Humans are animals, but also humans are very special and unusual type of animals. If we want to understand ourselves, sometimes we need to focus on what we have in common with other animals, and sometimes on what sets us apart from other animals.
This makes it complicated. How do decide which perspective to take in a given case? If a random topic is proposed, like eating, will you focus on what we have in common with other animals, our need for macro-and micronutrients, or will you focus on our unique rituals and taboos and etiquettes with regard to eating – which on the highest level turn a meal into a sacred, sacrificial act? If we talk about sex, will you focus on the bull-like raw animal desire, or the uniquely human poetry of romance? There is no clear-cut answer to that. And when there isn’t, one may as well shrug and keep an Aristotelean middle way, trying to be about equal part animal and human. The human part is animal, too, but in this context the human, also the humane, the humanitarian, and the humanist, means those – ultimately biologically rooted – human characteristics that are different and separate and set us apart from other animals.
You see, when you see Scott Alexander and Jack Donovan apparently agreeing about something or being on the same page, there is surely something interesting going on. When Scott defines the political Right as “survival values”, “tiny unstable bands facing a hostile wilderness”, that is exactly the topic of Jack’s The Way Of Men and Becoming A Barbarian. But Jack defines these are masculine values, not politically right-wing values, although of course everybody keeping their eyes open already noticed there is a huge overlap between these two concepts. Anyway, maybe time to offer a new perspective: masculine values or the values on the Right focus more on what is animalistic in humans, what humans share with other animals. Sex. Fighting. Dominance. Submission. Tribal raids. And this comes in largely two forms. There are men who actively endorse being humans behaving like other animals – “wearing a wolf’s head” – and this is what Jack Donovan is writing about and I don’t mean it as an insult. Being called an animal is an insult only amongst the civilized. Call a barbarian a lion, a wolf, a bear, and he will feel honored, he would be proud to have the lion’s courage and the bear’s strength.
However, the vast majority of the historic Right did not propose going barbarian: they wanted to protect civilization from barbarians, they were not with the pirates but with Caesar nailing the pirates to a cross. Conservative, right-wing, traditional, historic societies punished outlaws, criminals, gangsters far more harshly than liberal, Universalist societies. Most reactionary kings of history would at least jail Jack for seditious propaganda. This is fairly obvious. So while conservatives, reactionaries of the past generally opposed barbarian, animalistic behavior, they were at least keenly aware of it, keenly aware of how normal, how natural, how widespread it is, and how difficult it is to suppress, they believed the barbarians are at the gates at the slightest slip up of the guards, they believed civilized people themselves become barbarous and animalistic if things turn south and even every new generation of children are barbarians who need to be civilized arduously. To borrow a term from Thomas Carlyle, the conservative always wants to “chain the Beast”. They were openly repressive because repression was aimed at the Beast. Jack wants to unchain the Beast. What is common in both of them is seeing the Beast. Seeing ,realizing, accepting that there is a lot of ineridicable, hardwired animalistic behavior in man.
If anyone happens to be an Eric Fromm reader here: no, the animal is us is not that kind of blind and aimless destructiveness he proposed. Rather it is dominance, it is brutal, aggressive dominance. It is not about destroying a province just for shit and giggles, just for the fun of destructiveness, but rather it is about wanting to rule a province or country so bad that you don’t mind if you destroy half of it during the conquest if you must.
Just to put things into perspective… I used to think anger (and hatred) is a reaction to perceived injustice. Oh boy. What a naive angle. Anger is actually showing dominance. It is not injustice but simply the weakness of the other, the vulnerability of the other that fuels the flames of anger. It’s how humans and animals challenge each other and establish dominance. The idea of feeling wronged, feeling that the other committed injustice against us, is the whole I am mad at you because you did X to me and it was wrong, is actually a very roundabout thing. We expect – socially, perhaps also biologically – that “society” punishes people who are perceived as wrongdoers. So by framing others as wrongdoers, as committers of injustice and the breakers of rules, we can feel society is our side, hence we are strong and they are weak, hence we can humiliate them and establish dominance. Chew this for a while, it was not exactly easy for me to stomach either. Try to pay attention the next time a car driver is yelling at a cyclist jumping a red light, if you can sense an “Aha! I caught you now! You broke a rule, now I can assert dominance over you and society will support me!” element there. I bet there is.
