IMPERIUM

by Francis Parker Yockey
aka "Ulick Varange"

FOREWORD

THIS BOOK is different from other books. First of all, it is only in form a book at all. In reality, it is a part of the life of action. It is a turning-point in European history, a late turning point, but a real one. There is nothing original in the content of this book, the book itself only is original. The craze for originality is a manifestation of decadence, and the decadence of Europe is the ascendancy of the Barbarian.

This is the first of a line of works — the political literature of Europe. Heretofore all political works on the imperative side have been addressed to one nation of Europe alone. Among other things, this book marks the end of Rationalism. It does not bring it about — not books but only the advance of History can accomplish anything of that sort — it merely rings its funeral knell. Thus the imperative side of Life returns to its pristine source, the will-to-power. Henceforth there will be no discussion of action in terms of abstract thought.

This is addressed to all Europe, and in particular to the culture-bearing stratum of Europe. It summons Europe to a world-historical struggle of two centuries' duration. Europe will partake in this struggle either as a participant, or as the booty for marauding powers from without. If it is to act, and not merely to suffer in this series of gigantic wars, it must be integrated, and there is only one way this can occur. The Western Culture is suffering from disease, and the prolongation of this disease is the prolonging of Chinese conditions in Europe.

The word Europe changes its meaning: from now on it means the Western Civilization, the organic unity which created as phases of its life the nation-ideas of Spain, Italy, France, England and Germany. These former nations are all dead; the era of political nationalism has passed. This has not happened through logical necessity, but through the organic advance of the History of the West. It is this organic necessity which is the source of our imperative, and of the integration of Europe. The significance of the organic is that its alternatives are either to do the necessary or to sicken and die.

The present chaos — 1948 — is directly traceable to the attempt to prevent the integration of Europe. As a result, Europe is in a swamp, and extra-European forces dispose of former European nations as their colonies.

In this book are the precise, organic foundations of the Western soul, and in particular, its Imperative at this present stage. Either Europe will become totally integrated, or it will pass entirely out of history, its peoples will be dispersed, its efforts and brains will be at the disposal forever of extra-European forces. This is shown herein, not by abstract formulae and intellectualized theories, but organically and historically. The conclusions therefore are not arbitrary, not a subject for choosing or rejecting, but absolutely compelling to minds which wish to take part in affairs. The real author is the Spirit of the Age, and its commands do not admit of argumentation, and their sanction is the crushing might of History, bringing defeat, humiliation, death and chaos.

I condemn here at the outself the miserable plans of retarded souls to "unite" Europe as an economic area for purposes of exploitation by and defense of the Imperialism of extra-European forces. The integration of Europe is not a subject for plans, but for expression. It needs but to be recognized, and the perpetuation of nineteenth century economic thinking is entirely incapable here. Not trade and banking, not importing and exporting, but Heroism alone can liberate that integrated soul of Europe which lies under the financial trickery of retarders, the petty-stateism of party-politicians, and the occupying armies of extra-European forces.

The imperative integration of Europe takes the form of unity of People, Race, Nation, State, Society, Will — and naturally also — economy. The spiritual unity of Europe is there, its liberation will automatically allow the full blooming of the other phases of the organic unity, which all flow from the spiritual.

And thus, this book is a renewal of a war-declaration. It asks the traitors to Europe, the miserable party-politicians whose tenure of office is dependent upon their continued serviceability to extra-European forces, "Did you think it was over? Do you think that your misery and shame will remain securely forever on a world-stage which has seen true heroes upon it? In the war which you let loose, you taught men how to die, and thereby you have freed a spirit which will engulf you next, the Spirit of Heroism and Discipline. There is no currency that can buy this spirit, but it can overcome any currency."

Lastly, this book is itself the first blow in the gigantic war for the liberation of Europe. The prime enemy is the traitor within Europe, who alone makes possible the starving and looting of Europe by the outer forces. He is the symbol of Chaos and Death. Between him and the spirit of the twentieth century is unremitting war.

ULICK VARANGE
Brittas Bay, January 30, 1948

CONTENTS

• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• Introduction by Willis Carto and Revilo Oliver
• THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK
  • Perspective 3
  • The Two Aspects of History 17
  • The Relativity of History 21
  • The Meaning of Facts 25
  • The Demise of the Linear View of History 29
  • The Structure of History 38
  • Pessimism 46
  • The Civilization-Crisis 58
  • Darwinism 66
  • Marxism 78
  • Freudianism 89
  • The Scientific-Technical World-Outlook 98
  • The Imperative of Our Age 110
• THE 20TH CENTURY POLITICAL OUTLOOK
  • Introduction 123
  • The Nature of Politics 127
  • The War-Politics Symbiosis 137
  • The Laws of Totality and Sovereignty 152
  • The Pluralistic State 157
  • The Law of Constancy of Inter-Organismic Power 160
  • The Law of Constancy of Intra-Organismic Power 163
  • The Political Pluriverse 166
  • League of Nations 170
  • The Inner Aspect of the Law of Sovereignty 175
  • Political Organisms and War 183
  • The Law of Political Plenum 190
  • The Law of Protection and Obedience 194
  • Internationale 198
  • The Two Political Anthropologies 204
  • Liberalism 208
  • Democracy 224
  • Communism 231
  • Association and Dissociation of Forms of Thought and Action 234
• CULTURAL VITALISM — CULTURE HEALTH
  • Introduction 247
  • The Articulation of a Culture 250
  • Tradition and Genius 261
  • Genius 265
  • Genius and the Age of Absolute Politics 270
  • Race, People, Nation, State 273
  • Subjective Meaning of Race 292
  • Horizontal Race versus Vertical Race 300
  • Race and Policy 304
  • People 317
  • Nation 328
  • Nation and History 334
  • Nation and Rationalism 338
  • Nation in the 20th Century 348
  • State 354
• CULTURAL VITALISM — CULTURE PATHOLOGY
  • Culture Pathology 369
  • Culture Parasitism 376
  • Culture Distortion 402
  • Culture Retardation as a Form of Culture Distortion 410
  • Culture Distortion Arising from Parasitic Activity 416
• AMERICA
  • Introduction 443
  • The Origins of America 445
  • The American Ideology 450
  • The War of Secession, 1861-1865 458
  • The American Practice of Government 463
  • The History of American Imperialism 472
  • American Imperialism in the Age of Annihilation Wars 482
  • The American Revolution of 1933 493
  • World-Outlook 502
  • The Negro in America 512
  • Culture-Retardation in America 517
  • Propaganda 524
  • The Conduct of American Foreign Affairs from 1933 535
  • The Future of America 549
• THE WORLD SITUATION
  • The Political World 561
  • The First World War 565
  • The Second World War 571
  • Russia 578
  • Japan 587
  • America 591
  • The Terror 596
  • The Abyss 607
  • Imperium 612

INTRODUCTION

DIMLY, I could make out the form of this man — this strange and lonely man — through the thick wire netting. Inwardly, I cursed these heavy screens that prevented our confrontation. For even though our mutual host was the San Francisco County Jail, and even though the man upon whom I was calling was locked in equality with petty thieves and criminals, I knew that I was in the presence of a great force, and I could feel History standing aside me.

Yesterday, the headlines had exploded their sensational discovery. "MYSTERY MAN WITH THREE PASSPORTS JAILED HERE," they screamed. A man of mystery — of wickedness — had been captured. A man given to dark deeds and — much worse — forbidden thoughts, too, the journalists squealed. A man who had roamed the earth on mysterious missions and who was found to be so dangerous that his bail was set at $50,000 — a figure ten or twenty times the normal bail for passport fraud. The excitement of the newspapers and the mystery of it all seemed to indicate that this desperado was an international gangster, or a top communist agent.

 At least, this is what the papers hinted. But I know now that it erred in many ways, this "free press" of ours.

I know now that the only real crime of Francis Parker Yockey was to write a book, and for this he had to die.

It is always impossible, of course, to come to grips with the essence of greatness.  There are known facts of a great life, but facts are dead and almost mute when we seek the essential reality of a creative personality.  But let us review some of the facts we know of a life which is at once significant, fascinating and tragic.

Francis Parker Yockey was born in Chicago in 1917. He attended American universities, taking a B.A. degree in 1938 and, three years later, a degree in law from Notre Dame, where he was graduated cum laude.

From earliest childhood, Yockey was recognized for his prodigious abilities, and resented for them by many. History may reveal that the combination of originality and high intelligence in rare individuals is essential for human progress, but we mortals find these qualities more admired in biographies than in classmates, friends and underlings.

Yockey was a concert-level pianist; he was a gifted writer. He studied languages and became a linguist. As a lawyer, he never lost a case. He had an extraordinary grasp of the world of finance — and this is surprising, for we learn that in his philosophy economics is relegated to a relatively unimportant position. And it is as the Philosopher that Yockey reached the summit; it is this for which he will be remembered; he was a man of incredible vision. Even so, his personality was spiced by the precious gift of a sense of humor.

Like the great majority of Americans, Yockey opposed American intervention in the Second World War. Nevertheless, he joined the army and served until 1942 when he received a medical discharge (honorable). The next few years were spent in the practice of law, first in Illinois and subsequently in Detroit, where he was appointed Assistant County Attorney for Wayne County, Michigan.

In 1946, Yockey was offered a job with the war crimes tribunal and went to Europe. He was assigned to Wiesbaden, where the "second string" Nazis were lined up for trial and punishment. The Europe of 1946 was a war-ravaged continent, not the prosperous land we know today. Viewing the carnage, and seeing with his own eyes the visible effects of the unspeakable Morgenthau Plan which had as its purpose the starvation of 30 million Germans, and which was being put into effect at that time, he no doubt found ample reinforcement for his conviction that American involvement in the war had been a ghastly mistake. And feeling the might of the sinister power in the East, he might well have wondered whose interests were being served by such a "victory."

As Senator Robert A. Taft and many other responsible and thinking men of the day who had the courage to state their convictions, Yockey concluded that the entire procedure of the "war crimes trials" was serving the interests — and was meant to serve the interests — of international communism The use of torture, doctored evidence and ex-post-facto law before a court which was judge, jury, prosecutor and defense were merely part of the preposterous juridical aspects. Of even more importance was the reversion to barbarism which was inherent in the spectacle — a reversion so pointedly explored later by Britisher F. J. P. Veale in Advance to Barbarism.

For eleven months, Yockey's duty in Wiesbaden was to prepare reports on the various cases. Having a long view of history, he tried to do an objective job. Finally, in Washington, someone complained, and his superior called him on the carpet. "We don't want this type of report," he was told. "This has entirely the wrong slant. You'll have to rewrite these reports to conform with the official viewpoint."

Yockey felt that the time had come to take a stand, even if it meant to break with conformity and plunge into the lonely waters of social ostracism. "I am a lawyer, not a journalist," he said, "you'll have to write your own propaganda"; and he quit on the spot.

After Wiesbaden, he returned to America for five months. But following this taste of weltpolitik he was unable to settle down. He could not ignore an insistent feeling that he must immolate himself in the flames of controversy. And this conviction so destroyed his peace of mind that he knew he had no choice.

It was late 1947 when Yockey returned to Europe. He sought out a quiet inn at Brittas Bay, Ireland. Isolated, he struggled to begin. Finally, he started to write, and in six months — working entirely without notes — Francis Parker Yockey completed Imperium.

The formidable task of publishing it was the next step. Here, also, Yockey ran into serious problems, for no publisher would touch the book, it being too "controversial." Hungry publishers of our advanced day know that any pile of trash, filth, sex, sadism, perversion and sickness will sell when wrapped between two gaudy covers and called a book, but under no circumstances may they allow readers to come into contact with a serious work unless it contains the standard obeisances to the catchwords of equality, democracy and universal brotherhood.

Finally, however, Yockey was able to secure the necessary financing, and production began.

The first edition of Imperium was issued in two volumes. Volume I has 405 pages and three chapters. Volume II has 280 pages and also three chapters. Both were published in 1948 in the name of Westropa Press. Volume I was printed by C. A. Brooks & Co., Ltd. and Volume II by Jones & Dale — both of London. Both volumes measure 5 x 71/4 inches in dimensions and have a red dust jacket with the title in black script on a white field. The cover of Volume I is tan and that of Volume II is black.

It is known that 1000 copies of Volume I, but only 200 copies of Volume II, were finished. The discrepancy in quantity and the change in printers point to the difficulty in financing the job. Copies of the first edition are, of course, virtually unobtainable today.

The rarest combination in man is that of the philosopher and man of action. When Yockey tried his hand at political organization he proved that he was no exception to the rule — or was it that the times then were too out of joint with the future for a constructive movement to be started? Organizing the European Liberation Front in 1949, he and friends issued a manifesto called The Proclamation of London. But outside of getting beaten up in Hyde Park, nothing much happened. And here again he encountered the old trouble. Even among the forward-looking intellectuals and individualists who were his co-workers, his brilliance shone through. He was resented, and the effort soon collapsed.

His money and immediate hopes gone, Yockey procured a job with the Red Cross. He resigned in 1951 and travelled throughout Europe.

In 1952 the State Department refused to renew his passport. Repeatedly, he applied; each time he was rejected. A game then developed between the FBI and Yockey, for the FBI had received orders to keep him under surveillance at all times. This is a pattern which has since become obvious to vigorous anti-communists in all parts of the United States, especially in the South. When Yockey's whereabouts was known, the FBI would watch him night and day. When he dropped temporarily from sight, as he did frequently, his friends and relatives and contacts were constantly interrogated by agents who — they kept repeating "we just want to talk to him."

And this was undoubtedly the truth. This is all they wanted to do. They just wanted to know where he was, what he was doing, whom he was seeing, what he was saying and where he was going next.

Why, you ask? Why all the interest in Francis Parker Yockey, author? He himself gave the answer to a friend. "My enemies have evaluated me better than my friends," he said, and it was true.

And as I peered through the thick screens in the San Francisco Jail, and made out the indefinite shape on the other side, that tenth day of June, 1960, I knew that I would have to help the prisoner as best I could. I could do nothing else.

I have read your book, I said to the shadow, and I want to help you. What can I do?

Wait, he said. Wait, and do as your conscience tells you.

The following week was full of news of Yockey s appearance before Rabbi Joseph Karesh, the U.S. Commissioner.

Twice, I attended the hearings, and each time was fascinated by this man, Yockey. In stature he was about five feet, ten inches. He was light of weight, perhaps 145 pounds, and quick on his feet. His hair was dark, and starting to grey. The expression on his face — pensive, sensitive, magnetic — this was the unforgettable thing. It was his eyes, I think. Dark, with a quick and knowing intelligence. His eyes bespoke great secrets and knowledge and such terrible sadness. As he turned to leave, one time, those eyes quickly searched the room, darting from face to face with a sort of desperation, though the expression on his face of a determined resignation never wavered. What was he looking for? In that lions den, what else but a friendly countenance? As his gaze swept across, and then to me, he stopped and for the space of a fractional second, spoke to me with his eyes. In that instant we understood that I would not desert him.

Friday morning, June 17, I arose as usual. I heard the radio announcer pronounce words that stunned me.

Yockey was dead.

"I'll sleep through 'til morning" was the cryptic message he gave his cellmate, last night. Was the morning he anticipated the dawn of a new age?

A garbled note was found. The coroner declared it suicide and said the poison was potassium cyanide. No one knew where he had gotten it. The case was closed.

As Americans, we have been taught from infancy to believe that we live in a free country. But times change, and America has become transformed in many ways. Often, the old formalities are observed, but the meaning and inner reality of America has changed, and no one saw this more clearly than Francis Parker Yockey. How the press, for example, loves to brag to its victims — its readers — about its freedom. Yes, the press may be free to lie and distort and suppress and deceive and malign, but is it free to tell the truth?

The spectacle of a man being persecuted, framed and driven to his death simply because he wrote a book is not one we would expect to see in the Twentieth Century in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But are we free when an American citizen whose only crime was to write a book is denied a passport by the State Department — a privilege which is given to all but the most notorious degenerates and criminals? It was not until April 24, 1962, that the State Department finally got around to beginning hearings to deny passports to the most important communists — but the "free press somehow forgot to report at the time that no report of a confidential nature from the FBI or any other source would be used against a communist unless he was given the "right" of confrontation with his accuser. And, of course, the right of appeal would be scrupulously honored, even then.

Are we free when a citizen can be arrested without a warrant and held in jail without charges, but with the fantastic bail of $50,000 levied against him? Are we free when the vultures of the "free press" can swoop down upon the victim to heap calumny and scorn upon his head and accuse him of doing things he never did and saying things he never said in an effort to build up "public opinion" against him? Is America a free country when a sensitive genius can be held in the filthiest of jails with Negro and White criminals and is denied even clean clothes and a bath? Are we free when such a "criminal" is not allowed to see his sisters in private, and when a group which has supposedly been set up to defend the constitutional rights of citizens — the American Civil Liberties Union — would rather defend the "rights" of homosexuals, traitors, murderers and pornographers than a sincere patriot like Francis Parker Yockey, whose every thought and effort was in behalf of his fellow man? Are we free, I ask, when a judge can rule that a prisoner is not to have a "speedy and public trial by an impartial jury…," as guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, but, instead, must have a mental examination for the obvious purpose of eliminating a jury trial altogether? And finally, are we free when another group — vastly more powerful than the ACLU or the government itself — so powerful, indeed, that men dare not speak its name above a whisper, unless in terms of the most groveling praise — are we free when this group is able to dictate to the government the exact procedure which is to be used in disposing of troublemakers like Francis Parker Yockey? If such things as I have enumerated can happen — and they did — then our vaunted "freedom" is a fake thing; an empty word given to us by our watchful masters to keep us amused and quiet — as a parent gives a shiny bauble to a child.

It is enlightening to review the standard means whereby our masters combat positive ideas and movements. There is a pattern in such tactics which constructive forces will do well to study. The first tactic is suppression and determined non-recognition of the rebel and his works. The press will unanimously give the well known "silent treatment." Even at this early stage, if the movement gives promise of becoming significant, assassination is considered and carried out if possible. The murder of young Newton Armstrong, Jr., in San Diego, on the night of March 31, 1962, is a case in point. Quoting from Che Guevara's s book on guerilla warfare and the question of when to resort to assassination:

It is generally against the policy of the Communist Party to resort to assassination… However, it requires two criteria and a high-level policy decision… The criteria for the individual in question are that he must be highly effective and it must serve some sort of example — some sort of a highly effective example.

The next tactic is the Smear through libel, distortion, misrepresentation and the sowing of confusion wherever possible.This may be a negative smear with the purpose of destroying the effectiveness of an enemy or a positive smear for the purpose of building a haze around the truth to enable a disintegrative movement to develop. The falsification of the truth about Castro which was indulged in by virtually all of the press and, of course, the State Department, is a classic example of this. The Smear is usually started as an underground whispering campaign that viciously builds up to an outright and overt campaign, with the "free press" called into play. The object is to isolate enemies of the present regime and discredit them. The third tactic is infiltration into the movement and/or the building up of false leadership in order to sabotage the movement at the optimum time, meanwhile diverting patriot energies into harmless or controlled activities. The fourth and final stage is called upon only as a last resort, after the movement or philosophy has become institutionalized and is immune to grosser tactics. This is to "interpret" it so as to bring it as closely as possible into conformity with approved patterns. (Characteristically, the conflicting philosophies of both Jesus Christ and Friedrich Nietzsche have suffered this deadening interpretation.) Two or more of the above maneuvers are usually used simultaneously. For instance, in addition to the suppression of his Imperium, Yockey was also victimized by the Smear; and he was also in danger of assassination — and his enigmatic end settled the problem. Now it is with no gift of prophecy that one may predict that this present republication of his work will call forth the same sequence.

I tell you that the injustice of it all is enough to drive one mad. How can a man stomach the cynical or ignorant drivel of the liberals as they whine for "freedom of speech" and "right to dissent" and shake their bony fists at "conformity" and all the rest of their legerdemain when one knows that these moral cripples and ethical perverts demand their peculiar freedoms only for those who are working to destroy the West? We have seen their reaction when one committed to saving the West is in need of some of their medicine.

It was like a certain wise, old reporter whispered to one of Yockey's sisters as she slumped tearfully and quietly in her solitude. "Your brother is a martyr — the first of a long line of them — if we are to take back our country from those who have stolen it from us."

A surprising word on the Yockey affair came some weeks after his death, and was provided by the tight-lipped silence of the man who had been charged with railroading him to the insane asylum, the United States Attorney. Suddenly, inexplicably, he resigned his job, left his wife and children and joined a monastery.

Let us assume that at least one devoted servant of the Democracy has a conscience, even if displayed a little late.

Please allow me to expose to you my prejudice so that there will be no misunderstanding. I favor the survival of our Western cultural organism. I love those who fight for the integrity of the West, whoever they may be. And, as much as I fear and mistrust the outer enemies of the West, I despise our inner enemies and the cowards who support them far more — and I hate their putrid doctrine that calls our continuing degradation "inevitable."

Further, I believe that the West can survive. It all hinges on faith: faith in our future; faith in our superiority and survival. Skepticism, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, cynicism has destroyed the old faith, and it has not been replaced by a new one. But faith is and will always remain the essential ingredient in every historical force. Only a unifying faith can provide the common motivation for survival — the just and deep conviction of our right to live — and spark the single-minded and intolerant power which can clean and redeem our fast-decaying, rotting milieu. Very simply: the imperative of inspiring that faith is the central problem of our time.

And when I say, "survive," I mean nothing more. For we are so far gone; our philosophies, liberties and cultural patterns are so perverted or eroded that bare survival is all that is possible. I mean to say that those who are to save the West must realize at the outset that only part of it can be saved; that much must be sacrificed and that the resulting structure will be different from the past. Those who have gone before have allowed the dank "winds of change" to corrode the old life, and many weeds have sprung up which cannot entirely be eliminated. It is one thing to fight for an attainable ideal, but another to sacrifice for a lost cause. In determining what is attainable and what is forever lost a philosophy of history is needed.

And although our job is to rebuild we must not lose sight of the reality, for we cannot rebuild until we have captured. Political power is the essential criterion, not wishes or windbags, and to the goal of political power all else must be temporarily sacrificed. To say less is to insure defeat. He who is on board a sinking ship in a storm may be required to throw all his possessions overboard if this is necessary for common survival. Or, to use another image:

Those who would guide the West back across the Styx and out of the dark must travel first through the gates of Hell.

The practical problem of the recapture of political power divides itself into other questions. For one, is it possible to formulate an ethic and faith which, in itself, offers at least as much popular attractiveness as the painted lie of Marx? For another, how can those who would naturally lead such a movement compete with the highly-developed Leninistic operational diabolism in the perpetually savage and untamable jungle of political warfare — or is it necessary to do so? After all, the conspiracy we face is the hideous monster spawned of four millenniums of experience in guile and deception; so much so, in fact, that its main ally always has been the obtuse blindness of those on whom it feeds. "Struggle" to a man of the West means bullets, armies, and aircraft carriers. But to our enemy, international wars are of little meaning; "struggle" to him means not war but politics, and accordingly he has perfected his weapons in this most decisive of areas. Soldiers have never made good politicians, and, by the nature of their respective crafts, the soldier must always lose to the man of politics.

Finally comes the main consideration in formulating such a doctrine: will it certainly eradicate the politico-social evils and diseases of our day and lead mankind toward a better world?

It is by this standard and no other that you will, if you are wise, judge the work of Francis Parker Yockey.

To quit the search for such an ethic is to abandon history like the intellectual and spiritual nihilists — the liberals and beatniks. To quit the search is to turn over to the inner enemy carte blanche control over our lives, souls and fate.

The failure to provide this philosophy is not alone the fault of the saprophytes among us, however. Nor is it only the fault of the chameleon-like inner enemy of the West (the Culture Distorter; to use Yockey's apt term) which mercilessly persecutes and smashes all who dare to cry out against our rapid decline and degeneration; in all truth, it is mainly the fault of the many thousands who fully know the issues at stake yet have not the moral courage to identify and light the Culture Distorter; or — worse yet — who have, by diligent self-persuasion, convinced themselves that the battle for survival against an enemy that demands nothing less than total surrender can be fought and won with tax-deductible corporations, measured, "moderate" words and avoidance of "extremists." These dainty combatants swarm over every anti-communist movement like ants on sugar. By shrilly demonstrating their anti-communism they bribe their consciences to give them peace and often go so far as to join in the crucifixion of those few with moral courage lest they, too, be adjudged "guilty" by association. America has too many of such anti-communists and too few real patriots.

There is much in Imperium which can be easily misinterpreted. There is something for everyone to agree with. And there is something for everyone to disagree with. This is a distinguishing characteristic of every truly vital and revolutionary departure.

Yockey's criticism of Darwinism is an example of the first possibility, and it should be borne in mind that he is speaking of journalistic Darwinism, not the theory of evolution. A related point is his usage of the word, race. It would have added to clarity if another word, such as nobility, was used to describe those who feel the Imperative of the Age, for the genetic interpretation of race is a necessary, useful and valid one if we are to see all of our problems clearly and accurately. Also, Yockey cites some tests of doubtful validity when he asserts that children of immigrants into America are quite different in anthropological measurements than their parents. There is no doubt some truth to this; there are bodily differences caused by food and climate, but such conclusions can be carried into the realm of Lysenkoism unless great caution is used. Troyfim Lysenko is the Russian communist quack and high priest who "proved" through his hocus-pocus that environment and not heredity creates the man. Such a theory is the basic fallacy upon which the entire communist theory of man rests, though few people realize this. But heredity is a matter of genes and genes never change except through mutation unless genes of one type (race) are mixed with genes of another type (race). One of the best books on the subject to appear recently is Dr. Conway Zirkle's Evolution, Marxian Biology and the Social Scene. Evolution, biology and genetic inheritance must be treated as matters of life-facts, and any theory for the future has to accept them.

Yockey's usage of the word authority may be a source of misinterpretation. It should be remembered that the individual enjoyed far more liberty in Europe under the monarchs than in America, today. Doubters should familiarize themselves with Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, and the more recent work of Otto von Habsburg, The Social Order of Tomorrow. It is sure that by the use of this word, he does not mean Marxist-type collectivization.

Some readers have raised the question of Yockey's apparent anti-Russianism, and a clarifying word is necessary here. In later writings, Yockey made his views on Russia more clear; in fact, certain of his captors called him "anti-American and pro-Russian," during his San Francisco ordeal. Although this libel was of course vomited for the benefit of gullible newspaper readers, it shows that some of his later writings could have been misinterpreted as being pro-Russian, just as Imperium indicates an anti-Russian attitude. Of course, Yockey was neither pro- nor anti-Russian; he was concerned with the health and continuity of the West, and his view of the rest of the world was at all times subjective to what he considered in the best interests of the West at that time.

Accusations of "anti-Semitism," unless the imprecation is meant as simply having an open mind on the Jewish question, should be interpreted on the same level. The fact that he was captured in the home of a Jewish friend — even though that friend subsequently repudiated him — is instructive to the truth here.

Comment could be made on dozens of the brilliant thoughts and concepts presented in Imperium, such as, for one example, his relegating economics to its proper level — organically, the alimentary tract. His advocacy of European unification, long before this idea had gained any headway, is another case in point. This is perhaps a proof of his assertion that things that are considered "extreme today are the dogmas of tomorrow; the genius lives in the future, as he says, and whereas he used to be considered merely a little "odd" by his contemporaries, and avoided or tolerantly humored (unless, that is, he incurred the righteous wrath of the Church, in which case things could be made very hot for him) he is today declared by modern Freudianism to be mentally ill and unfit for the ancient protections of law; and this is surely indicative of the "progress" we have made in a thousand years.

The significance of the pseudonym Yockey chose as author of Imperium, Ulick Varange, should be noted. Ulick is an Irish given name, derived from Danish, and means "reward of the mind." Varange, of course, refers to the Varangians, that far-roving band of Norse heroes led by Rurik who, upon invitation from the Slavs, came to civilize Russia in the 9th Century, built the Russian Imperial State and formed the gifted and handsome Russian aristocracy until they were butchered by the Bolsheviks — along with some 20 million other Christians and Moslems — in that bloody terror. The name, therefore, drawn as it is from the Eastern and Western antipodes of Europe, signifies a Europe united "from the rocky promontories of Galway to the Urals," as he, himself, exhorts. Finally, the surname, Varange, by itself signifies the Western origin of historic Russia.

Imperium throughout is — again as the author says — not a book in the sense that it presents argument. It is prophetic, the work of an intuitive seer. You will find no bibliography or footnotes in Imperium for this reason in spite of the vast reading that the author has obviously done. And it is prophetic not only in the large historical sense, for could Yockey have been thinking of himself and predicting his own violent end when he stresses that the prophets of a new age often come to unnatural deaths? Twice this thought is brought out — once in the chapter THE ARTICULATION OF A CULTURE, and again, GENIUS.

Another interesting and mysterious fact about the manuscript he completed at Brittas Bay and that you now hold in your hand is that it is "keyed" so that, if the secret code can be discovered, the author's name is spelled. Thus, the question of authenticity which is always raised about a great work after the author dies cannot ever be a problem with Imperium.

It is important to seek the origins of Yockey's philosophy, for all are compelled to build on the backs of those who have gone before and to see the past clearly is to understand more fully. With more exaggeration than accuracy, Yockey states, "There is nothing original in the content of this book."

A grounding in Oswald Spengler is fundamental to understanding Yockey; in fact, it can be said that Imperium is really a sequel to Spengler's monumental The Decline of the West. Spengler, of course, is persona non grata to prevailing "intellects" for reasons that become very clear to any reader of Decline, so this revival of his influence — an inevitable revival, I'll add — will be a great shock to the tender minds of the beatniks, liberals and communists who have sucked at the dry pap of historical conformity for so long. These intellectual infants are always very eager to assure us that Spengler is "repudiated," a favorite semantic weapon of theirs, used regularly whenever they wish to avoid discussing issues and facts. But Oswald Spengler — "the philosopher of the Twentieth Century, as Yockey calls him — along with Gregor Mendel, Thomas Malthus and Charles Darwin — has shown us the pattern of the world of yesterday and the outline of it in the future, for better or for worse. Each of these giants is primary in his own field of study, and to study history while rejecting Spengler is quite as foolish as studying disease and rejecting the germ theory, or studying mathematics and rejecting numbers. The pathetic intellectual nihilists, materialists, equalists and do-gooders may yap, yap at the heels of Spengler until they are hoarse, but History cannot hear them.

"In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history..."  Spengler opens Decline, and follows it with two thick volumes of delightful and profound excursions into world history, war, philosophy, poetry, music, art, politics, religion, even mathematics.

Perhaps the best synopsis of Spengler — if there can be such a thing — has been done by Egon Friedell in his A Cultural History of the Modern Age, a three-volume work of which, incidentally, Yockey was very fond. Says Friedell in listing significant thinkers:

Lastly, and with deep admiration, we come to the name of Oswald Spengler, perhaps the most powerful and vivid thinker to appear on German soil since Nietzsche. One has to climb very high in the world's literature to find works of such scintillating and exuberant intellect, such triumphant psychological vision and such a personal and suggestive, rhythmic cadence as his Decline of the West. What Spengler gives us in his two volumes is the "outlines of a morphology of history." He sees, in place of the "monotonous picture of linear world-history" the "phenomenon of a plurality of mighty Cultures." "Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression, which arise, ripen, decay and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematic, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. These Cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field." Cultures are organisms, and cultural history is their biography. Spengler establishes nine such Cultures, the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Classical, the Arabian, the Mexican, the Western and the Russian, and he throws light upon each in turn, naturally not an equally bright and full light in every case, as, of course, our information concerning them is very unequal. But in the evolutionary course of these Cultures certain parallelisms rule, and this leads Spengler to introduce the conception of "contemporary" phenomena, by which he understands historical facts that, "each in its own Culture, occur in the same — relative — positions and, therefore, have an exactly corresponding significance." "Contemporary," for example, are the rise of the Ionic and that of the Baroque; Polygnotus and Rembrandt, Polycletus and Bach, Socrates and Voltaire are "contemporaries." But within the individual Culture itself, too, there is naturally complete congruence of all its life-expressions at each of its stages of evolution. So, for instance, there is a deep connection of form between the Classical Polis and the Euclidean geometry, between the space-perspective of the Western oil-painting and the conquest of space by railways, telephones, and long-range weapons. By means of these and like guiding principles, now Spengler arrives at the most interesting and surprising discoveries. The "Protestant brown" of the Dutch and the atheistic plein air of the Manet school, the "Way" as prime symbol of the Egyptian Soul, and the "Plain" as the leitmotiv of the Russian world-outlook, the "Magian" Culture of the Arabs and the "Faustian" Culture of the West, the "second religiousness" in which late Cultures revive the images of their youth, and the "fellahdom" in which man becomes again historyless — these, and many more like them, are unforgettable glimpses of genius that light up for a moment vast tracts of night, incomparable discoveries and hints of an intellect that possesses a truly creative eye for analogies. That the Cimmerians of learning have opposed to such a work nothing but stolidity and a deaf incomprehension of what his questions and answers are about is not surprising to anyone who knows the customs and mentality of the republic of scholarship.

Spengler published Decline in July, 1918, and we are still being washed in the very first breakwaters of that titanic event. For The Decline of the West was fully as revolutionary to the study of history in 1918 as Copernicus theory of heliocentricity was to the study of astronomy in 1543.

What, we may ask, is the main cause of resistance to accepting Spengler aside from the fact that he is a massive roadblock to the total victory of the marxist-liberal "intellectual"? The main difficulties, I think, are two: the necessity of acknowledging the essentially alien nature of every cultural soul, and the apparent necessity to reconcile ourselves to the dismal fact that our own Western organism must, too, die as have all those which have passed before.

Paradoxically, the fundamental problem of the second difficulty lies in the very Faustian Soul of the West which Spengler himself defined: "The Faustian Soul — whose prime symbol is pure and limitless space," he said; and it is true, for we need, in our innermost being, the perpetual reach to infinity. The idea of unlimited progress flows from this spiritual reality; this is a concept which is deeply and inextricably imbedded in every man of the West. Thus, the thought of inevitable death draws a fundamental rejection and is called pessimism.

As for the first specific difficulty, the acknowledgment of the essentially alien nature of each cultural soul, it follows that if every culture has its own inner vitality, it will be uninfluenced by the spirit of any other. This also runs against the very deepest grain of Western man who, for five hundred years and more, has been proselyting men all over the world in the vain hope of making them over into his own beloved image.

This psychological block runs deep in the West — so deep that it is an error which is apparent in all philosophical strata, certainly not only the leftist variety. Name any philosopher, economist or religious adept of Western history, except Hegel (1) (yes, even including Spengler) and you are virtually certain to find a man who sought to lay universal laws of human behavior; who, in other words, saw no essential difference between races. This error is so fundamental it is usually unconscious. (What would Lord Keynes, for example, do with his "universal" theory of oversaving if he were to try to apply it to Ghana or Haiti?) The Roman Catholic Church is a case in point. Tradition-minded Westerners rightly speak of the Church as being a bulwark of the West, but sometimes go so far as to identify the Church as the West. Unfortunately, the compliment is not returned. The Holy Roman Church is a universal Church — one Church for all men — which sees all people, wherever they are and whoever they be, as equal human souls whose bodies are to be brought to the holy embrace of Vatican City. It is the first to reject the impious suggestion that it owes a primary loyalty to the West. Scientific and philosophical demonstrations that men and cultures are, nevertheless, different in many fundamental respects and that it is unhealthy — unethical — to mix them are sure to meet with the same inhospitable reception that the Church earlier gave to Copernicus and Galileo. In April of 1962 three Catholics in New Orleans were excommunicated for daring to stand on this heretical Verity.(2)

A central point when thinking about this subject is the growth and now the total supremacy of the Western idea of technics. The entire world of science is a reflection of Western man and no other, and we have seen Western technics conquer the world. We see our science being appropriated to varying degrees and in varying manners by every simian Culture on the planet which has advanced beyond the arboreal stage. The stone age Negro denizens of Africa, Haiti, New Guinea and the southern Philippines are fascinated by clocks, radios and even sails. When an American city wants to get rid of its old street cars, it sells them to Amerindian Mexico. The Semitic Arabs ride their Cadillacs and use rifles made in Belgium; both of which are bought with the gold of oil royalties from Wall Street, Dallas or London. The Oriental Chinese have learned well, and are expected to explode an atomic bomb at any moment. And even the half-Western Russians, from the days of Peter the Great, or even Rurik, have constructed their ships, cannon and rockets with European engineers. But does this mass appropriation of Western technics have the slightest effect on the inner and distinctive soul of the culture which appropriates? The answer is no, and we should not allow our foolish pride to think otherwise.

The other cause of rejecting Spengler lies in the difficulty of reconciling ourselves to the apparent necessity of the death of the West as a cultural organism.

But it is not necessary, in my opinion, to make this reconciliation. For although a Culture is an organism, it is a peculiar one; and, by accepting the analogy in the first place, we are able to intelligently seek for the possibility of extending or renewing its life.

Yockey rejects this hypothesis and, as a thorough Spenglerian, foresees the end of the West. But it can be argued that the very introduction of the organic concept into historical philosophizing and theorizing plus the unparalleled mastery over Nature which the West has attained — and the infinite possibilities of this for the future — hold out the conception that the organism of the West need not suffer the same Destiny as cultures which have gone before and which had none of this knowledge. In other words, we now have the proper concept, thanks to Spengler, and have, for the first time in all history, identified the pathology of Culture, thanks to Yockey. And, in addition, Western technics have created the equally unique physical means to apply to the problem. To carry this examination further, the Western Culture excels all others in history in these areas:

1. The obsession with fact-history.
2. The development of the organic concept of Culture, and recognition of its pathology.
3. The development of science and master technics. Nearing-subjection of the microcosm and time, and the macrocosm and space.

Let us now turn to the so-far final and, according to Spengler, the "inevitable" phase of a Culture — the imperialistic. First of all, it is in this area that the Spenglerian theory, as applied to "the venture of predetermining history," appears to falter because the West appears to be behind on the timetable. Yockey comments on this and attributes it to the retarding influence of Money. This is probably true. The question is, if Money can disturb the cycle, cannot other things, too?

Here may be mentioned another unique fact as regards the Western situation. The condition of overproduction has become a fact of life that almost all sectors of political opinion are loath to recognize. Nevertheless, this is a fundamental departure for men, with widespread implications. Until now, slavery was necessary to support a high standard of living. (And, of course, slavery has always been sanctioned by religion and law when it is economically desirable.) So were foreign conquests for exploitation. This is no longer the case. The main economic problem for the West is to dispose of its surplus production, not to feed and clothe its masses. (This elemental truth is known by every so-called "laboring man" but it has escaped the notice of theorists and economists of both Right and Left.) Overproduction and technics, then, appear to have destroyed the economic imperative for imperialism. Finally, the atomic bomb and its far more terroristic descendants have infinitely diminished the use of war as an instrument of national policy. From these points of view, imperialism as a policy of gain is as dead as the slave trade and the battleship. And if imperialism is not to be undertaken as a deliberate policy of gain, from what standpoint is it to be undertaken? Religious fervor? Popular enthusiasm for capitalism? No, the day of the Crusades is also past for the West. We shall not see the West march to conquer the world in any other fashion but that of Wall Street's and the Peace Corps' — unless the need to dump our products finally can be resolved only in "war, the coward's solution for the problems of peace."

Now if one were to object that the above considerations smack of the causal view of history — against which Yockey inveighs — and assert that the final phase of our Culture is subject to purely spiritual phenomena, I should be bold to suggest the possibility of a miscalculation by Spengler which could have been based on a misinterpretation of his own data and his own theory which, if seen in a slightly different perspective, not only clears up the meaning of the theory in the light of present developments, but also validates it completely. Space permits only the barest of outlines here, at the risk of unintelligibility to all but those initiated in the mysteries of Spenglerism.

