As I have tried to show in another study,[1] all religious or political leaders whose action is directed against decadence, against the false values inseparable from the childish overestimation of ‘man,’ fail in the long run even when they appear to succeed. This is so because decadence is the true direction of Time against which no one should expect, during that cycle, to remain victorious forever. Despite this, some manage to establish a civilisation that is linked, in its basic principles, to some particular form of Tradition. They do this at the cost of certain necessary compromises on the exoteric level which ensure the permanent enthusiasm of the crowd to them, the consequence of spectacular success. Legislation based on their teaching still governs States, if not continents, centuries after their death. And although their work is crumbling and disintegrating all the more rapidly they have left something visible, something pitifully sclerotic—sometimes even degenerate—but at least historically significant. But there are others whose creation against the guiding trends of their time ends with them. This happens when inspired leaders refuse those compromises which are the indispensable conditions of success in this world. It also happens whenever such leaders live and act in a doomed age, when no rectification of any scope is possible any longer, no matter how worthy and skilful the initiator may be.
Only Kalki, the last of the avatars of Vishnu, can be successful in a battle against the tide of Time. And this success will then be total, consisting of nothing less than that absolute transvaluation of values that characterises the end of one world and the birth of an unknown and unthinkable world. Accompanied by unprecedented destruction, it will signify the end of the present cycle: the end of the Dark Age, from which nothing good could come; the end of this cursed humanity and the appearance of conditions of life and means of expression similar to those of every Golden Age.
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[1] The Lightning and the Sun, published in 1958.