane corresponds to the polarity between the exceptional and the normal. The profane is the normal, and the sacred is a crisis in the normal course of events - an exception that suspends the oppositions that structure social reality, transcending them and tracing their limits. The sacred is both exceptional and foundational, both dangerous and salvific (“Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst/Das Rettende auch”). It is the outer limit of the world, but also the dark core of things. The sacred marks the uncrossable limits of communal life - uncrossable insofar as the one who crosses them, ceases to be part of the community, or becomes other (for example, by undergoing initiation). The sacred is a paradigm common to nature and society, designating the primordial totality that transcends them and includes them. The sacred is normative in the sense that it is a limit that unites and gathers all the separate regions of the world, determining their “measures”. The dimension of the sacred belongs to the structure of Being itself, and can therefore never be entirely eliminated, even in the most secularised of modern societies: it can only be displaced and distorted.

The space of the ethnos is structured by the relation between a sacred centre (pole) and a profane margin. Here, Dugin draws on Mircea Eliade's work on the symbolism of the centre. According to Eliade, sacred space is founded and ordered from out of a central point marked by a “hierophany”: a revelation of the sacred. The centre is symbolically designated by the erection of an axis mundi, an axis that connects the various dimensions or regions of the cosmos. Space, then, is not homogenous, but differentiated by a central, vertical sacred axis or core and a profane, horizontal periphery or margin. Traditional cosmogonies frequently describe the cosmos as growing out of a central point. As Eliade defines it, the centre is any point at which a vertical movement between different ontological planes or cosmic regions - between profane and sacred space, between heaven and earth, gods and mortals, the realm of the living and of the dead - can occur. It is the world-pillar, the sacred mountain - Yggdrasil, Olympus, Meru, Irminsul. Climbing a mountain, a cosmic tree or pillar is a passage from one ontological plane to another. Yggdrasil connects the nine worlds to each other and makes it possible to travel between them. The sacred centre is also the spinal column of the yogi, the Vedic sacrificial pole, a lingam, or a sacred tree. It is the gathering symbol of the Christian cross. It is the altar upon which the redemptive sacrificial death of Christ is re-enacted, and churches and temples are oriented around the centrality of the altar. The axis is the totem pole, the “master signifier” that gathers the tribe around itself. A cornerstone or the central column of a building is another embodiment of the sacred centre. The axis unites within itself the symbolism of transcendence and of foundation. It is the column that supports the “house of Being”. The centre makes it possible for man to dwell in the world (the English word “home” is a cognate of the Old Norse word heimr, “world”), it is the pole that gathers, unifies and orders a cosmos. According to Eliade, its “temporal” counterpart is the sun at its zenith - which for Nietzsche was a symbol of the revelation of the unity of Being and Becoming in eternal cosmic recurrence.

While modern society revolves around the pole of the “sacred” and inviolable individual, each ethnos is gathered around a sacred axis. The ethnos views itself as dwelling near the sacred centre of the world. It is the proximity to this point of origin, this source of power and pole of attraction that roots the ethnos in a landscape. It is not primarily defined by borders - by the exclusion of an “other”, an enemy - but by the centripetal attraction of a pole of transcendence.

Each civilisation, while encompassing several ethne, is also organised around a pole, which presumably forms one of the poles of multipolarity. Dugin says that the symbol of Eurasianism, eight arrows radiating out from a central point, is a symbol of the ethno-centre. The radiating arrows are not only a symbol of Russian ambitions of imperialist expansion. They also symbolise the origin of Tradition in the centre of Eurasian heartland, and its subsequent diffusion throughout the rest of the world. Dugin claims that “excavations in Eastern Siberia and Mongolia prove that exactly here were the most ancient centres of civilization.” Finally, in an added postmodern touch, the symbol of Eurasianism is also a symbol of chaos  invented by the British science fiction and fantasy author Michael Moorcock in his 1970 novel “The Eternal Champion”. This is presumably an allusion to Dugin’s “chaotic logos”, and perhaps also to “right-wing anarchism” and its conception of sovereignty.