Spengler's method was to show the correlation of all aspects of the history of a cultural organism. As the Friedell quotation earlier suggests, Spengler drew analogies between apparently diverse elements within a Culture, all of which are given shape and meaning by the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) which is the creation of the cultural soul in its singular Destiny. Hence, in the search of the past he saw as the culminating stage that which expresses itself spiritually as universalism. In the realm of religion, it becomes a "second religiosity," starting as a conglomeration of many sects and cults which no one takes seriously but everyone concerns himself with. (This is what we have today. It is called the "social gospel" and appears in a thousand forms, profane as well as sacred. It is not true religion at all but cultism.) Finally this anarchy stabilizes into the form of a generally-accepted and genuine religion — and we are about 200 years away from this. In the realm of the economic, there is "big business" and the growing power of Money, which, however, is finally broken by the force of politics. In art, the zeitgeist expresses itself as the importation of exotic art forms, and inane experimentation which has no significance whatsoever except as natural degeneracy of the native form. Finally, in foreign outlook, there is imperialism, military expansion.

We can plainly see all of the above running true to form and right on schedule except for the latter. Why? Simply because the subjection of technics to the service of the West and the mastery of economics over the West has sublimated this stage of spiritual universalism from militaristic imperialism to other forms of expansion. Verily, never before has there been such an aggressive army of gun-shy expansionists and pacifist imperialists. World government fanatics literally swarm over the West. They and others staunchly support the United Nations — an anachronism which cannot possibly be effective toward its alleged purposes — yet support for this harmful fossil is a matter of personal morality with millions. The zeitgeist is always reflected in definitions, so it is the height of insult for a White man today to be labeled an "isolationist" or "nationalist." White folks must all be "free traders," "internationalists" and "cosmopolitan" in our outlook, and how we admire the "citizen of the world," whatever that is. Our view is intently focused away from our marches; it is far easier, we have discovered, to solve the problems of total strangers than to solve our own. Non-Western peoples are not so enlightened as we, and it is eagerly excused, utilizing a newly-discovered Christian double standard which is a mark of modern moral superiority, like belonging to the Classics Book Club or contributing to the Negro College Fund. What, asks Nietzsche, has caused more suffering than the follies of the compassionate? It is good for colored peoples to be nationalistic; we encourage it, in fact, and snap up Israel Bonds with a warm feeling of self-righteousness. We are joyful when colored peoples and Jews exhibit "race pride," the cardinal sin and taboo of our own puritanical environment. (Incidentally, why is it that every subject except one can be discussed in our enlightened age? Atheism is now a dull subject. Marxism is even duller, after one hundred years of popularity. A step further has taken us past plain sex to sadism and perversion; the Marquis de Sade is even becoming jaded. What racy topic is left to discuss since the equalists have brought democracy's blessings? Only one thing cannot be discussed in polite company: race.)

The heroes of Wall Street reap the most from this type of "imperialism," and today investors big and little interest themselves in foreign investments which are actually given tax advantages over domestic investments (Tax favoritism: the final criterion of status in our democracy) — or they support "foreign aid" — remembering to stipulate, naturally, that a portion of this neat gimmick to dispose of our surplus production be allotted to their own products. The ultimate expression of this militant water-pistol imperialism is the hilarious yet deeply symbolic "Peace Corpse," the true expression of the zeitgeist. Created out of the typically American combination of abysmal do-good stupidity and inability to gauge the feelings of others, and enlightened greed, this is the perfect symbol for today.

No, we do not need imperialism so long as we have leaders like Mennen Williams and Adlai Stevenson; savants like Eleanor Roosevelt and Arnold Toynbee and altruists like Herbert Lehman, James Warburg, and Douglas Dillon to solve our problems for us.

To further pursue this inquiry into the applicability of Spengler today it is important to bring out a certain point of view which is heard most infrequently, thanks to the purveyors of intellectual freedom and democracy. Neo-Spenglerians who are attuned to the racial view of history (call them "racists" for convenience) hold that the "final" phase of a Culture — the imperialistic stage — is final only because the cultural organism destroys its body and kills its soul by this process.

Obviously, if we are to draw analogies between cultures and organisms we must agree that the soul of the organism dies only because of the death of the body. The soul can sicken — the soul of the West is now diseased and perhaps mortally ill — but it cannot die unless the organism itself dies. And this, point out the racists, is precisely what has happened to all previous cultures; death of the organism being the natural result of the suicidal process of imperialism.

A word on the racial view of history before proceeding further. Today, of course, history is written from the marxist standpoint of economics, linear progress and class warfare — and Yockey explains this triple error well. Previous to the first World War history was written largely from the racial point of view. History was seen as the dramatic story of the movements, struggles and developments of races, which it is. Suppression of the racist point of view reached its apex about 1960. (It is no coincidence that the power of the Culture Distorter in every other field, including the political, gave signs — however faint — of wavering at that time, too.)

Perhaps the biggest reason for a growing tendency of White folks to look at the races objectively is, paradoxically, precisely because they have been forced to look at them subjectively! It is no problem to maintain a myth in ignorance. Negro equality or even supremacy, for example, is easier to believe in if there are no Negroes around to destroy the concept. In a word, internationalism in practice quickly metamorphoses into racism.

To turn from experience to academic matters, how many Americans or Britons are acquainted with the stupendously elemental fact that they are — in the historical sense — Germans; that they are, like it or not, a part of that great Teutonic-Celtic family which — millenniums before the dawn of Rome or even Greece — was one tribe, with one language? How many otherwise enlightened and well-meaning people who have heretofore judged their patriotism according to the degree of hatred they have had for their continental brothers know that the ancestors of the great Teutonic-Celtic family were the same Aryans who subjected India and civilized it, speaking the Sanskrit language and creating the caste system which, incidentally, was nothing originally but a system of racial segregation endowed with a religious significance in order to maintain it? Or that, before this, there were the Sumerians and the Persians, and that the modern name for Persia — Iran — is merely a corruption of Aryan?

Greece and Rome, also, were created by this great, far-roving, culture-bearing race of conquerors. In whatever part of the world it went, a different civilization was created, each of which was distinctive because it developed in tune with the environmental conditions in whatever location its history began, yet bearing unmistakable traces of its Aryan origin.

There are some civilizations about which we know little, as far as the racial elements are concerned. All we know for certain about the Egyptians is that they were Caucasian, and that they, like all slavemasters, mingled their blood with that of their Negro slaves. As for the so-called Amerindian civilizations, we now know without doubt that civilization was superimposed upon Indian savages by a White racial stock. In his popular books, Kon-Tiki and Aku-Aku, Thor Heyerdahl cleverly reveals the forbidden racist view, in spite of the fact that a million people who are familiar with the adventure described in the books are totally ignorant of the deep racial message he wrote into them. (It is a sad commentary indeed when a gifted scientist, in order to reveal a simple truth, must risk his life and then write an adventure story in code which, when interpreted, shows a forbidden fact.)

In Kon-Tiki, Heyerdahl writes, "…There is not a trace of gradual development in the high civilizations which once stretched from Mexico to Peru. The deeper the archeologists dig, the higher the culture, until a definite point is reached at which the old civilizations have clearly arisen without any foundation in the midst of primitive cultures." All of the wonders in South and Central America before the arrival of the Spaniards had been brought about suddenly by a race of White conquerors and that, as they melted their blood slowly into that of their subject native population, the civilization dwindled. The very reason Cortez conquered the Aztecs so easily was because Montezuma believed that the Spaniards were the fair-skinned, bearded men coming from the East which, Quetzalcotl' s prophecy foretold, would return; and the Incas in Peru had the very same legend. The name, Inca, by the way, is the name only of the aristocracy of the Peruvians. The Incas were White and the princesses were quite beautiful; so much so that many of the Spanish officers married them and took them back to Spain. A glance at the present ' Incas in Peru shows at once that these were not the creators of the great Peruvian Culture.

Some of the very best writing on this subject and, for that matter, on the fascinating subject of world prehistory generally is found in Paul Hermann's Conquest By Man, an extremely valuable book which is currently out of print.

An even cloudier origin must be ascribed to the Chinese civilization. Suffice it to say that there is abundant indication of early White movements to North China and there is much similarity between early Chinese culture and Babylonian. Genghis Khan, a Mongol, came from a tribe called "the gray-eyed men," according to biographer Harold Lamb, and he had red hair and green eyes. The Chinese have shown that they have the ability to maintain a civilization but we cannot prove that they have ever created one.

The intensive suppression, misrepresentation, condemnation and opposition to the racial view of history has had its effect. We still not only have much to learn (the surface of prehistory has barely been scratched and will never be more than scratched if the scientists persist in spending their time in well-financed projects in the so-called "cradle of civilization" in the Middle Fast) but the results of historical perversion have been satisfyingly abundant in the social area. This has allowed the Distorter to convince Europe that all that Europe has it owes to the Greeks, the Romans and an obscure tribe of vagabonds which some religious crackpots refer to as "God's Chosen People." (3) In The Testimony of the Spade, however, Geoffrey Bibby relates some results of his straying off the beaten archeological track and looking for the origins of Europe in Europe instead of the alien Orient; results which will be surprising to persons brought up to believe that their ancestors were bearskin-clad savages, civilized only when forced to acknowledge the superiority of Rome. In truth, virtually everything the West has it owes to itself, including holidays like Christmas and Easter (originally Teutonic celebrations of the Winter Solstice and the coming of Spring, with the latter celebration dedicated to the Goddess Eostre), to law, ethics and single-breasted jackets. The world wears leather shoes and trousers, not sandals and togas. Wearing apparel very similar to items sold at Sears, Roebuck today have been discovered in Europe dating back some three thousand years.

The Western Culture had its birth many millenniums ago. It began autochthonously and developed to the present point, when it now stands upon the verge of physical and spiritual annihilation only because it has ceased to believe in itself. This is the lesson we glean.

Further, there is a correlation too perfect to be a coincidence in that, in every case on record of the death or stagnation of a Culture there has been simultaneously an abortive attempt to digest large numbers of cultural and racial aliens into the organism. In the case of Rome and Greece death came about through imperialism and the resulting, inevitable backwash of conquered peoples and races into the heartland as slaves, bringing exotic religions, different philosophies; in a word, cultural sophistication first, then cultural anarchy. In the case of Persia, India and the Amerindian civilizations, a race of conquerors superimposed their civilization upon a mass of indigenous people; the area flourished for awhile, then the Culture vanished or, in the case of America, was on the verge of vanishing, as the descendants of the conquerors became soft, fat and liberal and took on more and more of the accoutrements and blood of the subject population. In the case of Egypt, the alien blood was brought in over the course of many centuries by the importation of Negro slaves. The inevitable racial mongrelization followed, creating the Egypt we know today.

We thus see the real reason underlying the "inevitable" decline and destruction of a cultural organism. It is because, at a certain stage, a Culture develops a bad case of universalism. Speaking pathologically, unless this is sublimated to harmless channels by proper treatment, it will inevitably kill the organism through the absorption of a resulting flood of alien microbes.

It is, therefore, the natural by-product of universalism which kills the organism; the death of the organism itself is neither natural nor necessary!

This conclusion comes by a synthesis of the Spenglerian and the racial point of view. Each tempers the other; together a comprehensive and hopeful theory of history can be developed which holds a deep meaning to Westerners of this day. At all costs, the imperialistic phase of our development must be avoided, and we must guard against the digestion of alien matter we have already partially absorbed. The West need not die if it learns to sublimate the present "universal" stage of the West from the orthodox to something more constructive which will not only satisfy the "inevitable" yearning that the West now displays for expansion and universalism but, at the same time, will provide a basis for the West to continue its development. What can that be?

Faintly shining above the wreckage of seven Cultures we can now detect a dim ray of hope which gives to us, as men of the West, reason to believe that the Destiny of our Culture can work itself out through a completely new path. This ray of hope shines from the same developments which have brought the West to its position of unqualified superiority to every other Culture. For the West has already embarked upon the greatest adventure in all history — the attempt to conquer Space — the attempt to bring the very Universe under the control of the race! This imperative needs no justification other than the one Sir Edmund Hillary gave when he was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: "Because it's there." This is the pristine reality of the Faustian Soul of the West, and it is beyond the logic of the rationalists.

Could any goal be at once so totally challenging, so impudent and impossible as this — and also so metaphysically necessary to the spiritual need of our Culture? And more — could any goal be so perfectly adapted to the physical situation in which we find ourselves?

The fates have provided the West well with the means of survival. At this point in history, our technics, industrial overproduction and the "population explosion" become all-important, for we see that finally the West has the means to turn the poetic imperative of the Faustian drive for the Infinite to reality; indeed, the inescapable need to do so.

For it is true that, regardless of all arguments to the contrary, Western man is bound to conquer Space or to die in the attempt. No longer is the drive toward infinity and largeness held back by earthly boundaries. Now, in fact, we have infinity at our elbow.

What I am suggesting is that at last the White man has burst the ties to Earth. I am stating the simple fact that, barring calamity caused by universal physical or biological destruction, we are now headed for the stars, and there is no power in heaven or earth to stop us. Coming days will see the present drive for Space magnified a thousandfold — a millionfold. All limits to the possibility of expansion have disappeared. Geographical expansion on Earth is senseless — and worse than senseless — it is suicide. The Frontier has come back — a Frontier that can never be dissipated. And with that Frontier comes literally limitless opportunities not only for physical expansion but for economic exploitation — and for the Soul of Faustian man to find its true expression.

Of course, man cannot conquer the heavens. Man cannot move the solar system, change planets in their orbits, add billions of square miles of dirt to the surface of the Earth, move other planets closer to the life-giving Sun to adapt them for colonization, refuel the Sun when it starts to fade and, most noble impossibility of all, actually upgrade the human species through deliberate biological mechanics; for, in the attempt to conquer Nature, we must fail; this is the eternal tragedy of the Faustian Soul, says Spengler in Man and Technics. But — and this is the important thing — we can try. And we will. The final end does not matter; time has no end; only the goal matters.

At the same time there is the grave danger that we will, with our attention fixed on the nearing stars, succumb to the subtle urging of the Culture Distorter and ignore the problems at home. The Infinite Challenge is of unspeakable excitement, but the mundane problem of the quality of men and their earthy environment is of more importance. Our venture to Infinity will be very short-lived if we come home to an earth peopled with a rapidly-degenerating human species; to nights that crawl with the prowlings of depraved, raceless savages, with only barred doors keeping the jungle out of the laboratory and the boudoir until day breaks; to a tyranny over our government that is exercised by organized and predatory minorities; to impossible taxes to support degenerative "welfare" schemes that are deliberately designed to proliferate the unfit and inferior at the expense of the productive and creative; to an organized filth that calls itself literature; to the ethical syphilis of Hollywood; to systematic lies that masquerade as scholarship; to purposeful journalistic and official propaganda that has as its sole aim the perpetuation of cultural decline; to thralldom to an economic system dedicated to extirpating individual excellence and personal responsibility; to a liberal philosophy and a sick religion — perfect for slaves — which ferociously combats all creative efforts of noble souls, revealing its own loftiest aspiration to be the implantation of a subconscious death wish in our people; to a cowardly hypocrisy that makes it impossible to speak of our real problems — and all of this for the purpose of stabilizing the total supremacy of the Culture Distorter, which feeds and fattens on these conditions.

Oswald Spengler, then, can be seen not as the prophet of inevitable doom, but as a challenger, as a seer who was — in common with all great creators — unable to see the final consequences of his creation. Hence, the importance of Spengler becomes the size of the future, and all men who are free from the grip of the destroyers must, as a categorical imperative, accept his basic teaching. What we do with it — whether or not we have the courage to build on the structure he built — this is up to us. We must hope that more men like Yockey will come to add a little more onto the concept he created, for the development of the Western cultural organism is not coming to an end, it is just beginning.

What is the significance of Imperium? Simply this. That now, for the first time, those soldiers who enlist in the service of the West have a profound theory to inspire and guide them. Imperium, after conquering all attempts to suppress it and destroy it — as have all constructive advances in the past of man — is seen as the only foundation which can be used to overthrow the inner enemies, re-conquer the Soul of the West and pave the way to the future.

In spite of the difference of opinion which Imperium will stir, this much is certain: here is a book which is basically different from other books, precisely as the author states on the first page. Whether it does, indeed, signal a turning-point in history such as the author describes, or not, it contains a vast amount of pregnant thinking and new concepts which any fair-minded person will welcome. It breaks through the straitjacket of present sterile intellectualism which affronts us from a thousand futile towers of "higher learning" and will undoubtedly endow every reader with possessions of thought which will enrich him and, in time, our Culture. Whether the apocalyptic prophecies are borne out, or whether an alternative and more constructive course can be imposed upon history — or whether the West and the world will come to its finality not with a bang but with a whimper, only the unfoldment of time can tell; but no intelligent man will ignore Imperium.

In one respect, Imperium is akin to Das Kapital, for Karl Marx gave to the conspiratorial Culture Distorter the necessary ideological mask to hide its mission of ruthless, total destruction. He provided an ugly and invalid theory of man, cloaked in putrifying equality, mewling hypocrisy, the disease of undiscriminating altruism and the "science" of economics. By so doing, he thrilled the rationalists with a totally specious verity, something their stunted, guilty souls desperately needed after they killed God.

Francis Parker Yockey has done the same thing for those who are constructive-minded and who have the intellectual and moral courage to face reality and seek and speak truth. This is why, although Yockey's plan for the West may not be perfect, it contains atomic power. If only one man reading this book is influenced to lead, and if others are made to see the world a little more clearly than they do now — and if they are thereby enabled to discriminate between their true friends and their real enemies, and to recognize the need for leadership and coordinated action — then Yockey's life of suffering and persecution and his monumental accomplishment in spite of all has not been in vain.

And whatever course Destiny may take from this day forth, I shall always be baffled by two questions.

For one, is the republication of this book, in itself, concrete evidence that its prophecy is being worked out?

And lastly — now you must accept this at my word and question me no further — it is most strange that two men — neither of whom can bring themselves to believe in either "Destiny" nor "Eternal Justice" — that these two heathens and bitter realists — these two rationalists, if you will — were the only ones with faith enough to take it upon themselves to see that Imperium is not forgotten but is made available for you, dear reader.

1. Extracts from the interesting Introduction to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Philosophy of History:

   "The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it we must quite give up the principle which accompanies all our ideas — the category of Universality. … Another characteristic fact in reference to the Negro is slavery. … Bad as this may be, their lot in their own land is even worse, since a slavery there quite as absolute exists; for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained to a consciousness of his own freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing — an object of no value. Among the Negro moral sentiments are quite weak, or more strictly speaking, non-existent. Parents sell their children and conversely children their parents, as either has the opportunity — the polygamy of the Negroes has frequently for its object the having of many children, to be sold, every one of them, into slavery … From these various traits it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been. … At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit."

2. In his final work, History of the People of Israel, Ernest Renan said, "Socialism may bring back by the complicity of Catholicism a new Middle Age. And there are, indeed, some rather horrifying straws in the wind as regards the Church's traditional hostility toward communism. March 7, 1963 witnessed the Pope grasping the hand of Alexi Adzheubi, an official representative of the same Bolshevism which so far has murdered at least 50 million patriots in Russia, China and elsewhere. What are millions to think — Catholic and non-Catholic — who have heretofore looked upon Rome as a bulwark against this unspeakably degenerate conspiracy? (Decent Catholics should not be too surprised or chagrined; Protestant sects by and large were captured by the Culture Distorter years ago.) But should the two equalitarian religions converge, compromise is required on the part of the Communist Party, too; being totally bankrupt intellectually, this is not too great a price. An anonymous letter supposedly written by a CP member was reprinted in the May, 1963 Truth Seeker, a strongly anti-communist free thought periodical. It bears repetition:

   …The Party has soft-pedaled atheism for years and now we are dropping it completely. Atheism divides the masses and offends all the good religious people in the Party and who work closely with us. Fanatical atheists who insist on preaching their views are thrown out … confusing the political problems we have with religious matters is asinine. By far the most progress the Party is making today is being made through the churches. … I expect to see a complete convergence of the Catholic Church and the Party within the next fifty years. …

   The shadow of this is clearly foreshown in Poland. Perhaps you have heard of Pax? This is a Catholic lay organization run by communist priests … tolerated by both the Party and the Church. … You may yet live to see the day when the dictatorship of the proletariat will be proclaimed by the Pope!"
   
    
3. Or, as Samuel Hoffenstein put it in his earthquaking couplet:

   How odd of God
   To choose the Jews.

4. In Nature and Man's Fate, biologist Garrett Hardin of the University of California has done what too few academicians can do: created a book of both beauty and far-seeing scope. But alas, words are only words; politics alone, let us ever remember, is the art of the possible.

THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

"Thus, as we do nothing but enact history, we say little but recite it: nay, rather, in that widest sense, our whole spiritual life is built thereon. For, strictly considered, what is all knowledge too but recorded experience, and a product of history; of which, therefore, reasoning and belief, no less than action and passion, are essential materials?" — CARLYLE

"The individual's life is of importance to none besides himself: the point is whether he wishes to escape from history or give his life for it. History recks nothing of human logic." — SPENGLER

PERSPECTIVE

FAR OUT in exterior darkness where no breath stirs, no light shines, and no sound is heard, one can glance toward this spinning earth-ball. In the astral regions, illumination is of the soul, hence all is dark but this certain star, and only a part of it is aglow. From such a distance, one can obtain an utterly untrammeled view of what is transpiring on this earth-ball. Drawing somewhat closer, continents are visible; closer yet, population-streams. One focal point exists whence the light goes forth in all directions. It is the crooked peninsula of Europe. On this tiny pendant of the great land-mass of the earth-ball, the greatest intensity of movement exists. One can see — for out here the soul and its emanations are visible — a concentration of ideas, energy, ambition, purpose, expansiveness, will-to-form. Hovering above Europe we can see what never before was so clearly visible — the presence of a purely spiritual organism. A close look reveals that the light stream is not flowing from the surface of Europe upward into the night sky, but downward from the hitherto invisible organism. This is a discovery of profound

4 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

and revolutionary importance, which was only vouchsafed to us by reason of our complete detachment from terrestrial events in the outer void, where spirit is visible and matter visible, only by reason of the light from the spirit.

More discoveries follow: on the other side are two islands, small in comparison with the land-mass. The pale glow diffused over isolated parts of these two islands is seen at once to be a reflection from the other side.

What is this supra-terrestrial phenomerion? Why does it hover over Europe in particular? What is the relationship between it and the human material under it? The latter is shaped up into intricately formed pyramidal structures. Ranks are formed. Movements proceed along channels of labyrinthine complexity. Persons stand to one another in defined relationships of command and obedience. Apart from this tiny peninsula, the human currents are horizontal, swirling, eddying like the water in the streams, the currents in the ocean, the herds on the vast plains. It is, then, the spirit-organism which forms and impresses the population of the peninsula into their intricate organic shapes.

With what can we compare this being, which could not be seen by us while we were earth-bound? It is alone at present.

But out here we have the freedom of time as well as the freedom of space. We are allowed to look upon a hundred generations as the earth-bound look upon the life-span of a fruit-fly. In our search for something similar to the spirit-organism we have seen, we go back two hundred generations. The ball is the same, but is in almost complete darkness. Things are almost indistinguishable; matter has not passed through the alembic of spirit, and is not apprehensible. A glance backward reveals a continuation of the void. We let a few generations pass in a moment, and spirit begins to make itself felt. A feeble, but

Perspective 5

promising, glow appears in northeast Africa. Then another, a thousand miles to the northeast, in Mesopotamia. They take names, Egypt, Babylonia. The time is around 3000 B.C. They increase in intensity and the first thing clear in each case is armies marching against the outer populations, who are felt as the barbarian. These spiritual organisms do not mix — their higher frontiers are sharp and clear; each being has its own hue, which adheres to it. Each organism seizes the human material in its landscape and impresses them into its service. First it gives them a common World-Idea, then it refines this into nations, each nation embodying a separate idea of the higher organism. A nobility and priesthood arise to embody different aspects of the idea. The populations are stratified and specialized, and the human beings live out their lives and destinies in a way entirely subordinate to the higher organism. The latter compels these humans with ideas. Only a small spiritual stratum of each human population is adapted to this kind of compulsion, but those who belong to it remain in the service of the idea, once it is felt. They will live and die for it, and in the process they determine the destinies of the population whence they spring. These ideas — not mere abstractions, strings of concepts, but living, pulsating, wordless necessities of being and thinking — are the technic by which these higher beings utilize human beings for their purposes. Religions of high complexity of feeling and rationale, forms of architecture, conceived in the spirit of that religion and put into its service, lyric poetry, pictorial art, sculpture, music, orders of nobility, orders of priesthood, stylized dwellings, stylized manners and dress, rigid training of the young up to these developments to perpetuate them, systems of philosophy, of mathematics, of knowledge, of nature, prodigious technical methods, giant battles, huge armies, prolonged wars, energetic economics to support this whole multifarious

6 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

structure, intricately organized governments to infuse order into the nations created by the higher being acting on the different types of human material — these are some of the floraison of forms which appear in these two areas. Each form is different in Egypt from the corresponding form in Babylonia. If an idea is taken over, it is only apparently adopted; actually it is misunderstood, re-formed, and adapted to the proper soul.

But the higher being approaches a crisis. It has expended itself in this earth-transforming process. It shudders, it apparently weakens, it palpitates — chaos and anarchy threaten its terrestrial actualizations — forces outside gather to strike it down and wipe out its grand creations. But it rouses itself, it puts forward its greatest effort of all — no longer in the creation of inward things, arts, philosophy, theories of life, but in the formation of the purely external apparatus of power: strict governments, giant armies, industry to support them, fleets of ships for war, legal systems to organize and order the conquests. It expands across areas never before investigated or even known, it unifies all of its proper nations into one, which gives its name to the rest and leads them on to the last great expansive effort.

The same great rhythm is observable in each of them. As one watches, the two lights die down from their splendid hues to an ever-paler earth-light. They go out slowly, leaving a glow of memory and legend in the minds of men, and with their last great creations lying in the widened landscape — Imperium.

Outside these two areas, the rest of the earth has remained unchanged. The human bands are distinguishable from the herding-animals only by a primitive culture, and a more intricate economy. Otherwise their existence-forms are devoid of significance. The primitive cultures are the sole thing existing above the plane of economics, in that they attribute symbolic significance to natural occurrences and human conduct. But

Perspective 7

there is nothing in these movements resembling the High Cultures which transformed the entire appearance of the Egyptian and Babylonian landscapes for almost forty generations from their first beginning until the last sinking.

Physical time flows on and centuries pass in darkness. Then, precisely as in Egypt and Babylonia, but again of a different hue, and to different music, a light appears over the Punjab. It becomes bright and firm. The same wealth of forms and significant happenings work themselves out as in the earlier two organisms. Its creations are all in the highest degree individual, as different from its two predecessors as they were vis-a-vis one another, but they follow the same grand rhythms. The same multi-colored pageant of nobles and priests, temples and schools, nations and cities, arts and philosophies, armies and sciences, letters and wars, passes before the eye.

II

Before this high culture was well on its way, another had started to actualize itself in the Hwang-Ho valley in China. And then a few centuries later, about noo B.C. in our way of reckoning, the Classical Culture begins on the shores of the Aegean. Both of these cultures have the stamp of individuality, their own way of coloring and influencing their terrestrial creations, but both are subject to the same morphology as the others observed.

As this Classical Culture draws to its close, around the time of Christ, another one appears in a landscape subjugated by the Classical in its last expansive phase — Arabia. The fact of its appearance precisely here makes its course an unusual one. Its forms are inwardly as pure as those of all the other Cultures, inwardly it borrows nothing any more than they did — but it was

8 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

inevitable that the material contiguity of landscape, temporal succession, and contact with the civilized populations of the older organism would influence the new soul to take over the wealth of classical creations. It was subjugated to them only in a superficial way however, for into these old bottles it poured its new wine. Through selection, reinterpretation, or ignoring, it expressed its own soul despite the alien forms. In its later, expansive phase, this culture embraced European Spain as the Western Caliphate. Its life span, its end form, its last great crisis — all followed the same organic regularity as the others. Some five centuries later the now familiar manifestations of another High Culture begin in the remote landscapes of Mexico and Peru. It is to have the most tragic destiny of any we have yet seen. Around 1000 A.D. the European Culture is meanwhile born, and at its very birth shows itself to be distinguished from the others by the extraordinary intensity of its self-expression, by its pushing into every distance both in the spiritual realm, and in the physical. Its original landscape was even of an extent many times the size of its predecessors, and from this base, in its middle life, it enters upon an Age of Discovery, in which it finds for itself the very frontiers of the earth-ball, and converts the world into the object of its politics. Its Spanish representatives in the two warrior bands of Cortez and Pizarro discovered the Civilization of Mexico and Peru, then in its very last stage of refinement of the material life. The two grand Empires of Mexico and Peru, with social forms, economico-political organization, transportation, communication, city life, all developed to the utmost limits for this particular soul made the invading Spaniards seem like mere naïve barbarians. But the technical disinterestedness of these empires left them helpless before the few cannon and horses of the invaders. The last act of this Culture-drama is its obliteration in a few years by the invaders

Perspective 9

from another world. This consummation is instructive as to the attention that the World-Spirit pays to human values and feelings. What soothsayer would have dared to tell the last Aztec Emperor, surrounded with the pomp of world-historical significance, clothed with the power of the world, that in a short time the jungle would reconquer his cities and palaces, that his armies and systems of control of his world-Empire would vanish before the onslaught of a few hundred barbarians ?

Each Culture-soul is stamped with individuality; from the others it takes nothing, and to them it gives nothing. Whatever is on its frontiers is the enemy, whether primitive or Culture-populations. They all are barbarians, heathens, to the proper culture, and no understanding passes between them. We saw the Western peoples prove the lifeworthiness of the European culture by their crusades against the highly civilized Saracens, Moors, and Turks. We saw the Germanic populations in the East and their Visigothic brothers in the South push the barbarian Slavs and the civilized Moors continually back during the centuries. We saw Western ships and Western armies make the whole world into the object of booty for the West. These were the relations of the West to that and those outside.

Within the Culture arose Gothic Christianity, the transcendent symbols of Empire and Papacy, the Gothic cathedrals, the unlocking of the secrets of the world of the soul and the world of nature in monastery cells. The Culture-soul shaped for its own expression the nations of the West. To each it gave individuality, and at the last, each thought it was a Culture in itself, instead of being a mere organ of a Culture. Cities grew out of the hamlets of Gothic times, and from the cities grew intellect. The old problem of the relation of Reason and Faith, the central problem of early Scholastic, is apparently being slowly decided in these cities in favor of the Supremacy of Reason.

10 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

The nobility of Gothic times, the masters of the earth who had no superior unless they voluntarily recognized him, become subject to an idea — the State. Life slowly externalizes: political problems move into the center; new economic resources are developed to support the political contests; the old agricultural economy metamorphoses into an industrial economy. At the end of this path stands a ghostly and terrifying Idea: Money.

Other Cultures also had seen this phenomenon appear at the same stage and grow to similar dimensions. Its slow growth in importance proceeds pari passu with the gradual self-assertion of Reason against Faith. It reaches its highest point with the Age of Nationalism, when the parts of the Culture tear one another to bits, even as outer dangers loom threateningly. At its highest point, Money, allied with Rationalism, contests for the supremacy over the life of the Culture with the forces of State and Tradition, Society and Religion. In our brief visit to interstellar space, we found the position of detachment whence we could see this grand life-drama unfold itself seven times in seven High Cultures, and we saw each of the seven surmount the last great crisis of two centuries' duration. The Mexican-Peruvian Civilization overcame the inner crisis only to fall before marauders appearing out of the blue sea.

The great crisis of the West set in forcefully with the French Revolution and its consequent phenomena. Napoleon was the symbol of the transition of Culture into Civilization — Civilization, the life of the material, the external, of power, giant economies, armies, and fleets, of great numbers and colossal technics, over Culture, the inner life of religion, philosophy, arts, domination of the external life of politics and economics by strict form and symbolism, strict restraint of the beast-of-prey in man, feeling of cultural unity. It is the victory of Rationalism, Money and the great city over the traditions of religion and authority, of Intellect over Instinct.

Perspective 11

We had seen all this in the previous high cultures as they approached their final life-phase. In each case the crisis had been resolved by the resurgence of the old forces of Religion and Authority, their victory over Rationalism and Money, and the final union of the nations into an Imperium. The two-century-long crisis in the life of the great organism expressed itself in gigantic wars and revolutions. All the Cultural energy that had previously gone into inner creations of thought, religion, philosophy, science, art-forms, great literature, now goes into the outer life of economics, war, technics, politics. The symbolism of power succeeds to the highest place in this last phase.

But at this point, we are suddenly back on the surface of the earth. No longer detached, we must participate in the great Culture-drama, whether we will or no. Our only choice is to participate as subject or as object. The wisdom that comes from the knowledge of the organic nature of a High Culture gives us the key to the events transpiring before our eyes. It can be applied by us, and our action can thereby become significant, as distinguished from the opportunistic and old-fashioned policy of stupidity which would try to turn the Western Civilization back in its course because stupid heads are incapable of adjusting themselves to new prevailing ideas.

III

With the knowledge of the organic nature of a High Culture, we have achieved an unparalleled liberation from the dross of materialism which hindered hitherto the glimpse into History's riddle. This knowledge is simple, but profound, and is therefore shut off from the inward appreciation of all but the few. In its train flow all the consequences of the necessary historical outlook of the coming times. Since a Culture is organic, it has an individuality, and a soul. Thus it cannot be influenced in its

12 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

depths from any outside force whatever. It has a destiny, like all organisms. It has a period of gestation, and a birth-time. It has a growth, a maturity, fulfillment, a down-going, a death. Because it has a soul, all of its manifestations will be impressed by the same spiritual stamp, just as each man's life is the creation of his own individuality. Because it has a soul, this particular culture can never come again after it has passed. Like the nations it creates to express phases of its own life, it exists only once. There will never be another Indian culture, Aztec-Mayan Culture, Classical Culture, or Western Culture, any more than there will be a second Spartan nation, Roman nation, French or English nation. Since a Culture is organic, it has a life-span. We observed this life span: it is about thirty-five generations at highest potential, or about forty-five generations from its first stirrings in the landscape until its final subsiding. Like the life span of organisms, it is no rigid thing. Man has a life span of seventy years, but this term is not rigid.

The High Cultures belong at the peak of the organic hierarchy: plant, animal, man. They differ from the other organisms in that they are invisible, or in other words, they have no light-quality. In this they resemble the human soul. The body of a High Culture is made up of the population streams in its landscape. They furnish it with the material through which it actualizes its possibilities. The spirit which animates these populations shows the life-phase of the Culture, whether youthful, mature, or at the last fulfillment. Like each man, a Culture has ages, which succeed one another with rhythmic inevitability. They are laid down for it by its own organic law, just as the senility of a man is laid down at his conception. This quality of direction we call Destiny. Destiny is the hallmark of everything living. Destiny-thinking is the type of thought which understands the living, and it is the only kind which does. The other

Perspective 13

method of human thought is that of Causality. This method is inwardly compulsory in dealing with inorganic problems of technics, mechanics, engineering, systematic natural philosophy. It finds the limits of its efficacy there, however, and is grotesque when applied to Life. It would tell us that youth is the cause of maturity, maturity of old age, that the bud is the cause of the full-blown flower, the caterpillar the cause of the butterfly.

The Destiny-Idea is the central motive of organic thinking. If anyone thinks it is merely an invisible causality, he understands it not. The idea of Causality is the central motive of systematic, or inorganic thinking. The latter is scientific thinking. It aims at subjugation of things to understanding; it wishes to name everything, to make outlines distinct, and then to link phenomena together by classification and causal linkage. Kant is the height of this type of thinking, and to this side of Western philosophy belong also Hume, Bacon, Schopenhauer, Hamilton, Spencer, Mill, Bentham, Locke, Holbach, Descartes. To the organic side belong Machiavelli, Vico, Montaigne, Leibnitz, Lichtenberg, Pascal, Hobbes, Goethe, Hegel, Carlyle, Nietzsche and Spengler, the philosopher of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Scientific thinking is at the height of its power in the realm of matter, that which possesses extension, but no direction. Material happenings can be controlled, are reversible, produce identical results under identical conditions, are recurrent, can be classified, can be successfully comprehended as though they are subject to an a priori, mechanical, necessity, in other words, to Causality.

Scientific thinking is powerless in the domain of Life, for its happenings are uncontrollable, irreversible, never-recurring, unique, cannot be classified, are unamenable to rational treatment, and possessed of no external, mechanical necessity. Every

14 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

organism is something never seen before, that follows an inner necessity, that passes away, never to reappear. Every organism is a set of possibilities within a certain framework, and its life is the process of actualization of these possibilities. The technique of Destiny-thinking is simply living into other organisms to understand their life-conditions and necessities. One can then apprehend what must happen.

The word Fate is an inorganic word. It is an attempt to subjugate Life to an external necessity; it is of religious provenance, and religion comes from the causal type of thinking. There is no science without a precedent religion. Science merely makes the sacred causality of religion into a profane, mechanical necessity.

Fate is not synonymous with destiny, but the opposite to it. Fate attributes necessity to the incidents of a life, but Destiny is the inner necessity of the organism. An incident can wipe out a life, and thus terminate its destiny, but this event came from outside the organism, and was thus apart from its destiny.

Every fact is an incident, unforeseeable and incalculable, but the inner progression of a life is destined, and works itself out through the facts, is helped or hindered by them, overcomes them, or succumbs to them. It is the destiny of every child that is born ultimately to become senile; incident may intervene in the form of disease or accident, and this destiny may be frustrated. These outer incidents — that may elevate a man to the heights despite his blunders, or cast him into defeat despite his efficiency and mastery of the idea of his time — are without meaning for Destiny-thinking.

Destiny inheres in the organism, forces it to express its possibilities. Incident is outside the organism, is blind, uninformed by necessity, but may nevertheless play a great role in the actualization of an organism, by smoothing its way, or imposing

Perspective 15

great obstacles to it. What is called Luck, Doom, Fate, Providence, express the bafflement and awe of men in the presence of this mystery, forever unknowable.

Destiny-thinking and Causality-thinking are related to one another, however, through their common provenance: both are products of Life. Even the most inorganic thinker or scientifico, the crassest materialist or mechanist, is subject to his own destiny, his own soul, his own character, his own life span, and outside this framework of destiny his free, unbound flight of causal fancy cannot deliver him. Destiny is Life, but Causality is merely a thought-method by which a certain form of Life, namely Culture-man, attempts to subjugate all around him to his understanding. Thus there is an order of rank between them: Destiny-thinking is unconditionally prior, for all Life is subject to it, while Causality-thinking is only an expression of a part of Life's possibilities.

Their differences may also be expressed in this way: Causality-thought is able to understand because its non-living material opposes no resistance, but submits to any conditions imposed upon it, having no inner compulsion of its own. When, however, Causality attempts to subjugate Life, the material itself is active, moving independently, will not stand still and be classified or systematized. Destiny-thinking can understand because each one of us is himself moved by Destiny, has an inner compulsion to be himself, and can thus, by transference of inwardly-experienced feelings, live himself into other forms of life, other individuations. Destiny-thinking moves along with its subject-matter; Causality stands still, and can only reach satisfactory conclusions with subject-matter that is also standing still.

