The Eye Opener

The plant exhibits -- at least, not to us -- no consciousness, i.e., no tension with its environment. The plant has thus only race, so to speak, for it is totally submerged in the cosmic flow. The animal exhibits tension, consciousness, individuality. Man has in addition self-consciousness and the ability and necessity of living a higher life in the realm of symbols. All men have this, but the difference in degree between primitive man and Culture-man in this respect is so vast that it seems almost a difference in kind.

It is the racial beat which informs primitive impulses, which informs action generally. Opposed to it is the illuminated part of the mind, the rootless reason, the intellect. The stronger these things are in relation to the racial plane, the more the existence bears an intellectual instead of a racial stamp.

Each individual, as well as each higher organic unit, has these two aspects. Race impels toward self-preservation, continuance of the cycle of generations, increase of power. Intellect decides the meaning of the Life, and the aim, and this may, for various reasons, deny one or all of these fundamental urges. The celibacy of the priest and the sterility of the libertine both come from intellect, but one of them is an expression of High Culture, and the other is the denial of Culture, an expression of total degeneracy. Intellect may thus be in the service of Culture, or opposed to it.

Race is, in the first instance -- in its subjective sense -- what a man feels. This influences, whether immediately or eventually, what he does. A man of race is not born to slavery. If his intellect counsel him to a temporary submission, rather than an heroic death, in the hope of future changes, it is a mere postponement of his breaking out. The man without race will submit permanently to any humiliation, any insult, any dishonor, so long as he is permitted to live. The continuance of breathing and digestion are Life to the man without race. To the man of race, Life itself represents no value, but only Life under the right conditions, affirmative Life, rich, expressive and growing.

Heroism can be motivated from either side of the soul: the martyr dies for the Truth which he knows, the fighting man who dies with weapons in his hands rather than submit to his enemies dies for the honor that he feels. But the man who dies for something higher shows that he has race, regardless of his intellectualized motives. For Race is the faculty of being true to one's self. It is the placing of a beyond-value on one's own individual soul.

In this subjective sense, Race is not the way one talks, looks, gestures, walks, it is not a matter of stock, color, anatomy, skeletal structure, or anything else objective. Men of Race are scattered through all populations everywhere, through all races, peoples, nations. In each unit they make up the warriors, the leaders of action, the creators in the sphere of politics and war.

Thus in the subjective sense, there is also a hierarchy of race. Above the men of race, below -- those without race. The first are swept up into action and events by the great cosmic rhythm of motion, the second are passed over by History. The first are the materials of high History, the second have outlasted every Culture, and when the stillness resumes its sway over the landscape after the whirlwind of events, these are the great mass. The Chinese mothers counsel their children with the ancient admonition: "Make thy heart small." This is the wisdom of the man without race, and of the race without will. The men of race are skimmed off every population that is caught up into the course of motion of a High Culture, and this process continues through the generations of History on the heights. What is left is the fellaheen.

Race in the subjective sense is thus seen to be a matter of instinct. The man with strong instincts has race, the man with weak or bad instincts has it not. Strength of intellect has nothing to do with the existence of race -- it may merely, in some cases, such as that of the man who takes a vow of celibacy -- influence the expression of a part of race. Strong intellect and strong instincts can co-exist -- think of the Gothic bishops who led their flocks to war -- they are merely opposed directions of thought and action, but it is the instincts that furnish the driving force for great intellectual accomplishments also. The center of gravity of ascendant Life is on the side of instinct, will, race, blood. Life which places rationalistic ideals of "individualism," "happiness," "freedom" before the perpetuation and increase of power is decadent. Decadent means -- moving toward extinction, extinction of higher Life in particular, and finally even of the life of the race. The intellectual of the great city is the type of the man without race. In every Civilization, he has been the inner ally of the outer barbarian.

This quality of having race has, obviously, no connection with which race one feels community. Race in the objective sense is a creation of history. One's destiny must express itself within a certain framework -- the framework of Fate. Thus a man of race born in Kirghizia belongs by Fate to the barbarian world of Asia with its historical mission of destruction of the Western Civilization. Rare exceptions are of course possible -- Life submits to no generalization entirely. Some Poles, Ukrainians, or even Russians, might be impelled by their souls to share the spirit of the West. If so, they belong to the Western race, and every healthy, ascendant race accepts recruits who come in on its terms and who have the proper feeling. In the same way, there are numerous intellectuals in the West who feel community with the outer idea of Asiatic Nihilism. How numerous they are is indicated by the journalism, novels and plays that live from them. But the converse would not be true of men without race -- they are not even acceptable to the enemy. They have nothing to contribute to an organic group -- they are the human grains of sand, atoms of intellect, without cohesion upwards or downwards.

