This is not a profound insight; it is something every schoolboy learns in the playground. When a challenge is allowed to pass without a forceful response, the challenger is immediately emboldened into starting a program of escalating depredations. The greater the depredations, the greater the retaliation needed to end them. After a while, the level of retaliation needed to regain peace becomes so destructive that victory over the predator ultimately becomes a pyrrhic victory. It is, therefore, always preferable to take the first challenge very seriously, and to respond forcefully, even disproportionately, rather than ignore it or let it pass in an attempt to keep the peace.

Perhaps no film serves as a better metaphor for this than the controversial 1971 psychological thriller, Straw Dogs. Directed by Sam Peckinpah, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, this is the story of a young couple – David Sumner, a timid, American mathematician and, Amy, his rather puerile Cornish wife – who move to a farm in a small village in Cornwall, and quickly run into trouble with the locals.

Having hired four workmen to finish his garage roof, David becomes absorbed in his work and Amy, bored and craving attention, begins flirting with the men – one of these is Charlie, who has a previous history with Amy. David had encountered a status challenge early on in the film (see below), but he had chosen to ignore it, thus triggering idle talk and a progressive loss of authority before the workmen.

One evening, David finds their cat dead, hung by the neck in their closet. Amy claims the workmen have done it as a provocation, to prove that they could get into his bedroom. David, however, is a coward, and lacks the nerve to confront the workmen. Instead, he attempts to win their friendship, and invites them in for a beer. Amy is horrified, but David argues that he wants to ‘catch them off-guard’. She is not fooled, however, and, when David fails to mention the cat, as expected, she visibly loses respect for her husband.

The workmen suggest that he come duck hunting with them, and David agrees; but on the appointed day the workmen leave him stranded on a lonely moor, after promising to drive ducks in his direction. Charlie then goes back to the Sumners’ house and rapes Amy, who, after some resistance, soon appears to enjoy the violation. Upon finishing, however, another workman shows up, and forces Charlie at gunpoint to hold Amy down while he takes a turn at raping her.

After several hours of standing around looking like an idiot on the moor, David finally realizes that he has been had and decides to walk back to the farm. By the time he arrives back home it is dark, and he finds his wife in bed, disheveled and withdrawn; she does not tell him about the rape. David tells his wife how the workmen stuck it to him, but is patronizing — as he always is towards her — and makes himself look even more of a fool in the process; Amy rebukes him for his cowardice and failure to confront the workmen about the cat. True to form, however, David blames Amy for ‘pushing’ him.

The following day David fires the workers, but even at this point he does it nervously and with diffidence. Later, David and Amy attend a church social. Amy is haunted by the trauma of the rape, and David, noticing her discomfort (yet still unaware of its source) suggests that they leave early.

They do, but it is a foggy night and, on the drive home, they hit the village idiot, Henry Niles. David takes him back to the farm. Unable to reach anyone as he telephones for help, however, he eventually telephones the village pub, with whose landlord he leaves a message.

This proves a mistake, though, for Niles had earlier in the evening disappeared with Janice Hedden, a village girl, who was later found dead: the girl’s father, Bobbie, an unemployed drunk and Charlie’s uncle, was by the time of David’s telephone call out for blood. Upon learning that Niles is at the Sumners’ farm, he and the workmen, including the two who raped Amy, decide to go there.

All drunk, they pound the door of the Sumners’ house and begin breaking windows. David refuses to give them Niles, despite his wife’s remonstrations, deciding it is a matter of principle. The violence escalates until the local magistrate arrives; the latter, however, is shot dead by Janice’s father. At this point, seeing that there was no turning back, the workmen decide to pull all the stops, and begin a violent siege. David attempts to defend his home, but, eventually, defenses are breached and some of the workmen gain access to the house. One by one, however, David kills them all. The last scene is David driving Niles back to town, smiling.

The film was meant to be an exploration of violence, and Dustin Hoffman is said to have agreed to play David Sumner because he was intrigued by the idea of a pacifist who was unaware of his capacity for violence.

I, however, see the film as an exploration of pacifism, and I believe David Sumner illustrates rather well how stupid we must look to our racial competitors when we remain silent in the face of their depredations and rationalize tolerating endless forced concessions and humiliations. To them, we are David Sumner; to us, they are the drunken villagers.