Just as even the most highly developed systematizers are subject to Destiny, so do they — all unwittingly — apply Destiny-thinking

16 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

in their daily lives and relationships with other human beings. The most rabid reflexologist unconsciously applies some of the psychological wisdom of the Abbe Galiani or Rochefoucauld, even though he has never heard of these seers of the soul.

THE TWO ASPECTS OF HISTORY

THE TOTAL DIFFERENCE between the methods of human thinking represented by the central-ideas of Destiny on the one hand, and Causality on the other, was sharply accented for the reason that only one of them is adapted to the understanding of History. History is the record of fulfilled destinies — of Cultures, nations, religions, philosophies, sciences, mathematics, artforms, great men. Only the feeling of empathy can understand these once-living souls from the bare records left. Causality is helpless here, for at every second a new fact is cast into the pool of Life, and from its point of impact, ever-widening circles of changes spread out. The subterranean facts are never written down, but every fact changes the course of the history of facts. The true understanding of any organism, whether a High Culture, a nation, or a man, is to see — behind and underneath the facts of that existence — the soul which is expressing itself by means of, and often in opposition to, the external happenings. Only so can one separate what is significant from what is unimportant.

18 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

Significant thus is seen to mean: having a Destiny-quality. Incidental means: without relationship to Destiny. It was Destiny for Napoleon that Carnot was Minister of War, for another man would probably not have seen Napoleon's project for an invasion of Italy through the Ligurian Hills, buried as it was in the files of the Ministry. It was a Destiny for France that the author of the plan was a man of action as well as a theoretician. It is thus obvious that the feeling for what is Destiny and what is Incident have a high subjective content, and that a deeper insight can make out Destiny where the more superficial sees only Incident.

Men are thus differentiated also with regard to their capacity for understanding History. There is an historical sense, which can see behind the surface of history to the soul that is the determinant of this history. History, seen through the historical sense of a human being, has thus a subjective aspect. This is the first aspect of History.

The other, the objective, aspect of History, is equally incapable of rigid establishment, even though at first glance it might seem to be. The writing of purely objective history is the aim of the so-called reference, or narrative, method of presenting history. Nevertheless, it inevitably selects and orders the facts, and in this process the poetic intuition, historical sense, and flair of the author come into play. If these are totally excluded, the product is not history-writing, but a book of dates, and this, again, cannot be free from selection.

Nor is it history. The genetic method of writing history attempts to set forth the developments with complete impartiality. It is the narrative method with some type of causal, evolutionary, or organic philosophy superimposed to trace the growth of the subsequent out of the precedent. This fails to attain objectivity because the facts that survive may be either too

The Two Aspects of History 19

few or too numerous, and in either case artistry must be employed in filling gaps or selecting. Nor is impartiality possible. It is the historical sense which decides importance of past developments, past ideas, past great men. For centuries, Brutus and Pompey were held to be greater than Caesar. Around 1800, Vulpius was considered a greater poet than Goethe. Mengs, whom we have forgotten, was ranked in his day as one of the great painters of the world. Shakespeare, until more than a century after his death, was considered inferior as a playwright to more than one of his contemporaries. El Greco was unnoticed 75 years ago. Cicero and Cato were both held, until after the First World War, to be great men, rather than Culture-retarding weaklings. Joan of Arc was not included in Chastellain's list, drawn up on the death of Charles VII, of all the army commanders who fought against England. Lastly, for the benefit of readers of 2050, I may say that the Hero and the Philosopher of the period 1900-1950 were both invisible to their contemporaries in the historical dimensions in which you see them.

The Classical Culture looked one way to Wincklemann's time, another way to Nietzsche's time, yet another way to the 20th and 21st centuries. Similarly, Elizabethan England was satisfied with Shakespeare's dramatization of Plutarch's Caesar, whereas fin-de-siécle England required Shaw to dramatize Mommsen's Caesar, Wilhelm Tell, Maria Stuart, Götz von Berlichingen, Florian Geyer, all would have to be written differently today, for we see these historical periods from a different angle.

What then, is History? History is the relationship between the Past and the Present. Because the Present is constantly changing, so is History. Each Age has its own History, which the Spirit of the Age creates to fit its own soul. With the passing

20 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

of that Age, never to return, that particular History picture has passed. Seen from this standpoint, any attempt to write History "as it really happened" is historical immaturity, and the belief in objective standards of history-presentation is self-deception, for what will come forth will be the Spirit of the Age. The general agreement of contemporaries with a certain outlook on History does not make that outlook objective, but only gives it rank — the highest possible rank it can have — as an accurate expression of the Spirit of the Age, true for this time and this soul. A higher degree of truth cannot be attained, this side of divinity. Anyone who prates of being "modern" must remember that he would have felt just as modern in the Europe of Charles V, and that he is doomed to become just as "old-fashioned" to the men of 2050 as are the men of 1850 to him. A Journalistic view of History stamps its possessor as lacking in the historical sense. He should therefore refrain from talking of historical matters, whether past or in the process of becoming.

THE RELATIVITY OF HISTORY

HISTORY must always have its subjective aspect, and its objective aspect. But the determining thing is always neither the one, nor the other, but simply the relationship between the two. Each of the first two aspects can be arbitrary, but the relationship is not arbitrary, but is the expression of the Spirit of the Age, and is therefore true, historically speaking.

Each of the eight Cultures which passed in brilliant review before us had its own relationship to History generally, and this relationship developed in a certain direction through the life-course of the Culture. It is only necessary to mention the Classical in this connection. Tacitus, Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius were regarded as historical thinkers by the Romans. To us they are simply story-tellers, totally lacking in the historical sense. This could not be a reflection on them, but only tells us something about ourselves. Our view of History is as intense, fierce, probing and extensive, as the whole cast of our Western soul generally. If there were ten millennia of history instead of five, we would find it necessary to orient ourselves to the whole ten instead of to the mere five.

22 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

Not only are the Cultures differentiated from one another also in their historical sense, but the various Ages within the Culture's development are so distinguished. Although all tendencies exist in all the Ages, it is nevertheless correct to say that one certain Life-tendency dominates any one Age. Thus in all Cultures, the religious feeling is uppermost in the first great Life-phase, lasting some five centuries, and is then superseded by the critical spirituality, lasting somewhat less long, to be succeeded by the historical outlook, which gradually merges again into the final rebirth of religion. The three Life-tendencies are, successively, sacred, profane, and skeptical.

They parallel the political phases of Feudalism, corresponding to religion; Absolute State, and Democracy, corresponding to early and late Critical philosophy; and Resurgence of Authority and Caesarism, the counterparts of skepsis and rebirth of religion.

The intra-Cultural development of the idea of Science, or Natural Philosophy, is from Theology through, in succession, physical sciences and biology, to pure, untheoretical, Nature-manipulation, the scientific counterpart of skepsis and resurgent authority.

The Age which succeeds to the Age of Democracy can only see its predecessors under their purely historical aspect. This is the only way it can feel itself as related to them. This too, however, as will be apparent, has its imperative side. Culture-man is always a unity, and the mere fact that one Life-tendency is uppermost cannot destroy this organic unity.

In all Ages, the individuals therein are separated from one another also by their varying development of the historical sense. Think of the different historical horizon of Frederick II and one of his Sicilian courtiers, of Cesare Borgia and one of his captains, of Napoleon and Nelson, of Mussolini and his

The Relativity of History 23

assassin. A political unit in the custody of a man with no historical horizon, an opportunist, must pay with its wasted blood for his lack.

Just as the Western Culture has the most intensely historic soul, so does it develop men with the greatest historical sense. It is a Culture which has always been conscious of its own history. At each turning-point there were many who knew the significance of the moment. Both sides, in any Western opposition, have felt themselves as clothed with and determining the Future.

Therefore Western men have been under the necessity of having a History-picture in which to think and act. The fact that the Culture was continually changing meant that History was continually changing. History is the continuous reinterpretation of the Past. History is thus continually "true," because, in each Age, the ruling historical outlook and values are the expression of the proper soul. The alternatives for History are not true or false, but effective or ineffective. Truth in the religio-philosophical-mathematical sense, meaning timelessly, eternally valid, dissociated from the conditions of Life, does not pertain to History. History that is true is History that is effective in the minds of significant men.

The highly refined historical sense is the characteristic of two groups: history-writers and history-makers. Between these two groups also there is an order of rank. History-writing has the task of setting forth for the Age its necessary picture of the Past. This picture, clear and articulate, then becomes effective in the thoughts and actions of the leading history-makers of the Age.

This age, like others, has its own appropriate History-picture, and it cannot choose one of a number of pictures. The determining thing in our outlook on History is the Spirit of our Age.

24 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

Ours is an external, factual, skeptical, historical, Age. It is not moved by great religious or critical feelings. That which to our Cultural forebears was the object of joy, sorrow, passion, necessity, is to us the object of respect and knowledge. The center of gravity of our Age is in Politics. Pure historical thinking is the close relative of political thinking. Historical thinking always seeks to know what was, and not to prove something. Political thinking has the first task of ascertaining the facts and the possibilities, and then of changing them through action. Both are undissociated realism. Neither begins with a program, which it desires to prove.

Ours is the first age in Western history in which an absolute submission to facts has triumphed over all other spiritual attitudes. It is the natural corollary of an historical Age, when critical methods have exhausted their possibilities. In the realm of Thought, historical thinking triumphs; in the realm of action, Politics occupies the center of the stage. We follow the facts no matter where they lead, even though we must give up dearly cherished schemes, ideologies, soul-fancies, prejudices. Previous ages in Western history formed their History to fit their souls; we do the same, but our view has no precedent ethical or critical equipment in it. On the contrary — our ethical imperative is derived from our historical outlook and not vice versa.

Our outlook on History is no more arbitrary than that of any other age of the West. It is compulsory for us; each man will have this outlook, and his level of significance will depend on the focus in these matters which he can attain and hold. Insofar as a man is an effective representative of this time, he has this particular History-picture and no other. It is not a question of whether he should have it; so to read is completely to misunderstand. He will have it, in his feelings and unconscious valuation of events, even if not in his articulate, verbal, ideas.

THE MEANING OF FACTS

WHETHER OR NOT a man's History-outlook is also intellectually formulated as well as effective in his unconscious doing, thinking, and valuing is merely a function of his general personality. Some men have a greater inner need to think abstractly than others.

It must not be supposed that the sense for facts, the historical sense, dispenses with creative thinking. The development of fact-sense is primarily the seeing what is there without ethical or critical preconceptions of what should or should not be there, might or might not.

Life-facts are the data of History. A Life-fact is something which has happened. It does not matter to its status as a fact that no one may know of it, that it has vanished without trace. Obviously creative thinking enters into the process of interpreting the data of History, and a moment's reflection shows also that the process of assessing the data of History is a creative one.

Physical facts, like resistance, sourness, redness, are accessible to everyone. Life-facts are not accessible to a man who has a

26 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

rigid view of History, and who knows that the purpose of all previous happening was to make this age possible, who knows that History has the sole meaning of "Progress." Remnants of social ethics, preconceived historical notions, utility dogmas — all shut out their victims from inner participation in the life of the 20th and 21st centuries.

To this century the new vista now opens of assembling the lost facts in previous ages and previous Cultures. Not tiny incidental data, but the broad outline of necessary organic developments that must have taken place. From our knowledge of past Cultures and their structures, we can fill in missing developments in some from what has survived in others. Most important to us now alive — we can fill in what remains to the fulfillment of our own Culture. This can be done in the way that a palaeontologist can reconstruct in broad outlines an entire organism from a single skull-fragment. The process is legitimate and trustworthy in both cases, for Life has patterns in which it actualizes its unique individuals. From an anonymous work of literature remaining, a creative thinker can reconstruct a general picture of the unknown author. Can one not draw quite accurately the soul-portrait of the unknown author of Das Büchlein vom vollkommenen Leben? So also can the "Crusades" period of a Culture be reconstructed if one has knowledge of its "Reformation" stage, or its "Enlightenment" phase.

The realm of Thought is interested in the missing stages of past Cultures, and the future of our own, but Action is interested in the Past only as the key to effective performance. Thus the higher importance of history-writing and history-thinking is that they serve effective action.

The fact-sense is only operative when dogma, sodo-ethical ideas, and critical trappings are put aside. To the fact-sense, it is important that hundreds of millions of people in a certain area

The Meaning of Facts 27

believe in the truth of Confucian doctrines. To the fact-sense, it is meaningless whether or not these doctrines are true — even though to religion, Progress-ideologies, and journalism, the truth or falsehood of Confucianism is important.

To a 21st century history-writer, the most important thing about the cells, ether-waves, bacillae, electrons, and cosmic rays of our times will be that we believed in them. All of these notions, which the age considers facts, will vanish into the one fact for the 21st century that once upon a time this was a world-picture of a certain kind of Culture-man. So do we look upon the nature-theories of Aristarchus and Democritus in the Classical Culture.

And thus facts too have their subjective and objective content. And again, it is the relationship between the man and the phenomenon that determines the form of the fact. Each Culture has in this way its own facts, which arise out of its own problems. What the fact is, depends on what man is experiencing the phenomenon: whether he belongs to a High Culture, to which Culture, to which age thereof, to which nation, to which spiritual stratum, to which social stratum.

The facts of the Second World War are one thing in this year 1948, in the brains of the Culture-bearing stratum of Europe, and something totally different in the minds of the newspaper-reading herds. By 2000 the view of the present Culture-bearing stratum will have become also the view of the many, and by that time, more facts will be known to the independent thinkers about the same War than are now known to the few. For one of the characteristics of Life-facts is that distance — particularly temporal distance — shows up their lineaments more clearly. We know more of Imperial history than Tacitus knew, more of Napoleonic history than Napoleon knew, vastly more of the First World War than its creators and

28 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

participants knew, and Western men in 2050 will know our times in a way that we can never know them. To Brutus his mythological ancestry was a fact, but to us a more important fact is that he believed it.

Thus the fact-sense, the prerequisite of the historical outlook of the 20th century, emerges as a form of the poetry of Life. It is the very opposite of the prosaic, drab insistence of the materialistic outlook that facts had to submit to a "progress" ideology in order to be cognized as significant. This view absolutely excluded its victims from any insight into the beauty and power of the facts of history, as well as from any understanding of their significance. The 21st century — whose men will be born into a time when this historical outlook is self-evident — will find it fantastic, if it ever takes notice of it, that in an earlier time men believed that all previous history was merely tending toward them. And yet that was the outlook of the 19th century: whole Cultures, equal by birth and spirituality to our own in every way, lived and died merely that the philistinism of the "progress"-ideologists could chalk up their "achievements" on the wall, meaning a few notions or technical devices.

THE DEMISE OF THE LINEAR VIEW OF HISTORY

LIFE is a continuous battle between Young and Old, Old and New, Innovation and Tradition. Ask Galileo, Bruno, Servetus, Copernicus, Gauss. All of them represented the Future, yet all were overcome, in one way or another, during their own lives, by the enthroned Past. Copernicus was afraid to publish during his lifetime, lest he be burned as heretic. Gauss only revealed his liberating discovery of non-Euclidean geometries after his death, for fear of the clamor of the Boeotians. It is therefore not surprising when the materialists persecute, by maligning, by conspiracy of silence, cutting off from access to publicity, or by driving to suicide, as in the case of Haushofer, those who think in 20th century terms and specifically reject the methods and conclusions of 19th century materialism.

The 20th century view of History has to make its way over the ruins of the linear scheme which insisted on seeing History as a progression from an "Ancient" through a "Mediaeval" to a "Modern." I say ruins, for the scheme collapsed decades ago, but they are heavily defended ruins. Hidden in them are the

30 THE 2OTH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

materialists, the posthumous inhabitants of the 19th century, the "Progress" philistines, the social-ethicians, the superannuated devotees of critical philosophy, the ideologists of every description whatever.

Common to them all is Rationalism. They assume as a tenet of faith that History is reasonable, that they themselves are reasonable, and that therefore History has done, and will do, what they think it should. The origin of the three-stage view of History is found in St. Joachim of Floris, a Gothic religionist who put forward the three stages as a mystical progression. It was left for the increasing coarseness of intellect devoid of soul to make the progression a materialistic-utilitarian one. For two centuries now, each generation has regarded itself as the peak of all the previous striving of the world. This shows that Materialism is also a Faith, a crude caricature of the precedent religion. It is supplanted now, not because it is wrong — for a Faith can never be injured by refutation — but because the Spirit of the Age is devoid of materialism.

The linear scheme was more or less satisfactory to Western man as long as he knew nothing of history outside the Bible, Classic authors, and Western chronicles. Even then, it would not have held up if the philosophy of history had not been a neglected field of endeavor. However, a little over a century ago began a spate of archaeological investigation, including excavations and deciphering of original inscriptions in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Crete, China and India. It continues today and now includes also Mexico and Peru. The result of these investigations was to show the historically-minded Western Civilization that it was by no means unique in its historical grandeur, but that it belonged to a group of High Cultures, of similar structure, and of equal elaboration and splendor. The Western Culture is the first to have had both the intense historical

The Demise of the Linear View of History 31

impetus as well as the geographic situation to develop a thorough archaeology, which includes now within its purview the whole historical world, just as Western politics at one time embraced the whole surface of the earth.

The results of this profound archaeological science broke down the old-fashioned linear scheme of regarding History. It was utterly unable to fit in the new wealth of facts. Since there was some geographic, even though no historical, community between the Egyptian, Babylonian, Classical, and Western Cultures, it had been able to distort them somehow into a picture that could convince those who already believed. But with the opening up of the history of the Cultures that were fulfilled in India, China, Arabia, Mexico, Peru — this view could no longer convince even believers.

Furthermore, the materialistic spirit, which had posited the "influence" of preceding Cultures on subsequent ones, meanwhile died out, and the new, psychological outlook on Life recognized the primacy of the soul, the inner purity of the soul, and the superficiality of the process of borrowing of externalia.

The new feeling about History was actually coeval with the tremendous outburst of archaeological activity which broke down the old linear scheme. The new outlook became a soul-necessity of Western Civilization at the same time that the history-seeking activity did, even though it was to remain half-articulate until the First World War. This intense outburst of probing of the Past was an expression of a superpersonal feeling that the riddle of History was not touched with the old linear device, that it had to be unlocked, that the totality of facts must be surveyed. As the new facts accumulated, the higher-ranking historians took a wider view, but not until the latter part of the 19th century did any historian or philosopher actually treat Cultures as separate organisms, with parallel

32 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

existence, independence, and spiritual equality. The idea of "cultural history" itself was a forerunner of this view, and was a prerequisite to the development of the 20th century outlook on History. The rejection of the idea that History was merely the record of reigns and battles, treaties and dates, marked an epoch. The feeling spread that "universal history" was wanted, the combination of the history of politics, law, religion, manners, society, commerce, art, philosophy, warfare, erotic, literature, into one great synthesis. Schiller was one of the first to articulate this general need, although both Voltaire and Winckelmann had written specific histories along these lines.

Hegel, on a spiritual basis, and Comte and Buckle, materialistically, developed further the idea of total history, i.e., cultural history. Burckhardt not only produced a quite perfect example of a cultural history in his Italian Renaissance book, but developed a philosophy of history-writing pointing toward the 20th century outlook. Taine, Lamprecht, Breysig, Nietzsche, Meray, all are milestones in the development away from the linear view of history. In their times, only Nietzsche, and to a lesser extent, Burckhardt and Bachofen, understood the 20th century idea of the unity of a Culture. But two generations later the idea of the unity of a High Culture is general in the highest spiritual stratum of Europe, and has become a prerequisite to both historical and political thinking.

What was this linear view of History ? It was either a mere arbitrary breaking-up of historical materials for handling and reference, without any claim to philosophical significance, or else it was an attempt at a philosophy of history. Its pretensions to the latter could not very well hold up in view of the fact that for generations the starting-point of the "Modern" age has been shifted around from century to century with complete freedom. Each writer has formulated the significance and dates of the three stages differently and the various formulations exclude

The Demise of the Linear View of History 33

one another. But if they are not the same view, why the same terminology?

Thus it was no philosophy of history, but a mere set of three names which were retained because of a sort of magic which was supposed to inhere in them. Nor was it a satisfactory method of breaking up the historical facts for reference purposes, since it left no place for China and India, and since it treated the Babylonian and Egyptian, in every way the historical equals of the Classical and our own, as though they were mere episodes, together constituting a prelude to the Classical. For this grotesque History-outlook, a millennium in Egypt was a footnote, while ten years in our own century were a volume.

II

The basis of the linear view was Cultural egocentricity, or in other words the unconscious assumption that the Western Culture was the focus of the whole meaning of all human history, that previous Cultures had importance only insofar as they "contributed" something to us, but that in themselves they had no importance whatever. This is why the Cultures which lived in areas remote from Western Europe are hardly even mentioned. These famous "contributions" — what was meant was a few technical devices from the Egyptian and Babylonian Cultures, and the Cultural remains generally of the Classical. The Arabian, again, was almost totally ignored, for geographic reasons. And yet Western architecture, religion, philosophy, science, music, lyric, manners, erotic, politics, finance, economics all are totally independent of the corresponding Classical forms. It is the archaeological cast of the Western soul, its intensely historical nature, that prompt it to reverence what mere geography might indicate is a spiritual ancestor.

And yet — who believes, or ever did actually believe, that the

34 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

Rome of Hildebrand, of Alexander VI, of Charles V, or of Mussolini, had any continuity whatever with the Rome of Flaminius, Sulla, Caesar? This whole Classicistic yearning of the West, with its two high points in the Italian Renaissance and above all, in Winckelmann's movement, was actually nothing but a literary-Romantic pose. If we had known less of Rome and more of Mecca, Napoleon's title might have been Caliph instead of First Consul, but nothing would have inwardly altered. The endowing of words and names with magic significance is quite necessary and legitimate in religion, philosophy, science, and criticism, but is out of place in an outlook on History.

Even in the Italian Renaissance, Francesco Pico wrote against the mania for the Classical: "Who will be afraid to confront Plato with Augustine, or Aristotle with Thomas, Albert, and Scotus?" Savonarola's movement also had cultural, as well as religious, significance: into the bonfires went the Classical works. The whole Classicist tendency of the Italian Renaissance has been too heavily drawn: it was literary, academic, the possession of a few small circles, and those not the leading ones in thought or action.

And yet this movement has been put forward as the "link" between two Cultures that have nothing in common in order to create a picture of History as a straight line instead of as the spiritually parallel, pure, independent, development of High Cultures.

To the religious outlook, with its branches, philosophy and criticism, "Progress-philistinism," and social ethics, facts figure only as proof, and lack any other interest. To the historical outlook, facts are the material sought after, and even doctrines, dogmas, and truths, are treated as simply facts. Previous Western ages were thus satisfied by the linear scheme, despite its

The Demise of the Linear View of History 35

complete independence of the facts of history. To the 20th century, however, with its center of gravity in politics, History is not a mere instrument of proving or illustrating any dogma, or socio-ethical "Progress" theory, but the source of our effective world-outlook.

And so, in implicit obedience to the Spirit of the Age, the leading minds of the 20th century reject the old-fashioned, anti-factual, linear theory of History. In its place the Spirit of the Age has shown the actual structure of human history, the history of eight High Cultures, each an organism with its own individuality and destiny. The older type of philosophy of history forced the facts to prove some religious, ethical, or critical theory; the 20th century outlook takes its philosophy of history from the facts.

The 20th century outlook is none the less subjective because it starts from facts; it is merely obeying the inner imperative of its own historical soul in seeing its History-picture thus. Our view is none the less peculiarly ours because it gives priority to facts; other types of men, outside the Western Culture, or beneath it, will never be able to understand it, any more than they can understand higher Western mathematics, Western technics, physics, or chemistry, Gothic architecture or the art of the fugue. This picture of History, absolutely compulsory as it is for the leading men of thought of action in the Western Civilization, is no compulsion for the masses that throng in the streets of the Western capitals. Historical relativity is, like physical relativity, the possession of a few leading minds. History is not experienced, nor made, in the streets, but on the heights. The number of men in the Western Civilization who were aware of the actual meaning of the Second World War is countable in thousands. Western philosophy, from the days of Anselm, has always been esoteric. No less so is the 20th century

36 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

outlook, and correspondingly small is the number of those for whom it is a soul-necessity. But the number for whom the decisions of these few will be decisive is not numbered in hundreds, but in hundreds of millions.

To the 20th century, the regarding of all previous human happening as merely introductory to, and preparatory to our own Western history, is simply immense naïvete. Evolutions that required just as long as our millennium of Western history are contracted into mere casual events; the men in these other Cultures are treated as though they were children, dimly trying to attain to one or another of our specifically Western ideas. But in each of these previous Cultures, the stage was reached and passed that we attained to in the 19th and 20th centuries: free science, social ethics, democracy, materialism, atheism, rationalism, class war, money, nationalism, annihilation-wars. Highly artificial living conditions, megalopolitan sophistication, social disintegration, divorce, degeneration of the old arts to mere formlessness — they exhibited all these familiar symptoms.

The vast amount of historical knowledge of which the 20th century must take account — knowledge unearthed by the historical age which succeeded to the age of Criticism — can tolerate no arbitrary forcing of the facts of history into a preconceived scheme with three magical stages, which must remain three even though no one can agree where one begins and the other leaves off, and of which the third stage has been prolonged indefinitely since Professor Horn of Leyden announced in 1667 his discovery of "the Middle Ages."

The first formulation of the 20th century outlook on History only came with the First World War. Previously, only Breysig had definitely broken with the linear scheme, but his earlier work covered only a part of human history. It was left to

The Demise of the Linear View of History 37

Spengler, the philosopher of the age, to set forth the full outline of the structure of History. He himself was the first to recognize the superpersonal nature of his work, when he said that an historically essential idea is only in a limited sense the property of him to whose lot it falls to parent it. It was for him to articulate that at which everyone was groping. The view of others was limited by one or another specialist horizon, and their projects were consequently incomplete, one-sided, top-heavy. Like all products of genius, Spengler's work seems perfectly obvious to those who come afterwards, and again, it was directed to those to come and not to contemporaries. Genius is always directed toward the Future; this is in its nature, and this is the explanation of the usual fate of all works of genius, political and economic, as well as artistic and philosophical, that they are understood in their grandeur and simplicity only by the after-world of their creators.

THE STRUCTURE OF HISTORY

ONE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS ASSUMPTIONS of the linear scheme was the idea of the singularity of civilization. The concept "civilization" was used as though all highly symbolic Life, wherever and whenever it appeared, was really a manifestation of the same thing — "civilization." "Civilization" outside of the West was imperfect, striving to be Western, stammering and fumbling. This "civilization" was something that previous ages had stupidly allowed to slip away, but somehow it was always found again, hidden in a book somewhere, and "passed on" to the Future.

Again this was Rationalism: it assumed that men made their own history, and whatever happened was traceable to human excellence or to human mistakes.

But, to the pinnacle of historical insight and self-conscious grand historical creativeness of deeds that is the 20th century, History is the record of the lives of eight High Cultures, each an organism, impressed with the principle of individuality, each thus a member of a Life-form. The type High Culture is a Life-form

The Structure of History 39

at the peak of the organic hierarchy of which plants, animals, and man are the lower members. Each of the Cultures that we have seen is a member of this higher genus, an individual. Belonging as they do to one genus, they have common characteristics in their general habitus, their life-necessities, their technic of self-expression, their relation to landscape and population-streams, and their life span.

The differences among the Cultures are in their souls, their individualities, and thus, despite their similar structure, their creations are in the highest degree dissimilar. In the organic hierarchy, the principle of individuality is manifested at an increasing level of concentration from plants, through animals, to man. Cultures are even more highly individual than men, and their creations are correspondingly less capable of any inward assimilation by other Cultures.

With the passing of the Age of Materialism, the West knows once more that the development of an organism is the unfolding of a soul. The matter is the mere envelope, the vehicle of the expression of the spirit. It is this ancient and universal wisdom that is the primary source of the liberation of our History-outlook from the darkness and oppressiveness of Mechanism. The events of a human life are the expressions of the soul of that human at its successive stages of unfolding. The identical outward occurrence is a different experience for each human being: an experience is a relationship between a soul and an outer event. Thus no two persons can have the same experience, because the identical event is quite different to each different soul.

Similarly the reactions of each Culture-soul to externals of landscape, population-streams, and events and movements outside the Culture-area, are individual to each Culture. The religious experiences of each Culture are unique: each Culture has its own non-transferable way of experiencing and depicting the

40 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

Godhead, and this religious style continues right through the life span of the Culture, and determines completely the philosophy, science, and also the anti-religious phenomena of the Culture. Each Culture has its own kind of atheism, as unique as its religion. The philosophy and science of each Culture never become independent of the religious style of the Culture; even Materialism is only a profane caricature of the basic religious feeling of the Culture.

The choice of art-forms, and the content of the art-forms, are individual to each Culture. Thus the Western is the first to invent oil-painting, and the first to give primacy to music. The number-feeling of the Culture develops in each its own mathematics, which describes its own number-world, which again is inwardly non-transferable, even though external developments may be partially taken over, and then inwardly transformed by other Cultures. The State-idea is likewise individual, as are the Nation-idea, and the style of the final Imperium, the last political creation of the Culture.

Each Culture has its own style in technics — weak and crude in the Classical and Mexican-Peruvian, colossal and earth-shaking in our own — its own war-style, its own relation to economics, its own history-style, or organic tempo.

Each Culture has a different basic Morale, which influences its social structure, feelings, and manners, its intensity of inner imperative, and thus the ethical style of its great men. This basic morale determines the style of public life during the last great phase of the life of the Culture — the Civilization.

Not only are the Cultures differentiated from one another by their highly developed representation of the principle of individuality, but each age of each Culture has its own stamp, which sets it off from its preceding age, and from the succeeding. These differences loom larger to the humans within a Culture

The Structure of History 41

than the difference between one Culture and another. This is the optical illusion of greater size produced by nearness. To us the difference between 1850 and 1950 seems vast — to the history of 2150 it will be much less so. We have the feeling before we study history that 1300 and 1400 were spiritually much the same, but in fact, in that century there were spiritual developments as far-reaching as those between 1850 and 1950.

Here again, the linear scheme distorted History utterly: it said "Ancient" and thought that thereby it was describing one thing, one general spirtuality. But Egypt and Babylonia both had their own corresponding phenomena to our Crusades, Gothic religion, Holy Roman Empire, Papacy, Feudalism, Scholasticism, Reformation, Absolute State, Enlightenment, Democracy, Materialism, Class War, Nationalism, and annihilation wars. So did the others — the Chinese, Indian, Arabian, Classical, and Mexican. The extent of information available is quite different with regard to the various Cultures, but enough remains to show the structure of History. Between one age of Egyptian history and the next, there was as much difference as between 1700, the period of our Spanish Succession Wars, and 1800, our Napoleonic Wars. This illusion about distance finds an analogy in the spatial world; a distant mountain range looks smooth; nearer, it is rocky.

The idea that "civilization" was one certain thing, rather than an organic life-phase of a Culture, was a part of the "Progress" ideology. This profane religion, its own peculiar mixture of Reason and Faith, satisfied a certain inner demand of the 19th century. Further research will probably discover it in other Cultures. It seems to be an organic necessity of Rationalism to feel that "things are getting better all the time." Thus "progress" was a continuous moral improvement of "humanity," a movement toward more and better "civilization." The ideology

42 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

was formulated slightly differently by each materialist, but it was not allowed to dispute that "Progress" occurred. To do so marked one as a "pessimist." The ideal toward which there was continual "progress" was necessarily unattainable, for if it could be attained, "progress" would cease, and this was unthinkable.

Such a picture fitted the Age of Criticism, but in an historical Age this picture becomes just one more object of interest, as being the expression of one certain life-stage of a certain Culture. It is on a par with the world-picture of imminent catastrophe of mid-14th century, the witch obsession of the 16th century, the Reason-worship of the 18th century. All these outlooks possess now only historical significance. What interests us is that once they were believed. But as for trying to force the old-fashioned "progress" ideology on the 20th century, such an attempt is ludicrous; whoever would try stamps himself as an anachronistic mediocrity.

II

The word history has been employed to cover all human events, those manifesting the development of a Culture, and those outside of any Culture. But the two classes of events have nothing in common. Man as a species is one Life-form, Culture-man is another. The word history therefore designates separate things in the two cases.

In what is man as a species distinct from other Life-forms, such as plants and animals ? Simply in his possession of a human soul. This soul shapes for man a different world from the world of other forms of life. Man's world is a world of symbols. Things that for animals contain no meaning, and no mystery, have for man a symbolic significance. Outside of a High

The Structure of History 43

Culture, this symbolizing-necessity shows itself in the formation of primitive culture. Such cultures have an animistic religion, an ethic of tabu and totem, and social-political forms on the same level. Such cultures are not a unity, i.e., no single prime symbol is actualized in all the forms of the culture. These cultures are mere sums, collections of motives and tendencies.

Nowhere is primitive man without some primitive culture of this type. Man as a pure animal does not exist. All animals have a purely economic-reproductive existence: their whole individual lives consist in the process of nourishing and reproducing themselves, their lives have no spiritual superstructure above this plane.

Nevertheless, man's life in primitivity, and in an area where a High Culture is fulfilling itself, are two incommensurable things. The difference is so vast as to constitute one of kind, and not of mere degree. Vis-a-vis the history of Culture-man, primitive man seems merely zoological. The history that Stanley found in progress on his African explorations was of the one kind, and Stanley himself represented the other kind. Similarly zoological is the history of the lake-dwellers in Switzerland, the Chinese today, the Arabs, Bushmen, Indians, Amerindians, Lapps, Mongols, and the countless other tribes, races, and peoples outside our Western Civilization.

The animal is solely concerned with economics, primitive man sees hidden meanings in the world — but Culture-man regards his high symbols as the content of Life. A High Culture re-shapes entirely the economic practice of the populations upon whom it sets its grip; it reduces economics to the bottom of the pyramid of life. To a High Culture, economics has the same significance that the function of eating has to an individual. Above economics are all the manifestations of the High Culture's life: architecture, religion, philosophy, art, science,

44 THE 20TH CENTURY HISTORICAL OUTLOOK

technics, education, politics, erotic, city-building, imperialism, society. The significance an individual has is the reflex of his personal connection with the symbols of the Culture. This valuation itself is produced by the Culture — to an anti-cultural outlook such as the curious "materialistic interpretation of history," any proletaire is worth more than Calderon, for Calderon was not a manual laborer, and therefore accomplished nothing in a world whose entire significance is economic.

The difference between the history of man as a species and the history of man in the service of High Culture is that the first is devoid of grand meaning, and that only the second is the vessel of high significance. In high history, men risk all and die for an Idea; in primitivity there are no superpersonal ideas of this force, but only personal strivings, crude lust for booty or formless power. Consequently it would be an error to regard the difference as merely quantitative. The example of Genghis Khan shows this: the events he let loose were considerable in size, but in the cultural sense they have no significance whatever. There was no Idea in this sweeping descent of the followers of an adventurer. His conquests were fatal to hundreds of thousands, the empire he erected lasted generations beyond him, but it was simply there — it stood for nothing, represented nothing beyond itself. Napoleon's empire on the other hand, brief though it was, was laden with symbolic meaning that is still at work in the minds of Western men, and that is, as we shall see, pregnant with the Future of the West. High Cultures create the greatest wars, but their significance is not merely that they open rivers of blood, but that these men fall in a struggle of ideas.

After a High Culture has fulfilled itself, the populations in its former area return to the condition of primitivity, as the examples of India, China, Islam, and Egypt tell us. The world-cities

The Structure of History 45

empty themselves, the outer barbarians plunder them bare, and the men that are left are once more clans, tribes, nomads. When outer events do not destroy the remains utterly, the caste system of the last stage remains indefinitely, as in India and China, but it is the mere skeletal remains of the former Culture, which, like everything living, passes away, never to return. The memory of the Culture remains, but the attitude of the remaining populations toward its products is once more entirely primitive, unchanging, purely personal.

The abandoned world-cities return once more to the landscapes which they once dominated. World-cities that were once as proud as Berlin, London, and New York disappeared under jungle vegetation or the sands of the plain. This was the fate of Luxor, Thebes, Babylon, Pataliputra, Samarra, Uxmal, Tezcuco, Tenochtitlan. In the latter cases, even the names of the great cities have perished, and we call them after nearby villages. But it is an unimportant detail whether the city lies dead upon the surface, inhabited by a few clans who farm in the open spaces, fight in the streets, and shelter in the abandoned structures, or whether the sands shift over the crumbling remains.

PESSIMISM

IT WAS a remarkably curious phenomenon that when the organically necessary historical outlook on History, replacing the religious and critical-philosophical outlooks of previous Western ages, appeared early in the 20th century, it was greeted by the day-before-yesterday thinkers with a cry of "Pessimism." By this word it was apparently thought possible to conjure away the spirit of the coming age, and summon to new life the dead spirit of an age that had passed away. To abstract inorganic thought this feat did not seem considerable, since it regarded History as the field wherein one could do whatever he wanted to make the Past dance to his own tune.

The word pessimism was a polemical word — it described an attitude of general despair, which was supposed to color opinions and assessments of facts. Any person who seriously used this word showed thereby that he was willing to treat a world-historical philosophy in an electioneering fashion. Obviously an asserted fact should be examined entirely independently of the attitude of him asserting it. The whole pessimism cry is thus an ad hominem argument, and worthless. Facts are not pessimistic

Pessimism 47

or optimistic, sane or insane — an optimist may assert a fact, a madman may, a pessimist may. Describing the man who uttered the fact still leaves entirely open the correctness or incorrectness of the fact. Its purely ad hominem nature was the first weakness in the "Pessimism" view of the 20th century outlook on History.

Pessimism only describes an attitude, and not facts, and hence is entirely subjective. The attitude toward life that Nietzsche continually belabored as "Pessimism" in its turn described Nietzsche as a pessimist, and both were undoubtedly correct. If someone else thinks my plans are doomed, I consider him a pessimist, from my standpoint. Similarly, if I think his aspirations will come to naught, he thinks me a pessimist. We are both correct.

The "Progress" ideologists, smug in their secure mental armor, insulated from all contact with Reality, naturally felt it to be insulting in the extreme when it was suggested that their particular Faith also had a life span, was also, like all previous world-pictures, merely a description of a particular soul of a certain age, and thus was destined to pass away. To say that the "Progress" religion would come to an end with the Age whose inner demands it satisfied was to deny the truth of this religion, since it claimed to be a universal description of all human history. What was worse was that the 20th century outlook on History was formulated in such a strict factual way as to be compelling to the 20th century mind. This meant that catchwords had to be employed against it, since no other form of disputation would avail. With the single word "Pessimism," it was hoped to strangle the 20th century outlook on History.

It would be mistaken to put this down to the malice of the "Progress" religionists. No age submits quietly to the Spirit of the coming age.

The witchcraft religionists certainly did not agree with the first materialists who denied the very existence of witches. The

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conflict between the Established and the Becoming goes on continually, and the Becoming always prevails. It does so, not because it is true, and the Established was false, but because both were the lifestage of an organism, a Culture. Truth and falsehood have as little to do with this process as they do with the transformation of the boy into a youth, the youth into a man, the man into a dotard. The grandson is no more true than the grandfather, yet he will prevail, because of the organic advantage he has. Similarly does the historical attitude of the 20th century supplant the 19th century religion of Materialism. Materialism, Rationalism, "Progress," are all worn out, but the historical attitude of the 20th century is full of vigor and promise, eagerness to set itself to its great factual tasks, to create its great deeds. This organic necessity alone gives it its compelling quality. No one in this gigantic age when nations are world powers in one decade, and colonies in the next, can conscientiously maintain even before himself any shallow and infantile pretense that underneath all these cataclysms there is the meaning of a steady "moral improvement" of "humanity."

