If you hang around in certain parts of the dissident sphere, maybe you've heard the phrase 'secret king'. It describes a person whose natural position in society is low or middling, but who nurses a delusional sense of high status, resulting in passive-aggression against other people. Telltale signs of a secret king include an affected pose of superiority, a combination of entitlement and underachievement, and the use of rationalisation and sophistry to interpret personal defeats as victories.
As far as I know, credit for coining the term goes to Vox Day, who likes to satirise the self-deception involved by repeating the phrase "secret king wins again!" On Vox's blog, however, the term more often used is 'gamma male', which means - more or less - a secret king mentality plus middlebrow intelligence and low sexual attractiveness. This concept is bound up with a theory of male natural hierarchy, which elaborates on the original Roissy hierarchy of 'alphas', 'betas' and 'omegas', ranking 'gamma' as one step above 'omega'. Casual observation suggests that Vox's hierarchy has not dethroned Roissy's, but the term 'gamma male' is becoming popular under its own steam, because it is the sole descriptor for a personality type that is rapidly becoming legion.
'Gamma' is clearly the odd man out in Vox's hierarchy. He is not just low on the pecking order, but is also afflicted by a sickness of the soul, which sabotages whatever modest potential he does possess. That a hierarchy should have its bottom is inevitable; that it should constitute such a fever swamp of socially-cancerous delusions is not. So I think it would be useful to make a distinction between 'secret king' and 'gamma male': between the delusion of undeserved high status, and the subset of men who fall prey to it most severely because of their unfortunate traits. The traits have always been around, but the delusion would appear to be a relatively new thing - at least to judge from the fact that we must use neologisms to describe it.
I propose that the secret king syndrome is a type of folk illness, caused by a collective fixed idea that runs through all of modern Western culture. This fixation cramps the strong and cripples the sickly, just as the poison of nightshade is contained in the whole plant, but concentrated in its berries. This means the secret king mentality can affect otherwise normal and healthy people, in certain contexts. In fact, in one particular context, that it affects almost everyone in the West.
This occurred to me only recently, a few weeks ago, following a discussion with a British friend on the subject of the coronavirus. My friend launched into a standard conservative take on the evil totalitarian Chinese state, which had caused all this trouble. I replied that China may have been the point of origin for the virus, but had got a handle on it far more quickly and effectively than the West, despite having had zero advance warning. I said that the response of Britain and the U.S. had been an absolute joke, and cited a few of the things I had been reading in the news at the time: the political point-scoring by the unaccountable media, the shit-stirring and rent-seeking by diversity commissars, the inability to produce basic masks due to the globalist hollowing of our industry, etc.
My assumption was that all this chaos, incompetence and political bullshit should make a laughing-stock of a country (as indeed it would, if that country were China, or Russia). But the viewpoint of my friend on the same facts was totally different. It was that Britain and the U.S. are "free countries", whose people have the right to pull in different directions, as opposed to the imagined monolith of Chinese society in which everyone is enslaved by the government. The underlying idea was that the Chinese success in containing the virus was somehow illegitimate, like curing an illness by the power of the devil. I continued to argue my case, bringing up this or that example, but every one was simply reinterpreted as evidence for Western liberty and Chinese slavery.
Maybe you don't think this is the most unreasonable opinion in the world, and now is not the time to argue the myths and realities of life in China. But let me make just two points. Firstly, the inhabitants of the West are not 'free' in the classical sense - free like the ancient Athenian or Roman citizens - because they have to pay for their government (and pay for so much of it that a true laissez-faire response would be politically impossible, leading to an unhappy medium, a cargo-cult lockdown). Secondly: if a Western government can perform a quick legal ritual and put everyone under house arrest, there's clearly no practical substance to this 'freedom' either, beyond the anarchy and chaos of liberal government. The state has the power to revoke it unopposed (no, the mithering of overgrown teenage girls like Brendan O'Neill does not constitute 'resistance'), but it chooses not to most of the time, one reason being that it is dependent on our economic activity. So how exactly are we better off than the Chinese, whose government has much the same arrangement with its people, but manages to actually govern instead of just parasitising society and virtue-signalling at its expense?
There seems to be a division of caste that is going unacknowleged here. If you are part of the political class, bureaucracy, corporate elite, official media, etc., the benefits of an open season on power are obvious. But if you are an ordinary person, who just has to put up with a state too anarchic to govern and too oversized to get out of the way, what exactly do you get out of liberal democracy? Evidently, there is at least one answer: you get to call yourself free and sovereign and other people enslaved and powerless, even if they are beating you on most objective measures of human accomplishment. Secret king wins again.
A lot of nationalists and reactionaries are feeling quietly vindicated right now. They naturally view the pandemic as an indictment of globalism and liberalism, and assume that others must naturally come to view it in the same way. But ordinary people are happy to get pissed on and say it is raining gold, and their rulers are happy to divert attention from their own parasitic non-governance, by rallying a public screaming fit against China. Once this has got going, China can simply be turned into a modern avatar of nationalist reaction, and most Westerners will probably end up doubling down on the global manifest destiny of liberal democracy.
Ironically, we would find it much easier to push back against this sort of misdirection if we were in China, because the collective process of self-deception involved is better understood there. We must describe it by neologisms from the fringes, but they have a word in general use: 'Ah Q mentality' (阿Q精神), which primarily means rationalising one's defeats and failures as victories. This term comes from a 1921 novella called The True Story of Ah Q, written by the leftist Chinese writer Lu Xun, and handily available in English translation.
Despite the standard view of the story, as a satire of the Chinese national character, the identity of 'Ah Q mentality' and 'secret king syndrome' is obvious. Ah Q is a despised village labourer who bullies the weak, fawns on the strong, repels women, and uses ridiculous mental contortions to frame his every defeat as a 'spiritual victory'. Some of his antics are allegorical: so when Ah Q takes a beating and says "a son has just beaten his father", this lampoons China's hollow claim to traditional superiority over foreigners such as the Europeans and Japanese, who were much stronger than her in practice. And yet, as the Wikipedia link will tell you, Ah Q's story was considered so true to life that many Chinese readers thought it was about their own lives.
This suggests a link between state decline and individual delusion. And such a thing is not hard to explain: for every state justifies itself by a political formula, and the more this becomes divorced from reality, the more the state teaches the people how to lie to themselves. The average Westerner would not yet recognise himself in a character like Ah Q, and the democratic "end of history" is not yet quite as bankrupt as 19th-century China's pretence to stand atop a Confucian hierarchy of nations. But perhaps we can look into the future of the one by drawing an analogy with the past of the other.
Of course, there is a limit to this. Ah Q can be universalised, because he shows the same combination of low merit, superficial intelligence and self-absorbed sophistry as the Western secret king type. But his delusions are quite alien to us: they are too Chinese, too externalised and ritualised, too obsessed with explicit status hierarchies and face-saving manoeuvres. I can't imagine any Westerner making up a prestigious family genealogy, or thinking of himself as a father beaten by his son. Ah Q can tell us nothing about the content of the secret king delusion.
But so far we have the term 'secret king', and the connection to the political formula of liberal democracy, and this tells us quite a lot. For the popular romantic appeal of liberal democracy depends on its promise that everyone shall be a king. Arguably, the term 'liberal democracy' means nothing else: democracy means that the mass of the people shall be sovereign, and liberalism means that each one among them is entitled to as much individual sovereignty as possible. And if the association of sovereignty with kingship seems dated, this is only because liberal democracy has been too successful in destroying the older regimes that originally played host to it.
