There are two books written by Julius Evola that I think are genuinely worth considering looking into, perhaps at least finding some ten-minute youtube summary about them and just listening to that. Those two books are "Revolt Against The Modern World" and "Ride The Tiger". In the first book he lays out his revisionist version of history and how he thinks the world came to be the way that it is today. In the second book he tries to provide a philosophy of life and way of living for people trying to avoid the traps of modernity.
One of the core principles he believes in which I also agree with is the idea that not all of us have the same spirit, even though we all possess relatively similar human bodies. I agree with this, being a person who genuinely believes in things like "otherkin" or "transspecies", because I personally have decided that this belief is useful to me in making it possible to differentiate between different types of energies that I work with in my life. I am not concerned with whether it is rational to believe such a thing, I choose to believe in it because believing in it solves a problem for me without creating another even worse problem.
If I FULLY agreed with Julius Evola, then I would go on to believe in the fascist concept that some spiritual entities are inherently superior, morally above, or "better" than other spiritual entities, for whatever reason. I do not agree with this, so where he sees the movement of history as a decline into modernity that signals the end of days or some other negative projection, I just see it as a neutral cycle of events that continues to unfold in a wave-like pattern throughout time, and we go through these cycles without ever really knowing where we are at in the grand scheme of it. We always think we know. Throughout history there have always been "doomers", and Evola is another example of one that just got a lot of press and media attention because his thoughts and feelings resonated with many people.
I can completely understand why he felt the way that he did. Whether you agree with all his feelings or not, I can easily picture myself following a similar ideological trajectory were I born into his same position during that time in Italy. In the proper context, it's possible to differentiate some of the wisdom from the nonsense that he wrote about, but it requires a constant awareness of the political context and psychology of Julius Evola himself, so you don't get swept up in all his propaganda.
I think the three pieces of advice that he gives in Ride the Tiger are actually exceptionally useful principles to live by. They actually transcend his own philosophy and go beyond even his own point of view, having very little to do with his own motives for upholding them. They are, in a sense, just really good principles in general that almost have nothing to do with anything he has to say really, though he manages to derive them somehow from his own ideas:
1. Do not try to prevent the end of a cycle.
2. Do not try to recreate past cycles.
3. Dissociate yourself from impulsive temptations.
I'm paraphrasing slightly, but those three rules are more-or-less the ground rules for Evola's philosophy of how to live in the world today. Obviously it's a lot more complicated than that, and I'm grossly reducing a very complex alt-right and very fascist ideology into three very neutral and "safe" rules to follow, which I think you kind of have to do if you want to extrapolate anything of practical value from Evola's writing. He is simply so hostile and even outright violent toward the modern age that you can tell there's a clear imbalance in him that strongly distorts the practicality of everything he says. However, if you can navigate that imbalance and do the work he should've done in his own life, and sort what's meaningful from what's not, you can see he had a lot of potential that unfortunately got twisted into bitterness and hubris.
encounter.
