(104) Gwyn

In a sense, I am against everything that the West is—and I completely agree with Islamic “fundamentalists” and Russians like Dugin when they say that the West is Satanic, for as it stands it is so. Indeed, even conservatives, who think they defend decent values, are utterly misled. To illustrate what I mean I return to a comment that I often reference made by Picasso to Jünger in Paris during the war: Picasso said that his paintings “worked” even if nobody ever saw them—and this indicated that Picasso understood “true action” as opposed to the false action that currently dominates the West, he understood what the East’s Taoists call “actionless action”.

Typical Western conservatives—men like Scruton or Hitchens—would denounce Picasso as a man who did “funny drawings” and “couldn’t draw”, as a degeneration. In actuality, Picasso was a more traditional man than Hitchens or Scruton; he thought in a way that is genuinely religious—whereas for most Western conservatives “action” and “practicality” mean that you can pick up a phone and put a dozen F-35 fighters in the sky. Yet that is not real action at all—it is totally profane, and not even what a man like Evola meant by “warriorship”.

People cannot credit, for example, that this website changes the world even when nobody reads it—or that a man could sit in a room and meditate and change the world; yet both are so—just as I had a friend from a Pakistani Communist family, educated at Oxford, whose mother would burn a fragment from the Koran to ward off the jinn. The conservatives who critique Picasso are effectively atheists; they would laugh if you said a picture in a drawer no one ever saw could change the world (“Postmodern nonsense”). Yet this is truth—it is real action. Picasso, when he saw the 30,000-year-old cave paintings at Chauvet, said: “We have invented nothing!”; and that was because he understood true action when he saw it.