Eugenics and the Church Lady
American eugenics’ had a strong liberal capitalist nature and where aimed upon a platform of bourgeoisie morals [Judeo-Christian influenced]. The church lady coming around to sterilize all the Oscar Wilde’s and too slothful to count the beans and turn the wheels of the machine. And those who drink to escape the nightmare of the liberal capitalist world. And its soulless, social-economic, caste system of materialist toil. In-between some droolers. Helping along some smarts to better make some money and carpet cling to moralist sentiments.
National Socialist aim of eugenics’ was the opposite. It had an aim of collecting the best racial elements and carefully cultivating them over time into a new superior type of man and women to reform the primordial core of the race. To create a new racial aristocracy with a perfected, blood heritability the superior culture creating and carrying elite. Which in time the whole race was evolve into as these policies where applied to the whole nation on a soft level. But the SS was the direct method that was aimed to a fast track. This was the ideal of the classic or Pagan civilizations. I believe they where looking at Metagenic’s as well. Given the Elite of the SS where all required by orders to practice Tantric Yoga [Kundalini Yoga].
The National Socialist eugenics’ policy was a total denial and dismantling of the liberal, capitalist, bourgeoisie worldview. Creating a new racial, blood elite to rule. Not a money class on liberal bourgeoisie values. Who are by nature not entitled to leadership as they don’t have the nature for it. And simply turn the world into one big corporation that destroys society and the best elements of it. Get them beans, baby. He who has the most beans wins, with one big, bean to rule them all.
This is why the eugenic movement in America fell flat on its face in time. It had no real great aim carried upon the banners of a higher world ideal. So it dissolved back into its bean counter, bourgeoisie mentality. It was a house build on liberal sand.
PERSONALITY FREEDOM HIERARCHY
From Men Among The Ruins. By Julius Evola
The essence of liberalism is individualism. The basis of its error is to mistake the notion of the person with that of the individual and to claim for the latter, unconditionally and according to egalitarian premises, some values that should rather be attributed solely to the former, and then only conditionally. Because of this transposition, these values are transformed into errors, or into something absurd and harmful.
Let us begin with the egalitarian premise. It is necessary to state from the outset that the “immortal principle” of equality is sheer nonsense. There is no need to comment on the inequality of human beings from a naturalistic point of
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view. And yet the champions of egalitarianism make equality a matter of principle, claiming that while human beings are not equal de facto, they are so de jure: they are unequal, and yet they should not be. Inequality is unfair; the merit and the superiority of the liberal idea allegedly consists of not taking it into account, overcoming it, and acknowledging the same dignity in every man. Democracy, too, shares the belief in the “fundamental equality of anything that appears to be human.”
I believe these are mere empty words. This is not a “noble ideal” but some-thing that, if taken absolutely, represents a logical absurdity; wherever this view becomes an established trend, it may usher in only regression and decadence.
Concerning the first point, the notion of “many” (i.e., a multiplicity of individual beings) logically contradicts the notion of “many equals.” First of all, ontologically speaking, this is due to the so-called “principle of undiscernibles,” which is expressed in these terms: “A being that is absolutely identical to an-other, under every regard, would be one and the same with it.” Thus, in the concept of “many” is implicit the concept of their fundamental difference: “many” beings that are equal, completely equal, would not be many, but one. To uphold the equality of the many is a contradiction in terms, unless we refer to a body of soulless mass-produced objects.
Second, the contradiction lies in the “principle of sufficient reason,” which is expressed in these terms: “For every thing there must be some reason why it is one thing and not another.” Now, a being that is totally equal to another would lack “sufficient reason”: it would be just a meaningless duplicate.
From both perspectives, it is rationally well established that the “many” not only cannot be equal, but they also must not be equal: inequality is true de facto only because it is true de jure and it is real only because it is necessary. That which the egalitarian ideology wished to portray as a state of “justice” is in reality a state of injustice, according to a perspective that is higher and beyond the humanitarian and democratic rhetorics. In the past, Cicero and Aristotle argued along these lines.
