November 23, 2025 • 14 mins
Argues that traditional civilizations are founded upon spiritual and metaphysical principles, contrasting this with the modern focus on materialism, progress, and history. Key themes include the doctrine of two natures—a physical and a metaphysical realm—and the belief that traditional truths are nonhuman, eternal principles outside of time and space. The source extensively examines traditional concepts of kingship, social hierarchy (castes), and the importance of rite and action as means to connect with the transcendent, contrasting this with the decline into democracy, secularism, and the "Dark Age" characterized by the triumph of the masses and the elevation of work over action. Finally, it explores ancient cosmological and mythological doctrines, such as the four ages and the symbolism of opposing male (solar/Uranian) and female (lunar/telluric) spiritual principles in the context of civilizational decline.
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Produced by:
https://www.podcaistudio.com/
You can listen and download our episodes for free on more than 10 different platforms:
https://linktr.ee/book_shelter
Get the Book now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Against-Modern-World-Politics/dp/089281506X?&linkCode=ll1&tag=cvthunderx-20&linkId=ec81638743c4e0880ca717033d745336&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
Produced by:
https://www.podcaistudio.com/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the deep dive. We take complex ideas, philosophy,
history and try to boil them down into something clear,
a story you can really grasp.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And today we're tackling, well, a pretty heavy one. Julias
Sevilla's vision of history. It's mainly from his big work
Revolt against the Modern World.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Yeah, definitely polarizing stuff. Our goal here isn't to endorse it, obviously,
but to understand the story he's telling, this grand narrative
of cosmic decline and maybe spiritual resilience.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Exactly, it's crucial to get that this isn't just politics
for him, it's metaphysics framed as history, and it all
starts with this core conflict he lays out, which it's
between two fundamental types of civilization. You've got the traditional world,
totally centered on the supernatural what.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
He calls being okay, being got it, and.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Then you have the modern world, which is obsessed with
the temporal, the changing, what he calls becoming.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
So all his critiques, the really controversial stuff about quality democracy,
it all flows from that metaphysical starting point.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Absolutely, he believes the modern world basically cut itself off
from being so for him, those critiques are just logical outcomes.
It all hinges on what he calls the fundamental doctrine
of the two natures.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Two natures, yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
The physical mortal world, which is inferior in his view,
and then the metaphysical immortal order that's the superior one,
the source, the anchor.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
And for people in that traditional world, this wasn't just
a theory.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Not according to Avola, it was lived knowledge. The invisible
wasn't just believed in. It was in a sense more real,
more fundamental than what you could see and touch.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Okay, so let's start the story at the top, the
absolute peak. Evola calls it the Golden Age, the era
of the gods. What did that look like?
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Pure being, light, life, connection to the transcendent. He draws
on myths like Hesiod, talking about a time when mortals
lived like gods, no sickness, no death, no toil.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Sounds pretty good. Where did this supposedly happen?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
He often links it to primordial North centers like Hyperborea,
But the key thing isn't the location, is that this state,
these beings didn't just die out. The idea is they retreated,
retreated where into the invisible they sort of stepped outside
of time altogether, and.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Right at the heart of this traditional setup was the ruler,
not just any ruler, though he had a specific term,
the Cocravartan.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Yes, it means the universal king or the spinner of
the wheel.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Spinner of the wheel. Yeah, what does that signify?
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Think of the universe of time as a constantly turning
wheel that's becoming or sisera. The cokravartan is the axel,
the still point at the center.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Uh okay. So completely unlike a modern leader who's all
about action, making changes, being seen to.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Do things, exactly the opposite, the cockravarten embodies innerstability. His
power isn't human, It comes from above. That's why you
see so many solar symbols linked to traditional kingship, the
Sun's unchanging glory. Think Egypt, Persia.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
So this king, this Darmaraja, lord of law, How did
he actually rule if he wasn't constantly busy.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Through his very presence, his being. Look at the Chinese
idea of temming, the mandate of heaven. The ideal emperor
rules way away, acting without acting. His spiritual integrity, his
connection to the cosmic order is what maintains harmony. If
things went wrong, disasters, unrest, it wasn't bad policy. It
(03:23):
was seen as the king losing that inner connection, his virtue,
his glory, fading.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
His center wasn't holding.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Precisely, And this principle didn't just apply to the king.