Each ethnos is a "logos". As Heidegger famously noted, the Greek word logos (speech) is related to the verb legein, an agrarian term signifying "gathering", "harvesting" (the ethnos, remember, is a hunter-gatherer or archaic agrarian society). The logos gathers together everything that has been made distinct by being named, including the dead and the gods, into a single space or “place” (Ort). In this sense, language is the “house of Being”. It is an ordering of space and time, inscribing the landscape and the cycle of the seasons into itself by means of a calendar, a map and a taxonomy. Space, time, man, and nature are gathered together in a single, permanent, identical figure: a world. Dugin identifies this figure with the ethnos, which strives to conserve and reproduce itself as a world, but not as a biological entity (although he does not make it clear why biological conservation of the race is not a necessary part of the conservation of the world of the ethnos). He also identifies the ethnos with a specific language.

Since each ethnos is a “logos” - in the sense of a structure of language, of thought, and of social relations - this becomes the basis for a kind of cultural and linguistic relativism. There is not just the one, universal Reason of the western Enlightenment. There are many different valid "rationalities" (although "reason”, "rationality" and “logic” are already deviations from the original meaning of "logos”). The fourth political theory rejects the “epistemological hegemony” of the West. Dugin argues, for example, that sub-Saharan Africans must not be deemed inferior because they do not live up to the norms and standards of the modern West. The Western conceptions of Reason, enlightenment and “emancipation” are not the universal goal “humanity” is consciously or unconsciously striving towards, with ethnic and cultural differences viewed as mere particularistic obstacles to be overcome on the way. The dominance of the Western form of rationality tends to exclude all other forms of rationality and deny them legitimacy. Dugin, like other postmodernists, wants to relativise the Western logos as only one of many possible logoi, without any legitimate claim to a privileged status. The relationship between these logoi is non-hierarchical, anarchic and pluralistic. Insofar as a subject is a kind of rationality, there are many different types of subjects - not just the modern, Western, enlightened version of humanity, defined by Western rationality. In other words, Dugin reiterates the postmodern critiques of Western culture, all of which are familiar ad nauseam to anyone who has attended a Western university. The global political hegemony of the West is founded on the hegemony of Western reason. Western rationality (technological rationality) not only allowed western man to subjugate his natural environment, it allowed the West to subjugate the rest of the world. It forced other peoples to choose between adopting the Western model themselves, or remaining colonial subjects of the West.

According to the ideology of the Enlightenment, reason is universal, and is the defining characteristic of universal human nature, of man as animal rationale. Reason is what all human beings have in common, a common norm on the basis of which conflicts can be neutralised and mediated, and the world ultimately harmonised. This is the telos – the goal and end-point – of history, and the path towards it is progressive, universal enlightenment. When this goal and ideal end-point is reached, conflict, and hence politics in any real sense, will cease to exist. But some critics of the enlightenment have argued that reason cannot neutralise the struggle for power and the conflictual dimension of reality, and that reason is itself an instrument of power and domination. The only authentic freedom is an essentially political freedom that contains within itself the possibility of conflict - conflict that cannot be neutralised by any common norm or foundation in universal reason.

The focus, then, is not on universal reason gradually overcoming the dark demons and phantoms of myth and irrationality, and in the process, uniting humanity, but on the specific world of each ethnos, which is prior to the separation between reason and intuition, logos and myth. Each ethnos identifies itself with the world (the cosmos), or at least sees itself as the centre of the world, insofar as it believes itself to be dwelling in the proximity of the “sacred centre”. The ethnos is a society rooted in a mythical space-time, a sacred geography. The ethnos not only dwells within a space, it is itself a living space, but not in Haushofer’s sense of “Lebensraum”. It is "a space that lives”.