Perhaps you think I'm pulling a sleight of hand here, trying to stretch the 'secret king' label around everyone who believes in liberal democracy. So let's say clearly that we are now moving beyond this type of kingship delusion, into one that is less egoistic and more theoretical, and not dependent on any undesirable personal traits. However, a delusion is still a delusion, and at this point a memorable quotation comes to mind that should prove this point beyond doubt. It's from a blog post by Antidem, which quotes the conservative sci-fi author John C. Wright as saying this:
What should really interest us is this view of the open kingship delusion as a guarantor of virtue, to the extent that people can be called slaves and poltroons for not sharing it. Of virtuous delusions, even misguidedly virtuous ones, Ah Q can tell us nothing. Fortunately, we can reach for a more famous delusional literary archetype: the protagonist of Miguel de Cervantes' four-hundred-year-old novel Don Quixote, which I've recently finished after having had it on my reading list for years. Just as the Chinese got the term 'Ah Q mentality' from The True Story of Ah Q, Don Quixote has bequeathed words like 'quixotic' and 'quixotism' to Westerners, again suggesting the resonance of delusional characters with ordinary people.
Don Quixote is a country gentleman in Spain who reads too many chivalric tales, and begins to think he is a knight-errant. Superficially, his fantasies resemble those of Ah Q: he takes a title to which he is not entitled, calls his old nag a charger, stays at inns and thinks they are castles, causes trouble for others and thinks he has set the world to rights. And yet Don Quixote's 'spiritual victories' bring him real victories: at one point he stares down a lion for the sake of his knightly reputation, elsewhere he resists seduction out of fidelity to his imaginary lady. He is a paradoxical character, a parody of late mediaeval and early modern Europe, which was obsessed with reviving tradition and yet ended up giving birth to modernity. According to a famous essay by Ivan Turgenev, Don Quixote's defining quality is his lack of egoism, and this is surely the main thing that separates him from Ah Q. He lays claim to grandiose status not to salve his pride, but to do what he finds to be good. Thus, he can carry his delusion into the world, instead of hiding within it.
It is likely, I think, that the letter 'Q' in Ah Q is an allusion to Don Quixote. It is a fact that Lu Xun read a translation of Cervantes' book, about a decade before conceiving of Ah Q. The true meaning of The True Story of Ah Q, then, is that it is a parody of Don Quixote (which is itself a parody of mediaeval chivalric romances), expressing a typical May Fourth view on Western positive action versus Chinese negativity and impotence. But as reactionary bad elements, we can apply a more Spenglerian reading, in which the spirit of Don Quixote can actually degenerate into that of Ah Q. And this may prove to be much more compelling. Lu Xun could only observe the distance between two delusions, and portray a temporary collision of decayed tradition with modernity. But we can stay within the remit of Western culture, and trace the permanent collision of modernity with reality.
Imagine, if you will, a vertical spectrum: its highest point is represented by Don Quixote, and its lowest point by Ah Q. Envisage an object moving down the spectrum, the Q-delusion, a specific cultural crystallisation of the infantile wish to be a king. This desire for kingship is fed by two motives, to do the work of a king and to have the status of a king, and the downward movement represents a degeneration from the one into the other.
This Q-delusion is not synonymous with liberal democracy, whose origins lie in religious inventions and power configurations. That's why it begins with Don Quixote, who still affirms throne and altar, and merely has a vague wish to become a king (by legitimate channels) after proving his worth as a hero. It also ends up at Ah Q, the exhausted fag-end of the process, who depends on no political forms and merely suffers from an vague, mindless sense of entitlement. But at each stage between these two points - the infancy of modernity, and the present day - the Q-delusion has attached itself to liberal ideologies and infused them with a glittering romantic beauty. And at the mid-point of the spectrum, I would say, is the open kingship delusion: the promise of liberal democracy, that all men shall be sovereigns unto themselves.
The first degeneration, into republican and democratic rebellion, is easily disguised as an advance. One reason is that the Q-delusion acquires a deceptive air of sanity at this point. Whereas Quixote-types do, and Ah Q-types think, crazy things for the sake of imaginary personal status, someone who has sublimated his lunacy into politics can remain otherwise normal and healthy. And what is lost in the quality of quixotism - the sincere desire to be worthy of kingship - is initially made up for in quantity. Telling ordinary people that they are kings may gratify their pride, but it also extends a sense of sovereign responsibility throughout society. For a time.
But liberalism cannot sustain any of the virtues it inherits from pre-liberal society, just as a bonfire cannot sustain the fuel it burns. The misattributed 'republican virtue' depends on an ideal of kingship repudiated by liberalism, much as the Victorian theory of saintly womanhood depended on its subservience to sinful manhood. As it begins to dissipate, the little kings become more interested in luxury than liberty, and the social order starts to decay - causing bureaucratic regental governance to advance, little by little, until the kings are far more tightly controlled than they ever were as peasants. Obviously I'm painting with broad brushstrokes, but you get the idea.
Eventually, the residues of quixotism settle on the stagnant waters of the Ah Q mentality. The de facto power-holders no longer promote the open kingship delusion, which rings as embarrassing to them as the memory of a promise in the mind of one who has broken it. But they are happy to keep it going in the form of a baseless sense of undeserved status, derived from the empty theories and rituals of liberal democracy. So the people are habituated to self-deception, falling prey to social pathologies like narcissism and dissaffection. And a few begin to sink below the waterline, into more severely self-absorbed and delusional patterns - the secret king syndrome being only one example.
This is one narrative of the degeneration. But it leaves out something very important. Everything I've said so far assumes a spontaneous, self-directed, voluntary collective process. This, too, is a liberal and democratic assumption, and obviously wrong in this case. Power has long wielded mass quixotic delusion as a weapon, first capturing the state by promising sovereign independence, then corroding the social order by creating excuses for bureaucratic rule. And now that there is little left to promise, those in power continue to benefit from the extraordinary faith of the average Westerner in liberal democracy - which, to paraphrase a maxim of La Rochefoucauld on human pride, transforms itself in a thousand ways, and is never so well-disguised as when masquerading as its opposite.
And don't forget: those in power control the mass media and entertainment industry, the most extensive and centralised mind-control apparatus in human history. As long as they need the Q-delusion, no matter how wretched it becomes, they can keep it on artificial life support. Moreover, they can even simulate higher points on the Q-spectrum - leading the Western Ah Q to believe he is still a Don Quixote, and keeping him off the "road to self-examination" that Lu Xun wanted to open to the Chinese by writing The True Story of Ah Q.
The external manipulation plays a major role in the later chapters of Don Quixote, in which the hero is sent on all sorts of fake adventures and wild goose chases, mostly by noblemen having a laugh at his expense. But since its object in our own time is the Ah Q type, who is usually far from willing to wake up from it, I have to say that a more pejorative turn of phrase is in order. Thus, I'm going to borrow the term 'thumotic pornography' from a recent article by Curtis Yarvin, better known in dissident circles as Mencius Moldbug.