It shaped the whole of society, which brings us to cast.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yeah, this is a really tricky part of Evola's thought
for modern readers. The hierarchy it is.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
And it's vital to grasp that. For him, the traditional hierarchy,
like the Indian system Brahma down to Shudra, wasn't primarily
about economics or power in the way we think of
it now. It was spiritual.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
But the idea of that twice born, the aria, being
inherently superior, how did he justify that? Sounds purely discriminatory.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
His justification rests on spiritual potential. The twice born were
those supposedly attuned to the divine element, the transcendent. The
shudra belonged more to the purely natural material realm.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
So in this ideal view, it wasn't about oppression.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
According to a Vola, No, it was about differentiation, allowing
each person to fulfill their own inherent nature. Their spud harma,
their specific function within a larger spiritually oriented whole. It
was meant to be organic, directing all functions upward.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
And what powered this whole system, what connected the earthly
structure to the heavens, the right.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Ritual ratus or elias sacram This was supreme. The idea
was that the physical world we see it only contains
effects effects. Yeah, the real causes for good harvests, for victory,
and battle for health. They were generated or at least guided,
in the invisible dimension. And the way you interacted with
that dimension was through precise ritual action. The head of
the family, the Pedophomilias, was like a priest king in miniature,
(04:57):
managing this ritual power.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Okay, so that's the peak. But Evola's story is mostly
about the decline, the involution. It happens in stages, right
following the Doctor of the four ages. What's the first
step down.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
That's the Silver age, And the big shift is in polarity.
Think of it as moving from the masculine solar north
to the feminine lunar south, from the sky father to
the earth mother.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
The feminine principle takes over dominates.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah, the focus shifts to the earthly the telluric. The
highest reality isn't that detached transcendent being anymore. It becomes
the universal Mother. Isis cibele demeter the cosmic womb?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
And why is that a decline?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
In e Vola's view, because the spiritual gets entangled with
the material, with generation, with nature, the solar principle, which
was supreme, gets demoted. It's often shown as a child
or consort born from the Great Mother, rather than being
the ultimate source itself.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
You could see this reflected in actual practices. Can't you
like how people dealt with death?
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Absolutely, It's a key contrast. The earlier solar aligned traditions
often favored cremation, purification by fire, freeing the spirit to ascend.
But the Silver Age cultures, often Southern Mediterranean ones, lean
towards burial, returning the body to the earth, the magna mater.
It's a very different spiritual orientation bound to the earth.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Okay, So after the Silver Age comes the Bronze Age,
the Age of battle axes sounds ominous.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
It is This is where raw physical force really comes
to the fore. It's an age of heroes, yes, but
also violence, war, the connection to divine guidance weakens further,
like in the Norse myths exactly, think of the quilight
of the easter finner, the wolf swallowing the sun and moon,
the bifrost bridge connecting worlds collapsing. Evola describes the men
(06:40):
of this age as having hearts hard as iron. It's
a descent into a kind of heroic materialism.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
But even here in this violent age, there was still
a path back up, a way to make fighting spiritual.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yes, the path of the traditional warrior. This is crucial.
Evola makes a distinction, drawing from Islam actually, between the
lesser holy war and the greater hole. The lesser war
is the external one, fighting enemies on the battlefield, but
the greater war el jiado akbar is the inner struggle
against what, against your own fear, your base instincts, the
attachment to life itself. For the traditional warrior, the external
(07:13):
battle becomes a ritual, a way to wage that inner war.
By facing death unflinchingly, by sacrificing the merely personal, they
could achieve a kind of transcendence.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Like critin telling Arjuna in the Gita fight, but do
it without attachment.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Precisely, that transforming the physical conflict into a spiritual discipline.
That was the warrior's route to immortality in a declining age.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Which brings us crashing down to the final stage, the
Iron Age, the kali Yuga, what Evola calls the modern world,
and here the connection to transcendence is basically gone.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Almost completely severed. In his view, the focus shifts entirely
to the human, the temporal, the material. This is where
his critique becomes absolutely sweeping.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Including things you might not expect, like his view on fascism.
Given his politics, he'd think he'd be on board, but
not really, not at all.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
He was famously dismissive. There's that quote. Too bad for
Mussolini when told the dictator didn't get his ideas.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Why the dismissal. What was wrong with fascism?