Conversely, to posit inequality means to transcend quantity and admit quality. It is here that the two notions of the individual and the person are differentiated. The individual may be conceived only as an atomic unit, or as a mere number in the reign of quantity; in absolute terms, it is a mere fiction and an abstraction. And yet it is possible to lean toward this solution, namely to minimize the differences characterizing the individual being, emphasizing mixed and uniform qualities (what ensues from this, through massification
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and standardization, is a uniformity of paths, rights, and freedoms) and conceiving this as an ideal and desirable condition. However, this means to de-grade and to alter the course of nature.
For all practical purposes, the pure individual belongs to the inorganic rather than to the organic dimension. In reality, the law of progressive differentiation rules supreme. In virtue of this law, the lower degrees of reality are differentiated from the higher ones because in the lower degrees a whole can be broken down into many parts, all of which retain the same quality (as in the case of the parts of a noncrystallized mineral, or those parts of some plants and animals that repro-duce themselves by parthenogenesis); in the higher degrees of reality this is no longer possible, as there is a higher organic unity in them that does not allow itself to be split without being compromised and without its parts entirely losing the quality, meaning, and function they had in it. Therefore the atomic, unrestricted (solutus), “free” individual is under the aegis of inorganic matter, and belongs, analogically, to the lowest degrees of reality.13
An equality may exist on the plane of a mere social aggregate or of a primordial, almost animal-like promiscuity; moreover, it may be recognized wherever we consider not the individual but the overall dimension; not the person but the species; not the “form” but “matter” (in the Aristotelian sense of these two terms). I will not deny that there are in human beings some aspects under which they are approximately equal, and yet these aspects, in every normal and traditional view, represent not the “plus” but the “minus”; in other words, they correspond to the lowest degree of reality, and to that which is least interesting in every being. Again, these aspects fall into an order that is not yet that of “form,” or of personality, in the proper sense. To value these aspects and to emphasize them as those that truly matter is the same as regarding as paramount the bronze found in many statues, rather than seeing each one as the expression of distinct ideas, to which bronze (in our case, the generic human quality) has supplied the working matter.
These references clarify what is truly a person and personal value, as op-posed to the mere individual and the mere element belonging to a mass or to a social agglomerate. The person is an individual who is differentiated through his qualities, endowed with his own face, his proper nature, and a series of at-tributes that make him who he is and distinguish him from all others—in other words, attributes that make him fundamentally unequal. The person is a man in whom the general characteristics (beginning with that very general
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characteristic of being human, to that of belonging to a given race, nation, gender, and social group) assume a differentiated form of expression by articulating and variously individuating themselves.
Any vital, individual, social, or moral process that goes in this direction and leads to the fulfillment of the person according to his own nature is truly ascending. Conversely, to give emphasis and priority to that which in every being is equal signifies regression. The will to equality is one and the same with the will to what is formless. Every egalitarian ideology is the barometric index of a certain climate of degeneration, or the “trademark” of forces leading to a process of degeneration. Overall, this is how we should think about the “noble ideal” and the “immortal principle” of equality.
After establishing this first point, it is easy to recognize the errors and mis-understandings associated with other liberal and revolutionary principles.
