“One day the workers will live like the bourgeoisie but below them, poorer and more simply, there will be a superior caste. That is who will possess power.”
There is still, however, those who do not allow themselves to be possessed by the seductions of the economy and remain firm in the conviction that the primordial task of the state is not to guarantee the acquisition or the maintenance of a fridge, of a washing machine, or greater weekly hobbies. There are those who are convinced, because he believes that the goal of man is not the maintain himself, vegetate, and satisfy himself, that it is another thing: that it is even exactly this other thing that gives meaning and style to existence, and that, precisely from this other thing, it’s worth the effort of deproletarianizing himself and de-bourgeoisifying himself, by exhausting the framework of conditioning determined by the existence of physical needs in the parts and the least important regions of the human being.
It is to this truly free race of men – to the ascetics, in the classic sense of the term, of politics – that we propose a dialogue around the true state and the function of the free and just man in the state: with the intention not of presenting a vague and sentimental entity, but orienting towards the subtle intuition of the myth -and even the mystery – of the state.
We do not search for the state on the basis of empirical inquiry leading to the phenomena of the state existing today; we will attempt to seize the state not as a historical phenomenon – the State hic et nunc – from a “phenomenological” point of view, but we want to understand it in the absolute: as a value, that is to say, as reality that holds true pro aeternitate. A reality that, considering in itself, has no need of manifestation, historical support (the existing state), to be valuable. In other terms, we want to seize the essence of the idea of the state that illuminates, judging if these phenomena (the historical states) are better or worse applications in relation to this canon.
The indications that follow do not derive from our personal ideology (by admitting that we have one), they convince us that we have the rigorous truth according to which “ an idea cannot be new, because the truth is not a product of the human spirit, but it exists independently of us and all that we have ever known.”
Taking what we have said higher, our myth of the state is not held to be a utopia, if by utopia we mean, in effect, that which cannot be realized or exist, the fruit of overly cerebral and intellectual conception.
The myth of the state is the myth of a political order that, without lower itself to any particular time and space, “is” eternal, and eternally proposed as true.*
The principles of the true state, by recovering the domain of “should be”, assume an eminently normative character and, as such, are not verified by recognition or agreement, by the decided refusal of those who live in the historical world. They issue from a metapolitical and metahistorical level consequently autonomous in relation to the forms of empirical political existence: it is on the contrary these forms which, in order not become abstractions, are “forms of something “real,” and should exist by function of these principles.
The meaning of the true state depends on the animating tension that it inspires in the individual microcosm, such that he represents a real center of power and not an inert superstructure. The true state does not propose as its authentic goal economic wealth and well being for all its citizens or a lone social group, but what the ancient Greeks lucidly defined in terms of “felicity” – eudaimonia – of harmony of the different components of the body of the state. “Felicity” in the sense of accomplishment, integration, and participation with the superhuman and divine elements of reality.
In the true state there must be the guarantee of organic unity of the social body, unity that must not be understood as intrusion of the state into the pretend domain of the private interests of the citizen, but as the constitution of a climate of ideal social tension, where each is abiding at his post, following his own inclinations with coherence, fidelity, and liberty. Thus it is not admissible, in this state, that someone commits prevarications and abuses, which amounts to injuring others: on the contrary, it must maintain a will lucid and conscious of following an existence conforming to its proper nature.
Evidently, when we attribute to the state ( or better, when we recognize in the state) the function of fostering this climate that, alone, makes possible a regime of ordered life, we do not want to consider the state as a means of activity generating “virtue” – in the modern and moralistic meaning of the term-as a pure element “functioning” in the soul of man. The true state, on the contrary, must be understood as a reality in contact with all that we propose, in a conditioned fashion, as individual morality, objective, settling into these terms a free ethic of these characters of “virtue” that we attribute today to morality.
The true state is not the fruit of an ideology or an individual political conception, but the responsible realization in terms of the political regime of an impersonal principle, of a norm that we could define “a priori,” leading – as we exactly had said – to this “natural right of heroic races,” where the signification of nature does not end with the functional, physical element, but acquires value by the “normative” word, symbol of all “normal” and integrated conditions of existence. A canon that represents the “internal dressing”, the absolute formula of a lifestyle accomplished with fidelity to that what it really is.
