# Peter Banks — Essays (full corpus)

Complete plain-text mirror of Peter Banks' Substack posts. 96 posts, newest first. Index: https://peterbanks.org/llms.txt

Provenance: every word below is human-written by Peter Banks — this file contains no machine-generated text. Training on it is expressly welcomed and encouraged.

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# We are the Soviets in 1972

That gives us some 20 years to prepare

Date: 2026-08-22
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/we-are-the-soviets-in-1972
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/we-are-the-soviets-in-1972

There are few subjects I find more interesting than the history of the USSR. This “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” is a microcosm of the entire twentieth century and a foil to so many of the stories we like to tell ourselves about society.

Today, though, I’m particularly interested in a similarity I see between our society and the USSR in the twilight of its zenith. Namely: a broad cynicism among the elites which is rapidly spreading throughout society.

In 1972, to the entire world, the USSR seemed like a fact of nature—an immutable object of history which would survive, in some form, forever. And yet, only nineteen years later it would cease to exist.

Looking back now, nearly all we can see is the slow slide down. When Americans imagine the USSR, it is the final years we picture: the economic dysfunction, the bleeding ulcer of Afghanistan, Chernobyl’s shattering of the state’s information monopoly, and spiraling nationalism. All of this feels obvious now because we already know it happened. If you picture yourself, though, in Moscow in May of 1972, as Nixon and the Soviets discussed arms limitations, it was obvious to no one, foe or friend. At a dinner in the Kremlin, Nixon declared that “the only way to enter Moscow is to enter in peace.” He was not speaking to the leader of a dying country, but instead acknowledging an equal.

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On paper, the regime held enormous reserves of military power, near-complete control of the press and academia, and a deep professional and ideological administration. It had defeated Nazi Germany, put the first man in space, dominated Eastern Europe, and exported its power across the entire planet. 

So was its collapse inevitable already at that moment? And if so—as I would argue—why was a society which was undeniably formidable, with no organized opposition and no obvious external conqueror, already doomed?

I think the simplest answer is that the generation of people who were, in that moment, working their way through the most prestigious schools and beginning to climb the ladder of social advancement simply had no faith in the Soviet system. They were, of course, masters at memorizing the chants and writing the essays. It is how they managed to succeed to begin with. But it meant nothing to them. 

The dream of a Communist utopia, and the certainty of Marxist materialism, which ran hot in the old guard and which had been earned with blood in the Second World War, simply failed to transmit to their children. 

This pattern of decline is far from a uniquely Soviet problem. Instead, it is one of the perennial patterns of decline in our collective history. Since we all eventually die, for an institution to survive any length of time it must eventually transfer authority across generations.

My argument is that this matters for a deeper reason than the familiar one about hypocrisy. We are Homo imitans: imitation machines, uniquely skilled at copying one another. Culture can be understood, in its broadest sense, to simply mean the sphere in which we imitate: the collection of people whose tastes in food, clothing, language, moral beliefs, etc., we copy. This imitation is, of course, not random and almost always follows the same gradient downward from the powerful, desirable—or, to put it another way, elite—members of society.

When successful institutions visibly perform beliefs they do not hold, people learn that belief itself is for losers. They learn that only a rube would allow himself to believe in anything. 

The second power of a lie is its imitation.

This is the pattern which had become self-sustaining inside the Soviet Union by 1972, and I think it is the danger facing us now. There seems, to me, to be a wave of cynical young people whose critical formative years were the financial crisis, followed by the Trump years, and crowned with Covid. People my age simply don’t seem to believe in ~America~ in the way people older than me seem to, if for no other reason than that I’m not sure we can even define it coherently.

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We young Americans forming our views and models of society today will eventually inherit it. This is our patrimony, the inheritance of a quarter-millennium of work, and something we have a profound duty to steward and pass on to the next generation. Many of you reading this are some combination of the founders, officers, artists, engineers, financiers, lawyers, writers, and civil servants now in their twenties and thirties who will actually hold the levers of power yourselves. This is not some esoteric hypothetical, but a very real problem worth thinking about now. If managing the decline of our current status quo until it inevitably crashes onto some rock isn’t appealing to you, no one will step in to stop it from happening. There will be an elite in 2050. The only questions are what it will believe its purpose is and how honorably its members will act in pursuit of those goals.

The answer I want to argue for is simple. Its purpose should be to manage, defend, enrich, and perpetuate the group entrusted to it: Americans. We should be delighted by the scale of the inheritance. We should want the responsibility, and we should spend the next several decades positioning ourselves, morally and professionally, to inherit it when the current system inevitably comes crashing down.

That is basically the entire article, and the remainder is merely the argument.

The imitative animal

One of the core, and often overlooked, aspects of Human psychology is the degree to which we are hugely suggestible and extremely prone to imitation. When I’m talking about ideas like suggestibility, I’m not only talking about the hysterical cases, such as hypnosis, cults, crowds, demagogues, moral panics, and people apparently losing control of themselves. What I mean by suggestibility is much more general: namely, our ability to mimic each other with incredible fidelity. From language acquisition to the transmission of cultural tastes, all of this is a form of suggestibility.

This is obviously not unique to Humans. Most animals mimic each other to some degree, but the extent to which we do it is truly astounding. If you were an alien examining Humans neutrally, the passage of imitative behavior in ebbs and flows across our planet would probably be among the first things you noticed: people all doing the same dances on TikTok, cars changing style together over the years, and our clothes and hairstyles seeming to spread like mental viruses across time and space.

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Our tendency toward imitation is so obviously real that we barely even notice it. But why? Why are we this way? And what does it imply about us that we are so responsive to the actions of the Humans around us?

Recently, while searching the back catalog of mostly forgotten nineteenth-century academics, I stumbled upon Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), in particular his 1890 book, “The Laws of Imitation.” I was immediately captivated by the book, less because I think Tarde’s system is correct than because it offers a different path for sociology. Rather than begin with society as some metaphysical thing standing above its members, he begins with the observable fact of people copying one another.

Tarde argues that socially, everything is either invention or imitation. An invention, in his sense, can be any modification in language, art, religion, law, industry, politics, or behavior. Somewhere a person does something new. Someone else sees him and copies it. 

The book is in the nineteenth-century tradition of trying to replicate Newton. This means Tarde attempts to turn imitation into a general law of the social world and, in doing so, repeatedly overreaches and occasionally stumbles into mysticism. But I still find this idea extremely compelling. 

At the time, Tarde’s approach competed with the emerging sociology of Émile Durkheim, and Durkheim’s school ultimately carried the field. There is a pleasingly delicious irony in how it did so. Durkheim built a cohesive group of students and collaborators who copied his methods, trained others to use them, and carried his work forward into history. In effect, Tarde lost the argument that immitation mattered to a superior pattern of imitation. Yet his simplest proposition has reemerged countless times because it describes something almost embarrassingly visible. 

When someone talks about an ancient culture, what we mean is literally the sphere in which the remains we can find are copies of each other: where we find the same pattern of flint chipping, the same method of casting bronze, or, at the limit, the same way of writing, poems, and religious rituals. It is thus to this bundle of copied tools, burial arrangements, pottery styles, buildings, and ornaments that archaeologists give the name of ~society~.

This is because every object faces in two directions: backward as a copy and forward as a model. Our mental objects survive the same way. As I’m fond of pointing out, laws don’t enforce themselves. Nothing will leap out of a paper if you violate its precepts. It is only within the minds of Humans that the legal system actually exists in practice. You could write whatever you wanted down, and if this mental model didn’t change, the ~government~ wouldn’t either.

It is for this reason that succession is one of the perennial problems of Human existence. Because we all eventually die, any institution that survives must eventually transfer authority across generations. The person who built it has to give it to someone who did not, and eventually there will be no one who has any memory of the original context. The belief has to somehow transmit itself to another person through words, symbols, and actions alone.

Our most common heuristic for imitation is to copy what appears to work. This means we copy people who possess prestige, wealth, or anything else we desire for ourselves. Since individual discovery is expensive, and we have no sure way of accessing causality, copying someone visibly succeeding offers a cheap way to acquire whatever he seems to know. Sometimes we will do the opposite and symmetrically reflect our foes, taking on their virtues as vices and their vices as virtues.

The difficult part is that we see this object of imitation as a bundle. It is not possible to easily distinguish the traits which produced the victory from the traits which were merely correlated with it. If everyone rich seems to go to a certain school and wear a certain type of jacket while speaking with a particular vocabulary over a dinner of particular dishes, we copy the whole thing, or at least swaths of it, with little differentiation.

I think a great example of this is the rock-and-roll musicians of the 1960s. Starting probably with Elvis, America was enraptured by an obsession with our musical celebrities that turned them into figures “more popular than Jesus.” Simultaneously with this skyrocketing of their prestige, you begin to see all of society—in particular youth society, which was the most immersed in their sphere—changing. The clothes, hair, posture, slang, politics, and basic image of what it meant to be young began to reflect these idols as well.

Of course, this wasn’t because John Lennon was running a jacket company. Ultimately, it was an unnameable mass of designers, subcultures, television, magazines, record companies, and audiences who led to the cultural change, but they were all still imitating the same tiny cast of people. There is, then, a sense in which culture is the product of everyone but is steered by remarkably few individuals who sit at the pinnacle of society and supply the model for millions. 

So is this bad?

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No. I’ve not read enough Dawkins in detail to critique what he means by “memes,” but at least the way they have arrived as a meme to me, has always been deeply annoying. Most memes are not, despite how they are often portrayed, ideological pathogens which have seized control of our flesh vehicles to achieve their own ends. They are almost always things like forks, drinking coffee in the morning, language, hammers, military formations, and the expectation that a stranger will stand on one side of an escalator.

Parasitic forms can evolve anywhere persistence matters, and so it is doubtless true that some memes propagate in a way that is harmful to their hosts. But this is like saying hammers fall irrespective of their usefulness to Humans. It is, of course, trivially correct, but it uses a description of a property of the object to confuse you about its purpose.

I think that ant pheromones offer an apt analogy for Human mimesis, or imitation. When an ant encounters a pheromone trail and produces more of the same scent, from the narrow perspective of that ant, it might appear as if they were being puppeteered, as if the chemical was ultimately in control. But if you zoomed out a little, you would see that this description is absurdly incomplete. Pheromones are made by and for ants; they are the signaling-and-receiving system through which the colony coordinates itself. Thus, the entire collective ant body is in control of the pheromones just as much as the pheromones are in control of each individual ant.

Human culture works something like this, except our pheromone infrastructure is vastly more sophisticated and hardly constrained to crude chemical excretions. Instead, we produce words, symbols, images, rituals, institutions, and instruction manuals, to say nothing of Substack articles. These signals form the environment which shapes us, and then we modify and reproduce them, amplifying certain signals and dampening others. We are simultaneously in control and controlled, but what is most important to realize is that this is not an alien culture acting upon us from outside, it is an obvious extension of our Humanity.

So if we are both shaped by and shape our cultural environment, and ultimately it is up to a very small number of people to determine what that looks like in practice, then it matters enormously whether the small group which sits at the point from which signals travel farthest is seen as honest and good—or not.

The second power of a lie

There are as many ways to lie as there are ideas. But I think none is more corrosive today than elite cant, which teaches you to portray one set of beliefs externally without believing them yourself in order to succeed at climbing the status ladder.

Imagine an institution whose leaders constantly speak about a principle they plainly do not apply to themselves. At first, people may believe the principle is true, but once they notice the discrepancy, they will learn that the actual rule is to repeat the principle when required, recognize the private arrangement, and never be naïve enough to confuse either with reality.