To begin with, I find it odd that the title “natural right” has been given to that which appears to be the most unnatural thing conceivable, or to that which is proper to primitive societies. The principle according to which all human beings are free and enjoy equal rights “by nature” is truly absurd, due to the very fact that “by nature” they are not the same. Also, when we go to an order that is not merely naturalistic, being a “person” is neither a uniform quality or a quality uniformly distributed, nor a dignity equal in everybody, being automatically derived from the mere membership of the single individual in the biological species called “mankind.” The “dignity of the human person,” with everything that this expression entails, and around which the supporters of the doctrine of natural law and liberals rally, should be acknowledged where it truly exists, and not in everybody. And even where this dignity truly exists, it should not be regarded as equal in every instance. This dignity admits different degrees; thus, justice means to attribute to each and every one of these degrees a different right and a different freedom. The differentiation of right, and the hierarchical idea in general, derives from the very notion of a person, since this notion, as we have seen, is inconceivable without referring to the difference, to the form, and to the differentiating individuation. Without these presuppositions, the respect for the human person in general is only a superstition, or rather one of the many superstitions of our time. In the domain of the person there is nothing on which the idea of a universal right could be based, or of a right that, as the doctrine of natural law claims, is to be enjoyed by everyone without discrimination.” Anybody who has the conscience and the
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dignity of a “person” cannot help but feel offended when that which is sup-posed to be one’s own law becomes a law binding everybody else (as is the case in Kant’s categorical imperative). Conversely, ancient wisdom believed in the principle suum cuique tribuere, to each his own. According to Plato’s view, too, the highest responsibility of the Guardians is to ensure that justice (under-stood in this sense) prevails.
Hence, the conundrum facing those who uphold the principle of “equality”: equality can exist only among equals, namely among those who are objectively at the same level and who embody an analogous degree of “personhood,” and whose freedom, right, and also responsibility are not the same as those characterizing other degrees, whether higher or lower. “Brotherhood,” too, which was included among the so-called “immortal principles” as a sentimental complement to the other two abstract principles (freedom and equality), is subject to the same restrictions: it is insolent to impose it as a norm and universal duty in indiscriminate terms. In the past, precisely thanks to the acknowledgment of the hierarchical idea, “peers” and “equals” were often aristocratic concepts: in Sparta, the title homoioi (“equals”) belonged exclusively to the elite in power (the title was revoked in cases of misconduct). We find an analogous idea in ancient Rome, among the Nordic peoples, and during the Carolingian and the Holy Roman Empire periods. Moreover, in the days of old, the title “peers” was attributed to English lords.
The same applies to freedom, the first term of the revolutionary triad. Freedom must he understood and defended in the same qualitative and differentiated manner as the notion of “person”: everybody enjoys the freedom he de-serves, which is measured by the stature and dignity of his person or by his function, and not by the abstract and elementary fact of merely being a “human being” or a “citizen” (as in the much acclaimed droits de l’homme et du citoyen). Thus, according to the Classical saying libertas summis infimisque aequanda, freedom ought to be equally distributed above and below. It has been rightly remarked that “there is not one freedom, but many freedoms. There is no general, abstract freedom, but there are articulated freedoms conformed to one’s own nature. Man must not generate within himself the idea of a homogenous liberty, but rather that of the whole of such differentiated and qualified liberties.”15 The other freedom, which is upheld by libertarianism and by natural law, is a fiction just like the idea of “equality.” Practically speaking, it is only a revolutionary weapon: freedom and equality are the catchwords certain social
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strata or groups employed in order to undermine other classes and to gain preeminence; having achieved this task, they were quickly set aside.
Again, in regard to freedom, it is important to distinguish between the freedom to do something and the freedom for doing something. In the political domain, the former is a negative freedom that corresponds to the absence of bonds while remaining itself formless. It generally culminates in arbitrariness and in anomie, and where it is granted to everybody, in an egalitarian and democratic fashion, it becomes an impossibility. Where there is equality there cannot be freedom: what exists is not pure freedom, but rather the many individual, domesticated, and mechanized freedoms, in a state of reciprocal limitation. Paradoxically, that kind of freedom could approximately be realized in the system that is most opposite to liberal preferences: namely, in the system in which the social question is resolved in such a way as to guarantee certain privileges for a small group, at the cost of the total subjugation of everybody else. If carried to its extreme consequences, the figure of a tyrant would then be the most perfect concretization of this concept or ideal of formless freedom.