Speaker 2 (08:12):
For Avola it lacked a genuine spiritual core. He saw
it as too plebeian, too bureaucratic, to focused on nationalism
and state power in a purely worldly sense. It didn't
aim to restore the transcendent principle.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
So just another manifestation of the Iron Age's.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Materialism exactly, just politics, not metaphysics. And he levels a similar,
maybe even harsher critique against Christianity.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
How so, how did Christianity contribute to the decline, According
to him.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Well, fundamentally by separating spiritual and temporal authority, render unto
Caesar and unto God. That split between Satudochium and regnum
was for Evola a direct attack on the unified sovereignty
of the traditional world.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Okay, the separation of church and state, basically yes.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
But more profoundly he also disliked its whole spiritual tenor,
the emphasis on suffering, guilt, compassion, the focus on a
dying God. He saw that as a kind of emotionalism,
a plashic Dinetian element, totally at odds with the detached,
impassive solar ideal of the Olympian gods he admired.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Interesting, But maybe the most fundamental shift he identifies in
modernity is about how we view human activity itself, This
idea of action versus work.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
This is absolutely key. In the traditional view, true action
was sacred, It was ritual. It was how humans connected
effects in this world to causes in the metaphysical realm.
It was free, meaningful work. Ponos in Greek was seen
as drudgery, a punishment almost fit for slaves. It was
just mechanical, contingent activity, cut off from any higher purpose.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
But the modern world flips that completely on its head totally.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
We've elevated work toil, economic activity, technical production into the
highest values. It's become a kind of religion in.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Itself, a mysticism of social service, he called where economic
output is the measure of all things exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Think about the difference between a traditional farmer performing harvest rites,
seeing the act as both physical and sacred, and modern agribusiness,
which is purely about yield and profit. We've lost the
very idea that there's a difference between sacred action and
profane work.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
And Ivola saw this playing out on a global scale
in his time, with America and Russia representing the final stage.
He called them two ends of the same pair of pincers.
That seems odd given the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
It does, but his point wasn't about their political ideologies,
which he saw as superficial. It was about their underlying substance,
which was materialism, quantity over quality, the rule of the masses,
the mass man technocracy. Whether it's state collectivism or corporate capitalism,
he argued, the end result is the same depersonalization, the
(10:50):
triumph of the economic, the dominance of the lowest principle,
what he called the fourth estate, the slave principle. They
were just different flavors of the same Iron Age reality.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Wow, of two sides of the same debase coin.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Basically, that was his view, both driving towards a world
dominated by machines and quantity, crushing the individual spirit.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
And the justification we tell ourselves for all this the
story that makes it seem.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Okay, that's what he calls the myth of progress, evolution, historicism,
all these modern ideas that tell us we're moving forward,
getting better.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
But for a Vola, they're just an alibi.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Exactly, an alibi for decline. They take this descent from
spirit to matter, from quality to quantity, and they slap
the label progress on it. Ideas like Darwin's or Fords
suggesting civilization rises from barbarism from the primitive seas. They
completely invert the traditional view of noble origins in a
Golden age. It makes the decline seem not just inevitable
(11:44):
but desirable. Hashtag tag outrou Okay.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
So we've traced this grand downward arc of history. According
to a Vola from a Golden age of being to
an iron age obsessed with becoming in matter. It's a
bleak picture. Where does that leave us listeners navigating this
modern world?
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Well, his conclusion is one of radical detachment. He essentially says, Look,
whether that perfect Golden age ever actually existed in a
literal historical sense doesn't even matter that much.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Really, why not?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Because the principles of tradition, transcendence, hierarchy right are timeless.
They exist outside history. His work isn't a call to
political action in the usual sense. It's more like a testimony.
It's for those few individuals who still sense that other dimension,
who feel fundamentally outside this world.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
And for those people, what's the strategy. You can't just
check out, can you No?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
And that's where his later idea from Ride the Tiger
comes in, cavel kerlet tiger, ride the tiger. Yeah, the
modern world is like a ferocious tiger dissolution and chaos.
You don't fight it head on, you don't run away
from it, and you certainly don't try to appease it.
You leap onto its back and ride it, move with
its destructive energy, but remain inwardly detached centered. The key
(12:56):
principle he gives is quite profound. You can do anything,
engage with anything the modern world throws at you, as
long as you are sure that you can do without
it maintain inner freedom.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
That sounds incredibly difficult, a path for very few.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
I imagine, definitely a path for a minority. Those he
sees as still rooted in terra firma, in that unchanging reality,
even while living in the chaos.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
They form a kind of invisible network.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
An invisible, unbreakable chain. As he puts it, these are
the people who hold onto possibilities beyond the current age.