The villagers are rough, uncouth, virile, hard, clannish, and menacing; they wear Wellington boots and coarse garments; they represent low cunning, brute force, excess, base instinct, and manual labor. David Sumner is polished, polite, feminine, soft, individualistic, and physically insignificant; he wears cloth shoes, cotton, and wool; he represents intelligence, pacifism, moderation, high principle, and mental work.

The sad moral of the film is that low cunning and brute force tends to be an effective strategy for resource acquisition. It is certainly also a universal one, which is favored by the bulk of humanity. And even if David emerges victorious in the end, we are forced to think of what he has lost: his cat has been killed, his wife has been raped, his home has been trashed, his peace has been stolen, and any goodwill he might still have enjoyed among the villagers has been fully expended. It is reasonable to speculate that he will have to move out and be tried for the deaths of the men he has killed — he might even be convicted for some or all of those deaths, and his wife might even leave him in the end.

Despite his intelligence, his high principles, and good will, the evil, lazy, drunken, and dumb workmen are unimpressed and they manage to take everything away from him — everything, including his sense of self, for through his final resort to slaughter, he abdicates the intellectualism, pacifism, and high principles with which he sought to define himself. All right, the workmen lose their lives, but what do they care? Their lives seemed rather useless anyway and they are dead, so they do not suffer their loss.

There are a number of key points in the film worth noting.

As Charlie rapes Amy, she is seen to become enthralled by his obvious masculinity, and she, accordingly, allows herself to be dominated. This scene was controversial at the time and instigated bans and cuts. Yet, it is probably one of the most educational scenes. There is no doubt here that she re-discovers in Charlie what her husband is lacking; even if only momentarily, her brewing contempt for, and anger at, her husband for his spinelessness is what causes her only to mount a weak resistance and to finally melt and embrace Charlie’s usurpation.

And despite the second rape by one of Charlie’s friends, of which Charlie is an accomplice, the two men subsequently show neither remorse nor worry at the prospect of David finding out. It does not seem to even cross their minds for the remainder of the film. Throughout it, both before and after the rape, the workmen remain tight and maintain a united front; the Sumners, by contrast, are divided: they undermine each other; she taunts him he ignores her; she is petty, he is patronizing; she rebukes him, he dismisses her; and, in short, they fail to act as a unit — to synchronize, complement, and synergize — which is one of the keys to a solid marriage.

Although Amy’s anger was triggered by the cat incident, David’s weakness and the fissures in their marriage, not apparent to her until that point, are revealed much earlier, during the initial scenes of the film. The latter begins in Amy’s native village in Cornwall. She has obviously been away with David in America, and has only just returned; David has obtained a research grant and the nearby farm is to serve as a retreat.

Amy encounters Charlie as David is loading the Sumner’s car with groceries, and Amy and Charlie engage in conversation. She attempts to show off her husband, telling Charlie about his research. But she does not explain it accurately, and David makes a patronizing and dismissive remark.

This is mistake number one: a married man ought never to undermine his wife in front of third parties; only a coward would do so to a loving wife, and only a man not interested in keeping his wife would thus invite others to steal her from him.

Then, David, upon learning that Charlie is unemployed, decides to hire him, as the workman he had previously hired to build the roof of his garage was taking too long. David asks for a cost estimate, but Charlie says simply ‘Reasonable,’ an unspecific answer that David accepts.

Mistake number two: if your money is on the line, you always demand precise answers; you always establish who is boss.

David then goes to the pub nearby to purchase a packet of cigarettes. Bobbie Hedden, hunched over at the bar and drunk, notices David walking in and facially registers his scornful disgust at the sight of David’s unmanly shoes; David, oblivious, looks immediately weak in the hard, working man’s pub, standing wide-eyed as he blows his nose. By the time he approaches the bar and orders his cigarettes — apparently the wrong kind, as far as the locals are concerned — he has already marked himself, not only as an outsider, but as prey: he speaks quietly and unassertively and is, accordingly, ignored by the barman.

Mistake number three: in a hard setting, hard presentational tactics apply; the moment the newcomer enters the scene he is under observation, and male observers begin determining his position in the power hierarchy; it is essential to confidently and unambiguously establish an assertive position, and to scare off challengers before they dare surface.

David then walks to the window and witnesses Charlie putting his hand around his wife’s neck, in a possessive gesture of masculine assertion. Charlie is trying it on, attempting to revive an old romantic flame. David watches the scene, says nothing, and does nothing; therefore, it falls upon Amy to rebuff him, which she does. Charlie backs down as David returns. Despite what he has just witnessed, however, his behaviour remains agreeable.