The sacred in itself is an abyss, a chaos. Outside of the cosmos of the ethnos, there is only a terrifying chaos, an abyss of nothingness, the residue of creation. It cannot be eliminated, only held at bay and circumscribed by a boundary. Chaos cannot manifest itself directly. It can only show itself by concealing itself, by taking on a paradoxical figure of form: by masking itself as a “nothingness that is”. It seizes or takes possession of an individual, who then becomes its vessel and personification (as in the case of shamanic possession, or the totemic figure representing the tribe's founder). There, the nameless forces of the outside are socialised and can address the community, taking on the personae (the "masks”) of demons, spirits or gods. Through this personification, the sacred becomes a “subject” that can engage in symbolic exchange with the community. The shaman or healer is the central figure of tribal or "ethnic" society, who communicates and mediates between the ethnos and the beyond - the sacred realm of the dead, demons or gods. The shaman is both a liminal and a “conservative” figure, a guardian who works to conserve the cosmic order, waging war on demons and malignant spirits of the chaotic outside. His or her work consists in dealing with the various crises that the ethnos and its members periodically go through. The shaman not only heals individuals in the tribe, but above all heals the tribe itself and the cosmos, making them whole, restoring the cosmic order founded on the sacred. He or she is able to pass from one ontological plane to another by climbing the axis mundi, the sacred pillar, mountain or world-tree.

Eliade believed that shamanism originated in Eurasia. It was a pre-historic vehicle through which elements of the primordial tradition were transmitted to pre-Columbian America and other areas. Eliade views the shaman as a kind of proto-sovereign, in the sense that he is able to magically bind and unbind. He occupies a “liminal” position - managing crises within the normal order of the tribe and cosmos, but doing so only insofar as he communicates with the dangerous, chaotic outside. He possesses traits similar to those that according to Carl Schmitt define sovereignty - the power to suspend the normative order, not in order to destroy it, but in order to save it from dissolution and chaos.

The shaman enacts the primordial, permanent struggle or strife, the activity and dynamism that underlies the static structure of the ethnos.  

The dynamic of the ethnos is opposed to the new. It views all change as a crisis, as entropy, eroding the stability of the cosmos. The ethnos is inherently conservative and anti-historical, in the sense that its sole purpose is to maintain homeostasis, to work to maintain its identity with itself. Its main concern is self-reproduction. Again, this is not in the sense of the biological preservation and self-reproduction of the race. In reproducing itself, the ethnos ritually restores and maintains the order and equilibrium of the cosmos and the flow of its circular economy. Its existence is centred in the cycle of the seasons, of seeding and harvesting, child-birth and death. The time of the ethnos, then, is not linear and irreversible (historical), but recurrent, circular and reversible. Using Armin Mohler’s terminology, we could also call the time-space of the ethnos a "sphere” (“Kugel”). It is a wholeness that has not yet been split into the dualisms of time and eternity, matter and spirit, man and nature, individual and society, etc. The individual is not seen as separate from the ethnos, and the ethnos is identified with the world. This world transcends and outlives the individual. The primary care of the individual is not self-preservation, but the preservation of the ethnos/world.

Since the time of the ethnos is the eternal return of the same, death itself is not an irreversible event. The souls of the ancestors return in their descendants. The individual as an historically unique, mortal being does not exist. Children are potentially destabilising, alien elements that threaten the cohesiveness of the tribe, but are assimilated through initiation. When they are initiated into adulthood, they become reincarnations or personifications of their ancestors. (Prior to initiation, children are viewed as both dangerous and sacred by many primitive tribal groups.) Individuality has no positive meaning for the ethnos. In this sense, the ethnos is the reverse of modern society, in which the individual defines itself in opposition to the community. Instead of the individual, it is the ethnos as a whole that is the normative unit, "the man". In other words, it could be viewed as a kind of "subject".

At this point, however, it becomes unclear how this can have anything to do with Dasein, since Dasein is defined precisely by its historicity, finitude and mortality. For Heidegger, men are, in their deepest and most fundamental essence, mortals. Dasein’s mortality is not the consequence of modern Western man’s loss of faith or nihilism. In a sense, the essence of man - Dasein - is finitude, and finitude is not simply a human characteristic, but part of the essence of Being itself. Dasein, as finitude, belongs to the structure of Being itself, so that the question of Dasein is a necessary step in approaching the question of Being. Heidegger elaborates his concept of Dasein not as a philosophical anthropology, but as a part of his ontological project. Dugin talks about Dasein, but detaches the term from the question of Being. In doing this, Dugin effectively empties the term of meaning. Nowhere does he show that he actually understands what Heidegger means by “Dasein”, or what is at stake in Being and Time.

