Review: Ride the Tiger: A Survival Guide for the Aristocrat of the Soul By Julius Evola

If you want to understand what a culture is, you take a look at what it bans and suppresses. If art or culture is censored, it is because it has touched on a sensitive, and therefore not trivial, issue. Faces of Death is my favorite film for much this reason. That’s why the Alt.right is worth taking a good hard look at. If I like nothing else about the alt.right, I respect them purely for having offended people. Regardless of anything else, if Richard Spencer has been banned from entering Poland, it is because he has presented a challenge to their social order. If I had anything positive to say about Richard Spencer who I’m not a big fan of, I will have to admit that he has something to do with revival of interest in Evola. I don’t belong to the Alt.Right for a number of reasons, but I like the fact that there is revival of interest in the works of Julius Evola, a thinker I admire greatly. Though connected to the Fascist party in Italy, we cannot blame the long dead Evola for the Alt.Right, as I am certain he wouldn’t embrace them, as he embraced little of anything to emerge from the modern world. Evola was one of those people who hates just about everything, kind of like myself.                                                     Finding that on Minds.com I have a growing audience that included alt.right members and recognizing quickly that these people had an interest in occult matters and even the works of Julius Evola, I started re-reading him. I had read him years before but had sort of forgotten about him. I like Evola. Nick Land is another formidable thinker somewhat associated with the alt.right but I think the one that speaks most deeply to me in my life circumstances is Evola, in so far as he has identified the modern world as the empty, soulless place it is. I am far less racialist than the alt.right, but there is a question that arises of egalitarianism and hierarchy, where I am going to fall actually more with the thinking of Land or Evola and dismiss the notion of the equality of man. Hierarchy is a natural consequence of nature. Obesity will remain prevalent among the welfare class as they will lack the self-discipline to become vegan as is necessary. Even those of wealthy backgrounds who fall to the opiate epidemic ill become dependent on the welfare state given time, also a consequence of lack of self-discipline.                                                                                                                                                                 Ride the Tiger does not directly address the notion of race much. I don’t think the Jews are even mentioned in it, which is of course a topic of fixation of the alt.right. The modern world, all of it, to Evola, is a place of desolation and the only advantage it may have is the challenge it present to whom he calls “the man of distinction”, which he identifies as being by no means the common man, but the man who looks onto the modern world and is able to identify it for what it is. Evola writing in 1961 identified the beginning of a massive import of ideas from the East that was to be a bastardization, which is of course evident in our times as the modern New Age movement. Evola, certainly, called that one. Equally perceptive, Evola spends a good chunk of the book not addressing the problem of post-structuralism as such as it did not exist yet but critiquing Heidegger, Sartre and other continental philosophy types. He does not fall to the philosophical position of nihilism, which he spends a great deal of space arguing against. I was surprised by how much time he spent writing against existentialism and surprised to see him reference Barth, another writer I had read years ago but forgotten about.                                                                                                                   A good chunk of the book is actually just Evola critiquing continental philosophy types he isn’t crazy about. There is for Evola the world of Tradition, a world which is hierarchal and which is governed by specific structures, and thus governed by meaning. Then there is the modern world for him which is antithetical to the world of Tradition. To Evola there is hope in that there are men of distinction who are able to be “still standing on their feet amongst the ruins”. Science, other than medicine, has done nothing to enhance the well-being of man, says Evola. The import of bastardized Asian thought also points to the emptiness of modern man. To ride the tiger would be to recognize the modern world as a wasteland and remain above it. It is not a situation that is likely to get better anytime soon in Evola’s view. We live now in the United States with the opiate epidemic, the obesity epidemic, and any number of other sicknesses. It is in this kind of sickness, this decline that the person who is cognizant, which is of course the person who is in an extreme minority, has to live. That is the way it is, and whether the left thinks Evola is a fascist or a racist or whatever else, he was right about that in a lot of ways. Was Evola a fascist? Oh he is almost beyond fascist. He loves hierarchy and sides in all class conflict with the aristocracy of a culture given that culture is a “traditional” culture such as Vedic India. It’s going to be hard for me to lie and say that he isn’t right about a lot of things.