Julius Evola

Man, at a given moment, wanted to “be free.” He was allowed to be so, and he was allowed to throw off the chains that did not bind him so much as sustain him. Thereupon he was allowed to suffer all the consequences of his liberation, following ineluctably up to his present state in which “God is dead” (or “God has withdrawn,” as Bernanos says), and existence becomes the field of absurdity where everything is possible and everything is allowed. Nothing has acted in all of this but the law that is known in the Far East as the law of actions and reactions, which is objectively “beyond good and evil” and beyond any petty morality.

They assume that misery is greater among the disinherited or the proletariat than among those living in prosperous or privileged economic conditions, and that it will consequently diminish with the “freedom from want” and the general advance of the material conditions of existence. The truth of the matter is that the meaning of existence can be lacking as much in one group as in the other, and that there is no correlation between material and spiritual misery. Only to the lowest and dullest levels of society can one preach the formula for all human happiness and wholeness as the well-named “animal ideal,” a well-being that is little better than bovine. Hegel rightly wrote that the epochs of material well-being are blank pages in the history book, and Toynbee has shown that the challenge to mankind of environmentally and spiritually harsh and problematic conditions is often the incentive that awakens the creative energies of civilization.3 In some cases, it is not paradoxical to say that the man of good will should try to make life difficult for his neighbor! It is a commonplace that all the higher virtues attenuate and atrophy under easy conditions, when man is not forced to prove himself in some way; and in the final analysis it does not matter in such situations if a good number fall away and are lost through natural selection. André Breton was right when he wrote that “we must prevent the artificial precariousness of social conditions from concealing the real precariousness of the human condition.”

But to avoid straying too far from my argument, the point is that the most acute forms of the modern existential crisis are appearing today at the margin of a civilization of prosperity, as witness the currents in the new generation that have been described. One sees there rebellion, disgust, and anger manifesting not in a wretched and oppressed subproletariat but often in young people who lack nothing, even in millionaires’ children. And among other things it is a significant fact, statistically proven, that suicide is much rarer in poor countries than in rich ones, showing that the problematic life is felt more in the latter than in the former. Blank despair can occur right up to the finishing-post of socioeconomic messianism, as in the musical comedy about a utopian island where they have everything, “fun, women, and whiskey,” but also the ever-recurrent sense of the emptiness of existence, the sense that something is still missing.

There exists, therefore, no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between the meaning of life and conditi