The freedom for doing something that is connected to each one’s own nature and specific function is quite another thing. This freedom mainly signifies the power to actualize one’s potential and to achieve one’s particular perfection within a given political or social context; it has a functional and organic character, and is inseparable from an immanent and unmistakable end. It is characterized by the Classical saying “Be yourself ” and thus by quality and by difference; this is the only true freedom, according to justice and to right. In the Classical view, as it was expressed by Aristotle, Plato, and Plotinus, the only institution conformed to justice is the one in which everybody has, does, and realizes what is proper to himself. Catholicism itself, during the golden age of Scholasticism (an age that is reviled today by progressive and liberal Catholics as “feudal” and “obscurantist”), upheld the same truth and ethics. The foundations of me-dieval Catholicism’s social doctrine were the idea of “proper nature,” which varies with every being; the freedom in terms of such nature as “willed by God”; and the adherence to one’s condition within a socially organic and differentiated system. Luther, too, upheld this doctrine. More recently, Benedetto Croce has written about the modern “religion of freedom,” though what he is referring to should rather be called the “fetishism of freedom.”
In the same order of ideas, we should consider the vexed question whether man comes before society or vice versa, and which of the two is the ultimate
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goal. From the traditional point of view, this question is definitely resolved by upholding man’s rather than society’s primacy. Every “social” thesis is a deviation connected to the same leveling and regressive tendency that I have criticized before—so much so, that individualism and anarchism have undoubtedly their good reasons and a much less degrading character when seen as reactions against such regressive tendency. Everything that is social, in the best of hypotheses, falls in the order of means and not in the order of ends. Society as an entity in itself is but a fetish and a personified abstraction; in reality, the plane proper to society is entirely material, physical, and subordinated. “Society” and “collectivity” are synonyms; if we exclude the individualistic interpretation of society as a sum of atoms coming together on the basis of a hypothetical contract, we are left with the idea that society is just a background before which the person is the positive, primary, and real thing.
Moreover, there are cases in which I am willing to acknowledge the priority of the person even before the State. The statolatry of the modern age has nothing to do with the traditional political view; the impersonal State, when regarded as a heavy juridical and bureaucratic entity (e.g., Nietzsche’s “cold monster”), is also an aberration. Every society and State is made of people; individual human beings are their primary element. What kind of human beings? Not people as they are conceived by individualism, as atoms or a mass of atoms, but people as persons, as differentiated beings, each one endowed with a different rank, a different freedom, a different right within the social hierarchy based on the values of creating, constructing, obeying, and commanding. With people such as these it is possible to establish the true State, namely an antiliberal, antidemocratic, and organic State. The idea behind such a State is the priority of the person over any abstract social, political, or juridical entity, and not of the person as a neuter, leveled reality, a mere number in the world of quantity and universal suffrage.
The perfection of the human being is the end to which every healthy social institution must be subordinated, and it must be promoted as much as possible. This perfection must be conceived on the basis of a process of individuation and of progressive differentiation. In this regard we must consider the view expressed by Paul de Lagarde, which can be expressed approximately in these terms: everything that is under the aegis of humanitarianism, the doctrine of natural law, and collectivity corresponds to the inferior dimension. Merely being a “man” is a minus compared to being a man belonging to a given nation and society; this, in turn, is still a minus compared to being a “person,” a quality
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that implies the shift to a plane that is higher than the merely naturalistic and “social” one. In turn, being a person is something that needs to be further differentiated into degrees, functions, and dignities with which, beyond the social and horizontal plane, the properly political world is defined vertically in its bodies, functional classes, corporations, or particular unities, according to a pyramid-like structure, at the top of which one would expect to find people who more or less embody the absolute person. What is meant by “absolute per-son” is the supremely realized person who represents the end, and the natural center of gravity, of the whole system. The “absolute person” is obviously the opposite of the individual. The atomic, unqualified, socialized, or standardized unity to which the individual corresponds is opposed in the absolute person by the actual synthesis of the fundamental possibilities and by the full control of the powers inherent in the idea of man (in the limiting case), or of a man of a given race (in a more relative, specialized, and historical domain): that is, by an extreme individuation that corresponds to a de-individualization and to a certain universalization of the types corresponding to it. Thus, this is the disposition required to embody pure authority, to assume the symbol and the power of sovereignty, or the form from above, namely the imperium.
