Will of impotence

It may be difficult for someone to find an answer to the question of how we ended up in this irrational and totally unscientific state of hysteria that has been going on for two years now. It is an almost global hysteria, in the sense that it affects the entire Western world but only some of the barbarian (for us, sic) territories at our borders, where people live following values ​​more or less different from the “democratic and progressive” ones as well, so dear to the elites and Western peoples.

The decay of our world began long before our days, weak and full of ignorant anguish, and looking back with intellectual honesty it is now possible to identify many of the salient points in which suicidal choices have been made. It is possible, that is, both to understand when bad teachers have spoken and their speeches have finally caught on, instructing their followers with intentions that were not the captivating ones declared at the beginning and when governments have decided to make them their own with high-sounding proclamations.

Observing this path is like looking into the abyss or looking straight into the eyes of the snake that is about to attack you: you know well that you are in mortal danger but you cannot look away and risk ending up, hypnotized, prey to the beast...

What to do? And above all: does it make sense to do something? Since the process is neither avoidable nor reversible, what is better: slow it down as much as possible or let it gain momentum until its final end, which will be both painful death and painful rebirth?

Roberto Pecchiolli, Italian essayist and blogger, has agreed to share with readers some of his considerations on the inevitable decline of our Western world.

1) Could you explain the difference between Kultur and Zivilisation and why this difference is so important?

A) First of all, the translation into Italian: Kultur in German means culture in the broad sense, or “civilization”, the specific way of being in the world of a people, of a time or of an idea. Zivilisation is mere civilization, the slow decay of principles and reasons. This is an opposition that has existed in German culture since the 18th century. In the twentieth century, the oppositional couple became one of the cornerstones of the so-called conservative revolution, from the first Thomas Mann, that of the “Considerations of an Unpolitical”, to Oswald Spengler, the author of the “Sunset of the West”. Kultur, for Spengler, is civilization, while Zivilisation, civilization (or society) is its ultimate, mannerist, degenerative stage. In its organic path, each Kultur-civilization goes through various stages. The initial creative impetus leads to maturity, to fullness, but inevitably results in a sort of stiffening, a symptom of old age and decline. Zivilisation is characterized by merely external, conventional norms and values, the result of which is widespread skepticism and then materialism, the last stage before the definitive sunset. For Thomas Mann, Kultur's own are art and metaphysics. They are opposed by Zivilisation, whose ideals are pacifism, egalitarianism, internationalism, humanitarianism. Art breathes into the eternal so it could never submit to the game of Zivilisation, which is linked to a particular context and is therefore historically relative and limited. Zivilisation is ideology, Kultur is tradition. The West - or what remains - is experiencing the extreme phase of Zivilisation, after having forgotten and even rejected the Kultur of which it is a child. This is the meaning of the Sunset described by Spengler, but also expressed by writers such as Paul Valéry and historians such as Arnold Toynbee. Each Kultur is born, lives, then has an inflection point and becomes Zivilisation, becomes sterile and finally dies. This, unfortunately, is the final, convulsive and confused stage we are experiencing.

2) The Greeks distinguished between Zoé (pure and simple existence) and Bios (life in its entirety). In your opinion, why is mere existence so prevalent in these our modern (sic) days?

A) The two terms (another oppositional couple, a sign of the constitutive dualism of our civilization) have been brought back to the center of the debate in the last two years by Giorgio Agamben, the most translated contemporary Italian philosopher. Agamben, who has spent his life studying the sources and nature of the “sacred”, found that due to the Covid-19 virus, man has fallen back into the simple defense of his biological existence. On the one hand, by emphasizing the instinct of conservation, on the other by expelling the spirit and soul, or Bios, from oneself. The contemporary man of the West has lost not only faith in God and in the Hereafter, but also all transcendence, reducing himself to a simple biological breath. This is why - whatever the origin of the virus - the policy of terror against the population is so successful, for this reason we accept without a word the loss of freedom and rights and the expropriation of our own physical body. The invisible being, after all, has unmasked us: we no longer believe in anything, except in bare life. Power knows this and takes the opportunity to impose a social, economic, existential agenda, from which we will all emerge poorer, less free, less “men”. A small observation with respect to the question: the use of the term “modern” is not by chance. In itself it only means “in today's way”. In reality, modern means for us current, new, therefore beautiful and right, as opposed to everything that is “of yesterday”. The problem is today, or the reduction of man and life to the present. Discrediting the past means cutting bridges, but also not having faith in the future. The bare life, “Zòe” is modern in that it is valid in the instant, without before and after, as for animals: the present made up of successive dots, devoid of a thread. This is the outcome that is really scary.