Mistake number four: self-explanatory.

Thus we see that the mock politeness of Charlie and his workers and, subsequently, their escalating transgressions have very subtle and fleeting points of origin. David, a classic introverted, intellectual type, attaches little importance to what I would like to call here ‘primate politics.’ He probably has never even thought about it.

Perhaps this is because David grew up in, and inhabited, a rarefied environment, where other people were very much like him, and where, therefore, he lived a sheltered existence. As a result, with offensive and defensive instincts very weak, power moments and status challenges pass either unnoticed or unacknowledged, with power and status gains invariably defaulting to the challenger.

This is very much analogical to the position of European-descended peoples in relation to the ever-growing presence of, and ever-escalating challenges from, immigrants from the Third World in Europe and across the Anglophone world.

European man is said to be the product of environmental evolutionary pressures that occurred in relative geographical isolation and, therefore, occurred away from intensive ethnic and racial competition. With the environment, rather than competing human collectivities, presenting the main source of challenges, group strategies designed for dealing with competition from the latter appear not to have been as important as those designed for dealing with the former: it could be that for European man intelligent cooperation, rather than cunning competition, proved more adaptive, and that, consequently, any inborn ethnocentrism became weakened or recessive.

Be that as it may, it is clear that modern European man unwittingly marked himself as prey long ago, and that he continues to do so now because, like David in the film, he encounters a psychological — and perhaps even a physiological — barrier when faced with the need to overcome evolved temperamental proclivities that were once adaptive but have become maladaptive in the changed human ecology of traditional White homelands.

Besides what I outlined at the beginning of this review, a key lesson of this film is the importance of being alert, of remaining vigilant, and even of being on the lookout for those subtle power moments that fly by in an instant, well before a visible, tangible challenge occurs. Before present negative trends became established, there were plenty of opportunities to pre-empt even their origin — yet we failed to notice them, and, when we did, we failed to act upon them, each time in the belief that it was only a minor incident, not worth the hassle and the unpleasantness of kicking up a fuss. Even the most minor of transgressions needs to be taken very seriously, and retaliation has to come fast and overwhelmingly.

Straw Dogs is a splendidly shot film, and both the interiors and exteriors are highly evocative, sometimes because of their bucolic charm, sometimes because of their natural beauty, sometimes because of their chilling grimness. It is also a film that perpetuates the tired old stereotype of rural and small-town Whites: the village’s tightly-knit community is portrayed here in a blatantly negative way, to the point where the villagers are quasi-animalistic, nearly deformed, and positively sinister.

This is likely to resonate with a Jewish audience, not only because the village is what one would imagine is every Jew’s worst nightmare, but also because Dustin Hoffman is so obviously Semitic in his physiognomy and — being cerebral, bespectacled, puny, urban, and high minded — a fairly common type of hero in Jewish American cinema. (Sumner’s swipe at Christianity at one point in the film contributes to this perception.)

Yet, for those who know and appreciate European village folk and the charms of living in a close, friendly rural community, the villagers in this film resemble not real life ones in Cornwall, but our new non-European fellow citizens and arrivals — although many of the latter are far uglier, far ruder, far more lustful, far more primitive, far more rapacious, and far quicker to engage in evil violence.

It works in this case, but such negative portrayal of Cornish villagers ought to be admonished all the same. The Duchy of Cornwall should have slammed the filmmakers with an immediate suit for defamation, if only to teach them a lesson.

This is certainly a strong and excellent film, even though made decades ago – and a must for its educational value.

Louis de Bonald, 1754 - 1840

The French statesman, writer, and philosopher, Louis Vicomte de Bonald belongs to the theologist school of the Traditionalists. Bonald was born on October 2nd, 1754 at Monna, near Millau a town in the Rouergue region (Aveyron) of southern France, into an aristocratic family. He studied at the Oratorian Collège de Juilly. As an aristocrat, military service was expected, so in 1773 he joined the king’s musketeers. The musketeers were dissolved in 1776 by Louis XVI, thus freeing Bonald of his military duties. So he returned to his own province, where he became involved in public affairs. He was elected mayor of Millau in 1785, and in 1790 chosen member of the departmental Assembly for Aveyron.