Going from humanity, through “society” or a collectivity based on natural law and the nation, and then proceeding in the political world all the way to a personality variously integrated, and finally to a dominating super-personality, means to ascend from lower degrees to degrees that are increasingly filled with “being” and value, each one the natural end of the previous one: this is how we should understand the principle according to which man is the end or the primary end of society, and not vice versa.
By way of example we may refer to the hierarchical place proper to the “nation” when it has a positive and constructive, rather than a revolutionary, meaning. “Nation” is a plus in regard to “humanity.” Thus, it is a positive and legitimate thing to uphold the right of the nation in order to assert an elementary and natural principle of difference of a given human group over and against all the forms of individualistic disintegration, international mixture and proletarization, and especially against the mere world of the masses and pure economy. Having set this demarcation as a protective fence, it is necessary to actualize inside it further degrees of differentiation that need to be implemented in a system of bodies, of disciplines and hierarchies, in virtue of which the State is created out of the substance of the nation.
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It should be noted that the above-mentioned hierarchical notion is based on, among other things, freedom understood in a further special and ethical sense. The freedom upheld by the antitraditional ideologies has an undifferentiated, nonfunctional and subversive character, as well as an external and al-most “physical” one. These ideologies usually ignore the emancipation of the single individual, which consists of being not so much free in relation to an external situation, whether real or imaginary, and in relation to others, as in being free toward oneself, namely toward the naturalistic part of one’s self. Usually every dignity within qualitative hierarchies should be legitimated with this kind of freedom, without love for which one could not call oneself a person. With this kind of assumption, the political domain interferes with the ethical one (“ethical” in the spiritual, rather than moralistic, sense of the term). In this context what will be paramount is the virile quality of him who, in the case of conflict between opposite needs, knows how to assert the right of given principles and a given law over that which belongs to the naturalistic and material realm, whether in his case or that of others. Thus, family bonds or special affections will not limit such a person, nor will he be guided by the mere notions of utility and well-being, even if these notions were defined in social and collective terms. The personality is realized and consolidated along the path of the special “asceticism” required by freedom understood in this way—namely, by inner freedom and control over oneself as a physical individual; likewise, the foundations of the hierarchical connections proper to that which can be rightly called “the natural right of heroic peoples” are not to be sought elsewhere.
The first of these foundations is that the measure of what one can demand from others is dictated by the measure of what one can demand from oneself; he who does not have the capability to dominate himself and to give himself a code to abide by would not know how to dominate others according to justice or how to give them a law to follow. The second foundation is the idea, previously upheld by Plato, that those who cannot be their own masters should find a master outside of themselves, since practicing the discipline of obeying should teach these people how to master their own selves; thus, through loyalty to those who present themselves as the representatives of an idea and as the living approximations to a higher human type, they will remain as faithful as possible to their best nature. This has always been recognized in a spontaneous, natural way, and has created in traditional civilizations a special fluid, the vital sub-stance of the organic and hierarchical structures, long before people fell under
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the spell of the suggestions or shallow rationalism espoused by subversive ideologies. In normal conditions all this goes without saying; thus, it is absurd to say that the only way in which the highest degrees in the social hierarchy were able to retain control was to apply physical force, violence, and terror and that people obeyed only out of fear or servility, or for their self-serving purposes. To think so is to denigrate human nature even in its most humble representatives, and to suppose that the atrophy of every higher sensibility that characterizes most people in this final age has always and everywhere ruled supreme.
