history – Page 40

VJMP Reads: Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger I

Having chosen a left-wing work (The Interregnum) for our previous reading, we now go to the right again and have a look at Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger. Subtitled “A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul”, it’s based on the premise that the fight against modernity has been lost and the only thing a thinking man can do is ride the tiger of modernity until it’s time to rebuild on the other side.

Part I of the eight parts of this book is called “Orientations” and divides into two essays.

The first of these is called ‘The Modern World and Traditional Man’. This opens outright with a declaration that this text isn’t for everyone. Like The Satanic Bible, Evola is explicit in that his book is only for a particular kind of person. Ride the Tiger is written for the outsider.

Evola’s style seems timeless in the sense that his complaints about the nature of society apply just as well to 2018 as they did to his time, and probably apply well to many times in the past. Things are collapsing, certainly in social terms if not yet physical ones, and so Evola advocates a return to traditional values.

These traditional values are not bourgeoisie ones, Evola is at pains to point out, but in fact “the very antithesis of them.” Indeed, he hints at evoking the perennial philosophy, such as when he writes “It is good to sever every link with all that which is destined sooner or later to collapse. The problem will then be to maintain one’s essential direction without leaning οn any given or transmitted form.”

Psychonauts such as the readership of VJM Publishing will commiserate with this feeling, as it’s a handy description of the ego death experience that comes with the peak of a psychedelic trip. One loses all touch with and memory of the fleeting forms of energy that make up the material world, and resides solely in pure consciousness, and thereby reunites with God.

Fittingly, then, Evola states that the Tradition that inspires him has “the character of an esoteric doctrine.”

The second essay, ‘The End of a Cycle – “Ride the Tiger”‘, continues in the same vein. Evola explains that the expression “to ride the tiger” is from the Far East and refers to the idea that it’s safer to ride on the tiger’s back than to try and flee and get pounced on, for the tiger will eventually tire out and then one can make an escape.

Essentially, the idea expressed here is this: great and terrible changes are sweeping the world, and will continue to do so. They will destroy much, if not all, of the existing order, regardless of whether this order is good or bad. There is no hope of resisting this process.

All of this sounds terribly pessimistic and nihilistic on the surface, but it’s clear that, like Nietzsche before him, Evola has anticipated the nihilism that follows the destruction of the incumbent value system, and is speaking of what must come beyond that. He writes of the “Four Ages” system famililar to readers of Plato’s Republic as well as to Hindus.

The warning of this chapter is that the forces of destruction and degeneracy are too powerful to be overcome; resisting them is as futile as resisting the tide. But in this there is still a message of hope: those destructive forces are too mindless, stupid and disorderly to hold sway for very long and so, like the storm, they will pass, and leave an opportunity to rebuild order in their wake.

And so, Evola mocks the “progressive” and “advanced” thinking of the West as little more than symptoms of a disease of the soul. This is apparently the context in which the book ought to be read.

The object of the book is summed up in the final paragraph of this essay: “defining the attitude to be taken toward certain experiences and processes of today”. In other words, how do we deal with the fact that everything’s falling to bits?

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

When The Stories About Mistreated Babies Come, War is Imminent

In the popular mind, wars are very sudden things, usually launched without warning against an unsuspecting enemy. Pearl Harbour is the most famous example, but we’ve also been conditioned to fear the possibility of an ICBM exchange, which would mean that we could potentially all be destroyed before more than a handful of us even knew what was going on. The truth is that The Powers That Be plan major wars long in advance – and their propaganda is calculated accordingly.

Even in video games like Civilization VI, it rarely happens that war is just launched out of the blue. The game mechanics incentivise a belligerent to make a denouncement before declaring war, and this is faithful to how history has transpired. There are far too many signs of impending war for this article to cover, but it will cover one sign that war has become imminent: when the mainstream propaganda organs begin to accuse a foreign enemy of mistreating babies in some manner.

In World War One, the British propagandists spread stories about the soldiers of the Huns (Germans) bayonnetting babies in their cribs when they invaded Belgium. The logic appeared to be that an enemy accused of such deeds was so evil that anyone who considered themselves a right-thinking person was morally obliged to volunteer for the armed forces so as to go and smash it.

The propaganda was effective – the British Empire recruited millions of its men to fight the Germans, and these men fought with the genuine belief that they were opposing an evil order.

When World War Two rolled around, Anglo propagandists saw no need to reinvent the wheel. And duly, we were told the same stories about Japanese soldiers bayonetting babies, this time babies of Chinese and Filipino origin. This had a similar effect on the receiving population, and millions of men signed up to fight the Imperial Japanese.

