True radicalism now lies outside of the neo-liberal democratic paradigm.
The only real radicalism is that which challenges the norms, ethics, values, victors’ histories and mythologies of Western society. It certainly lies beyond the now meaningless left-right polarities of today’s insipid political debates.
The thinkers, writers, philosophers and politicians discussed in these web pages all throw down a challenge to the accepted norms, ethics and conventions of Western society; radicals such as Julius Elova (pictured left), who summed it all up…
Since the modern view of life in its materialism has taken away from the single individual any possibility of bestowing on his destiny a transfiguring element and seeing in it a sign and a symbol, contemporary "slavery" should be reckoned as one of the gloomiest and most desperate kinds of all times. (Revolt Against the Modern World)
There is no opposition to this woeful situation. Real opposition has been surgically removed from education, religion, ethics, politics and economics in a rather sinister fashion. I came to this conclusion whilst writing my monograph, Karl Marx and the Realisation of Self, concluding that even the great Marx has been co-opted onto the side of those who would preserve the status quo. In the guise of the revolutionary options, political, cultural and academic Marxism have become perpetuators of the positivistic prison in which we must live out our lives. Opponents, as well as the proponents, have become the perpetuators.
Determinism rules the roost. It is ‘inevitable’ that globalised neo-liberal capitalism will spread across the globe. It is ‘inevitable’ that it will do so in the name of freedom and democracy – and who can oppose those except tyrants?
If an alternative to the ‘inevitable’ is to be found, it will lie beyond positivism, empiricism and materialism. The search for that alternative will demand a critical re-examination of the direction Western thought has taken, especially since the sixteenth century. The writers featured in these pages have each, in their own way, contributed to the search.
John Dunn.
Evola and other traditionalists
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