The Great Submission
Growing up, I was obsessed with Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Every Christmas, my parents would give me encyclopedias where mythical empires and historical figures came to life, ruling, warring, and enacting humankind’s epics. When I was eleven, I visited Napoléon’s mausoleum at Les Invalides and was immediately mesmerized by the life and legend of a man, ruthless and cunning, who carved his own path from the Corsican shores to an Emperor’s throne; a man who spun a reality distortion field so powerful it engulfed all of Europe for a decade; a man who sliced through the fabric of History like a knife cuts through butter, like a scalpel dissects muscle and fascia.
Lately, I have been rediscovering History as an adult, marvelling at the skills and self-belief of the sovereign individuals who shaped our world. It appears that I am not alone: these days, the Napoleonic Revival is in full swing on Twitter, spearheaded by the ascendent @BroductManager. Against the backdrop of the retvrn movement, this collective surge in longing for a Main Protagonist — itself perhaps a tributary of the Elon cult — seems to point to a more general longing for Greatness: Great Men, Great Works of Men, Great History.
Starting from this premise, we may find ourselves asking, “How do we get there?”
I. History as a Helicoid
One thing I have learned recently, but did not understand as a child, is that the study of History allows you to shift your Overton window and become a perpetual outsider. This can foster intellectual athleticism and ontological flexibility: every time you learn about an era, an empire, or a historical figure, you can step into another life and enrich your worldview. As one learns from the lives of others, one can test out narratives, form connections between their nodes, and rearrange the tectonic plates of their mind map.
Another insight I developed is that History follows a helicoid pattern. Up close, things often seem cyclical, each step bringing us to a point where we’ve been before; at the same time, though, we ascend, incrementally progressing along the Z axis. In contrast to theories of History that view the works of Man linearly (as part of a grand design, for example) or cyclically (exhibit A: Hard Times Create Strong Men; exhibit B: Hinduism, Buddhism), this conception of History finds an echo in the dialectic perspective: “each phase of the historical process could be said to contain the seeds of its own destruction and to “negate” itself.” (I’m more than happy to discuss this with any Hegelian; my understanding of his philosophy is woefully incomplete.)
If History is a helicoid, then, where is the pendulum’s bob in its oscillation today? What leitmotifs have woven themselves into the current social and political tapestry?
Some worry that we live in a Reign of Terror 2.0 because of Cancel Culture, comparing the physical death of the Terror with the social death of Cancel Culture. While the puritanical thread runs through both, I would argue that Cancel Culture is far removed from the Terror: the social death brought by contemporary ideological purges is but a shadow of the opprobrium that could befall you in the age of Socrates or under the rule of the Caesars, Louis XIV, or Catherine II.
I would, however, draw parallels between today and the times before the 1789 Revolution, at the dawn of the Estates General. France back then was on the brink of bankruptcy after decades of war and living off loans; discontent was brewing; a new class was rising, hungry for freedom and self-determination, having torn the veil from their eyes and seen rotting institutions and corrupted elites (ring a bell? [insert recent headline on inflation/covid/foreign policy]).
II. Vivat in æternum
The world is changing. One need not be a technology brother to notice that technological progress has been skyrocketing: SpaceX, mRNA, CRISPR, AlphaFold, 3D printing, and drone development are but a few examples. Some might even insist that we are witnessing the end of the Great Stagnation. Unable to keep up, institutions are crumbling, giving way to an increasingly decentralized Brave New World powered by web3, localism, and the off-grid lifestyle (often by way of the trad revival for the latter).
In short, things are about to get rocky, and if the exhausted Hellenistic states of 336 BC were fruits ripe for Alexander the Great’s plucking, and the exhausted Europe of the late 18th century was a perfect prey for Napoléon’s eagle claws, then the exhausted world of 20XX will be a welcome stage for the Übermensch who will usher in the Diamond Age.
Yes, dear readers, I see that you yearn for Napoléon. Yet for a Napoléon to rise from the ashes of old institutions, first a Robespierre must topple the dilapidated edifice and sow disorder — Samson pulling down the temple pillars. (Later still, a stern Metternich will have to clean up after everyone.) I believe the youth of today should read just enough about Napoléon to kindle the sacred fire of ambition and instead carefully study Robespierre, Marat, Saint-Just, et al. so that they may learn from their exploits and their blunders. (On another note, Robespierre was more scapegoat than monster; I think those of you who speak French would thoroughly enjoy Henri Guillemin’s lecture on the man behind the caricature.)
