They are in a hurry — not, as the heroic “élite,” out of generous impatience; not out of any longing to see the “Age of Truth” re-established before its time, but out of feverish lust; out of the will to snatch from the world, for themselves, all the material advantages and all the satisfactions of vanity they possibly can, before it is too late. And as time goes on, their hurry amounts to frenzy. The one obstacle that stands in their way and still defies them — that will always defy them, till the end — is precisely that proud élite that disaster cannot discourage, that torture cannot break, that money cannot buy. Whether consciously or unconsciously, whether they be, themselves, thoroughly wicked, or just blind, through congenital stupidity, the workers of disintegration wage war upon the men of gold and steel, with unabated, hellish fury. But theirs is not the frank, unashamed violence of the inspired idealists striving to bring forth, speedily, a lofty sociopolitical order too good for the unworthy world of their times. It is a sneaking, creeping, cowardly sort of violence, all the more effective that it is, outwardly, more emphatically denied, both by the scoundrels who apply it, or condone it, and by the well-meaning fools who actually believe that it does not exist. It is prompted by such feelings as one cannot possibly exhibit, even in a degenerate world, without running the risk of defeating one’s own purpose: by bare hatred, rooted in envy — the hatred of worthless weaklings for the strong, for no other reason that they are strong; the hatred of ugly souls (incarnated, more often than not, in no less ugly bodies) for the naturally beautiful ones; for the noble, the magnanimous, the selfless, the real aristocracy of the world; the hatred of the unhappy, and, even more so, of the bored, — of those who have only their pockets to live for, and nothing at all to die for, — for those who live, and are ready to die, for eternal values. Such is, more and more, the...