To recapitulate what we said at the beginning of this chapter: behind the “people” about which democrats speak, we find the “many” which are understood in an egalitarian way (and here lies the difference), insofar as recognition of their leaders is claimed to be made not by quality, but by quantity (the greater number, the majority of the electoral system). But quantity can be a criterion only on the presupposition of the equality of all individuals, which makes the value of each of their votes equal.
Now the “immortal principle” of equality may be the most questionable. The inequality of men is something too obvious to need to waste words on it: it suffices only to open one's eyes. But our opponents, who will grant this, will make it a matter of principle, and will say: men may very well be unequal, but they are so de facto, not de jure; they are unequal, but they should not be. Inequality is unjust, and not to allow for it, but instead to seek to go beyond it, is precisely the merit and the superiority of the democratic ideal.
Nevertheless, these are only words: the fact remains that the concept of the “many” is logically contradictory with the concept of the “equal many”.
In the first place, there is the Leibnizian principle of the identity of indiscernibles, which is expressed as follows: a being which was absolutely identical to another would be one and the same thing as it. Kant sought to refute this by reference to space in which there can be equal yet distinct things: but, even prescinding from the inconsistency of transferring to the spiritual ground an observation proper only to the physical world, the modern notion of space rejects the objection, since, for it, any point entails the ascription of a different value to Minkowski's four-dimensional continuum function. In the concept of “many”, their fundamental diversity is therefore implicit: an equal “many”, absolutely equal, would not be many, but one. To expect the equality of the many is a contradiction in terms.
In the second place, there is the principle of sufficient reason, which is expressed as follows: for everything there must be some reason for it to be one thing and not something else. Now a being absolutely equal to another would lack “sufficient reason”: it would be a duplication completely lacking any meaning.
For both these reasons, then, the idea that the “many” not only are unequal, but must be so, and that inequality is true de facto only because it is true de jure, that it is real only because it is necessary, turns out to be rationally founded.
But to posit inequality means transcending quantity, it means passing into quality; and so, the possibility, and the necessity, of hierarchy is justified; it is in this way that the criterion of the “majority” is proved absurd, and that every law and every morality, which starts from egalitarian presuppositions, is unnatural and violent.
We repeat that it is the superior which must justify the inferior, and not vice versa. Just as the nature of error is not to know itself as error, whereas the nature of truth is to posit itself as consciousness of truth, while knowing at the same time error as error—so the nature of what is superior is to posit itself directly as superior, as opposed to the inferior, which is made inferior exactly by this. Superiority must not be submitted to any sanction or recognition, but it must be based only on the direct awareness of superiority of those who are superior and prove themselves as superiors by every test.
For this reason, the so-called criterion of “utility” cannot offer any support. In fact we would have to begin by saying what is useful, in relation to what, and to whom. For example, a margin for violence exists even in the democratic regime—violence proper to the constituted authority, which requires a tax authority, civil and criminal laws, etc. This violence is not called such because it is thought to contribute to the greatest good of the greatest number. But who defines and justifies it as useful, and thus determines the famous boundaries between “legality” and “illegality”? We have already shown that, in a rational order of things, it cannot be the mass, because of the instability and inferiority of its discriminatory power. Therefore, if there is no intention to shift the centre to quality, the whole thing will turn into the worst of tyrannies: that exercised by the numerous upon the qualitatively superior few, who are overwhelmed inexorably by the system, established by law, of the determinisms of lower life, and of organised “society”, just as is happening in the modern West.
However, the “useful”, in the context of the mass, is itself something far less absolute than many would like to believe. Because of the irrational character of the psychology of the masses, that which the majority does has very seldom been the “useful” pure and simple, and even less often has it been the autonomous will of the many; instead, infinitely more often, it has been the power, the attractive force of particular persons, whose power the greater number of followers has been a only a consequence and an echo. Powerful individuals knew how to drag the crowds where they have wanted, ignoring all the mediocre, bourgeois, precisely calculated standards of “utility”, of suitability, of general well-being. History shows this to us everywhere: fired by enthusiasm for a man, a symbol, or an idea, millions of beings have overwhelmed the barriers of prudent normality, and sacrificed, immolated, or destroyed themselves.
Democratism knows this, and for this reason, slowly, subtly, winding throughout the whole of Europe, it seeks to extinguish the race of the leaders, the guiding spirits, the enchanters, and to create a levelling effect which reduces everything to the autonomy characteristic of the parts of an economic mechanism left to itself. And the game is succeeding dreadfully of late. Bolshevised Russia and democratic and mechanised America are opposed as two symbols, as two poles of the same danger.
But this will to degeneration, this darkness, on which Western “civilisation” is being shipwrecked, finds us against it. We, once again following Nietzsche, raise the alarm and issue the call. May our nations oppose a “from here on do not pass!” to the Bolshevik-American tide. But not with words, threats, or empty proclamations, but silently, isolating themselves and creating an aristocracy, an elite that firmly maintains, in the living reality of superior individuals, the values of our tradition.
After this, all the rest will follow as a natural consequence.