The ancient Greeks had a term for such figures, the
egaroya egaroya those who are awake. They keep the flame alive,
even if unseen by the majority.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
That leaves us with a really challenging thought. If Evola
is right and the modern world is, in his terms, unrealistic,
doomed because it's lost its connection to being, then what
does it actually mean for you listening now to find
that fixed point, that interstability he talks about, the cocrovartan
within that stands outside the relentless flow of time and history.
(13:59):
What would that even look like in your life?
Welcome to the deep dive. We take complex ideas, philosophy,
history and try to boil them down into something clear,
a story you can really grasp.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And today we're tackling, well, a pretty heavy one. Julias
Sevilla's vision of history. It's mainly from his big work
Revolt against the Modern World.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Yeah, definitely polarizing stuff. Our goal here isn't to endorse it, obviously,
but to understand the story he's telling, this grand narrative
of cosmic decline and maybe spiritual resilience.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Exactly, it's crucial to get that this isn't just politics
for him, it's metaphysics framed as history, and it all
starts with this core conflict he lays out, which it's
between two fundamental types of civilization. You've got the traditional world,
totally centered on the supernatural what.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
He calls being okay, being got it, and.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Then you have the modern world, which is obsessed with
the temporal, the changing, what he calls becoming.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
So all his critiques, the really controversial stuff about quality democracy,
it all flows from that metaphysical starting point.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Absolutely, he believes the modern world basically cut itself off
from being so for him, those critiques are just logical outcomes.
It all hinges on what he calls the fundamental doctrine
of the two natures.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Two natures, yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
The physical mortal world, which is inferior in his view,
and then the metaphysical immortal order that's the superior one,
the source, the anchor.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
And for people in that traditional world, this wasn't just
a theory.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Not according to Avola, it was lived knowledge. The invisible
wasn't just believed in. It was in a sense more real,
more fundamental than what you could see and touch.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Okay, so let's start the story at the top, the
absolute peak. Evola calls it the Golden Age, the era
of the gods. What did that look like?
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Pure being, light, life, connection to the transcendent. He draws
on myths like Hesiod, talking about a time when mortals
lived like gods, no sickness, no death, no toil.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Sounds pretty good. Where did this supposedly happen?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
He often links it to primordial North centers like Hyperborea,
But the key thing isn't the location, is that this state,
these beings didn't just die out. The idea is they retreated,
retreated where into the invisible they sort of stepped outside
of time altogether, and.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Right at the heart of this traditional setup was the ruler,
not just any ruler, though he had a specific term,
the Cocravartan.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Yes, it means the universal king or the spinner of
the wheel.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Spinner of the wheel. Yeah, what does that signify?
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Think of the universe of time as a constantly turning
wheel that's becoming or sisera. The cokravartan is the axel,
the still point at the center.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Uh okay. So completely unlike a modern leader who's all
about action, making changes, being seen to.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Do things, exactly the opposite, the cockravarten embodies innerstability. His
power isn't human, It comes from above. That's why you
see so many solar symbols linked to traditional kingship, the
Sun's unchanging glory. Think Egypt, Persia.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
So this king, this Darmaraja, lord of law, How did
he actually rule if he wasn't constantly busy.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Through his very presence, his being. Look at the Chinese
idea of temming, the mandate of heaven. The ideal emperor
rules way away, acting without acting. His spiritual integrity, his
connection to the cosmic order is what maintains harmony. If
things went wrong, disasters, unrest, it wasn't bad policy. It
(03:23):
was seen as the king losing that inner connection, his virtue,
his glory, fading.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
His center wasn't holding.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Precisely, And this principle didn't just apply to the king.