In Plato's tripartite theory of the soul, thumos (higher passion) is contrasted favourably with epithumia (lower passions and desires, including erotic desire). It is related to ambition, aggression, pride, the desire for glory and recognition, fear, anger, and so on. All of these qualities are engaged in political conflicts, and Yarvin/Moldbug defines thumos for his own purposes as 'political desire'. He defines thumotic pornography as a mobilisation of thumos that "has no impact" and "engages political instincts without changing the real world - like being a sports fan".
This concept is treated offhandedly, given no more elaboration than I have directly quoted here. But a basic lesson of the original Moldbug blog is that the permanent government - the bureaucracy, directed by the academic-media complex, a.k.a. 'the Cathedral' - is solidly progressive, whereas the elected government open to capture by conservatives is quasi-ceremonial. This leads me to suspect that Moldbug would apply the concept of thumotic pornography primarily to conservatives, as their voting and activism is largely masturbatory. I wouldn't disagree with this, but as I did with Vox Day's 'secret king', I'm going to make the case for a wider definition of thumotic pornography.
To lay out my reasoning, I'll use an analogy with epithumia, specifically erotic desire. The aims of erotic desire can be divided into high and low: sensual pleasure at the bottom, and romantic love at the top. There is a huge quantity of 'low porn' that simulates the fulfilment of lust, but there is also a subtler and more corrupting 'high porn', which can simulate stronger emotions and longer-term relations. If you're not sure what this looks like, the most famous example would be Belle Delphine. The fact that she appears to do better business than actual porn stars is mystifying, until we realise that she is selling girlfriend fantasies along with the fap fodder. And note that this depth of delusion requires reinforcement in reality, i.e. actions that would normally have an effect in the real world. When incels pay this girl for personal selfies and Skype chats, they are going through archetypal courtship rituals, but the only result is that they keep fapping and she counts her money.
The division of thumotic aims into high and low parallels the Q-spectrum, which is primarily a delusion of thumos. Victory, importance, success and so on are among the low and middling aims, but there is a holy grail above all of them, which is to achieve the status of a hero - a true Don Quixote. So if low thumotic porn includes sports fandom and ceremonial politics, we should expect to find a high thumotic porn that simulates heroism - and, following the analogy with high erotic porn, we should expect it to bait the delusion with some vestiges of reality. (Needless to say, where real danger, effort and difficulty come into play, we are no longer speaking of porn and masturbation - just as we cannot speak of them in the case of an incel who manages to solicit actual sex from an e-thot. We may still be able to speak of delusion in both cases, however.)
When we look for high thumotic porn in Western society, we find most of it being consumed by progressives. Indeed, it is restricted to them as a political privilege for supporting the inner party, for the perk of feeling like Don Quixote in a society of Ah Qs is not to be handed out to just anyone.
For example: in the Cathedral's iron delusion bubble, Donald Trump is not only the elective monarch of the USG, but also a crypto-fascist puppet of an evil Russian dictator. So anyone who marches against Trump, or insults him on Twatter or whatever, can enjoy the feeling of bravely resisting a fascist government. Of course, you'd think some of the progs would start wondering why their stunning and brave #resistance requires no actual courage. But all masturbation depends on suspension of disbelief; and the more divorced from reality it is, the bigger the incentive to suspend one's disbelief.
Progressives also get to project themselves onto official heroic narratives. Let's take a look at the standard pravda biography of Greta Thunberg. Do you get a vague sense of narrative déjà vu? You should, because you're reading the Hero's Journey: a quixotic template baked into Hollywood movies, and now adapted to the latest politically-correct themes, starring Greta Thunberg. The call to adventure, when Greta learns of the climate apocalypse! The initial failure to take it up, because she's too young and the normies won't listen, and she's crippled by her autism! The crossing of the threshold, as she pores over official climate science, and the fall into the abyss of clinical depression and school nonattendance! And, right on cue, the rebirth! Greta weaponises her autism, unlocking her superpowers, such as radical honesty and contagious neurotic anxiety! Roll up, roll up, and help her strike down the dark paternal forces of conservatism, achieving the ultimate boon, and bestowing the gift ofeven more money and power life on the governing classes all humanity...
It's an open secret that this cripple-cum-shaman secret king fantasy is full of bullshit. But the Greta cultists can be relied upon to ignore the stench, because they are receiving a kind of pleasure that feels very much like redemption and apotheosis, projecting their personal inadequacies onto a sort of democratic Ashtavakra and receiving vicarious gratification from her political victories. Force a man to wank, and he is swiftly exhausted; give him the freedom to wank, and porn everywhere, and reassurance that wanking is good for you, and he will always come back for more. The triumph of freedom.
It helps that the progressives' critics are hooked on the same stuff. Outer party conservatives, for all their prattle about facts and feelings, are just too low on the totem pole to enjoy a regular supply of high thumotic porn. Most of the time, they are the ones being pornographed, for the role of a conservative - whether husband, father, religious leader, or even POTUS - is to do a convincing impression of an authority figure who rolls over at the right point in a progressive Hero's Journey. They are paid appropriately for their services, allowed a low-porn thumotic release at election time, and humoured in various Ah Q-type delusions: surrendering to leftists and calling it a moral victory, submitting to feminism under a pretence of chivalry, etc.
But every now and again, conservatives are let off the cuck leash to savage some acceptable scapegoat for the cultural revolution, such as "deadbeat dads" or "neo-Nazis". And this is when their fabled gentility and moderation are cast to the winds, as they can finally stick their shabby, rusted, moldering swords in a safely defanged dragon. The retired Christian blogger Dalrock was a tireless critic of this cowardly self-deception, and once linked to a memorable video in which one such Ah Q briefly gets to play Don Quixote, or at least Greta Thunberg. (Yes, he's a ridiculous sight - but you wouldn't want to meet him somewhere dark and dangerous, like a family court.)
Needless to say, if anything is driving the perceived growth in secret king types and worsening the severity of their delusions, it is this state-run thumotic porn racket. But, as usual with the Cathedral, the creation of a social malaise is merely a justification for prescribing even more poison as a cure. In one of the most interesting pravda articles of the last few years, a thumotic porn addict seriously questions his heroic delusions, and blames them for his chronic delusional mindset (in this case, it is mostly maladaptive daydreaming, another type of extreme self-absorption that has only recently garnered scholarly attention). But look closer. All he wants, and all he's likely to get, is an ideological correction and a penance for feeling any thumos at all as a fucking white male.
If the full hero experience isn't to your liking, why not try the full saint experience? The Platonic cave has acquired some mod-cons since Plato's day. Now you can experience all the mystical euphoria that ought to come from climbing out of it, all while never leaving the comfort of your seat. This would explain the popularity of Cathedral-generated leftist cults involving fake sins, fake guilt, fake asceticism, fake mortification, and fake redemption. Perhaps we have ascended to the realm of nootic pornography by this point. But a wanker is a wanker, and what makes all of this so much masturbation is that none of these heroic journeys or saintly quests even get started in reality.
Before you ask, this is not just because they fail to challenge the ruling ideology, as if only a true rebel can be a hero and a true heretic a saint. Remember, progressivism does not admit the traditional definitions of heroism and sainthood, which involve defending order and defeating enemies (oppression!) and fulfilling spiritual endeavour (opium of the masses!). It wants to apply these words only to those warrior-types and priest-types who serve its cult of rebellion, and it wants to keep this rebellion burning indefinitely, even while concentrating power into progressive hands. But the idea of heroism and sainthood in political disorder depends on a sense of danger, difficulty, conquering grandeur, martyrdom, utopian promise etc., which increasingly drains away in practice, and must be maintained in appearance by deception (porn) and delusion (masturbation). In truth, heroism and sainthood in progressivism are unprincipled exceptions; a hero or saint by the traditional definition is not a progressive hero or saint, and a progressive hero or saint can only be fraudulent.
This enables us to close the thumos-epithumia analogy, by explaining what the permanent government gets out of distributing thumotic porn. Low thumotic porn props up the mass legitimacy of liberal democracy, enabling Ah Q to deny his own wretchedness. But high thumotic porn plays a more important role, preventing revolutionary energies from petering out and ending up in a formal consolidation of power. For this would inevitably lead to a Thermidor - which to progressives is the "betrayal of revolution" that we all learned to hate from Orwell's Animal Farm, but to sane people is just the revival of order and stability after a revolution or civil war.
Previous leftist revolutions, such as French republicanism and Soviet communism, have aimed at permanency but ended up falling prey to Thermidors. Western liberal democracy avoids this, and continues perpetuating its cultural revolution, through a more sophisticated system of bondage: it allows the revolution to ebb and flow, restrains it from swallowing all of society at once, hives off conservatives in weak outer parties, maintains enough free speech to keep heretics in the open, etc. But even this machine would grind to a halt if it were ever cut off from its true power source: the belief of countless thugs, bullies, cowards and popinjays that they are actually quixotic heroes. It is a Matrix of masturbation, constantly stimulating and feeding off its captive thumotic energies.
Once again, China is a good point of reference. Maoist communism had its own panoply of selective free speech, toy opposition parties, social justice warriors, callout culture, intersectionality, etc., and it launched a cultural revolution that lasted a decade and unleashed something like collective madness. But it was all too dependent on charismatic leadership; and once Deng Xiaoping got into power, he pulled off a Thermidorian double-whammy, cracking down on the Chinese cultural revolution and defeating its invasive Western variant. And thereafter China, while still beset by many social and political diseases, has gone from chaos to prosperity and garnered the respect of the West...
...LOL no, just kidding. Westerners may have trouble actualising their kingship, but at least they haven't had it explicitly revoked by their government. Few rightists are too based to sneer at a country in which the government must pay its shills to spread propaganda, when their counterparts in the West will hound people to suicide out of pure revolutionary fervour. And the contempt for Russia, which has been frustrating Western hopes for permanent revolution ever since Stalin had an ice-pick jammed into Trotsky's head, is even greater. So we are back at the point where we started: this delusional superiority complex that afflicts those living under liberal democracy, including those who bear the lash of the cultural revolution.
When I first thought to compare this to the 'Ah Q mentality', what actually came into my mind was a particular vignette in The True Story of Ah Q. It's near the beginning, when Ah Q is swanning around his village bragging that he shares the name of a local landowner. The man in question summons him for a dressing-down, slaps him on the face, and says - more or less - "Do you think you're worthy to share my name?" Whereupon Ah Q slinks off and, being what he is, goes around thinking he has won a great honour because such a man has slapped him on the face.
So why does this remind me of the Western normie attitude to democracy? Well, just as the daily pravda says, democracy in the West is a true successor to ancient Athenian democracy. As the pravda says, it holds the doors of wealth and power open to its citizens, which would be closed to all but a few of them in a monarchy or oligarchy. And as the pravda says, these citizens have every reason to think of themselves as a society of kings, and resist any political change that would subject them to hierarchical government. But if you are like me, and my kith and kin, and the vast majority of people in the West, and certainly everyone in the dissident community, you are not even a citizen in this democracy - much less a king.
Demokratia in ancient Athens was the granting of government power to the people, as defined by the bounds of citizenship. In modern Western democracy, given that government power cannot possibly be wielded by all those who are called citizens, this works the other way around: if you would know who the true citizens are, simply ask who enjoys the rights of government, i.e. to consume tax revenue and exert political power. In the modern West this embraces the permanent governing bureaucracy, its secular-religious academic brain, its extensions in NGOs and quangos, its electoral front, and so on, until we get to various gray areas such as nominally 'private' banks, corporations, etc. This is no shadowy oligarchy, but a huge mass of people distributed across a sprawl of organisations - a true system of government by mob anarchy.
Ordinary folk like ourselves, on the other hand, correspond to the slave population in Athens and the peasants in the Attic countryside (peasants if we are in the taxpaying class, slaves if we work in public-sector jobs without political relevance). And this basic division of citizens and non-citizens cannot be erased. For there is no sublunary political constitution that allows all to consume tax while none need pay it, or allows all to rule while none need be ruled.
But muh right to vote! Ok. Remember, as Spengler said, modern Western civilisation is based on much greater spatial extension than the city-culture of antiquity. In an open power system like democracy, this necessitates a system of regulating factional conflicts among citizens. The result is a rigmarole unknown to the ancient Athenians, and loosely descended from the original democratic struggles against monarchs and oligarchs. It is the democratic election: the holding of a ritualised civil war every four or five years, in which armies are raised, ceremonial war-speeches are made, and victory is decided by a simple count of heads. Thus your right to vote. You are invested with the power to marginally influence the outcome of a conflict between noblemen, by joining one or other of their factions, just like any old peasant in any old civil war.
Of course, every new extension of the vote - to workers, women, non-whites, etc. - has ended up creating more government offices, thus widening the citizen body. So the glorious pravda history of democratic enfranchisement really is pravda, i.e. true - you just have to rectify the names. But it is also a history in which the peasantry has been subjected to more and more taxation and regulation, by a government that started off as a sort of populist aristocracy and has grown into a huge parasitic citizen-society. And those among us who think they can use the election system to disenfranchise large numbers of citizens (libertarianism), or force them to wait on us like the kings they say we are (paleo-socialism), are expecting the cart to pull the horse.
Note that this view of democracy does not depend on any special insight into its workings, or any information about it that is not common knowledge. We have merely created a shift in perception, by refuting an inner fallacy, using the Q-spectrum narrative as a red pill. You can quibble with the literary ingredients in this pill, but it has done its work, as long as we can now see a cultural fixation that is normally inseparable from everything else. To see the delusion is to dissociate from it - and this brings us naturally to a dispassionate view of democracy, not unlike that of ancient Greek writers. It is government by the will of the mob, which may have a few advantages, but is highly corrosive to the social order.
That said, modern democracy - controlled informally by its progressive vanguard - shows some more sinister developments. The rise of the Cathedral has revoked a number of customary peasant rights, while supplying bigger doses of delusion to compensate. Not so long ago the peasant enjoyed the freedom to choose a side freely, and the possibility to gain actual spoils from ritual war. Now all citizens (and, to a lesser extent, most peasants) must be indoctrinated, entitled and inquisited by the Cathedral - which means the electoral contests are rigged, to the point at which conservatives can't even pull off a convincing protection racket. And as ritual warfare becomes ritual homage to a single power centre, the spoils increasingly go to special client groups, favoured for their extreme dependency on the state. The most important of these are racial minorities, the Bioleninist kakistocracy, and 'liberated women' (i.e. feminists).