Superiority and power need to go hand in hand, as long as we remember that power is based on superiority and not vice versa, and that superiority is connected with qualities that have always been thought by most people to constitute the true foundation of what others attempt to explain in terms of brutal “natural selection.” Ancient primitive man essentially obeyed not the strongest members of society, but those in whom he perceived a saturation of mana (i.e., a sacred energy and life force) and who, for this reason, seemed to him best qualified to perform activities usually precluded to others. An analogous situation occurs where certain men have been followed, obeyed, and venerated for displaying a high degree of endurance, responsibility, lucidity, and a dangerous, open, and heroic life that others could not; it was decisive here to be able to recognize a special right and a special dignity in a free way. To depend on such leaders constituted not the subjugation, but rather the elevation of the person; this, however, makes no sense to the defenders of the “immortal principles” and to the supporters of “human dignity” because of their obtuseness. It is only the presence of superior individuals that bestows on a multitude of beings and on a system of disciplines of material life a meaning and a justification they previously lacked. It is the inferior who needs the superior, and not the other way around.16 The inferior never lives a fuller life than when he feels his existence is subsumed in a greater order endowed with a center; then he feels like a man standing before leaders of men, and experiences the pride of serving as a free man in his proper station. The noblest things that human nature has to offer are found in similar situations, and not in the anodyne and shallow climate proper to democratic and social ideologies.
We should note in passing the irrationalism of the so-called utilitarian sociology, which could have been valued only in a society of merchants: in this doctrine, the “useful” is regarded as the positive foundation of every socio-political institution. However, there is hardly anything more relative than the
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concept of “useful.” “Useful” for what? In view of what? For if utility is restricted to its coarsest, most materialistic, calculating, and petty form, we must say that, whether for better or for worse, human beings rarely think and act by following the “useful,” understood in this narrow sense. Everything that has an emotional or irrational motivation has and will play a larger role in human conduct than that played by petty utility; if we did not acknowledge this fact, a great part of human history would be unintelligible. Among this order of non-utilitarian motivations (all of which lead man beyond himself), there is certainly a class that reflects higher possibilities, a certain generosity and a certain elementary heroic disposition; the above-mentioned forms of natural acknowledgment animating and sustaining every true hierarchical structure are de-rived from them. In these structures, authority as power may also play a part or, more specifically, it must have one. Thus, we can agree with Machiavelli’s saying that where one is not loved one should at least be feared (feared, not hated). It is a distortion to begin from a mutilated and degraded image of man in general and believe that in all the historical hierarchies, other than strength, the principle of superiority and the direct and proud acknowledgment of the superior by the inferior did not play a relevant part.17 Burke’s saying that every political system that presupposes the existence of heroic virtues and of higher dispositions leads to vice and corruption is not so much an index of cynicism, but instead of short-sightedness about knowledge of the human species.
The higher and more genuine legitimization of a true political order, and thus of the State itself, lies in its anagogical function: namely, in arousing and nourishing the individual’s disposition to act and to think, to live, to struggle, and eventually to sacrifice himself for something that goes beyond his mere individuality. This disposition is so real that it is possible not only to implement it, but also to abuse it; thus, alongside currents in which the single individual is led beyond himself by something that is spiritual and metaphysical (as was the case in all the major traditional forms), we can see other currents in which a demonic element is responsible for promoting an individual’s ecstasies (i.e., the experience of being “outside one’s self”). What is at work here is not an anagogic power, but rather a catagogic power—namely, the power that acts in the revolutionary phenomenon and is concretized in every collectivist ideology. In both cases, a sociology adopting utilitarian and individualistic perspectives is refuted; it proves to be merely a sophisticated and intellectual construction, especially when we consider human nature in its reality and concreteness.
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The progress of one form of human organization over another is not measured by the fact that in it things are materially and socially fine and that the materialistic need of utility is satisfied to a higher degree; rather, progress is measured by the degree to which certain interests and criteria of evaluation have become differentiated and predominant in it. These criteria should rise above the mediocre concept of “utility,” which happens to be the only perspective adopted by positivist sociology.
