From Moldbug to Donovan and back

I like impossible challenges, such as attempting to reconcile seemingly unreconcilable ideas and attitudes. I think Mencius Moldbug and Jack Donovan are the two polar opposites of Reaction. Donovan is something sort of a high-T philosopher of violence-glorifying neo-barbarism, while Moldbug’s political philosophy is largely about the idea that absolute kings did a better job at protecting low-T programmers-intellectuals from high-T barbarians than democratic liberalism does. Can we find ANYTHING in common in them – can we come up with any sort of a theory or analytical method that borrows from both?

The king and the subjects: a thought experiment

Imagine you are the king of a people, 500, 1000, or 2000 years ago.  In what circumstances would you want your subjects to be high-T masculine men, and in what circumstances would you rather want to emasculate them?

If you are on an offensive conquest spree like Alexander, or if you are on the defense and need to protect your country from external invasion, you want high-T warriors. This goes without saying.

The problem with high-T subjects is that they don’t necessarily like to be dominated by a king – they’d rather get a dominant position for themselves. In other words, you will have problems with disloyalty. There will always be muscular, wide-jawed hotshots gunning for your position.

Thankfully, the very fact of external threats, be that wars of conquests you started, or invasions started by your enemies, has the effect of making your subjects loyal. This is Group Dynamics 101, verified both by history and cognitive science: group cohesion, including loyalty to current leadership is made stronger by external threats. Rallying the population by making them paranoid about external threats (or internal ones “Otherised”) is the most basic trick in any populist politicians playbook.

In what circumstances would you want the opposite? When would you want your subjects be effeminate and low-T? Herodotus seems to have had a perfect answer:

“Herodotus recounted that, when the Persian king Cyrus the Great asked Croesus, a defeated king who was now his counsellor, what he should do in view of a revolt of the Lydians, Croesus advised him to punish the leader, “but let the Lydians be pardoned; and lay on them this command, that they may not revolt or be dangerous to you; then, I say, and forbid them to possess weapons of war, and command them to wear tunics under their cloaks and buskins on their feet, and to teach their sons lyre-playing and song and dance and huckstering. Then, O King, you will soon see them turned to women instead of men; and thus you need not fear lest they revolt.”[39]

Emasculating men is useful if you expect them to be disloyal. Why would they be disloyal? Because there is no external threat to rally their support behind you, because they are a conquered, subjugated population, or because they are slaves (castrating most male slaves was a common practice in multiple cultures and the probable reason was preventing rebelliousness).

We seem to have a model. If you are a king and have an enemy to fight, you want high-T soldiers. If you don’t have an enemy to fight, they might turn their fighting energies inwards, they may try to topple you and usurp your throne or revolt and become independent, so you better suppress their masculinity.

Therefore, if Jack Donovan is stating there is something, someone emasculating modern men, one possible explanation is that the current rulers fear revolt, or fear usurpation, largely due to the lack of WW2-type large scale external threats.

And this is actually something a Moldbug type political analysis could be relevant to. Who are the modern rulers? Why do they fear revolt or usurpation? Why cannot they just engineer a sufficiently scary external threat? Of course, it would only be a suitable threat if it would be equally threatening to elites (so that they sound convincing in condemning it) and to the plebs (so that they actually rally behind the elites and don’t just go meh) ?

And the million dollar question is: why is it so that whatever threats, real or imaginary, scare modern elites, they don’t scare the plebs, and what scares the plebs, does not scare the elites? Do they have no existential interests in common?

Expanding the model

But let’s go back to our old kingly model a bit, maybe there are some more insights to glean.

The movie 300, while obviously a shallow fantasy and not historical, and thus should not be seen as a source of serious historical arguments, still did a good job in one thing: spectacularly stereotyping two entirely different kinds of kingship or power in general: Leonidas and Xerxes.

Hollywood Leonidas stereotypes the model of a ruler as a field general, the kind of gang-boss Jack Donovan could presumably rally behind: while clearly dominant and not a “democratic” or egalitarian-in-the-modern-sense  type of leadership, this type of kingship is relatively egalitarian: the field general camps, sleep, eats, drinks, fights together with his men, he is a first amongst equals. If he  demands sacrifice from his men, he  dies with them too, does not just write them off and goes merrily home to raise another army. The spirit of camaraderie and group cohesion generates a significant amount of equality: the first-amongst-equals leader, the field general type of king is a leader, a boss from the in-group, not floating above the group.

There is another thing to consider here: a first-among-equals king, an in-group king is bound by the same laws and customs as everybody else. This type of king has his job to uphold laws and customs, not to make them. Indeed, many historical kings had to swear to uphold laws and  customs at the coronation. His will is NOT law – he just gets to decide how to apply the law in a given situation. Historically, this was what people meant when they said a king is not a tyrant. A tyrant’s will is law, a proper king’s will is not law, just a decision on how to apply the law. That is why in the movie Leonidas, not being a tyrant, could not override the Ephors – a tyrant could just have put them to the sword or ignored them. But the law said he must accept their decision, and he was not a tyrant, not above the law. The law was seen either as ancient custom, historical legacy, or a natural law, or the gods will, or some kind of a similar unchangeable thing that is more discovered than made, and it is not simply something the powerful can change as they will.   This is broadly what Anglo-Saxon or Aristotelean ideas of non-tyrannical kingship meant. And this is the type of king a Jack Donovan type masculine society accepts.

