It is a common refrain amongst the modern nationalist movements that organised sports have been reduced to primarily a deracinating force—to ensure the traumatised masses consume entertainment they do not need. Football has supplanted real identity with a false one of masturbatory feelings of accomplishment. The modern man cheers for the foreign team of millionaires when they win, & weeps when they lose—even against his countrymen—simply because they wear the colours of his city. It is not unusual for a commercialised football team to speak many different languages, and less unusual still for each player to have different roots. In this article I will cement this, & emphasise also the cult of self-love which has arisen.
In the preamble to the first of his essays within Meditations on the Peaks, Julius Evola wrote:
[T]he new generations have turned athletic competition into a religion and appear to be unable to conceive anything beyond the excitement of training sessions, competitions, and physical achievements; they have truly turned accomplishment in sports into an end in itself and even into an obsession rather than as means to a higher end.
Of course, Evola was writing some generations ago, this has even further degenerated into two different forms. The first is the bloated, useless, settee-bound man who does not consider sportsmanship important for himself because he pays a subscription fee to a sports television channel, & watches stronger men do it for him. He does not consider assisting his community because the stand-out members of his team, who represent his city the world over, do not resemble his people. This passive man does not think twice about this fact, for he has been freed from the burdens of nationhood and belonging.
This man is the natural endpoint of the modern male; all his expression and spirit has been funneled into impotent and repetitive rituals which serve only foreign interests and international finance. His burgeoning urge to favour his countrymen, his fellow townsfolk even, over others is scooped up and sold back to him for £49 with corporate logos plastered across it, & in such a degenerate and progressive form so as to next year be obsolete, when a version with a slightly different red is produced.
That urge for belonging is still there inside us, but it is being subverted into meaninglessness, & in doing so begins to defeat itself. Coinciding with the ripples caused by the various N.F.L. scandals in America, Premier League viewership figures dropped so much as 40% over the last few years. In this modern world where noticing similarities is vulgar and expressing pride is violence, it likely will not recover. We must not let that human urge for unity and struggle go with it.
The second version of modern decadence which has presented itself, & which is prevalent even in our Movement, is the man who loves himself too much. This man understands the importance of physical greatness, and perhaps he even understands—on a superficial level—the human necessity of rootedness. But these two qualities are made mockeries of by his atomisation, & his lack of ambition. Atomisation forces this man to spend long lonely hours between four cold walls at the gym, where the only benefit of bodily prowess is a circular and false chemical reaction with diminishing returns. Lack of ambition exacerbates this, shutting away his mind from ever believing sport could be not only a means to an end, but a means to a higher end.
Evola was famously a keen mountaineer. As above, he believed that a strong body was necessary as far as the material is connected with the metaphysical, & saw analogues in acts of valour with spiritual growth. But despite what you have been told by self-improvement blogs, it is not enough to only build your body amongst the machines and dead steel of the gym, surrounded by the limping embodiment of multicultural decadence. The modern formation of man as body-conscious and self-moulding-only-to-self-mould is a autoerotic trap which denies man his usefulness in the world, & denies him more seriously his ability to overcome the world, & to conquer.
In short, it is better to adjust your lifestyle to build your body than to not, but it is better still to build your body for your lifestyle. This lifestyle must include activity, & this activity—though it can be supplemented in the gym—must take place in the world, & amongst brothers.
We encourage everyone to find two or three men in your circle of friends, or nearby amongst the community, & hike, challenge your body, engage in football or cricket, but know that it is not the activity or sport which fills your heart and mind with purpose in these moments; it is brotherhood and spirituality. I will leave you with a further call to action from Evola, from the same essay:
In the struggle against mountain heights, action is finally free from all machines, and from everything that detracts from man’s direct and absolute relationship with things. Up close to the sky and to crevasses—among the still and silent greatness of the peaks; in the impetuous raging winds and snowstorms; among the dazzling brightness of glaciers; or among the fierce, hopeless verticality of rock faces—it is possible to reawaken (through what may at first appear to be the mere employment of the body) the symbol of overcoming, a truly spiritual and virile light, and make contact with primordial forces locked within the body’s limbs. In this way the climber’s struggle will be more than physical and the successful climb may come to represent the achievement of something that is no longer merely human.
Noble Youth 