If you feel something sort of a sinking feeling, you are beginning to get just how animalistic humans really are. No civilized society can work without rules. No rules will be obeyed if we don’t get mad at rulebreakers. And yet, we don’t get mad at them because they broke the rules: we get mad at them because we want to establish dominance and having broken a rule puts them into a weak, precarious, hard to defend situation, so we smell blood… this, this is the human animal for you. And this is precisely what the Left does not want to admit.
You see, values on the Left are those that are specifically human, that set us apart from animals, the specifically human, humane, humanitarian, humanist, intellectual, elevated, sophisticated, lofty, and many ways spiritual. Either they openly confront and fight everything animalistic – when they call you a fascist, they are basically calling you a werewolf – or tend to forget about it, deny the animalistic part of human nature, claim we have progressed beyond it or will shortly, and assume everybody is good and not a vicious animal at all. There is something gentle and lofty about them but therein lies the danger, the mortal danger. Since they keep denying the Beast – considering it a social construct, a product of oppressive social relations, they have no idea where it will rear its head, where it will strike next. They will just “lose faith in humanity” once again, until the next wannabee Messiah lifts them out of their depression again.
(You join the Right when your “faith in humanity” is irrevocably, permanently lost. But I admit it is hard not to be depressed about it. I am not exactly the cheeriest guy around.)
To give you a concrete example, the Left cannot really understand crime as such. They find it inherently abnormal and make up explanations like poverty or reflected racism. What they are missing – what they are incapable of understanding – is that crime is first and foremost fun. A very visceral kind of power trip. The dog chasing rabbit does not seem frustrated, angry or hateful – what you see on his face is pure joy. He is having helluva time. Come on. You have probably enjoyed simulated raiding in Clash of Clans. Do you really think the mugger doing it IRL needs a special reason to humiliate you and take your wallet? It is his idea of having fun. You are outside his tribe, you are fair game, you shouldn’t be surprised, the only question is really why were you unable to teach him Universalist morality i.e. that no humans are fair game ever. Finding an answer to that is something for a different occasion, though.
Anyhow, my point is that this humane loftiness, this softness, this compassion and empathic morality, this denial of the animal side of human nature makes the Left dangerous because they are the enablers of barbarians, they cannot predict when will large-scale organized barbarism like Communism or Fascism or Jacobinism break out, they are unable to understand and prevent small-scale barbarism i.e. crime, they are disgusted by all this and busily wishing these truths away. They act as unwitting enablers, urging the crowd on to rise up because they expect they want justice, and are utterly surprised when the crowd just morphs into a bunch of bloodthirsty animals instead. It is their lofty goodness that makes them dangerous: they constantly block the conservatives and reactionaries when they would try to keep the barbarians outside the gates. The Left’s values are certainly higher. But the irony is, the appeal of the higher is in itself animalistic: it is the animal desire for status. All this loftiness comes from a desire to be higher than all those humanoid animals, and yet a desire for this highness comes from an animal desire for dominance status which somehow metamorphosed into prestige status, the kind of status intellectuals and artists have.
