The preceding days have mapped the principal features of the modern world as Evola understood it. The map is not exhaustive, yet it is sufficient. Progress as myth, the predominance of quantity, the dissolution of forms, the economic center, the democratic leveling, the loss of the sacred, the technological environment, the decline of virility, the air of nihilism, the rootless condition, the cult of novelty, the materialist metaphysics, the end of true authority, and the reduction of man to sensation: these are the coordinates of the terrain.
Clarity about the terrain is the necessary foundation for any further work. Without it the young man remains subject to the successive explanations and remedies offered by the age itself. With it he can begin to distinguish between what belongs to the normal order of a higher civilization and what belongs only to the terminal phase of a cycle.
The diagnosis is not an invitation to bitterness or to permanent complaint. It is the clearing of the ground so that a different orientation becomes possible. The next section of this reader will turn from the description of the modern world to the principles of the Traditional order that once stood against it and that still provide the only coherent standard by which the present can be measured.
You have been given the map. The demand now is to hold it without theatrical rebellion and without quiet surrender. The man who can do that has already begun to occupy a different position on the terrain. From that position the later teachings on how to live become intelligible.