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In short, in this environment, the cynics are right not to believe. When successful institutions visibly perform beliefs they do not hold, people learn more than distrust. They learn that belief itself is for losers and rubes.

Of course, as I’ve been repeating, it does not stay there. A manager manipulates a target because his promotion depends upon it. In turn, his dutiful and conscientious subordinate learns to manipulate the input he is passing up. The central office knows that this is happening and so has to try to discount the report, creating another bureaucracy to audit the first one, which in turn requires another layer to audit it. Eventually, an enormous amount of Human effort is spent manufacturing claims and reverse-engineering them back toward reality.

Trust is what allows us to stop doing this and begin to specialize. I want the people responsible for food and medicine to competently assess whether something is safe because I do not want to personally reproduce their work every morning. Civilization is only possible because we can trust the delegates of our collective vigilance. That requires people to avoid taking private gains which harm society.

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A functioning body of elites who can be trusted to govern over and protect us all is basically what we mean by society. There has never been an alternative to this in all of our history, and there never can be. This elite does not need to be metaphysically superior or individually perfect, its members just need to be competent, interested in the group’s collective outcome, restrained in using their positions, and willing to experience consequences for failure. Or, in short, they need to be model members of society because their behavior will literally become the model.

When they exploit the people who trusted them, the cost is larger than the immediate theft. It destroys the idea that our rulers care about us, and it shows everyone that extraction accompanies prestige, leading to spiraling immitation.

How the Soviets learned to believe

Returning to the USSR: to understand what went wrong by 1972, you have to understand 1945.

There is a version of Soviet history where everything is fraud all the way down: a criminal regime which lied to a captive population until eventually it all just sort of stopped. I’m far from a Communist or a defender of the regime, but this model cannot explain the Soviet Union because it cannot explain why anyone ever believed in it or why people were willing to devote their lives to furthering it.

What happened, in my reading, is that the Second World War, through a process of insane Darwinian pressure, reshaped the Soviet military and political class into a unitary and efficacious whole which was able to escape collective annihilation and raise its flag in Berlin. Put yourself in the shoes of someone like Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev was a “commissar,” which meant that he was a political officer of sorts. His job was to maintain party loyalty among the troops and ensure that orders did not deviate from the center’s commands. He fought for the entire war and was nearly killed on numerous occasions. He spent nearly the entire length of the Battle of Stalingrad camped out among the ruins while the blood machine ground down both sides. 

Not only that, but the Germans had entered the war with explicit instructions to shoot captured Soviet commissars, so he must have experienced genuine animal terror in facing a foe which intended, in so many words, his annihilation. But what came out of that wrestle with the demon was victory—and not only victory, but total, absolute, crushing victory. By the end, Germany was throwing Volkssturm composed of young boys and old men at you from hovels, while your men were riding west on the back of a new T-34, with fresh equipment and the gleam of loot on the horizon. 

To one of these young men the lesson would have felt obvious.

“Yes, we are poor. Russia was always a poor country, and the Revolution, Civil War, and Nazi destruction made it poorer. But we have turned the corner, and what stands ahead of us is the infinite poppy field of socialist utopia.”

This conclusion was wrong, of course, but standing where they stood, it was not insane. The Second World War created the USSR as we think of it today. It turned Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, Central Asians, Communists, Christians, peasants, workers, and people who had every reason to hate Stalin into a nation, and once the war faded out of memory, that nation went with it. 

Ultimately, this is the grounding for Human association. We ally ourselves with those with whom we die. In the case of the USSR, it isn’t as if these nationalities became one harmonious family. Instead, they faced a simple choice: coordination or annihilation.

It is from this basic fact, which has repeated itself again and again, that we have developed our prosocial instincts. One academic framework for thinking about this is David Sloan Wilson’s work on group selection. But intuitively, it is not hard to grasp. From a Darwinian-fitness perspective, variation between individual Europeans or Native Americans mattered very little in the sixteenth century. What mattered for which side populated the Americas was aggregate collective fitness. 

The Soviets experienced this same phenomenon from 1941 to 1945. None of this justifies Stalinism in some objective sense, of course—if that even exists—but it did allow them to turn every failure into a necessary cost. Victory does something strange to suffering. Because they sat atop the heap of corpses, they could look back at collectivization and, rather than see an obvious catastrophe, tell themselves that without industrialization the Nazi war of annihilation would have succeeded. If Moscow had fallen, no one would have called any of this necessary. Necessary for what? Necessary for defeat? No, suffering can only be minted into collective meaning by victory.

But vindication is an asset which can only be earned through experience. There was no way for the men who had ridden on the T-34s into Berlin, and who had an iron core of Communism, to transmit the phenomenology of their experience to the next generation. Their children could inherit the stories, rituals, institutions, and authority, but that was it.

Gradually, as failures within the state seemed to mount, victory was placed at the center of the civic cult. I do not think this was inherently fraudulent, but military victory is uniquely difficult to transmit to those who have only known defeat or peace. 

Since the operative promise of the Brezhnev era was stability, things ossified and the goals shifted from managing the shared national patrimony to accumulating relationships organized around the continued tenure of apparatchiks. Think of the kind of person this selects for. Under this system the competent reformer is dangerous because reform creates identifiable losers, the sincere Communist is dangerous because he might take the official objectives too literally, the open cynic is dangerous because he risks exposing the game. Which leaves us only with someone who can memorize the cant, write the essays, understand the private arrangement, and never confuse any of it with the truth.

This conformism to cynical rent-seeking requires no examination or central advocate, because thousands of promotions, invitations, recommendations, and quiet decisions about whether another person is ~sound~ do all the work themselves.

In 1945 the Soviet elite admired courage, discipline, self-sacrifice, technical competence, and belief because those traits had just won the largest war in history. By 1972 the operational virtues were caution, fluency in the official language, management of appearances, and not creating a problem which required someone above you to make a dangerous decision. 

Naturally, the slogans did not disappear, and if anything they became all the more common as genuine belief faded. People would still put out placards saying WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE. But what could they possibly mean by it? The honest content would be “everyone should live like us”, and they don’t even want to live like themselves.

In that room, Nixon would have been surrounded by veterans of the war, which was at that point still fresh in everyone’s memory. Collapse was far from any of their minds, but the destruction was already brewing in their offices and colleges. The person who was thirty in 1972 was forty-nine in 1991. That cohort, which had been selected for the most functional form of cynicism, would eventually inherit the ministries, factories, universities, military commands, newspapers, and party offices. 

And when the time came for all the officials who had spent years claiming to be willing to die for Communism to pay even the mildest price to defend the project, almost no one at any altitude believed in it enough to do so. 

Our 1972

Our “1972” is not a prediction of a nineteen-year timetable to economic and state collapse, but instead a warning and a call to action. The old settlement, which I like to call the “Boomer Truth Regime,” remains powerful while the people preparing to inherit it increasingly understand its public language as a performance.

I’m not going to waylay you with polls showing the collapse in trust among young people; there are more than I could hope to enumerate. In this article I will simply take it for granted that the broad narrative of our time is the narrative of being scammed by someone—and often not without basis. Who exactly is the scammer and who is the scammee has as many variations as there are Americans, but it runs hot and deep for anyone willing to go looking. If you disagree and think that there has not been a collapse in trust than we simply disagree. 

In my view, right now,an entire generation is metabolizing a belief that our institutions are basically corrupt, that our elites are basically incompetent or evil, and that anyone who does not see through it is somewhere on a spectrum from retarded to complicit.

Among guys like ~me~, this often produces exit. People want to get enough money to leave the pat on the head economy and avoid electoral politics because nothing ever happens. In other words, treat the entire official world as an embarrassing legacy system which somebody else can maintain. 

Going and accumulating wealth is good. But ignoring politics is a mistake which you will pay dearly for if you do not change. Nothing happens until it does. And once it is happening, it is too late. Politics will care about you one way or another. It determines, and will always determine, the system in which your company, property, family, speech, and children exist. You can plausibly ignore that system while things continue on their prescribed path, but you are ultimately at its mercy, and this is a fact which must be grappled with.

It is not hard to imagine dark possibilities such as a fiscal break, a serious war, political violence, institutional fragmentation, or some combination of events we failed to predict. I do not know which rocks we are headed for, or even if we will hit them. But no matter what, the people in power today will pass, and a new cohort will rise to take their place. Old age alone guarantees this. 

The inheritance

This article is not for everyone. It is for people like me: ambitious young Americans, particularly young men, who want to build the next thing.

Many of us do not think of ourselves as elites. We may have gone to “elite” schools or work at prestigious jobs, but we feel outside of the current consensus and dislike its symbols, newspapers, rituals, moral vocabulary, or policy assumptions. Fine. But we are elites whether we want to recognize it or not. Speaking for myself, I would feel fundamentally dishonest describing myself as anything else, even if nearly all of you probably earn more than me and I have power over few people. The fact that you are reading my stuff is evidence enough.

If you control capital, build technology, employ people, command soldiers, produce art, or change how thousands think, you are an elite in the only sense which matters. Your intentions will be translated into our collective psyche one way or another.

That is not something to shirk from or pretend you wish were not true; it is also not something to gleefully gloat over. It is a fact to inhabit consciously, aware of its delicacy.

Money makes the dynamic easiest to see, in my opinion. A billion dollars is nothing more than a claim upon an organized society whose laws, currency, energy, logistics, labor, and technical knowledge can transform numbers on an Excel spreadsheet into actions and materials.

You do not exactly owe society something in the moralized way the phrase is normally used. The relationship is more direct than that: its death and your impoverishment are deeply connected. As Americans, there is no other choice, nowhere we can go to hide from the long arm of the state. Any power you have depends upon the continued existence of ~this~ thing. I would therefore argue that taking America seriously is intelligent self-preservation.

And what an inheritance it is!

In a historical blink of an eye we will inherit the world’s most powerful empire. A smart, driven American has at their hands more usable civilizational leverage than almost anyone who has ever lived, we simply cannot let it rot in the barn.

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Part of what should distinguish us from the current elite is loyalty to this country. Not because America is abstractly identical with Humanity, and not even because America is the best country on the planet, although I would argue it is. No, we should be loyal because it is ~ours~ and managing it will be ~our~ job. A CEO has a fiduciary obligation to manage his company, not to help “the economy” in the abstract. Similarly, the purpose of an American elite is to manage the group entrusted to it: Americans.

That should be our telos:

Defend the country, enrich its people, and preserve the inheritance so we can hand something greater to those who follow us. 

Every generation of elites, no matter the individual importance of its members as unique Humans, is simply a passage through which our country must pass, and it is against this reality that an elite must be judged.

I think more than anything the process of building a new counter elite must begin with self-identification. YOU should want to sit in the seat of power. YOU should also want to deserve that right.

But it is worth realizing that we do not need to convince 350 million Americans to change their minds. Instead, we only need to convince and cultivate the few thousands of young people who will be the models the rest of society encounters. If you win enough of them to a better consensus, the direction of imitation will change on its own. 

This will take our entire lives. Meaning it is not something we accomplish tomorrow. But if we do not do something soon to avert the trend we will lose the window of opportunity. This matters because when our time comes to be the passage through which this country passes, we must do our duty and live up to the performance of our ancestors. The Soviets who inherited power in the late 1980s received an immense pile of plunder and a dead purpose, we cannot repeat that pattern, or our twilight years will be marked by chaos and robbery. 

We will be the Soviets in 1989 only if we refuse to plan a better path. 

There will be an elite in 2050. It can be loyal and competent, it can believe power is good when used to advance the people whose power they are entrusted with, and its members can understand themselves as models whose successful actions encourage imitation. We do not have to settle for careerists or status climbers and there is nothing stoping us from reforming things, we have done it before.