It is pretty funny actually. This post may sound like a sales pitch for Leftist values, after all, I am admitting they are higher, purer and cleaner, and the values of the Right are far lower, dirtier with a lingering smell of blood and testosterone and unwashed peasants. So why I am still with the Right? Partially it is because I consider myself what the Americans call “red blooded”. It is a wonderful expression. It means the animal is strong with this one. It is the desire to eat big, drink big, lift big, fight big and fuck big. I’d say whereever Scott Alexander feels happy I would be bored to death. Those spaces tend to exclude dominance games. But beyond personal preference, there is something else, something actually important. To be aware of the Beast is a precondition to chaining the Beast. A full recognition of barbarism can lead to actually protecting civilization. Leftism by not recognizing the Beast, by thinking most people are basically well-meaning (in reality, they are most often just afraid), by tail-spinning into ever purer holiness signals, enables the barbarisms of the truly huge scale, the killing fields of Cambodia and that sort. And funnily enough it is the humane and humanist in me that says no to that. That level of cruelty, even if accidental, is something I cannot stomach. By understanding the animal, in yourself and others, ultimately fewer people end up getting killed. And this is actually a Universalistic moral proposal.
But here is a riddle. Why do we associate the animal with the masculine and the brutal? Half of animals are female. I mean, when I say “animalistic behavior” you think of some kind of aggressivity, not an infant suckling breast milk, even though that is more common and necessary for (mammal) animal life. Well, maybe masculinity needed to be tamed more for civilization to emerge than femininity, because feminity was already controlled and tamed, when needed repressed by the the pre-civilized, barbarian patriarchs. Animalistic men always repress the feminine in women if it causes any problem for them, so the real question for civilization is whether something can repress animalistic men or not. But it is not a full answer. There is more to animal behavior than conflict. There is more to specifically human features than avoiding conflict. And you cannot just equate the lack of conflict with The Way Of Women. I don’t think I can really reduce the worldview of the Scott Alexander types to saying they dislike conflict and that is feminine. There is more there, and thus I think there is some more figuring out to do.
As for me, I really have to make up my mind one of these days. Jack’s stuff is highly romantic, but any moderately reactionary historically figure would have had them all hanged without a regret. Should I be on the side of civilization, the sheepdogs protecting the idiotic liberal lambs with no survival instinct who aren’t grateful at all, or one of the wolves? I still don’t know. I guess one thing Jack haven’t figured out yet is the ethnic angle, when the lambs are predominantly white and the wolves not, how exactly this white wolf thing is supposed to work. Who is ingroup with whom.
Anyhow, I feel like I sort of figured politics out now and should maybe focus on technology or fitness. It is at the root a conflict between the general animalistic features in man vs. the specifically human features. As the specifically human is higher status, the animal dominance drive, metamorphosed into a prestige status drive, leads a lot of educated, intelligent, nice people to constantly deny the lower-status animalistic drives. Thus they rear their heads at unexpected times and then Utopian designs collapse.
The Right has two problems. One of them being constantly made to feel low status due to constantly focusing on what is animalistic and dangerous and low and definitely not lofty in in Man, and thus having a difficulty to offer an attractive club to join. We are bit like a pig breeder club, right, our conversations don’t smell of lilies, they have a lingering smell of the nasty and the messy because we are trying to deal with real, not idealized humans. The other problem is that the Right is naturally divided. Some are just Realist Universalists: they want to suppress the Beast everywhere, their main difference with the Left is that they understand how hard it is. Others want to play sheepdog only for their nation or tribe, and some are actively trying to be the wolves preying on another nation or tribe. Thus the Right is divided.
I think this is why also Jim is describing history as a contest between warriors and priests. The priest, the holy man, the scholar, the preacher, the intellectual is the quintessentially human: he is doing what only humans can do. The warrior represents what almost every animal can do – after all Nature is red in tooth and claw. Warriors like to call themselves Wolves. Priest consider that rude, crude, stupid and unholy. Huh. It will sound conceited, but I have a strange gut feeling that I have figured out the most important roots of politics and history. Can someone please be so kind and pop my bubble?
UPDATE: this is how it works on the average grunt level, like the guys mud-wrestling on Reddit under “Left” and “Right” flags, the Machiavellians on top of the social ladder are an entirely different question, they are just using both.