The forgetting of Being is not a human error - and much less the error only of Western humanity - but part of the essence of Being itself. The essence of nihilism is not a human error or something created by human beings at all. Moreover, only the complete nihilism that coincides with the end of Western metaphysics and the planetary dominion of modern technology opens up the possibility of the question of Being in Heidegger’s sense. Contrary to what traditionalists believe, nihilism cannot be overcome through a return to metaphysics, since nihilism is itself the final actualisation of metaphysics. The essence of metaphysics is the movement of transcendence (Übersteigen). The history of metaphysics is the event of transcendence, the transcendence of beings by Being. It is in this sense that Heidegger defines metaphysics as “the history of Being”. All metaphysical concepts are structured by the fundamental ontological difference between Being and beings, i. e., the transcendence of beings by Being, through which beings are gathered, grounded and held in suspense by the withdrawal of Being.

The historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) of Dasein is founded on the irreversible and unrepeatable event (Geschehnis) that Dasein itself is. Dasein is not only mortal, but also “natal” (gebürtig). Natality is the essence of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit). Birth is an “event” (Geschehnis) in the sense that ontologically, it is an absolute beginning, an absolute interruption or break with the past (even though ontically, it is of course a natural event, part of a continuous chain of causes and effects). Man has a history because man as Dasein is himself history.

Death, for Heidegger, is not simply a natural event, a consequence of the fact that our bodies are part of the natural world and conditioned by its cycles of growth and decline. On the contrary, man’s mortality separates him (as Dasein) from the natural realm. It has the power to violently tear Dasein out of the automatisms of inauthentic social relations, the commerce of everyday life and the impostures of false subjectivity. Heidegger calls this sleep-walking, inauthentic existence “das Man”. Das Man is not responsible for its existence. Instead, it observes existence from the outside, like a kind of spectacle. Mortality is never “addressed to” das Man, but always concerns someone else. In a sense, “the subject” - abstract humanity - is das Man - a free-floating ego detached from concrete, historical, finite existence. The traumatic truth of being-towards-death, the crisis of existential anxiety, isolates Dasein and liberates it at the same time, but not in the sense in which the “subject” is free because it floats in an unconditioned, transcendent realm somewhere outside or beyond the objective world. 

Finitude is for Heidegger not just a naturally given limit to freedom, power and life. The limits that isolate and liberate Dasein are not simply negative or privative, but positive and active - active in the sense of a power of overcoming. The limit transcends or overcomes what it limits. Dasein’s “transcendence” is being-towards-death, not the transcendence of a subject suspended above concrete existence. The individuality of authentic Dasein is not the basis of the arbitrary freedom of irresponsible, hedonistic egoism. The finitude of Dasein is given meaning only as an historical responsibility. The authentic freedom of Dasein is not an unconditioned freedom from time and history, but is the essence of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) itself as an event (Geschehnis). Through historical existence, Dasein’s finitude becomes the source of a potential renewal and re-founding of the historical community it is born into. Insofar as Dasein’s limit is active, it is a decision, and Dasein is summoned to affirm, take responsibility for and ground that decision in its projected being-as-a-whole.

Heidegger would view the historicity of primitive, tribal Dasein as only existing as something undeveloped or pre-conscious. Only Western man has a deeper experience of the fundamentally historical essence of Dasein as an event (Geschehnis), which corresponds to Being as an event (Ereignis). However, this experience has remained unthought and philosophically unelaborated, because thinking has remained trapped by the categories of metaphysics, subjectivism and Christian humanism. Dugin, however, attempts to relativise Heidegger's notion of Dasein, claiming that it only applies to Western Europeans. In doing so, however, Dugin shows himself to be more a postmodern relativist than a Heideggerian. By giving complete ontological priority to language, he renders the concept of Dasein effectively meaningless. For Heidegger, man does not exist as Dasein because he has a language, but has a language because he exists as Dasein. In other words, Dasein as an event (Geschehnis) is ontologically prior to language and social life. It follows that the existential structure of Dasein cannot itself be determined by the structure of language and society. Heidegger’s position is in a sense absolutely opposed to that of social constructivism, which is merely a form of subjectivism, making reality - including man himself - entirely a creation of man. It goes without saying that it is also opposed to Marxism, which interprets humanity’s emancipation as humanity’s self-production.