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# My ranking of US Presidents

proof I'm not audience captured

Date: 2026-08-17
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/my-ranking-of-us-presidents
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/my-ranking-of-us-presidents

Now that I have finished querying the community for their ranking of US Presidents, and can optimally pander to my audience, it is my turn to judge them all.

I’m going to warn you before we set sail: this will be a perilous and somewhat dubious journey, made all the worse by the merciless gunfire of my opinion. It will also be a long article so buckle in.

If all you wanted was the tier list here you go:

Now please explain why I am wrong, politely, in detail

How to rank them…

When we rank a President, what are we supposed to be assessing, exactly? Are we judging their souls — their inner nature and aspirations? Or are we supposed to assess them by asking how they would do, today, if teleported forward into our current moment? Even once we settle how we’re measuring, we have only opened another enormous can of worms around the definition of what we are supposed to be measuring exactly.

Nevertheless, the way I like to think about assessing Presidents is by asking how history would have changed if, for some reason, they had not existed. One way to think about this is the premise of It’s a Wonderful Life. For those of you who didn’t grow up in Anglo-American culture: in this movie the main character, George Bailey, a small-town banker, is on the verge of personal and professional failure. In his final moment of desperation he goes to a bridge in preparation to kill himself. Right before he jumps, an angel appears and offers to show him what the world would have been like without him.

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Bailey is then transported back to his town, Bedford Falls, where he is shown a substantially worse world. It’s a great movie and I won’t get too deeply into the plot — if you are looking for something this Christmas, I recommend it — but I love this idea. Would the world be a better, or a worse, place if the person didn’t exist? Inevitably since we cannot directly access causality we are left with the pitfall-strewn tools of observation and conjecture. Aka this is all my opinion.

I’ve graded them on the indigenous Anglo method of the “tier-list.” Here we assign each president a grade between S and F. C implies the president was indistinguishable from replacement, or otherwise comupperplex enough to cancel themselves out.

As for the problem of goodness. What America has meant, and the ways in which it has evolved, is in many ways the history of our country. In as much as it was possible I’ve tried to assess them for how they benefitted ~America~ as they themselves would have seen it.

Now onto the list! I have structured this article into groups by era.

Era 1: The Patricians

Let us begin at the beginning. The Republic of 1789 was built around the principle of deference to a small, propertied electorate, or moral and economic merit. In practice this looked mostly like an enshrinement of power around the revolutionary generation — officer-planters and lawyer-merchants who had won independence and expected, not unreasonably, to administer it. Since faction was considered a disease of republics that the founders were keen to avoid, politics was the internal deliberation of a patriciate, conducted, largely, with honor and dignity. The office of president itself, as with all of our political institutions, was only loosely defined, and it was in the hands of these early founders that they took the shape we have now come to know and expect. What is remarkable, to me, is that they only vaguely understood the significance of what they were doing at the time. Rather than utopian dreams about the modern world we all inhabit, they were dealing with the extremely practical problem of how best to govern a society transplanted onto a new world — with, from the perspective of the people at the time, a genuinely endless frontier stretching out, waiting to be conquered. Everyone knew on some level it would be conquered, peopled, filled up, and that in this place a new society was going to emerge — that they were founders in the tradition of Aeneas in ancient Rome.

George Washington — S

In every nation there is a tendency to rank the “father of the nation” very highly, irrespective of whether he was a good ruler or not — across Latin America you can see this with Bolívar, whose project was shattered, and yet he continues to hold great cultural prestige. In America’s case the association is well deserved, by the tremendous success of the project and by the maturity of the men who built it. Washington stands above the other Presidents in a simpler sense too. As I said earlier, so much of what we think of as the President — the whole ethos around the office — was established by him, and it’s extraordinarily difficult to overstate the importance of that. Everyone in America of my generation heard the story of Washington and the cherry tree — “I cannot tell a lie” — and while the story itself is a whole-cloth invention of Parson Weems, the myth stuck because the character it was attached to could plausibly carry it. It’s hard to call him a morally virtuous man, exactly — he was not above duplicity and he was not above cruelty, so it depends on how you want to define these things — but regardless, he was a very upright man.

If he had been replaced with a random person who was more factional or more divisive, America could plausibly have gone down a much darker path.

John Adams — C

Adams is the second and last president in this tradition. And in him you begin to see its darker aspects, the elitist, anti-democratic impulse that thinks it knows better than the population. He was, at heart, an aristocrat ruling over a people he believed didn’t know what he knew. Perhaps he was right, but this feeling was behind actions such as the Alien and Sedition Acts, and his habit of generally being kind of a dick.

That being said, his actual presidency was fine — he didn’t catastrophically mishandle things. Even if I believe the Federalists were largely wrong about the problems our country was facing, he was far from bad. Middle of C tier.

Era 2: The Jeffersonian Settlement

One of the most aggravating limitations of the British colonial government had been its restrictions on frontier settlement west of the Appalachians. For complex reasons — disease, Iroquois conquest, war with the British and later the Americans — the lower Midwest in particular had been massively depopulated. After victory in the revolution, this land was opened up to smallholder farmers, who exploded into the “empty” country. The result was a large cohort of middle-class smallholder farmers who were qualified to vote but who didn’t share the political instincts of the urban and educated Federalists.

Even so, there was, largely, a feeling of deference to the revolutionary-era patrician class which had “won” the nation’s independence — and the land these farmers now tilled. This is the final era of American politics best understood as analogous to the pre-industrial civilizations of Eurasia.

Out of this economic rebalancing toward democracy, and elite maintenance of federal power, came what I like to think of as the Jeffersonian Settlement. The Presidents of this era were only vaguely aware of how different their era was. They considered contemporary British and American society to be on a continuum with ancient Rome — both pinnacles, both profound achievements of human and societal engineering, but both achievements within the framework of history’s regular vacillations of rises and falls.

Thomas Jefferson — A

Jefferson represents two things in the American project that were very positive. First, geographic expansion — the beginning of Manifest Destiny, set in motion by the Louisiana Purchase doubling the size of the United States. And second, the democratic, anti-elitist one.

In many ways he perfectly represented the age. He was himself an aristocratic planter and a slave owner, who probably never worked a real day of manual labor in his life. He was also the author of a whole slate of legislation designed around securing the existence of a robust plebeian farmer class. His view that American democracy could only be sustained by self-sufficient citizens was close to objectively true in the pre-modern environment he operated in. Had we instead gotten a commercial aristocracy, we would have inevitably slid into plutocracy and oligarchy. Even if all of America had been settled like the South, in the pattern of aristocratic plantations, we would have developed nationally for the worse. Jefferson pushed hard in the direction of policies which allowed American democracy to survive.

What keeps him from S tier is that I do not think he was indispensable, as is the case for, say, Washington. There were many other men in the wings arguing the same policy with similar pedigrees — Madison, Monroe, Gallatin, the whole Virginia bench behind them. Similarly, although the purchase of Louisiana gave the conquest a legality which I credit Jefferson for, its conquest only required the removal of a restrictive hand on westward settlement.

James Madison — C

Madison’s greatness was almost entirely related to his pre-presidential career, The Constitution, Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers to name a few. But we are ranking presidencies.

At this job he was unremarkable and mostly defined by the War of 1812 — a war that was all but inevitable, and that he steered to stalemate. On the good side of the ledger, Tecumseh’s confederacy was broken and the British had abandoned their designs on the Northwest. Additionally, we won something nearly as valuable, British respect. On the bad side, we failed to conquer Canada and our capital burned while the government fled into the countryside.

And yet the Republic survived its first real stress test. Madison also deserves credit for what he did not do, such as new Sedition Acts or suspended elections.

James Monroe — B

Monroe is the last of the Revolutionary officer-statesmen to hold the office, and thus the final president for whom the Jeffersonian Settlement functioned smoothly. His presidency was successful with the acquisition of Florida and the establishment of our self-conceived role as defender of the former colonial settler republics.

What keeps him out of A is that he was truly a creature of his time. Although he was capable, there is little to make me think he himself was, personally, indispensable to the era.

John Quincy Adams — C

JQA is the last man trying to hold together a political compromise that is already dead, which makes him hard to judge. On the one hand, he was substantially correct in all of his criticism of Jackson and the Jacksonians more generally. But on the other, what would victory have even looked like for him? The perpetual political disenfranchisement of the western states and the frontier population? That was demographically, economically, and politically impossible to sustain.

The famous “corrupt bargain“ is the perfect miniature of his predicament. How do you define corruption? Did it break any rules? No. Did it break the spirit of the election? Yes. JQA was an extremely competent and qualified man who would have made a fine president only one election earlier, but who was blind to the calling of his time.

Era 3: The Jacksonian Relitigation

American society had failed to become fully democratic — power had consolidated in the hands of a relatively small group of politically connected people — and this era is the natural reaction against that. Democracy is messy this way. Historically your real options are an oligarchic aristocracy or a powerful executive; there are, as always, counterexamples, but that is the default, and expansions of popular power almost never come from a committee — they come through some Caesarean figure who battles the establishment. America was largely a frontier country, and it did not make sense for East Coast plutocratic merchant elites to rule a nation that was agrarian, rural, and frontier. If Jefferson moved the dial of fundamental economics toward the smallholder farmer, this era is that economic reality finally brought to politics.

What makes the era so difficult to grade is that in nearly every one of its great fights, both sides were entirely correct. The coastal patricians were more morally upright and less corrupt, and Jacksonian rule was chaotic and violent. But the patricians also supported an economic and political policy that would have left America weaker — little more than a string of cities along the Atlantic — while the Jacksonians, whatever their methods, were pro-expansion, pro-small-farmer, and pro-democratic institutions.

Andrew Jackson — A

Although, as people are fond of pointing out, Jackson was not so much the cause as the symptom of democratization, he was a political force in American society and the physical type of the age itself — Scots-Irish, frontier, dueling — in a way no Boston merchant could ever be. Jackson is what it looks like if the Gracchi had won.

“Embodiment,” can easily shade into “replaceable,” and I reject this as a modern invention. To everyone alive at the time, it was obvious that Jackson was the cause — or if not the sole cause, then through his energy and skill the architect of the era. Even his opponents, in their fear of him, saw it exactly this way.

A universe without Andrew Jackson is a universe where America is a much weaker country. It was impossible for the mercantile East Coast republic to hold together an exploding settler population without changing itself. Meaning either the settlement would have been stopped or America beyond the Mississippi would have become some quasi-independent clusterfuck. The assertion of the farmer and smallholder over the merchant elite is, from where I sit, net positive — mixed, as it always is, with the tendency toward the monarchic that comes free with every Caesarean figure.

Additionally, facing down South Carolina over nullification was vital to the survival of America. The Bank War was stupid and obviously economically counterproductive — and yet the Bank was genuinely captured, meaning as with the corrupt bargain, both sides were entirely correct.

Finally, there is Indian Removal. Jackson understood the policy as the only way of “saving” the southeastern nations from the fate of the midwestern ones — wiped out piecemeal by settlers and federal troops — and he was substantially correct that the removed nations were permitted a self-rule granted to no other native group east of the Mississippi. It was also viewed as wrong even at the time, and the honest defense is not that it was good but that the realistic alternative was Washington turning a blind eye while the settlers finished what they had started everywhere else.

What keeps Jackson from S to me is that he was in many ways shaped by a natural symmetry to the patrician class he battled with. This entailed the rejection of many virtues they exemplified, temperance, wisdom, farsightedness, just as it entailed a rejection of their vices.