In the lead up to the Gulf War in 1990, the infamous Nayirah testimony got the American public onboard with an American invasion of Kuwait. Nayirah was purported to be a 15-year old Kuwaiti who had been present when Iraqi soldiers invaded. Her testimony involved a harrowing tale about watching helplessly on as plundering Iraqi soldiers went as far as dumping babies out of incubators in their haste to steal everything.

Neither the American public nor the media saw fit to challenge this narrative. Who could be so cruel as to ask sceptical questions when the well-being of incubator babies were on the line?

In 2018, the Eye of the Empire is turned upon North Korea. Because of their intercontinental ballistic missile program, North Korea threatens to become a brutally disruptive force in the Asia-Pacific region. They could already put a nuclear warhead on a missile and hit Japan with it, and America might well intervene before America itself comes into range.

That explains why there has been so much anti-North Korea propaganda in the mainstream media in recent months, such as this piece in Australia. The linked piece recounts another harrowing story, this time of a “hero defector” who is now informing the world that the dogs in China eat better than North Koreans.

This degree of propaganda, with phrases like “hero defector”, is worrisome, as it speaks of an effort to make North Koreans appear killworthy to Western audiences. The real cause for alarm will come if and when the Western propaganda organs start reporting stories about babies being starved to death, or being thrown into soup-pots by starving villagers.

If stories like that ever come then you will know that the war drums are beating.

The Yin-Yang of History

Traditionally speaking, when men like this start appearing among your youth, it’s the beginning of the end

The postwar period was a good one for the West. The major Anglo powers had seen all the challengers and potential challengers to their world hegemony bombed flat – partially by them, mostly by each other. With Nazism and Communism both falling to their knees, the liberal democratic order ushered in some good times for the people of the world. Peace and prosperity reigned… but the yin-yang of history tells us that nothing lasts.

The 1990s might be seen, from the vantagepoint of history, as the apogee of these good times. The Soviet Union had fallen, and China and India were yet to rise. Those of us who knew the course of history, however, knew this: good times create weak men. Weak mean create hard times. Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times.

This is the yin-yang of history.

Good times are the equivalent of summer. Here, people don’t have to think very hard about how to survive and thrive. In the same way that it’s warm and sunny in summertime and so people don’t have to think very hard about what clothing to put on before they go outside, political conditions are favourable in the sense that the ruling class doesn’t have to think very hard about security without and solidarity within.

In the summertime of history, wealth abounds from the increased energy in the atmosphere. To most, these good times seem like they’re going to last forever. The more perceptive of people, however, even if they don’t know about the yin-yang of history, can often see the signs of collapse coming in advance.

The problem with good times, as Plato observed in The Republic, is that they create weak men. When times are good, the tendency is to let minor infractions slide, and although this can lead to an atmosphere of joy it also leads to indiscipline. This indiscipline is why the weak men are weak, and it’s this indiscipline that leads to the hard times.

It might be argued that this is the stage that the West finds itself in 2018 A.D. Our Baby Boomer leaders, who were raised with all the laxness of a generation that had got its fill of violence in World War II and had decided to bring up the Boomers with as little harshness as possible, clearly do not possess the mental discipline to educate themselves properly about the matters of the world.

In our age, it’s entirely possible to find a Western minister or higher who doesn’t know the basics about history or science. There is ample opportunity to learn about such things, of course, but our leaders would rather drink alcohol and watch television. Some, like the Belgian Minister of Health, have lost control of their weight entirely.

These weak men cast a shadow on their nations: the same as the shadows of autumn, who they represent. Their enemies observe this absence of intellectual power, and they move to take advantage.

Because the leaders have no discipline to educate themselves properly, they don’t understand what’s really happening in the world. This results in decisions getting made on the basis of how things used to be a long time ago (but no longer are), or how things might be in some idealised future world (instead of how they now are).

These poor decisions lead naturally to hard times. This stage in the cycle of history corresponds to the wintertime. Leaders lead the people in the wrong direction, causing them to dissipate their energies on follies or to spill them on battlefields for no reward. Here there is poverty – in fact, there is never enough of anything, and people learn to live with want.

Hard times can lead to bitterness, but in the same way that the bitterest cold of winter leads to a hardening in the form of ice, so too do the bitterest lows of life lead to a hardening of the heart. These hard men do not, at first, bode well for the people who they live among. To the contrary – the pitiless, ruthless nature of hard men make them natural criminals and killers.