During the early phases of the French Revolution he directed his efforts at the local and regional level to maintain order. Even after the National Assembly abolished the aristocracy, Bonald was reelected as mayor and then elected to the departmental assembly. The turning point in Bonald’s relation to the Revolution came with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which subordinated the Catholic Church to the new national government. Bonald believed it wrongly stripped the Church of its position in society. By refusing to force the clergy to take the oath of allegiance, Bonald disqualified himself from holding public office, though he was still largely supportive of the Revolution. By October 1791, however, Bonald had joined the counterrevolution and had emigrated from France. Hoping to overthrow the Revolution from without, he became a soldier in the army of Condé, and, when the army was disbanded, retired to Heidelberg, where he took charge of the education of his two elder sons.

Bonald published at Constance, in 1797, his first work: Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux, which was suppressed in France by order of the Directory. In 1797 Bonald returned to France under the name of Saint-Séverin, and published Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles de l’ordre social (1800); Du divorce (1801); and La législation primitive (1802). He also collaborated with Chateaubriand and others in the Mercure de France, contributing several articles which were published in book form with other studies in 1819 under the title Mélanges littéraires, politiques, et philosophiques.

His hiding continued until 1802, when he received a pardon from Napoleon. Later, Bonald entered the Napoleonic government, serving on the Great Council of the Imperial University. In 1808 he declined to be a member of the Council of the University, but finally accepted in 1810. He refused to take charge of the education of the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and of the King of Rome, the son of Napoleon I.

After Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, Bonald quickly joined the restoration monarchy of Louis XVIII. A monarchist and royalist by nature and by principles, Bonald welcomed the restoration of the Bourbons. He was appointed a member of the Academy by royal decree in 1816. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the national legislative body. From 1815 to 1822 he served as deputy from Aveyron, and in 1823 became a peer of France. He then directed his efforts against all attempts at liberalism in religion and politics. The law against divorce was proposed by him in 1815 and passed in 1816. He took a prominent part in the law of 1822 which did away with the liberty of the press and established a committee of censure of which he was the president. In 1815 he published his Réflexions sur l’intérêt général de l’Europe; in 1817, Pensées sur divers sujets in 2 vols. 8 vo. (2d., Paris, 1887); in 1818 Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaisances morales; in 1827, Démonstration philosophique du principe constitutif des sociétés. Meanwhile he collaborated with Chateaubriand, Lamennais, and Berryer, in the Conservateur, and later in the Défenseur founded by Lamennais. Bonald continued to serve under the next monarch, Charles X.

Bonald refused to serve under Louis Philippe, who had come to power in the Revolution of 1830. In 1830 he gave up his peerage and withdrew to his country home to lead a life of retirement in his native city. — “There is not to be found in the long career,” says Jules Simon, “one action which is not consistent with his principles, one expression which belies them.” He died in Paris, 23 November, 1840.

* * *

A number of thinkers have endeavored to comprehend the nature of modernity. Their analyses differ, but many thinkers agree about key points on the road to modernity: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, to name a few. To understand the modern world one has to examine one of those periods: the French Revolution. To some, the Revolution heralded political liberalism with cries of “liberté, egalité, and fraternité.” To others, the Revolution signified the rejection of the West’s heritage of the past two millennia. As the Revolution was occurring, a number of thinkers sensed its challenge to the old order (not only politically, but more importantly, philosophically). Louis De Bonald described the political problems of the Revolution. In doing so, however, he also developed a theory of language, interrelating with his theory of government. According to de Bonald, man is essentially a social being or, as Aristotle said, a zoon politicon. His development comes through society; and the continuity and progress of society have their principle in tradition. Since language is the instrument of sociability, speech is as natural to man as is his social nature itself. Language to Bonald meant the entire system of communication, not only words but syntax and relation of words. Man cannot think without language. Hence, language could not have been discovered by man, for “man needs signs or words in order to think as well as in order to speak”; that is “man thinks his verbal expression before he verbally expresses his thought”; but originally language, in its fundamental elements together with the thoughts which it expresses, was given him by God His Creator (cf. Législation primitive, I, ii). This thought is the basis for Bonald’s claim that language ultimately had a divine source. This claim rests upon his argument that if thought and language are co-dependent, one cannot begin without the other. Then to start the language process, some outside idea is necessary. If this is the case, language serves as a type of apologetic for the existence of God as the originator of language. Such an apologetic would not be airtight, and it might only demand a deistic first cause. Still, it is a large and important claim. The evolutionist claim is that through chance developments over time, the appearance of design can develop. To evolutionists, the evolution of language fits nicely into their account of the evolution of life and perception.

The above mentioned fundamental truths, absolutely necessary to the intellectual, moral, and religious life of man, must be first accepted by faith. They are communicated through society and education, and warranted by tradition or universal reason of mankind. Society, state and law are of divine origin and therefore subject to religion and the church. There is no other basis for certitude and there remains nothing, besides tradition, but human opinions, contradiction, and uncertainty (cf. Recherches philosophiques, i, ix).

From Euro-Synergies, October 12, 2009.

Editor’s Note: For Bonald’s work in English, see The True & Only Wealth of Nations: Essays on Family, Economy, & Society , On Divorce, and in Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition.

Julius Evola, 1898 - 1974

In its literal sense, this question is by no means a novel one. While contemplating the magnificent remains of cultures whose very name has not even come down to us, but which seem to have conveyed, even in their physical material, a greatness and power that is more than earthly, scarcely anyone has failed to ask themselves questions about the death of cultures, and sensed the inadequacy of the reasons that are usually given to explain it.

We can thank the Comte de Gobineau for the best and best-known summary of this problem, and also for a masterly criticism of the main hypotheses about it. His solution on the basis of racial thought and racial purity also has much truth in it, but it needs to be expanded by a few observations concerning a higher order of things. For there have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands. An example quite close at hand is the case of the Swedes and the Dutch. These people are in the same racial condition today as they were two centuries ago, but there is little to be found now of the heroic disposition and the racial awareness that they once possessed. Other great cultures seem merely to have remained standing in the condition of mummies: they have long been inwardly dead, so that it takes only the slightest push to knock them down. This was the case, for example, with ancient Peru, that giant solar empire which was annihilated by a few adventurers drawn from the worst rabble of Europe.

If we look at the secret of degeneration from the exclusively traditional point of view, it becomes even harder to solve it completely. It is then a matter of the division of all cultures into two main types. On the one hand there are the traditional cultures, whose principle is identical and unchangeable, despite all the differences evident on the surface. The axis of these cultures and the summit of their hierarchical order consists of metaphysical, supra-individual powers and actions, which serve to inform and justify everything that is merely human, temporal, subject to becoming and to “history.” On the other hand there is “modern culture,” which is actually the anti-tradition and which exhausts itself in a construction of purely human and earthly conditions and in the total development of these, in pursuit of a life entirely detached from the “higher world.”

From the standpoint of the latter, the whole of history is degeneration, because it shows the universal decline of earlier cultures of the traditional type, and the decisive and violent rise of a new universal civilization of the “modern” type.

A double question arises from this.

First, how was it ever possible for this to come to pass? There is a logical error underlying the whole doctrine of evolution: it is impossible that the higher can emerge from the lower, and the greater from the less. But doesn’t a similar difficulty face us in the solution of the doctrine of involution? How is it ever possible for the higher to fall? If we could make do with simple analogies, it would be easy to deal with this question. A healthy man can become sick; a virtuous one can turn to vice. There is a natural law that everyone takes from granted: that every living being starts with birth, growth, and strength, then come old age, weakening, and disintegration. And so forth. But this is just making statements, not explaining, even if we allow that such analogies actually relate to the question posed here.

Secondly, it is not only a matter of explaining the possibility of the degeneration of a particular cultural world, but also the possibility that the degeneration of one cultural cycle may pass to other peoples and take them down with it. For example, we have not only to explain how the ancient Western reality collapsed, but also have to show the reason why it was possible for “modern” culture to conquer practically the whole world, and why it possessed the power to divert so many peoples from any other type of culture, and to hold sway even where states of a traditional kind seemed to be alive (one need only recall the Aryan East).

In this respect, it is not enough to say that we are dealing with a purely material and economic conquest. That view seems very superficial, for two reasons. In the first place, a land that is conquered on the material level also experiences, in the long run, influences of a higher kind corresponding to the cultural type of its conqueror. We can state, in fact, that European conquest almost everywhere sows the seeds of “Europeanization,” i.e., the “modern” rationalist, tradition-hostile, individualistic way of thinking. Secondly, the traditional conception of culture and the state is hierarchical, not dualistic. Its bearers could never subscribe, without severe reservations, to the principles of “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” and “My kingdom is not of this world.” For us, “Tradition” is the victorious and creative presence in the world of that which is “not of this world,” i.e., of the Spirit, understood as a power that is mightier than any merely human or material one.

