I’m finding it very difficult to understand Julius Evola. A lot of people are talking about him right now because of Steve Bannon and American politics. It seems clear enough Evola was anti-democratic and pro-tradition. I’ve read dozens of articles online, watched dozens of YouTube videos, and brought home two books from the store — and still I don’t quite get it.
It seems he thinks the modern world is shallow, a common enough judgment, but then in some perverted way he believes all the peasants around him should just shut up and be content with their lowly status as servants to him and his kind.
The clearest explanation I’ve found is an essay by Tom X Hart on Medium:
“These are Traditional fellows. But all that is Traditional has been wiped away by capitalism, revolution, secularism, liberalism, communism, socialism, industrialisation, democracy, the middle class, the working class, bureaucrats, feminism, two global mechanised wars, science, and the Enlightenment — by every movement that seeks to level down human experience to the mundane, the democratic, and the materialistic as opposed to the vital, elitist, and spiritual.“
It sounds like some of the nobiliary fakers I know. Fake ancestry, fake titles. What I don’t understand is why anyone would fall for what is surely one of the oldest cons in the book. Destroy the existing order and surely you’ll become one of the aristocrats in the new order. Bosh.
Tom X Hart, “Julius Evola – or, tiger riding for dummies”, at Medium.com (May 19, 2017), visited July 10, 2017.deleted by the author; musta had some qualms about it
More Information
- Julius Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex (1958).
- Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (1961).
Updated Nov. 4, 2020 to remove broken link.