To be honest, it always amuses me to see self-identified libertarians decry Robespierre’s tyranny and in the same breath praise Napoléon’s genius. How many were killed in twelve years of Napoleonic Wars compared to the Reign of Terror’s puny ten months? How many were accused or jailed by the Little Caporal’s secret police, how many voices were silenced by his press censorship? How many more suffered when he reinstated slavery? When one coldly considers Napoléon’s deeds, it becomes impossible to mistake the tyrant for a liberator. Why, then, does he appeal to us so much?
Bonaparte’s masterstroke, in my book, was to construct the Legend of Napoléon in such a way that the ordinary man will take his side and identify with him rather than those upon which he ruled — many of them equally as ambitious, smart, and capable; all of them with their own hopes and dreams — millions of which were used as cannon fodder and sacrificed like NPCs. After all, History was written by propagandists adept at hypnotizing the masses.
Or maybe you’re not hypnotized. Maybe, just maybe, you don’t really want freedom — at least not as much as you’d like to admit to yourself, and certainly not as much as it’s allowed to admit these days.
III. Fatherneed and Revolution
Nowadays, everyone wants to lead and no one wants to follow (or so they claim). Yet somewhere in our heart of hearts, I believe we all long to submit to a higher power: the rise of tradcath, the near-religious/religious fervor of crypto, and — according to some/me — the Napoleonic Revival on Twitter are testaments to this longing.
“I tried hard to have a father
But instead I had a dad”Nirvana, Serve the Servants
I still remember Jordan Peterson’s meteoric rise to fame the way one remembers a fever dream. Back then, I was both mesmerized and baffled by his fervent following, particularly their zeal in defending him; to me, this reflected emotional involvement. Eventually, I realized that Peterson took up the mantle of spiritual father to his audience. In an increasingly secular world, he was a father figure and sense-maker for countless disenfranchised young people. In the face of uncertainty and social upheaval, he was someone who told us how the world worked and that things were going to be okay, provided that we make our bed and clean up our life: a benevolent cult leader/patriarch, if you will.
The importance of a father in a child’s life is supported by a growing body of research. Child psychiatrist Kyle Pruett even coined the term Fatherneed in his book of the same name. In light of the popularity of men like Peterson, Trump, and more recently Zemmour, this begs the question: what if the Fatherneed was not only individual, but also collective?
Like any aspect of our psyche, the Fatherneed can be wielded against us; as I see it, this partly explains the capharnaum of current politics. For decades (maybe even centuries or since time immemorial, depending on who you ask), governments have exploited populations’ collective Fatherneed by telling us what we want to hear but not what we need to hear, spawning spoiled children who evolve into immature adults. How could we ever expect such disordered masses to follow the lead of an Alexander or a Napoléon, let alone give birth to such a figure?
My hypothesis, as improbable as it seems, is that cryptography — and its widespread adoption — might solve this. As we know, one of crypto’s central tenets is sovereignty. On a first level, it seeks to grant us independence from central bank-controlled, government-tampered fiat currency. On a second level, it promises emancipation from traditional nation-states through the creation of network states.
By demanding that we become sovereign, crypto requires us to become our own father figure and parent ourselves rather than wait for a parent to come in and save the day. In the face of derelict institutions, crypto aims to enable us to pull ourselves by our bootstraps and establish new cities and new forms of governance (on this matter, technologist and researcher Saffron Huang wrote a detailed piece on Turing-complete governance by way of decentralized systems). In short, cryptography — among other mechanisms like going off-grid and embracing localism — could empower us, collectively, to become adults and answer the collective Fatherneed ourselves.
Today’s crypto/decentralization revolution might prove itself as violent and momentous as its 1789 sister, albeit (hopefully) not as bloody. Indeed, while another storming of the Bastille seems improbable for now, the world is indisputably becoming fragmented and — according to many — reorganizing itself along three axes postulated by Balaji: CCP, NYT, BTC.
IV. Patresfamilias, Politicians, Prophets
Let’s recap for a moment, shall we?
It appears that nowadays we are ruled by incompetent tyrants (bad parents) who pretend to uphold democracy but instead operate on the infamous “do as I say, not as I do” proverb. In such a situation, some might argue that the reasonable thing to do is to emancipate ourselves and cultivate autonomy (no parents) by becoming as self-reliant as possible, either by becoming Luddites and/or going off-grid or by founding network states.
Now, my belief is that eventually, competent leaders (good parents) will emerge from the new people, and because we will be truly free by then — and therefore will have made peace with authority — we may willingly return to the fold, knowing that we are stronger together than apart.
All in all, this unfolding of events follows the helicoid model: History does not repeat itself but it often rhymes, all the while forging ahead. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
At this point, perhaps you are wondering, “Can’t we remain in the no parents stage this time around? Why would emancipated men enslave themselves anew by yielding to a higher authority?”
My answer to this, while tentative, comes in two parts.
Firstly, while it is better to be your own parent than to have bad parents, it is better yet, in my opinion, to have good parents than to be your own parent. In other words, similarly to the optionality crisis in the private sphere, I believe that when it comes to the public sphere, it is better to have no rulers at all than bad rulers, and better yet to have good rulers than no rulers at all.
Secondly, by denying our innate desire to follow and relegating it to the depths of our subconscious minds, we make ourselves vulnerable to demagogues, who can wield our Fatherneed against us and play us like fiddles even as we build radically democratic, decentralized states. In my experience, people who boast that they are “not the type of person who follows” are often those who would benefit most from following. Countless self-proclaimed “free thinkers” lead dissipated, directionless lives, all the while screeching about their independence. It is easy to profess that one is free as they are hurling through the universe like a valence electron; it is much harder to submit to the right power.
Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Napoléon accomplished what they did because men followed them — men who obeyed, submitted to a greater power, sacrificed their life for king and country. Who in the West, nowadays, would suffer and die for a cause? For all our technological advances and tools for connectivity, could we even coordinate half of our predecessors’ great feats?
As important as is the Fatherneed self-sufficiency in today’s circumstances, I do not view it as a sustainable mode of operation in the long run. Looking back on History, one model of social organization seems to prevail across cultures and timelines, on both smaller and larger scales: autocracy.
On a smaller, private scale, there was a time when patriarchs (and sometimes matriarchs) were the source of social cohesion, the pillar upon which order rested. Power was concentrated in their hands, they were the embodiment of family unity, and their word was law. Whether this dynamic was enforced through actual legislation — as with the Roman paterfamilias — or unwritten social rules, it seems to me that such a system fostered a sense of surrender which went beyond mere resignation.
On a larger, public scale, there were kings, Holy Roman Emperors, and dictators who commanded both political and military power — some of them good, most of them mediocre (but are current politicians so much better?), some of them horrible, and some of them stars so incandescent that their light still shines on today, indifferent to the spacetime continuum. This, I conjecture, is where we find our intensely yearned-for Greatness: Great Men, Great Works of Men, Great History.
Perhaps the Habsburgs will tweet their way into getting back their empire. I would not be surprised if the last 250 years of Western democracy were but a small pocket of insanity, a daring experiment, amidst the constant rise and fall of autocracies.
Truth be told, between a Good Democracy and a Good Autocracy, I cannot claim to know with certainty which one is more powerful, feasible, or sustainable (maybe the point is that nothing endures anyway?). For now, we may strive to be sovereign, but when the time comes (if it comes), how will we know when to submit or to whom we should submit? To which degree should we submit on the individual and collective scales? Am I/are we overreacting?
Despite these looming uncertainties, there are three things which I can advance with more confidence:
In a world where the concept of authority will be decoupled with that of tyranny, where we will have a word for "cult leader" that does not carry a sinister connotation, perhaps we may see the return of patriarchs and matriarchs, emperors and philosopher kings. Yet I do not believe that power should be a birthright. The truly powerful do not ask for worship: they become worthy of worship.
Meaningful submission can only happen when those who submit are truly free to begin with. If History is helicoidal, we would not merely revert to the autocracy of our ancestors, but instead adopt a new form of opt-in autocracy, beyond democracy and autocracy 1.0. I cannot pretend to know whether the men who followed History’s great conquerors yielded willingly. I suspect, however, that we people of today are not free; but by freeing ourselves, be it through cryptography or other ideological means, we will hopefully establish conditions for the Übermensch rising from the ashes to guide humanity into a new era.
As tumultuous as our times may be, I choose to regard the unfurling chaos as sheer potential energy being converted into kinetic energy; if History is any indication, we would be remiss not to use this spark to ignite our great endeavors. I am utterly convinced that there has never been a better time to change the course of History — in fact, there has never been a better time to be alive. As agentic as they were in their living, Alexander, Robespierre, Napoléon, and Metternich all lay dead and cold now. You and I, on the other hand, are still alive. Today, the stage is ours. We may die tomorrow, but today, today, we shall live.
Merry Christmas, dear readers.