Coming back to liberalism, I wish to say that it represents the antithesis of every organic doctrine. Since according to liberalism the primary element is the human being regarded not as person, but rather as an individual living in a form-less freedom, this philosophy is able to conceive society merely as a mechanical interplay of forces and entities acting and reacting to each other, according to the space they succeed in gaining for themselves, without the overall system reflecting any higher law of order or meaning. The only law, and thus the only State, that liberalism can conceive has therefore an extrinsic character in regard to its subjects. Power is entrusted to the State by sovereign individuals, so that it may safeguard the freedoms of the individuals and intervene only when these freedoms clash and prove dangerous to one another. Thus, order appears as a limitation and a regulation of freedoms, rather than as a form that freedom itself expresses from within, as freedom to do something, or as freedom connected to a quality and a specific function. Order, namely the legal order, eventually amounts to an act of violence because, practically speaking, in a liberal and democratic regime a government is defined in terms of a majority; thus, the minority, though composed of “free individuals,” must bow and obey.
The specter that most terrifies liberalism today is totalitarianism. It can be said that totalitarianism may arise as a borderline case out of the presuppositions of liberalism, rather than out of those of an organic State. As we shall see, in totalitarianism we have the accentuation of the concept of order uniformly imposed from the outside onto a mass of mere individuals who, lacking their own form and law, must receive one from the outside, he introduced in a mechanical, all-inclusive system, and avoid the disorder typical of a disorganized and selfish expression of partisan forces and special-interest groups.
Events have recently led toward a similar solution, after the more or less idyllic view proper to the euphoric phase of liberalism and of laissez-faire economy has turned out to be simply a fancy. I am referring here to the view according to which a satisfactory social and economic equilibrium allegedly arises
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out of the conflict of particular interests: almost as if a preestablished harmony a la Leibniz would take care of ordering everything for the better, even when the single individual cares only for himself and is freed from every bond.
Thus, not only ideally, but historically too, liberalism and individualism are at the beginning and at the origin of the various interconnected forms of modern subversion. The person who becomes an individual, by ceasing to have an organic meaning and by refusing to acknowledge any principle of authority, is nothing more than a number, a unit in the pack; his usurpation evokes a fatal collectivist limitation against himself. Therefore, we go from liberalism to democracy: and then from democracy to socialist forms that are increasingly inclined toward collectivism. For a long time Marxist historiography has clearly recognized this pattern: it has recognized that the liberal revolution, or the revolution of the Third Estate, opened a breach and contributed to erode the previous traditional sociopolitical world and to pave the way to the socialist and communist revolution; in turn, the representatives of this revolution will leave the rhetorics of the “immortal principles” and the “noble and generous ideas” to naive and deluded people. Since every fall is characterized by an accelerated motion, it is not possible to stop halfway. Within the system of the predominant ideologies in the West, liberalism, having absolved its preliminary task of disintegration and disorganization, has quickly been set aside—thus, the claim of some of its contemporary epigones to be able to contain Marxism, which represents the last link in the chain of causes, rings hollow indeed and is indicative of lack of wisdom. There is a saying from Tacitus that summarizes in lapidary style what has happened since the “liberal revolution”: Ut imperium evertant, libertatem praeferunt; si perventerint, liberatem ipsam adgredientur—that is, “in order to overthrow the State (in its authority and sovereignty: i.e., imperium) they uphold freedom; once they succeed, they will turn against it too.” Plato said: “Probably, then, tyranny develops out of no other constitution than democracy—from the height of liberty, I take it, the fiercest extreme of servitude.”19 Liberalism and individualism played merely the role of instruments in the overall plan of world subversion, to which they opened the dams.
Thus, it is of paramount importance to recognize the continuity of the cur-rent that has generated the various political, antitraditional forms that are today at work in the chaos of political parties: liberalism, constitutionalism, parliamentary democracy, socialism, radicalism, and finally communism and Soviet-ism have emerged in history as degrees or as interconnected stages of the same.