Since the ethnos, according to Dugin, does not know irreversible, historical time - only cyclical time, the eternal return of the same - it is inherently opposed not only to everything new, but to all forms of accumulation. The ethnos ritually destroys (sacrifices) accumulated resources that could endanger its homeostasis and symbolic equilibrium. Not only a deficit, but an excess of production is viewed as dangerous and problematic. In this sense, its economy is anti-capitalist. It constantly interrupts the linear time of accumulation. Accumulation is viewed as guilt, as a debt to the gods that must be repaid. To sacrifice something - to destroy an accumulated excess - means to give it to the gods. The ethnos strives to conserve a social and cosmic equilibrium, as well as an equilibrium between society and nature. Society is naturalised and nature is socialised. Together, they form a sacred whole, a circular economy. 

The ethnos, then, is a form of primordial, pre-historic communism in which work is play and man lives in perfect accord with his natural environment. It is an ecologically sound, harmonious cosmic and social totality, a golden age before man’s fall into history, a paradise in which the entropic, destructive force of time is defeated, or at least held in check. The ethnos does not know the tension of social stratification, and there is no division of labour, except between the genders. The relationship between the genders, however, is also balanced and non-patriarchal. The space-time of the ethnos, as we noted earlier, is reversible, and this goes for its social relations, too. There are no asymmetrical, hierarchical relationships within society, only a balance maintained through symbolic exchange. In other words, the ethnos is a democratic and egalitarian society (at least on a symbolic level). As an embodiment the golden age, it represents the primordial perfection of man. The man of the ethnos, in other words, is a sort of noble savage (a modern concept if there ever was one!) that can be opposed to the evils of Western society since the scientific revolution.

The restoration of this primordial unity, bringing linear history and capitalist accumulation to an end in a revolutionary holocaust, is according to Dugin the unconscious mythical and eschatological dimension of communism. The revolution abolishes linear time, which is identified with entropy and usury. Dugin apparently thinks that the violence of communist revolutions should be interpreted as a kind of sacrificial destruction of accumulated wealth. Capitalist accumulation is an excess that must be sacrificially destroyed through the liquidation of the bourgeoisie as a class.

The modern age is the age of revolutions, but as Jünger observed, the violence of revolutions - including the Terror of the French revolution - could be interpreted as a return of repressed elemental forces under the mask of enlightened modernity. Just as gods, spirits and demons communicate with the tribe by personifying themselves in the shaman, elemental chaos shows itself under the mask, the “persona” of the modern, supposedly rational, revolutionary subject. This is why for Dugin, the only real problem with communism was that it failed to understand itself. Its self-interpretation, its “hermeneutic circle" must be shattered. Communism made a mistake regarding the political subject. It saw class, rather than the archaic ethnos, as its subject. It wore the mask of a modern, progressive, secular ideology. This is why Marxists could not understand why communist revolutions took place in undeveloped, agrarian societies, and not, as Marx had predicted, in industrially developed societies like Germany.