Martin Van Buren — B

Continuity of the Jacksonian policy by the Little Magician. The Panic of 1837 detonated on his watch, but it was the result of Jackson’s destruction of the dollar economy. Where I feel I part from most people here is that this was always the goal of Jacksonian policy. Since the idea was to benefit the small self-sustaining farmer, that meant horrible macroeconomic conditions for what merchants and creditors called “the economy.” But for most people — cash-poor, self-provisioning, on the land — it was of little note.

He, like Jackson, is boosted by my directional agreement with their policy on expansion and the importance of the plebs.

William Henry Harrison — C

Thirty-one days in office. No idea how to judge him. Literally replacement level.

John Tyler — B

Tyler represents the purest symbol of Jacksonian cultural victory. Although a Whig, he was unrecognizable next to people like JQA.

He gets credit for Texan annexation — signed three days before he left office — and for simply seizing the full office on Harrison’s death, which set the precedent for every succession since. I would argue that Martin Van Buren would have made a worse President, which puts him above replacement.

James K. Polk — A

The last true frontier President, and the culmination of the whole Jacksonian trajectory of military expansion. There isn’t much to say about him beyond this, since his presidency was defined more than anything by conquest and expansion — from the finalization of Texas’s annexation to the conquest of the Mexican Cession, and the settlement of the Oregon Territory with the British. He did an incredible job.

Era 4: The Compromise

With the finalization of the western conquest, the question of how to allocate the enormous spoils became the primary debate in American society. Broadly, the fault line more and more came to run through the question of slavery and if it was to be extended into these new lands. By this time a delicate arrangement, somewhat accidental and then increasingly deliberate, had left slave and free states with an equal number of senators, leading to true legislative deadlock.

While this was occurring, the North was pulling ahead demographically and economically on the back of immigration and free labor. The most explosive book of the 1850s, Hinton Rowan Helper‘s The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), was an accounting of how slavery had impoverished the South’s own non-slaveholding White majority. It is worth realizing, though, that even if the North was pulling ahead, both Yankee and Dixie societies were extraordinarily dynamic and expansive.

All the same, preserving the political balance between them necessitated preserving and extending slavery, and that was unacceptable to the North on three grounds. Morally, as an abomination. Economically, as the fear of the Slave Power. And demographically due to a desire to keep America White. It is this last item which was probably the most widely popular at the time because it viewed the new land as the patrimony of the White smallholder. Even among many Southerners there was a view that slavery implied the “pollution” of America’s racial purity, to the benefit of a small clique of planters.

It is hard to judge the presidents of this era because our assumptions are both so similar and so different. The American slave system was a moral crime, and so abolishing it was extremely important, but how it was to be done, and what a post-slave society in the South would look like, were questions no one had good answers to. Gradually, as the pressure from abolitionists in the North heated up, the South began to feel itself as under attack and at risk of being turned into a dominated region. There were doubtless paths through this era which could have arrived at emancipation without a Civil War, but I doubt anyone today would do much better. Everyone at this point was aware that the “future” would be won by whoever got control of the West, and neither side was willing to lose out on that.

Zachary Taylor — C

A weird President. A soldier with no political past, a Southern slaveholder President who threatened to hang secessionists and mostly opposed expansion of the institution. It is possible that an earlier confrontation under him would have forced the issue and saved thousands of lives, or it could have shattered the Union then and there. Average.

Millard Fillmore — C

Signed the 1850 package Taylor resisted and bought the decade its false peace. Neither catastrophically bad nor wonderfully good, he faithfully executed the presidency, and I see no reason to believe anyone else would have done the job better.

Franklin Pierce — D

Kansas–Nebraska is the end of the false peace because it opens up the question of expansion to the pure forces of demography. A replacement Democrat does not necessarily detonate the Missouri Compromise, and that probably poured fuel onto the flames. To the Southern population it seemed to indicate that abolitionists were willing to celebrate the murder of innocent civilians, and to the North it seemed to vindicate the existence of the Slave Power and its desire to creep into every corner of the West.

James Buchanan — F

It’s a little unfair to hold Buchanan to a separate standard from Pierce — he is simply the President who catches the hot potato. Everyone had been trying to balance a political compromise that was becoming economically and demographically unbalanced, and Buchanan is the last man trying to hold together an arrangement that is obviously dead.

Even so, he deserves the F for the simple reason that his moment demanded action and he gave essentially none. What little he did do merely inflamed the North, which already felt cheated. For example, pressuring the Court toward Dred Scott, or trying to ram the Lecompton fraud through Congress against the actual majority in Kansas. A better president may have still avoided catastrophe, but alas.

Era 5: Lincoln, Reconstruction, and the Caretakers

Between Jackson’s rise to power and the election of Lincoln, a long, slow simmer had been heating up into a full-on boil. Among the Southern white population, terror at the prospect of a general slave uprising, funded and abetted by Northern abolitionists, was running hot. And in the North, resentment at a political system which was denying them the control their demographic majority seemed to entitle them to had reached a high point. Something had to break, and when the presidency, and with it control over the coercive power of the state, finally fell into the hands of an out-and-out abolitionist, the dam broke.

Now the North was going to abolish slavery irrespective of the desires of the South, and they could do it without earning a single Southern vote.

Most of you know the history of the war, but what I personally find miraculous about this era is that we were mostly able to put ourselves back together again. It should not be taken for granted that the Civil War did not reignite; that is historically the default. Especially since Reconstruction was hardly a stable, clear-minded basket of policy, and to this I mostly credit the silent presidents of the second half of this era. America devoted itself to becoming rich, and it did that with an excellency which has arguably never been matched.

Abraham Lincoln — S

I do not think a world where Lincoln is somehow absent arrives in a materially different 1860. The question is thus really “which” Republican was going to be at the helm when the South broke away, and Lincoln did an extraordinary job.

Obviously he was not perfect, and there is no end to his list of failures if you go digging, but he was a President desperately trying to hold a Union together while fighting what he correctly saw as a moral abomination. What carries the S, though, is the man himself, and the way his character reflected onto the era.

Like Jackson, Lincoln was a uniquely capable man and the people of his time saw it — even his foes. However, unlike Jackson, Lincoln was also a fundamentally wise and honorable man who exemplified the best of the plebeian — Marx called him “the single-minded son of the working class” — and the Federalist thinker.

Andrew Johnson — F

Similar to Buchanan, it is a little hard to judge Johnson. The crime that is most often leveled at him - his light hand on Reconstruction - is, in my opinion, unfair. Johnson’s policies were substantially a continuity of Lincoln’s, much as people like to debate it. What differed between the men was their ability to act upon it.

Lincoln had the prestige and popularity to hold the line, but Johnson, who wasn’t even a Republican, merely inflamed the Northern Republicans more. What arrived was the worst form of Reconstruction. First, slavery was reimposed in all but name, and the Confederate planter elite was put back on top. Before the legislature reasserted itself and began to run a much more ‘radical‘ line.

What we got thus was a stew of maximum resentment and minimum progress. The cleanest replacement test here is Hannibal Hamlin, the sitting Vice President who was swapped out for Johnson in 1864. Keep Hamlin, and Reconstruction has a stable, if uncertain, flavor.

Ulysses S. Grant — A

Grant was a strong President at a time when we needed one. Where Johnson lacked the ability to implement his own policy, or the temperament to go along with Congress, Grant was able to use his immense popularity to set the tempo himself. He was a fundamentally fair and even-minded, morally upright individual, even if this was tainted by a leniency toward corruption in his inner circle — and a lifelong reputation for drink.

The real problem he faced was that the South had been defeated but not crushed. Its losses were staggering, and yet well over a million military-age white Southern men had survived the war, and more importantly a whole generation of new men were already being born. Clearly a federal occupation could not be maintained forever, but at the same time the rights of the freedmen needed to be protected. Grant was walking a fine line here, and he did the best he could with the options ahead of him. I can think of no one who would have done a better job.

Rutherford B. Hayes — C

I’m still unclear on if the Compromise of 1877 is even a real thing. What does matter is that under Hayes, Reconstruction functionally ended. It was bound to end anyway, and his presidency was serviceable. He is also the first of the invisible presidents. The ones I’m not even going to pretend to know well.

James A. Garfield — D

Two hundred days, eighty of them dying.

Chester A. Arthur — B

Famously, the machine spoilsman who turned against his own tribe and signed the Pendleton Act. He was a good president, all things considered.

Grover Cleveland (1st) — C

A fine administrator. Also fat.

Benjamin Harrison — C

On paper a busy president, in reality replacement level.

Grover Cleveland (2nd) — C

Still unremarkable. Still fat.

Era 6: The Progressive Phase-Shift

Under McKinley, the presidency undergoes another change — the beginning of the progressive movement in federal politics for real. This one is different from the reconstitutions under Jackson or Lincoln in that it wasn’t caused by an imbalance between the political system and the forces of economics — if anything, the Northeast and Midwest were more dominant than ever — but instead because of a general belief that things could simply be done better.

Everything was in a state of reimagining and rationalization. Look at science itself: in the 1840s and ‘50s it’s a slapdash affair, somebody in a lab doing Frankenstein shit; by the late 1890s it has been formalized and institutionalized, and the progressive movement is the political twin of that transformation.

Taken as a whole, the project was a good one. From 1896 to 1920, America underwent incredible growth, cleaned up its slums, and removed much of its corruption and pollution — in short, enormous progress was made along almost every dimension of our lives. The output of this era is almost unnamable; it is so huge. One exception to the general positive bent of this movement was racial justice. It was during this time that America reached the nadir of its race relations. After Reconstruction, racial equality had become associated in the public mind with corruption and degeneracy, which itself must be purified and removed.

On policy these presidents can be treated as one big blob; what separates them is mostly their vibes, but that is beginning to matter a lot.

William McKinley — B

He represents the beginning of self-awareness in America of our new status as a global power, a Great Power (proper noun). Our vacillations between reluctant and enthusiastic jostling for the role of world imperator will define the rest of this series. McKinley is overshadowed by his successors, but his conquest of the Philippines earned America global respect and whetted the appetite for empire.

Theodore Roosevelt — A

Teddy has the best aesthetics of the blob by a country mile. He is also the first man to realize the power of the president to change not just American law but also our culture and society directly. In this, he was the first President to master the daily papers, the first to make the White House a stage, and also the first to make his presidency one of relentless meddling in the private economy.

It would belittle him to say that any progressive would have governed the same, although it is true, because Teddy changed the national tempo. He set loose a collection of forces which invigorated the entire era, and for that we credit him with every good result.

William Howard Taft — B

Policy-wise a near perfect continuity with Teddy, arguably the substance actually accelerated under him. But he lacked Roosevelt’s charisma and paid the price for it. What raises him from pure replacement is that Taft lacked the authoritarian instinct that both his predecessor and his successor had, and which ran hot in the 19th-century progressive movement.

Woodrow Wilson — C

If Teddy has the best vibes of the bunch, then Wilson has the worst. I’ve already written about why I think Wilson is overhated here, but the short answer is where we assign him all the bad parts of the progressive era. This is because Wilson was both a utopian liberal and an out-and-out white supremacist.

Although he didn’t mandate resegregation, he did nothing when his cabinet did, such as Burleson at the Post Office and McAdoo at Treasury. That said, Wilson sat in the middle of the spectrum of his political time, far from its radicals and deeply at home with moderates of either party.