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disease. Without the French Revolution and liberalism, constitutionalism and democracy would not have existed; without democracy and the corresponding bourgeois and capitalist civilization of the Third Estate, socialism and demagogic nationalism would not have arisen; without the groundwork laid by socialism, we would not have witnessed the advent of radicalism and of communism in both its national and proletarian-international versions. The fact that today these forms often appear either to coexist or to be in competition with each other should not prevent a keen eye from noting that they sustain, link, and mutually condition each other, being only the expression of different degrees of the same subversion of every normal and legitimate institution. It necessarily follows that, when these forms clash, the one that will prevail will be the most extreme, or the one located on the lowest step. The beginning of the process is to be traced to the time when Western man broke the ties to Tradition, claiming for himself as an individual a vain and illusory freedom: when he became an atom in society, rejecting every higher symbol of authority and sovereignty in a system of hierarchies. The “totalitarian” forms that are emerging are a demonic and materialistic counterfeit of the previous unitary political ideal, and they represent “the greatest and most savage slavery,” which, according to Plato, arose out of formless “freedom.”
Economic liberalism, which engendered various forms of capitalist exploitation and of cynical, antisocial plutocracy, is one of the final consequences of the intellectual emancipation that made the individual solutus—that is, lacking the inner, self-imposed bond, function, and limit that are found instead in every organic system’s general climate and natural hierarchy of values. Moreover, we know that in more recent times, political liberalism has become little more than a system at the service of laissez-faire—namely, economic liberalism—in the context of a capitalist-plutocratic civilization; from this situation new reactions arose, pushing everything lower and lower, to the level of Marxism.
The above-mentioned connections are also visible in the special sector of property- and wealth, especially when we consider the meaning of the change that occurred within it, following the institutions created by the French Revolution. By denouncing everything in the economic world that was still inspired by the feudal ideal as a cruel regime based on privileges, the organic connection (displayed mainly in various feudal systems) between personality and property, social function and wealth, and between a given qualification or moral nobility and the rightful and legitimate possession of goods, was broken. It was
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the Napoleonic Code that made “property” neutral and “private” in the inferior and individualistic sense of the word; with this code, property ceased to have a political function and bond. Moreover, property was no longer subject to an “eminent right,” nor tied to a specific responsibility and social rank and subject to a “higher right.” In this context, rank signified the objective and normal consecration in a hierarchical system that the superior one, as well as the personality formed and differentiated by a supra-individual tradition and idea, receives_ Property, and wealth in general, no longer had any duties before the State other than in fiscal terms. The subject of property was the pure and simple “citizen,” whose dominant concern was to exploit the property without any scruples and without too much regard for those traditions of blood, family, and folk that had previously been a relevant counterpart of property and wealth.20
It was only natural that in the end the right to private property came to be disputed; whenever there is no higher legitimization of ownership, it is always possible to wonder why some people have property and others do not, or why some people have earned for themselves privileges and social preeminence (of-ten greater than those in feudal systems), while lacking something that would make them stand out and above everybody else in an effective and sensible manner. Thus the so-called “social question,” together with the worn-out slogan “social justice,” arose in those conditions where no differentiation is any longer visible other than in terms of mere “economic classes” (wealth and property having become “neutral” and apolitical; every value of difference and rank, of personality and authority having been rejected or undermined by processes of degeneration and materialization; the political sphere having been deprived of its original dignity). Thus, subversive ideologies have successfully and easily unmasked all the political myths that capitalism and the bourgeoisie have employed, in the absence of any superior principle, in order to defend their privileged status against the push and final violation by the forces from below.
Again, we can see that the various aspects of the contemporary social and political chaos are interrelated and there is no real way to effectively oppose them other than by returning to the origins. To go back to the origins means, plainly and simply, to reject everything that in any domain (whether social, political, or economic) is connected to the “immortal principles” of 1789, as a libertarian, individualistic, and egalitarian thought, and to oppose it with the hierarchical view, in the context of which alone the notion, value, and freedom of man as person are not reduced to mere words or excuses for a work of destruction and subversion.