These three groups go by many names in the pravda, but let's trade them in for meaningful ones, just as we unmasked our citizens, peasants and slaves. By my judgement, they correspond to the following historical types: the janissary, the court eunuch, and the imperial concubine (retained by an abstract democratic state with no-one at its centre, hence her declaration of marital loyalty is "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"). The emergence of these types, long viewed as harbingers of tyranny in the West, makes mockery of the notion that democracy guarantees liberty. Indeed, under the huge, chaotic democratic state, their numbers and social parasitism are hugely increased; no Chinese emperor or Ottoman sultan would stand for it.
So it would seem that some form of Thermidor is becoming an urgent necessity, even if it would fall far short of the ideal, and do no more than reduce the size of the existing tyranny. At the very least, what would we have to lose? What is the freedom of the peasant under late democracy, other than the freedom to get slapped, and walk away feeling honoured and powerful - or even, to refer to another episode in The True Story of Ah Q, to feel as if he has been doing the slapping?
And yet, while peasants might discuss Thermidors, only citizens could ever initiate them. In the meantime, if there is any point in our being dissidents, we must answer the question of what is to be done. I've said more than enough for now, so thanks for reading, and stay tuned for a follow-up post.
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As far as I know, credit for coining the term goes to Vox Day, who likes to satirise the self-deception involved by repeating the phrase "secret king wins again!" On Vox's blog, however, the term more often used is 'gamma male', which means - more or less - a secret king mentality plus middlebrow intelligence and low sexual attractiveness. This concept is bound up with a theory of male natural hierarchy, which elaborates on the original Roissy hierarchy of 'alphas', 'betas' and 'omegas', ranking 'gamma' as one step above 'omega'. Casual observation suggests that Vox's hierarchy has not dethroned Roissy's, but the term 'gamma male' is becoming popular under its own steam, because it is the sole descriptor for a personality type that is rapidly becoming legion.
'Gamma' is clearly the odd man out in Vox's hierarchy. He is not just low on the pecking order, but is also afflicted by a sickness of the soul, which sabotages whatever modest potential he does possess. That a hierarchy should have its bottom is inevitable; that it should constitute such a fever swamp of socially-cancerous delusions is not. So I think it would be useful to make a distinction between 'secret king' and 'gamma male': between the delusion of undeserved high status, and the subset of men who fall prey to it most severely because of their unfortunate traits. The traits have always been around, but the delusion would appear to be a relatively new thing - at least to judge from the fact that we must use neologisms to describe it.
I propose that the secret king syndrome is a type of folk illness, caused by a collective fixed idea that runs through all of modern Western culture. This fixation cramps the strong and cripples the sickly, just as the poison of nightshade is contained in the whole plant, but concentrated in its berries. This means the secret king mentality can affect otherwise normal and healthy people, in certain contexts. In fact, in one particular context, that it affects almost everyone in the West.
This occurred to me only recently, a few weeks ago, following a discussion with a British friend on the subject of the coronavirus. My friend launched into a standard conservative take on the evil totalitarian Chinese state, which had caused all this trouble. I replied that China may have been the point of origin for the virus, but had got a handle on it far more quickly and effectively than the West, despite having had zero advance warning. I said that the response of Britain and the U.S. had been an absolute joke, and cited a few of the things I had been reading in the news at the time: the political point-scoring by the unaccountable media, the shit-stirring and rent-seeking by diversity commissars, the inability to produce basic masks due to the globalist hollowing of our industry, etc.
My assumption was that all this chaos, incompetence and political bullshit should make a laughing-stock of a country (as indeed it would, if that country were China, or Russia). But the viewpoint of my friend on the same facts was totally different. It was that Britain and the U.S. are "free countries", whose people have the right to pull in different directions, as opposed to the imagined monolith of Chinese society in which everyone is enslaved by the government. The underlying idea was that the Chinese success in containing the virus was somehow illegitimate, like curing an illness by the power of the devil. I continued to argue my case, bringing up this or that example, but every one was simply reinterpreted as evidence for Western liberty and Chinese slavery.
Maybe you don't think this is the most unreasonable opinion in the world, and now is not the time to argue the myths and realities of life in China. But let me make just two points. Firstly, the inhabitants of the West are not 'free' in the classical sense - free like the ancient Athenian or Roman citizens - because they have to pay for their government (and pay for so much of it that a true laissez-faire response would be politically impossible, leading to an unhappy medium, a cargo-cult lockdown). Secondly: if a Western government can perform a quick legal ritual and put everyone under house arrest, there's clearly no practical substance to this 'freedom' either, beyond the anarchy and chaos of liberal government. The state has the power to revoke it unopposed (no, the mithering of overgrown teenage girls like Brendan O'Neill does not constitute 'resistance'), but it chooses not to most of the time, one reason being that it is dependent on our economic activity. So how exactly are we better off than the Chinese, whose government has much the same arrangement with its people, but manages to actually govern instead of just parasitising society and virtue-signalling at its expense?
There seems to be a division of caste that is going unacknowleged here. If you are part of the political class, bureaucracy, corporate elite, official media, etc., the benefits of an open season on power are obvious. But if you are an ordinary person, who just has to put up with a state too anarchic to govern and too oversized to get out of the way, what exactly do you get out of liberal democracy? Evidently, there is at least one answer: you get to call yourself free and sovereign and other people enslaved and powerless, even if they are beating you on most objective measures of human accomplishment. Secret king wins again.
A lot of nationalists and reactionaries are feeling quietly vindicated right now. They naturally view the pandemic as an indictment of globalism and liberalism, and assume that others must naturally come to view it in the same way. But ordinary people are happy to get pissed on and say it is raining gold, and their rulers are happy to divert attention from their own parasitic non-governance, by rallying a public screaming fit against China. Once this has got going, China can simply be turned into a modern avatar of nationalist reaction, and most Westerners will probably end up doubling down on the global manifest destiny of liberal democracy.
Ironically, we would find it much easier to push back against this sort of misdirection if we were in China, because the collective process of self-deception involved is better understood there. We must describe it by neologisms from the fringes, but they have a word in general use: 'Ah Q mentality' (阿Q精神), which primarily means rationalising one's defeats and failures as victories. This term comes from a 1921 novella called The True Story of Ah Q, written by the leftist Chinese writer Lu Xun, and handily available in English translation.
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| Secret king with Chinese characteristics |
This suggests a link between state decline and individual delusion. And such a thing is not hard to explain: for every state justifies itself by a political formula, and the more this becomes divorced from reality, the more the state teaches the people how to lie to themselves. The average Westerner would not yet recognise himself in a character like Ah Q, and the democratic "end of history" is not yet quite as bankrupt as 19th-century China's pretence to stand atop a Confucian hierarchy of nations. But perhaps we can look into the future of the one by drawing an analogy with the past of the other.
Of course, there is a limit to this. Ah Q can be universalised, because he shows the same combination of low merit, superficial intelligence and self-absorbed sophistry as the Western secret king type. But his delusions are quite alien to us: they are too Chinese, too externalised and ritualised, too obsessed with explicit status hierarchies and face-saving manoeuvres. I can't imagine any Westerner making up a prestigious family genealogy, or thinking of himself as a father beaten by his son. Ah Q can tell us nothing about the content of the secret king delusion.
But so far we have the term 'secret king', and the connection to the political formula of liberal democracy, and this tells us quite a lot. For the popular romantic appeal of liberal democracy depends on its promise that everyone shall be a king. Arguably, the term 'liberal democracy' means nothing else: democracy means that the mass of the people shall be sovereign, and liberalism means that each one among them is entitled to as much individual sovereignty as possible. And if the association of sovereignty with kingship seems dated, this is only because liberal democracy has been too successful in destroying the older regimes that originally played host to it.