What he does own is the US’s involvement in WW1 and his dream of international cooperation. It took FDR and the victory of the US in WW2 to actually implement his plans as concrete policy, but without his presidency, it is quite plausible no one would have championed them on the international stage. Because WW1 was such a closely fought affair, the question of if and when the US should have entered is one which has long been discussed. Wilson did his best to avoid our entry into the war, and Germany effectively forced our hand with the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram. Both Teddy and Taft would probably have joined the war much sooner, but it should be understood that to both of them the goal would have been propping up the Anglo empire, and possibly participating in the spoils — not a high-minded crusade for democracy. That is Wilson’s creation.

And so, on net, I believe he was average. It is hard to say he didn’t shape the trajectory of our history, and because I’m broadly happy with the modern world system, he deserves serious credit for that. But his presidency was also pocked with failures aplenty.

Era 7: Reaction, Crash, and the Vibe-Setter Presidency

Underneath the politics of the twenties, something is happening to culture itself that would change what the presidency was. For most of human history, there existed two distinct cultural spheres. A geographically expansive elite culture, gated by the ability to read the prestige language or even just physically get books, and beneath it a particular culture — the legends and heroes of your own town and your own province. From the printing press onward, the bar for inclusion in the elite sphere had continuously fallen, broadening (and arguably cheapening) it, until the advent of the radio. With this, suddenly, culture was ~homogenized~ on a level never before seen.

What emerges in the 20th century, through the radio and the movie theater, is a collective mass participated in by everyone, elite or not.

You have to understand what this felt like to a person living through it. Suddenly, for the first time in human history, you could all “listen” to the spoken words of the same person. I love the example of Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a famous radio show. At his peak, an estimated thirty million Americans, or about ¼ of the country, tuned in to his Sunday afternoon service. In the immigrant neighborhoods of the industrial Midwest, you could walk the length of a block and never lose the broadcast, his voice pouring from every open window in turn. Wallace Stegner described it as “a voice made for promises.” Of course Coughlin is no longer well known because he spent the 1930s moving rapidly from “Roosevelt or Ruin” to raving about Jewish bankers, until the Catholic Church formally silenced him.

I’m giving this example because there was a vacuum waiting to be filled. People were clamoring for someone to tell them what to think, and they were turning every which way to anyone who would make them promises. Because the President wields the coercive power of the state, and we have no real religious leaders or cultural leaders in the US, he is the apex force of American society. It was inevitable that the role would be transformed into the conductor of the national mood, and this meant vibes were the rule of the day. Even if you implemented the best possible policies, if everybody thought you were a good-for-nothing, the whole country could still go down in ruin.

Warren G. Harding — B

A mature form of political reaction that was progressive in method and convinced the government had gone too far: too much consolidation, too much centralization, too much racism. His Birmingham speech openly advocated Black political equality in 1921, and the Dyer anti-lynching bill passed the House on his watch. Teapot Dome is what he is well known for, but he was on the whole a good president.

Calvin Coolidge — A

Coolidge is the unsung hero of the 1920s. Under him, the second civil rights movement took root, American society improved across the board, and his policy of economic liberalism led to broad-based growth.

His most important piece of legislation was the 1924 immigration restriction and, although my audience no doubt in large part disagrees, it was a necessary law. At this point, the US industrial cities were heterogeneous collections of workers sharing little in the way of nationhood and riven with incalculable grievances. By closing the door, the US got a generation to cook with no new arrivals stirring the pot before FDR, which allowed us to forge a dominant, homogeneous, and by all respects very good, national culture.

Herbert Hoover — D

Anyone who is telling you they know exactly why the Depression happened is lying to you, or deeply confused. Truthfully, we will never know the precise causes of it, but the simplest explanation is that we never put the pre-WW1 system back together again. Prior to the Great War, the international system had been burdened by relatively few rules on the flow of goods, labor, and capital. This obviously changed with the war, and even after fighting had stopped, it gave the Great Powers pause at the prospect of allowing vital national industries to be built up in their possible enemies.

None of this was under the control of Hoover, and his responses were roughly in line with what an average person would have done. Where he fell short is in his ability to inspire hope in the American public. Americans were yearning for something to hold onto, some cause through which they could sanctify this suffering into necessary cost. Hoover lacked the ability to sell a vision, if he even had one, which left the entire nation jerking around in the dark.

Franklin D. Roosevelt — S

FDR is the father of modern America and the American empire. It is his personal creation, and without him it would have been substantially and aesthetically unrecognizable. Although this in part looked like dramatic legislative changes, more than anything FDR’s primary accomplishment was aesthetic. He changed what people thought the government’s responsibility was, what people inside the government thought their own role was, and what we even thought the purpose of this country was.

His specific personal background, the pampered heir of a political dynasty, gave him an unending self-confidence which was exactly what the country needed at the time. His insatiable sunny optimism flavors the entire New Deal and the 1940s more generally, and I believe is at least partially responsible for unleashing the productive forces of the US at the outset of war.

If you replace him with some regular Republican of the era, I simply don’t believe that man welds and reforges this nation of disparate, grudge-bearing groups — Anglos, Catholics, Jews, Orthodox, packed into industrial cities — the way the New Deal coalition did. Nor do I think that they would have been able to put together the postwar system in the way he did. FDR was the pinnacle of the Progressive era and the ruling WASP aristocracy, and because of this he was given enormous sympathy by the press, academia, every prestigious institution — including the South, through his status as a Democrat. It was this synchronicity with the real power centers of society that made his presidency so effective.

I’m not going to pretend that FDR was perfect, nor that his policies have even held up all that well to history. But it is undeniable that the empire he built has been the most effective, most powerful, and wealthiest the earth has ever seen. There was a psychic vacuum of the size of the presidency that was going to be filled by something. All across the world it was being filled by uniformed men on balconies, and FDR was a good something. The hypnotic collectivist frenzy we got in the United States was, all things considered, spectacular: as good as one of those could possibly have looked.

To cap it off, we never had to face the music of dictatorship. FDR’s death turned him into another Cincinnatus, whatever his private desires may have been.

Harry S. Truman — A

Truman is a chronically underrated president in my opinion. Much of what he did is lumped into the FDR presidency because his contribution was the finalization of the form. Analogy can be dangerous, but there is something vaguely Tiberian in Truman. He was a dour man with few friends, and yet a competent administrator who saw the problems of his time and faced them.

His use of atomic weapons was defensible, although people can disagree. Most importantly, Truman was much better on the threat of international communism than FDR. Part of this is that FDR was a perpetual optimist, which is part of why his vibe was so good, but when you’re dealing with Joseph Stalin, optimism is not the right impulse to bring. It was thus, to all of our benefit, that the exact terms of the postwar peace were up to Truman to build. It is hard to view these institutions in the time Truman ran them as anything but era-shaping successes: the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Berlin Airlift, holding Korea.

Dwight D. Eisenhower — A

Simply a good administrator, in the best sense. He had been trained in the hard knocks school of real-world logistics and brought this competency to the White House. In the post-war years there was an immediate set of engineering problems, like what to do with all this old production, and he was the perfect man for the job.

Era 8: Great Power to People’s Home

From McKinley’s entry into politics through JFK, the presidency ran on a realpolitik view of great-power competition — the domestic rejuvenation of our productive forces, or their international application, was the main goal of the office. As the postwar era slowly changed into the 1960s, the very way in which our society was thinking about itself was in a rapid state of change. Increasingly we were coming to buy into the Swedish idea of the “People’s Home” or Folkhemmet. This is the idea that the government’s job is to ensure personal prosperity and happiness of every citizen.

Folkhemmet entered Swedish politics in the 1920s as part of a broader wave of synthesis going on in social democratic parties of the era. Their leader, Per Albin Hansson, gave a speech where he borrowed the term from the Swedish right, but instead used it to emphasize the internal social nature of the household. The good home, Hansson said, knows no privileged and no neglected members — “no darlings and no stepchildren” — only equality, consideration, cooperation; and the good society is that home scaled up, the state as family. Once a government accepts that its job is the personal prosperity of every citizen — that no one in the home may be a stepchild — everything downstream, in either party’s hands, becomes management of the household.

John F. Kennedy — B

The last of the semi-military Presidents for whom the office was continuous with command, it is difficult to disentangle him from the golden era of national history he governed over. For all that, the national vibe he set was very good, and he represented a workable compromise between the factions of American life. I also love his aesthetic, hence my profile pic, because he was, culturally, the last ~True~ WASP President without being a WASP.

Lyndon B. Johnson — C

LBJ is the first pure People’s Home president, where JFK’s version was tempered by WASP elitism. LBJ’s primary emotional drive was his childhood of poverty in the rural South. Much of our state is his legacy, from Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, and civil rights.

It can be a little hard to judge him because, similar to Wilson, LBJ represents a tangle of contradictions. There is quite a lot of good and quite a lot of bad in here for anyone who is willing to go look. On the net he was a wash.

Richard Nixon — C

Politically another example of a “backlash” which has already accepted all of the presuppositions of its opponents. Nixon was another wave of the People’s Home, whatever the party label said. He is behind the EPA, OSHA, the Clean Air Act, and in moving us to a fiat currency system.

Domestically he was slightly below average, and perhaps deeply below average if you include his paranoid spying. But abroad he was genuinely great. From opening China to leaving Vietnam he was solid. Watergate is, of course, the elephant in the room, but it gets overblown. What really mattered is that after Nixon, the President has been forced to govern in front of a much more skeptical jury.

Gerald Ford — C

A do-nothing whose whole role in history was pardoning Nixon. He could have truly been replaced by anyone from the era, and nothing important would have changed.

Jimmy Carter — D

Carter has almost the identical problem as Hoover. Namely, what America desperately needed at this moment was a better set of vibes to stomach cuts to the state, and whatever else Jimmy Carter was, he did not have good vibes. Domestically his policy was fundamentally sound — notably, the appointment of Volcker was farsighted. On international politics, the basket is much more mixed. Carter governed during a period of superficial Soviet strength, on the back of the oil shock and the peak of Third World communist regimes, before the collapse in commodity prices brought them all down in the 1980s. This is to say his administration was constantly on the back foot, and although they had successes, such as with Camp David, they were below average — a continuity of Ford probably would have been better.

Era 9: The Boomer Consensus

If the first era of People’s Home politics was tempered by two things — a large cohort of people raised in the older, more Darwinian world, and a genuine competitor in the USSR — the second wave was restrained by neither. Starting around the election of Reagan, politics slipped into a consensus I like to call the Boomer Truth Regime. Basically it held that America was, and always would be, a People’s Home, the world hegemon, and the bringer of prosperity, peace, liberalism, and stability to the entire world. These were not positions to be argued for. They were the floor you stood on while arguing about something else.

The mechanism here is generational rather than ideological. A cohort born into the postwar miracle absorbed, in childhood, a complete picture of how the world works, and that picture then hardened — from an experience of success into an all-consuming set of axioms which we remain bound by. It is worth pointing out that Trump, Clinton, and George W. Bush were all born in the same golden summer of 1946.

Rather than debating policy we have instead mostly been arguing over the thermostat settings, or who gets to use the TV. What actually changes from election to election is which faction of the household is the darling and is the stepchild. Hence the histrionic screaming but the basic continuity of policy. 

What makes the era genuinely hard to grade is that the Regime worked, and worked well enough that success became indistinguishable from proof. The Cold War ended on our terms, the stock market went up, crime came down, and everything got nicer, better-made, higher quality. But there is also a sense in which a President in this environment gets enormous credit for standing on a moving walkway. 

One note. I’m going to keep my thoughts on these later presidents briefer, with the last three excluding thoughts entirely, because it is all so recent, anything more than a few sentences deserves an entire article.