This is surprisingly good and hits a critical inflection point of our social evolution. I'm super relieved that it doesn't contain traces of the excess moralizing that I've grown extremely averse towards. Hmpf. I grew up obsessed with moral relativism (+had the typical aversion towards democracies [though GWB triggered this in many liberals]), which is not the ideal solution, but just one solution to being trapped in a system that prevented ppl of my generation from having any agency whatsoever
Similarly I grew up obsessed with thiel, who is highly imperfect, but is still the apotheosis of the self-knowledge of how we've let extreme levels of unnecessary stupidity hold us back from real progress (and he's the ONLY person who appropriately ACTS on said anger, whereas most other people are "dead enough" to content themselves with mediocrity, not having enough "aliveness" to act on what's truly lost). I guess I need a revolutionary anger-driven figure to inspire me, which is why I'm largely uninspired by any of the purported "great men" of any democracy - they're just "lame" compared to what *could* be possible from the viewpoint of those who aren't constrained by checks and balances. I think the imaginative space/agility of people today is *much* larger than those before (+we theoretically have more "abundance"), which can prevent the "worst excesses" of dictatorship from happening again.
I'm still angry and sus at both K12 and Asian parenting and how they've basically destroyed another generation, but we can do so much better, and as emotionally appealing as it is to say that we just want to "blow up the schools" and unschool everyone, it may not be the globally optimal solution compared to those I've seen at ad astera (still a better solution than 95% of schools and parents though...)
I've been reading up on early Christianity lately and find it quite oddly inspirational (ESP IN THE INTERNAL INTEGRITY IT INSPIRES IN PEOPLE, *and* just HOW contrarian/courageous you needed to be to believe in it IN ITS EARLY DAYS), though I'm still very anti-(what it has become).
#theplot
Virgin political theorist: People voted for Trump because of Fatherneed. Chad rando who actually watched Trump's speeches: voters let him hit it cuz he's goofy.
Even the best autocrat can't compete with mediocre democracy and I doubt any kind of fancy new system can change that. Unless they are into abusive dads, people with Fatherneed should look elsewhere for a solution. The incentives of an autocracy are all wrong. The autocrat is not free, as everyone (even Aristotle, who should have known better!) seems to imagine. The higher power the autocrat must submit to is the collective will of the generals, who can depose him at will if they collaborate to do so. And that has implications for how the state has to be run. The military must be paid, before all else, and the generals must be paid lavishly enough that they prefer the incumbent to a coup. A coup normally carries risk, but failure to pay the agreed rates provides them all a point they can coordinate around, knowing the other generals can be trusted to recognize this as the point at which their peers will also prefer, and assist in, a coup.
In poorer states the military eats up the entire budget and even the dictator is poor; in relatively wealthier ones the leader can decide whether to feather his own nest or try investing a bit in the welfare of the people, and most choose the former. The best an autocrat can ever aspire to is to pay the soldiers first, and then throw the leftovers to the people. By and large the bad ones aren't incompetent; they are highly competent and simply optimizing for something different than what you want them to optimize for. You can't get better ones because they have a selection process, and accountability to their selectorate, just like democratic leaders do. That selectorate is not the people at large, but whoever commands the raw physical power of guns or whatever is the weapon of the day.
The obvious question: why doesn't this also happen in democracies, which also have a military and lots of ambitious generals? The answer: because a general who wants to depose the President can try without risking his life or freedom, and without inheriting a temporarily crippled government, by running for President. Given the difficulties inherent in organizing a coup, the success rate of being a candidate, able to coordinate a campaign with any willing supporter out in the open, may be just as high or higher than the success rate of coup attempts. And, in a democracy that also has effective protection from arbitrary arrest, there is a further anti-coup equilibrium. A successful coup might result in better pay, but it also means more physical danger and miserable working conditions, and not just in the coup period itself. The new dictator can assassinate generals of questionable loyalty at will any time they are not united against him, and the new dictator can be murdered at will any time the generals are united. Any general who persists in the desire for a coup despite all this still faces the fact that his peers are dis-incentivized by all these factors, and so can't be relied upon to help. The end result is all the players benefit from leaving the selection in the hands of the people. And that in turn means candidates must appeal more to the desires of the people and less to the desires of the generals, which pushes more of the budget to investment in the people or toward tax cuts, and pushes toward greater freedom for the average citizen.
Suggested reading: The Dictator's Handbook, by Bueno de Mesquita. Alternately, CGPGrey's summary video, Rules for Rulers.