3) Nicolás Gómez Dávila stated that the modern world will not be punished, the modern world is the punishment…

A) This is so, in the sense that it does not even realize that it is degraded, inhuman, shapeless. All this at increasing speed, since - physics teaches us – “motus in fine velocior”, speed accelerates eventually. The man without qualities, trained, tamed, dependent on the establishment, denatured, that is, torn from his essence, is the punishment of himself, but he will realize it in the final act, less and less distant. A society of death - cheerful, sanitized, but still dead - can only achieve its goal, disappear. Davila wrote some particularly striking aphorisms. One of them comes to mind: cathedrals were not made for the tourist board. It is terrible to note that our time does not know how to edify, it ignores the sense of the sacred, it laughs at every faith, every cause pursued with sacrifice. Cathedrals are empty of faithful but full of tourists, just like every monument, work of art, symbol of civilization that is nothing more than a “location” to take selfies (one of the most ridiculous symbols of the winding up Zivilisation) to post on social networks, a kind of certificate of existence in life of the post-modern human, or to shoot commercials. The commodity universe. If all this is not a punishment...

4) You often speak of “oicophobia” and “will to impotence”. What exactly is it about? What origin do they have?

A) Oicophobia is a neologism invented by two non-conformist intellectuals, the French Jew Alain Finkielkraut and the English Roger Scruton. It means hatred of oneself, contempt for what one is, for the civilization of which one is children. Self-hatred is a degenerative disease. First of all because it is unnatural: every being loves himself, if they come to hate themselves, it is because something turbid, terrible, has crossed their mind. If this happens to a civilization - ours - it means that sunset is near and night is upon us. Oicophobia, in terms of civilization, means throwing away everything that made us who we are. It also means giving up without a fight, or rather with stupid joy, like someone who gets rid of a burden. It is the opposite of the “will to power”, which for Nietzsche is the instinct of men and civilizations on the rise. Before him, the pessimist Schopenhauer had theorized the senselessness of living, speaking of “noluntas”, not will. Will of impotence is the name I give to the attitude of those who surrender themselves to the will of others, to other civilizations, to those who give up defending their reasons for living because they no longer have any. It seems to me that this is the current attitude in the West. However, I also think that, in some way, every single man has reflections of life: the last word is not said. Curzio Malaparte wrote that it is not over until it is all over.

5) How has self-hatred been able to establish itself in our Western world?

A) There is no simple answer. I think one of the problems is the claim to universality. What is true of one system of thought, values ​​and principles is not necessarily true of another. In the past “will of power”, we observed the Other, the civilizations with which we met and clashed, measuring it with a counterfeit meter, ours. We were the advanced, the “beyonder”, the righteous, those who had understood everything, thanks to our science, technology, the way of life we ​​had chosen. If we were the “beyonder”, the others had to adapt to our canons, be like us. In this impact - and in the clash of civilizations and outlook on life that ensued - we began to doubt our supremacism and to consider our reasons as so many wrongs to be redressed. The sense of guilt, what Hegel and Marx called the unhappy conscience, has taken hold of us, and everything has turned into its opposite. Good has become evil and vice versa. In a Spenglerian sense, it is as if Kultur had suddenly surrendered to a mysterious voice that had prescribed not only to cut ties with the past, with oneself, with everything that had characterized us for three millennia, but to hate what one was and what one is. In psychoanalytic terms, we killed the father, but we no longer know why and we reject the inheritance. We hate our face because it reminds us of him, we burn everything he left us to hide the traces of the crime. Like Cain after the assassination of Abel, we condemn ourselves to wandering in the desert, hiding from everyone, even ourselves.

6) You introduced the expression “barcode generation”. QR codes and the various Green Passes go even further. Why does the human being love to be branded and show Nazi passes?