Every race, no matter how transitory it may be contemplated from the viewpoint of History, expresses a certain idea, a certain plane of existence by its life, and its idea is bound to be attractive to some individuals outside it. Thus in Western life, we are not unfamiliar with the man who, after associating with Jews, reading their literature, and adopting their viewpoint, actually becomes a Jew in the fullest sense of the word. It is not necessary that he have "Jewish blood." The converse is also known: many Jews have adopted Western feelings and rhythms, and have thereby acquired Western race. This process -- contemptuously called "assimilation" by the Jewish leaders -- threatened during the 19th century the very existence of the Jewish race by ultimate absorption of its total racial body into the Western races. To halt it, the leaders of the Jews evolved the program of Zionism, which was solely an expedient for maintaining the unity of the Jewish race, and maintaining its continued existence as such. For this reason they also recognized the value of anti-semitism of the social type. It was serving the same purpose of preserving the racial unity of the Jews.

The dying out of racial instincts means the same thing to an individual as it does to a race, people, nation, State, Culture: unfruitfulness, lack of will-to-power, lack of ability to believe in or follow great aims, lack of inner discipline, desire for a life of ease and pleasure.

The symptoms of this racial decadence in various parts of the Western Civilization are manifold. There is first the ghastly distortion of the sexual life arising from the complete dissociation of sexual love from reproduction. The great symbol of this in the Western Civilization is everything suggested by the name Hollywood. The message of Hollywood is the total significance of sexual love as an end in itself -- the erotic without consequences. The sexual love of two grains of sand, two rootless individuals, not the primeval sexual love looking to the continuity of Life, the family of many children. One child is permitted, as being a more complicated toy than a dog, perhaps even two, one boy and one girl -- but the family of many children is a subject for humor to this decadent outlook.

The instinct of decadence takes many forms in this realm: dissolution of Marriage by divorce laws, attempts to discard, through repeal or non-enforcement, the laws against abortion, preaching in the form of novel, drama, journalism, the identification of "happiness" with sexual love, holding it up as the great value, before which all honor, duty, patriotism, consecration of Life to a higher aim, must give way. An erotomania is abroad through our civilization, not indeed like the sexual obsession of the 13th century which was at least racially affirmative, in that it increased the Western Peoples, but always a purely rootless erotic-without-consequences. This spiritual disease is the suicide of the race.

The weakening of the will -- Nietzsche called it "paralysis of will" -- another symptom of dying out of racial instincts, leads to a total deterioration of public life in the afflicted races. Government leaders dare not offer a stern program to their masses of human grains of sand: they abdicate, but remain in office as private men. Government ceases; the only functions that continue are the ones that have always gone on, no new aim, no sacrifices. Keep the old going; no creation! No effort! That would be too hard. Keep the pleasures going, the panem et circenses. Never mind the necessities of life, we are willing to renounce them as long as we have the pleasures.

This weakening of the will leads to voluntary abandonment of empires conquered with the blood of millions over ten generations. It leads to abysmal hatred of whoever and whatever represents sternness, creation, the Future. One of its products is Pacifism, and the only way a racially-dissolving population can be driven to war is through conscription coupled with pacifist propaganda -- "This is the last war -- actually it is a war against war." Only an intellectual could be taken in by such stark Unreality. The weak will of society manifests itself in the Bolshevism of the upper classes, the sympathy with the enemies of society. Anyone with unimpaired will however is really felt to be the enemy -- even cogent reasoning is hated: ideals are so much less demanding.

Mediocrity rises over the horizon of a dying race as its last great ideal; total mediocrity, renunciation of all greatness and distinction of any kind whatever; also mediocrity of the racial blood-stream -- anyone can come in now, not only on our terms, for there are no more terms, and there are no racial differences, everything is one, dull, eventless, mediocre.

The weakening of the will is not hard put to find an ideology which rationalizes it as "progress," everything desirable, the aim of all previous history. The democracy-liberalism complex lies to hand, and it acquires in such times the meaning of Death -- of race, nation and Culture. There are no human differences, everyone is equal, men are women, women are men, "the individual" is everything. Life is a long holiday whose main problem is devising new and more stupid pleasures, there is no God, no State, off with the head of anyone who says there is a mission, who wishes to resurrect Authority.

These symptoms, or similar ones, will be found present at the demise of every upper stratum whose will is weakened. Thus Tocqueville has described for us how the French upper stratum of 1789 had no suspicion whatever of the impending Revolution, how nobility waxed enthusiastic over the "natural goodness of Humanity," the "virtuous people," the "innocence of Man" while the Terror of 1793 lay before their very feet -- spectacle terrible et ridicule. Did not the Petrine nobility of Russia up until 1917 go through the same performance? The Tsar resisted pleas to leave while there was time with "My people will not hurt me." Their picture of the Russian peasant was that of a happy, simple muzhik, basically good. Similarly the weakening of the Western will in certain countries was shown by the deluge of pro-Russian propaganda spread, sometimes with official encouragement, in those countries from 1920 to 1960.