It shaped the whole of society, which brings us to cast.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yeah, this is a really tricky part of Evola's thought
for modern readers. The hierarchy it is.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
And it's vital to grasp that. For him, the traditional hierarchy,
like the Indian system Brahma down to Shudra, wasn't primarily
about economics or power in the way we think of
it now. It was spiritual.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
But the idea of that twice born, the aria, being
inherently superior, how did he justify that? Sounds purely discriminatory.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
His justification rests on spiritual potential. The twice born were
those supposedly attuned to the divine element, the transcendent. The
shudra belonged more to the purely natural material realm.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
So in this ideal view, it wasn't about oppression.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
According to a Vola, No, it was about differentiation, allowing
each person to fulfill their own inherent nature. Their spud harma,
their specific function within a larger spiritually oriented whole. It
was meant to be organic, directing all functions upward.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
And what powered this whole system, what connected the earthly
structure to the heavens, the right.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Ritual ratus or elias sacram This was supreme. The idea
was that the physical world we see it only contains
effects effects. Yeah, the real causes for good harvests, for victory,
and battle for health. They were generated or at least guided,
in the invisible dimension. And the way you interacted with
that dimension was through precise ritual action. The head of
the family, the Pedophomilias, was like a priest king in miniature,
(04:57):
managing this ritual power.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Okay, so that's the peak. But Evola's story is mostly
about the decline, the involution. It happens in stages, right
following the Doctor of the four ages. What's the first
step down.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
That's the Silver age, And the big shift is in polarity.
Think of it as moving from the masculine solar north
to the feminine lunar south, from the sky father to
the earth mother.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
The feminine principle takes over dominates.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah, the focus shifts to the earthly the telluric. The
highest reality isn't that detached transcendent being anymore. It becomes
the universal Mother. Isis cibele demeter the cosmic womb?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
And why is that a decline?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
In e Vola's view, because the spiritual gets entangled with
the material, with generation, with nature, the solar principle, which
was supreme, gets demoted. It's often shown as a child
or consort born from the Great Mother, rather than being
the ultimate source itself.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
You could see this reflected in actual practices. Can't you
like how people dealt with death?
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Absolutely, It's a key contrast. The earlier solar aligned traditions
often favored cremation, purification by fire, freeing the spirit to ascend.
But the Silver Age cultures, often Southern Mediterranean ones, lean
towards burial, returning the body to the earth, the magna mater.
It's a very different spiritual orientation bound to the earth.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Okay, So after the Silver Age comes the Bronze Age,
the Age of battle axes sounds ominous.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
It is This is where raw physical force really comes
to the fore. It's an age of heroes, yes, but
also violence, war, the connection to divine guidance weakens further,
like in the Norse myths exactly, think of the quilight
of the easter finner, the wolf swallowing the sun and moon,
the bifrost bridge connecting worlds collapsing. Evola describes the men
(06:40):
of this age as having hearts hard as iron. It's
a descent into a kind of heroic materialism.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
But even here in this violent age, there was still
a path back up, a way to make fighting spiritual.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yes, the path of the traditional warrior. This is crucial.
Evola makes a distinction, drawing from Islam actually, between the
lesser holy war and the greater hole. The lesser war
is the external one, fighting enemies on the battlefield, but
the greater war el jiado akbar is the inner struggle
against what, against your own fear, your base instincts, the
attachment to life itself. For the traditional warrior, the external
(07:13):
battle becomes a ritual, a way to wage that inner war.
By facing death unflinchingly, by sacrificing the merely personal, they
could achieve a kind of transcendence.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Like critin telling Arjuna in the Gita fight, but do
it without attachment.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Precisely, that transforming the physical conflict into a spiritual discipline.
That was the warrior's route to immortality in a declining age.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Which brings us crashing down to the final stage, the
Iron Age, the kali Yuga, what Evola calls the modern world,
and here the connection to transcendence is basically gone.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Almost completely severed. In his view, the focus shifts entirely
to the human, the temporal, the material. This is where
his critique becomes absolutely sweeping.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Including things you might not expect, like his view on fascism.
Given his politics, he'd think he'd be on board, but
not really, not at all.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
He was famously dismissive. There's that quote. Too bad for
Mussolini when told the dictator didn't get his ideas.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Why the dismissal. What was wrong with fascism?
Speaker 2 (08:12):
For Avola it lacked a genuine spiritual core. He saw
it as too plebeian, too bureaucratic, to focused on nationalism
and state power in a purely worldly sense. It didn't
aim to restore the transcendent principle.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
So just another manifestation of the Iron Age's.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Materialism exactly, just politics, not metaphysics. And he levels a similar,
maybe even harsher critique against Christianity.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
How so, how did Christianity contribute to the decline, According
to him.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Well, fundamentally by separating spiritual and temporal authority, render unto
Caesar and unto God. That split between Satudochium and regnum
was for Evola a direct attack on the unified sovereignty
of the traditional world.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Okay, the separation of church and state, basically yes.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
But more profoundly he also disliked its whole spiritual tenor,
the emphasis on suffering, guilt, compassion, the focus on a
dying God. He saw that as a kind of emotionalism,
a plashic Dinetian element, totally at odds with the detached,
impassive solar ideal of the Olympian gods he admired.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Interesting, But maybe the most fundamental shift he identifies in
modernity is about how we view human activity itself, This
idea of action versus work.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
This is absolutely key. In the traditional view, true action
was sacred, It was ritual. It was how humans connected
effects in this world to causes in the metaphysical realm.