Some men have been rational for short periods — this is the sum total of the appearance of Reason in History. But such men have never made History, for it is irrational. The pretense of Reason being the meaning of History was itself irrational, since it was a product of History.

When the worship of Reason was instituted in Revolutionary France as a religion — a Faith — a fille de joie was crowned as the Goddess of Reason. Even Rationalism bears the stamp of Life — it is irrational.

The meaning of the word pessimism must be further laid bare. As we have seen, the word is subjective, and thus describes everybody, if he has a conviction that something is doomed. Suppose I say — Imperial Rome inwardly decayed, and within a

Pessimism 49

few centuries the Roman idea was completely dead. Is this pessimism? My grandfather is dead — am I a pessimist to say so? Someday I shall die — pessimism? Everything living must die — pessimism? To Life belongs Death — pessimism? Is there any example of an individual which has moved completely outside the organic sequence of that Life-form to which he belongs, and remained constantly at one life-stage for such long time-periods as to justify the conclusion that it was a case of Life without Death? An example would be a man who lived for — not 100 years, for we all believe such a man will eventually die — but two or three hundred years, and continually at one life stage, say the biological age of 65 years.

We know no such man, no such life-form. The criers of "pessimism" will call this pessimism, no doubt. We should keep up the pretense before ourselves all of our individual lives that we shall not die, for to admit mortality is pessimism.

History discloses seven precedent High Cultures to us. Their gestation-periods were morphologically identical, as were their birth-pangs, their first life-activities, their growth, their mature stages, their great Civilization-crises, their final life-forms, the gradual relaxing, the coming to each of a time when one had to say, looking at the landscape where the mighty being had fulfilled itself, that it was no longer, that it had died. This realization gives extreme pain to the "Pessimism" wailers, and I know of no remedy for their pain. These seven Cultures are dead — it would have been much more remarkable if they had gone on forever.

II

But our Civilization is itself a stage of a High Culture, the Culture of the West. Its millennium of history shows that it is an individual organism belonging to the Life-form High Cul

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ture. Can fact-thinkers pretend that it belongs to the Life-form but has no Life-span ?

The question can now be formulated: exactly how is it "Pessimism" to say that since seven High Cultures fulfilled themselves that an eighth will also? If this is "Pessimism," then anyone admitting his own mortality is inevitably a "Pessimist." The alternative to pessimism thus becomes idiocy.

However pessimism is an attitude, and if someone says that to admit the fact that Life is fulfilled in Death is pessimism, he shows something about himself. He shows his own cowardly I fear of death, his entire lack of heroism, of respect for the mysteries of Being and Becoming, his shallow materialism. One I must never forget that these same people are the ones who write f and read, in their book and magazine press, a literature on indefinitely prolonging the life-span of the human species. Again, this shows something about them. How they delight in juggling insurance statistics in such a way as to make them think they are living longer! This is their valuation of life: the longest life is the best. To this mentality, a short and heroic life is sad, not inspiring. Heroism generally is thus merely foolish, since indefinitely prolonged life is the aim of "Progress."

In the Gothic religious times, the Western form of the idea of immortality of the soul was formed and developed. With the age of Materialism, this became caricatured into the immortality of the body. The doctor of medicine became the priest of the new religion, and a whole literature glorified him as the ultimate human type, since he was saving life. And yet, shocking though it is to these people, Death continues to accompany Life. 20th century wars take more lives than 19th century wars. The generations continue their procession to the grave, and even the most cowardly materialist, who can never admit that anything living will ever die, goes the way of the materialists in the other eight Cultures.

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To people who live in a nameless terror of personal death, naturally the idea of the passing away of a superpersonal soul is also horrible and frightening. Materialists have never been respecters of facts — whatever was not measurable by their ruler did not exist. Historical facts are per se uninteresting to a rationalist outlook, which begins with a critical principle, and not with facts, and it was hardly to be expected that a view of history resting on five millennia of history rather than on a simple philosophical platitude would take them along with it.

It is curious that the Pessimism-wailers, who denied the Culture would ever die, also denied the organic nature of a Culture. In other words, they also denied it lives. Their materialism compelled them to the last, their cowardice to the first. Most important about all their attitudes was that they did not understand the central idea of the 20th century outlook. The hundreds of volumes that they wrote against it — each one echoing the magic word "Pessimism" — show that distressingly clearly. On every page is a fundamental misunderstanding of the great thesis. By their lack of comprehension, they provided another proof of the accuracy of the outlook, for the view of one age only reflects the soul of that age, and the 20th century outlook was definitely not adapted to their 19th century outlook.

One great historical fact could have given them consolation: the passing of this Culture, which was not alive, and also would never die, according to them, would mean little to them in particular. In the first place, a Culture is not born, nor does it die in a few years; these processes are measured in generations and centuries. Thus no man could ever see a Culture appear or disappear, and no materialist would ever be obliged to undergo the painful experience of watching it die. More important, the lives of the ordinary people, on the everyday plane of life, are little affected by the presence of the Culture or the Civilization, during and after its passing, the life of the ordinary people, in

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its stark fundamentals, is simply life. The great numbers vanish, since they were only there to perform the last great life-tasks of the Civilization; the artificial living-conditions go, the great wars cease, the great demands, the great deeds. Pacifism — organic pacifism, not ideological pacifism, which stirs up wars — is the end-condition of a Culture.

Now then, the materialists are exclusively among the ordinary people — what concern have they with great things like heroism, great wars, and imperialism? Therefore the end of a Culture should beckon to them. Actually, however, their whole terror rested on an illusion. It would be as foolish for someone now to worry about the events of 2300 A.D. as it would have been for Frederick the Great to worry about the conditions of 1900. He could not have imagined those exact conditions, hence he could not have planned for them, hence it would have been foolish for him to dread them. They were to be the concern of other people. The day's demands, as Goethe said, constitute one's immediate duty. We living in Europe today have a certain task imposed upon us by the situation, the times, and our own inner imperative. The most we can do about forming the remote Future is to do our utmost in giving to this age the strong and manly form it demands. The generation after the next will have its task also, and the only way we can make ourselves effective in their age will be so to conduct ourselves now that our deeds and example will live after us.

To a materialist, this is pessimism.

III

There are many intellectuals who stop at the title of leading works of an historical age: these gathered the basis for their charge of pessimism against the 20th century world-outlook

Pessimism 53

from the title of the first book fully to outline it: The Decline of the West. Decline had a definitely pessimistic sound to these gentlemen; they needed no more. In his essay Pessimism? (1921), Spengler mentioned that some people had confused the sinking of a Culture with the sinking of a steamship, whereas, as applied to a Culture, the idea of a catastrophe was not contained in the word. He explains further that this title was decided upon in 1911, when, in his words, "the shallow optimism of the Darwinistic age lay over the 'West-European-American world." He prepared the book, in which he set forth the thesis of an age of annihilation-wars for the immediate future, for the coming age, and chose the title to contradict the prevailing optimism. In 1921, he wrote, he would choose a title that would contradict the equally shallow pessimism then prevailing.

If pessimism be defined as seeing nothing more to be done, it does not touch a philosophy which sets forth task after task remaining to the Western Civilization. Apart from the political and economic, to which this work is devoted, Western physics, chemistry and technics all have their peaks before them, as have also archaeology and historical philosophy. The formulation of a legal system freed from philology and conceptualizing is also a need. National economy needs to be approached and organized thoroughly in the 20th century spirit, and above all, an education must be created, in the grand sense of consciously training the coming generations, in the full light of the historic necessity of our Future, for the great life-tasks of the Civilization.

The cry of "Pessimism" is dying down — the 20th century outlook on History surveys from its historical peak and to its own unique, vast, historical horizons, the life-courses of eight High Cultures accomplished, and even looks boldly and confidently

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into its own Culture's future, yet to be accomplished. Readers in 1950 have forgotten, and readers in 2050 will possibly have no way of finding out, that before the 20th century outlook on History appeared, unrealized history was regarded as a blank tablet on which man might write whatever he wished. This was of course the instinctive attitude of no single man of action — they have to know better in order to accomplish the veriest trifle, but even they had to maintain the pretense that the Future was carte blanche.

No one thinks in this fashion during the second half of the 20th century; the bleating of the rationalists and the whimpering of the materialists are growing fainter. Even they are now talking about History, instead of about their old platitudes. Even their press now fits out its herd of readers with a history-outlook. History begins in 1870, and it ends after the next war; each war is portrayed as the last. This History-picture did service for more than a generation, and its very existence in materialistic journalism is a sign of the increasingly historical attitude of the age. After the First World War, a "League of Nations" was established to bring about "World Peace," and there was a considerable number of persons in the Western Civilization who took it seriously. Within the short space of one generation, however, a second "League" was founded after a Second World War, but this time, owing to the inner victory in the West of the 20th century world-outlook which had occurred meanwhile, almost no one looked upon the "League" as anything other than a localization of diplomatic war-preparations between the two remaining powers. We have come a long way from the old "Progress" days.

The tables are turned on the wailers of "Pessimism." Actually they are merely the representatives of the Spirit of an Age that has gone forever. Thus they are anachronistic in this Age, and to the extent that they try to intervene in its Life, they must

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fight against its every expression-tendency. They can only negate the Future with their hopeless attempt to revive the Past. Does not this make them pessimists?

The definitive word can now be said about pessimism, and about optimism, for the two are inseparable as concepts. If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them? They are twin soul-diseases. Between them lies realism, which wants to know what is, what must be done, how it can be done. Realism is historical thinking, and it is also political thinking. Realism does not approach the world with a preconceived principle to which things ought to submit — it is this prime stupidity which begets both pessimism and optimism. If it looks as though things will not fit, so to declare is pessimism. Optimism continues to pretend that they do, despite the entire course of History, to the contrary. Of the two diseases, optimism is more dangerous to the soul, for it is more blind. Pessimism, by not being afraid to affirm the unpleasing, is at least capable of seeing, and may yield to a flaring-up of healthy instincts.

Every captain must prepare for both victory and defeat, and tactically, the latter part of his plan is more important, and no captain would refrain from taking measures to apply in defeat because someone said to him that this was pessimism. Let us go further — a hundred odd Americans were surrounded in 1836 in the Alamo by Mexican armies numbering thousands. Was it pessimistic for them to realize that their position was hopeless ? But there happened something which the materialists — the real pessimists — can never understand. The members of the tiny garrison did not allow the obvious hopelessness of the situation to affect their personal conduct — every man chose to fight on rather than surrender. They thought rather of what was left to do than of the ultimate annihilation.

This was also the attitude of the Kamikaze pilots who in the

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Second World War drove their explosive-laden airplanes on to enemy ships of war. Not only is this attitude entirely outside any stupid optimism-pessimism scheme, but it is the essence of heroism itself. Fear of death does not prevent the hero from doing what has to be done. The 20th century has this heroic attitude once more, and it thinks of its task, and not of the ultimate end of all Life in Death. Least of all does it fear death so much, both individual death and the fulfillment of the Civilization within which we must actualize our possibilities, that it attempts to deny Death in any way. It wants to live Life, not cringe before Death. Optimism and pessimism are for cowards, weaklings, fools, and stupid persons, incapable of appreciating the mystery, power, and beauty of Life. They shrink from sternness and renunciation, and escape from the brutality of facts into dreams of immortality of the body, and indefinite perpetuation of the world-outlook of the 19th century.

As I write — 1948 — these cowardly pessimists lord it over the submerged Western Civilization, propped up by extra-European forces. They pretend that all is well, now that Europe is the spoils for powers from without, sunk to the level of India and China. The 20th century spirit, however, which they hate because it is young and full of Life, intends to sweep them one day soon into History's dust-bin, whither they were long since consigned. Theirs is the attitude — Do nothing. And yet they have the temerity to brand the representatives of the 20th century spirit with the positive attitude of accomplishment as "Pessimists." The materialists and Liberals talk of "return" to better conditions — always return. The new spirit commands: Forward to our greatest Age of all.

This age and its spirit would not shrink from entering upon its task of building the Empire of the West even if it were told that the outer forces are too strong, that they will never succeed.

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It prefers to die on its feet rather than live on its knees, like the materialists and other cowards who now make themselves serviceable to the outsiders in their great task of looting and destroying the Western Civilization.

The great ethical imperative of this age is individual truth-to-self, both for the Civilization and its leading persons. To this imperative, an unfavorable situation could never bring about an adaptation of one's self to the demands of the outsider, merely in order to live in slavish peace. One asserts himself, determined on personal victory, against whatever odds exist. The promise of success is with the man who is determined to die proudly if it is no longer possible to live proudly.

THE CIVILIZATION-CRISIS

ALL THE CULTURES arrived at the point in their development when their possibilities for culture — in the narrower sense — were fulfilled. The Life-directions of religion, philosophy, and the arts of form, were fully expressed and formed definitively. The Counter-Reformation was the period of the definitive shaping of Western religious formative potentialities, and thenceforward religion was on the defensive against profane tendencies, which gradually increased and finally, with the turn of the 19th century, gained the upper hand. Kant is the high point of Western possibilities in inorganic philosophy, as was his contemporary Goethe for organic philosophy. Mozart is the high point of music, the art that the Western Culture chose as its most perfect for its own soul.

Naturally the Culture had always had both an inner and outer life; politics and war had always continued, since they are inseparable from the life of Culture-man. But in the first centuries of the Culture — say until 1400 — Religion had dominated the total Cultural life. Gothic architecture, Gothic sculpture,

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glass-painting and fresco — all these arts had served religious expression, and these centuries may be called the Age of Religion. This period yielded to new tendencies, less inward, reflected also in the greater development of trade and economic production. The new tendencies are more urban; they contain more adaptation to the external world, but they are still primarily inward. The arts pass into the custody of "Great Masters," and become emancipated from religion. The maturity of the Culture shows itself in its development at this time of its greatest and most refined art. In the West, this was music; in the Classical, it was sculpture.

The Reformation and Counter-Reformation are both steps away from the Age of Religion. Philosophy becomes independent of theology, and natural science challenges dogmas of Faith. The basic attitude toward the world is still sacred, but the illuminated foreground widens constantly. This period is the Baroque in our Culture, lasting from 1500 to 1800, the Ionic in the Classical.

During these centuries, the politics reflected the strict formative stage of the Culture. The struggle for political power was strictly within the bounds imposed by the Culture-soul. Armies were small, professional; war was the possession of the nobility; peace treaties were arrived at by negotiation and compromise; honor was present at every decision of politics or war.

The later Baroque produced the Age of "Enlightenment." Reason was now felt as all-powerful, and to challenge its almightiness became as unthinkable as it would have been to challenge God in Gothic times. The English philosophers from Locke onward, and the French Encyclopedists who adopted their ideas, were the custodians of the spirit of this age.

By 1800, the externalizing tendency has prevailed completely over the old inwardness of the strict Culture. "Nature" and

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"Reason" are the new gods; the outer world is regarded as primary. From having examined his own soul, and having expressed its formative possibilities to the limit in the inner world of religion, philosophy, and art, Culture-man now finds his imperative directed to subjecting the outer world to himself.

The great symbol of this transition in our Culture is Napoleon, in the Classical, Alexander. They represented the victory of Civilization over Culture.

Civilization is in one way a denial of the Culture, in another way it is the sequel. It is organically necessary, and all the Cultures went through this stage. This present work is concerned throughout with the problems of Civilization in general, and of our immediate problem for the period 1950-2000 in particular. Therefore it is not necessary to do more than present in this place a bare outline of the significance to the organism of the Civilization-phase.

With the triumph of Reason comes an immense liberating effect on the Culture-populations. The feelings that were formerly expressed only in strict forms, whether in art, war, cabinet-politics, or philosophy, are now given free rein, increasingly independent of Culture-bounds. Rousseau for instance, advocated the doing away with all Culture, and the descent of Culture-man to the purely animal plane of economics and reproduction. Art develops increasingly away from strict form, from Beethoven to our day. The ideal of the Beautiful yields finally to the ideal of the Ugly. Philosophy becomes pure social-ethics, when it is not a coarse and crude metaphysics of materialism. Economics, formerly merely the foundation of the great structure, now becomes the focus of immense energy. It too succumbs to Reason, and in this field, Reason formulates the quantitative measure of value, Money.

Reason applied to politics produced Democracy; applied to

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war, it produced the mass army to replace the professional one, and the dictate instead of the treaty. The authority and dignity of the Absolute State are felt as tyranny by the new life-tendencies, and in heavy battles, the forces of Money, Economics, and Democracy overcome the State. For its responsible, public, leadership, is substituted the irresponsible, private, rule of anonymous groups, classes, and individuals, whose interests the parliaments serve. The psychology of monarchs is replaced by the psychology of crowds and mobs, the new base for power of the man of ambition.

Production, technics, trade, public power, and — above all — population-numbers increase fantastically. These numbers are produced by the enormous final life-task of the Culture, namely the subjection of its known world to its domination. In an area where formerly there were 80 millions there are now 260 millions.

The great common denominator of the Civilization ideas is mobilization. The masses of the Culture-populations, and the masses whom they conquer, the earth itself, and the power of intellectual ideals — all are mobilized.

II

From the standpoint of the whole life of the organism this stage is a crisis, for the whole idea of the Culture itself is attacked, and the custodians of the Culture must wage a battle of more than two centuries against inner attacks, in class war. Down beneath the Culture, the idea awakens in the minds of intellectuals that this Culture is a thing that must be done away with, that man is an animal and is corrupted by development of his soul. Philosophies appear, denying the existence of anything but matter; life is defined as a physico-chemical process; its

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twin-urges are economic and reproductive; anything above this level is sinful. Both from the economic leaders and from the class-warriors comes the doctrine that all life is nothing but economics. From self-styled "psychologists" comes the doctrine that life is nothing but reproduction.

But the strength of the organism, even in crisis, is too great for a few intellectuals and their mobs to destroy it, and it goes its way. In the Western Civilization, the expansive tendency reached the point where by 1900, 18/20 of the surface of the earth was controlled politically from Western capitals. And this development merely brought an aggravation of the crisis, for this power-will of the West gradually awakened the slumbering masses of the outer world to political activity.

Before the inner war of classes had been liquidated, the outer war of races had begun. Annihilation-wars and World Wars, continuous internal strain in the form of unrelenting class-war, which regards outer war merely as a means of increasing its demands, the revolt of the colored races against the Western Civilization — these are the forms which this terrible crisis takes in the 20th century.

The peak of this long crisis exists now, in the period 1950-2000, and possibly in these very years will be decided forever the question whether the West is to fulfill its last life-phase. The proud Civilization which in 1900 was master of 18/20 of the earth's surface, arrived at the point in 1945, after the suicidal Second World War, where it controlled no part whatever of the earth. World power for all great questions was decided in two outer capitals, Washington and Moscow. The smaller questions of provincial administration were left to the nations-become-colonies of the West, but in power-questions, the regimes based in Russia and America decided all. Where formal control was left with Europe, as in Palestine, actual control

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was retained in Washington. The food-rations, trade-union policy, leaders, and tasks of the former Western nations were decided upon outside of Europe.

In 1900, the State-system of Europe reacted as a unit when the negative will of Asia thought, by the Boxer rebellion, to drive out the Imperialism of the West from China. Western armies from the leading States moved in, and smashed the revolt. Less than half a century later, extra-European armies are moving freely about Europe, armies containing Negroes, Mongols, Turkestani, Kirghizians, Americans, Armenians, colonials and Asiatics of all areas. How did this happen?

Quite obviously, through the inner division of the West. This division was not material — material cannot divide men if their minds agree. No, it was spiritual division that brought Europe into the dust. Half of Europe had a completely different attitude toward Life, a different valuation of Life, from the other half. The two attitudes were respectively the 19th century outlook, and the soth century outlook. The division continues, and the amount of food a man in the Western Civilization can eat is dependent on the decision of someone in Moscow or Washington. When the spiritual division of Europe comes to an end the extra-European powers will be unable to hold down the strong-willed populations of Europe.

The first step in action is thus the liquidation of the spiritual division of Europe. There is only one basis on which this can be done; there is only one Future, the organic Future. The only changes that can be brought about in a Culture are those which its life-stage necessitates. The 20th century outlook is synonymous with the Future of the West, the perpetuation of the 19th century outlook means the continuation of the domination of the West by Culture-distorters and barbarians. The task of the present work is the presentation of all the fundamentals of the

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20th century outlook necessary as the framework for comprehending and thorough action. First is the Idea — not an ideal which can be summed up in a catchword, or one which can be explained to an alien, but a living, breathing, wordless feeling, which already exists in all Westerners, articulate in a very few, inchoate in most. This Idea, in its wordless grandeur, its irresistible imperative, must be felt, and thus only men of the West can assimilate it. The alien will understand it as little as he has always understood Western creations and Western codes. In his victory parade in Moscow in 1945, the barbarian exhibited his Western captive slaves to the jeering crowds of his cities, and made them drag their national flags behind them in the dust. If any Westerner thinks that the barbarian makes nice distinctions between the former nations of the West, he is incapable of understanding the feelings of populations outside a High Culture toward that Culture. Tomorrow the captive slaves offered up to the annihilation-instincts of the Moscow mobs may be drawn from Paris, London, Madrid, as well as from Berlin. A continuation of the spiritual division of the West makes this not only possible but absolutely inevitable. Both the outer forces are working for the continued division of the West; within they are helped by the least worthy elements in Europe. This is addressed however to the only people that matter — the Westerners who can feel the Imperative of the Future working within them.

It is necessary that their world-outlook be the same in all its fundamentals, and we know in this historical age that the prevailing spirituality of an age is a function of its soul, and that comparatively little latitude is allowed in its necessary formulation. Therefore, the present work contains not arguments, but commands of the Spirit of the Age. These thoughts and values are necessary for us. They are not personal, but super-personal

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and compulsory for men who intend to do something with their lives.

Our action-task is dictated for us by the fact that the soil of our Civilization is occupied by the outsider. Our inner imperative and outlook on Life is determined for us by the Age. A part of the outlook of any age is simply the negation of the outlook of the previous age. Each age has to assert its new spirit against its predecessor, which would continue, even in the stage of rigor mortis, to dominate the spiritual landscape of the Culture. In establishing itself, the new spirit must deny the hostile old one. In a substantial part, therefore, our 20th century outlook is the negative of the 19th century materialism. Having destroyed this dank ruin, it erects over it its own, appropriate, view of the world and Life.

Since this is written for those whose world-view is researched to its very foundations, the preliminary, negative, aspect must be equally thorough. The world view of the millions is the task of journalism, but those who think independently have an inner necessity for a comprehensive picture. The great foundations of the old outlook were Rationalism and Materialism. They will be completely examined in this work, but here it is proposed to treat only three thought-systems, Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, products of materialistic thought, all of which were the focus of great spiritual energy in the 19th century, and which, continuing to have a vogue in the early 20th century, contributed greatly to lead Europe into its present abyss.

DARWINISM

ONE OF THE MOST fruitful discoveries of the 20th century was the metaphysics of nations. The unveiling of the Riddle of History showed that nations are different manifestations of the soul of the High Cultures. They exist only in Cultures, they have their life span for political purposes, and possess — vis-a-vis the other nations of the Culture — individuality. Each great nation is given an Idea, a life-mission, and the history of the nation is the actualizing of this Idea. This Idea, again, must be felt, and cannot be directly defined. Each Idea, to actualize which a given nation was chosen by the Culture, is also a stage of the development of the Culture. Thus Western History presents during the recent centuries, a Spanish period, a French period, an English period. They correspond to Baroque, Rococo, and early Civilization. These nations owed their spiritual and political supremacy during these years solely to the fact that they were the custodians of the Spirit of the Age. With the passing of the Age, these custodians of its Spirit lost their spiritually dominating position in the Culture.

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The early Civilization was the English period of the West, and all the thought and activity of the whole Civilization was on the English model. All nations embarked upon economic imperialism of the English type. All thinkers became Anglicized Intellectually. English thought-systems ruled the West, systems which reflected the English soul, English life-conditions, and English material conditions. Prime among these systems was Darwinism, which became popular, and thus politically effective.

Darwin himself was a follower of Malthus, and his system implies Malthusianism as a foundation. Malthus taught that population increase tends to outrun increase of food supply, that this represented an economic danger, and that "checks" on this population increase alone can prevent it from destroying a nation, such as epidemics and wars, unhealthy living conditions and poverty. Malthusianism expressly regards care for the poor, the aged, and orphans, as a mistake.

A word on this curious philosophy; first it has no correspondence whatever to facts, and therefore is not valid for the 20th century. Statistically it has no basis, spiritually it shows complete incomprehension of the prime fact of Destiny, Man, and History — namely that the soul is primary, and that matter is governed by soul-conditions. Every man is the poet of his own History, and every nation of its History. A rising population shows the presence of a life-task, a declining population points to insignificance. This philosophy would legitimate a man's existence by whether or not he is born into an adequate food-area! His gifts, his life task, his Destiny, his soul, are put at naught. It is one example of the great philosophic tendency of materialism: the animalization of Culture-man.

Malthusianism taught that the food-population ratio imposed a continuous struggle for existence among men. This "struggle

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for existence" became a leading-idea for Darwinism. The other leading ideas of Darwinism are found in Schopenhauer, Erasmus Darwin, Henry Bates, and Herbert Spencer. Schopenhauer in 1835 set forth a Nature-picture containing the struggle for self-preservation, human intellect as a weapon in the struggle, and sexual love as unconscious selection according to the interest of the species. In the 18th century, Erasmus Darwin had postulated adaptation, heredity, struggle, and self-protection as principles of evolution. Bates formulated before Darwin the theory of Mimicry, Spencer the theory of descent, and the powerful tautological catchword "survival of the fittest" to describe the results of the "struggle."

This is only the foreground, for actually the road from Darwin back to Calvin is quite clear: Calvinism is a religious interpretation of the "survival of the fittest" idea, and it calls the fit the "elected." Darwinism makes this election-process mechanical-profane instead of theological-religious: selection by Nature instead of election by God. It remains purely English in the process, for the national religion of England was an adaptation of Calvinism.

The basic idea of Darwinism — evolution — is as little novel as the particular theories of the system. Evolution is the great central idea of the philosophy of the 19th century. It dominates every leading thinker and every system: Schopenhauer, Proudhon, Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche, Mill, Ibsen, Shaw. These thinkers differ in their explanation of the purpose and technique of evolution; none of them question the central idea itself. With some of them it is organic, with most purely mechanical.

Darwin's system has two aspects, of which only one is treated here, for only one was effective. This was Darwinism as a popular philosophy. As a scientific arrangement it had considerable

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qualifications, and no one paid any attention to these when converting it to a journalistic world-outlook. As the latter, it had a sweeping vogue, and was effective as a part of the world-picture of the age.

The system shows its provenance as a product of the Age of Criticism in its teleological assumptions. Evolution has purpose — the purpose of producing man, civilized man, English man — in the last analysis, Darwinians. It is anthropomorphic — the "aim of evolution" is not to produce bacilli, but humanity. It is free trade capitalism, in that this struggle is economic, every man for himself, and competition decides which life-forms are best. It is gradual and parliamentary, for continual "progress" and adaptation, exclude revolutions and catastrophes. It is utilitarian, in that every change in a species is one that has a material use. The human soul itself — known as the "brain" in the 19th century — is only a tool by which a certain type of monkey advanced himself to man ahead of his fellow-monkeys. Teleology again: man became man in order that he might be man. It is orderly; natural selection proceeds according to the rules of artificial breeding in practice on English farms.

II

As a world view, Darwinism cannot of course be refuted, since Faith is, always has been, and always will be, stronger than facts. Nor is it important to refute it as a picture of the world, since as such it no longer influences any but day-before-yesterday thinkers. However, as a picture of the facts, it is grotesque, from its first assumptions to its last conclusions.

In the first place, there is no "Struggle for existence" in nature; this old Malthusian idea merely projected Capitalism on to the animal world. Such struggles for existence as do occur

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are the exception; the rule in Nature is abundance. There are plenty of plants for the herbivores to eat, and there are plenty of herbivores for the carnivores to eat. Between the latter there can hardly be said to be "struggle," since only the carnivore is spiritually equipped for war. A lion making a meal of a zebra portrays no "struggle" between two species, unless one is determined so to regard it. Even so, he must concede that it is not physically, mechanically, necessary for the carnivores to kill other animals. They could as well eat plants — it is the demand of their animal souls however to live in this fashion, and thus, even if one were to call their lives struggles, it would not be imposed by "Nature" but by the soul. It becomes thus, not a "struggle for existence," but a spiritual necessity of being one's self.

The capitalistic mentality, engaged in a competition to get rich, quite naturally pictured the animal-world also as engaged in an intensive economic contest. Both Malthusianism and Darwinism are thus capitalistic outlooks, in that they place economics in the center of Life, and regard it as the meaning of Life.

Natural selection was the name given to the process by which the "unfit" died out to give place to the "fit." Adaptation was the name given to the process by which a species gradually changed in order to be more fit for the struggle. Heredity was the means by which these adaptations were saved for the species.

As a factual picture, this is easier to refute than it is to prove, and factual biological thinkers, both Mechanists and Vitalists, like Louis Agassiz, Du Bois-Reymond, Reinke, and Driesch rejected it from its appearance. The easiest refutation is the palaeontological. Fossil deposits — found in various parts of the earth — must represent the possibilities generally. Yet they disclose

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only stable specie-forms, and disclose no transitional types, which show a species "evolving" into something else. And then, in a new fossil hoard, a new species appears, in its definitive form, which remains stable. The species that we know today, and for past centuries, are all stable, and no case has ever been observed of a species "adapting" itself to change its anatomy or physiology, which "adaptation" then resulted in more "fitness" for the "struggle for existence," and was passed on by heredity, with the result of a new species.

Darwinians cannot get over these facts by bringing in great spaces of time, for palaeontology has never discovered any intermediate types, but only distinct species. Nor are the fossil animals which have died out any simpler than present-day forms, although the course of evolution was supposed to be from simple to complex Life-forms. This was crude anthropomorphism — man is complex, other animals are simple, they must be tending toward him, since he is "higher" biologically.

Calling Culture-man a "higher" animal still treats him as an animal. Culture-man is a different world spiritually from all animals, and is not to be understood by referring him to any artificial materialistic scheme.

If this picture of the facts were correct, species ought to be fluid at the present time. They should be turning into one another. This is, of course, not so. There should actually be no species, but only a surging mass of individuals, engaged in a race to reach — man. But the "struggle," again, is quite inconclusive. The "lower" forms, simpler — less fit? — have not died out, have not yielded to the principle of Darwinian evolution. They remain in the same form they have had for — as the Darwinians would say — millions of years. Why do they not "evolve" into something "higher"?

The Darwinian analogy between artificial selection and natural

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selection is also in opposition to the facts. The products of artificial selection such as barnyard fowls, racing dogs, race horses, ornamental cats, and song-canaries, would certainly be at a disadvantage against natural varieties. Thus artificial selection has only been able to produce less fit life-forms.

Nor is Darwinian sexual selection in accordance with facts. The female does not by any means always choose the finest and strongest individual for a mate, in the human species, or in any other.

The utilitarian aspect of the picture is also quite subjective — i.e., English, capitalistic, parliamentarian — for the utility of an organ is relative to the use sought to be made of it. A species without hands has no need of hands. A hand that slowly evolved would be a positive disadvantage over the "millions of years" necessary to perfect the hand. Furthermore, how did this process start? For an organ to be utile, it must be ready; while it is being prepared, it is inutile. But if it is inutile, it is not Darwinian, for Darwinism says evolution is utilitarian.

Actually all the technics of Darwinian evolution are simply tautological. Thus, within the species it is individuals which have a predisposition to adapt themselves that do so. Adaptation presupposes adaptation.

The process of selection affects those specimens with definite aptitudes which make them worthy of selection, in other words, they have already been selected. Selection presupposes selection.

The problem of descent in the Darwinian picture is treated as finding the interrelations of the species. Having assumed their interrelationship, it then finds they are interrelated, and proves the interrelationship thus. Descent presupposes descent.

The utility of an organ is a way of saying it works for this species. Utility thus presupposes the existence of the very species which has the organ, but lacking that organ. The facts however,

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have never shown a species to pick up a certain missing organ, which seemed necessary. A Life-form needs a certain organ because it needs it. The organ is utile because it is utile.

The naïve, tautological, doctrine of utility never asked "Utility for what?' That which serves duration might not serve strength. Utility is not a simple thing, but entirely relative to what already exists. Thus it is the inner demands of a life-form which determine what it would like to have, what would be useful to it. The soul of the lion and his power go together. The hand of man and his brain go together. No one can say that the strength of the lion causes him to live the way he does, nor that the hand of man is responsible for his technical achievements. It is the soul in each case which is primary.

This primacy of the spiritual inverts the Darwinian materialism on the doctrine of utility. A lack can be utile: the lack of one sense develops others; physical weakness develops intelligence. In man and in animals alike, the absence of one organ stimulates others to compensatory activity — this is often observed in endocrinology in particular.

III

The whole grotesquerie of Darwinism, and of the materialism of the entire 19th century generally, is a product of one fundamental idea — an idea which happens also to be non-factual to this century, even though it was a prime fact a century ago. This one idea was that Life is formed by the outer. This generated the sociology of "environment" as determining the human soul. Later it generated the doctrine of "heredity" as doing the same. And yet, in a purely factual sense, what is Life? Life is the actualizing of the possible. The possible turns into the actual in the midst of outer facts, which affect only the precise

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way in which the possible becomes actual, but cannot touch the inner force which is expressing itself through, and, if necessary, in opposition to, the outer facts.

Neither "heredity" nor "environment" determine these inner possibilities. They affect only the framework within which something entirely new, an individual, a unique soul, will express itself.

The word evolution describes to the 20th century the process of the ripening and fulfilling of an organism or of a species. This process is not at all the operation of mechanical-utility "causes" on plastic, formless, protoplasmic material, with purely accidental results. His work with plants led de Vries to develop his Mutation theory of the origin of species, and the facts of palaeontology reinforce it to the extent of showing the sudden appearance of new species. The 20th century finds it quite unnecessary to formulate mythologies, either in cosmogony or biology. Origins are forever hidden from us, and a historical viewpoint is interested in the development of the process, not in the mysterious beginning of the process. This beginning, as set forth by scientific mythology, and by religious mythology, has only an historical interest to our age. What we note is that once these world-pictures were actual and living.

What is the actual History of Life, as this age sees it? Various species of Life exist, ranked, according to increasing spiritual content, from plants and animals, through man, to Culture-man, and High Cultures. Some of the varieties, as shown by fossils, existed in former earth-ages in their present form, while other species appeared and disappeared.

A species appears suddenly, both in fossil-finds, and in the experimental laboratory. Mutation is a legitimate description of the process, if the idea is free from any mechanical-utility causes, for these latter are only imagined, whereas mutations

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are a fact. Each species has also a Destiny, and a given Life-energy, so to speak. Some are stable and firm; others have been weak, tending to split off into many different varieties, and lose their unity. They have also a life span, for many have disappeared. This whole process is not at all independent of geological ages, nor of astral phenomena. Some species, however, outlast one earth-age into the next, just as some 19th century thinkers have survived into the 20th century.

Darwinians offered also an explanation of the metaphysics of their evolution. Roux, for instance, holds that the "fit for the purpose" survive, while the "unfit for the purpose" die. The process is purely mechanical, however, and is thus fitness for purpose without purpose. Nägeli taught that an organism perfects itself because it contains within it the "principle of perfection," just as Moliere's doctor explained that the sleeping potion worked because of a dormitive virtue inherent in it. Weismann denied the heredity of acquired characteristics, but instead of using it to destroy Darwinism, as it obviously does — if every individual has to start anew, how can the species "evolve" ? — he props up the Darwinian picture with it by saying that the germ-plasm contains latent tendencies toward useful qualities. But this is no longer Darwinism, for the species does not evolve if it is only doing what it tends to do.

These tautological explanations only convinced people because they believed already. The age was evolutionary, and materialistic. Darwinism combined these two qualities into a biologico-religious doctrine which satisfied the capitalistic imperative of that age. Any experiments, any new facts, only proved Darwinism; they would not have been allowed to do otherwise.

The 20th century does not see Life as an accident, a playground for external causes. It sees the fact that Life-forms begin

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suddenly, and that the subsequent development, or evolution, is only the actualizing of that which is already possible. Life is the unfolding of a Soul, an individuality. Whatever explanation one gives of how Life started only reveals the structure of his own soul. A materialistic explanation reveals a materialist. Similarly the imputing of any "purpose" to Life as a whole transcends knowledge and enters the realm of Faith. Life as a whole, each great Life-form, each species, each variety, each individual, has however a Destiny, an inner direction, a wordless imperative. This Destiny is the primary fact of History. History is the record of fulfilled (or thwarted) destinies.

Any attempt to make man into an animal, and the animals into automata, is merely materialism, and thus a product of a certain type of soul, of a certain age. The 20th century is not such an age, and looks upon the inner reality of the human soul as being the determinant of human history, and the inner reality of the Soul of the High Culture as being the determinant of the history of that Culture. The soul exploits outer circumstances — they do not form it.

Nor does the 20th century, not being capitalistic, see any struggle for existence going on in the world, either of men or animals. It sees a struggle for power, a struggle that has no connection with cheap economic reasons. It is a struggle for domination of the world that the 20th and 21st centuries see. It is not because there is a shortage of food for the human populations of the world — there is plenty of food. The question is power, and in the decision of that question, food, human lives, material, and everything else that the participants can dispose of, will come into play as weapons, and not as stakes. Nor will it ever be decided, in the sense that a lawsuit can be decided. Readers living in 2050 will smile when told that there was once a rather widespread belief in the Western Civilization that the

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First World War was the "last war." The Second World War was also so regarded, all during the preparations for the Third. It was a case of wish-thinking pacifist idealism being stronger than facts.

Darwinism was the animalization of Culture-man by means of biology; the human soul was interpreted as a mere superior technique of fighting with other animals. We come now to Marxism, the animalization of man through economics, the human soul as a mere reflex of food, clothing and shelter.

MARXISM

ALTHOUGH ENGLAND was the nation which actualized the ideas of the early Civilization phase of the West — the period 1750-1900 — namely, Rationalism, Materialism, Capitalism, yet these ideas would have been actualized otherwise, even if England had been destroyed by some outer catastrophe. Nevertheless, for England these ideas were instinctive. They were wordless, beyond definition, self-evident. For the other nations of Europe, they were things to which one had to adapt oneself.

Capitalism is not an economic system, but a world-outlook, or rather, a part of a whole world-outlook. It is a way of thinking and feeling and living, and not a mere technique of economic planning which anyone can understand. It is primarily ethical and social and only secondarily economic. The economics of a nation is a reflection of the national soul, just as the way a man makes his living is a subordinate expression of his personality.

Capitalism is an expression of Individualism as a principle of Life, the idea of every man for himself. It must be realized that this feeling is not universal-human, but only a certain stage

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of a certain Culture, a stage that in all essentials passed away with the First World War, 1914-1919.

Socialism is also an ethical-social principle, and not an economic program of some kind. It is antithetical to the Individualism which produced Capitalism. Its self-evident, instinctive idea is: each man for all.

To Individualism as a Life-principle, it was obvious that each man in pursuing his own interests, was working for the good of all. To Socialism as a Life-principle, it is equally obvious that a man working for himself alone is ipso facto working against the good of all.