Perhaps you think I'm pulling a sleight of hand here, trying to stretch the 'secret king' label around everyone who believes in liberal democracy. So let's say clearly that we are now moving beyond this type of kingship delusion, into one that is less egoistic and more theoretical, and not dependent on any undesirable personal traits. However, a delusion is still a delusion, and at this point a memorable quotation comes to mind that should prove this point beyond doubt. It's from a blog post by Antidem, which quotes the conservative sci-fi author John C. Wright as saying this:
As Antidem comments, this is "simply delusional" (if everyone's a king, no-one will be, etc.) But it's not a secret king delusion, so let's remove all confusion, and call it the 'open kingship delusion'. After looking up the Antidem post, I also looked up the source of the quotation and the original discussion on Mr. Wright's blog, and the second of of these is worth a read. Again, don't be confused about Wright's high-handedness towards his monarchist commenters: he really believes what he is saying, that they are born slaves choosing a life of obedience. And the early liberals and democrats, in whom we struggle to see anything like the Ah Q mentality, would surely agree."[Y]ou say inferiority to a monarch is not the same as inferiority to me, John Wright. The answer already given there is that I am a member of the sovereign ruling in America, hence the same rank as a king."
What should really interest us is this view of the open kingship delusion as a guarantor of virtue, to the extent that people can be called slaves and poltroons for not sharing it. Of virtuous delusions, even misguidedly virtuous ones, Ah Q can tell us nothing. Fortunately, we can reach for a more famous delusional literary archetype: the protagonist of Miguel de Cervantes' four-hundred-year-old novel Don Quixote, which I've recently finished after having had it on my reading list for years. Just as the Chinese got the term 'Ah Q mentality' from The True Story of Ah Q, Don Quixote has bequeathed words like 'quixotic' and 'quixotism' to Westerners, again suggesting the resonance of delusional characters with ordinary people.
Don Quixote is a country gentleman in Spain who reads too many chivalric tales, and begins to think he is a knight-errant. Superficially, his fantasies resemble those of Ah Q: he takes a title to which he is not entitled, calls his old nag a charger, stays at inns and thinks they are castles, causes trouble for others and thinks he has set the world to rights. And yet Don Quixote's 'spiritual victories' bring him real victories: at one point he stares down a lion for the sake of his knightly reputation, elsewhere he resists seduction out of fidelity to his imaginary lady. He is a paradoxical character, a parody of late mediaeval and early modern Europe, which was obsessed with reviving tradition and yet ended up giving birth to modernity. According to a famous essay by Ivan Turgenev, Don Quixote's defining quality is his lack of egoism, and this is surely the main thing that separates him from Ah Q. He lays claim to grandiose status not to salve his pride, but to do what he finds to be good. Thus, he can carry his delusion into the world, instead of hiding within it.
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| Mediaevalism without allegory |
Imagine, if you will, a vertical spectrum: its highest point is represented by Don Quixote, and its lowest point by Ah Q. Envisage an object moving down the spectrum, the Q-delusion, a specific cultural crystallisation of the infantile wish to be a king. This desire for kingship is fed by two motives, to do the work of a king and to have the status of a king, and the downward movement represents a degeneration from the one into the other.
This Q-delusion is not synonymous with liberal democracy, whose origins lie in religious inventions and power configurations. That's why it begins with Don Quixote, who still affirms throne and altar, and merely has a vague wish to become a king (by legitimate channels) after proving his worth as a hero. It also ends up at Ah Q, the exhausted fag-end of the process, who depends on no political forms and merely suffers from an vague, mindless sense of entitlement. But at each stage between these two points - the infancy of modernity, and the present day - the Q-delusion has attached itself to liberal ideologies and infused them with a glittering romantic beauty. And at the mid-point of the spectrum, I would say, is the open kingship delusion: the promise of liberal democracy, that all men shall be sovereigns unto themselves.
The first degeneration, into republican and democratic rebellion, is easily disguised as an advance. One reason is that the Q-delusion acquires a deceptive air of sanity at this point. Whereas Quixote-types do, and Ah Q-types think, crazy things for the sake of imaginary personal status, someone who has sublimated his lunacy into politics can remain otherwise normal and healthy. And what is lost in the quality of quixotism - the sincere desire to be worthy of kingship - is initially made up for in quantity. Telling ordinary people that they are kings may gratify their pride, but it also extends a sense of sovereign responsibility throughout society. For a time.
But liberalism cannot sustain any of the virtues it inherits from pre-liberal society, just as a bonfire cannot sustain the fuel it burns. The misattributed 'republican virtue' depends on an ideal of kingship repudiated by liberalism, much as the Victorian theory of saintly womanhood depended on its subservience to sinful manhood. As it begins to dissipate, the little kings become more interested in luxury than liberty, and the social order starts to decay - causing bureaucratic regental governance to advance, little by little, until the kings are far more tightly controlled than they ever were as peasants. Obviously I'm painting with broad brushstrokes, but you get the idea.
Eventually, the residues of quixotism settle on the stagnant waters of the Ah Q mentality. The de facto power-holders no longer promote the open kingship delusion, which rings as embarrassing to them as the memory of a promise in the mind of one who has broken it. But they are happy to keep it going in the form of a baseless sense of undeserved status, derived from the empty theories and rituals of liberal democracy. So the people are habituated to self-deception, falling prey to social pathologies like narcissism and dissaffection. And a few begin to sink below the waterline, into more severely self-absorbed and delusional patterns - the secret king syndrome being only one example.
This is one narrative of the degeneration. But it leaves out something very important. Everything I've said so far assumes a spontaneous, self-directed, voluntary collective process. This, too, is a liberal and democratic assumption, and obviously wrong in this case. Power has long wielded mass quixotic delusion as a weapon, first capturing the state by promising sovereign independence, then corroding the social order by creating excuses for bureaucratic rule. And now that there is little left to promise, those in power continue to benefit from the extraordinary faith of the average Westerner in liberal democracy - which, to paraphrase a maxim of La Rochefoucauld on human pride, transforms itself in a thousand ways, and is never so well-disguised as when masquerading as its opposite.
And don't forget: those in power control the mass media and entertainment industry, the most extensive and centralised mind-control apparatus in human history. As long as they need the Q-delusion, no matter how wretched it becomes, they can keep it on artificial life support. Moreover, they can even simulate higher points on the Q-spectrum - leading the Western Ah Q to believe he is still a Don Quixote, and keeping him off the "road to self-examination" that Lu Xun wanted to open to the Chinese by writing The True Story of Ah Q.
The external manipulation plays a major role in the later chapters of Don Quixote, in which the hero is sent on all sorts of fake adventures and wild goose chases, mostly by noblemen having a laugh at his expense. But since its object in our own time is the Ah Q type, who is usually far from willing to wake up from it, I have to say that a more pejorative turn of phrase is in order. Thus, I'm going to borrow the term 'thumotic pornography' from a recent article by Curtis Yarvin, better known in dissident circles as Mencius Moldbug.
In Plato's tripartite theory of the soul, thumos (higher passion) is contrasted favourably with epithumia (lower passions and desires, including erotic desire). It is related to ambition, aggression, pride, the desire for glory and recognition, fear, anger, and so on. All of these qualities are engaged in political conflicts, and Yarvin/Moldbug defines thumos for his own purposes as 'political desire'. He defines thumotic pornography as a mobilisation of thumos that "has no impact" and "engages political instincts without changing the real world - like being a sports fan".
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| Nous (intellect), the charioteer, drives the good horse thumos (passion) and the bad horse epithumia (desire) |
To lay out my reasoning, I'll use an analogy with epithumia, specifically erotic desire. The aims of erotic desire can be divided into high and low: sensual pleasure at the bottom, and romantic love at the top. There is a huge quantity of 'low porn' that simulates the fulfilment of lust, but there is also a subtler and more corrupting 'high porn', which can simulate stronger emotions and longer-term relations. If you're not sure what this looks like, the most famous example would be Belle Delphine. The fact that she appears to do better business than actual porn stars is mystifying, until we realise that she is selling girlfriend fantasies along with the fap fodder. And note that this depth of delusion requires reinforcement in reality, i.e. actions that would normally have an effect in the real world. When incels pay this girl for personal selfies and Skype chats, they are going through archetypal courtship rituals, but the only result is that they keep fapping and she counts her money.
The division of thumotic aims into high and low parallels the Q-spectrum, which is primarily a delusion of thumos. Victory, importance, success and so on are among the low and middling aims, but there is a holy grail above all of them, which is to achieve the status of a hero - a true Don Quixote. So if low thumotic porn includes sports fandom and ceremonial politics, we should expect to find a high thumotic porn that simulates heroism - and, following the analogy with high erotic porn, we should expect it to bait the delusion with some vestiges of reality. (Needless to say, where real danger, effort and difficulty come into play, we are no longer speaking of porn and masturbation - just as we cannot speak of them in the case of an incel who manages to solicit actual sex from an e-thot. We may still be able to speak of delusion in both cases, however.)
When we look for high thumotic porn in Western society, we find most of it being consumed by progressives. Indeed, it is restricted to them as a political privilege for supporting the inner party, for the perk of feeling like Don Quixote in a society of Ah Qs is not to be handed out to just anyone.
For example: in the Cathedral's iron delusion bubble, Donald Trump is not only the elective monarch of the USG, but also a crypto-fascist puppet of an evil Russian dictator. So anyone who marches against Trump, or insults him on Twatter or whatever, can enjoy the feeling of bravely resisting a fascist government. Of course, you'd think some of the progs would start wondering why their stunning and brave #resistance requires no actual courage. But all masturbation depends on suspension of disbelief; and the more divorced from reality it is, the bigger the incentive to suspend one's disbelief.
Progressives also get to project themselves onto official heroic narratives. Let's take a look at the standard pravda biography of Greta Thunberg. Do you get a vague sense of narrative déjà vu? You should, because you're reading the Hero's Journey: a quixotic template baked into Hollywood movies, and now adapted to the latest politically-correct themes, starring Greta Thunberg. The call to adventure, when Greta learns of the climate apocalypse! The initial failure to take it up, because she's too young and the normies won't listen, and she's crippled by her autism! The crossing of the threshold, as she pores over official climate science, and the fall into the abyss of clinical depression and school nonattendance! And, right on cue, the rebirth! Greta weaponises her autism, unlocking her superpowers, such as radical honesty and contagious neurotic anxiety! Roll up, roll up, and help her strike down the dark paternal forces of conservatism, achieving the ultimate boon, and bestowing the gift of
It's an open secret that this cripple-cum-shaman secret king fantasy is full of bullshit. But the Greta cultists can be relied upon to ignore the stench, because they are receiving a kind of pleasure that feels very much like redemption and apotheosis, projecting their personal inadequacies onto a sort of democratic Ashtavakra and receiving vicarious gratification from her political victories. Force a man to wank, and he is swiftly exhausted; give him the freedom to wank, and porn everywhere, and reassurance that wanking is good for you, and he will always come back for more. The triumph of freedom.
It helps that the progressives' critics are hooked on the same stuff. Outer party conservatives, for all their prattle about facts and feelings, are just too low on the totem pole to enjoy a regular supply of high thumotic porn. Most of the time, they are the ones being pornographed, for the role of a conservative - whether husband, father, religious leader, or even POTUS - is to do a convincing impression of an authority figure who rolls over at the right point in a progressive Hero's Journey. They are paid appropriately for their services, allowed a low-porn thumotic release at election time, and humoured in various Ah Q-type delusions: surrendering to leftists and calling it a moral victory, submitting to feminism under a pretence of chivalry, etc.
But every now and again, conservatives are let off the cuck leash to savage some acceptable scapegoat for the cultural revolution, such as "deadbeat dads" or "neo-Nazis". And this is when their fabled gentility and moderation are cast to the winds, as they can finally stick their shabby, rusted, moldering swords in a safely defanged dragon. The retired Christian blogger Dalrock was a tireless critic of this cowardly self-deception, and once linked to a memorable video in which one such Ah Q briefly gets to play Don Quixote, or at least Greta Thunberg. (Yes, he's a ridiculous sight - but you wouldn't want to meet him somewhere dark and dangerous, like a family court.)
Needless to say, if anything is driving the perceived growth in secret king types and worsening the severity of their delusions, it is this state-run thumotic porn racket. But, as usual with the Cathedral, the creation of a social malaise is merely a justification for prescribing even more poison as a cure. In one of the most interesting pravda articles of the last few years, a thumotic porn addict seriously questions his heroic delusions, and blames them for his chronic delusional mindset (in this case, it is mostly maladaptive daydreaming, another type of extreme self-absorption that has only recently garnered scholarly attention). But look closer. All he wants, and all he's likely to get, is an ideological correction and a penance for feeling any thumos at all as a fucking white male.
If the full hero experience isn't to your liking, why not try the full saint experience? The Platonic cave has acquired some mod-cons since Plato's day. Now you can experience all the mystical euphoria that ought to come from climbing out of it, all while never leaving the comfort of your seat. This would explain the popularity of Cathedral-generated leftist cults involving fake sins, fake guilt, fake asceticism, fake mortification, and fake redemption. Perhaps we have ascended to the realm of nootic pornography by this point. But a wanker is a wanker, and what makes all of this so much masturbation is that none of these heroic journeys or saintly quests even get started in reality.
Before you ask, this is not just because they fail to challenge the ruling ideology, as if only a true rebel can be a hero and a true heretic a saint. Remember, progressivism does not admit the traditional definitions of heroism and sainthood, which involve defending order and defeating enemies (oppression!) and fulfilling spiritual endeavour (opium of the masses!). It wants to apply these words only to those warrior-types and priest-types who serve its cult of rebellion, and it wants to keep this rebellion burning indefinitely, even while concentrating power into progressive hands. But the idea of heroism and sainthood in political disorder depends on a sense of danger, difficulty, conquering grandeur, martyrdom, utopian promise etc., which increasingly drains away in practice, and must be maintained in appearance by deception (porn) and delusion (masturbation). In truth, heroism and sainthood in progressivism are unprincipled exceptions; a hero or saint by the traditional definition is not a progressive hero or saint, and a progressive hero or saint can only be fraudulent.
