Quotes by Savitri Devi, The Lightning and the Sun:
“The so-called “religious toleration” practiced by modern states and individuals springs from anything but an intelligent understanding and love of all religions as manifold, symbolical expressions of the same few essential, eternal truths—as Hindu toleration does, and always did. It is, rather, the outcome of a grossly ignorant contempt for all religions; of indifference to those very truths which their various founders endeavored to reassert, again and again. It is no toleration at all.”
“All the advocates of “progress” lay enormous stress upon such things as literacy, individual “freedom,” equal opportunities for all men, religious toleration, and “humaneness,” progress in this last line covering all such tendencies as find their expression in the modern preoccupation for child-welfare, prison-reforms, better conditions of labor, state aid to the sick and destitute, and, if not greater kindness, at least less cruelty to animals. The dazzling results obtained, in recent years, in the application of scientific discoveries to industrial and other practical pursuits, are, of course, the most popular of all instances expected to show how marvelous our times are. But that point we shall not discuss, as we have already made it clear that we by no means deny or minimize the importance of technical progress. What we do deny is the existence of any progress at all in the value of man as such, whether individually or collectively, and our reflections on universal literacy and other highly praised “signs” of improvement in which our contemporaries take pride, all spring from that one point of view. We believe that man’s value—as every creature’s value, ultimately—lies not in the mere intellect but in the spirit: in the capacity to reflect that which, for lack of a more precise word, we choose to call “the divine,” i.e., that which is true and beautiful beyond all manifestation, that which remains timeless (and therefore unchangeable) within all changes.
The individual living under the iron and steel rule of modern “progress” can eat whatever he fancies (to a great extent) and marry whom he pleases—unfortunately!—and go wherever he likes (in theory at least). But he is made to accept, in all extra-individual matters—matters which, to us, really count—the beliefs, the attitude to life, the scale of values and, to a great extent, the political views, that tend to strengthen the mighty socio-economic system of exploitation to which he belongs (to which he is forced to belong, in order to be able to live) and in which he is a mere cog. And, what is more, he is made to believe that it is a privilege of his to be a cog in such an organism; that the unimportant matters in which he feels he is his own master are, in fact, the most important ones—the only really important ones. He is taught not to value that freedom of judgement about ultimate truth, aesthetical, ethical, or metaphysical, of which he is subtly deprived. More still: he is told—in the democratic countries at any rate—that he is free in all respects; that he is “an individual, answerable to none but to his own conscience” . . . after years of clever conditioning have molded his “conscience” and his whole being so thoroughly according to pattern, that he is no longer capable of reacting differently.
As for “equality of opportunities,” there can be no such thing anyhow, strictly speaking. By producing men and women different both in degree and in quality of intelligence, sensitiveness, and will-power, different in character and temperament, Nature herself gives them the most unequal opportunities of fulfilling their aspirations, whatever these might be. An over-emotional and rather weak person can, for instance, neither conceive the same ideal of happiness nor have equal chances of reaching it in life, as one who is born with a more balanced nature and a stronger will. That is obvious. And add to that the characteristics that differentiate one race of men from another, and the absurdity of the very notion of “human equality” becomes even more striking. What our contemporaries mean when they speak of “equality of opportunities” is the fact that, in modern society—so they say—any man or woman stands, more and more, as many chances as his or her neighbor of holding the position and doing the job for which he or she is naturally fitted. But that too is only partly true. For, more and more, the world of today—the world dominated by grand-scale industry and mass-production—can offer only jobs in which the best of the worker’s self plays little or no part if he or she be anything more than a merely clever and materially efficient person. The hereditary craftsman, who could find the best expression for what is conveniently called his “soul” in his daily weaving, carpet-making, enamel work, etc., even the tiller of the soil, in personal contact with Mother Earth and the Sun and the seasons, is becoming more and more a figure of the past.
There are fewer and fewer opportunities, also, for the sincere seeker of truth—speaker or writer—who refuses to become the expounder of broadly accepted ideas, products of mass-conditioning, for which he or she does not stand; for the seeker of beauty who refuses to bend his or her art to the demands of popular taste which he or she knows to be bad taste. Such people have to waste much of their tine doing inefficiently—and grudgingly—some job for which they are not fitted, in order to live, before they can devote the rest of it to what the Hindus would call their Sadhana—the work for which their deeper nature has appointed them: their life’s dedication.
The idea of modern division of labor, condensed in the oft-quoted sentence “the right man in the right place,” boils down, in practice, to the fact that any man—any one of the dull, indiscriminate millions—can be “conditioned” to occupy any place, while the best of human beings, the only ones who still justify the existence of the more and more degenerate species, are allowed no place at all.”