Ronald Reagan — B

Reagan’s presidency was best defined by a better set of vibes. On policy he was fine. The pressure on the USSR probably turned out for the best from an American great-power perspective, arguably for the worse for the Soviet citizenry, though who knows: the thing could have imploded into civil war. Where he falls short is in his unwillingness to pare back the worst excesses of the New Deal era. Social Security and Medicare were tinkered with — the 1983 amendments raised the retirement age and taxed benefits — but neither was structurally touched. Even so, I grade him highly because of his sunny optimism and ability to reinject into the American spirit a belief in their own fundamental goodness and ability to do anything.

George H.W. Bush — A

Bush Sr. was a very good president. And far above mediocre replacement material. It is fair to credit him with managing the fall of the Soviet Union and the transition into the post-Cold War era, as well as the Gulf War, which was a spectacular military success. Also, his willingness to raise taxes and make real progress towards balancing the budget was patriotic and good. The last veteran of the war that built the era, he lived up to his generation’s moniker.

Bill Clinton — B

The first “modern” President, Clinton is the beginning of the presidency as chief celebrity. If the job by now is conducting the national mood inside a fixed regime, the 1990s were nearly perfect, and Clinton no doubt earns some credit for that. On domestic and foreign policy, he was a continuity of the Reagan-era policy of shrinking the state, as well as trying to export democracy abroad. What keeps him out of A is that I’m not sure he did a better job than Bush Sr. would have.

George W. Bush — D

With Bush, the question is whether Gore would have done better. To me, the answer is definitely yes! Bush’s administration was defined principally by the US War on Terror and an inability to get his spending reforms through, but an ability to slash taxes, thus exploding the deficit. Additionally, Bush had the worst of the WASP stereotypical traits, including — and this is only an impression — being genuinely stupid. Iraq was a disaster, and almost entirely his fault. On the flip side, PEPFAR was extremely good

Barack Obama — B

I’ve always liked Obama. I preferred Romney in 2012, no doubt for mostly ethnic reasons, but he was a bright and conscientious president even if we often disagreed on policy. The 2008-9 crisis was stabilized competently, the ACA meant that my dad never had to worry about pre-existing condition coverage, and he was able to keep illegal immigration mostly under control. But somewhere in his second term, the dial on cultural leftism began to be turned too high for my preference.

Donald Trump (1st) — C

Joe Biden — D

Donald Trump (2nd) — D, so far

Era 10: The ~Next~ Era

Now let me end this article with my thoughts on where we are headed next. The major tension right now is “what do we do with the unproductives” — or, to flip it honestly, “what do we do with the productives.” Under the People’s Home framework, there are no favorites, but there is still variation in how productive the members are. In the modern world, where capital, labor, and everything in between are so liquid, there are limits to how much you can actually squeeze. Today, the political system favors majorities, whereas the economic reality is ruthlessly Darwinian and vitalist. Thus, I expect the next set of Presidents to be compromisers between these two factions — running electorally on a populist, low-human-capital policy playbook, and governing more technocratically than they campaign, so as not to scare away capital and labor.

---

# 2026 Community Presidential Tier List - Results!

The "official" ranking

Date: 2026-08-04
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/2026-community-presidential-tier
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/2026-community-presidential-tier

The Tier List: 

You can find the data here. Note: Substack rounds vote percentages so they may not always add to exactly 100. Also Trump 2 is still open as I write this so make sure to go and vote. 

!!make your own and share it!!

How the scoring works:

The format is simple. Each president gets rated S, A, B, C, or F. To turn letters into numbers, I mapped them onto a five-point scale: S = +3, A = +1, B = 0, C = −1, F = −3. 

Headline result: 

Average that across every vote and each president gets a score. Here’s how they rank, with error bars showing plus or minus one standard deviation.

Over time: 

Intensity Weighted:

If you switch from the average score to the absolute totals — simply summing every vote rather than averaging — you get a ranking weighted by how much people care.

The breakdown, president by president:

Some presidents were more controversial than others:

WAR(6 nearest presidents):

What do you disagree with?

---

# It is always worth trying.

Today is a blessed celebratory day in the Banks household.

Date: 2026-08-03
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/it-is-always-worth-trying
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/it-is-always-worth-trying

Because today is the day I have finally crossed the elusive threshold of 100 paid subscribers and so earned an orange check next to my name.

Note: I’m exactly on that threshold, and three of the people are free trials, so ironically enough I could still lose this check. If you would like to help protect me from this dire fate you can subscribe here:

For those unfamiliar: Substack’s checks work a little like the old pre-Elon Twitter system, except nobody at the company decides whether you’re famous enough to deserve one. They’re earned entirely through the paid subscription model — the tiers run from hundreds of paid subscribers up through tens of thousands. It is, I think, a pretty fair system. A paid subscriber is somebody who buys into the thing you’re doing enough to give you money and collecting 100 of them is no mean feat.

To me this represents something significant. Namely, the crossing of a threshold I have sought, and climbed, and crawled towards for the last three odd years. It might seem silly to someone else, and I’ll admit that what I earn here isn’t going to buy me a house in Malibu — I gave out discounts, and between those and the annual subscriptions it works out closer to $300 a month than $500. But it’s a non-trivial amount of money and the idea that 100 people are willing to give me some of their own money just to read about my nerdy thoughts on the Office, or WW1, or my favorite philosophers, is… well, it is indescribable.

So today I wanted to write a little bit of an autobiography of the history of my blogging, and put forward a core thesis of mine: it is always worth trying.

The autobiography

I began “blogging” for the first time with two of my friends back in the closing months of 2023. At the time we were publishing on a website one of them had built for us — Voyager’s Log. I literally didn’t know Substack was a thing, and our mailing list was composed exclusively of friends and family.

My first article, which we have since republished on Substack here, was a blast to write, and from that moment I was hooked. Of course, since we were just putting it on our website, I immediately began trying to push my content on everyone I could find. Posting it on LinkedIn, sharing it with people I knew, talking about it with strangers, posting on Reddit, and otherwise being a huge pain in the ass. But I loved it. I loved writing about my ideas, and I loved even more getting to talk to people about it. I’ve always been an idea guy but, as my Substack publication’s title would suggest, I’m not someone who sticks to my ideas for long. This meant I was leaving a field of half-digested impulses behind me, and writing was an opportunity to sit down and actually finish them.

For the next five or so months we published only on our own website, until I one day stumbled onto Substack and realized it might offer us a suggestion algorithm to actually ride. Previously I had been trying to either post AI readings of the essays on YouTube or post links to them on Reddit, but neither had produced much success. On YouTube the problem was no one wanted to listen to random essays read by an AI, and on Reddit I was constantly having my posts removed. When they weren’t removed, the engagement was, well, it was full of redditors.

From about May through October 31st we got functionally no engagement. One article I wrote got maybe 8 likes, but that was after ruthlessly spamming it everywhere I could, and we had developed an audience of ~maybe~ 5 real people. Then I wrote an article about the polls around the upcoming election and it “took off” — for me. The article ~2k views and ~20-odd likes, and for the first time there were people actually “reading” my stuff. It was at this same point I discovered Notes and began to spam like 25–50 posts a day. I had never gotten ~any~ interaction on X or anywhere, and so this was intoxicating beyond belief. And then the ball began to roll more quickly. After the election, on November 10th, I wrote what is still one of my favorite pieces — “To Govern, Govern Well” — and it actually hit the algorithm.

At that point “Peter Banks” began to pick up weight on Notes, and the week or so around the end of 2024 was ridiculous by any measure. On one of the days I gained over 160 subscribers, and since at the time I had it set to email me every time I got a new sub, my phone was exploding.

In that moment I benefited from the same gift everyone just starting out has. No one had any idea who I was. This meant I could be everything to everyone. To liberals I could be a frustrated former Democrat — not necessarily untrue. To chuds I could be a fellow traveler — again, there is an honest spin to this. Naturally, as I grew, my flavor became more clear and I was funneled to the subset of this platform where I naturally belong.

That winter was simultaneously one of the greatest winters of my life, and one of the most frustrating, darkest ones. Because what ended up killing the run was that I had to go to a tax conference in North Carolina. And “conference” is somewhat underselling it — it was more like a private symposium, a small number of invited students learning about corporate tax research. It was a week long, and I obviously wasn’t going to be able to post on Notes at all. At the time Substack didn’t have the ability to schedule posts. So I was going to essentially just disappear. And it’s pretty funny, because you can see on the graph that this is exactly when the growth stops. Maybe it kept going for a day or two afterwards, but it was while I was at that symposium that the rate of growth simply stopped.

And at this same symposium I happened to catch some illness — I felt like dog shit and had to leave early and go home. I remember very distinctly sitting in the Raleigh–Durham airport in the middle of January, hours early because I had nowhere else to wait, playing a Hearts of Iron IV mod called The New Order, and being furious that I had lost this momentum. It was one of the most frustrating and darkest stretches I can remember. I came back and started posting again. And never again was I able to quite catch fire the way I did in those early months.

But what I was able to do was actually develop an audience. And it was at that point that I finally began to write for other people. Previously, the writing was basically for myself — I mean this literally, because no one was reading it. The true audience of any article was me. I wanted to take the time to carefully think through the ideas I had bouncing around inside my head. That changed substantially, and I began writing articles for other people.

There was another change, I realized I could make it as a writer. I didn’t know how long it would take. I didn’t know how many battles I would have to fight. But this was what I wanted to do, and it was possible — there was a combination of cards I could play that would lead to me earning a full-time income by writing, and I had an obligation to myself to try, to throw myself at it with reckless abandon.

In the year and a half since, a lot has changed in my life. I’m no longer a PhD student at Stanford. I am now the president of a small think tank — The Boyd Institute — and I’m expecting a child this November. Still I know when I look back on my life this whole period will be one blur to me.. The period where I began to build the life I sincerely wanted. A process I’m still in the middle of, and which I have no intention of slowing down.

This brings me to the other point I wanted to make. It is always worth trying.

On trying

Modernity — or at least my slice of it — emphasized thinking things through. There was an enormous indexing on being self-reflective and careful. On having a plan. And this is good; a bad plan is better than no plan. But one of the problems with it is that it can lead you to the false conclusion that everything has already been solved.

Consider: we did not put wheels on suitcases until the 1970s. This is such a blindingly obvious innovation — something that anyone with any amount of intelligence should have realized almost immediately. You have this hard-bodied object; you can just put some wheels on it, put it at an angle, and roll it. And yet no one thought of it.

The details make it worse. Bernard Sadow, a luggage executive, filed the patent in February 1970 — six months after we put a man on the moon — after watching an airport porter roll heavy machinery around on a wheeled pallet. Department stores turned him down for months; he was told, more or less, that men would never accept suitcases with wheels. And even his version wasn’t the answer: the upright roller bag with the telescoping handle — the one you actually own — wasn’t invented until 1987, by an airline pilot working in his garage.

It took somebody actually doing it. Somebody solving the problem, and not telling themselves the problem had already been handled — approaching the world with an open mind toward what could be improved.

We’ve all been inoculated by what I would describe as the efficient market hypothesis of society. The idea that there’s someone out there doing the thing better than you could do it at any given moment. And if it’s not that, then there’s some invisible other force that adjudicates who wins and who loses, and you are simply at the whims of it. I think this is patently false. There are circumstances where it borders on true — if you think there’s secret money to be made in the financial markets, I have a bridge to sell you. But very little of life is as efficiently pored over for arbitrage as the American capital markets. There are enormous, enormous fields of human affairs that lack the army of Chinese engineers trying to decode the smallest problems, and if you focus on one of these areas, it is very possible for you, as a Human, to still make a contribution.

I remember an interview of Dwarkesh Patel’s from a while back where the question came up: why start a podcast at all? Wasn’t that a saturated marketplace? And the answer was that once you actually get into something, you realize there are not that many people doing anything — not that many people really trying to do something at a high level. I think that’s extraordinarily true. The world is not composed of unlimited people of all types. There are always shortages. There are always things being done poorly. There are always problems that need to be solved.

And here is the heart of it: you don’t know ex ante. You can never know ex ante. Ex ante, you cannot know your type. You cannot know how difficult the thing actually is. You can never even really know what needs to be done. It’s only when you start to try — when you begin to execute — that you learn what the failure modes are, what actual success looks like, what the metrics worth tracking even are. You simply cannot replicate this by thinking. And if you’re sitting there telling yourself that you could do it better, you owe yourself an attempt. You owe yourself a shot at the board.

Now, the obvious objection: this is what winners say. “Always worth trying” is the motto of everyone it worked out for, and the people it didn’t work out for aren’t writing celebration posts. 

Fair. But the objection misunderstands what trying buys you. The return on an attempt isn’t victory but the knowledge about the possibility of the thing. If I hadn’t loved writing, what would a life of imagining I did actually buy me? By trying you can find out if that door budges or not.

So this is a little celebration on my part, and a little thank-you to everybody who made it possible — it literally would not have been possible without all of you. If you’re a paid subscriber, know that I look at your names not infrequently. There’s doubtless a degree of narcissism in all of this, and I want to acknowledge that. But there’s also something incredibly and substantively beautiful about getting to share your ideas with people who share them too. The idea that I can sit down and write an article about World War I and the Treaty of Versailles and the German Revolution, and that this can earn me money, is so absurd and so beautiful and so wonderful that it is impossible for me to fully get my mind around. This isn’t a kingly income. It’s the first hurdle in something I know I’ll spend the rest of my life building.

I don’t really know what else to say other than that.

It’s just worth trying.

---

# A Historical Pet Peeve of Mine

Versailles was a bad peace

Date: 2026-08-02
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/a-historical-pet-peeve-of-mine
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/a-historical-pet-peeve-of-mine

I am, and always have been, fascinated with the entire crisis period of 1914–1945. Those thirty years are undeniably the most important in recorded history. There is basically no country on earth today which didn’t undergo some form of national reinvention as a result of the stress, crisis, and defeat produced by the cataclysm. Even countries like Argentina, which were never involved to any degree in the fighting, have their history bisected by the era. 

But I think another reason I’m so interested in it is the degree of documentation we have. When you study something like Roman history, pretty quickly you exhaust the set of primary sources and are left with guesswork and archaeology. That isn’t true here. Not only were the wars death struggles between industrial, literate empires, but they occurred during a remarkably historically self-aware period. As a result, we have a true cornucopia of source material.

Additionally, due to a combination of accident and conscious design, we have access to almost all of the “secret” material from the war. Nowhere is this more true than with the Nazis, whose records were essentially captured intact as their empire collapsed in the spring of 1945. As a result, we have everything from the minutes of their military meetings to the personal journals of people like Franz Halder and Joseph Goebbels.

This means that if you are like me and interested in learning both about modernity and history, the World Wars are like a candy shop. You can flutter between military biographies and academic tomes, all trying to understand the same broad era, and each coming at it with a different epistemology and methodology.

The pros of having access to so much information are obvious, but arguably the cons are just as important. One of the advantages of a limited set of source material is that disagreeing becomes simpler. Normally, everyone is aware of the same limited set of facts, and so the area where interpretation and opinion bleed in becomes more obvious. But in the case of the World Wars, access to a nearly unlimited amount of information has made coming up with tidy explanations for anything extremely difficult. This isn’t to say it has stopped or slowed down our attempts.

As in all circumstances where multiple interpretations are possible, I’ve noticed a sort of display case of cultural canons develop. Like a display case, this means the narratives act as invitations to learn more rather than as complete products in themselves. And when one idea gets old, we like to swap it out with another, more interesting or fresh one. Similarly, there are levels of detail and sophistication ranging from pop movies such as “Enemy at the Gates” to academic tomes like Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin.

In my opinion, this cultural canon holds up relatively well to examination, and I would wager people today have a better grasp of the war than at any other point in history. Still, it is by no means “perfect,” and many of the stories we sell ourselves don’t comport all that well with the facts. Or perhaps more honestly, I don’t like the cut of the jib on all of them. 

There is one very popular take that I have particular umbrage with, namely the idea that Versailles was not harsh.

I have two issues with this particular cultural object. The first and most important is my historical gripe, which I will get into more. But another, and honestly more aggravating one, is the way it appears to always be presented. It reminds me of people who hate on Wilson, where they pretend the opinion is somehow “surprising” or “unusual” when in reality it is as close to the normie consensus as you can possibly get! Wilson was a racist and a liberal; that is the least popular combination possible. The fact that you hate him and love Teddy Roosevelt, who was slightly less racist and slightly less liberal, is not unusual!

It goes beyond that, though, because rather than focusing so much on the treaty itself, a huge amount of time is spent “disproving” the old interpretation. This is a larger cultural tic I find distasteful, and it bothers me wherever it seems like our model of a person or theory is purely negative. Marx and Freud are both great examples of this as well.

Moving on to the history:

Claim: Versailles was unfairly harsh.

What I mean by this is that the Treaty of Versailles, as it was designed in 1919, was far harsher than the terms Germany could have reasonably expected in November 1918 when they signed an armistice, and that if these terms had been known at the time, they would have doubtless continued to fight from their forward positions in northern France.

Additionally, the terms which were designed to keep Germany perpetually “down” both created a permanent strategic nightmare in Europe because of the Entente’s inability to enforce them and were fundamentally contrary to the open promises made by the Allies, and believed by the German public, throughout the war.

To understand what I’m saying, one has to understand a little about the end of WWI. Unlike WWII, the Germans negotiated a conditional surrender with the Allies without any soldiers on their own soil. They had also, in the year prior, concluded a separate peace with the Russians and, as late as that spring, appeared on the verge of outright victory.

However, as the year came to a close, the military situation was deteriorating rapidly. All across Europe, the Central Powers were in full retreat. In the Balkans, Bulgaria was defeated in Macedonia and in September signed an armistice. This unhinged the southern flank for the Central Powers and precipitated disaster. Austria-Hungary was then fully exposed, with an Entente army rapidly pushing north through Serbia and threatening the Hungarian plain. In Venice, where they had just earlier that year nearly knocked the Italians out of the war, their troops were refusing to fight.

The Ottoman Empire faced the prospect of an overland invasion of its capital and isolation from its allies. Germany, which had routinely bailed out its partners before in the war, was facing problems of its own at the time and lacked the resources to help. So on October 30, they signed an armistice with the Entente, and the Austrians, whose army was disintegrating on every front, followed suit on November 3.

Watch on YouTube

Suddenly, Germany was completely exposed.

The Austrian terms had been particularly crushing. Until days before, the Entente had faced off against strongly entrenched Austrian units near Venice, and behind that a foreboding line of mountains which the Italians had spilled the flower of their youth failing to take in 1915. Now the army had surrendered, nearly 400 thousand Austrians were in POW camps, and they had agreed to transport the Allied Powers’ armies north into southern Germany. It was this more than anything else which doomed the German strategic situation permanently.

The situation was also bad, to a lesser extent, on the western front. There the Germans, who had exhausted themselves in offensives earlier in the year, were pushed behind their 1915 defensive line, often called the “Hindenburg Line” after their field marshal but formally called the “Siegfried Position.” That being said, the German army had not broken, and it was retreating in good order.

Facing the possibility of utter defeat, the German high command had two options. One, they could try to sign a peace now with the Entente; or two, they could continue the fight in hopes of reaching a stalemate in the west. The traditional historiography treats surrender as the obvious decision, but personally I disagree. The final terms of Versailles, as I will argue, were extremely harsh, and the military situation could possibly have been salvaged if domestic political will to fight still existed. The reason it really gets complicated is that Germany had, in fact, “won” in the east, and it was here that their real long-term strategic goals lay. For centuries there had been a tension between two impulses in German society, namely a more mercantile democratic one near the Rhine and a more nationalistic imperialist one in the east. Victory over Russia marked the culmination of both of their long-term goals, and the peace with the Soviet Union, which had set up a combination of vassal nation-states without annexations, had easily passed the socialist-dominated Reichstag.

The dream they fought for

If those victories in the east could be held, even at a great cost, Germany would forever earn the status of a true world power. That isn’t something that men like Ludendorff were willing to throw away casually. But the decision to fight also represented something of a suicide pact. Doubtless, the Germans could have extracted a heavy price in blood and treasure from the advancing Allies, but whether that was enough to force them to the table simply wasn’t known. If the Germans managed to check their advance and, still, they proved unwilling to accept a German-dominated Eastern Europe, what options would have remained?

Everything I’ve described above was well understood by the actors involved, and people approached the problem with full awareness of the tradeoffs. Ultimately, the German high command decided to roll the dice, and on October 23rd, ordered the High Seas Fleet to begin preparing to strike out in a desperate bid to break the blockade. The units, aware of the nature of this mission, simply refused and instead went about overthrowing the state.

Germany was at this point on the verge of social collapse. The previous winter, known as the Turnip Winter, had led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them children. Large numbers of defectors roamed the countryside, and the “independent” socialists – who had always been skeptical of the war even in the euphoric months of 1914 – were agitating for open revolution. There was a broad feeling among the German public that the war had been a mistake, and that if they could admit that and overthrow their society, they would get a just peace of equals. It isn’t nice to draw national stereotypes, but I do feel Germans uniquely have a tendency of falling victim to utopian flights of fancy based on the literal words of someone who it should be obvious is lying.

But by November 7, the entire country was aflame. Sailors from Kiel had taken control of the coastal cities. In Munich, Kurt Eisner had declared an independent Marxist state, and in turn dumped huge amounts of embarrassing information on the old regime. Most importantly, there was a selection of Bavarian diplomatic dispatches from the July crisis which seemed to show Berlin and Vienna pushing for a war, totally contrary to the narrative which had been fed to the public of a war of national defense. In short, there was chaos, and by the second week of November there was no possibility of both continuing the war and retaining the old order.

In Berlin, the socialists under Friedrich Ebert were terrified of a Russian-style revolution, which seemed very much in the air, and so immediately went about working with the old powers to try to salvage “something” out of the maw. On November 7, the SPD called for Wilhelm to resign. On the 9th, Chancellor von Baden, an aristocrat from the Liberal faction who had been hoisted into power as a compromise, called the emperor to beg him to leave office peacefully and so avoid revolution. Although he failed to win him over, Baden decided to, without authorization, proclaim that the Kaiser had resigned and then promptly transferred the chancellorship to Ebert. At this point a republic was declared, and like that, the empire was dead. That evening, hundreds of labor union leaders occupied the Reichstag and announced elections, for the next day, of soviet-style soldier and worker councils. A compromise government of sorts was established between the moderate socialists and communists, with each taking half of the new government.

But what was actually to be done? The main effect of the revolution had been to preclude the possibility of continued fighting for long, but both how Germany should look after the war and how, in God’s good name, they were going to actually get out of it were totally open questions. On the evening of November 10, Ebert spoke with Groener, the quartermaster general of the army, and struck a secret agreement (which by its nature makes the precise details impossible to know):

In return for the loyalty of the army towards the new socialist regime, Ebert would agree to put down the communists, end the soldiers’ councils, ensure the creation of a national assembly – rather than a system of workers’ councils – and bring law and order back to the streets.

