Evola: about Work, Economy and Life

“It must be stated in no uncertain terms that everything that is economy and economical interest as fulfillment of material needs and of the more or less artifical appendixes of those, has had, have and will always have a subordinated function in a normal humanity, that beyond this sphere must distinguish an order of superior values, political, spiritual, heroic, an order that doesn’t know and doesn’t accept classes on an economical level, that doesn’t know of “proletarians” nor of “capitalists”, an order, only in function of which must be defined those things for which really has value to live and to die”.

“So it can be legitimately stated that the so called “elevation of the social conditions” has to be considered not as a good thing, but as an evil, when the price is the enslavement of the individual to the productive mechanism and to the social conglomerate, the degeneration of the State in “State of work” and of society in “society of consumerism”, the elimination of every qualitative hierarchy, the atrophy of every spiritual sensibility and of every “heroic” capacity in the more broad sense of the word”.

“The fundamental idea was that work doesn’t served to bind but to release man: to enable him to follow more worthy interests, once regulated what is requested by the needs of existence. None economical valour seemed as deserving that to it one had to sacrifice one’s independence and that the search for the means to the existence undertook beyond measure the existence itself”.

“The turning point has been the advent of a conception of life that instead of maintain the needs within natural limits looking for the achievement of that who really is worth of human effort, has had as ideal the growth and artificial moltiplication of the very needs, but also of the resources to satisfie them, without regard for the growing slavery that, in force of an unavoidable law, that is what it was to be, first for the individual and then fot the masses”.

“One of the features of the economical age according to his more sleazy and plebeian aspects is indeed this species of auto-sadism, that consists in the glorification of work as an ethical valour and essential duty, and in the conception in the sense of work of any form of activity. To a future, more normal humanity there will not be perversion that will appear more singular of that, where again, the means becomes the objective”.

“The fundamental point, here, is indeed to be able to recognize that it doesn’t exist external economical growth and social prosperity that is worth and to which flatters one should not absolutely resist when counterpart will be an essential limitation of the liberty and space required so that each one can be able to realize what is possible to him beyond the sphere conditioned by matter and by the needs of the ordinary life”.

“In the modern world, if it has been deprecated “the unjustice” of the caste system, even more have been stigmatized the ancient civilizations that knew slavery and has been ascribed as a pride of the modern times to have vindicated the principle of “human dignity”. What instead is worth to be put in relief, is that, if there is ever been a civilization of slaves, that is exactly the modern civilisation. None traditional civilisation ever viewed masses as numerous condemned to a dark, disanimated, automatic work: slavery, that has not even as counterpart the high stature and the tangible reality of figures as lords or dominators, but that is instead imposed through the tiranny of the economical factor and the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized civilization. And since the modern vision of life, materialistic, has stolen to the individual every possibility to confer to his own destiny something transfigurant, to see in it a sign and a symbol, so the slavery of today is the more grim and the more desperate of how many have ever been known”.

– Julius Evola

By Fabio Artuso, from Ancestor Voice:
https://ancestorvoice.wordpress.com/2016/05/28/evola-about-work-economy-life/