The 19th century was the age of Individualism; the 20th and 21st are the ages of Socialism. No one has understood if he thinks this is an ideological conflict. Ideology itself means: the rationalizing of the world of action. This was the preoccupation of the early phase of the Western Civilization, 1750-1900, but no longer engages the serious attention of ambitious men. Programs are mere ideals; they are inorganic, rationalized, anyone can understand them. This age however is one of a struggle for power. Each participant wants the power in order to actualize himself, his inner idea, his soul. 1900 could not understand what Goethe meant when he said, "In Life, it is Life itself that is important, and not a result of Life." The time has passed away in which men would die for an abstract program of "improving" the world. Men will always be willing to die however, in order to be themselves. This is the distinction between an ideal and an idea.

Marxism is an ideal. It does not take account of living ideas, but regards the world as a thing that can be planned on paper and then set up in actuality. Marx understood neither Socialism nor Capitalism as ethical world-outlooks. His understanding of both was purely economic, and thus a misunderstanding.

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The explanation Marxism offered of the significance of History was ludicrously simple, and in this very simplicity lay its charm, and its strength. The whole history of the world was merely the record of the struggle of classes. Religion, philosophy, science, technics, music, painting, poetry, nobility, priesthood, Emperor and Pope State, war, and politics — all are simply reflections of economics. Not economics generally, but the "struggle" of "classes." The most amazing thing about this iedological picture is that it was ever put forward seriously, or taken seriously.

The 20th century finds it unnecessary to contradict this History-picture as a world-outlook. It has been supplanted, and has joined Rousseau. The foundations of Marxism must however be shown, since the whole tendency which produced it is one that this age is impelled to deny as a premiss of its own existence.

Being inwardly alien to Western philosophy, Marx could not assimilate the ruling philosopher of his time, Hegel, and borrowed Hegel's method to formulate his own picture. He applied this method to capitalism as a form of economy, in order to bring about a picture of the Future corresponding to his own feelings and instincts. These instincts were negative toward the whole Western Civilization. He belonged with the class-warriors, who appear at a corresponding stage of every Culture, as a protest against it. The driving-force of class-war is the will to annihilation of Culture.

The ethical and social foundations of Marxism are capitalistic. It is the old Malthusian "struggle" again. Whereas to Hegel, the State was an Idea, an organism with harmony in its parts, to Malthus and Marx there was no State, but only a mass of self-interested individuals, groups, and classes. Capitalistically, all is economics. Self-interest means: economics. Marx

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differed on this plane in no way from the non-class-war theoreticians of capitalism — Mill, Ricardo, Paley, Spencer, Smith. To them all, Life was economics, not Culture. To them all, it was the war of group against group, class against class, individual against individual, whether they say so expressly or not. All believe in Free Trade, and want no "state interference" in economic matters. None of them regard society or State as an organism. Capitalistic thinkers found no ethical fault with destruction of groups and individuals by other groups and individuals, so long as the criminal law was not infringed. This was looked upon as, in a higher way, serving the good of all. Marxism is also capitalistic in this. Its ethics have superadded the Mosaic law of revenge, and the idea that the competitor is evil morally, as well as economically injurious.

The competitor of the "working-class" was the "bourgeoisie," and since the "victory of the working-class" was the sole aim of the entire history of the world, naturally Marxism, being a philosophy of "Progress," ranged itself with the "good" worker against the "evil" bourgeois. The necessity for thinking things are getting better all the time — a spiritual phenomenon which accompanies every materialism — was as indispensable to Marxism as it was to Darwinism and 19th century philistinism generally.

Fourier, Cabet, Saint-Simon, Comte, Proudhon, Owen, all designed Utopias like Marxism, but they neglected to make them inevitable, and they forgot to make Hate the center of the system. They used Reason, but Marxism is one more proof that Hate is more effective. Even then, one of the older Utopias (that of Marx was the last in Europe, being followed only by Edward Bellamy's in America) might have played the Marxian role, but they came from countries with lower industrial potential, and thus Marx had a "capitalistic" superiority over them.

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II

In the Marxian scheme, History got almost nowhere until the Western Culture appeared, and its tempo accelerated infinitely precisely with the appearance of Marxism. The class-war of 5,000 years was ready to be finally wound up, and History was to come to an end. The "victory" of the "proletariat" was to abolish classes, but it was also to dictate. A dictatorship of the proletariat implies someone to receive the dictate, but this is one of the mysteries of Marxism, which kept the conversation of disciples from flagging.

By the time Marxism appeared, there were, says the theory, only two "classes" left, proletariat and bourgeoisie. Naturally, they had to carry on war to the death, since the bourgeois was taking nearly all the proceeds of the economic system, and were entitled to nothing. Au contraire, it was precisely the proletaire who was getting nothing who was entitled to everything. This reduction of classes to two was inevitable — all History had only existed in order to bring about this dichotomy which would finally be liquidated by the dictate of the proletariat. Capitalism was the name given to the economic system whereby the wrong people were taking everything, leaving nothing for the right people. Capitalism created the proletariat by mechanical necessity, and equally mechanically, the proletariat was fated to swallow up its creator. "What the form of the Future was to be was not included in the system. The two catchwords "Expropriation of the Expropriators" and "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" are supposed to contain it.

Actually it was, of course, not even in theory a plan for the Future, but simply and solely a theoretical foundation for class war, giving it an historical, ethical and economic-political

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rationale. This is shown by the fact that in the preface to the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto a theory was put forth by Marx and Engels according to which Communism could come directly from Russian peasantry to Proletariat-dictate without the long period of bourgeois-domination which had been absolutely necessary in Europe.

The important part of Marxism was its demand for active, constant, practical, class-war. The factory-workers were selected as the instruments for this struggle for obvious reasons: they were concentrated, they were being mistreated, they could thus be agitated and organized into a revolutionary movement to realize the completely negative aims of the coterie of Marx.

For this practical reason, Hate finds its way into a picture of History and Life, and for this reason, the "bourgeois" — simply mechanical parts of a mechanical evolution, according to Marx — are endowed with malice and evil. Hatred is useful in fomenting a war which does not seem to be occurring of itself, and to the end of increasing hatred, Marx welcomed lost strikes, which created more hatred than successful ones.

Only to serve this purpose of action are the absurd propositions about labor and value put forth. Marx understood journalism, and had no scruple whatever about saying that the manual laborer is the only person who works, who creates economic value. To this theory, the inventor, the discoverer, the manager are economic parasites. The fact is, of course, that the manual type of labor is merely a function of the value-creating, precedent, prerequisite labor of organizer, intrepreneur, administrator, inventor. Great theoretical importance was attached to the fact that a strike could stop an enterprise. However, as the philosopher said, even a sheep could do that if it fell into the machinery. Marxism, in the interests of simplification, denied even a subsidiary value to the work of the creators. It had no

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value — only manual labor had value. Marx understood propaganda long before Lord Northcliffe was heard of. Effective mass-propaganda cannot be too simple, and in the application of this rule, Marx should have received some sort of prize: all History is class-war; all Life is class-war; they have the wealth, let us take it.

Marxism imputed Capitalistic instincts to the upper classes, and Socialistic instincts to the lower classes. This was entirely gratuitous, for Marxism made an appeal to the capitalistic instincts of the lower classes. The upper classes are treated as the competitor who has cornered all the wealth, and the lower classes are invited to take it away from them. This is capitalism. Trade unions are purely capitalistic, distinguished from employers only by the different commodity they purvey. Instead of an article, they sell human labor. Trade-unionism is simply a development of capitalistic economy, but it has nothing to do with Socialism, for it is simply self-interest. It pits the economic interest of the manual laborers against the economic interest of the employer and manager. It is simply Malthus in new company. It is still the old "struggle for existence," man against man, group against group, class against class, everyone against the State.

The instinct of Socialism however absolutely precludes any struggle between the component parts of the organism. It is as hostile to the mistreatment of manual laborers by employers as it is to the sabotage of society by class-warriors. Capitalism convinces itself that a "Struggle for Existence" is organically necessary. Socialism knows that any such "struggle" is unnecessary and pathological.

Between Capitalism and Socialism there is no relationship of true and false. Both are instincts, and have the same historical rank, but one of them belongs to the Past, and one to the

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Future. Capitalism is a product of Rationalism and Materialism, and was the ruling force of the 19th century. Socialism is the form of an age of political Imperialism, of Authority, of historical philosophy, of superpersonal political imperative.

It is not at all a matter of terminology or ideals, but a matter of feeling and instinct. The minute we begin to think that a "class" has responsibilities to another class, we are beginning to think Socialistically, no matter what we call our thinking. We may call it Buddhism, for all History cares, but we will think that way. If we use the terminology of Capitalism and the practice of Socialism, no harm is done, for practice and action are what matter in Life, not words and names. The only distinction between types of Socialism is between efficient and inefficient, weak and strong, timid and bold. A strong, bold, and efficient Socialist feeling will, however, hardly use a terminology deriving from an antithetical type of thought, since strong, ascendant, full Life is consonant in word and deed.

III

Marxism showed its Capitalistic provenance in its idea of "classes," its idea toward work, and its obsession with economics. Marx was a Jew, and had thus imbibed from his youth the Old Testament idea that work was a curse laid upon man as a result of sin. Free Capitalism placed this same value on work, regarding it as something from which to be delivered as a prerequisite to the enjoyment of Life. In England, the classic land of Capitalism, the ideas of work and wealth were the central ideas of social valuation. The rich had not to work; the "middle classes" had to work, but were not poor; the poor had to work to exist from one week to the next. Thorstein Veblen, in his "Theory of the Leisure Class," showed the wide ramifications

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in the life of 19th century nations of this attitude toward work.

The whole atmosphere of the Marxian Utopia is that the necessity for the proletariat to work will vanish with its "victory." After the "Expropriation," the proletariat can retire, and even have ci-devant employers for servants.

This attitude toward work is not universal-human, but a thing tied to the existence of English Capitalism. Never before in the Western Culture was there a prevailing feeling that work should be despised; in fact, after the Reformation, the leading theologians all adopted a positive attitude toward work as a high, if not the highest, value. From this period comes the idea that to work is to pray. This spirit is once again uppermost, and Socialistic instinct regards a man's work, not as a curse laid upon him, a hated thing from which money can free him, but as the content of his Life, the earthly side of his mission in the world. Marxism has the opposite valuation of work from Socialism.

Similarly, the Marxian concept of "class" has nothing to do with Socialism. The articulation of society in Western Culture was at first into Estates. Estates were primarily spiritual. As Freidank said in Gothic times

God hath shapen lives three,

Boor and knight and priest they be.

These are not classes, but organic ranks. After the French Revolution came the idea that the articulation of society was a reflection of the situation of money-hoards. The term class was used to describe an economic layer of society. This term was final for Marx, since Life to him was simply economics, saturated as he was with the Capitalistic world-outlook.

But to Socialism, money-possession is not the determinant of rank in society any more than it is in an Army. Social rank in Socialism does not follow Money, but Authority. Thus Socialism

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knows no "classes" in the Marxian-Capitalistic sense. It sees the center of Life in politics, and has thus a definite military spirit in it. Instead of "classes," the expressions of wealth, it has rank, the concomitant of authority.

Marxism is equally obsessed with economics as its contemporary English environment. It begins and ends with economics, focusing its gaze on the tiny European peninsula, ignoring the past and present of the rest of the world. It simply wanted to frustrate the course of Western history, and chose class-war as a technique for doing it.

There had been class-war before Marxism, but this "philosophy" gave it a theory which said there was nothing else in the world. There had been jealousy in the lower orders before Marxism, but now this jealousy was given an ethical basis which made it alone good, and everything above evil. Wealth was branded as immoral and criminal, its possessors as the arch-criminals. Class-war was a competition, and something more — it was a battle of good against evil, and thus more brutal and unlimited than mere war. Western thinkers like Sorel could not adopt this attempt to make the class-war exceed any limitations of honor and conscience; Sorel conceived of class-war as similar to international war, with protection of non-combatants, rules of warfare, honorable treatment of prisoners. Marxism regarded the opponent as a class-war criminal. The opponent could not be assimilated into a new system; he was to be exterminated, enslaved, starved, persecuted.

The Marxist class-war concept thus far exceeded politics. Politics is simply power-activity, not revenge-activity, jealousy, hatred, or "justice." Again, it has no connection with Socialism, which is political through and through, and regards a defeated opponent as a member of the new, larger organism, with the same rights and opportunities as those already in it.

This was one more connection of Marxism with Capitalism,

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for the latter had a tendency to moralize politics, making the opponent into a wicked person.

Lastly, Marxism differs from Socialism in being a religion, whereas Socialism is an instinctive organizatory-political principle. Marxism had its bible, its saints, its apostles, its heresy-tribunals, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, its dogmas and exegesis, sacred writings and schisms. Socialism dispenses with all this; it is interested in procuring cooperation of men with the same instincts. Ideology has even now little importance to Socialism, and in the coming decades it will have ever less.

As Socialism creates the form of the Future, Marxism slips into the Past with the other remnants of Materialism. The mission of Western man is not to become rich through class-war; it is to actualize his inner ethico-politico-Cultural imperative.

FREUDIANISM

As WAS THE CASE with Darwinism and Marxism, Freudianism has no Cultural, but only anti-Cultural significance. All three are products of the negative side of the Civilization-crisis, the side which destroys the old spiritual, social, ethical, philosophical values, and substitutes for them a crude Materialism. The principle of Criticism was the new god to whom all the old values of the Western Culture were offered up. The spirit of the 19th century is one of iconoclasm. The outstanding thinkers nearly all had their center of gravity on the side of nihilism: Schopenhauer, Hebbel, Proudhon, Engels, Marx, Wagner, Darwin, Dühring, Strauss, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Strindberg, Shaw. Some of these were also, on the other side of their beings, heralds of the Future, the spirit of the 20th century. The leading tendency was however, materialistic, biological, economic, scientific — against the soul of Culture-man and the hitherto acknowledged meaning of his life.

Not on a par with them, but in their tradition, is the system of Freudianism. The soul of Culture-man is attacked by it, not

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from an oblique direction of economics or biology, but from the front. The "science" of psychology is chosen as the vehicle to deny all the higher impulses of the soul. On the part of the creator of psychoanalysis, this assault was conscious. He spoke of Copernicus, Darwin, and himself as the three great insulters of mankind. Nor was his doctrine free from the fact of his Jewishness, and in his essay on The Resistance to Psychoanalysis, he says that it is no accident that a Jew created this system, and that Jews are readily "converted" to it, since they know the fate of isolation in opposition. Vis-a-vis the Western Civilization Freud was spiritually isolated, and had no recourse but to oppose.

Freudianism is one more product of Rationalism. It turns rationalism on the soul, and finds that it is purely mechanical. It can be understood, and spiritual phenomena are all manifestations of the sexual-impulse. This was another one of those marvelous and grandiose simplifications which guarantee popularity for any doctrine in an age of mass-journalism. Darwinism was the popular outlook that the meaning of the life of the world was that everything else was trying to become man-animal, and man was trying to become Darwinian. Marxism: the meaning of all human life is that the lowest must become the highest. Freudianism: the meaning of human life is sexuality, actual, optative, conative, or otherwise. All three are nihilistic. Culture-man is the spiritual enemy. He must be eliminated by animalizing him, biologizing him, making him economic, sexualizing him, diabolizing him.

To Darwinism, a Gothic cathedral is a product of mechanical evolution, to Marx it is an attempt of the bourgeois to trick the proletariat, to Freud it is a piece of frozen sexuality.

It is both needless and impossible to refute Freudianism. If everything is sex, a refutation of Freudianism would also be

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sexual in significance. The 20th century does not approach phenomena that have become historical by asking whether they are true or false. To its historical way of thinking, a Gothic cathedral is an expression of the intensely religious, newly awakening young Western Culture, which shadows forth the striving nature of this Culture-soul. In its necessity for self-expression, however, this new outlook must reject the materialistic tyranny of the older, immediately preceding outlook. It must free itself also from Freudianism.

This last great attempt to animalize man also uses critical-rationalistic methods. The soul is mechanical: it consists of one simple impulse, the sexual instinct. The whole life of the soul is the process of this instinct getting misdirected, twisted, turned upon itself. For it is elemental to this "science" that this instinct cannot go correctly. To describe the mechanical functions of the soul is to describe diseases. The various processes are neurosis, inversion, complexes, repression, sublimation, transference, perversion. All are abnormal, unhealthy, misdirected, unnatural. As one of its abecedarian truths, the system states that every person is a neurotic, and every neurotic is a pervert or invert. This applies not only to Culture-man, but to primitive man as well.

Here Freud surpasses Rousseau, who at the beginning of the early Civilization phase of the West, affirmed the purity, simplicity, and soul-healthiness of the savage, in contrast to the wickedness and perversion of Culture-man. Freud has widened the attack — the whole human species is the enemy. Even if one did not know from all the other phenomena that the early Civilization-phase of Materialism and Rationalism had closed, one would know from this system alone, for such complete nihilism is obviously not to be surpassed, expressing as it does anti-Cultural feeling to its uttermost limits.

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As a psychology it must be called a patho-psychology, for its whole arsenal of terms describe only aberrations of the sexual instinct. The notion of health is completely dissociated from the soul-life. Freudianism is the Black Mass of Western Science.

Part of the structure of the system is the interpretation of dreams. The purely mechanical workings of the "mind" (for there is no soul) are shown by dreams. Not clearly shown, however, for an elaborate ritual is needed to arrive at the real meaning. "Conscience censorship" — the new name for Kant's "moral reason" — "symbolism," "repetition-compulsion" — these and many more Kabbalistic numina have to be invoked. The original form of the doctrine was that all dreams were wishes.

To dream of the death of a loved person was explained by psychoanalysis as latent parent-hatred, the symptom of the almost universal Oedipus-complex. The dogma was rigid: thus if the dream was of the death of a pet dog or cat, the animal was the focus of the Oedipus-complex. If the actor dreams of not knowing his part, it shows that he wishes he might sometime be so embarrassed. In order to attract more converts, including those of weaker faith, the doctrine was slightly changed, and other dream-interpretations were admitted, such as the "repetition-compulsion," when the same fear-dream recurs regularly.

The dream-world of course reflected the universal sexuality of the soul. Every conceivable object in a dream was capable of being a sexual symbol. "Repressed" sexual instinct appeared in dreams, symbolizing, transferring, sublimating, inverting, and running the whole gamut of mechanical terminology.

Every person is a neurotic in his mature life, and it is no accident, for he became so in his childhood. Experiences in infancy determine — quite mechanically, since the whole process is non-spiritual — which particular neuroses will accompany the person through his life. There is really nothing that can be done

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about it, except to deliver oneself into the care of a Freudian adept. One of these announced that 98 per cent of all persons should be under the treatment of psychiatrists. This was later in the development of the system; at first it would have been 100 per cent, but, as with Mormonism, the original purity of the doctrine was compromised by the Elders for reasons of expediency.

The average man who is doing his work presents a great illusion to the eye of an observer — it looks as though he is doing what he is doing. Actually, however, Freudianism shows that he is only apparently doing it, for in actuality he is quietly thinking about sexual matters, and all that one can see is the results of his sexual fantasy sifted through mechanical filters of conscience-censorship, sublimation, transference, and the like. If you hope, fear, wish, dream, think abstractly, investigate, feel inspired, have ambition, dread, repugnance, reverence — you are merely expressing your sexual instinct. Art is obviously sex, as are religion, economics, abstract thought, technics, war, State and politics.

II

Freud earned thus, together with his cousin Marx, the Order of Simplicity. It was the coveted Decoration of the age of Mass. With the demise of the Age of Criticism, it has fallen into the discard, for the new outlook is interested, not in cramming all the data of knowledge, experience, and intuition, into a prefabricated mold, but in seeing what was, what is, what must be. Over the portal of the new outlook is Leibnitz's aphorism: "The Present is loaded with the Past, and pregnant with the Future." The child is father to the man — this is ancient wisdom, and describes the unfolding of the human organism

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from infancy to maturity, every stage being related backwards and forwards because one and the same soul speaks at every moment. Freudianism caricatures this deep organic vision with a mechanical device whereby childhood determines the form of maturity, and makes the whole organic unfolding into a causal process, and what is more a diabolical, diseased one.

Insofar as it is Western at all, Freudianism is subject to the prevailing spirituality of the West. Its mechanism and materialism reflect the 19th century outlook. Its talk of the unconscious, of instinct, impulse, and the like, reflects the fact that Freudianism appeared at the transition point in the Western Civilization when Rationalism was fulfilled and the Irrational emerged again as such. It was not at all in the terminology or the treatment of the new, irrational elements in the doctrine that Freudianism presages the new spirit, but simply and solely in the fact that irrational elements appear. Only in this one thing does this structure anticipate; in every other way, it belongs to the Malthusian-Darwinian-Marxian past. It was merely an ideology, a part of the general Rationalistic-Materialistic assault on Culture-man.

The irrational elements that the system recognizes are subordinated strictly to the higher rationalism of the adept, who can unravel them and lead the suffering neurotic into the light of day. They are, if possible, even more diseased than the rest of the mind-complex. They may be irrational, but they have a rational explanation, treatment, and cure.

Freudianism appears thus as the last of the materialistic religions. Psychoanalysis, like Marxism, is a sect. It has auricular confession, dogmas, and symbols, esoteric and exoteric versions of the doctrine, converts and apostates, priests and scholastics, a whole ritual of exorcism, and a liturgy of mantic. Schisms appear, resulting in the foundation of new sects, each of which

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claims to be the bearer of the true doctrine. It is occult and pagan, with its dream-interpretation, demonological with its sex-worship. Its world-picture is that of a neurotic humanity, twisted and perverted in its strait jacket of Western Civilization, toward whom the new priest of psychoanalysis stretches out the hand of deliverance through the anti-Western Freudian Gospel.

The Hatred that formed the core of Marxism is present in the newer religion also. In both cases it is the hate of the outsider for his totally alien surroundings, which he cannot change, and must therefore destroy.

The attitude of the 20th century toward the subject-matter of Freudianism is inherent in the spirit of this age. Its center is in action — external tasks call to Western soul. The best will hear this call, leaving those to busy themselves with drawing soul-pictures who have no souls.

Scientific psychology was always thus — it has never attracted the best minds in any Culture. It all rests on the assumption that it is possible by thought to establish the form of what thinks, an extremely dubious proposition. If it were possible to describe the Soul in rational terms — a prequisite to a science of psychology — there would be no need for such a science. The Reason is a part, or better, a partial function, of the Soul. Every soul-picture describes only the soul of him who draws it, and those like him. A diabolist sees things Freud-wise, but he cannot understand those who see things otherwise. This explains the vileness of the Freudianistic attempts to diabolize, sexualize, mechanize, and destroy all the great men of the West. Greatness they could not understand, not having inward experience of it.

Soul cannot be defined — it is the Element of Elements. Any picture of it, any psychological system, is a mere product of it, and gets no further than self-portrayal. How well we understand now that Life is more important than the results of Life.

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Psychology-systems use the terminology — in all Civilizations — of the material sciences of physics and mechanics. They reflect thus the spirit of natural science, and take rank therewith as a product of the age. To the higher rank to which they aspired, namely the systematization of the Soul, they do not attain. No sooner was Freudianism well-established as the new psychoanalytic Church than the onward development of the Western Civilization made it old-fashioned.

The psychology of the 20th century is one adapted to a life of action. To this age psychology must be practical or it is worthless. The psychology of crowds, of armies, of leadership, of obedience, of loyalty — these are valuable to this age. They are not to be arrived at by "psychometric" methods and abstruse terminology, but by human experience — one's own, and that of others. The 20th century regards Montaigne as a psychologist, but Freud as merely the 19th century representative of the witch-obsession of the Western Culture in its younger days, which was also a disguised form of sex-worship.

Human psychology is learned in living and acting, not in timing reactions or observing dogs and mice. The memoirs of a man of action, adventurer, explorer, soldier, statesman, contain psychology of the type that interests this age, both in and between the lines. Every newspaper is a compendious instruction in the psychology of mass-propaganda, and better than any treatise on the subject. There is a psychology of nations, of professions, of Cultures, of the successive ages of a Culture, from youth to senility. Psychology is one aspect of the art of the possible, and as such is a favorite study of the age.

The greatest repository of psychology of all is History. It contains no models for us, since Life is never-recurring, once-happening, but it shows by example how we can fulfill our potentialities by being true to ourselves, by never compromising with that which is utterly alien.

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To this view of psychology, any materialism could not possibly be psychology. Here Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, and Freud meet. They may have understood other things, but the human soul, and in particular the soul of Culture-man, they did not understand. Systems like theirs are only historical curiosities to the 20th century, unless they happen to claim to be appropriate descriptions of Reality. Anyone who "believes in" these antiquated fantasies stamps himself as ludicrous, posthumous, ineffective, and superfluous. No leading men of the coming decades will be Darwinians, Marxians or Freudians.

THE SCIENTIFIC-TECHNICAL WORLD-OUTLOOK

SCIENCE is the seeking after exact knowledge of phenomena. In discovering interrelations between phenomena, that is, observing the conditions of their appearance, it feels it has explained them. This type of mentality appears in a High Culture after the completion of creative religious thought, and the beginning of externalizing. In our Culture, this type of thinking only began to feel sure of itself with the middle of the 17th century, in the Classical, in the 5th century B.C. The leading characteristic of early scientific thinking, from the historical standpoint, is that it dispenses with theological and philosophical equipment, only using them to fill in the background, in which it is not interested. It is thus materialistic, in its essence, in that its sole attention is turned to phenomena, and not to ultimate realities. To a religious age, phenomena are unimportant compared with the great spiritual truths, to a scientific age, the opposite is true.

Technics is the utilization of the macrocosm. It always accompanies a science in its full blooming, but this is not to say that

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every science is accompanied by technical activity, for the sciences of the Classical Culture, and the Mexican Culture had nothing at all which we would call technical proficiency. In the early Civilization stage, Science predominates, and precedes technics in all its attempts, but with the turn of the 20th century, technical thinking began to emancipate itself from this dependence, and in our day, science serves technics, and no longer vice versa.

In an Age of Materialism, which is to say, an antimetaphysical age, it was but natural that an antimetaphysical type of thinking like science would become a popular religion. Religion is a necessity for Culture-man, and he will build his religion on economics, biology, or nature, if the Spirit of the Age excludes true religion. Science was the prevalent religion of the 18th and 19th centuries. While one was permitted to doubt the truths of the Christian sects, one was not allowed to doubt Newton, Leibnitz, and Descartes. When the great Goethe challenged the Newtonian light-theory, he was put down as a crank, and a heretic.

Science was the supreme religion of the 19th century, and all other religions, like Darwinism and Marxism, referred to its great parent-dogmas as the basis for their own truths. "Unscientific" became the term of damnation.

From its timid beginnings, science finally took the step of holding out its results, not as a mere arrangement and classification, but as the true explanations of Nature and Life. With this step, it became a world-outlook, that is a comprehensive philosophy, with metaphysics, logic and ethics for believers.

Every science is a profane restatement of the preceding dogmas of the religious period. It is the same Cultural soul which formed the great religions that in the next age reshapes its world, and this continuity is thus absolutely inevitable. Western

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Science as a world-outlook is merely Western religion represented as profane, not sacred, natural, not supernatural, discoverable, not revealed.

Like Western religion, science was definitely priestly. The savant is the priest, the instructor is the lay brother, and a great systematizer is canonized, like Newton and Planck. Every Western thought-form is esoteric, and its scientific doctrines were no exception. The populace were kept in touch with "the advance of science" through a popular literature at which the high-priests of science smiled.

In the 19th century, science accreted the "Progress" idea, and gave its own particular stamp to it. The content of "Progress" was to be technical. "Progress" was to consist in faster motion, further sound, wider exploitation of the material world ad infinitum. This showed already the coming predominance of technics over science. "Progress" was not to be primarily more knowledge, but more technique. Every Western world-view strives after universality, and so this one declared that the solution of social problems was not to be found in politics and economics, but in — science. Inventions were promised which would make war too horrible for men to engage in, and they would therefore cease warring. This naïvete was a natural product of an age which was strong in natural science, but weak in psychology. The solution of the problem of poverty was machinery, and more machinery. The horrible conditions that had arisen out of a machine-Civilization were to be alleviated by more machines. The problem of old age was to be overcome by "rejuvenation." Death was pronounced to be only a product of pathology, not of senility. If all diseases were done away with, there would be nothing left to die from.

Racial problems were to be solved by "eugenics." The birth of individuals was to be no longer left to Fate. Scientific priests

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would decide things like parentage and birth. No outer events would be allowed in the new theocracy, nothing uncontrolled. The weather was to be "harnessed," all natural forces brought under absolute control. There would be no occasion for wars, everyone would be striving to be scientific, not seeking power. International problems would vanish, since the world would become one huge scientific unit.

The picture was complete, and to the materialistic 19th century, awe-inspiring: all Life, all Death, all Nature, reduced to absolute order, in the custody of scientific theocrats. Everything would go on this planet just as it went in the picture of the heavens that the scientific astronomers had sketched out for themselves; serene regularity would reign — but — this order would be purely mechanical, utterly purposeless. Man would be scientific only in order to be scientific.

II

Something happened, however, to disturb the picture, and to show that it, too, bore the hall-mark of Life. Before the First World War, the disintegration of the psychical foundations of the great structure had already set in. The World War marks, in the realm of science, as in every other sphere of Western life, a caesura. A new world arose from that war — the spirit of the 20th century stood forth as the successor to the whole mechanistic view of the universe, and to the whole concept of the meaning of Life, as being the acquisition of wealth.

With truly amazing rapidity, considering the decades of its power and supremacy, the mechanistic view paled, and the leading minds, even within its disciplines, dropped away from the old, self-evident articles of materialistic faith.

As is the usual case with historical movements, expressions

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of a super-personal soul, the point of highest power, of the greatest victories, is also the beginning of the rapid downgoing. Shallow persons always mistake the end of a movement for the beginning of its absolute dominance. Thus Wagner was looked upon by many as the beginning of a new music, whereas, the next generation knew that he had been the last Western musician. The passing away of any expression of Culture is a gradual process — nevertheless there are turning points, and the rapid decline of science as a world-outlook set in with the First World War.

The down-going of science as a mental discipline had long preceded the World War. With the theory of Entropy (1850), and the introduction of the idea of irreversibility into its picture, science was on the road which was to culminate in physical relativity and frank admission of the subjectivity of physical concepts. From Entropy came the introduction of statistical methods into systematic science, the beginning of spiritual abdication. Statistics described Life and the living; the strict tradition of Western science had insisted on exactitude in mathematical description of reality, and had hence despised that which was not susceptible of exact description, such as biology. The entrance of probabilities into formerly exact science is the sign that the observer is beginning to study himself, his own form as conditioning the order and describability of phenomena.

The next step was the Theory of Radioactivity, which again contains strong subjective elements and requires the Calculus of Probabilities to describe its results. The scientific picture of the world became ever more refined, and ever more subjective. The formerly separate disciplines drew slowly together, mathematics, physics, chemistry, epistemology, logic. Organic ideas intruded showing once more that the observer has reached the point where he is studying the form of his own Reason. A

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chemical element now has a lifetime, and the precise events of its life are unpredictable, indeterminate.

The very unit of physical happening itself, the "atom," which was still believed in as a reality by the 19th century, became in the 20th century a mere concept, the description of whose properties was constantly changed to meet and prop up technical developments. Formerly, every experiment merely showed the "truth" of the ruling theories. That was in the days of the supremacy of science as a discipline over technics, its adopted child. But, before the middle of the 20th century, every new experiment brought about a new hypothesis of "atomic structure." What was important in the process was not the hypothetical house of cards which was erected afterwards, but the experiment which had gone before.

No compunction was felt about having two theories, irreconcilable with one another, to describe the "structure" of the "atom," or the nature of light. The subject-matter of all the separate sciences could no longer be kept mathematically clear. Old concepts like mass, energy, electricity, heat, radiation, merged into one another, and it became ever more clear that what was really under study was the human reason, in its epistemological aspect, and the Western soul in its scientific aspect.

Scientific theories reached the point where they signified nothing less than the complete collapse of science as a mental discipline. The picture was projected of the Milky Way as consisting of more than a million fixed stars, among which are many with a diameter of more than 93,000,000 miles; this again as not a stationary cosmic center, but itself in motion toward Nowhere at a speed of more than 600 kilometers a second. The cosmos is finite, but unlimited; boundless, but bounded. This demands of the true believer the old Gothic faith again:

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credo quia absurdum, but mechanical purposelessness cannot evoke this kind of faith, and the high priests have apostatized. In the other direction, the "atom" has equally fantastic dimensions — a ten-millionth of a millimeter is its diameter, and the mass of a hydrogen atom stands to the mass of a gram of water as the mass of a post card stands to the mass of the earth. But this atom consists of "electrons," the whole making up a sort of solar system, in which the distances between the planets is as great, in proportion to their mass, as in our solar system. The diameter of an electron is one three-billionth of a millimeter. But the closer it is studied, the more spiritual it becomes, for the nucleus of the atom is a mere charge of electricity, having neither weight, volume, inertia nor any other classic properties of matter.

In its last great saga, science dissolved its own psychical foundations, and moved outside the world of the senses into the world of the soul. Absolute time was dissolved, and time became a function of position. Mass became spiritualized into energy. The idea of simultaneity was discarded, motion became relative, parallels cut one another, two distances could no longer be said absolutely to equal one another. Everything which had once been described by, or had itself described, the word Reality, dissolved in the last act of the drama of science as a mental discipline.

The custodians of science as a mental discipline, one after another, abandoned the old materialistic positions. In the last act, they came to see that the science of a given Culture has as its real object the description, in scientific terms, of the world of that Culture, a world which again is the projection of the soul of that Culture. The profound knowledge was realized through the very study of matter itself that matter is only the envelope of the soul. To describe matter is to describe oneself,

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even though the mathematical equations drape the process with an apparent objectivity. Mathematics itself has succumbed as a description of Reality: its proud equations are only tautology. An equation is an identity, a repetition, and its "truth" is a reflection of the paper-logic of the identity-principle. But this is only a form of our thinking.

The transition from 19th century materialism to the new spirituality of the 20th century was thus not a battle, but an inevitable development. This keen, ice-cold, mental discipline turned the knife on itself because of an inner imperative to think in a new way, an anti-materialistic way. Matter cannot be explained materialistically. Its whole significance derives from the soul.

III

Materialism from this standpoint appears as a great negative. It was a great spiritual effort to deny the spirit, and this denial of the spirit was in itself an expression of a crisis in the spirit. It was the Civilization-crisis, the denial of Culture by Culture.

For the animals, that which appears — matter — is Reality. The world of sensation is the world. But for primitive man, and a fortiori for Culture-man, the world separates out into Appearance and Reality. Everything visible and tangible is felt as a symbol of something higher and unseen. This symbolizing activity is what distinguishes the human soul from the less complicated Life-forms. Man possesses a metaphysical sense as the hall-mark of his humanity. But it is precisely the higher reality, the world of symbols, of meaning and purpose, that Materialism denied in toto. What was it then, but the great attempt to animalize man by equating the world of matter with Reality, and merging him into it? Materialism was not overcome because

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it was false; it simply died of old age. It is not false even now — it merely falls on deaf ears. It is old-fashioned, and has become the world view of country cousins.

With the collapse of its Reality, "Western science as a mental discipline has accomplished its mission. Its by-product, science as a world-outlook now belongs to yesterday. But as one of the results of the Second World War, there appeared a new stupidity — technics-worship as a philosophy of Life and the world.

Technics has in its essence nothing to do with science as a mental discipline. It has one aim: the extraction of physical power from the outer world. It is, so to speak, Nature-politics, as distinguished from human politics. The fact that technics proceeds on one hypothesis today, and on another tomorrow, shows that its task is not the formation of a knowledge-system, but the subjecting of the outer world to the will of Western man. The hypotheses that it proceeds on have no real connection with its results, but merely afford points of departure for the imagination of technicians to think along new lines for new experiments to extract ever more power. Some hypotheses are of course necessary; precisely what they are is secondary.

Technics is even less capable than science, then, of satisfying the need for a world-outlook to this age. Physical power — for what?

The age itself supplies the answer: physical power for political purposes. Science has passed into the role of furnishing the terminology and ideation for technics. Technics in turn is the servant of politics. Ever since 1911, the idea of "atomic energy" has been in the air, but it was the spirit of war which first gave this theory a concrete form, with the invention, in 1945, by an unknown Westerner of a new high explosive which depends for its effect on the instability of "atoms."

Technics is practical; politics is sublimely practical. It has

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not the slightest interest in whether a new explosive is referred to "atoms," "electrons," "cosmic rays," or to saints and devils. The historical way of thinking which informs the true statesman cannot take today's terminology too seriously when he remembers how quickly yesterday's was dropped. A projectile which can destroy a city of 200,000 persons in a second — that however is a reality, and affects the sphere of political possibilities.

It is the spirit of politics which determines the form of war, and the form of war then influences the conduct of politics. Weapons, tactics, strategy, the exploitation of victory — all these are determined by the political imperative of the age. Each age forms the entirety of its expressions for itself. Thus to the form-rich 18th century, warfare also was a strict form, a sequence of position and development, like the contemporary musical form of variations on a theme.

An odd aberration occurred in the Western world after the first employment of a new high-explosive in 1945. Essentially, it was referrable to remnants of materialistic thinking, but there were also perennially old mythological ideas in it. The idea arose that this new explosive would blow up the whole planet. In the middle of the 19th century, when the railway idea was projected, the medical doctors said that such swift motion would generate cerebral troubles, and that even the sight of a train rushing past might do so; furthermore the sudden change of air-pressure in tunnels might cause strokes.

The idea of the planet blowing up was just another form of the old idea, found in many mythologies, Western and non-Western, of the End of the World, Ragnarök, Götterdämmerung. Cataclysm. Science also picked up this idea, and wrapped it up as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The technics-worshipers fancied many things about the new explosive.

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They did not realize that it was no end of a process, but the beginning.

We stand at the beginning of the Age of Absolute Politics, and one of its demands is naturally for powerful weapons. Therefore, technics is ordered to strain after absolute weapons. It will never attain them, however, and any belief that it will stamps its possessor as simply a materialist, which is to say, in the 20th century, a provincial.

Technics-worship is completely inappropriate to the soul of Europe. The formative impulse of human Life does not come from matter now any more than it ever did. On the contrary, the very way of experiencing matter, and the way of utilizing it, are expressions of the soul. The naïve belief of technics-worship that an explosive is going to remake the Western Civilization from its foundations is a last dying gasp of Materialism. This Civilization made this explosive, and it will make others — they did not make it, nor will they ever make or unmake the Western Civilization. No more than matter created the Western Culture can it ever destroy it.

It is still materialism to confuse a civilization with factories, homes, and the collectivity of installations. Civilization is a higher reality, manifesting itself through human populations, and within these, through a certain spiritual stratum, which embodies at highest potential the living Idea of the Culture. This Culture creates religions, forms of architecture, arts, States, Nations, Races, Peoples, armies, wars, poems, philosophies, sciences, weapons and inner imperatives. All of them are mere expressions of the higher Reality, and none of them can destroy it.

The attitude of the 20th century toward science and technics is clear. It does not ask them to furnish a world-outlook — this it derives elsewhere — and it positively rejects any attempt to

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make a religion or a philosophy out of materialism or atom-worship. It does however have use for them, in the service of its unlimited will-to-power. The Idea is primary, and in actualizing it, superiority in weapons is essential in order to compensate for the immense numerical superiority of the enemies of the West.

THE IMPERATIVE OF OUR AGE

BY SURVEYING the entire previous happening of the world, Western man understands himself in his 20th century phase. He sees where he stands, he sees also why it was that he was impelled to orient himself historically. His inner instinct forbade that he distort History in the materialistic fashion by subjecting it to an ideology of some kind. He sees the ages of previous Cultures to which his present phase is related: the "Period of the Contending States" in the Chinese, the transition to Caesarism in the Roman, the "Hyksos" era in the Egyptian. None of them are ages of the flowering of art or philosophy, all have their center of gravity in politics and action. They are the periods of large-space thinking, of the greatest deeds, of external creativeness of the highest possible magnitude. Philosophers and ideologists, world-improvers and art-traders, slip down to the street-level in these ages, when the imperative is directed to action and not to abstract thought.