This is a basic idea of the authentically traditional view of life, which does not permit us to speak with contempt of merely material conquests. On the contrary, the material conquest is the sign, if not of a spiritual victory, at least of a spiritual weakness or a kind of spiritual “retreat” in the cultures that are conquered and lose their independence. Everywhere that the Spirit, regarded as the stronger power, was truly present, it never lacked for means — visible or otherwise — to enable all the opponent’s technical and material superiority to be resisted. But this has not happened. It must be concluded, then, that degeneracy was lurking behind the traditional facade of every people that the “modern” world has been able to conquer. The West must then have been the culture in which a crisis that was already universal assumed its acutest form. There the degeneration amounted, so to speak, to a knockout blow, and as it took effect, it brought down with more or less ease other peoples in whom the involution had certainly not “progressed” as far, but whose tradition had already lost its original power, so that these peoples were no longer able to protect themselves from an outside assault.

With these considerations, the second aspect of our problem is traced back to the first one. It is mainly a question of explicating the meaning and the possibility of degeneracy, without reference to other circumstances.

For this we must be clear about one thing: it is an error to assume that the hierarchy of the traditional world is based on a tyranny of the upper classes. That is merely a “modern” conception, completely alien to the traditional way of thinking. The traditional doctrine in fact conceived of spiritual action as an “action without acting”; it spoke of the “unmoved mover”; everywhere it used the symbolism of the “pole,” the unalterable axis around which every ordered movement takes place (and elsewhere we have shown that this is the meaning of the swastika, the “arctic cross”); it always stressed the “Olympian,” spirituality, and genuine authority, as well as its way of acting directly on its subordinates, not through violence but through “presence”; finally, it used the simile of the magnet, wherein lies the key to our question, as we shall now see.

Only today could anyone imagine that the authentic bearers of the Spirit, or of Tradition, pursue people so as to seize them and put them in their places — in short, that they “manage” people, or have any personal interest in setting up and maintaining those hierarchical relationships by virtue of which they can appear visibly as the rulers. This would be ridiculous and senseless. It is much more the recognition on the part of the lower ones that is the true basis of any traditional ranking. It is not the higher that needs the lower, but the other way round. The essence of hierarchy is that there is something living as a reality in certain people, which in the rest is only present in the condition of an ideal, a premonition, an unfocused effort. Thus the latter are fatefully attracted to the former, and their lower condition is one of subordination less to something foreign, than to their own true “self.” Herein lies the secret, in the traditional world, of all readiness for sacrifice, all heroism, all loyalty; and, on the other side, of a prestige, an authority, and a calm power which the most heavily-armed tyrant can never count upon.

With these considerations, we have come very close to solving not only the problem of degeneration, but also the possibility of a particular fall. Are we perhaps not tired of hearing that the success of every revolution indicates the weakness and degeneracy of the previous rulers? An understanding of this kind is very one-sided. This would indeed be the case if wild dogs were tied up, and suddenly broke loose: that would be proof that the hands holding their leashes had become impotent or weak. But things are arranged very differently in the framework of spiritual ranking, whose real basis we have explained above. This hierarchy degenerates and is able to be overthrown in one case only: when the individual degenerates, when he uses his fundamental freedom to deny the Spirit, to cut his life loose from any higher reference-point, and to exist “only for himself.” Then the contacts are fatefully broken, the metaphysical tension, to which the traditional organism owes its unity, gives way, every force wavers in its path and finally breaks free. The peaks, of course, remain pure and inviolable in their heights, but the rest, which depended on them, now becomes an avalanche, a mass that has lost its equilibrium and falls, at first imperceptibly but with ever accelerating movement down to the depths and lowest levels of the valley. This is the secret of every degeneration and revolution. The European had first slain the hierarchy in himself by extirpating his own inner possibilities, to which corresponded the basis of the order that he would then destroy externally.

If Christian mythology attributes the Fall of Man and the Rebellion of the Angels to the freedom of the will, then it comes to much the same significance. It concerns the frightening potential that dwells in man of using freedom to destroy spiritually and to banish everything that could ensure him a supra-natural value. This is a metaphysical decision: the stream that traverses history in the most varied forms of the traditional-hating, revolutionary, individualistic, and humanistic spirit, or in short, the “modern” spirit. This decision is the only positive and decisive cause in the secret of degeneration, the destruction of Tradition.

