GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

It is only possible to engage in peaceful activity insofar as someone protects that activity from those who would interrupt it violently—to rob or coerce or take revenge on one or more of the participants, or just for the hell of it. The participants can protect themselves, but as the predators get more sophisticated—as they specialize and hone their predatory skills—it will be hard for the participants to keep up, because they are too busy specializing in their peaceful activities to compete as self-protectors in the arms race against the predators. The law of comparative advantage suggests they will eventually farm out protection duties, either to private security or the state. Even the most primitive communities will probably delegate self-defense, except perhaps in the most extreme circumstances, to the strongest and most aggressive young men. It is probably at least as true to say that, once communities have been stratified, any peaceful activity is not only protected by but has the at least tacit permission of whoever controls, which is to say, owns, the territory upon which that activity is conducted. Much early trading was no doubt carried out between members of different communities, but it nevertheless took place somewhere, and therefore required the sanction of one or both of the sovereigns involved (for example, through treaties).

Once communities are sufficiently differentiated so that various non-ritual interactions take place regularly within a sovereign territory, the sovereign is primarily distinguishing between the peaceable and the predatory amongst his own people (“his own” in the sense of those he rules over). The sovereign is either capable of doing this, or he isn’t—if he is, then he permits all activities that he does not prevent, because he can prevent any of them; if he isn’t, then he simply isn’t sovereign, which means someone else is, or others are—perhaps some incompletely subdued Big Men are sovereign over at least parts of the territory, perhaps street gangs are sovereign over some inner city neighborhoods, etc. Now, central to liberal political thinking is that liberty or prosperity or happiness of good government (the emphasis shifts from thinker to thinker) requires limitations in sovereign power. There are certain human or civil rights that can’t be violated, or there is a constitution that prevents the government from using its power in certain ways. The problem with this approach is evident in the operations of our contemporary governments—who, exactly, decides whether the government has violated someone’s rights, or has overstepped limits placed on its exercise of power? Whoever decides is, then, sovereign. In theory, liberalism would like to situate this “ultimate” sovereignty with the “people”—but the people could only exercise this sovereignty through revolution, in which case the resultant sovereign would not exactly be the “people” but whichever party or militia manages to concentrate power in its own hands. Otherwise, the decision is made by some branch of the government itself, which means there’s a kind of shell game going on here. At higher levels of civilization, the game of ping pong between the legislature, executive and judiciary might preserve a sense of moderation and cooperation on the part of all parties, but there is nothing in this haphazard and informal distribution of powers that helps to preserve that level of civilization—on the contrary, the more power that seems to be lying around unclaimed, the more people will try and figure out how to pick it up. We go from uncertainty to uncertainty, and struggles for power come to permeate the entire social order. So, for example, we might say that, in effect, in the US the Supreme Court is sovereign insofar as it has the final word on what the executive and legislative branches do. Maybe—but that only lasts as long as some enterprising President, sensing popular winds at his (or her!) back, decides to defy the Supremes (how many divisions do they have?). Even more, the Supreme Court justices emerge from a broader judicial culture, comprised of the lower courts, the law schools, professional associations, and so on—so, must we locate sovereignty elsewhere? (Should we accept the assertion, made, I think, mostly seriously, by more than one “Reactionary” blogger, that Harvard is, in fact, sovereign?) Sovereignty in this case becomes both highly impenetrable and extremely unreliable and unstable. Maybe, indeed, sovereignty is mobile, taken up by different agencies depending upon needs and circumstance—this is an attractive idea, and I can imagine it working fairly well in small, closely knit communities, where charismatic individuals would step forth and be acknowledged by the community in emergencies. That, in fact, seems to be the model of sovereignty in the Hebrew Bible’s book of Judges, but it hardly seems transferable.

Liberal theory not only fails but fails disingenuously precisely because it allows no one to claim sovereignty even though someone must. Liberalism is extremely hostile to anyone saying something like “alright, I’m going to do what it takes to maintain order here,” even though there are obviously times when someone needs to do that. We could see liberalism as a kind of pathology, a phobia—it is possessed by the idea that if anyone ever does “take over” and impose order they will do so forever, and in unaccountable, inscrutable and terrifyingly destructive ways. I think we can describe this pathology even more precisely and more personally—that guy, that dictator, that Alpha, that Bad Daddy who takes over will stop me from doing something that I very much want to do. The fact that in a post-romantic West everyone likes to see his/her deepest desires as “subversive” feeds into this phobia. But that just means you want your deepest desires to be sovereign, and how is that supposed to work? Someone will be sovereign—the question is, is it better that we all know exactly who that is? If you say yes—the more emphatically you say yes—because the more uncertainty there is, the more the purpose of sovereignty is defeated, and the less protection we can expect for peaceful interactions, then you are led inexorably to absolutism, without all the fuzziness introduced by rights, limited and divided powers and the rest of the liberal machinery.

The biggest problem, then, is how to get someone into that position (whoever chooses that someone, if he is indeed chosen, is, at least for that moment, sovereign—so, how are they chosen)? Democracy is a proposed solution to this problem, probably prompted by the realization that monarchy cannot be separated from an inadequate selection process, far too dependent upon accidents of birth. Democracy is just a way of dividing sovereignty by providing the electorate with a kind of punctual sovereignty on election day; once the elected officials take power they are sovereign, and I am far from the first to note that what the people thought they were voting for may have very little to do with what those elected choose to do with their sovereignty. And, of course, the electorate as sovereign can do what it likes, and there is no reason to assume that what it likes bears any relation to the purposes of sovereignty in the first place. (Your good democrat will bristle at that very formulation—that someone might dare to assert that sovereignty has “essential” purposes beyond what the people would like those purposes to be—but if the sovereignty of the people, such as it is, is simply presumptive, why should the people school themselves in the preservation of sovereignty?) If the sovereign is genuinely sovereign, he can decide on matters of succession, so will we not very soon find ourselves back in a hereditary monarchy?

Since I began playing with the notion of absolutism, the problem the notion seemed to pose for me is how to integrate it with the other political/anthropological concepts I have been taking on board recently: nationalism, parrhesia, and producerism. In principle, absolutism could rule over a multinational empire; for that matter, it could break up a nation and impose some other ordering principle. And, needless to say, the absolute sovereign can quickly shut up any aspiring parrhesiac. And will an absolute sovereign not see imaginative, charismatic producerists as a threat? But I then considered that the problem might, in fact, be a solution. A successful sovereign would want all of these things. Ruling over a nation is far more likely to provide the sovereign with the “middle” (Cf., my previous post) he needs to govern as minimally as possible—not to mention the ballast a cohesive nation provides in possible conflicts with other sovereigns. (If force of circumstance requires a sovereign to incorporate alien peoples, the wiser sovereign will seek to integrate the new people into the existing one.) The producerists, meanwhile, will be the source of wealth, advice, and political and military leadership. The question of parrhesia is more difficult. It’s a democratic prejudice (confirmed, though, by 20th century dictatorships) that an absolute sovereign will suppress all criticism and deviation from the “party line.” Nothing in the concept of absolute sovereignty requires this (and, for an obvious counter-example, the absolute monarchs of early modern Europe allowed for a very rich and often dissonant artistic and religious culture). Still, some discourses will be marked as heresy and sedition and, at any rate, the sovereign will always have the absolute power to classify them as such. (Some are in even the freest and most democratic countries, but let’s leave that aside for now—these nagging “double standard” comparisons and charges of “hypocrisy” are especially irritating when we are trying to think something through.)

I will try this formulation: the more successful and secure a sovereign, the more he will allow for and embrace public criticisms of his decisions, exposures of corruption, satirical representations of powerful figures and a vigorous intellectual and artistic life. A less successful sovereign will be unsuccessful in other ways, so his oppressiveness regarding open discourse will just be part of a bigger problem; a sovereign who is less secure through no fault of his own might have good grounds for tightening the reins, and a responsible class of artists and intellectuals will tailor their works accordingly and find new ways to speak freely within the imposed limits. In the case of the failed sovereign, well, we may get to the point where he needs to be removed—there is nothing more dangerous than the revolutionary abyss of radically uncertain sovereignty than a catastrophically failing sovereign. Given the presumption in favor of absolute sovereignty, we can assume that revolutions will only take place as a last resort, and will not be carried out until the leading figures of the middle, the best judges of the status of sovereign power, have been convinced there is no other way. (Now, along with the failed sovereign we are likely to see a corrupted and compromised middle, but that doesn’t change anything—it just means the situation is worse, and we have fewer leading figures to rely upon.) Considering this possibility gives us the solution to the problem of sovereign selection and succession. A successful sovereign, who is successful because he has cultivated the middle and the producerists, and listened to the public conversations of his subjects, can be expected to choose his successor well, even if it is his own child. The leading subjects will support as best they can the less successful sovereigns, and try to shepherd the people through harder times, including reckless choices of a successor. Ultimately the salvation of order will depend upon the sovereign being persuaded by those leading subjects (and first of all allowing them to try, without any fear—although if they are indeed “leading,” they should also be courageous). As for the first post-liberal absolute sovereign—that in fact is the easiest choice, because it will be whoever is brave, resourceful, intelligent and charismatic enough to lead a lot of imperfect people through some very desperate times—and there won’t be an over-supply of candidates.

I will briefly note that I am not just building utopian castles in the sky here—or, perhaps, I should note that the point of constructing utopias has always been to find better ways of talking about what is right in front of us. You can see from my discussion that to speak in terms of absolute sovereignty as a measure of good and true order is necessarily to speak in very different ways about social interaction and order. You end up speaking much less about interests, desires and resentments as the basic elements of social order (which leads to all the liberal problems of “balancing” and the Machiavellean plans to distract through amusements, etc., and gnawing sense that continued social order depends upon a good quarter of economic growth) and much more about deferral, discipline and charisma (in Philip Rieff’s sense of the attractive power “given off” by the more disciplined). Once you commit yourself to clear and certain sovereignty, because it’s the only way of preventing resentments from splintering society, you become interested in all the ways we can expect ourselves and others to transcend those resentments through devotion to a center. When I was watching the TV mini-series The Tudors a couple of years ago, I was struck by how most of the people executed (sometimes, especially in the case of Anne Boleyn, for the craziest of reasons) on order of King Henry VIII made a point, in their speech before those assembled to witness the execution, to praise the king and implore the people to be grateful and obedient toward him. This seems outrageous to almost any modern—why, they should have declared their innocence, denounced the injustice, railed against the king, called upon the people to rise up against the tyrant (what did they have to lose, after all?)—but I found it very impressive, checked to make sure it was historically accurate, and was very grateful to the producers for including such “counter-cultural” sentiments. (They were only a generation away from some terrible violence carried out in the name of contesting the legitimacy of the king, but that they had so internalized this lesson and translated it into civic and religious terms that it informed their final act is remarkable.) I would say that overt and sustained renunciation of violence precisely when the desire to give oneself over to it is almost irresistible is the highest form of parrhesia—which means that following the discipline of parrhesia might be especially likely to lead one to absolutism.

I have always insisted that on the originary scene the assembled could not have put forth their respective gestures simultaneously. I have some very good (to my mind) reasons for doing so, but the one relevant here is that the assumption of simultaneity excludes any representation of a threat to social order on the scene itself. If everyone is an equal participant on the scene—equal in commitment, enthusiasm, understanding of the implications of what they are doing—then “anti-social” activity must be secondary and contingent, explicable in terms of specific circumstances, not a perennial threat (at most there will be resentments that are always already contained, at least within the prevailing form of order even if not the specific regime). We could assume that, ultimately, everyone really just wants a seat at the table. That’s not necessarily the case, though. If the sign was first put forth (with whatever degree of intentionality) by one, then a couple more, then a majority, then it makes sense to further infer that the final participants, those who came last, did so out of fear of a now imposing group force, or even needed to be restrained by those determined to protect the center. No one can dispute that there are lots of people who behave acceptably for fear of punishment or social approval, and really have contempt for (or simply no comprehension of) the norms in the name of which they would be subject to censure. The current relaxation of norms makes this very obvious, and is certainly why the existence of psychopaths and sociopaths has become such an interesting subject (how many are there? How can we recognize them? Where does the boundary lie between psychopathy and sociopathy and normalcy? Do they have advantages over normal people when it comes to acquiring wealth and power?). The political relation between those who live by the sign and those who live in contempt/fear of those who live by the sign is very different than the political relation between those assumed to be bound by roughly symmetrical reciprocity. If you are working with the latter model, you will find divided and uncertain sovereignty much less of a concern (and maybe even a source of social vibrancy) than if you are working with the former.

Steve Sailer speaks often of the alliance of the wealthiest and most powerful with the poor and marginalized against the middle—what he calls the high-low alliance (and sometimes “the coalition of the fringes”—what we could call the victimocracy). The Reactionary Futures blog, which argues for what we might call a kind of political absolutism (in both the sense that it prioritizes power in analyzing social relations and considers centralization and certainty of sovereignty the only means of social stability) also argues strenuously in favor of this analytic framework—indeed, Reactionary Futures takes this very literally, making a case for seeing the foundations (Ford, Carnegie, etc.) as the central political agents of the past 100 years. The power and relevance of this framework is pretty obvious, but the reasons for it, and the best way of accounting for it, is not immediately clear. Why would the “highs” (the billionaires, the corporations, Wall Street, the media) prefer an alliance with the lows rather than the middle? On the surface, it looks like the SJWs are driving the agenda—the corporations seem to be scrambling to figure out how to avoid boycotts and protests—but the theory of the high-low alliance complicates this picture considerably. Indeed, Reactionary Futures argues, fairly convincingly I think, that the civil rights movement was not some spontaneous demand for justice, or an inevitable step in the path of social progress but, rather, instigated and funded by the foundations (the blogger makes a similar case for the leading intellectual movements of the later 20th century, from left to right—differences between which RF considers virtually irrelevant). Even so, why would the foundations support these social movements? Why not get behind the segregationists? Some kind of somewhat objective analysis of the interests of the founders must lie behind these choices. Also, we must be able to distinguish between intended and unintended consequences of the foundations’, or the “highs” in general, historical interventions—unless we want to attribute omniscience and omnipotence to them, which is always just a way of making it easier to get to the conclusions you want. Are the highs against the middle—do they consider the middle a threat or obstacle (to what?)—or do they simply bypass or ignore it for some other reason?

RF seems to see the funding of the lows by the highs as a means of promoting disorder so as to create the need for order—a need the elite can then satisfy, thereby accumulating more power. For RF, this kind of strategy is necessary because modern society has produced a separation between actual power and formal power—real economic and cultural power is not directly recognized as political power, and so economic and cultural (ultimately, according to RF, also political) power has to operate indirectly to reach its actual level of power. A more absolutist approach would eliminate the difference between economic, cultural and political power (making it all directly political), thereby making power coherent and also requiring that those with power also take responsibility for their exercise thereof. Of course, the best example of such singular sovereignty was the absolute monarchy of the late Middle Ages/early modern period. All property belongs to the monarchy, and all private property is, in fact, “lent” by the monarch (this is ultimately, if extremely indirectly and disingenuously, the case today as well, despite the furious attempts of liberal ideology to deny it—think for a few minutes of all the ways the state could take your property if it found a “compelling,” i.e., any, reason to do so). It was the rise of modern property, liberalism and capitalism that multifurcated property, thereby producing the competing power centers.

That the relatively autonomous power centers are competing with each other is the key to the solution of the problem—the power center (the progressive billionaire, the media conglomerate, the corporation) that is furthest in advance of generating disorder is also the one most likely to present itself as the most credible candidate to lead the reordering. The highs, then, are recruiting foot soldiers from among the lows to gain an edge against their rivals. To that extent, the “middle” is incidental. But the middle is a problem because the middle is comprised of the participants of the originary nomos, or land apportionment, their descendants, and those who have bought into later reapportionments. Even if we grant RF’s absolutism, the sovereign power will (I may very well be departing from RF here) rely upon the middle: the sovereign’s orders must be conveyed, the sovereign must be kept apprised of where his attention is most needed, and, above all, the sovereign must not be lured into governing any more intrusively than absolutely necessary (because that allows it to be captured by various fractional interests)—for all of these lines of political power to remain open, a middle of property owners, intelligently loyal to the sovereign, that disciplines itself far more than it requires external discipline, is indispensable. A stable, secure sovereign would realize this, and nurture the middle. But for rivals for power among the highs in a decentered system, the middle is an unwelcome hindrance, a drag, because catering to the middle allows some other section of the elite to plug directly into the more volatile and manipulable lows and fringes.

Meanwhile, if the middle is not the center of the sovereign’s attention—if there is not a relation of reciprocal deference between them—and the model to which at least the better of the lows seek to assimilate, the middle itself is bereft and adrift, pulled apart by the more exciting lifestyles of the highs and lows (is white guilt more a fear of not adhering to norms of equality adequately, or envy of the freedom and presumed authenticity of the lows and fringes?). RF’s political hopes lie in the emergence of great men, or perhaps an enlightened section of the elites, who can seize sovereignty and initiate a process of restoration. One can laugh at these ideas, or call them fascist, but such responses would just be the last gasps of a dying consumerism and can be disregarded. My own disagreement with RF is that I think the process would have to work the other way: a restored middle would generate the imperative for sovereign certainty—depending upon what would be involved in the restoration of the middle (an eventuality I really have no more right to be confident in than RF does in his preferred scenario), I can easily imagine a middle that is tired of the endless BS and sh*t tests that pass for democracy, liberalism, republicanism, equality, human rights and all the rest, and is ready for some absolutism. Maybe the often touted “non-partisanship” of the “radical center” should be taken seriously—it could very well be that the middle just wants reasonable and necessary laws, applied and enforced reliably, fairly, and consistently, and the order that would follow, and doesn’t care so much about the process by which this is accomplished.

From a pedagogical, rhetorical and propagandistic standpoint, “absolutism” has a lot to recommend itself in the middlistic struggle against the high-low alliance. In response to just about any complaint of the left it is possible to simply ask whether the laws governing the case are clear, are they—can they be—enforced with transparency and regularity, will proposed reforms increase or diminish such clarity, regularity and transparency, and so on. There are good laws, the need for which is easily understood and which are therefore easily enforced, in which case officials who fail to do so are derelict; and there are bad laws, which are bad because they can’t be easily understood and enforced. A determined absolutism could demonstrate systematically that what the victimocrats want is lawlessness and disorder. That’s all—not equality, not fairness, not reciprocity, not truth, not recognition, not justice. The attacks on white patriarchal Western heterosexual bourgeoisness are concentrated attacks on everything that stands for order, which is to say a nomos that has proven more capable than others of transmitting and enhancing its founding order. The lows who are dragged in as cannon fodder in the rivalries of the elites can’t, of course, know what they want to result from their endless agitation; but the truth is the highs really don’t either—the convergence of all forms of power among the globalizing ruling class is actually tending towards absolutism (a perfect symbol of that being Mark Zuckerberg’s eagerly assenting to Angela Merkel’s plea that he do something about all that anti-migrant sentiment on Facebook) while, paradoxically, undermining any possibility for sovereignty by building that power on massive infusions of dyscivilizational elements to the societies they wish to rule.

It’s convenient and accurate enough to speak about the civilizational war in the West in terms of nationalism vs. globalism/imperialism or alt-right vs. SJW. A more comprehensive approach, though, would explain it as a crisis of the producerist/consumerist split which goes back to the (pre)historical emergence of the Big Man. The “globalists,” the “managerial class,” the “political class,” the “ruling class,” the “transnational elites”—whatever you want to call all those aligned by their sharing interests and therefore outlooks across national boundaries—want nothing more than to create a global subject class defined solely in terms of consumption. You get educated in order to get a job in order to spend your life as a consumer and define yourself in terms of your consumption choices. There’s nothing morally or ethically objectionable about such a life—many people are suited for it and are quite happy living it, assuming their income is sufficient to support it. To force everyone into it, though, requires quite a bit of violence and lying—moreover, not everyone who buys into it has read the fine print, and there might be quite a bit of buyer’s remorse. The symmetry of all on the margins in relation to a single center eliminates a lot of smaller resentments, against smaller and overlapping centers, only to concentrate them all into one totalizing one: the all against one (and one against all) of tyranny. Judaism and then Christianity, realizing that the desire for centrality was not eliminated through the actual seizure of the center but, rather, that everyone on the margin would now define himself in terms of that desire for centrality, posited a King behind the king to whom any terrestrial king was ultimately accountable. Kings suffer, are defeated and overthrown, sin and are punished, die—like everyone else; and that “critique” of monarchy is actually the way “everyone else” comes to be defined, or anthropomorphized. The brilliance of the modern imperative is to off-load the center onto impersonal systems, like democracy, the market, science and technology, in order to remove the bullseye while centralizing beyond the dreams of any ancient pharaoh—the bureaucrats, executives, managers and public servants all act in the name, first, of some transcendent principle, and, then, some self-referential procedure, not their own concentration of power. But this strength has turned into a weakness because someone has to take responsibility, and all we have now are “experts” who are expert mostly in deflecting responsibility onto someone else. You could explain the entire Obama administration pretty well by simply imagining them doing little more than, after something happens, asking themselves how can we make the Republicans, Fox News and talk radio responsible for this. It’s trolling and baiting all the way down. The victimary, the SJWs, are just a virus released by the final breakdown of all pre-modern immunological systems—it has taken a long time to extricate the natural sense of responsibility. In what is a confirmation and slight modification of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism, the consumerist bureaucracy itself just becomes another horde of ravenous consumers.

Producer’s desire begins in the realization that the world is your construct—you can complain about the “media,” or “ideology,” or whatever (complaint and outrage are just consumerist twitches—the world didn’t serve up what you were promised, and you want some Consumer Protection Agency in the sky to get you a refund)—but what you pay attention to is up to you. You can look at your responses to the bait laid around you, and instead, say, of getting outraged at someone else’s evil, you can see that they are acting purposefully in some way that has been effective in the past for the sake of some stake they are protecting; you can, then, assess your own behavior, and the role it has perhaps played in rendering action you now see to be harmful effective. And then you can act more purposefully, in particular by modeling and encouraging others to train themselves in the discipline you have formed. You can look calmly at the “sh*t tests” (a very illuminating term I have learned from the androsphere) the SJWs put you to, and realize that they really just want someone to draw a line and stick to it. (Is it possible that the SJWs are really shocked that so many take their BS so seriously?) By now we’d have to be really gullible to think that anyone considers allowing transgenders to serve openly in the military (with the costs of the “gender reassignment” therapy and surgery covered by Uncle Sam) to be a “human rights” issue. Those whom the alt-right call “cuckservatives” take such bait and with Pavovlian predictability go on to write think pieces about how, while of course the army has to maintain discipline and we have to make sure it is not politicized what is most important is that the bigots on “our” side must be disavowed. Surely conservatives will soon get the idea that the Democrats are the real transphobes, the Republicans the true protectors of the trans. They fail the sh*t test. Look at the final paragraph of an essay by David French in National Review that otherwise says some good things about this latest sh*t test:

Fortunately the warrior culture is resilient. Infantry platoons aren’t likely to go full PC anytime soon, but the Left keeps chipping away. It will keep chipping away until the horrible reality of the battlefield reminds us all that our military isn’t a social laboratory. Our enemies focus on war while we sidetrack our soldiers with social justice. Not even our immense technical and material advantage can save us forever from the consequences of our own folly.

Implicit here is some narrative of “us” waking up, “snapping out it,” and realizing that “we” have been foolish. Although “we” probably won’t until we lose a war or two. But why would that “remind” us of anything? French imagines some essential American identity—rather than a war, there is a confused “we” (it’s like describing World War II—and of course we do see such descriptions all the time—as some Western “we” considering but finally eschewing suicide). If those infantry platoons can hold out a bit longer, we’re all sure to realize that and get “our” head straight. Constructing and expressing faith in these imagined “we’s” is the quintessential consumerist posture—one waits, Godot-like, for the margins to align symmetrically before a vanishing center. But if, as French says (spotting the obvious right away), these new rules are about social engineering rather than military readiness, then those issuing the rules are derelict in their primary responsibility. They are saboteurs. (It’s an easy call—“social justice” is intrinsically sabotage of any institution in which it is advanced.) The duty of every commander is to immediately jail and then dishonorably discharge any soldier who murmurs a word questioning his gender and thereby disrupts discipline. If he is not permitted, he can only continue to be a commander if he resigns, and informs all those infantry platoons that it is their duty to do so as well. The preservation of something like a “military” then requires the announcement of the formation of a people’s militia, preparing for war against the saboteurs, with an invitation to all those soldiers to volunteer. (I originally thought to say “traitor” instead of “saboteur,” but “traitor” presupposes the very community that doesn’t exist—a saboteur is not a traitor from his standpoint, and we learn more from studying that standpoint than bewailing the betrayal.) Clearly all this would be unthinkable for French—but what, exactly, is wrong with the argument? Once you, as a consumer, realize you have been suckered, you can either up your dosage of snake oil (we need to return to the true principle of equality, or implement it sincerely for the first time), or you discover a discipline—a mission, a vocation, a cause, a calling, if you like, and then you’ll realize that those principles oddly seem to have no other purpose than to get in your way.

The commanders and soldiers who acted in this way would be enacting producer’s desire—they would all be Big Men, albeit little big men as there would be a lot of them. Rather than trying to conform to commands issued from the existing center, they would be imagining and constructing new centers, giving shape to their vocation as soldiers and defenders of the people. That is what it means to be a “producer”—to disregard threats, blandishments, attempts at shaming, side issues and chumming, in order to pursue your discipline. If you read the consumerists, you can see that underlying their discourse always is the imperative to stay in line, make sure you keep getting fed, fear social disapproval, defer to those with greater credentials than yours. The most courageous among them figure out ways to become troublesome enough so that someone else will consider it cost-effective to appease them—it’s not such a hard scam to run on people who, more than anything else, want no trouble. If you read the producerists, you see a contempt for social approval, ridicule of credentials, defiance of The Narrative, an eagerness to take what they are told not to think as a cue to what they should think about, and an overwhelming desire to stay independent of the institutions (by now, almost all of them) infested by the SJWs. For the first time in the history of civilization, the role of the Big Man or Alpha (desperately suppressed by monotheism and metaphysics until this day) can be openly broached. And that’s what the war of Western civilization is really all about.

Perhaps one could say that I’m just complaining here—even worse, I’m complaining about people complaining. I don’t think so because I don’t expect anyone to do anything other than what they want to do. I don’t really want anyone to do anything other than what they want to do. I don’t accuse anyone of not conforming to some ethical or moral model that I imagine has been inscribed somewhere. I prefer the logic of compensation to moral indoctrination—if there are some who want to rape, loot and murder, there will have to be enough who want to deter, confront and neutralize the rapists, looters and murderers—and there will have to be enough who want to have enough people who want to do that. And those who want those things will do so because they want other things as well. Then we’d all have to figure out how to get what we want, rather than expressing outrage when the world we want doesn’t magically materialize from our own good intentions. I would just have people consider whether they want to study the origins of their wants more systematically, because I think they will conclude that the more their wants entail delegating responsibility to others for the satisfaction of those wants the less what they get will turn out to be what they really want. And to consider that if you are among those who want to discipline your wanting you will want to have as little as possible to do with those who don’t.

What should we do about resentment? Is there some non-resentful position from which we can ask that question? Interestingly, there may be: among the hundred or so flowers blooming on the right these days, one of them, represented by the blog Reactionary Futures and building upon the “Unqualified Reservations” of Mencius Moldbug, argues, very cogently, for a new kind of absolutism. The idea is that power divided ultimately leads to chaos: a single, undisputed locus of sovereignty is the only basis for social order. The models for this proposed order seem to be absolute monarchies and corporate CEOs. How to get there, and how to sustain it seem to me unanswered questions (the only answer I’ve seen so far seems to be “virtuous elites and rulers”), but this argument (predicated, how accurately I have not determined, on the thinking of Thomas Carlyle and Bernard De Jouvenel) takes into account (explicitly) Rene Girard’s understanding of the unlimited, envious, rivalrous desire constitutive of the human. If all resentment is resentment at another’s centrality, the way to eliminate resentment, or, at least reduce it to manageable proportions, would be to establish a single, uncontested, efficient center that no one could resent effectively. There is certainly enough historical evidence to suggest that human beings have demonstrated a preference for this kind of solution.

If, that is, we think about resentment in quantitative terms, in which case the point is to reduce it as much as possible. Gans often speaks about resentment in these terms, and he does so in this Chronicle as well, and if there is a basis for doing so, and we can, in fact, identify a non-resentful position from which such “measurements” can be made, it is certainly worthwhile keeping quantitative resentment talk around. But there are other ways to speak about resentment, also present in Gans’s Chronicle: to “restore a general suspicion of resentment” is not quite the same as “reducing” it, because it implies that some resentments can be cleared of suspicion, and it’s also possible that “suspicion of resentment” is nothing more than “resentment of resentment,” which would lead us to choose between more and less legitimate resentments. This is difficult because resentment precedes and, in “sublimated” form, is the basis of “legitimation,” “justification,” and so on. So, the transcendence of resentment would be a transcendent resentment, which does seem a fairly accurate description of the Old Testament God. Similar ambiguity seems to attach to the “control” of resentment (rather than just of “violence”), which seems to suggest the establishing of constraints and means of channeling resentment, rather than simply minimizing it. From a “qualitative” perspective, constraining resentment might, in some senses, involve generating more of it, or at least exhibiting some forms of it more overtly.

If we are to distinguish between more and less acceptable forms of resentment (a qualitative approach which might, if we want to be optimistic, be preparatory to a “quantitative” approach), I would suggest that the thing for our transcendentalizing resentment to target is what we could call “unrestricted, unqualified resentment.” If one resents a lack of reciprocity in general, one’s resentment cannot be addressed, and will always escalate, because it will always be possible to identify some way in which social relations could be more reciprocal, and advances in reciprocity will provide models for otherwise undetectable failings. Resentments on behalf of some historically established mode of discipline, on the other hand—on behalf of monarchy, or monogamy, or church, or property—are intrinsically limited, since resentment of breaches of the institutional norms will subside with the re-secured stability of the institution (at which point the leaders of the institution will themselves rein in resentment on its behalf). In this case one resents attempts to set up new centers at the expense of established ones (to presuppose the very norms that the new center proceeds to undermine), and resenting one center on behalf of another prevents the unlimited destruction implied in an attack on all centers from a presumed centerlessness. It even leaves open the possibility that the new center will turn out to have had a point.

Gans’s list of the effects of resentment includes a diverse group: “It was resentment that made Eve give Adam the apple, resentment that made Achilles conduct a sit-down strike against Agamemnon, resentment that motivated the Jews to leave Egypt, that got Jesus crucified…” It’s certainly interesting to see the Exodus on the list, even though, when you come to think of it, it was an extremely risky decision and judgment of the results, even to this day, may remain mixed. Also, from the Moldbugian approach, the rejection of the fairly well perfected God-Emperor system of ancient Egypt might very well be the beginning of all the problems we face today. (Also some of the non-problems, though, at least from a non-Moldbugian perspective.) Achilles’s resentment at his superior value going unrecognized by the military/political hierarchy of the Greeks leads to a new form of reciprocity, the mutual respect of enemies, in his agreeing to return Hector’s body to Priam. (Although, admittedly, it’s not clear what this does for his relations with Agamemnon.) And the need for the divinized imperial system to suppress (resent?) anthropological insights into its limitations and sources of power beyond its ken seems to legitimate the necessarily risky efforts needed to preserve those insights and activate those sources of power. The resentments of the alt-right seem to me similarly limited and productive, insofar as they, like Achilles, resent on behalf of values required but undervalued by the resented institutions themselves, on the one hand, and on behalf of truths placed in danger by their victimary opponents, on the other (there is no claim made by the victimocrats which the alt-rightists have any reason to fear addressing thoroughly and publicly. As Gans’s reference to the rejection of causality by today’s victimary activists makes clear, the same is not true for the other side). The “parrhesia” I have associated with the alt-right may be seen as very resentful (how do we assess the resentment of the cynic Diogenes who, when Alexander the Great asked him what he, Alexander, could do for him, requested that Alexander get out of his sun?), but it resents the decadent suppression of anthropological truths that themselves generate resentment (like Gans’s proposal all those years ago)—and we might see that as initiating a virtuous circle of transcendentalizing resentments.

The consequences, for political thinking, of my centralization of deferral, discipline and civilization in originary thinking, are clear, at least in outline: what is politically legitimate and necessary is the leadership, through charisma, of the most disciplined individuals (in economic terms: those with the longest time preference), who will therefore seek each other out, recognize one another, and model modes of deferral for the less disciplined. The most basic forms of “rule” bear out these assumptions: when a group is confronted with some threat or emergency requiring expeditious and unified action, any chance of success depends upon the most capable (those who resist panic and the tendency to find some scapegoat within the group) taking charge, setting an example, and being deferred to in all critical decisions. The earliest forms of “government” must surely have taken this form, of those who were coolest under pressure and able to see past the apparently dire immediate circumstance being deferred to. Otherwise, why would such forms have come into existence in the first place? All governments are set up so as to maximize the possibility of iterating this originary form of leadership, and to the extent that governments fail to elevate such figures, it is because of some design flaw and/or decadence. To this day, there is a tacit agreement that genuine legitimacy resides in the leader’s ability to handle the “3AM phone call,” to recall a Hillary Clinton ad from 2008—someone can wield power without such legitimacy, but such power will always be obeyed grudgingly, more out of fear or resignation than devotion—and even in such cases, there must enough people who see that power as legitimate, because, after all, there would have to be some loyalists ready to instill fear in the others. Ultimately, we could imagine ways of quantifying, provisionally, such relations—John Adams once posited as the relevant political question, how many votes does a particular man’s vote carry with it?

Using this conception as a guide to political thinking in the present (where all political thinking has to take place) is not that simple. Without perpetual, self-evidently and unanimously recognized threats and emergencies occurring on a daily basis in such a way as to provide regular tests, how can we recognize the more disciplined? As we all know, the guy who seems to have to all together might collapse under pressure, while some loser might rise to the occasion. It also strikes me as a potential contradiction that I agree with those who find Donald Trump, a seemingly supremely undisciplined man (at least in some arenas), as the most likely champion of American and Western civilization today. At the very least, the indispensability of Trump’s tit-for-tat semi-barbarism needs to be accounted for; or what seems indiscipline must be shown to be something else. Otherwise, the argument for legitimacy through disciplinary charisma risks becoming a more theoretical sounding label slapped on one’s political preferences of the moment.

To develop this mode of political thinking, I will return to my discussions of Eric Gans’s analysis, in The End of Culture, of the second most important originary event in human history: the emergence of the Big Man. Gans counters Girard’s theory of myth: rather than a distorted recollection of the originary lynching, myth, for Gans, is an “explanation” of ritual; ritual, meanwhile, is a re-enactment of the originary event, a re-enactment continually modified with the sedimentation of subsequent crises requiring the iteration of ritual on new terms. Myth creates motivations or intentions for the figures on the ritual scene (“backstories,” in Hollywoodese); it is a declarative overlaying of the imperative-ostensive form of ritual. Myths are, therefore, attempts at originary thinking that are simultaneously (as all originary thinking must be) projections forward, as intentions dimly glanced at in one’s surroundings provide the materials for de-sedimenting the unrecoverable scenes and ritual re-enactments constitutive of the inevitable idiosyncrasy of ritual.

This understanding of myth is not obviously related to the emergence of the Big Man, but the increasingly complexity of intentions attributed to figures on the ritual scene (which, of course, can include animals and the elements) lays the groundwork for making sense of the Big Man’s “usurpation” of the center. Mythical versions of the Big Man will attribute ever more powerful intentions to that central figure, for a while, at least, at the expense of everyone else, who are relegated to some form of servitude. First of all, he gives all; but in that case he must have a right to all. He is the center of gift circulation, so he must be omniscient as well: he must know what everyone needs and deserves, and how to produce and provide it. He must, therefore, also be aware of resentments directed his away, and of attempts to bring those resentments to fruition in various plots. He has eyes and ears everywhere, and so on. What this amounts to, in effect, is a continual process of humanization (which, clearly, was not accomplished at one blow on the originary scene—hominization, just like biological evolution, continues), or, more precisely, anthropomorphization: just as in that despised literary trope, the Big Man doesn’t really have those intentions until they are attributed to him—he must grow into them, and in turn project corresponding intentions onto his subjects. The intellectual and moral overturning of tributary tyranny (by both metaphysics and monotheism) derives from this anthropomorphized world, ever richer in intentions, actual and possible. The more fully “intentionalized” our world, the more human we are—but there are always tacit practices and habits yet to be “intentionalized” or anthropomorphized. (For that matter, there is certainly backsliding as well—intentions that had been fleshed out explicitly are “de-activated” and return to their tacit state.)