It was free, meaningful work. Ponos in Greek was seen
as drudgery, a punishment almost fit for slaves. It was
just mechanical, contingent activity, cut off from any higher purpose.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
But the modern world flips that completely on its head totally.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
We've elevated work toil, economic activity, technical production into the
highest values. It's become a kind of religion in.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Itself, a mysticism of social service, he called where economic
output is the measure of all things exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Think about the difference between a traditional farmer performing harvest rites,
seeing the act as both physical and sacred, and modern agribusiness,
which is purely about yield and profit. We've lost the
very idea that there's a difference between sacred action and
profane work.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
And Ivola saw this playing out on a global scale
in his time, with America and Russia representing the final stage.
He called them two ends of the same pair of pincers.
That seems odd given the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
It does, but his point wasn't about their political ideologies,
which he saw as superficial. It was about their underlying substance,
which was materialism, quantity over quality, the rule of the masses,
the mass man technocracy. Whether it's state collectivism or corporate capitalism,
he argued, the end result is the same depersonalization, the
(10:50):
triumph of the economic, the dominance of the lowest principle,
what he called the fourth estate, the slave principle. They
were just different flavors of the same Iron Age reality.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Wow, of two sides of the same debase coin.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Basically, that was his view, both driving towards a world
dominated by machines and quantity, crushing the individual spirit.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
And the justification we tell ourselves for all this the
story that makes it seem.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Okay, that's what he calls the myth of progress, evolution, historicism,
all these modern ideas that tell us we're moving forward,
getting better.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
But for a Vola, they're just an alibi.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Exactly, an alibi for decline. They take this descent from
spirit to matter, from quality to quantity, and they slap
the label progress on it. Ideas like Darwin's or Fords
suggesting civilization rises from barbarism from the primitive seas. They
completely invert the traditional view of noble origins in a
Golden age. It makes the decline seem not just inevitable
(11:44):
but desirable. Hashtag tag outrou Okay.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
So we've traced this grand downward arc of history. According
to a Vola from a Golden age of being to
an iron age obsessed with becoming in matter. It's a
bleak picture. Where does that leave us listeners navigating this
modern world?
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Well, his conclusion is one of radical detachment. He essentially says, Look,
whether that perfect Golden age ever actually existed in a
literal historical sense doesn't even matter that much.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Really, why not?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Because the principles of tradition, transcendence, hierarchy right are timeless.
They exist outside history. His work isn't a call to
political action in the usual sense. It's more like a testimony.
It's for those few individuals who still sense that other dimension,
who feel fundamentally outside this world.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
And for those people, what's the strategy. You can't just
check out, can you No?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
And that's where his later idea from Ride the Tiger
comes in, cavel kerlet tiger, ride the tiger. Yeah, the
modern world is like a ferocious tiger dissolution and chaos.
You don't fight it head on, you don't run away
from it, and you certainly don't try to appease it.
You leap onto its back and ride it, move with
its destructive energy, but remain inwardly detached centered. The key
(12:56):
principle he gives is quite profound. You can do anything,
engage with anything the modern world throws at you, as
long as you are sure that you can do without
it maintain inner freedom.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
That sounds incredibly difficult, a path for very few.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
I imagine, definitely a path for a minority. Those he
sees as still rooted in terra firma, in that unchanging reality,
even while living in the chaos.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
They form a kind of invisible network.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
An invisible, unbreakable chain. As he puts it, these are
the people who hold onto possibilities beyond the current age.
The ancient Greeks had a term for such figures, the
egaroya egaroya those who are awake. They keep the flame alive,
even if unseen by the majority.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
That leaves us with a really challenging thought. If Evola
is right and the modern world is, in his terms, unrealistic,
doomed because it's lost its connection to being, then what
does it actually mean for you listening now to find
that fixed point, that interstability he talks about, the cocrovartan
within that stands outside the relentless flow of time and history.
(13:59):
What would that even look like in your life?
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