Theme: Civilization

NOTES ON JULIUS EVOLA’S RIDE THE TIGER

(reason the european right fails)

1) EXPERIENTIAL LANGUAGE SHOWS HIS LACKING. He has to use a lot of experiential terms because he does not understand the ‘scientific’ content of our ‘traditions’ that he ‘feels and intuits’.

2) WE CANNOT RE-EVOLVE INTUITIONISTIC TRADITIONS, WE CAN ONLY IMPOSE OBSERVABLE LAW. Without understanding that content, one cannot impose the content of that prior (traditional) order by procedural, institutional, intentional means. The habituated, ‘unscientific’ mythos that the ‘traditional world’ evolved under cannot be institutionally reconstructed. In other words, while one can accidentally evolve, by trial and error, a set of myths, rituals, traditions, norms and habits, and institute them by the legislation; once the scientific . In other words, if content is ‘true’ then it can be imposed by rule of law.

3) ARISTOCRATIC ACCUMULATION VS PROLETARIAN CONSUMPTION. He is speaking of the aristocratic mind, and how there is no longer a role for aristocratic mind in our ‘bourgeoise’ or better stated ‘consumer’ civilization, in which we signal by consumption rather than the production and paternal ‘farming’ of civilizational excellence: the true, the commons, and the beautiful. In other words, he is speaking as an aristocratic producer of commons, not a bourgeoise production of consumption, nor a mere consumer of production. He lacks the language (Propertarianism) to make his statements in what we would today call a ‘technical’ or ‘scientific’ language.

That’s the IMPORTANT POINT: Conservative construction of commons vs progressive consumption of commons

4) LACKING LANGUAGE MEANS LACKING THEORY. Through traditional lends, he uses antique terminology that misleads him (as do many french, german and Italian thinkers). Imprecise words (allegories) are an intellectual prison just as precise words (theories) are an intellectual key to intellectual freedom.

5) VIRTUE ETHICS He is looking for a virtue ethics (as are most of us, since they are the easiest to understand and adopt with the least general knowledge), which evolves in response (as justification of) a set of metaphysical value judgements. But one cannot construct virtue ethics by institutional means. One can only justify scientific institutions by a means of virtue ethics.

6) SAVIOR MYTH. As such, (like Hoppe), Evola’s solution is to preserve our literature and intentions, and seize an opportunity that MAY come in the future. Meaning he has failed to develop an institutional solution to restore the scientific (objectively good) content of our traditions. In other words, he is creating a christian “savior mythos” for himself. And not a solution for ourself. My solution is actually pretty simple: continue the evolution of the common law of non-imposition against any form of property, into a formal inviolable, verbalism-impervious, logic of cooperation.

7) BELIEF WITHOUT MEANS OF PERSISTENCE VS INCENTIVES WITH MEANS OF PERSISTENCE. While as an intellectual I sympathize with and share sentiments and intuitions with, as well as aesthetic history, he provides little explanation of the incentives and institutions that allowed those traditional circumstances to arise, and he focuses as do most ‘philosophers’ upon what good ‘belief’ is (which is nonsense, since belief is justificationary). ‘Belief’ and ‘value’ are terms hungover from the age of mysticism. We need not believe incentives. They exist. They can be constructed. We can construct a high trust order. In fact, it’s not even complicated. Few recipes are complicated. It’s discovering them.

8) MY OWN GERMANIC (PREWAR) BIAS. I realize that I am an anglo analytic (scientific) not a continental rational (moral), and that english is a technical language and that continental intellectual history is poetic, literary, romantic, moral and spiritual. They have the curse of norms that island people (the anglosphere) has in canada thanks to the french abuse of canada in the 70’s, but which americans and to some degree australians do not quite. In this case it is most obvious that America is a german country speaking the english language prior to the breakup of germanic civilzation into anglo and german wings in the 1830’s. And americans retain the pre-war germanic political culture, albeit in english language, more so than do either Britain or Germany today.

9) NOTHING TO LEARN FROM HIM BUT POETIC LICENSE. Realistically, I just can get nothing from him. I have developed propertarianism and testimonialism to escape the limits of the ages of mysticism and rationalism, and to bring political discourse into the age of science.

10) OTHERS MIGHT GAIN MEANING PRIOR TO PROPERTARIANISM. Perhaps for many others of the aristocratic (paternal) class, it is, and will be, easier to understand Evola prior to understanding Propertarianism and Testimonialism. Perhaps I am the product of my half century of science and computer science. Perhaps I have been trained to eradicate the subjective experience from my perceptions such that the subjective experience sounds to me as talk of gods will sounds to scientists and aethists. So becasue of that training, and my now near universal loss of appreciateion for fictional literature, and what I term justificationary moralizing, I can find no value in looking backward into less parsimonious political literature. But that does not mean others will not. It means only that like classical liberalism, anglo libertarianism, cosmopolitan libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, and Neo-Reaction, that Evola is a step in the intellectual history that many must go through, even though he has no solutions and provides us no means of achieving our ends – or even understanding what too seek and how.

RESTATING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ADVOCATIVE INFORMAL BELIEF AND PROHIBITIONARY FORMAL INSTITUTIONS.

Belief and ‘value’ are not meaningful words in political philosophy. They are artifacts of religious mysticism and its half hearted reformation: rational philosophy. Adults today speak in terms of Institutions, incentives, economics, and law.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine