The Limits of the Barbarian

The diagnosis of the problem underpinning the barbarian right and the wide-spread rejection of woke politics is correct: we live in an open-air prison, overly surveilled, lorded over by fragile and cruel HR matrons, and forced to fit into the strictures of an ethics hostile to our animal instincts and suffocating the creative and reckless energy necessary for cultural and biological revival. The malaise so widely experienced is a direct consequence of this environment—enforced by police, the military, lawmakers, and corporate codes of conduct.

The hard turn to the right by men is a visceral rejection of this fake and gay world. Men like Liver King, BAP, Trump, and Tate offer the seductive alternative. “Slough off the womanly shackles holding you down and embrace the ubermensch you were born to be!” Or some alternative of that promise. The figures offer an uneasy ideological venn diagram, but they all tap into this restless, unconstrained energy that defies the bonobo matriarchy, where everyone fingers and fucks everyone else and the threat of shame and ostracization is the stated mechanism for social control.

Stated being the key word. The state is still enforcing itself via violence, but the strands of anti-police and anti-military rhetoric underscore how the aspiring matriarchs think of themselves—conflict should be resolved via talking things out and therapy sessions, and unresolved conflicts should be pursued via passive aggressive means, like shunning, shaming, and social rejection. Therapy and cancel culture are a consequence of this ideology. “There would be no criminals if only they could resolve their childhood trauma. There would be no violence or hatred if only we could all embrace our shared humanity. And if you are mean, we’ll stop talking to you, meanie.”

But look at what they actually do. While they are dismantling the police state and trying to defund the military, they concurrently employ the vestiges of the old order to push their own ends—no matter whether or not it conflicts with an end goal that will jettison such primitive and barbaric means.

Whether they will ever jettison physical force and violence to pursue their ends is another question. The Soviet Union is a lesson in how deeply schizophrenic a philosophy can be—embracing wholesale slaughter of its citizens, a massive police state, a pervasive intelligence force with its tendrils in every industry and country, and an aggressive foreign policy all in the name of achieving a communist utopia that will allow you and your buddies to go fishing and play Playstation to your hearts content. Never mind the hundreds of millions of corpses you have to walk over on your way there.

In many ways, the Soviet Union repudiates their end-game. Despite all the moral posturing, the animal instincts within us, the propensity towards violence, domination, pride, and self-interest, can never be conquered—sorry art therapists who will have us all finger-painting our way out of lust and avarice. At best, what the Soviet Union achieved was a cowardly redirecting and reframing of those instincts as necessary goods in pursuit of their own annihilation. The results speak for themselves. Hundreds of millions dead. Grocery stores with empty shelves. And the eventual collapse and reversion to gangster-style capitalism under Putin. This happened everywhere: Russia, China, Laos, Vietnam, and so on without fail. The only country to manage hold true to its principles is North Korea, and the malnourished, 4-foot-something dwarves that have escaped its walls speak to how effective it has been at implementing its supposed utopia.

The barbarian right rejects this anti-human vision as deluded and dishonest. The argument for many of them, myself included, is not so much a grand, sweeping analysis of historical patterns—that he who resists and denies nature ends up hijacked and ruined by it, but something much more primal. They feel the suffocating blandness of the world around them, of having to walk on egg-shells for decades for fear of showing up late to a meeting or commenting on how nice a broad looks in a skirt, of having to unduly transmute their longing for violence and adventure into a love of baking or corporate ladder running. National parks, the supposed preserve of the natural world, are highly curated and controlled. No hunting. No foraging. No going off the trail. It has become an open-air museum and a massive middle-finger to the longings stirring in their heart. No freedom for you, wage slave.

They, like me, hardly know anyone who is genuinely happy. Their co-workers and college buddies’ eyes have glazed over. They drag their feet through the world like a man whiling away for decades in prison, awating his execution by old age. Suicide rates are, unsurprisingly, on the rise.

The problem is the moralistic world that they’ve been coerced and brainwashed into believing and following. And when they step outside of it, when they stop caring about the HR harridans and being a “decent human being,” when they stop caring about being called a racist, fascist, bad evil guy, when they start rejecting the prevailing morality and unleash their instincts, they feel free, and they realize in their own bones the absurd, life-denying vision of themselves and the world that they’ve been sold and forced to conform to from birth. They want no part of that and sense, consciously or not, that whatever inculcates such miserable, glassy-eyed denizens will never produce the majesty, ecstasy, excitement, and greatness that they long for.

The barbarian right’s response to this is to reject all moral frameworks. To become a beast, a savage, a monster. To rip up the foundations of society. To go berserk and, in the desolation formed from their rampaging, to let a thousand flowers bloom. This is the Apollonian instinct that men like Trump and BAP represent and tap into. It is the instinct of the wolf, and it is the instinct that founded this website and this series—to recall us back to our ancient, animalistic, primitive, unconstrained roots and unleash the pent-up energy that has been awaiting liberation for centuries.

But Apollo alone is insufficient. Apollo is not the head of the gods. Zeus, or for us Celts, Lugh, is. Apollo oversaw the koryos, the ritualized unleashing of the energies of youth embodied in young war bands living beyond the ken of society. These young men, unconstrained by laws and mores, raided, hunted, drank excessively, slept beneath the stars, recited epics, and lead what most men would consider “pretty fucking awesome” lives—for a time. It is what, essentially, the late high-school and college years have become, except not utterly castrated.