Because of his historical position, in a Civilization at the beginning of its second phase, his soul has a certain organic predisposition, and the custodians of the Idea of this time will of

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necessity think and feel thus, and not otherwise. It can be definitively stated what this relationship is to the various forms of human and Cultural thought and action.

To religion, this age is once more affirmative, the very opposite of the negative atheism of Materialism. Every man of action is in constant contact with the unforseeable, the Imponderable, the mystery of Life, and this precludes the laboratory attitude on his part. An age of action lives side by side with Death, and values Life by its attitude toward Death. The old Gothic religious idea is still with us — it is at his last moment that a man shows what is in him in its purity. Though he may have lived a wastrel, he may die a hero, and it is this last act of his life that creates the image of him that will survive in the minds of his descendants. We cannot possibly value a life according to its length, as Materialism did, or believe in any doctrine of immortality of the body.

Between his earthly task and his relationship to God, there is no conflict for Western man. At the beginning of a battle, it is the custom of soldiers to pray. The battle is the foreground, that toward which the prayer is directed is the transcendent, is God. Our metaphysical imperative has to be fulfilled within a certain Life-framework. We have been born into a certain Culture, at a certain phase of its organic development, we have certain gifts. These condition the earthly task which we must perform. The metaphysical task is beyond any conditioning, for it would have been the same in any age anywhere. The earthly task is merely the form of the higher task, its organic vehicle.

To philosophy, the Spirit of the Age has its own attitude, different from all previous centuries. Its great organizing principle is the morphological significance of systems and events. It rests upon no critical method, for all these critical methods merely reflected the prevalent spirit, and its spirit has outgrown

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criticism. The center of its thought-life is in History. By History we orient ourselves, we see the significance of the previous centuries of our own Culture, we understand beyond any system or ideology the nature of what we have to do, we see the significance of our own inmost feelings and imperative.

For systems of world-improvement, products of a type of thinking which has become old-fashioned, this age has no use. It is interested solely in what must be done, and what can be done, and not at all in what ought to be done. The world of action has its own organic rhythms, and ideologies belong to the world of thought. Living ideas interest us, stillborn ideals do not.

To art, the Age can have only one attitude. At best, our artistic tasks are secondary, at worst, art has degenerated to frightfulness and chaos. Mass clangor is not music, pictorial nightmares are not even draughtsmanship, let alone the art of painting. Obscenity and ugliness are not literature, materialistic propaganda is not drama, disconnected words thrown formlessly on to paper are not lyric poetry. Whatever art-tasks the age has to fulfill will be carried out by individuals acting quietly within old Western traditions, not noising themselves about with journalistic art-theories.

In an age of action and organization, legal thought reaches a new development. Western law will not stand outside the age of politics, with its accompanying thought-forms of history and psychology. It will be entirely renewed with these ideas, and its old materialism, in public law, commercial, and in particular, in criminal law, will be thrown into the discard.

Technics, and its handmaid, science, are of high importance to the Western Civilization in its present phase. Technics must provide Western politics with a strong fist for the coming struggles.

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Into the social structure of the Western Civilization there will be infused the principle of authority, supplanting the principle of wealth. This view is not at all hostile to private property or private management — that belongs to the negative feeling of hatred and jealousy which inform class war. Tht 20th century Idea liquidates class war, as it does the idea of economics being the determining force in our life.

Economics occupies the position in the new edifice of the foundation and its spiritual importance is indicated thereby. The foundation is not the important thing in a structure, but strictly secondary. But in an age of action, economic strength is indispensable to political units. Economics can be a source of political strength, can serve sometimes as a weapon in the power-struggle. For these reasons, the 20th century will not neglect the development of the economic side of life, but will provide it with a new impetus from the now dominant idea of politics. Instead of economics being the sphere wherein individuals battled one another for private spoils, it becomes now a strong and important side of the political organism which is the custodian of the Destiny of all.

The view of the soth century toward the various directions of thought and action is not arbitrary, any more than that of previous ages was. Most of the best minds of the 19th century were nihilistic in tendency, sensualistic, rationalistic, materialistic — because the age was one of crisis in the Culture-Life, and these ideas were the Spirit of the Age. Similarly, the idea of political nationalism was self-evident to that age, but that too was a product of the great crisis, thus a form of disease as destructive as it was necessary.

Every juncture of organic happening presents a choice and an alternative. The choice is to do the necessary, the alternative is chaos. This has nothing to do with school-book logic; that logic

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is just one of the numberless products of Life, and Life will always invent as many logics as it has need for, but Life will always obey one logic, organic logic. This is not describable by any system, but can be comprehended by Destiny-thinking, the only form of thought serviceable to action. Life goes forward, or it goes nowhere. Opposition to the Spirit of the Age is the will-to-nothingness.

In the realm of theory, this age has as many alternatives as it has ideologists to dream them up. In the realm of fact, it has only one choice — and that is delineated for it by the Life-phase of the Civilization, and the outer circumstances in which we find ourselves at the moment.

We know that the transition of one age into the next is gradual, and we know that even as it has fulfilled itself in some directions, it thinks it is just beginning in others. Thus while science as a mental discipline has achieved its goal, science as a popular outlook for fools and uncreative persons continues to exist. Materialism no longer claims any of the best minds, but the best minds are not in control at this moment. The West is dominated by the outer world, in the control of barbarians and distorters, and they find the least valuable minds of Europe most serviceable to them. Materialism serves the great cause of destroying Europe, and that is why it is forced on the populations of Europe by the extra-European forces.

There are two ways in which we are sensible of our great task, our ethical imperative which claims our lives. First from our inward feeling, which impels us to look at things this way and no other. Secondly from our knowledge of the history of seven previous High Cultures, each of which went through this same crisis, and each of which liquidated the long Civilization-crisis in precisely the way that our instincts tell us ours is to be resolved.

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II

Our momentary situation takes the form of a great battle — a battle which may take more than one war to resolve it, or which may be resolved by a sudden cataclysmic happening, entirely unforeseeable to us now. On the surface of history it is the unforeseen that happens. The most human beings can do is to be prepared inwardly. In complete contradiction to our instinct, feelings, and ideas, the 19th century sits leering upon the throne of Europe, wrapped in the cerements of the grave, and propped up by the extra-European forces. This means that the age in which we find ourselves takes the form of a deep and fundamental conflict. These ideas can never live again — their supremacy merely means the strangulation of the young, living tendencies of the New Europe. Their supremacy simply consists in forced lip-service to them. They do not affect the action-thinking, the organic-rhythms of the age, they are merely instruments of thwarting the will of Europe by holding it in subjection to the least valuable elements in Europe, who are maintained in power by extra-European bayonets.

The conflict is far-reaching; it affects every sphere of Life. Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to

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Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of "happiness"; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self-sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism.

But the greatest opposition of all has not yet been named, the conflict which will take up all the others into itself. This is the battle of the Idea of the Unity of the West against the nationalism of the 19th century. Here stand opposed the ideas of Empire and petty-stateism, large-space thinking and political provincialism. Here find themselves opposed the miserable collection of yesterday-patriots and the custodians of the Future. The yesterday-nationalists are nothing but the puppets of the extra-European forces who conquer Europe by dividing it. To the enemies of Europe, there must be no rapprochement, no understanding, no union of the old units of Europe into a new unit, capable of carrying on 20th century politics.

In the previous seven High Cultures, the period of the nationalistic disease was liquidated by the spread of one feeling over the whole Civilization. It was not unaccompanied by wars, for the Past has always, and will always, fight against the Future. Life is war, and to wish to create is to bring about the opposition of the great Nay-sayers, those whose existence is tied to the Past, is sunk into the Past. The division of the Civilization was in each case resolved by the reunion of the Civilization, the reassertion of its old, original, exclusiveness and unity. In each case, from petty-stateism came Empire. The Empire Idea was so strong that no inner force could oppose it with hope of success.

Nationalism itself in Europe transformed itself into the new Empire-Idea after the First World War, the beginning of our

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age. In each Western country, the "Nationalists" were those who were opposed to another European War, and who desired a general political understanding in Europe to prevent its sinking into the dust where it now struggles. They were thus not nationalistic at all, but Western-Imperial. Similarly the self-styled "internationalists" were the ones who wished to stir up wars among the European states of yesterday, in order to sabotage the creation of the Empire of the West. They hated it because they were alien to it in one way or another, some because they were completely outside the Western Culture, others because they were incurably possessed by some ideology or other which hated the new, vital, masculine, form of the Future, and preferred the old conception of Life as money-chasing, money-spending, hatred of strong, ascendant Life, and love of weakness, sterility, and stupidity.

And thus, the extra-European forces, together with the traitorous inner elements in Europe, were able to bring about a Second World War which defeated on the surface the powerful development of Western Empire. But the defeat was, and had to be, only on the surface, since the decisive impulse, as this century knows once more, comes always from within, from the Inner Imperative, from the Soul. To defeat on the surface the actualization of an Idea that is Historically essential is to strengthen it. Its energy, that would have been diffusing itself outward in self-expression turns inward and is concentrated onto the primary task of spiritual liberation. The materialists do not know that what does not destroy, makes stronger, and destroy this Idea they cannot. It uses men, but they cannot use it, touch it, injure it.

This whole work is nothing but an outline of the Idea of this Age, a presentation of its foundations and universality, and every spiritual root of it will be traced to its origins and necessity.

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But in this place, it should be mentioned that the idea of a universal Europe, an Empire of the West, is not new, but is the prime form of our Culture, as of every other. For the first five centuries of our Culture, there was a universal Western people, in which the local differences counted but slightly. There was a universal king-emperor, who might have been often defied, but was not denied. There was a universal style, Gothic, which inspired and formed all art from furniture to the cathedral. There was a universal code of conduct, Western chivalry, with its honor-imperative for every situation. There was a universal religion and a universal Church. There was a universal language, Latin, and a universal law, Roman law.

The disintegration of this unity was slowly progressive from 1250 onward, but was not entirely accomplished, even for political purposes, until the age of political nationalism, beginning c. 1750, when Westerners for the first time allowed themselves to use the barbarian against other Western nations.

And now, as we enter upon the late Civilization-phase, the idea of a universal Europe, an Empire of the West in the 20th century style emerges once more as the single, great, formative Idea of the age. The form in which the task presents itself is political. It is a power question whether this Empire will be established, for strong extra-European forces oppose it, and these forces have divided the soil of our Culture between them.

III

The Empire of the West is a development that no inner European force could possibly oppose with more than token resistance, but its establishment is now crossed by the decisive intervention of outer forces in the life of the West. The struggle is thus spiritual-political, and its motive force derives from

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the Idea of Western unity. At this moment, the existence of the West in freedom for self-development is a function of the distribution of power in the world.

The age is political in a sense that no previous Western age has been so. This is the Age of Absolute Politics, for the whole form of our life is now a function of power.

Action, to be effective, must be within a spiritual framework. As Goethe said, "Unlimited activity, of whatever kind, leads at last to bankruptcy." Our action must not be blind. Our ideational equipment must be of a kind which can turn everything to its own account. It frees itself therefore from every kind of ideology, economic, biological, moralistic. It springs directly from the fact-sense which this age takes as its point of departure.

In the universities and in most of the books, outmoded methods of looking at the field of politics are presented. The doctrine is still taught that there are various "forms of government" which can be moved about from one political unit to another. There is republicanism, there is democracy, monarchy, and so on, and so on. Some of these "forms" are held out as "good"; others as "bad." It is better to have Europe occupied by the barbarian than to have a Western Empire under a "bad" "form of government." It is better to eat the rations that Moscow and Washington allow than it is to have a proud and free Europe with a "bad" government.

This is the very height of stupidity. Asininity on this level can only be reached by ideologists without soul and without intellect.

This sort of thing is book-politics, and is traceable to the fact that the word politics has two meanings: it means human power-activity, and it also has the dictionary meaning of a branch of philosophy. Now, if by politics, one means a branch

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of philosophy, very well. It can then turn into whatever one wishes. Carte blanche reigns in the world of philosophy. But — the real meaning of the word politics is power-activity, and in this sense, acting Life is itself politics. In this sense, facts rule politics, and the making of facts is the task of politics. This is the only possible meaning of the word to the 20th century, and this most serious moment of our Cultural life demands the utmost clarity of the minds of active men in order that they may be entirely free from any trace of ideology, whether derived from logic, philosophy, or morality.

And thus we stand before the view of politics which answers the inner demand of the Age of Absolute Politics.

THE 20TH CENTURY POLITICAL OUTLOOK

"Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honor and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty." — SPENGLER

"The time for petty politics is past; the next century will bring the struggle for the dominion of the world — the compulsion to great politics." — NIETZSCHE, 1885

INTRODUCTION

THE DISTRIBUTION of powers in the first two World Wars was grotesque — the way it was occasioned is examined elsewhere. The results of these two wars were consequently grotesque. In both of them the outlook of the nineteenth century was apparently victorious. Superficially it was indeed, but actually such a thing is impossible. Owing to the organic nature of a Culture, as well as of the nations it creates, the Past cannot triumph over the Future — the alternatives are always only two in organic life: either forward development, or sickness and extinction.

The Western Civilization was not extinguished by these fearful conflicts, even though its existence was brought to the lowest possible point politically.

The First of the series of World Wars created a new world. The old ideas of history, politics, war, nations, economics, society, culture, art, education, ethics, were swept away. The new ideas of these things however were possessed only by the best brains of Europe, the small Culture-bearing stratum. Unfortunately

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the political leaders in Europe immediately after the First World War — save one — did not belong to this stratum.

The Second in the series arose from the fact that all Europe had not yet come under the impress of the new idea, the 20th century world-outlook. Half of Europe continued to play the old-fashioned, fatal game of petty-stateism. The leaders responsible for this represent what Goethe had in mind when he said: "The most terrible thing in the world is ignorance in action." Europe has not yet paid the full price for the malice and stupidity of these leaders. Nietzsche had wished to see such an increase in the threatening attitude of Russia that Europe would be forced to unite, to abandon the miserable game of political nationalism, petty-stateism. Not only did this happen politically, it happened culturally — Russia seceded totally from Europe and returned to Asia, whence Peter the Great had dragged it. But Europe continued to luxuriate in the repulsive game of frontiers and customs, little plans, little projects, little secrets — even after it had looked on at the spectacle of the Bolshevik revolution. Nietzsche had assumed in his thought that brains would be present at the helm in Europe — he forgot to wish that.

Readers in the year 2000 will find it hard to believe that in 1947 a French aspirant for power based himself on a program for making France secure from Germany, or that in 1947 England and France signed at Diinkirchen a treaty of alliance against Germany. Both America and Russia allowed these two political powers of yesterday to sign this harmless treaty — it could not in any way conflict with the plans of the extra-Europeans in Moscow and Washington, for it looked not to the future, or even to the present, but solely to the Past. Is it possible that the people who prepared and signed this treaty were under a collective hallucination that the year was 1750, 1850,

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or in any other century? When politicians become subjects of confusion, their countries must suffer.

Such things could not happen — Europe could not have reached such a low — if the new outlook on politics, the organically necessary outlook, had been clearly present in the ruling stratum in every European land. This new outlook — which becomes automatically the view of anyone who understands it — is now formulated here for the first time in its entirety.

The word politics itself has been subject in recent history — say, since 1850 — to a deep misunderstanding. Two things are responsible: first the economic obsession of the nations of our Civilization during the 19th century, second the culture-distorting influence of America on certain European areas. The economic obsession gradually developed into the view that politics was something outmoded, that it only reflected preceding economic realities, that ultimately it would pass away. Thus war came to be regarded as an anachronism.

In America, because of the special conditions which prevailed there, unique in Western history, the word politics came to mean adherence to a group or an idea from a chicane motive. American politicians continually accused one another of engaging in "politics." This meant that politics was regarded as something unnecessary, something dishonest, something that could and should be done away with. This was in very truth their understanding of the word.

This deep misunderstanding of the nature of politics in Europe grew because of the extraordinarily long period of peace among the European nations between 1871 and 1914. This seemed to prove that war and politics were gone. The idea was so deeply fixed that 1914 only seemed to be the exception that proved the rule. There was also a mental necessity on the part of weak heads in Europe and America to regard the 1914

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war as the last war. Nor did 1939 change this. Again there was a last war. People with this viewpoint are not embarrassed by the necessity of regarding every war as the last war. To an ideologist, his theory is normative — it is the facts which go askew.

The time has come when persistence in this sort of mental legerdemain must cease. Politics is not a subject for logical exercises, but a field for action in the Spirit of the Age.

THE NATURE OF POLITICS

FIRST, what is politics? That is, politics as a fact. Politics is activity in relation to power.

Politics is a domain of its own — the domain of power. Thus it is not morality, it is not esthetics, it is not economics. Politics is a way of thinking, just as these others are. Each of these forms of thought isolates part of the totality of the world and claims it for its own. Morality distinguishes between good and evil; esthetics between beautiful and ugly; economics between utile and inutile (in its later purely trading phase these are identical with profitable and unprofitable). The way politics divides the world is into friend and enemy. These express for it the highest possible degree of connection, and the highest possible degree of separation.

Political thought is as separate from these other forms of thought as they are from each other. It can exist without them, they without it. The enemy can be good, he can be beautiful, he may be economically utile, business with him may be profitable

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— but if his power activity converges on mine, he is my enemy. He is that one with whom existential conflicts are possible. But esthetics, economics, morality are not concerned with existence, but only with norms of activity and thinking within an assured existence.

While as a matter of psychological fact, the enemy is easily represented as ugly, injurious, and evil, nevertheless this is subsidiary to politics, and does not destroy the independence of political thinking and activity. The political disjunction, concerned as it is with existence, is the deepest of all disjunctions and thus, has a tendency to seek every type of persuasion, compulsion, and justification in order to carry its activity forward. The extent to which this occurs is in direct ratio to the purity of political thinking in the leaders. The more their outlooks contain of moral, economic or other ways of thinking, the more they will use propaganda along such lines to further their political aims. It may even happen that they are not conscious that their activity is political. There is every indication that Cromwell regarded himself as a religionist and not as a politician. A variation was provided by the French journal which fanned the war spirit of its readers in 1870 with the expectation that the poilus would bring car-loads of blonde women back from Prussia.

On the other side, Japanese propaganda for the home populace during the Second World War, accented almost entirely the existential, i.e., purely political nature of the struggle. Another may be ugly, evil and injurious and yet not be an enemy; or he may be good, beautiful, and useful, and yet be an enemy.

Friend and enemy are concrete realities. They are not figurative. They are unmixed with moral, esthetic or economic elements. They do not describe a private relationship of antipathy. Antipathy is no necessary part of the political disjunction of

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friend and enemy. Hatred is a private phenomenon. If politicians inoculate their populations with hatred against the enemy, it is only to give them a personal interest in the public struggle which they would otherwise not have. Between superpersonal organisms there is no hatred, although there may be existential struggles. The disjunction love-hatred is not political and does not intersect at any point the political one of friend-enemy. Alliance does not mean love, any more than war means hate. Clear thinking in the realm of politics demands at the outset a strong power of dissociation of ideas.

The world-outlook of Liberalism, here as always completely emancipated from reality, said that the concept enemy described either an economic competitor, or else an ideational opponent. But in economics there are no enemies, but only competitors; in a world which was purely moralized (i.e., one in which only moral contrasts existed) there could be no enemies, but only ideational opponents. Liberalism, strengthened by the unique long peace, 1871-1914, pronounced politics to be atavistic, the grouping of friend-enemy to be retrograde. This of course belongs to politics as a branch of philosophy. In that realm no misstatement is possible; no accumulation of facts can prove a theory wrong, for over these theories are supreme, History is not the arbiter in matters of political outlook, Reason decides all, and everyone decides for himself what is reasonable. This is concerned however only with facts, and the only objection made here to such an outlook in the last analysis is that it is not factual.

Enemy, then, does not mean competitor. Nor does it mean opponent in general. Least of all does it describe a person whom one hates from feelings of personal antipathy. Latin possessed two words: hostis for the public enemy, inimicus for a private enemy. Our Western languages unfortunately do not

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make this important distinction. Greek however did possess it, and had further a deep distinction between two types of wars: those against other Greeks, and those against outsiders of the Culture, barbarians. The former were "agons" and only the latter were true wars. An agon was originally a contest for a prize at the public games, and the opponent was the "antagonist." This distinction has value for us because in comparison with wars in this age, intra-European wars of the preceding 800 years were agonal. As nationalistic politics assumed the ascendancy within the Classical Culture, with the Peloponnesian Wars, the distinction passed out of Greek usage. 17th and 18th century wars in West-Europe were in the nature of contests for a prize — the prize being a strip of territory, a throne, a title. The participants were dynasties, not peoples. The idea of destroying the opposing dynasty was not present, and only in the exceptional case was there even the possibility of such a thing happening. Enemy in the political sense means thus public enemy. It is unlimited, and it is thus distinguished from private enmity. The distinction public-private can only arise when there is a super-personal unit present. When there is, it determines who is friend and enemy, and thus no private person can make such a determination. He may hate those who oppose him or who are distasteful to him, or who compete with him, but he may not treat them as enemies in the unlimited sense.

The lack of two words to distinguish public and private enemy also has contributed to confusion in the interpretation of the well-known Biblical passage (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27) "Love your enemies." The Greek and Latin versions use the words referring to a private enemy. And this is indeed to what the passage refers. It is obviously an adjuration to put aside hatred and malice, but there is no necessity whatever

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that one hate the public enemy. Hatred is not contained in political thinking. Any hatred worked up against the public enemy is non-political, and always shows some weakness in the internal political situation. This Biblical passage does not adjure one to love the public enemy, and during the wars against Saracen and Turk no Pope, saint, or philosopher so construed it. It certainly does not counsel treason out of love for the public enemy.

II

Every non-political human grouping of whatever kind, legal, social, religious, economic or other becomes at last political if it creates an opposition deep enough to range men against one another as enemies. The State as a political unit excludes by its nature opposition of such types as these. If however a disjunction occurs in the population of a State which is so deep and strong that it divides them into friends and enemies, it shows that the State, at least temporarily, does not exist in fact. It is no longer a political unit, since all political decisions are no longer concentrated in it. All States whatever keep a monopoly of political decision. This is another way of saying they maintain inner peace. If some group or idea becomes so strong that it can effect a friend-enemy grouping, it is a political unit; and if forces are generated which the State cannot manage peaceably, it has disappeared for the time at least. If the State has to resort to force, this in itself shows that there are two political units, in other words, two States instead of the one originally there.

This raises the question of the significance of internal politics. "Within a State, we speak of social-politics, judicial-politics, religious-politics, party-politics and the like. Obviously they

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represent another meaning of the word, since they do not contain the possibility of a friend-enemy disjunction. They occur within a pacified unit. They can only be called "secondary." The essence of the State is that within its realm it excludes the possibility of a friend-enemy grouping. Thus conflicts occurring within a State are by their nature limited, whereas the truly political conflict is unlimited. Every one of these internal limited struggles of course may become the focus of a true political disjunction, if the idea opposing the State is strong enough, and the leaders of the State have lost their sureness. If it does — again, the State is gone. An organism either follows its own law, or it becomes ill. This is organic logic and governs all organisms, plant, animal, man, High Culture. They are either themselves, or they sicken and die. Not for them is the rational and logical view which says that whatever can be cogently written down into a system can then be foisted on to an organism. Rational thinking is merely one of the multifarious creations of organic life, and it cannot, being subsidiary, include the whole within its contemplation. It is limited and can only work in a certain way, and on material which is adapted to such treatment. The organism is the whole, however, and does not yield its secrets to a method which it develops out of its own adaptive ability to cope with non-organic problems it has to overcome.

Secondary politics often can distort primary politics. For instance the female politics of petty jealousy and personal hatred that was effective in the court of Louis XV was instrumental in devoting much of French political energy to the less important struggle against Frederick, and little French political energy to the more important struggle against England in Canada and India and on the seas. Frederick the Great was not beloved by the Pompadour, and France paid an empire to chastise

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him. When private hostility exerts such an effect on public decision, it is proper to speak of political distortion, and of such a policy as a distorted one. When an organism consults or is in the grip of any force outside of its own developmental law, its life is distorted. The relation between a private enmity and a public politics it is circumstanced to distort is the same as that between European petty-Stateism and the Western Civilization. The collectively suicidal game of nationalistic politics distorted the whole destiny of the West after 1900 to the advantage of the extra-European forces.

III

The concrete nature of politics is shown by certain linguistic facts which appear in all Western languages. Invariably the concepts, ideas, and vocabulary of a political group are polemical, propagandistic. This is true throughout all higher history. The words State, class, King, society — all have their polemical content, and they have an entirely different meaning to partisans from what they have to opponents. Dictatorship, government of laws, proletariat, bourgeoisie — these words have no meaning other than their polemical one, and one does not know what they are intended to convey unless one knows also who is using them and against whom. During the Second World War, for instance, freedom and democracy were used as terms to describe all members of the coalition against Europe, with an entire disregard of semantics. The word "dictatorship" was used by the extra-European coalition to describe not only Europe, but any country which refused to join the coalition.

Similarly, the word "fascist" was used purely as a term of abuse, without any descriptive basis whatever, just as the word democracy was a word of praise but not of description. In the

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American press, for example, both during the 1914 war and the 1939 war, Russia was always described as a "democracy." The House of Romanov and the Bolshevik regime were equally democratic. This was necessary to preserve the homogeneous picture of these wars which this press had painted for its readers: the war was one of democracy against dictatorship; Europe was dictatorship, ergo, anything fighting Europe was democracy. In the same way, Machiavelli described any State that was not a monarchy as a republic, a polemical definition that has remained to this day. To Jack Cade the word nobility was a term of damnation, to those who put down his rebellion, it was everything good. In a legal treatise, the class-warrior Karl Renner described rent paid by tenant to landlord as "tribute." In the same way, Ortega y Gasset calls the resurgence of State authority, of the ideas of order, hierarchy and discipline, a revolt of the masses. And to a real class warrior, any navvy is socially valuable, but an officer is a "parasite."

During the period when Liberalism ruled in the Western Civilization, and the State was reduced, theoretically, to the role of "night-watchman," the very word "politics" changed its fundamental meaning. From having described the power activities of the State, it now described the efforts of private individuals and their organizations to secure positions in the government as a means of livelihood, in other words politics came to mean party-politics. Readers in 2050 will have difficulty in understanding these relationships, for the age of parties will be as forgotten then as the Opium War is now.

All State organisms were distorted, sick, in crisis, and this introspection was one great symptom of it. Supposedly internal politics was primary.

If internal politics was actually primary, it must have meant that friend-enemy groupings could arise on an internal political

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question. If this did happen, in the extreme case civil war was the result, but unless a civil war occurred, internal politics was still in fact secondary, limited, private, and not public. The very contention that inner politics was primary was polemical: what was meant was that it should be. The Liberals and class-warriors, then as now, spoke of their wishes and hope as facts, near-facts, or potential facts. The sole result of focusing energy onto inner problems was to weaken the State, in its dealings with other States. The law of every organism allows only two alternatives: either the organism must be true to itself, or it goes down into sickness or death. The nature, the essence of the State is inner peace and outer struggle. If the inner peace is disturbed or broken, the outer struggle is damaged.

The organic and the inorganic ways of thinking do not intersect: ordinary class-room logic, the logic of philosophy textbooks tells us that there is no reason why State, politics and war need even exist. There is no logical reason why humanity could not be organized as a society, or as a purely economic enterprise, or as a vast book-club. But the higher organisms of States, and the highest organisms, the High Cultures, do not ask logicians for permission to exist — the very existence of this type of rationalist, the man emancipated from reality, is only a symptom of a crisis in the High Culture, and when the crisis passes, the rationalists pass away with it. The fact that the rationalists are not in touch with the invisible, organic forces of History is shown by their predictions of events. Before 1914, they universally asserted that a general European war was impossible. Two different types of rationalists gave their two different reasons. The class-warriors of the Internationale, said that international class-war socialism would make it impossible to mobilize "the workers" of one country against "the workers" in another country. The other type — also with its center of

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gravity in economics, since rationalism and materialism are indissolubly wedded — said no general war was possible because mobilization would bring about such a dislocation of the economic life of the countries that a breakdown would come in a few weeks.

THE WAR-POLITICS SYMBIOSIS

WE COME to the relation of war to politics. It is not proposed to treat of the metaphysics of war, but to develop a practical outlook of the possibilities and necessities of war to serve as a basis for action.

First, a definition: war is an armed struggle between organized political units. It is not a question of the method of fighting, for weapons are merely a way of killing. Nor of military organization — these things determine nothing about the inner nature of war. War is the highest possible expression of the friend-enemy disjunction. It confers the practical meaning on the word enemy. The enemy is he upon whom one is preparing to make or upon whom one is making war. If there is no question of war he is not an enemy. He may be a mere opponent in a contest for a prize, he may be a mere heathen, a mere ideological opponent, a competitor, a hateful thing for reasons of antipathy. The minute he becomes an enemy, the possibility or actuality of armed struggle, war, enters. War is not an agon, and thus the armed struggles among the States of the Western

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Culture up to the middle of the 18th century were not wars in the 20th century meaning of the word. They were limited in their object and scope, and vis-a-vis the opponent they were not existential. Thus they were not political in the 20th century meaning of the word — they were not fought against enemies in our sense of the term. Unfortunately our Western languages lack the precision which Greek had in this respect to distinguish between intra-Hellenic struggles, agons, with the opponent the "antagonist," on the one hand, and wars against the non-Culture member, on the other hand, in which the opponent, e.g., the Persian, was the enemy. The Crusades were thus war in the full unlimited sense of the word: the deep spiritual objective was the assertion of the Cultural superiority, and of the true Faith against the heathen. The opponent — though one naturally extended personal magnanimity to his soldiers because of the inner imperative of chivalrous honor — was an enemy, not to be allowed to continue in his unity if it could be destroyed.

Honor in the Crusades forbade personal meanness, but did not exclude total destruction of the enemy organized unit. Honor in intra-European struggles did forbid imposing too harsh a treaty upon the defeated opponent, and it entered no one's mind to deny the opponent the right to existence as an organized unit.

During the history of our Culture, from Pope Gregory VII to Napoleon, the struggle against a member of the Culture was limited, but that against the heathen, the non-member of the Culture was true, unlimited war.

Wars before, after and outside a Culture are unlimited. They are a more pure expression of the barbarian in man, in that they are not highly symbolic. They are spiritual, for everything human is spiritual. The spirit is primary with man, the material

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is the vehicle of the spiritual development. Man sees symbolic significance in that around him — his experiencing of these symbols and his acting and organizing in accordance are what make him man, even though he carry within him also the animal instincts. His soul of course, with its transforming symbolism, completely changes the expression of these instincts. They pass into the service of the soul and its symbolism. Man does not kill, like a tiger, for food to eat — he kills because of spiritual necessity. Not even wars entirely outside a High Culture are purely animal, entirely devoid of symbolic content. With man that would be impossible — only something spiritual can bring masses on to a battlefield. But the symbolism of a High Culture is a grand symbolism — it links past, present and future and the totality of things, dissolving them all into a magnificent performance of which it is later realized that that, too, was a symbol. It is only in comparison with these grand meanings, this grand super-personal destiny, that extra-Cultural human phenomena seem merely zoological. Thus, because of their lower symbolic content, lower spiritual potential, these wars can never approach the intensity, scale, or duration of wars connected with High Culture. Defeat is acknowledged much more easily, for it is only the souls of those engaged that are affected. In Cultural wars however, the soul of the Culture is at work, lending its invisible, but invincible strength to those in its service, and a struggle can be maintained for years against fearful odds. A few defeats, and all would have been up with Genghis Khan. Not so with Friedrich der Grosse, or George Washington, for they felt themselves to be the vehicle of an Idea, of the Future.

There can not be said to exist an enmity unless the possibility of war is present. A possibility in fact, not a mere conceivability. Nor need the possibility be daily and imminent. Nor need the

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door be closed on negotiations before the possibility of war, and therefore true enmity can be said to exist.

Not even among warlike States is life a daily blood-shed. War is the highest possible intensification of politics, but there must also be something less intense, the period of recuperating, negotiating, steering, preparing. Without the fact of peace, we would not have the word war, and — what the pacifists have never thought of — without war, we could not have peace, in the blissful, dreamy, saccharine, way they use the word. All the fierce energy that war devotes to super-personal struggles would go into domestic discord of one sort or another, and the casuality list would hardly be less.

The relation of war to politics is clear. Clausewitz, in the usually misquoted passage, called war "the continuation of political intercourse by other means." Usually misquoted, because it does not mean that the military fighting is the continuation of politics, for this it is not. Fighting has its own strategic and tactical grammar. It has its own organic rules and imperatives. War does not have however a motivation of its own — this is supplied by politics. As is the intensity of the political struggle, i.e., of the enmity, so is the war.

It was insight into this interrelationship that prompted an English diplomat to say that a politician was better trained for fighting than the soldier, for he fights continually and the soldier only occasionally. It is also observable that professional soldiers would turn a war into an agon before political soldiers would. The phrase political soldier is only ad hoc, to designate anyone fighting from conviction, rather than from profession.

Clausewitz expressed in the same chapter a description of this relationship between politics and war that has validity in this century: "As war belongs to politics, so does it take on its character. When politics becomes grand and powerful, so does

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the war, which can ascend to the height where it attains to its absolute form."

War presupposes politics, just as politics presupposes war. Politics determines the enemy, and the time of opening the war. These are not problems for the soldier. Armies must be prepared to fight any political unit.

War and politics cannot be defined in terms of mutual aim, or purpose. It makes no organic sense to say that war is the aim of politics, or politics of war. It could not be, in either case. Each is the prerequisite of the other, neither could exist without the other. A given policy could aim at a certain war, naturally, but no politics could possibly aim at war in general.

It is the eventuality of war which gives to political thinking its hall-mark that makes it a different form of thinking from, say, economic thinking, moral, scientific, or esthetic thinking.

II

The disjunction of friend-enemy being the essence of political thinking and acting, is this to say that there is nothing between ? No, for neutrality exists as a fact. It has its own rules and conditions of existence. The Western Culture developed as a part of its international law a law governing neutrality. The very formulation of these rules for neutrals shows that the decisive thing is the conflict, the friend-enemy disjunction. The problem for a neutral is how to keep out; it is not the problem of the others in the usual case how to keep the neutral out. The whole practice of the law of neutrality was dependent upon who was at war. If the Great Powers were at war, neutrals had as a matter of practice, few rights. If small powers were engaged in a war, and the Great Powers were neutral, neutrals had many rights.

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But the essential thing is that neutrality as a policy stands in the shade of the practical possibility of war and active politics. For a country to become neutral as a form of existence would be to cease to exist as a political unit. It might continue to exist economically, socially, culturally, but politically it could not exist if it were neutral. To renounce war is to renounce the right to an enemy. As long as a power is committed to war in any one given eventuality, it has not adopted total neutrality. Thus, Belgium's neutrality during the 19th century was only a word, and not a fact, for it maintained an army, diplomatic representation abroad, and it entered into military understandings with France and England against Germany. As long as a country maintains an army it cannot say its basic national policy is neutrality. An army is an instrument of politics, even if only a politics of self-defense. Politics and neutrality exclude one another, as do neutrality and continued existence. Here again, another instance of the polemical nature of all political language: Neutrality was turned into a polemical word by certain small countries of Europe. Actually by their very existence they were serving the political purposes of one half of Europe against the other half. This position, of being committed by their very existence to one side of a struggle, they called "neutrality." They knew their politics would involve them in war, they knew on which side they would be, and when the war did come, they cried aloud that their "neutrality" had been violated.

To renounce politics — which is what total neutrality means — is to renounce existence as a unit. In many cases it is the part of wisdom and the dictates of Culture to amalgamate with another power, to renounce an empty existence as a unit, an existence without a meaning or a future.

In addition to neutrality as a precarious fact, during war, and neutrality as a polemical fraud, there is neutrality which

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arises from the hopelessness of carrying on a war successfully. This is closer to true neutrality, for what it means is that powers reduced to such a case have disappeared from the calculations of the other powers, unless of course the land in question is attractive as spoils or as a battlefield. In this case, it must choose for itself to which of the powers still in the struggle it will surrender its independence. If it fails to do this, the choice will be made for it. A power which by its economic weakness, small size, or age, cannot possibly carry on a war has in effect renounced war and become neutral. Whether it is allowed to continue a posthumous existence depends entirely on how attractive its domains are. For purposes of high politics, it is not a political, but a neutral factor.

From the development of colossal war technics came the fact that few powers can support or wage a war. This led the rationalists and Liberals, ever bright with a new wish-informed thought, to announce that the world was becoming pacified. No more war or politics — "power-politics" is their word, just as one could talk of beauty-esthetics, utile-economics, good-morality, piety-religion, legal-law — the world is become neutral, the occasions of war are going, political powers can no longer afford wars, and the like. It is not war or politics which is disappearing, it is only that the number of contestants has grown less.

A pacified world would be one in which there was no politics. It would thus be one where no human difference could possibly arise which could range men against one another as enemies. In a purely economic world men could be opposed, but only as competitors. If morality was also there the proponents of different theories could oppose one another, but only in discussion. Religionists could oppose one another, but only with the propaganda of their respective faiths. It would have to be a

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world in which there was no one who would kill, or better yet, such a languid, colorless and boring world that no one could possibly take anything seriously enough to kill or risk his life about it.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that a rationalist, Liberal, or pacifist who believes that it is possible for war to vanish simply does not understand what the word war means, its reciprocal existence with politics or the nature of politics as the ranging of men against one another as enemies. In other words, and in the kindliest words possible, these people do not know what they are talking about. They wish to abolish war by politics, or even by war. If war were gone and politics remained, they would then abolish politics by war, or perhaps by politics. They confuse verbal virtuosity with political thinking, logic with soul-necessities, accident with history. As for superpersonal forces, they do not exist, because they cannot be seen, weighed and measured.

III

Since the symbiosis of war and politics forms its own thought-category, independent of other ways of thinking, it follows that a war could not be carried on from a purely nonpolitical motive. If a religious difference, an economic contrast, an ideological disjunction, were to reach the degree of intensity of feeling at which it would range men against one another as enemies, it would thereby become political, and such units as formed would be political units and would be guided by a political way of manoeuvring, thinking, and valuing, and not by a religious, economic or other way of thinking. Pure economics could not possibly wage a war, for war does not pay economically. Pure religion could not wage a war, nor pure ideology,

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because war cannot spread religion, cannot convert, but can only result in an accretion or diminution of power. Motives other than strictly political ones can indeed actuate a war — but the war takes them up into itself, and they vanish into it. Western Christianity has motivated wars, such as the Crusades, but these wars did not let loose the forces upon which Christianity places a positive value. Economics has motivated wars, but the immediate result of a war has never been a profit.

For this reason the Liberals and rationalists comfortably convinced themselves before 1914 that war had vanished because it did not show a profit. They were moving in their private world of abstraction, where economics was the sole motive of human conduct, and where invisible superpersonal forces did not exist. And 1914 did not cause them to change their theory — no, where the facts and theory conflict, it is the facts which need revision. 1914 caused them to re-implement their theory: The First World War was all the more proof of their viewpoint, for it showed that it was economically necessary that war disappear. These people did not know that economic necessity of human beings is never taken into account by superpersonal forces. Could they get no clue from the statement of one of the most immediate participants in the feverish flurry of negotiations of July, 1914, that all of the statesmen concerned merely drifted into the war? A strictly factual view shows that superpersonal organisms have no economics in our sense of the word, for they are purely spiritual. When Culture populations nourish themselves — and that is what economics is — they are nourishing the higher organism, for the populations are its cells. Its cells are to the superpersonal soul as the cells of a human body are to the human soul.