A) The barcode makes you less than numbers: a clump of apparently identical signs and lines that designate me, just me. It makes me a mass-produced product, a commodity. For over two centuries, equality has been talked about as a just, useful, necessary goal, the final goal of human life. There is only one weakness in all this: men are not the same and, in reality, they do not want to be. George Orwell explained it masterfully in “Animal Farm”, where everyone was the same, but someone was more equal than others. Significantly, the pigs. Power - which certainly abhors equality - knows that a flock is easily dominated. So, it turned us into sheep, working to make us happy with this condition. Less freedom, less culture, less knowledge equal tamed masses, to which what theorized by the Bourbons are offered: parties, flour and gallows. Nothing new under the sun. They give us some entertainment, television series, consumption, compulsive sex; they distribute some flour - citizenship income, the last pennies of the welfare state - and, of course, punish the reprobate. Every time has its enemy. Now it is the turn of the unvaccinated, or simply of those who disagree with the official narrative, on the epidemic, on the new “rights” - coincidentally almost all of them related to the sexual and instinctual sphere. Always, the power designates a scapegoat, whose punishment arouses the applause of the crowd, gathered around the power. And then it's not that people love to be branded, but if we take away critical thinking what is left? The official version, believed by compulsion to repeat, the “comfort”, the ease of being in the flock. Seneca, the philosopher who was Nero's advisor, wrote “easy transitur ad plures”, it is easy to pass with the majority, reassuring, comfortable. Exempt from thinking and judging, exactly what power wants. Let us think of the laws that prohibit “discriminating”, that is, judging, choosing what we like and what we don't like. The barcode makes us goods, the next chip degrades us to remotely controlled livestock specimens. But how can we make it clear, if in addition to closing the spaces of opposition, they have restricted thinking and locked up the mind, as Allan Bloom understood, observing the cultural closure induced in American universities?

7) Critical Race Theory, neo-feminism, gender, extremist environmentalism that winks at explicit cannibalism. Is there a hidden player who benefits from this situation?

A) I think we should reread Marx more often. He was wrong in imagining communism as a science and as a liberation, but his ability to analyze capitalist society remains unsurpassed. The dominant ideas are always the ideas of the ruling class. All the bad things you mention, united for twenty years in the theory of intersectionality, were born in American universities, which are private institutions. Whoever takes the chair does not do it without the consent of the one who pays the players and therefore decides the music. Gender, homosexualism, culture of cancellation, resentful feminism, anti-male, racialization, “reproductive health”, free drug or almost, euthanasia, Gaea theory and climate terrorism would not have left the university classrooms if someone, from above, had not promoted them to the official agenda of the West. The oligarchy of power - financial, technological, industrial and therefore cultural - wants this because her project involves a small population, homologated peoples, no social rights, one-size-fits-all, equivalent, liquid, fungible man. No conspiracy: it's all out in the open. The Great Reset of the Davos party is very clear: you will have nothing and you will be happy. You will have nothing and you will be nothing. Klaus Schwab, Grand Chamberlain of the World Economic Forum, and George Soros, the sinister “philanthropist” billionaire, have declared that we will never return to the world of “before”. It wasn't much, indeed, but this is a thousand times worse: an upside-down world in which Shakespeare comes to mind: the witches of Macbeth (ugly is the beautiful, and beautiful is the ugly) and the time when “the mad lead the blind” (King Lear).

8) Is ours an inevitable decline or can something be done to return to the old values? In other words: can we still rely on a Tradition to reverse the process?

A) From an exclusively human point of view, the fate of the West - land of sunset - is sealed. I'm not sure it's bad, though. If we have overturned principles and values, if we live in the will of impotence, if we refuse to survive as a civilization, even biologically, if even death (the sanitized and legal “good death”) appears to us a solution to old age, disease, discomfort, loneliness, is a sign that we are already finished. Therapeutic persistence is useless, the point of no return has probably come. In every end, however, there is a beginning. Those who replace us will have the will to power, love for life and will inevitably have to deal with the immense legacy we leave behind. We have refused it, others will consider it precious and perhaps will thank the few who have kept the torch alight. I quote a passage by Antoine Saint Exupéry, the author of the “Little Prince”, which I always have in my heart. It is taken from “War Pilot” and is the bewildered but indomitable gaze of those who observe the destruction of the bombings from above: “not all is lost if among the scattered stones of a construction site or in the midst of the rubble there is a man, even one alone, who knows how to think of a cathedral”. Many of us still think of a cathedral, missing but not alone.