Authentic communism, Dugin argues, is "national communism" (represented by Stalin, for example) or agrarian communism (represented by Pol Pot). "National communism" (or "national gauchism", as Dugin also calls it) is interpreted as a revolt against the Western, modern world, a revolt rooted in local, ethnic traditions. National communism is a hybrid of the Western rationality of Marxism and the mobilising force of non-Western ethnic myths. Dugin points to the "National Communistic character of successful Marxist revolutions, recognising nationalistic elements as a driving factor and virtue, providing these revolutions with success and stability via archaic national stories of the mobilisation of Marxism as nationally interpreted eschatological myth" [“The Fourth Political Theory”, p. 128]. "National Communism", Dugin tells us, "ruled in the USSR, Communist China, North Korea, Vietnam, Albania, Cambodia, and also in many Communist movements of the Third World, from the Mexican Chiapas and Peruvian Sendero Luminoso to the Kurdish Workers' Party and Islamic socialism [128]. In national communism/gauchism, Marxism functions as a universal philosophical framework that allows national movements - local by their nature - to communicate with each other and "even claim universality and planetary breadth; transforming, thanks to socialist rationality warmed up by nationalism, into a messianic project [130]." In his opinion, "National Gauchism could certainly have a global future, insofar as among many segments of humanity archaic, ethnic and religious energies are far from being spent, whatever can be said of the citizens of the modern, enlightened and rational West" [131]. Dugin evidently follows the old leftist, anti-colonialist topos of the third world and non-whites as the only remaining revolutionary subjects (third world nationalism, unlike European nationalism, was glorified by the left as a revolt against Western imperialism). In reality, mass non-white immigration to the West, attracted by its earthly “paradise” or “golden age” of material wealth, religious tolerance, modernity and generous welfare systems, has long since made it obvious that non-white peoples are not the subjects of national communist revolutions, but simply one of the instruments of the globalist, ethnocidal anthropological revolution. 

Dugin appears to equate the white West with the bourgeoisie, and non-white peoples (or Russians insofar as they are “not fully white”) with the revolutionary subject. He believes that the first successful communist revolution took place in Russia because the "ethnos" had retained more of its primitive vitality there than in the modern West (remember, Dugin views Russians as non-white). His concept of the ethnos allows him to interpret Russia's backwardness as a positive trait, rather than as a source of shame, in the same way that the negative view of the West found in traditionalist writings allows muslims to view their societies as spiritually superior to the decadent, anti-traditional, secular West, while at the same time apparently not feeling the least compunction over living as parasites on the productive labour of Western societies. It becomes embarrassingly obvious that one is dealing with an overcompensation for what is really a collective inferiority complex. Russia's backwardness is interpreted as the proof that it has successfully warded off infection by the “evils” of Western modernity. The communist revolution was in its essence a revolt of the Eurasian Russian ethnos against Western-oriented elites. Bolshevism was a re-Asianisation of Russia. Rather than taking the modern West as a norm, which can only lead to devaluing the history of Russia and other non-Western nations as marginal and backward, Dugin wants to reverse the relationship, restoring Eurasia to the dignity of the "sacred centre" and marginalising the West as its "profane periphery". Dugin assigns a central, Messianic role to Russia analogous to the Messianic role the German conservative revolutionaries assigned to Germany as the sacred centre or axis of Europe. Eurasia is not only a locus of the great geopolitical decisions of our time, it is a sacred centre also in the sense of a crossing, a crucial point, an intersection and mediator between East and West, Europe and Asia. A similar role is assigned to Iran, Hungary and Turkey as Eurasian mediators between the East and Europe. Eurasianists declare themselves to be close to the leftist Turkish Workers’ Party, and Turkey is viewed by Eurasianists as part of Europe for purely geopolitical reasons. The massive occupation of German territory by Turkish immigrants, they argue, will be a positive factor in favouring the integration of Turkey and Germany into a common Eurasian empire. Here, as always for the Eurasianists, geographical and geopolitical considerations take complete precedence over racial factors, to the point of completely denying the latter. We see the implications of Dugin's conception of the ethnos as constituted not by race or by history, but by a space. Here, for some reason, Dugin is suddenly no longer a social constructivist. Geopolitical determinism is substituted for racial or historical materialist determinism. Geopolitical factors are seen as being more decisive than both racial and economic factors. Racial nationalism is rejected as either “utopian” or “reactionary”. The issue of race is not viewed as being of critical, decisive importance - what is decisive for the Eurasianists - what determines the distinction between friend and enemy - is the fight against the West.

This complete precedence given to soil at the expense of blood makes the relevance of Eurasianism for European nationalists today - for whom immigration is the existentially decisive question - very dubious. The massive occupation of European soil by African and Middle Eastern immigrants on does not make them Europeans, and never will. This is not just because they lack a deep relationship to European soil and traditions, but also because they are racially alien. Blacks and arabs in Europe may be “westernised”, but that only means globalised, that is, Americanised. Homo Americanus is the normative “human” type of the post-modern age.

Dugin tries to interpret Marxism’s profane, linear vision of history in terms of cyclical, mythic time, making the communist political revolution into a cyclical cosmic revolution, a return to a utopian golden age. Just as he tries to translate historical time into mythical time, he tries to translate geopolitical space into sacred geography. He wants us to see the West as the absolutely negative pole, and the East as the absolutely positive pole. In the Manichean and tiresomely propagandistic narrative of the Eurasianists, the East is paradise (Eden) and the West is hell. “Sacred geography on the basis of ‘space symbolism’ traditionally considers the East as ‘the land of Spirit’, the paradise land, the land of a completeness, abundance, the Sacred ‘native land’ in its fullest and most perfect kind. […] The West has the opposite symbolical meaning. It is the ‘country of death’, the ‘lifeless world’ […]. West is ‘the empire of exile’, ‘the pit of the rejected’, according to the expression of Islamic mystics. West is “anti-east”, the country of […] decay, degradation, transition from the manifest to the non-manifest, from life to death, from completeness to need, etc.” Moreover, “[a]long the East-West axis were drawn peoples and civilizations, possessing hierarchical characters — closer to the East were those closer to Sacral, to Tradition, to spiritual wealth. Closer to West, those of a more decayed, degraded and dying Spirit”.
 

 “[S]acred geography univocally affirms the law of ‘qualitative space’, in which the East represents the symbolic ‘ontological plus’, and the West the ‘ontological minus’. According to the Chinese tradition, the East is Yang, the male, bright, solar principle, and the West is Yin, the female, dark, lunar principle.” “Geopolitical East represents in itself the straight opposition to geopolitical West. […] Instead of ‘democracy’ and ‘human right’ the East gravitates around totalitarianism, socialism and authoritarianism, i.e. around various types of social regimes, whose only common feature is that the centre of their systems there is not the ‘individual’, ‘man’ with his ‘rights’ and his peculiar ‘individual values’, but something supra-individual, supra-human — be it ‘society’, ‘nation’, ‘people’, ‘idea’, ‘weltanschauung’, ‘religion’, ‘cult of the leader’ etc. The East opposed to western liberal democracy the most various types of non-liberal, non-individualistic the societies — from authoritarian monarchy up to theocracy or socialism. Moreover, from a pure typological, geopolitical point of view, the political specificity of this or that regime was secondary in comparison with the qualitative dividing between ‘western’ (= ‘individualist - mercantile’) order and ‘eastern’ (= ‘supra-individualist – based on force’) order. Representative forms of such anti-western civilization were the USSR, communist China, Japan about 1945 or Khomeini’s Iran”  [“From Sacred Geography to Geopolitics”].

Here, Dugin deviates completely from traditionalism in confusing brute material force with true authority, and interpreting communist forms of totalitarianism and collectivism, as well as the unstratified, non-hierarchical collectivism of primitive societies, as "supra-individual" and transcendent. Evola, who never advocated totalitarianism, regarded them both as the opposite of supra-individual and transcendent - as sub-individual and undifferentiated.

Ernst Jünger, in his National Bolshevik period, not only rejected bourgeois individualism, but also its flip side, the collectivism of the masses. Instead, he believed that both bourgeois individualism and the formlessness of the masses would be overcome by the emergence of a new “type” of man, which he called “the Worker”, that will be capable of mastering the forces mobilised by modern technology. But Dugin simply adopts, reversing it, Popper's liberal reduction of fascism and communism to the single term "totalitarianism”, reducing radically heterogeneous movements to the same, simply because they reject liberalism. In this sense, he actually interprets fascism not so much from the point of view of the left, as from the point of view of liberalism.

The ethnos, then, is not what traditionalists like Evola call a traditional society. Moreover, given that the ethnos is in its essence ahistorical and lacks a relation to the other, Dugin has not sufficiently clarified how it can be a political and historical subject. It is also unclear how Dugin proposes to unite Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as historicity with the anti-historical position of traditionalism. He has, however, proposed another possible political and historical subject: civilisation. This will be the topic of the next installment of this essay.

Part one can be found here.