A war from purely religious, economic, or other, motives would be senseless as well as impossible. From religious contrasts

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arise the thought-categories of believer and non-believer, from economics those of co-worker and competitor, from ideological those of agreer and disagreer. Only from political contrasts come friend-enemy groupings, and only from enmity can come war. The enmity can start elsewhere — the personal distaste of the mistress of a ruler has brought about an enmity grouping among Western States — but when it comes to enmity, it is politics. Although the enmity may have started on a religious contrast, when it comes to war, one will fight against believers, or accept the help of non-believers. Only the Thirty Years War need be mentioned in this connection. Though economics be the beginning of the enmity, once it rises to the intensity of enmity, one fights without regard to the economic consequences of his fighting, but only to the political consequences.

Other thought-categories claim they should have a monopoly of thinking, that the political should be subject to them. The zoth century outlook on politics merely observes that they do not as a matter of fact. From an esthetic standpoint, war and politics may be ugly, from an economic, wasteful, from the moral, wicked, from the religious, sinful. These viewpoints, however, are neutral from the political standpoint, which tries first, to assess the facts, and second to change them, but never tries to value them according to a non-political scheme of values. Some politicians do this, it is true. English politicians in particular, after Cromwell, felt an inner compulsion to present every one of their wars as somehow directly involving Christianity, even a war which planted the Hammer and Sickle in the heart of Europe was a war for Christianity. But this does not affect what I am saying here, as this sort of thing only affects vocabulary, but does not touch facts, or action. Using a non-political terminology or propaganda cannot depoliticize politics,

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any more than using a pacifist terminology can debellicize war.

Politicians are usually not pure in their thinking any more than other men. Even a saint commits sins, even a scientist has his private superstitions, even a divine may have his little taint of mechanism, even a Liberal may have his minuscule trace of animal instinct which if released may cause a sanguinary war, after the conclusion of which he may try to exterminate the human beings comprising the population of the former enemy.

Just as a war cannot, as a matter of fact, be purely economic, religious, or moral, it follows that a war need not qualify under any other category in order to be justifiable from the political standpoint. The Scholastic philosophers set forth the ethicoreligious prerequisites of a just war. St. Thomas Aquinas formulated them in a fashion which is final for ethico-religious thought. From the political standpoint however, the test of the justification is quite different. It is of course obvious that the word justification is inadequate, since this word belongs originally to moral thinking and not to political thinking. It must therefore not be interpreted as an invasion of the field of morality if the word justification is used in this connection, for what is meant is appropriateness, desirability, advantageousness, and indeed these are contained in the secondary meaning of the word justification. Now, in this practical, political sense, what wars are justified? Politics is activity in regard to power. Units engaged in politics may gain or lose power. Instinct and understanding direct them to seek to increase power. War is the most intense method of trying to increase power. Thus a war which has no practically foreseeable possibility of increasing power is not politically justifiable. A war which promises an increase in power is politically justifiable. This is what the word success means in this connection, i.e., that increased

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power is the result of the war. When diminished power is the result of the war, the war was unsuccessful.

IV

The words defeat and victory thus divide into two sharply and precisely defined sets of meanings: the military and the political. Although the armies in the field may be on the winning side, nevertheless the unit to which they supposedly belong may emerge from the war with less power than it entered upon it. I say supposedly belong for the reason that when a political unit is in the situation where even military victory means political defeat, it is not in political reality an independent unit. Thus: if there were only two powers in the world, the one gaining the military victory in a war would of necessity gain the political victory. There is no second possibility. But if there were more than two powers engaged in a war, and a military victory was gained, one or more powers must have gained the political victory, i.e., must have increased in power. Thus if any power, despite the fact that it was on the winning side in a military sense, nevertheless emerged with less power, it was in fact fighting for the political victory of another power. In other words it was not actually an independent unit, but was in the service of another unit.

To be specific instead of general: after the First World War, England, although on the side of the victorious in a military sense, was weaker in the political sense, i.e., it had less power afterwards than before the War. In the War of the Spanish Succession, France emerged from the War weaker than it had entered, despite the fact that it had gained the military victory.

But between these two sets of meanings of the words victory and defeat, there is an order of rank: the political meaning is

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primary, for war itself is subsidiary to politics. Any politician would prefer a military defeat coupled with political victory to the converse. Despite the military defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars, Talleyrand negotiated a political victory for France out of the Congress of Vienna. To say that a unit gained a military victory and also suffered a political defeat is only another way of saying that the military opponent was not a real enemy. A real enemy is he whom one can strike down and thereby increase one's own power.

It is for the politician to determine whom to fight, and if he selects as the enemy a unit at whose expense no power can possibly be gained even in a militarily successful war, that politician was incapable. He may be merely stupid, he may be carrying on a private parasite-politics, using the lives of his country-men to implement his personal antipathies, like Graf Briihl in the Seven Years War, he may be a distorter, representing an outer force not belonging to the Nation, or even to the Culture.

Such a politician may also be a traitor who sells himself for a private economic consideration, like the Poles who disappeared upon the outbreak of war in 1939 and were never heard of again.

But regardless of why a politician chooses for an enemy a unit which was not a real enemy, the fact remains that in so doing he is abdicating the sovereignty of his State and placing it therewith in the service of another State.

The classic example of this in recent history is, of course, England's participation in the Second World War. England was on the victorious side in the military sense, but sustained a total defeat in the political sense. Already during the war a member of the English Parliament was able to announce that apparently England was a dependency of America. At the conclusion of that War, England's power and prestige had sunk

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so low that it had to abandon the Empire. Extra-European forces were the victors. England had fought in the Second World War and had given lives and position for the political victory of others. It was not the first time in history, nor will it be the last, but because of its magnitude, it will always remain the classic example.

A tiny island of some 242,000 quadrate kilometers, with only 40,000,000 population, nevertheless, England controlled in 1900 17/20 of the surface of the earth. This includes all the seas, on which England was supreme in the sense that it could deny them to any other power. In less than 25 years, or after the First World War, 1914-1918, England found this sea supremacy gone as well as its commercial primacy, and its position of arbiter of Europe in the sense that it could prevent any power taking first place. In less than 50 years, or after the Second World War, 1939-1945, all was gone, the Empire and also the independence of the homeland. The lesson of course is that a structure built through centuries of war, bloodshed, and high political tradition of choosing always for an enemy him whose defeat would increase the Empire of England — that this can be lost through one or two wars against a power not a real enemy.

In 1939 even there could be no difference of opinion among political thinkers that England could not have an enemy in Europe, since the extra-European forces, Japan, Russia and America had become decisive in world-politics. But in 1946 there could be no difference of opinion on this subject among human beings anywhere in the world, regardless of their ability or inability to think politically. Always excepting the Liberals, of course, who move among theories, and not among facts. Indeed, even after this disastrous War, Liberals, distorters and stupid persons in England continued to glory in the "victory"

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of England. From the political standpoint, the most hopeful

fact for England's future in the period after the War was that the extra-European occupation forces were withdrawn from England.

Thus we have seen again the existential nature ot organic alternatives: a unit can either fight a real enemy, or it must lose. And again, a unit not fighting a real enemy is in the service of another power — there is no middle ground. If a unit is not fighting for itself, it is fighting against itself. The broadest formulation of this fundament is: an organism must be true to its own inner law of existence, or it will sicken and die. It is the inner law of a political organism that it must increase its own power; this is the only way it can behave toward power. If it tries to confer power on another organism, it injures itself. If it tries merely to prevent another organism from attaining power, it injures itself; if it gives up its complete existence to blocking another organism, quite regardless of its success in this negative aim, it will destroy itself.

France from 1871 onward is an example of the latter. The whole idea of the existence of France as a State was to block and frustrate a neighboring State. The inspiriting slogan of this idea was Revanche. The idea was pursued for decades, and in the process, French power was destroyed. The policy could not of course have arisen in a healthy organism.

THE LAWS OF TOTALITY AND SOVEREIGNTY

THE ORGANIC Laws of Sovereignty and Totality refer to all political units whatever. They describe any unit, whatever its provenance, that reaches the degree of intensity of expression at which it participates in a friend-enemy disjunction. Totality refers both to issues within the organism and to persons within the organism. Any issue within the organism is subject to political determination, because every issue is potentially political. Any person in the organism is existentially embraced in the organism. Sovereignty places the decision in every important juncture with the organism. Both of these laws are existential, like all organic conditions: either the organism is true to them, or it is faced with sickness and death. Both laws will be explained.

First the Law of Totality: Any contrast, opposition, or hostility whatever existing within groups among the organism may become political in its nature, if it reaches the point where a group or a unit feels another group, class or stratum to be a real enemy. For such a unit to arise within an organism is for

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the possibility of civil war to be present, or a severe crisis in the organism, which renders the organism liable to damage or extinction from without. Therefore, every organism, by its very existence, has the characteristic that it assumes power over the determination of all issues. This does not mean that it plans the total life of the population — economic, social, religious, educational, legal, technical, recreational. It means merely that all of these things are subject to political determination. Many of these things are neutral to some States, but objects of interest to others. But all organisms will intervene when an inner grouping may possibly become a focus of a friend-enemy disjunction. This describes all political units whatever, entirely independently of how they formulate their written constitutions, if they have any.

The Law of Totality affects individuals by embracing them existentially in the life of the organism. Politics places the life of every man within the political unit in the balance. It demands, by its very existence, the readiness of all individuals in the service of its fulfillment to risk their lives. Other groups may demand dues, periodical attendance at meetings, investment of time in group projects. If they demand however — so fundamental is this organic law of totality — that the member plight his life to the group, they become therewith political. The French public law professor Haurion designated it as the hall-mark of a political unit that it embraced the individual entirely, whereas non-political groups embrace him only partially.

This is the Law of Totality in other words. It is thus a touchstone of a group for this purpose whether it demands an existential oath.

If a group extracts such an oath from members, the group is political. This Law of Totality, it is hardly necessary to add, is

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not at all derived from conscription for military service. Conscription exists only for a few centuries within a High Culture, whereas the Law of Totality describes the Culture itself when it is itself constituted as a political organism, and, during the period of concentration of politics in Culture-States, it describes every individual State. Like all organic laws it is existential: if any inner force can challenge it, the organism is sick; if the challenge is attended with success, the organism is in severe crisis and may be annihilated. In any case, its unity will be temporarily in abeyance, with the possibility of partitioning by outer powers.

The Law of Sovereignty is the inner necessity of organic existence which places the decision in every important juncture with the organism, as opposed to allowing any group within to make the decision. An important juncture is any one which affects the organism as a whole, its steering in the world, its choice of allies and enemies, the decision of war and peace, its inner peace, its unchallenged inner right to decide controversies. If any of these can be called into question, it is a sign that the organism is sick. In the healthy organism, this sovereignty is absolutely undisputed, and may continue so for centuries. But a new age with new interests may raise contrasts which the rulers do not grasp; they may blunder, and find themselves on the defensive in a civil war. The challenge of the sovereignty of the organism was the first symptom of crisis. If the organism survives the crisis, the new rulers of the same organism will be the focus of the same sovereignty.

An important fact has been touched upon with this: it is not the rulers who are sovereign within the meaning of this law. Their powers in fact are derived from their symbolic-representative position. If a stratum represents and acts in the Spirit of the Age, revolution against it is impossible. An organism true to itself cannot be sick or in crisis.

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The Law of Sovereignty does not mean that every aspect of group life within the organism is dominated at all times by the political, nor that everything is organized, or that a centralized system of government necessarily reaches out always and destroys every organization of whatever kind. The outlook developed here is purely factual, and the Law of Sovereignty describes all political organisms; it is a formulation in words of a quintessential characteristic of a political organism.

Totality of organization — the "Total State" — is a phase of political organizations at certain times and under certain conditions. Some States are neutral in religious matters, others promulgate an official religion. Some States during the 19th century were more or less neutral economically, others intervened in the economic life. In the 20th century all States intervene in economic affairs. Different terminology is used to describe this intervention in different States, and the degree of intervention depends on the necessity of the organism. Thus an organism with relatively abundant economic resources will intervene to a lesser degree than one which must make every particle of work and material count. But this does not alter the fact that all States intervene in economics in the soth century.

The Law of Sovereignty is independent of the fact that in a given organism some internal force, say, religion or economics, may be stronger than the government. Such a thing can, and often does, exist. If this internal force is not yet strong enough to hinder the government, it is not yet political; if it is strong enough only to stalemate the government, but not yet strong enough to create war, then there is no political unit present. If no one can make a determination of enmity, or of war, there is no politics. This means that other units which preserve their political character can either ignore the sick unit in making their own combinations, or can attack it with good initial advantage.

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The Law of Sovereignty is thus also existential. It describes a healthy organism, on its path to fulfillment. Where this law does not obtain, the organism is — vis-a-vis other organisms of the same kind — in abeyance, and if this condition persists, the political organism will disappear. The best example of a case where the Law of Sovereignty showed its existential character is that of 18th century anarchic Poland. The weakness and sickness of the organism led to its repeated partitioning.

THE PLURALISTIC STATE

IN THE 19TH CENTURY Western Civilization, the comparative neutrality of the various States, and therefore the apparent weakness of the States vis-a-vis internal economics units and their tactics, e.g., trade unions with their strikes, led the Liberals and intellectuals to announce, a bit prematurely as it turned out, that the State was dead.

"This colossal thing is dead," announced the French and Italian syndicalists. They were heard by other rationalists, and Otto von Gierke came out with his doctrine of "the essential equality of all human groups." This was, of course, a way of denying the primacy of the State, and was thus polemical and not factual. The intellectuals wanted the State to be dead, and so they announced its passing as a fact. This theory came to be known as the doctrine of "the pluralistic State." It took its philosophical foundation and its political theology from pragmatism, a philosophy of materialization of the spiritual evolved in America. Pragmatism branded the seeking for a last unity, in whatever realm, even in that of nature-study, as a superstition,

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a remnant of Scholastic. Thus no more Cosmos, and naturally no more State. This outlook was peculiarly adapted to the members of the Second Internationale, which was liberal in tendency. Its two poles of thought were the individual, at one extreme, and humanity, at the other. It saw the "individual" as living in "society" as a member of many organizations, an economic enterprise, a home, a church, a Turnverein, a trade-union, a nation, a State, but none of these organizations had any sovereignty whatever over the others, and all were politically neutral. The fighting proletariat of the Communists became in such a pluralistic State also a politically neutral trade-union or party. All the organizations would have their claim on the individual, who would be bound to a "plurality of obligations and loyalties." The organizations would have relations and mutual interests, but no subjection to the State, which would be merely an organization among organizations, not even primus inter pares.

Such a pluralistic State is of course not a political organism. If an external danger were to threaten such a State, it would either succumb at once, or else fight, in which case, it would become at once a political organism, and the "pluralism" would vanish. Such a pluralistic thing is not politically viable. There is always the possibility of an external danger, an internal natural catastrophe, such as a drought, famine or earthquake, which would force centralization, or the arising of a group with political instincts which aims at total power over other groups, and which does not have enough intellect to understand the refined theory of the "pluralistic" State. America, before 1914, was more or less such a thing, and from 1921 to 1933 it resumed its pluralism. This "pluralistic State" came to an end in 1933, when a group arose which seized for itself a totality of power.

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Political theories, like "pluralistic State," "dictatorship of proletariat," "Rechtstaat," "check and balance," all have political significance, provided they attain to a certain vogue. This significance is dual: first, all such theories are imperative and polemical, and, by demanding a change in the internal form of the State, show by their very existence at least that the State against which they are complaining is sick; secondly, they are a technic for weakening the State further, by working up real contrasts and finally rising to the intensity of a friend-enemy disjunction, i.e., Civil War.

The 19th century was the heyday of using theories as political technics. It will be as difficult for the 21st century to understand the idea of "dictatorship of the proletariat" as it is for us to understand how Rousseau's theories could have been the focus of so much political passion. The frightful crisis that occurs in all High Cultures when they enter upon their last great phase, Civilization, the externalization of the Culture-soul, is also the birth-time of Rationalism. As Napoleon said, "Intellect runs about the pavements in France." Intellect, the externalized, analyzing, dissecting faculty of the soul, applies itself also to politics. The results are a spate of theories, decline in the internal authority of all States, and the calling into question of the internal authority in all States.

THE LAW OF CONSTANCY OF INTER-ORGANISMIC POWER

IT HAS BEEN SEEN that theories are a technic for weakening the State by trying to work up a friend-enemy disjunction on the basis of the theory. This technic is available not only to internal groups which aspire to attain to true political significance, but also to other States. The other State need not even have to carry out an intervention in order to reap the benefit of the activity of theorizing groups in another State.

We have seen that a State which fights a power not a real enemy is thereby fighting for a third power. This was but an instance of a law which is broader, and which is called the Law of Constancy of Inter-Organismic Power.

It may be thus formulated: In any age, the amount of power in a State-system is constant, and if one organic unit is diminished in power, another unit, or other units are increased in power by the same amount.

If a statesman, entrusted with the destiny of a State, moves with the sure consciousness of mastery which a feeling for organic laws confers upon him, he can never choose for the

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enemy of his State a power which his State cannot defeat, for such a power would not be a real enemy. He would know, even if only unconsciously, that the power which his own State would lose, in a war it could not win, would merely be transferred to some other power, either the one wrongly chosen as enemy, or a third power. One of the many phenomena which instance the Law of Constancy of Inter-Organismic Power is that of a given State being racked internally by groups using theories to work up internal contrasts. A point will be reached — short of the point of civil war, which of course dissolves the organism at least temporarily — in this process at which the external power of the organism will be diminished. The power lost passes thereby to another State or States.

The circumstances of the total situation determine which other power will be the beneficiary of this accretion of power. Even the particular theory which the agitating group is using plays often a certain role, for certain theories are owned by certain powers. France owned the theories of "democracy" and "equality" from 1789 to 1815. England owned the theory of "liberalism" in its many forms from the middle of the 19th century down to the First World War. Russia took over the theory of "dictatorship of the proletariat" in 1917.

II

In reality there is no such thing as a "political association" or a "political society" — there can only be a political unit, a political organism. If a group has real political significance, as shown by its ability to determine a real enmity, with the actuality or possibility of war, the political unity becomes decisive, and, even though it started out as a free intellectual association, it has become a political unit, and has lost entirely any "social"

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or "associative" character it may have had. This is no mere distinction of words, for the political is its own thought category. To be in politics is not the same as to be in a society, since a society involves no risk of life. Nor can a society become political by calling itself so. True political thinking, occasioned by the presence of a political organism will not take place in it, unless it acquires real political unity, and the only way it can do this is to be the focus of an enmity-opposition, with its possibility of war. The fact that a group in an "election" votes as a unit does not confer upon it political significance; usually the "election" itself has no political significance.

THE LAW OF CONSTANCY OF INTRA-ORGANISMIC POWER

IN THE MATTER OF "elections" which had a vogue of almost two centuries during the life of the Western Civilization, both in Europe and in its spiritually dominated areas elsewhere, an important law of political organisms is shown.

In "democratic" conditions — the origin and historical significance of "democracy" are shown elsewhere — occur the inner-political phenomena known as "elections." It was the theory of "democracy" arising about 1750 that the "absolute" power of the monarch, or the aristocracy, depending on local conditions, must be broken, and this power transferred to "the people." This use of the word "people" shows again the necessarily polemical nature of all words used politically. "People" was merely a negative; it merely wished to deny that the dynasty, or else the aristocracy, belonged to "the people." It was thus an attempt to deny the monarch or aristocracy political existence; in other words, this word implicitly defined them as the enemy, in the true political sense. It was the first time in Western history that an intellectualized theory became the

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focus of political happening. Wherever the monarch or aristocracy were stupid or incapable, wherever they looked backward instead of adapting themselves to the new century, they went down. Wherever they took over the theories themselves and interpreted them officially, they retained their power and their command.

The technique of transferring this "absolute" power to "the people" was to be through plebiscites, or "elections." The theoretical proposal was to give the power to millions of human beings, to each his nth/millionth fraction of total existing political power. This was of course impossible in a way that even the intellectuals could see, so the compromise was "elections" through which each individual in the organism could "choose" a "representative" for himself. If the representative did something, by a satisfying fiction it was agreed that each little individual "represented" had done that himself. In a short time it became obvious to men interested in power, either for themselves personally, or to carry through their ideas, that if one worked previously to one of these "elections" to influence the minds of the voting populace, he would be "elected." The greater one's means of persuasion of the masses of voters, the more certain was his subsequent "election." The means of persuasion were whatever one had at hand: rhetoric, money, newsprint. Since elections were large things, disposing of large amounts of power, only those who commanded corresponding means of persuasion could control them. Oratory came into its own, the Press stepped out as a lord of the land, the power of Money towered above all. A monarch could not be bought; what bribe could appeal to him ? He could not be put under the usurers' pressure — he could not be sued. But party politicians, living in times when values became increasingly money-values, could be bought. Thus democracy presented the picture of the

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populace under the compulsion of elections, the delegates under the compulsion of Money, and Money sitting in the seat of the monarch.

So the absolute power remained — as it must in any organism, for it is an existential law of every organism that: The power within an organism is constant, and if individuals, groups, or ideas within the organism are diminished in power, some other individuals, groups, or ideas are increased in power by that amount. This Law of Constancy of Intra-Organismic Power is existential, for if a diminution of power in one place within does not pass elsewhere within the organism, the organism is sickened, weaker, and may have lost its political existence as an independent unit. The history of South America from 1900 to 1950 is rich in examples of triumphant revolutions against regimes that stripped them of power — which then moved to the United States of North America, and as long as that condition continued, the country in which such a revolution had occurred was a colony of Yanqui imperialismo.

THE POLITICAL PLURIVERSE

WE HAVE SEEN what the "pluralistic State" is. There is, however, another type of pluralism, one of fact and not of theory. There is a pluriverse in fact, which is not merely an attempt to prove one philosophy or to deride another. The world of politics is a pluriverse. Although politics has been defined as activity in relation to power, and the inner nature, prerequisites, and invariable characteristic of politics have been set forth, nevertheless the nature of power itself remains to be shown. Power is a relation of control between two similar organisms. The degree of control is determined by the nature of the two organisms acting reciprocally on one another. Power appears, in its dim beginnings, in the animal world, where the beasts of prey exert something similar to power over their prospective victims. As something more than transitory, something constituted, however, it begins with man.

Animals can be classified spiritually — and there is no point in any other classification, such as the materialistic Linnean one — into two great groups, herbivores and beasts of prey. If the

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materialistic thinkers had ever looked at it so, they would surely have put man down as a beast of prey. And they would have been correct for the animal part of him. This animal part is in constant tension with the spiritual part, the specifically human soul which sees symbolism in things and gives the symbol primacy over the mere phenomenon. For this is in very truth the deepest depth of all philosophizing whatever. Where does the question of a conflict between "appearance" and "reality" ever come from in the first place? All great philosophy in High Cultures, and there is none without High Cultures, has been saturated with the idea of establishing the true relationship between appearance and reality, and this was in obedience to an instinct which embodies the essence of man: his human soul tells him that Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.

The will-to-power of the beasts of prey is limited and practical; it is fierce but unspiritual. Man carries within him this same will-to-power, but his soul infuses into it a purely spiritual intensity that raises its demands and its performances incomparably above the level of the beast. To the beast his will-to-power comes into play only in killing. Man, however, seeks not to kill, but to control. To control he will kill, but as Clausewitz correctly said, conquerors prefer submission and peace, it is the victim who makes the war. A man with a strong will-to-power wants control, not war as an end in itself.

But a display of will-power by one man calls forth opposition elsewhere. Similarly with superpersonal organisms — they do not and cannot exist alone, since, in their political aspect they are units of opposition. Each one exists as a unit-with-the-power-to-choose-and-fight-enemies. The ability to create a friend-enemy disjunction is the essence of the political.

But this ability necessitates opponents of similar rank. Hence

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it is quite total political stupidity to speak of a world with only one State, one Parliament, one government or however they put it. One could forgive Tennyson, but one can only say that if a politician talks about a world with "one State," "one Parliament," or "one government," he is the perfect type of the intellectual ass, and should be anywhere except in a position to distort the destiny of a State and bring misery to the individuals in it. He is an ass, even though he knows better, for — and this will sound self-evident to readers of 1980 and after — there is absolutely no necessity for a politician to deal in lies exclusively, as the Liberal school, the class-warriors, and the distorters believe. Men who are fighting against the Future perhaps have good reason to practice deception constantly, to throw clouds of theories over their actions, to say peace when they mean war, and war when they mean peace, and to keep elaborate classifications of "secret," "confidential" and the like.

The only secrecy that needs to exist in politics is that created by limitations of understanding on the part of individuals — and absolutely nothing can be done about this type of secrecy. For instance, the facts about the nature of politics and power which have been set down here will remain secret from the intellectuals and rationalists forever, even though they read this.

And similarly with lies: quite obviously the statesman who is the embodiment of the Spirit of the Age has no need of fundamental lies. He cannot fear the truth, since his actions are those of organic necessity, against which no force within the organism can prevail. Equally obviously he who sets out to strangle the Future, like Metternich and the Fürstenbund, or the Liberals, democrats, party-leaders of whatever nature, culture-distorters, and intellectuals of the period 1900-1975 have daily, pressing need of lies, ever bigger and better lies. They like to call this Macchiavellism, and to accuse others of it. But

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Macchiavelli was certainly not a "Macchiavellian," or he would not have written his factual, truthful book. Instead he would have written a book about how good human nature is in general, and how extraordinarily good in particular is the nature of princes. Where Macchiavelli writes of deception he is thinking of deceiving the enemy — Liberals and distorters regard deception as the norm of conduct toward the populations whose destiny is in their hands, and over whose lives they hold the power of disposition.

The classic example in this realm is and will always remain the "election" in America in the Fall of 1940. There were two candidates, representing the same interests, and the populace was offered its "choice" between them. The issue which the populace would thereby "decide" was whether or not America would intervene in the Second World War. Both candidates said publicly in totally unequivocal language that they would not involve America in the War. Yet both of them were committed to the interests which made them candidates to involve America in the war as soon as possible. Both candidates were of course successful, for in late democratic conditions, the parties become trusts and no longer compete, since competition would injure them both. After the "election," the two successful candidates carried out their real commitment, took America to war, and sent to their deaths the very men whose lives they had vowed to spare from death in the Second World War, which did not affect American interests. One of the candidates explained after the "election" that his non-intervention promise to the populace was mere "campaign oratory."

In such a case, there is no doubt whatever that Macchiavelli would have counseled the rulers of America to have both candidates declare for intervention. But party-politicians deal in lies from inner compulsion, for their activity itself is an organic lie.

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

THE FACT that a world with "one State" or "one government" was an organic impossibility was well shown by two attempts on the part of what might be called the Holy Alliance of the 20th century to institute such a condition. After each of the first two World Wars the extra-European Holy Alliance against Europe established a "League of Nations."

The political organisms however remained organic, and thus subject to the Law of Sovereignty. If a political unit exists it is sovereign; the member units of these two "leagues of nations" continued to exist politically and thus were sovereign. Incidentally the organic Law of Sovereignty is not the "principle of sovereignty of nations" of Grotius and Pufendorff; that was a legal concept and thus subject to juristic quibbling, whereas the organic Law of Sovereignty describes all political units whatever since it belongs to their very existence.

Thus the dilemma was that the "leagues of nations" had no sovereignty — again I am speaking of factual, organic sovereignty, not legal sovereignty — and hence were not political

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units. There is no political unit without organic sovereignty; there is no organic sovereignty without a political unit.

What, then, were these two "leagues of nations" ? They had two aspects, the ethical and the practical-political.

In terms of practical politics, they were polemical realities. Whatever power controlled them could thus speak for all nations, and thus any power opposing it was hors-la-loi, outside the comity of nations, not even human, for the league was humanity. They rapidly of course, needless to say, passed into the control of certain member-States, according to the Law of Sovereignty — where there is no sovereignty there is no independent political unit, and sovereignty must therefore reside elsewhere. And, in fact, the first league of nations, formed after the First World War, passed into the control of England. The second league of nations, formed in a time — after the Second World War — when politics had entered upon a more absolute stage, was seized by America.

This was foreseeable from the fact that Russia had allowed the geographical site of it to be established in America. This was not merely to keep out the undesirable swarms of ideologues, parasites, and holiday-makers, such as necessarily accompany every "league of nations," and to keep out the spies who pullulate in such a condition, but it actually showed a limited and secondary interest in the thing.

In the past, certain powers have owned certain theories. Conversely, there has never been an important theory that did not have practical, political ownership. A theory without a political unit to use it to practical purpose is not important; if the protagonists of a theory have sufficient passion and non-th retical political skill to work up intense feeling with their theory, they will possibly attain power with such a weapon. If they reach a point just short of power, an already existing political

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unit will appropriate the theory for practical purposes. Example: Marxism, taken over in 1918 by Bolshevik Russia for political use against Europe, when its protagonists in Germany showed themselves politically stillborn.

The "league of nations" theory was, in fact, owned by America. Whoever spread the idea — even England, which seized the first "league" — was increasing the power of America, whether he knew it or not.

It was inevitable that politicians free of ideology, like the Kremlin Mongols, would see this. Since they understood how to use theories, it was obvious they would allow no political unit to hamstring them with its theory. Thus perished the second and last "league of nations."

There was also an ethical aspect to these leagues. They were another example of the deception that was still thought in the first half of the 20th century to be a necessity of political conduct. They were actually nothing but polemical attempts to deny Europe. The formation of Europe as a political unit was in the Spirit of the Age. Whoever agitated anything else was merely negating this idea. This explains the fact that though the two "leagues of nations" accomplished nothing else as a political fact, nevertheless they prevented — Europe. This is quite independent of whether all people participating were conscious of this. However, it is the organic task of the politician to be conscious of political reality and to understand and assess rightly the possibilities of the time. It is of course now known that many persons who participated in these world-frauds were quite conscious of the realities.

From what has been said about the nature of political organisms the relation of the statesman to his political organism is obvious: just as he calls on his populace to die, he cannot refuse if necessary to give his own life. To his political unit he owes

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all his physical energies and all his talent and genius. For him to be careless in researching a situation — and above all — for him to do that which he knows is contrary to the furtherance of the life of the organism is to forfeit his right to live. He can consider himself lucky indeed if he is able to die of a heart attack, brain concussion, blood clot or simply old age.

When the extra-European forces gradually increased their power to such an extent that the independent existence of the West became problematical — this was evident from 1920 onward, and was transparent from 1933 — it was the collective duty to their States and to the Western Civilization for all statesmen in Europe to endeavor to save their respective States and Western States collectively from political annihilation by extra-European forces. Thus any statesman in a European State who sabotaged the general West-European understanding and final settlement that was sought by the custodians of the spirit of the Western Civilization was a strangler and distorter of the destiny of his own country and of that of the Western Civilization.

The ethics thus formulated is an ethics of fact. It is organic, political, factual and nothing else.

Its sole imperative is an organic-political one. It is distinguished from religious ethics in that it has no theological sanction. It is distinguished from all ethical systems whatever in that it only sees one relationship — that of the individual to the political unit. Nor does it have a sanction in the punitive sense. The organic relationship between the political unit and the statesman itself sets the ethical imperative. If the statesman violates it by injuring instead of furthering the life of the organism, the sanction is a matter for Destiny, the inner force of organisms. By doing so he forfeits his right to live, but often he is fortunate enough to escape with his life. The existential

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embrace of the lives of the individuals in it which has been shown to be an essential characteristic of a political unit makes no exception in favor of politicians. At its highest tension, this organic imperative causes a statesman in its service to tie his own life to the success of his own idea for the organism. Bismarck and Friedrich der Grosse also were determined to take their lives in the event of failure.

THE INNER ASPECT OF THE LAW OF SOVEREIGNTY

THE LAW OF SOVEREIGNTY describes characteristics of all political units whatever. It places the decision in every matter having political significance with the organism. Depending on circumstances any one, or even more, internal issues may become important politically, i.e., may begin to assume the form of a political unit and determine a friend-enemy disjunction. The government of the organism will always intervene at this point if its understanding and will are unimpaired. Charles I of England allowed this critical juncture to pass, by allowing his first Parliament to send Montague to the tower for preaching the divine right of kings. From then on the situation deteriorated steadily, and a correspondingly increasing amount of force was necessary to attempt to change the direction events were moving. The actual significance of the struggle was seen from the very beginning by the contemporary political thinker Thomas Hobbes, who wrote against the State-destroying nature of the Parliamentary position. He was also sensitive enough to the situation to know when things had reached the stage of personal

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insecurity, and left England in 1640. During these years of internal enmity, England did not exist as a political unit, it was ignored in European power-combinations, and it can thank the total European situation that it was not partitioned.

The Parliament considered itself the government, the monarchists considered themselves the government. A political outlook naturally does not concern itself with the question of which was "right." Such a question has no political meaning. It has only a legal meaning, and law is a reflex of politics. Politics is concerned with assessing facts and acting upon them; law comes afterward and has the function of consolidating a given political fact-complex. Law formulates the disjunction legal-illegal according to political dictate. If there is no political unit to prescribe the law, there can be no law. Thus in time of Civil War there is no law — there are two laws. If the result of the War is a reconstitution of the former people and territory again as a political unit, it will always turn out that the victor was the one who was legally right all the time, and the defeated was legally wrong. This invariable fact shows the nature of law.

Nevertheless, Parliament and King stood opposed, each claiming to be England. Politically, they were both wrong, for there was no England. In political language, two Englands equal no England. Each of the two groups was a political unit, and had become such by determining an enemy. Each of them was conducting itself as a government and each availed itself of the organic political right — also, but afterward a legal right — to determine the inner enemy. An organic characteristic of all political units whatever — that they determine the inner enemy when they feel it necessary — is the internal corollary of the Law of Sovereignty. Thus Cavaliers in Parliamentary territory were the enemy of the government, and their existence was that

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of outlaws. Correspondingly with adherents of Parliament in Royal territory. It must not be supposed because of the example used of a Civil War, that such determination of the inner enemy only occurs then. On the contrary, if Charles I had declared his opponents to be inner enemies from the very beginning, and had treated them as such, there had been no Civil War. To do this however, he lacked the vigor and the understanding. He should have consulted Hobbes, who understood these things. But Charles was not a reading man, and did not know Hobbes's treatises on Human Nature and De Corpore Politico.

Every political unit in history has exercised in need, and sometimes not in need, its organic power to determine the inner enemy. If it does it soon and proceeds thoroughly, the danger is past. If it procrastinates and takes half-measures, it ceases to be a political unit.

If it exercises this power when there is no need, it is merely persecuting its own population, and is sowing seeds of hatred that will one day bear surprising fruit. The organic ethic of the relation of the statesman to his political unit applies also to conduct of this type. The statesman has no organic right to dispose wantonly of the lives of the populace. To send subjects to their death in a war against a power not a real enemy, a war which thus by its very nature must be unsuccessful, or to declare a group as an inner enemy when it does not contain the real possibility of constituting itself as a true political unit is vicious, non-political conduct in both cases. Such a man exposes himself to the organic sanction that Destiny often imposes in such cases.

This organic right to determine the inner enemy is not always exercised in the same manner. It may be open: arrest, sudden attack, shooting down at home, butchery in the streets. It may be concealed: drawing up of punitive laws general in their

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terms but applying in fact only to one group. It may be purely formless, but nonetheless real: the ruler may attack verbally the individual or group in question. Such a declaration may be used only to intimidate, or it may be a method of bringing about assassination. It may be economic pressure — such a tactic is naturally the favorite of Liberals. A "blacklist" or boycott may destroy the group or individual.

It goes without saying that the exercise of such a right has no connection whatever with any written "constitution" which purports verbally to distribute the public power in a political unit. Such a "constitution" may forbid such a declaration of inner enemy, but units with such constitutions have never hesitated in need, and have often invoked such procedure independently of need. Thus the transatlantic part of the anti-Europe coalition in the Second World War carried out, quite independently of necessity, since there was no real inner enemy as a matter of fact, extensive inner persecutions directed against groups and strata of its population. It does not affect the political nature of this activity that it was done by culture-distorting elements, for the organic laws set out here describe all political units whatever, even if they fall into the hands of political and cultural outsiders.

II

This inward application of the Law of Sovereignty is of course valid for political units in all the High Cultures. Our information on it in the Classical Culture is sufficient to show its development there. The best-known example is that of the Resolution of Demophantos in the year 410 B.C. which declared of every person who sought to destroy Athenian democracy that he was "an enemy of the Athenians." In the same period the

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Ephors of Sparta declared war on all Helots found living within the territory of Sparta. In our own Culture, the activities of the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada are instructive, and above all the famous document by which Phillip II condemned the entire population of the Netherlands to death as heretics represents about the ultimate development of which this organic right is capable. Calvin's theocracy in Geneva was outdone by Phillip only quantitatively.

In old Roman public law the undesirable was declared solemnly to be "hostis," which was the word describing the public enemy. The Imperial proscriptions, regardless of their economic motive, were an application of the same organic function. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Acht und Bann were directed against inner dangerous or unwanted elements. They were declared Friedlos, and placed outside all protection. Anyone aiding such a person fell thereby into the same category. The Jacobins and the Comité de salut public slew their thousands of victims, both with and without declaration of enmity.

In early democratic conditions, the weakening of the State vis-a-vis internal groups would have made it more difficult to invoke this right, but correspondingly, since all Western States were in more or less the same internal condition, the necessity for its invocation was not often present. In any case the triumph of theories of equality and freedom in the realm of political vocabulary made it inexpedient to invoke the right in the old open, declared, legalistic way.

The early democracy was, in the Western Civilization, from about 1800 to 1850. During this period internal sovereignty as exemplified by determination of the internal enemy was more refined, intellectualized, concealed. Examples: The American Alien and Sedition Laws, the Austrian measures against democrats 1815-1848. Bismarck's laws against class-warriors. Of

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course in war the right was as forcefully exercised as ever, but was usually legally formless: the Yankees in the American War of Secession, 1861-1865; French Communards, 1871.

With the sudden transition to non-democratic conditions marked by the First World War, began the Age of Wars of Annihilation. It could also be called the Age of Absolute Politics. The 19th century was the Age of Economics — not that economics was ever prior in a real sense in the world of action, but economics supplied much of the motivation of politics, as shown by phenomena like the Opium War, the American War of Secession, the Boer War. Economics wants a weak State, and in the Age of Economics, the States were on the defensive, but the new Zeitgeist changed the entire meaning of History and content of action. Because of the fact that the Zeitgeist of the 20th century did not attain to external triumph in all Europe, many supposed that the Age of Economics was not only continuing but was attaining to new victorious heights.

That this was not the case was shown by the war which greeted the opening of the century. The war in question was between the Boer State, a colony of the Western Civilization, and England. The War was not against savages, or aborigines of spoil lands and thus does not come into the same classification as the Australian war against the autochthonous tribes of Tasmania, when the victims were hunted down like rabbits to total extermination. We have seen that the armed contests between Western Culture-States were not true wars, but were agonal in nature. The turning point to Civilization was marked by Napoleon, the herald of absolute war and politics, but this tradition continued so strong that in the French War against Prussia, 1870-1871, victorious Prussia still did not think of annihilating the totally defeated foe, nor of subjecting it to an endless military occupation, but contented itself with re-incorporating

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two provinces and imposing an indemnity which was paid off in a few years.