If we understand this, we can perhaps also grasp the sense of those legends that speak of mysterious rulers who “always” exist and have never died (shades of the Emperor sleeping beneath the Kyffhäuser mountain!). Such rulers can be rediscovered only when one achieves spiritual completeness and awakens a quality in oneself like that of a metal that suddenly feels “the magnet,” finds the magnet and irresistibly orients itself and moves towards it. For now, we must restrict ourselves to this hint. A comprehensive explanation of legends of that sort, which come to us from the most ancient Aryan source, would take us too far. At another opportunity we will perhaps return to the secret of reconstruction, to the “magic” that is capable of restoring the fallen mass to the unalterable, lonely, and invisible peaks that are still there in the heights.

From Deutsches Volkstum, Nr. 11, 1938.

rom section no. 57 of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ. The translation is by H. L. Menken. The paragraph breaks have been introduced for online readability. The ellipses are Nietzsche’s.

A book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates.

The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and painfully attained truth are fundamentally different from those which one would make use of to prove it. A law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the “thou shall,” on which obedience is based.

The problem lies exactly here.—At a certain point in the evolution of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the series of experiences determining how all shall live—or can live—has come to an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as possible from the days of experiment and hard experience.

In consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further experimentation—the continuation of the state in which values are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized ad infinitum.

Against this a double wall is set up: on the one hand, revelation, which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws are not of human origin, that they were not sought out and found by a slow process and after many errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came into being complete, perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle . . . ; and on the other hand, tradition, which is the assumption that the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a crime against one’s forefathers to bring it into question. The authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers lived it.

The higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern with notions of right living (that is to say, those that have been proved to be right by wide and carefully considered experience), so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism—a primary necessity to every sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up such a law-book as Manu’s means to lay before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection—it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life. To that end the thing must be made unconscious: that is the aim of every holy lie.

The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no “modern idea,” can exert any influence. In every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery and feeling of perfection.

It is not Manu but nature that sets off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity—the last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select.

The superior caste—I call it the fewest—has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum [few men are noble]: goodness is a privilege.

Nothing could be more unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees ugliness—or indignation against the general aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. “The world is perfect”—so prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who says yes to life. “Imperfection, whatever is inferior to us, distance, the pathos of distance, even the Chandala themselves are parts of this perfection.”

The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct.

They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others . . . . Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—They are the most honorable kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the most cheerful and most amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but because they are; they are not at liberty to play second.

The second caste: to this belong the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security, the more noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of warrior, judge and preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute the executive arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking from them all that is rough in the business of ruling—their followers, their right hand, their most apt disciples.

In all this, I repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing “made up”; whatever is to the contrary is made up—by it nature is brought to shame. . . . The order of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types—the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.

A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.

The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism.

The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization.

It would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart—it is simply his duty . . . .

Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and teach him revenge . . . . Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of “equal” rights . . . . What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.

is section no. 39 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols.

39. Critique of modernity. — Our institutions are no good any more: on that there is universal agreement. However, it is not their fault but ours. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good enough for them. Democracy has ever been the form of decline in organizing power: in Human, All-Too-Human (I, 472) I already characterized modern democracy, together with its hybrids such as the “German Reich,” as the form of decline of the state. In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum. When this will is present, something like the imperium Romanum is founded; or like Russia, the only power today which has endurance, which can wait, which can still promise something — Russia, the concept that suggests the opposite of the wretched European nervousness and system of small states, which has entered a critical phase with the founding of the German Reich.

The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: perhaps nothing antagonizes its “modern spirit” so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called “freedom.” That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: one fears the danger of a new slavery the moment the word “authority” is even spoken out loud. That is how far decadence has advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, of our political parties: instinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the end.

Witness modern marriage. All rationality has clearly vanished from modern marriage; yet that is no objection to marriage, but to modernity. The rationality of marriage — that lay in the husband’s sole juridical responsibility, which gave marriage a center of gravity, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage — that lay in its indissolubility in principle, which lent it an accent that could be heard above the accident of feeling, passion, and what is merely momentary. It also lay in the family’s responsibility for the choice of a spouse. With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage on “love” — it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive (wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast — physiologically too — to an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage has lost its meaning — consequently one abolishes it.