Evola on Democracy

It is perhaps a bit sacrilegious to post a criticism of American democracy on this our Republic’s most important holiday but I have always thought that if something was true then it can stand the test of opposition. If a thing said is a slander, an untruth or the product of sloppy thinking and ignorance then it is easily dismissed. It is only those things said that hit close to the mark that make us cringe and perhaps even cause us pain.

Baron Giulo Cesare Evola aka Julius Evola was no friend of the American experiment. He was many things during his life; scholar, soldier, Fascist political activist, poet and artist but he is perhaps best remembered as staunch supporter of the philosophy of Traditionalism. Wikipedia’s biographical entry on Evola includes this quote by the European scholar, Franco Ferraresi, “Evola’s thought can be considered one of the most radically and consistently anti egalitarian, anti liberal, antidemocratic, and anti popular systems in the twentieth century.”

Wikipedia’s biography of Julius Evola

Test of Evola’s “Civilta Americana” with commentary

So here is a bit from Evola’s essay “Civilta Americana” written in 1945 at the beginning of the era of the United States near global dominance:

“This is the end of yet another American illusion. America: the ‘land of opportunity’, where every possibility is there for the person who can grasp it, a land where anyone can rise from rags to riches. At first there was the ‘open frontier’ for all to ride out across. That closed and the new ‘open frontier’ was the sky, the limitless potential of industry and commerce. As Gardner, Moore and many others have shown, this too is no longer limitless, and the opportunities are thinning out. Given the ever increasing specialisation of labour in the productive process and the increasing emphasis on ‘qualifications’, what used to seem obvious to Americans – that their children would ‘go further’ than they would – is for many people no longer obvious at all. Thus it is that in the so-called political democracy of the United States, the force and the power in the land, that is to say the industry and the economy, are becoming ever more self-evidently undemocratic. The problem then is! : should reality be made to fit ideology or vice-versa? Until recently the overwhelming demand has been for the former course of action; the cry goes out for a return to the ‘real America’ of unfettered enterprise and the individual free of central government control. Nevertheless, there are also those who would prefer to limit democracy in order to adapt political theory to commercial reality. If the mask of American ‘democracy’ were thereby removed, it would become clear to what extent ‘democracy’ in America (and elsewhere) is only the instrument of an oligarchy which pursues a method of ‘indirect action’, assuring the possibility of abuse and deception on a large scale of those many who accept a hierarchical system because they think it is justly such. This dilemma of ‘democracy’ in the United States may one day give place to some interesting developments. ” – Julius Evola

Julius Evola was no friend of the American version of democracy but neither is the new American transnational oligarchy. Who could argue this summer that “deception on a large scale” is being perpetrated against a degenerated and ignorant American electorate who don’t even know much of anything about the founding principles of this nation, its history or the characteristics of those institutions designed to preserve our liberties. Worse yet than the appalling state of ignorance that has been reached by our native population is the fact that we have included in our electorate tens of millions of recent Third World immigrants who are not only are ignorant of American culture and traditions but are indifferent if not actively hostile towards them.

A ship from the great days of sail is an incredibly complex and highly developed machine whose component parts reached a near perfection during the late 18th Century before being supplanted by the new technologies of iron ships and steam. The development of the human technologies of sailing vessels stretches back thousands of years and so the great ships of the end of the age of sail were the end products of hundreds of generations of men attempting new and better techniques of ship design that were then passed down and improved over and over.

[amazon-product alink="0000FF" bordercolor="FFFFFF" height="240"]0892819057[/amazon-product]Our nation is like one of those great sailing vessels, it is a complex machine composed of many complicated devices that have been perfected and passed down over the ages. We are sailing into the future in a great ship designed by a generation of brilliant men, who had a tremendous understanding of the great sum of European knowledge, but along the way we have failed to preserve the knowledge of how the ship works. The ship is still moving forward because of its great bulk, the immensity of its sails and its forward momentum. Our crew is ignorant and our ships officers indifferent to the great machine that keeps them afloat.

I once read a terrific SciFi story where the descendants of the crew of a great star faring vessel that set out to span the great reaches of the galaxy had degenerated. They no longer even realized that they were in a spaceship and they had no concept of technology. The plants from the ships hydroponics systems had spread throughout the ship and made it appear to be a jungle. The descendants of the crew had also physically shrunk over many hundreds of generations and they were now the size of pygmies. The great ship continued to sail on through the void but it was not the same ship and its crew no longer remembered their mission, their culture or even their identity. It reminds me of our ship of state today.