“Hegel rightly wrote that the epochs of material well-being are blank pages in the history book, and Toynbee has shown that the challenge to mankind of environmentally and spiritually harsh and problematic conditions is often the incentive that awakens the creative energies of civilization. In some cases, it is not paradoxical to say that the man of good will should try to make life difficult for his neighbor! It is a commonplace that all the higher virtues attenuate and atrophy under easy conditions, when man is not forced to prove himself in some way; and in the final analysis it does not matter in such situations if a good number fall away and are lost through natural selection. Andre Breton was right when he wrote that “we must prevent the artificial precariousness of social conditions from concealing the real precariousness of the human condition.”

But to avoid straying too far from my argument, the point is that the most acute forms of the modern existential crisis are appearing today at the margin of a civilization of prosperity, as witness the currents in the new generation that have been described. One sees there rebellion, disgust, and anger manifesting not in a wretched and oppressed subproletariat but often in young people who lack nothing, even in millionaires’ children. And among other things it is a significant fact, statistically proven, that suicide is much rarer in poor countries than in rich ones, showing that the problematic life is felt more in the latter than in the former. Blank despair can occur right up to the finishing-post of socio-economic messianism…

There exists, therefore, no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between the meaning of life and conditions of economic well-being. There is a famous example, not recent but from the traditional world, of the Buddha Shakyamuni. He who on a metaphysical plane radically denounced the emptiness of existence and the deceptions of the “god of life,” pointing out the way of spiritual awakening, was not a victim of oppression and hunger, not a representative of social strata like the plebians of the Roman empire, to whom the revolutionary sermons of Christianity were first addressed; no, he was of the race of princes, in all the splendor of his power and all the fullness of his youth. The true significance of the socioeconomic myth, in any of its forms, is as a means of internal anesthetization or prophylaxis, aimed at evading the problem of an existence robbed of any meaning and at consolidating in every way the fundamental insignificance of modern man’s life. We may therefore speak either of an opiate that is much more real than that which, according to the Marxists, was fed to a humanity as yet unillumined and unevolved, mystified by religious beliefs, or, from another point of view, of the organized method of an active nihilism. The prospects in a goodly part of today’s world are more or less those that Zarathustra attributed to the “last man”: “The time is near of the most despicable of men, who can no longer despise himself,” the last man “of the tenacious and pullulating race.” “We have invented happiness, says the last men with a wink,” having “abandoned the lands where life is hard.”

- Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger, 29-31

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5529489&forum_id=2#47669376)