But the hardness of hard men leads to discipline in those who come after them. This discipline – true iron discipline – is a matter of Will and therefore it is ultimately generated from within. These disciplined men are the opposite of the men we have in 2018 A.D. These disciplined men impose order upon their minds by devoting themselves to the correct course of study and behaviour.

Disciplined people who study hard represent the springtime of a people. It is for these people that VJM Publishing exists. These are the people who will rise up and make good decisions. They will come to occupy positions of leadership not because their backers paid for the best advertising, but because they are asked by their peers to occupy these positions on the basis of demonstrated wisdom.

Because of this wisdom, these leaders are not afraid to shy away from the knowledge necessary to make the correct decisions. This leads to increasing wealth and prosperity. So when the men of gold are recognised as such and are placed into positions of leadership on account of this, then the people will enter another golden age, or another age of summer.

A Person’s Politics Follow From Their Conception of Human Nature

People who believe that humans are more like bonobos than chimpanzees tend to be left-wing, and vice-versa

Most people with strong political opinions like to think that their opinions are perfectly logical, and derive directly from natural principles. Although most people are correct and reasonable in that their political opinions follow logically from their perception of human nature, the problem is that people have an extremely varied range of beliefs when it comes to their perceptions of human nature. In some cases, there’s no way of knowing who’s right.

Take, for example, the question of nature versus nurture. This is another way of asking: how much of a person’s behaviour can be attributed to natural causes that they were born with, such as genes, and how much can be attributed to environmental causes, such as how they were raised?

All positions on this extremely important question fall somewhere between 100% nature and 100% nurture, the former being known as “genetic determinism” and the latter being known as the “tabula rasa” (“blank slate”) theory. This sounds objective and scientific, but it really isn’t, because one’s attitude here will reflect one’s political opinions.

Take the question of Third World immigration and refugees, for example. A person who believes in genetic determinism might be extremely reluctant to open the borders to African or Muslim refugees, because they will tend to believe that these people will never and can never learn to behave in a civilised manner.

A person who believes in the tabula rasa theory, by contrast, will tend to believe that the wealth of Western nations is because of cultural reasons, and therefore African and Muslim refugees will acclimatise to the Western way of doing things, and therefore over time their crime rates and income levels will equalise with the native population.

Another area in which this occurs is with regard to bonobos and chimpanzees. Here we can also see that a person’s belief about the scientific, biological reality of the human species has a profound effect on their political beliefs.

Bonobos and chimpanzees are the two generally accepted chimpanzee species, and some (such as Jared Diamond) have argued that humans are so similar to them that we belong in the same group as them as a third chimpanzee. But from which of the two can we draw more accurate inferences about the true nature of behaviour in the human animal?

The bonobo is a creature of peace, the chimpanzee is a creature of war. This is evident from observing the two species in their natural habitat. The chimpanzee is violent, cruel, loves fighting and tends to cure anxiety by bashing a weaker chimp. The bonobo is hypersexual, loves bonding and grooming and tends to cure anxiety by having sex.

If a person believes that humans are more like the bonobo they will tend towards pacifism and polyamory, and will be left-wing. If a person believes that humans are more like the chimp they will tend towards violence and monogamy, and will be right-wing. This is true even if the person in question knows nothing at all about the ethology of the two species.

A third is whether or not people are naturally lazy. This one is especially difficult because attitudes to industriousness are biological to a major extent.

Few appreciate this, but in a cold environment people evolve to be active because physical activity keeps you warm, and this confers a survival advantage by staving off colds and hypothermia-related conditions. In a warm environment people evolve to be inactive because physical activity gives you heatstroke.

This is why pale-skinned people tend to work hard and dark-skinned people don’t – it’s not because of any moral failure on the part of the latter.

Consider this information in the context of whether or not we should bring in a universal basic income. The fear on the conservative side is that a universal basic income would cause certain demographic groups to become lazy and shiftless, and they would all stop working immediately and live the parasitic lifestyle natural to their kind.

If a person’s conception of human nature is not that people are lazy but rather that people are industrious, they will be much more likely to support a universal basic income out of the hope that it will free people from drudgery and therefore enable them to put their energies into creative endeavours of more benefit to human happiness.

In summary, it’s usually possible to surmise a person’s political opinions from their belief in human nature. Political opinions are not formed in a vacuum – they are informed by many factors, one of which is a person’s belief in how other people naturally behave given a certain schedule of reinforcements and punishments.