Hollywood Xerxes stereotypes a different kind of kingship: an absolute god-king. Not member of the in-group but floating high above the group, not a first amongst equals but completely different in kind and stature, not the best of the same category as the others, but an entirely different category of his own, someone beyond a mere mortal. And of course a tyrant – he is not bound by custom, law, tradition: his word is law. And of course, he needs meek, emasculated subjects who tremble at his might and  completely prostrate themselves to his will, with the notable exception of the military and its generals (thus they are vulnerable to usurpation by generals who are high-T enough to keep high-T troops in line: see the history of Byzantine Emperors).

Mencius Moldbug prefers shareholders, not kings. But he certainly prefers shareholders hiring a competent CEO and not simply hoping the genetic lottery made themselves competent at running things, therefore, I think he also prefers it is better for a king to hire a competent Mazarin or Richelieu and not try his hands at administration himself. This suggests that the king’s role is largely ceremonial, and doing that right brings us to the vicinity of the Sun King – Xerxes model, who is not the first  of the ingroup, but floats entirely above the group. Because a largely ceremonial first-amongst-equals in-group gang leader is a contradiction in terms, obviously. But a largely ceremonial living god or suchlike, well, that just gives us Japan, so probably makes sense.

But Moldbug is certainly a renegade liberal in the cultural sense – he often said so himself that his cultural DNA is largely liberal and he ultimately wants the same things they claim to want, namely a safe and peaceful civilization, just by different means. He apparently has little interest in conquest and the grim glory of bloody battles. As Moldbug would have certainly been loyal to modern civilized kings, such as the Stuarts, and such kings and their loyalists have certainly been far  closer ancestors to liberals than Donovan’s barbarians were, we can use Moldbug to decode the liberal cultural DNA a bit as well.

First of all, liberals certainly went from the-kings-word-is-law type of absolutely tyranny to the the-people’s-word-is-law type of popular tyranny i.e. democracy. Being loyal to old law, old tradition, old custom, even old Constitutions, is not a liberal virtue.

Second, as to the question whether liberal elites consider themselves in-group with the plebs or above their group, we might as well just look at their plates. One excellent way for a in-group field general type king to demonstrate camaraderie is to eat the same kind of slop the soldiers have to. Liberals have long been known to be food snobs (just like absolute kings or aristocrats were, as opposed to tribal chieftains, who may have got the best cut of the meat, but from the same deer!).

(At a second reading, this sounds like an inane argument. But clearly if elites try hard to demonstrate that their tastes in food, drink, music or sports is completely different to those of the plebs, that is not a sign of in-group camaraderie. And I think food is especially symbolic: after I began to drift to the political right, towards conservatism, I noticed after a while that I now somehow like what is considered peasant food of my own culture, largely pork sausages with with garlic: it felt to me eating like a farmer roots me firmer into the group my people. Eating is a deeply symbolic, even spiritual activity, see Scruton here. )

Therefore, we see a pattern emerging. The modern world emasculates men because the modern elites need men emasculated, to prevent rebellion or usurpation. The primary reason is the lack of an external threat to rally support against, largely because elites and the plebs have few interests in common, so few threats could threaten them both.  Modern liberal elites resemble a distributed version of Hollywood Xerxes or the Sun King, not a distributed version of of a gang-leader, Hollywood Leonidas or a Saxon or Viking king: they don’t lead in person, they don’t share camaraderie and are not part of the in-group of the plebs, they try to float somewhere above them, and they are far more interested in making new laws than upholding old laws, customs or traditions.

Presumably, all these traits – lack of in-groupness between elites and the plebs, lack of a common set of reverence for old laws and traditions – increases the risk of rebellion or usurpation for the liberal elites, which risk is already high due to the lack of credible external threats. Due to this risk, it is their existential interest to try to emasculate the male population and make them more docile.

Notes on restoration

Finally, we must ask the question, can masculinity be restored when it is seen as dangerous by the elites? I think this would be a topic far too large for this post, part of a far larger series on a general restoration, but let me at least offer a few fragments of ideas. As long as the current elites cannot be replaced, what could be done is building counter-cultures of passive resistance where the current elites are not seen as legitimate leaders. I think there is a huge difference between obeying the law because you see the lawmakers as legitimate, and between doing it because you must, but seeing a different set of counter-cultural leaders exercising proper authority over you. The second could be compared to the earliest Christians, who largely obeyed Roman law, when it was not 100% incompatible with the Gospel, but still considered their own bishops the truly legitimate authority over them.

Thus, having a counter-cultural “shadow  government” of male leaders, who show in-group camaraderie to most men, who demonstrate they are bound to them by shared traditions and rules, who present themselves as law-appliers, not law-makers, and who are not shy saying they are fighting, not just for something, but also against some people as well, such leaders would be relatively safe from revolt or usurpation in the counter-culture. Thus, at least in the counter-culture, such leaders could allow, even encourage a culture of robust masculinity to flourish.