The sequence and structure—event/ritual/myth—doesn’t change, even under post-ritual, post-mythical conditions. We still all the time, every day, on many levels, instigate crises due to mimetic rivalry; we create practices and habits that defer the worst possible outcome of those rivalries; and we come up with stories, rationalizations if you like, for how we arrived at those habits and practices. In fact, what we call “rationalizations” are just attempts to (as Girard does, in Gans’s account) conflate event and practice/habit, to insist that the way we do things is just, circularly, the way things are done—to conflate our resentments with self-evident justice. But in order to rationalize, you need to draw upon “canonical” intentions—in other words, your rationalization will be effective to the extent that you can purport to demonstrate that you (or one on whose behalf you rationalize) only did what anyone would have done. Rationalization is the mode of thought of consumer satisfaction: I deserve what everyone else deserves because no one in my situation could have done any better than I did. So, here we can mark the difference between consumer satisfaction and the proto-Big Man’s producer’s desire: the latter invents/discovers a non-canonical intention, or anthropomorphizes in a new way. What the producer defers is the desire, compulsion even, to reinforce and seek shelter in the most “authorized” intentions—once you defer the incredibly powerful desire to disperse responsibility for your acts you need to find a way to enhance your responsibility for your acts and the only way to do that is by broadcasting your actions as exemplary, thereby in fact creating new forms of intentionality.

So, the marginal anthropomorph is, first of all, the “producer” who self-exemplifies and allows to be attributed to himself a “human” quality that didn’t exist before, much less reside “in” that producer. But he is not the only emergent anthropomorph. Let’s return to the notion of a “universal conversation” put forth in Gans’s recent Chronicle, and my own discussion of it a couple of posts back. Now, we can’t take this notion of a universal conversation (in a post-colonial, wired, world) literally, if it’s supposed to mean that we are all actually talking to each other simultaneously. Conversations are, as they always have been, limited in scope: anyone who’s spent a bit of time on blog comment sections will attest that there is always a threshold past which additional voices can no longer be included within the conversation (one person can’t really respond to more than 5 or 6 genuinely diverse interlocutors), which, if it continues, splits into several separate conversations. However, we can take this notion absolutely literally if we take it to mean that anyone could eavesdrop on, and interrupt, any other conversation. Indeed, that vague, menacing, sense of always being overheard (which gets projected, somewhat mythically, onto super-competent and malevolent state security agencies) by those who could at any moment enter the conversation and reset the norms so as to discredit and, in effect, eliminate oneself is the quintessential “PC” experience.

Now, in order to engage with each other on the marketplace, we have to anthropomorphize each other, that is, attribute to one another the intentions constitutive of a successful exchange. Much of modern economics is a quasi-mythical explanation of the practices and habits of life in the marketplace, supplementing the intentions that would make sense of it all. For that matter, liberal politics is itself little more than a similar, and far more desperate attempt to anthropomorphize, as if the intentions “evident” in market exchange (respecting the autonomy of the other, weighing options, assessing actual and possible resources, etc.) could be projected onto the process of selecting individuals to staff the government and of engaging in discourse over laws and their enforcement. But not all exchanges are successful—indeed, some are bitterly regretted in retrospect—and more or less mythical intentions and narratives are constructed to account for those as well. The more humanity we are capable of attributing to others, the more inhumanity we are capable of attributing. The end of history is a chimera because these two capacities must always progress alongside each other. Without engaging in moral equivalence, or concealing my own interest in the matter (as if I could), it is easy to see the escalating SJW-alt-right battleground as taking shape along these lines, with each side constructing mythical social orders defined precisely by their categorical exclusion of the inhuman other.

Aside from the self-exemplifying desiring producer himself, then, the marginal anthropomorph is the figure whom you interrupt and address (or to whose interruption and address you respond) within the universal conversation and to whom you attribute a possible intention that would defer the escalation within the battlespace. This doesn’t involve signaling your virtue to the other side by taking on your own “extremists.” It doesn’t involve purges, or searches for “common ground.” It merely involves opening some reality closed off by the escalation, and asking someone else, even a hypothetical interlocutor, what they would do with it. Even something like “OK, after you’ve killed them all, then what?” Any course of action which we can attribute (always somewhat mythically) to a “we” breaks down into a (charismatic) relation between the more and less disciplined among “us”: asking what these different parts or levels of the “we” are doing when the “we” acts implicitly invites the interlocutor to adopt the imaginary standpoint of the more disciplined, and that at least makes conversation possible, even if it’s the conversation of opposing generals laying the ground rules for a battle the following day that will leave only one army in existence. It would be a conversation between those have invented and crossed a threshold in the ongoing hominization process; between marginal anthropomorphs.

And what about Trump? Suffice it to say that his tit-for-tat approach is exposing tacit practices and habits that will need to be “intentionalized,” and thereby creating the conditions for extensive anthropomorphization.