Aesthetic Aristocracy

The attitudes that totalitarianisn requires are: obedience, even though such obedience does not amount to acknowledgment and adhesion; conformism; and irrational forms of aggregation, among which it is possible to detect a fanatical, sinister, and blind capability of sacrifice. The whole system has an undefined character because it lacks a true authority: moreover, there is a lack of true commitment among people living in a totalitarian society; a lack of the sense of responsibility; and a lack of the dignity of free beings who acknowledge this authority and arrange themselves in one efficient formation. In this perspective, totalitarianism is a school of servility and a pejorative extension of collectivism: it acts not as an influence from above, capable of leading and unifying people, but rather as a formless power that has become crystallized in a center, in order to absorb, bend, mechanize, control, and impose uniformity on the rest of society.

When an ascesis is understood as a technique for the conscious creation of a force that can be applied, in the first place, at any level, then the disciplines taught by the doctrine of awakening can be recognized as those that incorporate the highest degree of crystallinity and independence.

To make a lasting change in the direction of development of any important aspect of a society, reform is insufficient and revolution is required.

"I have always dreamed," he mouthed, fiercely, "of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers, and free from the taint of that resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity--that's what I would have liked to see."

Beware the men with green eyes.

I overcame myself, the suffer;

I carried my own ashes to the mountains;

“It seems that nothing exists for modern man other than what can be seen and touched; or at least, even if they admit theoretically ­that something else may exist they hasten to declare it not mere­ly unknown but “unknowable,” which absolves them from having to give it further thought. If nevertheless some persons still are to be found who try to form some kind of idea of an “other world,” rely­ing as they do on nothing but their imagination they picture it in the likeness of the terrestrial world and transfer to it all the condi­tions belonging to that world, including space and time and even a sort of “corporeality””

"Contrary to what the bourgeois and liberal polemics claim, the warrior idea may not be reduced to materialism, nor it is synonymous with the exaltation of the brutal use of strength and destructive violence. Rather, the calm, conscious, and planned development of the inner being and a code of ethics; love of distance; hierarchy; order; the faculty of subordinating the emotional and individualistic element of one’s self to higher goals and principles, especially in the name of honor and duty—these are all elements of the warrior idea, and they act as the foundations of a specific “style” that has largely been lost."

"These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass in an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsmen, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape. "

— Jules Verne

“There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out and through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall”