Love for distance and order, the ability to subordinate one's individualistic and passionate element to principles, the ability to take action and wo… - Julius Evola

We have to face the consequences of the fact that the family has long since ceased to have any higher meaning, or been cemented by living forces that go beyond the merely individual. The organic and, to a certain degree, "heroic" character that its unity presented in the past has been lost in the modern world, just as the institution's residual veneer of "sacrality" bestowed by religious marriage has disappeared, or nearly so. In reality, in the great majority of cases the modern family is presented as a petit bourgeois institution determined almost exclusively by conformist, utilitarian, primitive, or at best sentimental factors. Above all, its essential fulcrum has disappeared, which was constituted by the primarily spiritual authority of its head, the father: that is shown by the etymological meaning of the word pater as "lord," or "sovereign." […] How could the family continue to have a firm, binding center, if its natural head, the father, is so often estranged from it today—even physically, when the practical mechanism of material life takes him away from it? What authority can the father have, especially in the so-called upper classes, if he is reduced to a money-making machine, a busy professional, and the like?

It is a cliché that the modern scientific vision has desacralized the world, and the world desacralized by scientific knowledge has become one of the existential elements that make up modern man, all the more so to the degree that he is "civilized." Ever since he has been subject to compulsory education, his mind has been stuffed with "positive" scientific notions; he cannot avoid seeing in a soulless light everything that surrounds him, and therefore acts destructively. What, for example, could the symbol of the sunset of a dynasty, like the Japanese, mean to him when he knows scientifically what the sun is: merely a star, at which one can even fire missiles.

For a long time there have been no true sovereigns, monarchs by divine right capable of wielding sword and scepter, and symbols of a higher human ideal. More than a century ago, Juan Donoso Cortés stated that no kings existed capable of proclaiming themselves as such except "by the will of the nation," adding that, even if any had existed, they would not have been recognized. The few monarchies still surviving are notoriously impotent and empty, while the traditional nobility has lost its essential character as a political class and any existential prestige and rank along with it. Its current representatives may still interest our contemporaries when put on the same plane as film actors and actresses, sport heroes and opera stars, and when through some private, sentimental, or scandalous chance, they serve as fodder for magazine articles.