Quotes By Julius Evola:
"Present western "civilization" awaits a substantial upheaval, without which it is destined, sooner or later, to smash its own head. It has carried out the most complete perversion of the rational order of things. Reign of matter, gold, machines, numbers; in this civilization there is no longer breath or liberty or light. The West has lost its ability to command and to obey. It has lost its feeling for contemplation and action. It has lost its feeling for values, spiritual power, godlike men. It no longer knows nature. No longer a living body made of symbols, gods, and ritual act, no longer a harmony, a cosmos in which man moves freely like "a kingdom within a kingdom", nature has assumed for the Westerner a dull and fatal exteriority whose mystery the secular sciences seek to bury in trifling laws and hypotheses. It no longer knows Wisdom. It ignores the majestic silence of those who have mastered themselves: the enlightened calm of seers, the exalted reality of those in whom the idea becomes blood, life, and power. Instead it is drowning in the rhetoric of "philosophy" and "culture", the specialty of professors, journalists, and sportsmen who issue plans, programs, and proclamations. Its wisdom has been polluted by a sentimental, religious, humanitarian contagion and by a race of frenzied men who run around noisily celebrating becoming (divenire) and "practice", because silence and contemplation alarm them.
It no longer knows the state, the state as value crystallized in the Empire. Synthesis of the sort of spirituality and majesty that shone brightly in China, Egypt, Persia, and Rome, the imperial ideal has been overwhelmed by the bourgeois misery of a monopoly of slaves and traders.
Europe's formidable "activists" no longer know what war is, war desired in and of itself as a virtue higher than winning or losing, as that heroic and sacred path to spiritual fulfillment exalted by the god Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. They know not warriors, only soldiers. And a crummy little war was enough to terrorize them and drive them to rehashing the rhetoric of humanitarianism, and pathos or, worse still, of windbag nationalism and Dannunzianism.
Europe has lost its simplicity, its central position, its life. A democratic plague is eating away at its roots, whether in law, science, or speculation. Gone are the leaders, beings who stand out not for their violence, their gold, or for their skills as slave traders but rather for their irreducible qualities of life. Europe is a great irrelevant body, sweating and restless because of an anxiety that no one dares to express. Gold flows in its veins; its flesh is made up of machines, factories, and laborers; its brains are of newsprint. A great irrelevant body tossing and turning, driven by dark and unpredictable forces that mercilessly crush whoever wants to oppose or merely escape the cogwheels.
Such are the achievements of western "civilization". This is the much ballyhooed result of the superstitious faith in "progress", progress beyond Roman imperiousness, beyond radiant Hellas, beyond the ancient Orient - the great Ocean.
And the few who are still capable of great loathing and great rebellion find themselves ever more tightly encircled."
Julius Evola, Imperialismo Pagano (1928)
"This is obviously the case with the 'self-made man'; in a society which has lost all sense of tradition the notion of personal aggrandizement will extend into every aspect of human existence, reinforcing the egalitarian doctrine of pure democracy. If the basis of such ideas is accepted, then all natural diversity has to be abandoned. Each person can presume to possess the potential of everyone else and the terms 'superior' and 'inferior' lose their meaning; every notion of distance and respect loses meaning; all life-styles are open to all. To all organic conceptions of life Americans oppose a mechanistic conception. In a society which has 'started from scratch', everything has the characteristic of being fabricated. In American society appearances are masks not faces. At the same time, proponents of the American way of life are hostile to personality.
The Americans' 'open-mindedness', which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their 'individualism'. Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind', puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.
In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste (in the original meaning of the word), not even that of servant or shudra, would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over the entire world."
Julius Evola, "Civilta" Americana (American "Civilization") (1945)
"When bland patriotism turned into radical nationalistic forms, the regressive character of such tendencies and the contribution from the emergence of the mass-man in the modern world became clearly evident. For the essence of nationalistic ideology is to hold homeland and nation as supreme values, conceiving them as mystical entities almost with a life of their own and having an absolute claim on the individual; whereas, in reality, they are only dissociated and formless realities, by way of their negation of any true hierarchical principle, and of any symbol or warrant of a transcendent authority. In general, the foundation of political unities that have taken form in this direction is antithetical to the traditional state. In fact, as I have said, the cement of the latter was a loyalty and fidelity that could dispense with the naturalistic fact of nationality; it was a principle of order and sovereignty that, by not being based on this fact, could even be valid in areas including more than one nationality. It was the dignities, particular rights, and castes that united or divided individuals "vertically," beyond the "horizontal" common denominator of "nation" and "homeland." In a word, it was unification from above, not from below.