This enables us to close the thumos-epithumia analogy, by explaining what the permanent government gets out of distributing thumotic porn. Low thumotic porn props up the mass legitimacy of liberal democracy, enabling Ah Q to deny his own wretchedness. But high thumotic porn plays a more important role, preventing revolutionary energies from petering out and ending up in a formal consolidation of power. For this would inevitably lead to a Thermidor - which to progressives is the "betrayal of revolution" that we all learned to hate from Orwell's Animal Farm, but to sane people is just the revival of order and stability after a revolution or civil war.
Previous leftist revolutions, such as French republicanism and Soviet communism, have aimed at permanency but ended up falling prey to Thermidors. Western liberal democracy avoids this, and continues perpetuating its cultural revolution, through a more sophisticated system of bondage: it allows the revolution to ebb and flow, restrains it from swallowing all of society at once, hives off conservatives in weak outer parties, maintains enough free speech to keep heretics in the open, etc. But even this machine would grind to a halt if it were ever cut off from its true power source: the belief of countless thugs, bullies, cowards and popinjays that they are actually quixotic heroes. It is a Matrix of masturbation, constantly stimulating and feeding off its captive thumotic energies.
Once again, China is a good point of reference. Maoist communism had its own panoply of selective free speech, toy opposition parties, social justice warriors, callout culture, intersectionality, etc., and it launched a cultural revolution that lasted a decade and unleashed something like collective madness. But it was all too dependent on charismatic leadership; and once Deng Xiaoping got into power, he pulled off a Thermidorian double-whammy, cracking down on the Chinese cultural revolution and defeating its invasive Western variant. And thereafter China, while still beset by many social and political diseases, has gone from chaos to prosperity and garnered the respect of the West...
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| The short-lived paradise of social justice, pre-Thermidor Communist China |
When I first thought to compare this to the 'Ah Q mentality', what actually came into my mind was a particular vignette in The True Story of Ah Q. It's near the beginning, when Ah Q is swanning around his village bragging that he shares the name of a local landowner. The man in question summons him for a dressing-down, slaps him on the face, and says - more or less - "Do you think you're worthy to share my name?" Whereupon Ah Q slinks off and, being what he is, goes around thinking he has won a great honour because such a man has slapped him on the face.
So why does this remind me of the Western normie attitude to democracy? Well, just as the daily pravda says, democracy in the West is a true successor to ancient Athenian democracy. As the pravda says, it holds the doors of wealth and power open to its citizens, which would be closed to all but a few of them in a monarchy or oligarchy. And as the pravda says, these citizens have every reason to think of themselves as a society of kings, and resist any political change that would subject them to hierarchical government. But if you are like me, and my kith and kin, and the vast majority of people in the West, and certainly everyone in the dissident community, you are not even a citizen in this democracy - much less a king.
Demokratia in ancient Athens was the granting of government power to the people, as defined by the bounds of citizenship. In modern Western democracy, given that government power cannot possibly be wielded by all those who are called citizens, this works the other way around: if you would know who the true citizens are, simply ask who enjoys the rights of government, i.e. to consume tax revenue and exert political power. In the modern West this embraces the permanent governing bureaucracy, its secular-religious academic brain, its extensions in NGOs and quangos, its electoral front, and so on, until we get to various gray areas such as nominally 'private' banks, corporations, etc. This is no shadowy oligarchy, but a huge mass of people distributed across a sprawl of organisations - a true system of government by mob anarchy.
Ordinary folk like ourselves, on the other hand, correspond to the slave population in Athens and the peasants in the Attic countryside (peasants if we are in the taxpaying class, slaves if we work in public-sector jobs without political relevance). And this basic division of citizens and non-citizens cannot be erased. For there is no sublunary political constitution that allows all to consume tax while none need pay it, or allows all to rule while none need be ruled.
But muh right to vote! Ok. Remember, as Spengler said, modern Western civilisation is based on much greater spatial extension than the city-culture of antiquity. In an open power system like democracy, this necessitates a system of regulating factional conflicts among citizens. The result is a rigmarole unknown to the ancient Athenians, and loosely descended from the original democratic struggles against monarchs and oligarchs. It is the democratic election: the holding of a ritualised civil war every four or five years, in which armies are raised, ceremonial war-speeches are made, and victory is decided by a simple count of heads. Thus your right to vote. You are invested with the power to marginally influence the outcome of a conflict between noblemen, by joining one or other of their factions, just like any old peasant in any old civil war.
Of course, every new extension of the vote - to workers, women, non-whites, etc. - has ended up creating more government offices, thus widening the citizen body. So the glorious pravda history of democratic enfranchisement really is pravda, i.e. true - you just have to rectify the names. But it is also a history in which the peasantry has been subjected to more and more taxation and regulation, by a government that started off as a sort of populist aristocracy and has grown into a huge parasitic citizen-society. And those among us who think they can use the election system to disenfranchise large numbers of citizens (libertarianism), or force them to wait on us like the kings they say we are (paleo-socialism), are expecting the cart to pull the horse.
Note that this view of democracy does not depend on any special insight into its workings, or any information about it that is not common knowledge. We have merely created a shift in perception, by refuting an inner fallacy, using the Q-spectrum narrative as a red pill. You can quibble with the literary ingredients in this pill, but it has done its work, as long as we can now see a cultural fixation that is normally inseparable from everything else. To see the delusion is to dissociate from it - and this brings us naturally to a dispassionate view of democracy, not unlike that of ancient Greek writers. It is government by the will of the mob, which may have a few advantages, but is highly corrosive to the social order.
That said, modern democracy - controlled informally by its progressive vanguard - shows some more sinister developments. The rise of the Cathedral has revoked a number of customary peasant rights, while supplying bigger doses of delusion to compensate. Not so long ago the peasant enjoyed the freedom to choose a side freely, and the possibility to gain actual spoils from ritual war. Now all citizens (and, to a lesser extent, most peasants) must be indoctrinated, entitled and inquisited by the Cathedral - which means the electoral contests are rigged, to the point at which conservatives can't even pull off a convincing protection racket. And as ritual warfare becomes ritual homage to a single power centre, the spoils increasingly go to special client groups, favoured for their extreme dependency on the state. The most important of these are racial minorities, the Bioleninist kakistocracy, and 'liberated women' (i.e. feminists).
These three groups go by many names in the pravda, but let's trade them in for meaningful ones, just as we unmasked our citizens, peasants and slaves. By my judgement, they correspond to the following historical types: the janissary, the court eunuch, and the imperial concubine (retained by an abstract democratic state with no-one at its centre, hence her declaration of marital loyalty is "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"). The emergence of these types, long viewed as harbingers of tyranny in the West, makes mockery of the notion that democracy guarantees liberty. Indeed, under the huge, chaotic democratic state, their numbers and social parasitism are hugely increased; no Chinese emperor or Ottoman sultan would stand for it.
So it would seem that some form of Thermidor is becoming an urgent necessity, even if it would fall far short of the ideal, and do no more than reduce the size of the existing tyranny. At the very least, what would we have to lose? What is the freedom of the peasant under late democracy, other than the freedom to get slapped, and walk away feeling honoured and powerful - or even, to refer to another episode in The True Story of Ah Q, to feel as if he has been doing the slapping?
And yet, while peasants might discuss Thermidors, only citizens could ever initiate them. In the meantime, if there is any point in our being dissidents, we must answer the question of what is to be done. I've said more than enough for now, so thanks for reading, and stay tuned for a follow-up post.
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