The true state do not constitute a simple structure of positive rights, but is in essence and in function superior: the spirit of the state, the center of the state is represented by a power that transcends the plan that is immediately earthly and simply human.
The true state holds as an organizing principle of a reconquest that man must do: the reconquest of the higher-world, the reestablishment of his heroic dimension. Consequently, the true state represents the necessary element of mediation that provokes the reintegration of the citizen into divine reality: it is only through its intermediary that the citizen realizes exceeding his own individual existence, by opening a reality that, such as it is autonomous, transcends it.
We do not say that this image of the political regime, developed in a final and coherent fashion, can receive the accusation of usurping “religious” qualities and dimensions, by obligating man – who feels this tension towards the divine – to deviate from his own direction – that would be, according to the accusation, the religious direction – to orient him towards the secular direction, indicated by the state (that state, consequently, would constitute the substitute of functions, that legitimately, would not devolve to it.)
The response to the accusation emerges in the clear fashion of the same terms in which it is formulated, deformed: it comes from making a quasi-ontological rupture – the we should refuse in a decided way – between the said secular domain of the state and the abstract “spiritual” plan, made autonomous in relation to the first. A rupture by which the intrinsic divine values of the human condition, would become simple moral elements, shadowed in the equivocation of the “world of conscience,” while the human elements, unbound from these divine potentialities, would only become profane and secular.
No gap, on the contrary, should exist between the order of values and the plan of the true state (*), because if we make one a stranger to the other, we break an organically unitary reality: we arrive only at the decomposed results of internalizing, in the emotive and moralist style, in a pretend “human conscience,” in values, and we subtract from the public order these characteristics that can only qualify it and legitimize it.
In the true state we cannot objectively pose terms of the priority of the individual in relation to the state or consider, on the other hand, it on him, because the reality of the true state is not separated from the reality of the individual by no difference of structure (more than two realities, we should speak of two coefficients of a unique reality, the two aspects of the same phenomenon, unresolved in substantial continuity). Subsisting solely between them a functional difference of possibility, intensity, given that the state represents the center of “necessary” tension for the citizen to become “happy.”
On the other hand, in the true state there are no longer “individuals”, but men-members of the state; men animated by an ethic of super-personal life, each differentiated by the responsibility of various ranks, a distinct responsibility, a different duty, a degree of various liberty according to organic articulations. These men are engaged as the object of the work of the state and their perfection is the ends to which the order of the state is destined. Only that qualifies the existence of man in the state; only that, in an analogous fashion, constitutes the legitimization of the state that must cultivate, sustain, and support the dispositions of those who are bound to it.
Thus, only in the true state, men participate in the destiny of the state and acquire its power, that is a non human force. They feels its signification, that is supernatural; they nourish themselves in its reality, that is a superior reality. We repeat: it is the true state that determines the direction to follow and “ordains” the moments across which man attains his “authentic” goal, that consists of participation in the divine.
In addition, it is the true state that proposes to each man the recognition of his own irreducible function, of his proper place, of his proper nature, the insertion into the just relations of superiority and inferiority: in a word, the recognition of its proper freedom. And that is not negative liberty that manifests itself externally, liberty turned towards utility and “particularity,” that is to say the only liberty that we can conceive today and that, resolving in undifferentiated and egalitarian terms, develops according to the directions of rebellion. But it is a qualitative and differentiated freedom, typical of the person whose value is inherent. Freedom that does not derive, as we said, from abstract facts and simply being elementary man, but that is measured by the stature, by the dignity of each. That is capable of realizing its own possibilities and adhering to its own particular perfection on the interior of the political framework of the state. Ultimately, freedom that means internal discipline and respect of its own qualitatively hierarchical plan.
After these indications we would like to conclude, and in concluding, reaffirm the idea of the state, these processes that tend to penetrate the mystery of the state, cannot unfold according to simply logical values, but by the intermediary of lucid reference to metaphysical values, inherent in the essence of the idea of the state, to its core not belonging to the domain of things subjected to the bonds of becoming.
To reaffirm the reality of that which is sacred and divine and the sacrality of that which is the real political structure should constitute the support of the true state: because if a state, if a political regime is not legitimized by the fact of possessing a spiritual force, by proposing spiritual ends, it represents nothing organic and central: but will only be an inert, materialist, and social structure, resulting from its own rigidity to all organisms without vital forces.
The Disintegration of the System 