Once all this is recognized, we can see in a different light the present crisis, both objective and ideal, of the concepts and sentiments of homeland and nation. Again, one might speak of destructions that attack something already having a negative and regressive character, so that they could even signify a potential liberation, if the direction of the whole process were not toward something still more problematic. Therefore, even if only a void remained, it would be no reason for the differentiated man to deplore that crisis and concern himself with the reactions in the "realm of residues." The void could be filled, the negative could give rise to the positive, only if the ancient principles returned to replace the dissolving naturalistic unities with those of a different type; if it were no longer homelands and nations that united or divided, but rather ideas; if the decisive thing were not sentimental and irrational adhesion to a collectivizing myth, but a system of loyal, free, and strongly personalized connections - something that would naturally require as a fundamental point of reference leaders invested with a supreme and intangible authority. Along this line they could even be formed by transnational groupings such as were known in various imperial epochs and, partially, in the Holy Alliance. Today, the degraded counterfeit of all that is taking form alongside the crisis of national sovereignties: power blocs determined solely by factors that are material, economic, and "political" in the worst sense, devoid of every ideal. Hence the insignificance of the antithesis between the two principal blocs of this type existing today, between the democratic West and the communist and Marxist East. For lack of a third force of a different character, and a true ideal to unite and divide beyond homelands, nations, and anti-nations, the only prospect is that of an invisible unity, in a world without frontiers, of those few individuals who are associated by their very nature, which is different from that of the man of today, and by the same inner law - in short, almost in the same terms as Plato used, speaking of the true state, which idea was then taken up by the Stoics. A similar, dematerialized type of unity and state was at the basis of the Orders, and its last reflection, deformed to the point of being unrecognizable, can be seen in secret societies like Freemasonry. If new processes are to develop when the present cycle exhausts itself, perhaps they could have their point of departure in this very kind of unity. Then we could see in action the positive side of overcoming the idea of homeland, whether as myth of the romantic bourgeois period or as a naturalistic fact almost irrelevant to a unity of a different type. Being from the same country or homeland would be replaced by being, or not being, for the same cause. Apoliteia, the detachment of today, contains this eventual possibility for tomorrow. In this case too it is necessary to see the distance existing between the attitude indicated here and certain recent products of modern political erosion: a formless and humanitarian cosmopolitanism, a paranoid pacifism, and the whims of those who want to feel themselves only as "citizens of the world," eventually becoming the "conscientious objectors.""
Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger (1961)
"If the two most recent phases of the involutionary process which has led to the modern decline are first, the rise of the bourgeoise, and second, the collectivization not only of the idea of the State, but also of all values and of the conception of ethics itself, then to go beyond all this and to reassert a 'warlike' vision of life in the aforementioned full sense must constitute the precondition for any reconstruction: when the world of the masses and of the materialistic and sentimental middle-classes gives way to a world of 'warriors', the main thing will have been achieved, which makes possible the coming of an even higher order, that of true traditional spirituality."
Julius Evola, Metaphysics of War (2007)
"The "immortal principles" of 1789 and the rights of equality granted by absolute democracy to the atomized individual regardless of qualification or rank, and the irruption of the masses into the political structure, have effectively brought about what Walther Rathenau calls a "vertical invasion by barbarians from below," Consequently, the following observation of essayist Ortega y Gasset remains true: "The characteristic fact of the moment is that the mediocre soul, recognizing itself as mediocre, has the audacity to assert the right of mediocrity and impose it everywhere."
[...] I have already said that the positive overcoming of nihilism lies precisely in the fact that lack of meaning does not paralyze the action of the "persona." In existential terms, the only exception would be the possibility of action being manipulated by some current political or social myth that regarded today's political life as serious, significant, and important. Apoliteia is the inner distance unassailable by this society and its "values"; it does not accept being bound by anything spiritual or moral. Once this is firm, the activities that in others would presuppose such bonds can be exercised in a different spirit. Moreover, there remains the sphere of activities that can be made to serve a higher-ordained and invisible end, as when I mentioned the two aspects of impersonality and what is to be gained from some forms of modern existence."
Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger (1961)
Other quotes:
"Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality. Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons - such as the wish to flaunt one's status - are parasites of the mind. They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before."
"Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities - especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media - are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (2008)
“Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (1851)
https://www.sophiaperennis.com/books/hinduism/east-and-west/
Illustration of modern decadence applied to arts