After the most volatile period of youth passed, these young men returned to the polis as adults. The beast within had been nourished and given its due but, now, had to be submit itself to the yoke of civilization. Boys cannot be boys forever. These young men doubled as scouts, skirmishers, raiders, and pioneers, but they never served as generals or in the heavy infantry that was the back-bone of the army. For that role, men, not wolves, are needed. And men require discipline, rules of engagement, and a willingness to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. A hot-headed seventeen-year old might too easily leap out from the phalanx to pursue personal glory rather than hold the shield wall and protect their brethren, threatening the integrity of the unit and the army.

The fatal flaw of the barbarian right is that it conflates the unleashing of the beast with its political end. All that men need to do is go berserk and everything else will work itself out. But history—and, likely, the personal lives of these men themselves, tells another story. First, though, barbarians are cool and the barbarian philosophy, at least initially, feels so right. The Golden Horde marching its way across Europe and Asia, conquering and slaughtering all who stood against it, is cool. The Germanic armies storming the ramparts of Rome and dismantling the corrupt shell of a culture it had become is cool. But these explosive movements, possessed by the wolf, failed to materialize into a long-term, sustainable win. The Vandals, aided by Christianity, plunged Europe into the Dark Ages. The Mongols crumbled in less than a century, with its only remnant, the Yuan Dynasty, devolving into a technocratic shadow of its former self. Alexander and his Hellenic supernova suffered a similar fate, his empire unable to survive him. Each conquered civilization was indelibly changed and revitalized by the destruction, and, in some cases, the clearance allowed for these higher elements to seize power once again. It was not, however, a reasoned and effective long-term strategy. In many cases, such as in Persia, the same stultifying forces took hold and kept its hold for many more centuries.

The other drawback of the barbarians: they are easy prey for more disciplined, professional, organized soldiers, especially in the long-game. The freedom-loving Thracians and Scythians were subdued by the more regimented Greeks and, later, Romans. The professional army of Phillip the II, exploited to great effect by his successor, Alexander, ended-up turning on itself. The empire fractured into sub-kingdoms. The Greek states broke free, and, eventually, the more composed and calculating Romans brought them all to heel.

The history of the Soviet Union provides another example. The Bolshevik Revolution was essentially a peasant rebellion against the degraded elites, but it was the more ruthless and well-organized man, Stalin, that sapped their zeal and created a dictatorship garbed in the symbols and ideology of communism. The rabble might win the battle, but they never win the war.

In these civilizations and figures, save for Stalin, we find an example that threads a path between the barbarian right and the bonobo matriarchics. This path is more restrained, patient, disciplined, and calculating. It is the way of Philip the II, the Early Roman Republic, and the Archaic Greeks that repulsed the Persians. There example provides an alternative vision that is neither divorced from the Apollonian instincts nor hijacked by it, but one that gives it a long leash and plenty of opportunities for it to expend its energy counter-balanced by law, virtue, and reason.

This is the noble way, the Aryan way. It is a vision of man that is more Zeus- or Lugh-like—capable of violence, energetic, ambitious, but also measured, patient, composed, civilized, virtuous, and just.

There are two issues that the Aryan way addresses that the barbarian right gets wrong: the untightening of moral strictures and the reorientation of virtue. The untightening of moral strictures is not about creating a new moral framework to impose on oneself or others but to hold moral judgments more loosely. The barbarian right goes all in on this. No discipline. No restraint. Hold nothing back. Just let your primal energy propel you forward and onward—to hell with everything else.

This correction is necessary. I cannot imagine any other time in human history where a people have been as up-tight about their morality as us today—be it over questions of whether drinking milk is ethical to accusations of racism to bombing schools in Gaza. The modern man possesses a certain tightness that our ancestors, even the virtue-obsessed Romans or medieval Christians lacked. Go read the books of Chaucer or Juvenal to be disabused of the quaint ideas we have about how they actually behaved. Sure, the priests and critics whinged about how decadent modern people had become, but their actions demonstrated the relative freedom which they enjoyed. We have a proverbial moral stick up our asses further than anyone else. Letting loose that moral frame is desperately needed.

But it is not abandoning morality altogether. Virtue holds society together, tempers desires, and allows for more calculated, composed actions rather than the knee-jerk, headlong reactions of youth. For this, we need to redefine what virtue is. Much of the West has adopted a sickly understanding of virtue that is draining us all dry—be a good worker drone, blow billions a year of tax dollars so that dysgenic freaks can continue to eek out a sorry existence in the name of human rights, and resolve every conflict through sitting down and having a polite conversation and empathy. The stagnation that this bonobo monarchist regime has ushered in is unbearable, and an ethics more akin to Sparta, ancient Rome, or Renaissance Italy would be more in-line with a culture of vitality, creativity, innovation, and enable the necessary conflict and destruction which allows for social, biological, and genetic renewal. The Roman ethics would have us conquering the stars rather than making sure that everyone had access to unlimited Cheerios, fentanyl, and breast implants.

As I’ve said before and I’ll say again, I fully embrace Trump. I embrace BAP. I embrace the barbarian right as a necessary counter-weight to the degraded, ugly, dysgenic, stagnant forces that are dragging everyone into misery and slowing technical and biological progress in the name of hippy slogans.

But these are not the end. They are merely one of the forces arrayed against those who have created this world of gyno politicians and strung-out whores in tents leeching off tax-payer generosity and ignorance.

The end is Lugh, radiant, powerful, composed, just, organized, intelligent, calculating—and with a love for the rambunctiousness and mischief of youth, with a tolerance for excess and for flaunting right-and-wrong in favor of the wolf possessing us again. It is the hoplites marching in lock-step towards the Persians. It is the slow, grinding, calculated politicking of Phillip the II, Scipio Africanus, and Charlemagne the Great. It is the wolf within man alive, hungry, restless, pacing back and forth, rippling with muscles—but kept at his master’s side.

Let loose the wolves of war—but don’t forget the leash.