Is Democracy Our New God?
Jun 29, 2022 · 2 mins read
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Introduction. Julius Evola was a 20th century Italian writer and an admirer of Vilfredo Pareto, an insightful sociologist. In his essay on Pareto, Evola lists the New Gods that have come up since religion lost credibility, the many problems of democracy, and much more👇
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Evola praises Pareto “for his anti-conformism, for his courageous love of the truth & for his intolerance toward the ideologies, the myths & the mendacities of a bourgeois & democratic world." Even a hundred years later, Pareto's ideas have "a character of surprising topicality."
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Evola writes: "Pareto has confirmed the constancy of...the existence of an elite, that is of a minority which dominates, in every society." The throne is passed around different sets of elites - the theory of "elite circulation" - but power is never uniformly distributed.
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Since religion is no longer around to give us our truths and values, we turn to "the secular religions of the bourgeois world." Pareto notes the modern myths and our new Gods: "Humanity, Democracy, Progress, Liberty, Popular Will, Equality."
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Take egalitarianism. Evola writes: "Objectively speaking, equality is absurd." Pareto writes that the project of equality is a ploy by people "who wish to withdraw themselves from an inequality which is against them, and to institute another favorable to them."
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Evola writes: "Every egalitarian ideology is only an instrument, hypocritically used for subversive ends." The secret goal is not to achieve equality, but reverse inequality.
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Our contemporary "leveling egalitarianism" has no equivalent in past societies like Sparta. Pareto: "Only the members of an exceedingly restricted aristocracy counted de facto as effectively equal or peers." They maintained their position by strictly observing "difficult duties."
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Vico, a 17th century philosopher, notes: "Equality is exalted and proclaimed first to overturn one’s superiors, then to draw alongside them, and finally to put them under oneself as inferiors, instituting new inequalities through a hierarchy which has been turned on its head."
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On universal adult franchise: “Who is this new god that bears the name ‘universal suffrage’? He is not better defined, nor any less mysterious & less foreign to the reality of things than so many other divinities: nor is his theology, as others, lacking in patent contradictions."
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The problem with running a country by the popular will is that the popular will is extremely malleable: “In truth, with or without universal suffrage, it is always an oligarchy which governs, which knows how to give to the ‘popular will’ the expression that it desires."
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