The organic idea must be the beginning and sound foundation of the new State.
In the previous chapter we indicated how the concrete concept of the organism is opposed to the compound, which is the form of a assemblage of atomistically free elements, held together only by an impersonal, abstract bond, that is not located in any higher principle, nor based on a real and substantial difference of the elements themselves. And we added that the opposition between the imperial ideal and the liberal-democratic ideal is precisely like the one which exists between organisation and composition.
Our imperialism requires universality and unity; but not something abstract, characteristic of an impersonal law or of an unreal "collective will" and an internationalist and pacifist collapse, even if that which is concretised in the reality of a superior individual and in which the sense of the transcendent is equivalent to the principle of differentiation and articulation.
Our imperialism definitely transcends nationalism: but, while democratic supranationalism is a weakening and subordination of national assertion, promiscuously associated with many other national assertions, the imperial and Roman supranationality is that of a national assertion which, by means of a group of rulers, is reasserted beyond itself in a synthesis superior both to it and to the other nations, which it takes back under itself.
Strange as it may seem, at the basis of our imperialism, there are values which appear likewise as assumptions for the liberal forms of democracy. The values of freedom and independence stand in effect at the centre of the best Aryan traditions. A nobleman, according to the primordial Germanic tradition and later in the order of the same medieval civilisations, was equivalent to a free man. The first Roman constitution is based on the idea of the patres, priests, leaders, and supreme judges of their peoples, who are free as so many worlds within one world. Frederick II will say: "I am king insofar as I am free."—Identical in word, radical opposition in spirit.
The difference lies in the fact that, in liberalism, these values are professed by a race of slaves, which does not dare to think them and to will them all the way, through and in individuals, but instead shifts them, in an illegitimate, egalitarian way, to "society" and "humanity", where they lose their primeval meaning and are transformed into errors.
To hear it said—according to the first of its "immortal principles"—this race would have established the age of freedom. In reality, there is nothing of it. They do not know what freedom means. If they did, they would also know that to want freedom, is totally the same as wanting the Empire.
Let us observe more precisely. Freedom does not tolerate compromises: either it is affirmed, or it is not. But if it is claimed, it is necessary to claim it all the way, without fear—that is, it is necessary to claim it as unconditioned freedom.
The man who stated there is only one man who can call himself free, understood this perfectly well. Several free beings can only limit and contravene each other—unless one supposes that, in the depths of each of them, there is a law that regulates their actions according to a sort of pre-established harmony.
Now, since a law does not cease to be a law merely because it is an interior law, and moreover, since this law is, by hypothesis, something which will transcend the conscious power of each individual, even in this case there is only a semblance of true freedom.
We are therefore faced with this alternative: either to fail in the demand, altering its value, that is, rejecting freedom by allowing the many, individual, atomistic freedoms to remain tamed, mechanised, in mutual self-limitation (liberal democratism); or to hold uncompromisingly firm, and create the ideal of a being who—through an inner superiority ceasing to represent one force among many others in that dynamic system which is social reality—realises himself in that which, as determiner of the law of this very reality, is free from the law; who, therefore, will be law and authority only for the others. This means that as much reality as freedom has, so has the Empire.
This Empire must be conceived using the analogy of a body which has become one under the dominating synthesis of a soul. The unity to which such a body converges—unlike one without a soul—is a higher principle, which has its beginning and end within itself; which does not live for the needs of the body, but instead, the body serving as its tool; and which is not produced by the body, but vice versa, in the sense that the soul is the ultimate aim, the deep organising principle of the body itself, without which the latter would disintegrate (Aristotle).
Likewise, we will say that the Leader, as bearer of the value of freedom, will not be the mere representative of the masses (the democratic thesis), the impersonal symbol of a mythical self-organisation, of which these masses are already capable, but just the opposite: the masses would receive order and form only thanks to this superior force, qualitatively distinct from the others that they laboriously tend to express. And this force, far from living for them, would subordinate the interests of the masses to those wider horizons which it alone can determine; without recognizing the right of anyone to give sanction to its law, which is not law because it is just, but which is just because it is law, and his law (in striking contrast to the democratic principles of popular sanction and of dedication of the governors to abstract "principles" or to what is supposed to be the common interest). Otherwise the top leader would not be a free being, but merely the foremost of the servants, and not a spirit, but the voice of the body.
Unfortunately, today, no one knows any more what freedom is, no one dares to think it in all its consequences. Unfortunately, today, almost no one knows how to command, or how to obey. The risk of absolute responsibility and of absolute commitment, have both totally disappeared, in the face of the mediocrity of the mechanised collectivity.
And people dare to sing the praises of an age of freedom and liberalism, boasting of the abolition of slavery, without understanding that, instead, freedom can only exist when there are masters opposed to slaves, when there are proud leaders and masses that boldly and generously put their lives and their destinies into their hands; without understanding that only a race of slaves could have demanded the abolition of slavery, a race of slaves which remained such even when the chains had been smashed and the hierarchies broken down—insofar as their need for servitude and dependence created new and much more terrible tyrants: on one hand, the Semitic judge-God of providence and grace, and on the other, gold and "public opinion"—tools of the Jewish conspiracy; the fetish of the socialised, impersonal law, and the moralistic intolerance of the Protestant nations; the omnipotent man of the masses of Bolshevism.