England had also so conducted itself in intra-Cultural armed contests. And yet in 1900, it carried the war against the Boers to complete annihilation. This was in true 20th century style, and note that it was England, the organism which had brought forth the idea of the 19th century and was not destined to produce the idea of the 20th century, which thus acted completely within the spirit of the new age. So strong is the Spirit of the Age — it compels inner submission even though one use the formulae of the past and believe that he is leading a moribund idea to new life.

The Boer War was mentioned because it marked a turning point also in the matter of the internal aspect of the Law of Sovereignty. In this War, the English armies initiated the 20th century method of designating and handling the inner enemy. It is nonetheless an historical epoch in this matter that no real political need existed for what occurred, for we are interested in what did occur, and not in re-writing history. In this War, large numbers of civilian Boers, men, women and children, came into the custody of the English armies. They were taken into custody on the theory that they were a danger to the internal security of the territory controlled by the Empire, that thus they were inner enemies. The numbers involved were considerable, too great for the systems of prisons and jails there existing. The solution adopted was to place them into detention camps, hastily constructed ad hoc. These were called "concentration camps," and this word was to have a destiny of its own.

After the First World War, the Age of Absolute Politics showed its manifestations everywhere, and one way it did it was to introduce this "concentration camp" system into every country in the Western Civilization. The more dangerous its

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external situation, the greater was the necessity of firm inner control, unbroken and unbreakable inner peace, and thus those countries with the most political concern introduced large numbers of persons they declared inner enemies, or in any case treated as inner enemies, into prison camps. But since the word was connected with politics, it acquired polemical significance, and was used by some States as a method of attacking the "morality" of other States. And yet these concentration camps were similar in all countries, just as prisons are. It is not material that extra-European forces imprisoned Europeans in the camps they set up in England, or that Europe imprisoned Slavs, Jews and Bolsheviks in the camps it set up in Europe; the camps were essentially the same from the political standpoint.

They both illustrate the internal aspect of the Law of Sovereignty as it develops in the 20th century. The Age of Absolute Politics has a full century more in its course, and thus the number of prison camps and the number of inmates will increase and not decrease.

It remains to say a word on the future development of internal sovereignty. Since the spirit of these times and the next is no longer that of economics, but that of absolute politics, sly and veiled methods of acting against inner individuals and groups will fall into disuse. In their place will appear once more open and legally formulated inner enemy-declarations. Even economically motivated determinations will be quite openly pursued with political means.

POLITICAL ORGANISMS AND WAR

A POLITICAL UNIT has the jus belli, the organic right to make war on the enemy it has determined. Not moral right here — this organic right is a thing independent of morality, even though also the strictest Scholastic philosophers gave to political units the purely moral right to wage war. But it is in a purely political way that the word is used here: the right to make war is a part of the habitus of the organism. The existence as a political unit, the determination of an enemy, the making of war, the maintenance of the inner peace, the declaration of the inner enemy, the power of life and death over the life of all subjects — these are merely different facets of politico-organic existence. They cannot be separated; they are an indivisible whole; insofar as they can be defined at all, they can only be so in terms of each other.

In the exercise of its power to make war, a State disposes of the lives of its own subjects and of those of the enemy. This bloodshed is not a life-requirement of a State, but occurs merely as a part of the process of acquiring power. The State

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directly seeking power is not the one that brings about bloodshed and war. No politician whatever would make war against another unit if he thought it would submit to incorporation without a fight. Thus war is always the result of resistance, and not of political dynamism. War is not normative; it is existential only. In the entire panorama of the history of the High Cultures, I doubt that there has been a case where the ruling stratum of a political unit ever decided that, first of all, it wanted war, and then cast about for someone upon whom to make war. It would not be political.

Nor is the mere power over life and death generally, jus vitae ac necis, the hall-mark of a political organism. Many States in history recognized this power to be in family units. Old Rome gave it to the paterfamilias. Some States have allowed the master power over the life of the slave. Most states have permitted the victim of an imputation of dishonor to contest for the life of his vilifier. Many States have recognized the right of blood-revenge among clans — although this reaches the very frontier in this matter, and is seldom found, and then only in peace.

It is thus quite conclusive that politics, as such, seeks no monopoly of taking life. Politics at its highest potential, war, takes life only because resistance requires it. Politics is activity in relation to power, and there is only one way organic instinct behaves toward power: it seeks more. Metaphysically this is the relation between the soul of man and the soul of the High Culture on the one hand, and the habitus of the beast of prey on the other hand. Although it permits subjects in certain cases, which it determines, in accordance with the Law of Sovereignty, to take life, the State never permits subjects to make war. If a group of subjects assume this power, a new State has arisen. If the right of blood-revenge turns into clan-warfare, the State

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must intervene, for its existence is involved. That is why, in all States engaged in serious politics, the right of blood-revenge is abrogated.

The right to make war and in the process to dispose of life is purely political. No Church could possibly ask its members to die for the Church — this is quite different from insisting that martyrdom is preferable to apostacy — unless it is becoming a political unit. In critical times, many Churches, such as Abu Bekr's Islam, have become States, but then they are no longer Churches, and they are ruled by the political way of thinking and its basic inner, organic demand for more power, and no longer by the religious imperative of salvation and conversion.

It would be cruel and insane to ask men to die in order that the remainder would have an unimpaired, or higher standard of economic life. When war is motivated by an economic idea, the economics vanishes into the war-political situation; i.e., the test of success is the political one, the method of waging it is not reviewed as to its cost, the means used always are military-political, the leadership is always political, and would be so even if exclusively economists were used as the war leaders. Their thinking would indeed be curious, but it would not be economic. Politics and economics are two different directions of human thinking and are hostile to one another. For this reason no true politician and no true soldier would ever with full consciousness carry on or fight a war for an exclusively economic motive, no matter what grand opportunities it offered for personal distinction. Economically motivated wars like the American War of Secession, 1861-1865, the English Opium War, the Boer War were of necessity presented to the participants under an untruthful propaganda.

Economics lacks the strength in itself — i.e., "pure" economics — to rouse men to the level of action where they will risk their

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lives. This is because economics presupposes life, and merely seeks ways of securing, nourishing, perpetuating the life. It simply does not make sense to buy life with death — when death becomes a possibility, we are no longer in the sphere of economics. If economics wants a certain war, it can only bring it about by political means, and then also — we are no longer in the sphere of economics.

Morality has often been put forward as the motivation of war, and many wars have been waged in the name of morality. This however does not make sense — that is not according to any Western system of morality — for States are not within the purview of morality, which is valid only for individuals. Furthermore the materialistic morality of the 19th century denounced war as murder. Therefore when protagonists of this type of morality — and they continue to exist and to do so — demand a war to stop war, it is an obvious fraud. The most any one man can do about stopping murder is to refrain from murders himself, but these morality-warriors have not done that.

A morality-war is impossible not only from the moral side, but from the war-political side. War is not a norm — one cannot fight against it. War is an existential disjunction, not a system or an institution. There is no rational aim, program, for economic, moral, esthetic or other change, no ever-so-correct norm that would justify one in killing. To adopt war and politics is in fact to abandon the other things. One can retain non-political ideas privately, but if they become public they vanish into the political. The result is politics dressed in moral clothing.

Another fact emerges about politics mixed with morality. There are, first, two possible mixtures: that of the Cromwell-Torquemada type on the one hand, in which also the politician believes that he is actualizing morality by his policies, and the

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Lincoln-Roosevelt type, in which the morality is purely a deception. In the first case, in proportion as the politician thinks morally, his politics is faulty. Thus Cromwell refused in 1653 a Spanish Alliance which would have been highly advantageous to England because he abhorred the religion of Spain. His conduct was of course nonetheless politics, for he made with France the same alliance he refused with Spain and received considerably less from it than Spain had offered. In the second case, where it is not taken seriously, as in the case of Roosevelt, it is not morality at all and is repulsive to honor. Thus morality in politics makes bad politics if taken seriously, and if used cynically, it dishonors him who uses it.

The question may be asked why moral vocabulary is imported into politics in this Age of Absolute Politics. The answer is that it is done quite deliberately and politically. It is elementary that politics does not include within the idea enemy any subsidiary content of malice or hatred. Hatred is private; it occurs between antipathetical persons out of their own private hostility. Even though this terminology is different from that of Hegel, the idea is identical. He spoke of the hatred of the public enemy as being undifferentiated and totally free from personality. This is no longer hatred in the primary meaning of that word. War is between States, and when the enemy State is overcome — what overcome means is a reflex of the Age, and in an Age of Absolute Politics means total incorporation of the other State — there can be no more war. Enmity ceases, and if there ever was any animosity of any kind it must cease now, since it was directed, if it was political, against the enemy State. That State is gone.

But — if the population of a State has been given exclusively propaganda to the effect that the war was not political, but for moral, humanitarian, legal, scientific and other reasons, this

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population will regard the end of the war as the beginning of unlimited opportunities of oppressing the population of the former enemy State. Moral propaganda thus stands forth in its nakedness — in the 20th century it is a means of fighting a war after the war, a war not this time against a State with weapons in its hands, but against the survivors of the defeat. Herein is the true significance of a phenomenon that mystified many persons at that time — I refer to the "concentration camp" propaganda against Europe, which was developed to its full height after the Second World War. This propaganda was solely for the purpose of a war after the war, thus not a true war, since there was no opposing unit, but an attempt to rouse extra-European populations and extra-European armies of occupation to ever-renewed ferocity and personal hatred against a defenseless European population.

Thus a moral "war to end war" develops in actuality into an endless war. A war for humanitarian purposes develops into a war to exterminate by starvation the population of the former State. A war against concentration camps results in bigger and more numerous concentration camps. This must be so in an Age of Absolute Politics, for obviously moral reasons for a war are not necessary in such an age. Propaganda cannot bring more men on to the battlefield than can the Spirit of the Age. Therefore he who is using the vocabulary of morality wishes to import into the struggle a viciousness that the spirit of politics alone cannot develop. Proudhon observed: "Whoever says humanity wishes to deceive."

Only politics shows the real meaning of war. Economics, esthetics, law and the other forms of thought cannot supply its meaning, for war is politics at its highest intensity. The political meaning of a war is that it is waged against a real enemy. To be justified politically, the war must be an affirmation of the

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political organism or for the saving of the organism. To expend human life in any other war is distortion of the destiny of the State and treacherous dishonorable killing of the soldiers and civilians who die in it. The decision as to who is the enemy must be made by statesmen who embody the national idea, and if it is not, the result is political distortion. In the language of politics a just war is only that one waged against a real enemy. It is immature thinking to suggest that military men should decide in such matters. It is possible for a politician to be also a soldier, but a soldier does not become ipso facto a politician. In Rome all statesmen generally speaking were ex-commanders, but they had gone into the field as part of their political careers. Caesar embarked late in life upon the military career, but how many professional soldiers could have gone into politics with corresponding attainment? In matters of politics, soldiers are circumstanced the same as the populace in general.

THE LAW OF POLITICAL PLENUM

THE ESSENTIALITY OF WAR to organic political existence is shown by the fact that a State cannot give up its jus belli without thereby giving up political existence. There have been in the history of the High Cultures very few examples of a political unit abandoning, either openly and consciously, or simply through submission, the organic right to make war. And in no case has a power that was important, or even considered itself to be important, renounced this right.

The famous Kellog Pact — what 21st century historians will designate as the high point of ideology-politics — did not even try to obligate its signatories to renounce war. The pact merely "condemns" war. The French version was "condamner," the German "verurteilen." Naturally in an age when many politicians were masquerading as clerics, most anyone was willing to "condemn" war. But the leading clerical powers made reservations to their condemnation. Thus England said that it could not condemn war in the case of its national honor, self-defense, implementation of the League of Nations or of neutrality

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treaties, or of the Locarno treaty, the welfare of spheres of interest like Egypt, Palestine and so on. France made similar exceptions, as did Poland. It was soon observed by political thinkers that the pact did not forbid, but sanctioned war, for the exceptions covered all possible cases. Thenceforward wars were to be legally formulated. Other political thinkers compared it to a New Year's resolution.

Organic realities were thus obeyed by this singular Kellog Pact, even though it purported to set them aside. Instead of law abolishing politics, politics used law, as usual, to prop up a certain political state of affairs.

The Pact also spoke only of war "as an instrument of national policy." As an instrument of some other idea however, nothing was said, not even of international policy. Thus the most vicious wars were not covered by the treaty. A war for an international policy, for "humanity," for "morality" and the like is the worst of all possible wars, for it dehumanizes the opponent, makes him into a personal enemy, sanctions any type of cruelty against him, and removes all restraints of honor from the person conducting such a war.

Nor is it possible to give up political existence entirely. Only a unit may disappear. The Organic Law of Political Plenum appears. If a given State should become tired through old age, and wished no longer to carry on war or polracs, it could, if it desired, announce its idea to the world of States. It could say that it had renounced enmity and embraced all States as its friends, that it would make no more war and wanted only peace. Such conduct, no matter how logical it would be to effectuate such a wish, would not have that result. Logic does not obtain in politics. A State would by such conduct create a political vacuum, and other States not tired of war and politics would immediately abolish this vacuum and bring the area and

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population of the abdicating State into its own realm. Such a plenary action might be open and undisguised, or it might be veiled. In any case an abdicating power moves at once into a larger realm. A political vacuum is an impossibility in a system of States. This Law of Political Plenum describes actual political situations, and there need be no announcement of abdication by the disappearing State. If such a State merely by reason of the general development of the larger situation sinks into the place where it cannot wage war, i.e., engage in politics, the Law of Political Plenum is at once operative. It is not necessary for the incorporation of the disappearing State into the larger State to be accompanied by the marching in of troops. This is of course the 20th century method of doing it, for this is the Age of Absolute Politics, and any type of disguise for political action is both unnecessary and inappropriate. It occurs automatically with the lowering of political potential in the disappearing State.

Thus, for example, the American seizure of half Europe after the Second World War was a mixture of military and crypto-political means. The seizure of the other half of Europe by Russia was more open, but still loaded with 19th century talk of "justification," "non-interference," "security," "military necessity," and so forth. In both cases the fiction of independence of the former political units of Europe was maintained.

This dividing of the Western Civilization between the two extra-European forces occurred as an instance of the Law of Political Plenum. European States were individually unable to wage war after 1945 because of the enormous requirements in industrial establishment and man-power. These existed only in Russia and America. Europe collectively thus became a political vacuum, because of the individual political incapacity of the States of the Western Civilization.

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Inability to wage war is abdication in fact of political existence, whether the abdicating State knows this or not. Thus, apart from all fiction, the frontiers which were maintained for a while in Europe after the Second World War were not power-frontiers, but administrative lines of demarcation. Thus America and Russia did not take these frontiers seriously each within its own half of Europe. The only frontier Russia and America took seriously was the one remaining power-frontier in Europe, that between them. The world of actual politics at any one time is described by powers capable of waging war.

Only political independence can be given up, not political existence. Politics still is present, with its existential embrace of the lives of the whole population. We stand before the Organic Law of Protection and Obedience.

THE LAW OF PROTECTION AND OBEDIENCE

THE PURPOSE for which the great political thinker Hobbes wrote his Leviathan was to show the world once more the "Mutual Relation between Protection and Obedience," demanded alike by human nature and divine law. The Roman formula was protego ergo obligo. To him who supplies protection also goes obedience. It will go either voluntarily, as the result of persuasion, or as the result of force. Once more, there is here no moral content in this formula. It may have also a moral aspect, but nothing said about it here relates to any such aspect, or to any other aspect than the purely political. A 20th century outlook on politics is necessarily purely factual, and neither approves nor disapproves of political realities. Approval 2nd disapproval on a moral basis is outside politics. Approval and disapproval on the basis of Culture-feelings, taste and instinct is, however, the driving-force of politics. But in examining realities as a prerequisite to acting upon the realiites, we put aside all pre-conceptions whatever. Thus — Protection and Obedience. This organic law is again

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a description of an existential reality. Without the relationship of protection in one place and obedience in another, there is no politics. Every political organism exhibits it, and the extent of protection and obedience describes the territorial frontiers of the organism. Wherever a power is under the protection of another power, the two are one for external political purposes. Whatever apparent anomalies have existed disappear as soon as political tension in the area in question heightens. Looking at the organism inwardly, the amount of protection and the amount of obedience, and the quality of these things, describes the inner strength of the unit. A high degree of protection and a high degree of obedience constitute an integrated organism that can stand the test of politics. Such an organism can often prevail against great odds. A low degree of the protection-obedience relationship describes a unit that is inwardly weak. It cannot stand a real hard struggle, and will often succumb in a test even to an organism with fewer material means and numbers.

Thus when in the 20th century an organism dare not conscript a population within its area, such an area is one of inner weakness, and cannot be counted part of the political body. Such a situation can only continue as long as such an area is not the focus of political tension. The law also describes the geographical extent of a political unit. Where protection and obedience stop, there are the actual frontiers.

Once more the words protection and obedience have5 also been used with an entire absence of any moral content. Thus "protection" can mean unlimited terror by military means, and "obedience" may be a reflection of the alternative of the concentration camp. The condition of occupied Europe under extra-European armies is protection within the meaning of this organic law. Even though these extra-European armies are

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starving and torturing the populace, nevertheless they are protecting that part of Europe from incorporation by another political unit. America protects its half from Russia and Russia protects its half from America. Thus the word is neutral vis-a-vis the disjunction of altruism-egoism. Protection is not kindliness, it is acquisition of power. Obedience is not gratitude, it is political submission from whatever motive.

Where the protecting force is within a Culture and the area and populace protected also belong to the Culture, the obedience will be full, natural and voluntary, on the part of the Culture-bearing stratum at least when the issue is the existence of the Culture.

This Law describes Western feudalism, for instance. Feudalism is the strongest political system that can arise. It is integrated inwardly and outwardly. It is the system where political activity is within a self-evident cadre of forms. It is an Internationale in the only true sense of the word; it is a phenomenon of equal validity in the whole Culture. In our case, it was the form and vessel of all Western happenings for 300 years. The basic formulation of the feudal Idea is nothing but Protection and Obedience.

Protectorates such as Western international law recognizes are examples of the law. It also describes any federal units that arise. The central government is the only political one, for it protects and thus receives political obedience.

The existential nature of the Law is also shown by the fact that if a State is unable to protect an area and population within its system, that area and population will pass into the system of another State that can protect and has the will to protect. The passing may be by revolt, it may be by war. It may be by negotiation, particularly if the protecting State allows a quasi-government to exist in the protected area, which can make a private

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understanding with other powers to deliver to them the population and territory. This shows incidentally the danger of carrying fictions too far in politics. To boast too loudly that vassals are not vassals may be to transfer them to another allegiance. Similarly to describe one's fortresses as impregnable is dangerous; this will never convince a resolute State of equal rank, but may convince their owner.

A more inclusive way of saying this is that in an Age of Absolute Politics political appearances should correspond to political reality. In the century of economico-moral cant, mastery consisted in maintaining an elaborate pretense of freedom, and simultaneously therewith a rigid condition of servitude. This sort of thing becomes both impracticable and disgusting in this Age which will embrace the two next centuries. Impracticable because the danger constantly exists of deceiving only one's self, and not the political enemy. Disgusting because the more robust forces of this Age scorn sly deceits and veiled formulae for the fact of political subordination.

In a country where the cant of morality exercises a monopoly over political vocabulary, politicians cannot speak openly even to one another. The propaganda terror necessary to maintain such an absurd type of political terminology in contradiction to facts ends by weakening from within governments in such countries. Anyone making a purely factual remark becomes suspect, and some of the best brains have found their way thus into the concentration camps.

INTERNATIONALE

IT HAS BEEN SEEN that the world of politics is a pluriverse. This organic fact has within it fatal consequences for the league of nations type of ideologist, and upon it his schemes founder. Neither of the two "leagues of nations" which were established by extra-European forces after the first two World Wars were international organizations, but merely interstate organizations. The English language does not permit of the clarity of the distinction with the same self-evidence as the German language. German "zwischenstaatlich" means occurring between States, as self-contained impenetrable units; "international" in German means occurring inside of both States, and passing through the State frontiers in every sense. Thus Macedonian terrorism in the 19th and 20th centuries was truly international, but it was not interstate. If the populations of the various States of the world were represented in a "league of nations" quite independently of their various States, and if the States had no standing in it whatever, it could then possibly be called an international organization. When the sole membership is of States,

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then the organization is merely "zwischenstaatlich," or in English, "interstate."

The importance of the distinction is that an interstate organization presupposes States. If they are true States and not States merely in name, they are described by the laws of Sovereignty and Totality. And in truth in both leagues at least some of the members were true States in this sense. In the first league, there were at various times five, six or seven such States. In the second league there were only two. But as long as there are two, such a league is merely an arena for the conduct of interstate politics.

An Internationale, provided it comes from the soul of the Culture, has the possibility of absorbing all States into it, provided it is an idea embracing life totally, i.e., a Cultural idea, and not merely a political scheme — and above all not a mere abstraction of some kind, an ideal — and feudalism was such an Internationale. Needless to say the various class-war revolutionary "internationales" were not this, for they had their origin purely in politics, and were purely negative. A Cultural Idea cannot be negative; such an Idea is not made by men, but comes from the development of the Culture, and represents an organic necessity of the higher organism. The phrase Spirit of the Age is transferable with the phrase Culture-idea. Both are superpersonal, and the most that a man can do is to formulate the Idea, try to actualize it, or try to strangle and distort it Change it, or destroy it, he cannot.

An Internationale representing a Culture-idea is of course supra-national as well as international in the true sense, for nations are creations of the High Culture. Only such an Internationale could absorb States into it — and then only the States within the Culture. The idea would naturally have no inner effect on populations and areas outside its organic body. Thus no Western Internationale could inwardly touch China, India,

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Japan, Islam or Russia. Their reaction to such an Internationale, provided they were affected by its external effects would of necessity be purely negative. If such an Internationale were to constitute the West as a unit also for political purposes — and the outer world has quite correctly always regarded the West as a unit for all other purposes — it would tend to create an anti-Western unity among the areas and populations outside. This would be only because the Western Civilization — the first one to do so — has made the whole world into its sphere of activity. For the first time in the history of the High Cultures, a Culture-political system embraced the entire world. For the politics of the extra-European forces is also in its depths motivated by the historically omnipotent force of our Western Civilization, in this way, that extra-European forces only derive their unity from the fact that they are a negation of Europe. If there were no Europe, Russia would merely be the scene of nomadic groups wandering with their herds, and engaging in small-scale inter-tribal warfare. Similarly, the famous "Chinese Revolution" of 1911 was a mere echo-phenomenon of Western currents, and its whole significance is that it had an anti-Western effect in the area the West calls China.

A true Internationale acts directly upon the entire Culture-area and all the populations in it. Capitalism was such a true Internationale — it was an expression of the Spirit of the Age. England was the vessel chosen by the Culture to actualize this idea, and England remained the spiritual home of Capitalism. The other nations were forced to orient their lives to this idea — which was also a world-outlook more than a system of economics. They could either affirm it, or. negate it. This choice existed only because the Spirit of the Age also contained political nationalism, and thus Capitalism, belonging as it did to one nation, did not and never could have amalgamated all the

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Western nations into one nation. Political nationalism was moribund even before the First World War, and thereafter the practice of political nationalism was simply Culture-distortion — every nation of the West was injured by it individually, and all of them collectively.

The Internationale of our times appears in a time when the Spirit of the Age has outgrown political nationalism. The Age of Absolute Politics will not tolerate petty-Stateism. The whole world is the spoils in this gigantic political age, and obviously tiny units, like the various former States of Europe, with a few tens of thousands of quadrate kilometers, with a few tens of millions of population cannot engage in a political struggle in a world filled with a population of 2,000,000,000 of human beings. The smallest possible unit that could even begin to participate in this world-struggle would have to have an area the size of Europe and hither Russia. Any struggle preliminary to this is local.

The two "leagues of nations" were merely interstate phenomena, thus pre-supposed States, thus were not themselves political units, thus could not engage in politics, thus did not exist as political realities. The Laws of Sovereignty and Totality, formulated herein, described the member-States of the leagues, but not the leagues themselves. Liberals and rationalists, moralists and logicians adrift in the world of facts, were not dismayed by the situation presented. They said that all that was necessary was to transfer sovereignty — mere legal sovereignty, for they knew nothing, and can know nothing, of the Organic Law of Sovereignty — from the member-States to the league itself. They thought that "sovereignty" was a word written down on a piece of paper, and was thus, according to the calculus of symbolic logic, manipulable at will. Sovereignty however, happens to be an existential characteristic of a political

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organism, and these organisms are not subject to human control, but, on the contrary, control the human beings in their areas politically. This is a fact and thus exists on a different plane from logic, a plane which can never possibly intersect that of logic. Logic deals with one phase of Culture-man, his intellect, and that only. It can only dissect, analyze, conduct spiritual post-mortems. Thus it cannot act, for action is creation. Politics in this light resembles art more than it does logic. Logic is light, politics is chiaroscuro; logic is cameo, politics is intaglio; logic is rigid, politics fluid. Creation is of the whole soul, and logic is only one product of a small part of the soul. Nonsense in logic may be sound politics; nonsense in politics may be sound logic. Culture-political ideas precede reality; intellectual ideals bark at the heels of reality.

The basic idea of the leagues of nations was to abolish war and politics. To provide a meeting place for war-political units could hardly do it, and consequently these meeting places had no political significance, which continued to reside in the capitals.

We have seen that a world with one State is organic nonsense, since a State is a unit of opposition. But some of the intellectuals wanted a world with no States whatever, singular or plural. They spoke of "humanity," and wished to unite it for the purpose of abolishing politics by politics, war by war. They were thus affirming war and politics, but this remained hidden from them. The name "humanity" became thus a polemical word — it described everyone except the enemy. This was of course nothing new, for this overworked word had appeared as a political word in the 18th century, when it was used by the intellectuals and equality-ideologues to describe everyone, except the nobility and clergy. It thus dehumanized the nobility and clergy and when power came into the hands of the intellectuals,

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in the French Terror of 1793, they showed that they considered their enemies subject to inhuman treatment because they did not belong to "humanity." Again, politics and logic separate out: humanity in logic means inhumanity in politics.

But yet the word humanity excludes no one, semantically speaking. The enemy is also human. Therefore humanity can have no enemy, and the "one State" liberals and the "humanity" intellectuals were involved in the very sort of thing they wished to abolish — politics and war. "Humanity" was not a peace word, but a war slogan. The "one State" remained in the world of dreams. Politics remained in the world and turned all of these anti-political things to its own use.

What would be a world without politics? Nowhere would there be protection or obedience, there would be no aristocracy, no democracy, no empire, no fatherland, no patriotism, no frontiers, no customs, no rulers, no political assemblies, no superiors, no subordinates.

For this world to come about or to continue to exist, there would have to be a total absence of men with lust for adventure and domination. No will-to-power, no barbarian instincts, no criminals, no superiority feelings, no Messianic ideas, no unpeaceable men, no programs of action, no proselyting, no ambition, no economics above the personal level, no foreigners, no race, no ideas.

We come to the fundamental disjunction between political thinking and mere thinking about politics. All intellectualistic thinking about politics posits a certain great non-existent characteristic of human nature.

THE TWO POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGIES

THE TOUCHSTONE of any political theory whatever is its attitude to the fundamental ethical quality of human nature. From this standpoint there are only two kinds: those which posit a "naturally good" human nature, and those which see human nature as it is on the other hand. Good has meant reasonable, perfectible, peaceful, educable, desiring to improve, and various other things.

Every Rationalistic political or State theory regards man as "good" by nature. The Encyclopedists, the Illuminati and the devotees of Baron Holbach's philosophy were all symptomatic of the advent of Rationalism in the 18th century. All talked of "the essential goodness of human nature." Rousseau was the most forceful and radical of 18th century writers in this respect. Voltaire set himself apart by denying totally this essential goodness of human nature.

It is curious that a theory of politics could ever possibly ground itself on such an assumption, since politics actualizes itself only in the form of the friend-enemy disjunction. Thus a

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theory of hostility assumes that human nature is essentially peaceable and non-hostile.

The middle of the 18th century is the beginning of the word liberalism, and of the idea-complex liberalism. Since human nature is basically good, there is no need to be strict with it, one can be "liberal." This idea was derived from the English Sensualist philosophers. The Social Contract theory of Rousseau originated with the Englishman Locke in the previous century. All Liberalism predicates a sensualistic, materialistic philosophy. Such philosophies are rationalistic in tendency, and Liberalism is simply one variety of politically applied rationalism.

The leading 17th century political thinkers, like Hobbes and Pufendorff, looked upon the condition of "nature," in which States existed, as one of continual danger and risk, in which those engaged in action were driven by all the instincts and impulses of the beasts — hunger, fear, jealousy, rivalries of all kinds, desire. Hobbes observed that true enmity is possible only between men, that the friend-enemy disjunction is as much deeper between men than between animals as the world of men is spiritually above the world of the beasts.

The two political anthropologies are illustrated in the story, found in Carlyle, of the conversation between Frederick the Great and Sulzer, in which Sulzer was explaining the new discovery of Rationalism that human nature was essentially good. Ach, mein lieber Sulzer, Ihr kennt nicht diese verdammte Rasse, said Friedrich — "You don't know this damned race."

The assumption of the goodness of human nature developed two main branches of theory. Anarchism is the result of radical acceptance of this assumption. Liberalism uses the assumption merely to weaken the State and make it subservient to "society." Thomas Paine, an early Liberal, expressed the idea in a formula that remains valid for Liberalism to-day: Society is the result of

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our reasonably regulated needs; the State is the result of our vices. Anarchism is the more radical in proportion to the completeness of its acceptance of the human goodness assumption.

The idea of "balance of power," a technic of weakening the State, is Liberal throughout. By this means the State is to be rendered subject to economics. It cannot be called a State theory, for it is a mere negative. It does not deny the State completely, but wants it decentralized and weakened. It does not want the State to be the center of gravity of the political organism. It prefers to think of the organism as "society," a loose grouping of free and independent groups and individuals, whose freedom finds its sole limitation with the customary criminal law. Thus Liberalism has no objection to individuals being more powerful than the State, being above the law. What Liberalism dislikes is authority. The State, as the grandest symbol of authority, is hated. The two noble orders, as the symbols of authority, are likewise hated.

Anarchism, the radical denial of the State, and of all organization whatever, is an idea of genuine political force. It is anti-political in its theory, but by its intensity it is political in the only way that politics can manifest itself, i.e., it can bring men into its service and range them against others as enemies. During the 19th century, anarchism was a force to be reckoned with, although it was nearly always allied with some other movement. Particularly in 19th and early 20th century Russia was anarchism a powerful political reality It was known there as Nihilism. The local strength of anarchism in Russia was owing to its coincidental attractiveness for the tremendous anti-Western feeling under the thin Petrine crust. To be anti-Western was to be against everything, therefore anti-Western Asiatic negativism adopted the Western theory of Anarchism as its vehicle of expression.

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Liberalism, however, with its compromising, vague attitude, incapable of precise formulation, incapable also of rousing precise feelings, either affirmative or negative, is not an idea of political force. Its numerous devotees, in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries have taken part in practical politics only as the ally of other groups. It could not create an issue; it could not line up men as friends or enemies; therefore it was not a political idea, but only an idea about politics. Its followers had to be for or against other ideas as a means of expressing their Liberalism.

Anarchism was able to rouse men to sacrifice of life, not so Liberalism. It is one thing to die to wipe out all order, all State; it is quite another to die in order to bring about a decentralization of State power. Liberalism is in essence non-political; it is outside of politics. It would like to have politics serve as the handmaid of economics and society.

LIBERALISM

LIBERALISM is a most important by-product of Rationalism, and its origins and ideology must be clearly shown.

The "Enlightenment" period of Western history which set in after the Counter-Reformation laid more and more stress on intellect, reason and logic as it developed. By the middle of the 18th century this tendency produced Rationalism. Rationalism regarded all spiritual values as its objects and proceeded to revalue them from the standpoint of "reason." Inorganic logic is the faculty men have always used for solving problems of mathematics, engineering, transportation, physics and in other non-valuing situations. Its insistence on identity and rejection of contradiction are practicable in material activity. They afford intellectual satisfaction also in matters of purely abstract thought, like mathematics and logic, but if pursued far enough they turn into mere techniques, simple assumptions whose only justification is empirical. The end of Rationalism is Pragmatism, the suicide of Reason.

This adaptation of reason to material problems causes all problems whatever to become mechanical when surveyed in

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"the light of reason," without any mystical admixture of thought or tendency whatever. Descartes reasoned the animals into automata, and a generation or so later, man himself was rationalized into an automaton — or equally, an animal. Organisms became problems in chemistry and physics, and superpersonal organism simply no longer existed, for they are not amenable to reason, not being visible or measurable. Newton provided the universe of stars with a non-spiritual self-regulating force; the next century removed the spirit from man, his history and his affairs.

Reason detests the inexplicable, the mysterious, the half-light. In a practical problem in machinery or ship-building one must feel that all the factors are under his knowledge and control. There must be nothing unpredictable or out of control. Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable. If a thing actually cannot be calculated, Reason merely says that the factors are so numerous and complicated that in a purely practical way they render the calculation unfeasible, but do not make it theoretically impossible. Thus Reason also has its Will-to-Power: whatever does not submit is pronounced recalcitrant, or is simply denied existence.

When it turned its gaze to History, Rationalism saw the whole tendency as one toward Reason. Man was "emerging" during all those millennia, he was "progressing" from barbarism and fanaticism to enlightenment, from "superstition" to "science," from violence to "reason," from dogma to criticism, from darkness to light. No more invisible things, no more spirit, no more soul, no more God, no more Church and State. The two poles of thought are "the individual" and "humanity." Anything separating them is "irrational."

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This branding of things as irrational is in fact correct. Rationalism must mechanize everything, and whatever cannot be mechanized is of necessity irrational. Thus the entirety of History becomes irrational: its chronicles, its processes, its secret force, Destiny. Rationalism itself, as a by-product of a certain stage in the development of a High Culture, is also irrational. Why Rationalism follows one spiritual phase, why it exercises its brief sway, why it vanishes once more into religion — these questions are historical, thus irrational.

Liberalism is Rationalism in politics. It rejects the State as an organism, and can only see it as the result of a contract between individuals. The purpose of Life has nothing to do with States, for they have no independent existence. Thus the "happiness" of "the individual" becomes the purpose of Life. Bentham made this as coarse as it could be made in collectivizing it into "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." If herding-animals could talk, they would use this slogan against the wolves. To most humans, who are the mere material of History, and not actors in it, "happiness" means economic well-being. Reason is quantitative, not qualitative, and thus makes the average man into "Man." "Man" is a thing of food, clothing, shelter, social and family life, and leisure. Politics sometimes demands sacrifice of life for invisible things. This is against "happiness," and must not be. Economics, however, is not against "happiness," but is almost co-extensive with it. Religion and Church wish to interpret the whole of Life on the basis of invisible things, and so militate against "happiness." Social ethics, on the other hand, secure economic order, thus promote "happiness."

Here Liberalism found its two poles of thought: economics and ethics. They correspond to individual and humanity. The ethics of course is purely social, materialistic; if older ethics is

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retained, its former metaphysical foundation is forgotten, and it is promulgated as a social, and not a religious, imperative. Ethics is necessary to maintain the order necessary as a framework for economic activity. "Within that framework, however, "the individual" must be "free." This is the great cry of Liberalism, "freedom." Man is only himself, and is not tied to anything except by choice. Thus "society" is the "free" association of men and groups. The State, however, is un-freedom, compulsion, violence. The Church is spiritual un-freedom.

All things in the political domain were transvalued by Liberalism. War was transformed into either competition, seen from the economic pole, or ideological difference, seen from the ethical pole. Instead of the mystical rhythmical alternation of war and peace, it sees only the perpetual concurrence of competition or ideological contrast, which in no case becomes hostile or bloody. The State becomes society or humanity on the ethical side, a production and trade system on the economic side. The will to accomplish a political aim is transformed into the making of a program of "social ideals" on the ethical side, of calculation on the economic side. Power becomes propaganda, ethically speaking, and regulation, economically speaking.

The purest expression of the doctrine of Liberalism was probably that of Benjamin Constant. In 1814 he set forth his views on the "progress" of "man." He looked upon the 18th century Enlightenment with its intellectualistic-humanitarian cast as merely preliminary to the true liberation, that of the 19th century. Economics, industrialism, and technics represented the means of "freedom." Rationalism was the natural ally of this trend. Feudalism, Reaction, War, Violence, State, Politics, Authority — all were overcome by the new idea, supplanted by Reason, Economics, Freedom, Progress and Parliamentarism.

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War, being violent and brutal, was unreasonable, and is replaced by Trade, which is intelligent and civilized. War is condemned from every standpoint: economically it is a loss even to the victor. The new war technics — artillery — made personal heroism senseless, and thus the charm and glory of war departed with its economic usefulness. In earlier times, war-peoples had subjugated trading-peoples, but no longer. Now trading-peoples step out as the masters of the earth.

A moment's reflection shows that Liberalism is entirely negative. It is not a formative force, but always and only a disintegrating force. It wishes to depose the twin authorities of Church and State, substituting for them economic freedom and social ethics. It happens that organic realities do not permit of more than the two alternatives: the organism can be true to itself, or it becomes sick and distorted, a prey for other organisms. Thus the natural polarity of leaders and led cannot be abolished without annihilating the organism. Liberalism was never entirely successful in its fight against the State, despite the fact that it engaged in political activity throughout the 19th century in alliance with every other type of State-disintegrating force. Thus there were National-Liberals, Social-Liberals, Free-Conservatives, Liberal-Catholics. They allied themselves "with democracy, which is not Liberal, but irresistibly authoritarian in success. They sympathized with Anarchists when the forces of Authority sought to defend themselves against them. In the 20th century, Liberalism joined Bolshevism in Spain, and European and American Liberals sympathized with Russian Bolsheviks.

Liberalism can only be defined negatively. It is a mere critique, not a living idea. Its great word "freedom" is a negative — it means in fact, freedom from authority, i.e., disintegration of the organism. In its last stages it produces social

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atomism, in which not only the authority of the State is combated, but even the authority of society and the family. Divorce takes equal rank with marriage, children with parents. This constant thinking in negatives caused political activists like Marx, Lorenz v. Stein and Ferdinand Lasalle to despair of it as a political vehicle. Its attitudes were always contradictory, it sought always a compromise. It sought always to "balance" democracy against monarchy, managers against hand-workers, State against Society, legislative against judicial. In a crisis, Liberalism as such was not to be found. Liberals found their way on to one or the other side of a revolutionary struggle, depending on the consistency of their Liberalism, and its degree of hostility to authority.

Thus Liberalism in action was just as political as any State ever was. It obeyed organic necessity by its political alliances with non-Liberal groups and ideas. Despite its theory of individualism, which of course would preclude the possibility that one man or group could call upon another man or group for the sacrifice or risk of life, it supported "unfree" ideas like Democracy, Socialism, Bolshevism, Anarchism, all of which demand life-sacrifice.

II

From its anthropology of the basic goodness of human nature in general, Rationalism produced 18th century Encyclopedism, Freemasonry, Democracy, and Anarchism, as well as Liberalism, each with its offshoots and variations. Each played its part in the history of the 19th century, and, owing to the critical distortion of the whole Western Civilization entailed by the first two World Wars, even in the 20th century, where Rationalism is grotesquely out of place, and slowly transformed itself into

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Irrationalism. The corpse of Liberalism was not even interred by the middle of the 20th century. Consequently it is necessary to diagnose even now the serious illness of the "Western Civilization as Liberalism complicated with alie