Anyway, a few more correlations. Why I think the survival values = animalistic values = masculine values = struggle for dominance = Right path is better? Because it makes you secure and confident at a very basic level, you accept your sexuality fully, accept being a man, enjoy your atavistic urges and become sexually successful with women, so it satisfies you at a very basic level. The price is that you will be seen as a stupid by the the elites and low status and in certain circumstances it can be intellectually boring, fighting and fucking is all fine but gets old after a while if there is nothing else. However, we live in a special period of history where it is actually intellectually stimulating, because contrarian. But make no mistake, actual reactionary socities were pretty boring, there was not much else for a rural nobleman than fighting and hunting and feasting and fucking. And a barbarian society was even more boring, mostly it is just herding your cattle and really taking care that the neighboring tribe doesn’t steal it. You wouldn’t go raiding all the time. They were basically cowboys and that is one boring job. While in our modern times being such a contrarian is intellectually stimulating, we should be aware how in general, the price of being at peace with our animal, masculine nature was intellectual stagnation.
The reverse of it is true for the opposite, thrive values = specifically human, humane and humanist values = feminine to neuter values = competing for prestige and coolness points = Left camp. At some level it is awesome! You get to do the kind of only humans can and generally speaking only smart humans, you can feel yourself soooo much above others, it is a heady feeling. You get to feel you lead, you are shaping policy, you are changing the world and making an impact (i.e. power trip), and you count and matter in the big picture… it is refined, it is sophisticated, it brings you prestige, status and interesting parties to get invited to, and it used to be intellectually stimulating, though no longer so because it became the dominant mainstream so right now any guy who wants to make everybody equal with everybody else does not sound like a brave new critical thinker anymore but more like a tired parrot, but nevermind, the whole thing still feels like you are the educated guys who are in the know and mingle with the experts. So it is totally awesome – however. However. There will be a hollow. There will be a gaping hole in your existence. There will be a gnawing insecurity deeply buried, because while you furiously denounce patriarchy and racism you will not feel like you are really a man. You will feel a strange disconnect with your body and instincts. You will not be half as confident as some dumb plumber with his narrow minded opinions and it hurts. Every time you are not under police protection and someone promises you an ass whooping, you will not see it as a challenge to take but a threat to be scared of and you will loathe yourself for. Your successes with women will be anything but stellar. You will often be lonely. Sometimes you will score a low quality woman and rationalize her getting fat and walking all over you like a she-boss as independence from patriarchical standards. And when you get cucked, you might feel for a second to react like an actual man and beat the crap out of the other man to show who dominates this bedroom – but not being used to it, the motive will quickly dissipate and all that is left is formless self-loathing. This path is treacherous – it can turn you into a Bono, a celeb, but a hollow one who feels at some level fake.
Our secret weapon is precisely this hollowness of the prestige path. The Left hand path does make people famous and celebrated and all-around high but it gives them no dominance. They don’t get to rule, don’t get to say this dirt up to that fence or border is mine and do as I say, only their Machiavellian puppetteers get to say that who are far higher and far more hidden. Women won’t throw them at their feet. Men don’t submit and don’t treat them like a pack leader. Even their kids talk back. All he finds is shallow admiration with a tinge of envy and perhaps a backstab coming when someone tweets he said something dubious ten years ago. His success is hollow.
Admittedly, the Right hand path is harder. I personally haven’t even done much IRL beyond the gym lifting – and that already helped tremendously, still, let’s face it, I am not a boss, not an alpha of a group, and if I will ever be it will be more of a workplace promotion for my intellectual qualities, rather than the outcome of a manly dominance challenge. And my kid talks back too. Yet, at least seeing these glimpses of the road ahead, feels like a return, a homecoming, a reconnection.
I guess Jim got that right with this warriors vs. priest model after all. Being a warrior can be incredibly narrow, stupid, primitive – but whole. Being a priest is all over fantastic and stimulating, the horizons are huge – but there is a connection missing, between the mind and the body, the instinct, the nature, the sex. While here “priest” is used as a metaphor for intellectuals, the Catholic Church actually got this right by demanding celibacy. That at least made the disconnect, the missing link, the lack of wholeness formal and official.