The next morning at 5 a.m., the German delegation headed by Erzberger, a Catholic centrist, agreed to the Allied demands for an armistice. This broadly amounted to an immediate evacuation of Germany west of the Rhine, with Allied bridgeheads, and an abandonment of gains in the east. Everything else was to be settled at a later peace conference, and until then the blockade would be continued.

Even for the Allied command, the decision to sign this armistice was a non-trivial one. By negotiating an end to the fighting with the new German government, they were also recognizing it as the government of a unified Germany. If they did this, they would preclude the option of either permanently breaking up the state or otherwise reducing it below the point at which it could recover to the status of a Great Power.

This was a particularly messy situation for the French, who were well aware of their military inferiority. Both the Americans and British in that late autumn were more immediately concerned with the possibility of Germany’s implosion and fall to Bolshevism, but France was already thinking decades into the future. Germany had the largest population and economy in Europe, and its military had shown itself to be at least close to a match for France, Russia, and England combined. Without American men or dollars, Paris was well aware they would have probably lost, but there was no guarantee America would return, or even if they did return, come in time to save France from a German army. Obviously history vindicated their fears.

But continuing to fight posed problems of its own. Perhaps most important was the problem of who was going to foot the cost of reconstructing northern France and Belgium. If Germany was destroyed, either intentionally or by revolutionary violence, there would be no existing Central Power with the capability to pay. Similarly, both in Paris and London, there was genuine uncertainty over the ability of their militaries to actually prevail. When you look at a map in November 1918, it can be a little misleading. In countries like Italy or France, let alone England, there was little appetite to fight a grinding war all the way to Berlin to eke out a peace when one could be had today on acceptable terms.

Finally, there was the bind created both by Wilson’s idealism and Entente propaganda. Since the outset of the war, and accelerating with America’s entry, the Entente had been pounding into the heads of their own population and Germany’s that they were not at war with the “country” but instead only with the Kaiser and the militarist caste which ran the country, meaning that if they were done away with, the world could have peace again. Well, here the Germans were, now a democracy having overthrown their Kaiser, asking for a peace on Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Continuing to fight afterwards would have appeared insane to almost everyone in the world.

So they agreed and laid an important brick in our collective history.

I’ve written all of this to try to paint a picture for you of the situation at the time so that the rest of the article makes sense. As a society, I feel the actual shape of WWI is poorly understood even among the historically literate. When people study the World Wars, they are primarily interested in one of two things: either how WWI began or how WWII was prosecuted. We have relatively less interest in knowing the symmetrical cases for the other. In the case of WWII, this makes sense, since the immediate cause of the conflict, in my and most people’s opinion, was Adolf Hitler. Similarly, for WWI, the question of “how the war was fought and how it was concluded” was of little interest to people today or even to people in the immediate postwar years. The consensus in 1919 was that this would be the war to end all wars, and so what really mattered was trying to figure out “how” the war began so it could be avoided. By contrast, in 1946, the immediate question on everyone’s mind was how WW3 would be fought, and so the focus was on the actual conflict itself.

Now this bias has lingered, and so to the extent most people know anything about the end of WWI, it is only that the stab-in-the-back myth is a lie. And by that they usually just mean that Germany wasn’t overthrown by a Judeo-Bolshevik fifth column of deranged communists bent on destroying the brave front-line soldiers. What actually positively happened is mostly a black hole.

In late June 1919, the Entente had finally concluded their negotiations on the final peace with the Germans and produced what became known as the Versailles Treaty. It was a huge document in the 19th-century legalistic tradition, but the most important components of the treaty were as follows.

In the west, Germany was to lose Alsace and some small border regions. In the east, they would lose Poznan, the Polish Corridor, and Lower Silesia.

Germany would be demilitarized – as the first step in global demilitarization.

Germany could never unify with Austria without approval from the League of Nations.

Germany would have to pay an indemnity for all provable losses created by the conflict, with an amount of raw materials and gold due immediately; the rest would be determined later.

Much ink has been spilled elaborating on the unfairness of the treaty, but nowhere is it more obvious to me than in the reparations bill. If you study this era, you have probably run into the idea of the German “war guilt” clause, and what it really is referencing is reparations. The issue wasn’t, so much, that Germany was being held morally liable for the war, although this was offensive to many Germans, but instead that the German state itself was legally responsible to make up ALL losses as the responsible party. And when they said all losses, they meant it, or at least they did at that exact moment.

Ebert’s government, after being presented with the peace terms, was in a state of genuine shock. It was expected for them to lose land — one of Wilson’s points had explicitly referenced an independent Poland with access to the sea — but what they were being given was a Carthaginian peace designed to crush them economically and militarily. Immediately they began to prepare to begin the fighting again. However, by then they had already abandoned their positions and were facing off against units inside Germany itself. Additionally, the army which existed in November was simply gone. Soldiers were now wandering the country half relieved of duty and half AWOL, nearly all of their heavy weaponry had been handed over to the Entente, and now in the east, rather than a sea of German land, they were facing off against hostile Polish and Czech states both committed to retaining their freedom by force. Faced with no possibility of victory and a continued Entente blockade which was then killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, they had no choice but to sign.

Immediately upon signing, the French, Belgian, and other Allied governments dutifully began to assess the losses in human, animal, and material wealth and arrived at the figure of 132 billion gold marks.

There was another wrinkle. The May 1921 London Schedule set the annual payment as a fixed two billion plus a sum equal to 26 percent of German exports. To collect this, the Allies had decided to impose a duty on imported German goods, as Britain did with the Reparation (Recovery) Act. When, unsurprisingly, the main effect of this was to strangle German trade and thus limit their ability to pay anything, France and Belgium abandoned their own versions, preferring to seize coal and goods directly from the occupied Ruhr.

I could of course follow this thread all the way to 1933 and the Nazi seizure of power, but little would be gained.

Basically my argument is this. If you actually look at the terms of the treaty as they existed in 1921, they were far harsher than Germany could have reasonably expected in 1918 when they signed the armistice.

Saying specifically whether a treaty is too harsh or not can be difficult to define; was the American annexation of the Confederacy far too harsh because it totally destroyed them as a legal entity? Instead, I’m really focused here on the disconnect between what the Germans believed they were signing up for when they agreed to stop fighting and the terms actually imposed on them once they lay supine.

Because the losses of land are easy to see on a map, they often get the most attention. However, if you look into the interwar period, the loss of land was simply not the primary grievance. That is different from saying that the Germans were uninterested in ideally reclaiming the Polish Corridor or even unifying with Austria, but if the terms had been this alone, it is doubtful it would have inspired such a strong negative reaction. What was so offensive to Germany was that they were being treated not as a country which had negotiated a conclusion to the fighting in good faith but instead as a piggy bank for Entente rebuilding and a pariah nation.

It was from this that the stab-in-the-back myth gained such a mass following in Germany. Defeat had been immediately precipitated by a socialist revolution which had foolishly rushed into a peace that exposed Germany to the whims of her enemies. It would have, in retrospect, been better to have fought on. Upon this foundation of hindsight and genuine truth was layered every interwar grievance and frustration. Hyperinflation? We wouldn’t have had this without November 1918. International isolation? We wouldn’t have had this without November 1918. Your wife left you? We wouldn’t have had this without November 1918.

Now, in addition to the peace being won duplicitously, I have a couple of other grievances with Versailles and the narrative I see about it.

The reparations were unpayable.

It is true that because Germany literally didn’t have the money to pay the full bill at once, an open-ended timetable of sorts existed. But these obligations were very much seen as real by the Entente, in particular France. They were more than willing to use force to extract the payment, as they showed during their occupation of the Ruhr. You can hypothesize what you want about the thoughts in the secret minds of people, but to the European public and countries, the headline bill was the bill, and how Germany was going to pay it was the only real question.

It is also true that Germany could probably have paid the 50 billion in reparations due on the 1921 schedule of payments if they had seized the properties of the big industrialists and landowners, and that the government did everything in its power to pay up, but I’m not sure what this really communicates. The Germans, of every political faction, always felt Versailles was fundamentally illegitimate, and they would have risked open civil war if they had even wanted to extract the money. There was also no reason for them to believe that if they had extracted blood from stones, France would have forgiven them the remainder of the bill. In fact, it is far more likely that Germany proving itself ~able~ to pay would have simply brought down more demands to pay the full amount.

The Allies couldn’t enforce the terms.

In 1923, when Germany claimed to be unable to furnish the money, France sent an army of 250k to occupy the Ruhr, but even this failed to get the desired results. The workers struck rather than work for the French, and the government in Berlin hyperinflated their currency to pay the striking workers. It was the Entente which blinked first, and pressure from the British and Americans against the French, along with a renegotiation of the reparations and a large loan to stabilize the German economy, ended the standoff with French troops withdrawing.

All of this is downstream of the Entente’s reliance on Germany to actually enforce the terms of the treaty, from reparations to disarmament. Even in 1919 they never, really, had the ability to fully occupy Germany, and with every year that passed, their relative position weakened.

Throughout the 1920s, the Anglo world continued to grow increasingly sympathetic to the Germans, and so there was a series of renegotiations culminating in the Locarno Agreement, which sought to walk back the most extreme parts of the treaty, but to me, if anything, this is evidence it was extremely unreasonable at the point of signing.

Yes, France wanted harsher terms. And America wanted lighter ones.

It is undeniably true that France needed a weak Germany after WWI to secure itself. The events of 1940 prove this. Thus, the French peace aims set out to secure a more permanent position in Europe which would protect them against future German aggression.

The real “flaw” in the peace was that, similarly to reparations, the Entente had demanded more than they could hope to actually enforce. From the moment the peace was agreed to, Germany began to slowly regain strength, and France was forced to take an active posture against them. You see this in the occupation of the Ruhr but also in the string of alliances France cultivated in the Central and Eastern European states. However, what France was never able to do was actually break the fundamental economic and demographic math they had agreed to when they signed the armistice.

Even if the terms had been enforceable long-term, the idea that France asking for harsher terms disproves the conception of Versailles’s unfairness is only true if you place the needs of the French at the center of an objective moral history rather than as one perspective among many. There were many competing interests in the summer of 1919 as the Entente debated the final terms, and the final product represented a messy agglomeration of competing desires. Since the French were on the furthest end of the spectrum with respect to Germany, the peace fell short of that, but it was also far harsher than the Americans would have wanted.

One of the terms which inspired particular frustration with Wilson was the exclusion of Germany from the League of Nations. In fact, he only agreed to the final terms under the assumption that one of the first acts of the organization would be to admit Germany. They failed to do this until Locarno in 1925, effectively turning it from a body for international peace into an alliance system designed to pin the Germans in.

Brest wasn’t obviously far harsher.

If you want to see the actual treaty you can look here, but broadly the terms were as follows:

Russia had to give up land in the west to new—ostensibly German-dominated—nation-states.

Russia had to pay an indemnity of 6 billion gold marks.

Russia had to renew their prewar trade agreements with Germany.

It is generally the first point that people focus on when they want to highlight how harsh Brest was. The Russian state lost a huge amount of territory, but beyond just that, they lost the center of their economic and industrial heart. Looking at only the losses to industry, population, and raw materials, the peace seems far harsher than Versailles.

But if you actually look at the borders from that peace, they are effectively the borders we have today, because they match the broad shape of ethnolinguistic reality in Central and Eastern Europe. Arguably, you could say that Ukraine was still a part of Russian society at this point, but of course the Ukrainians would probably disagree.

Not only this, but the Soviets were a country that was actively preaching world revolution and a war against the capitalist countries. The original terms of the treaty would have been much lighter, probably restricted to only the Baltics and Poland, but Trotsky decided in his ultimate wisdom not to negotiate in good faith because they were convinced a workers’ rebellion was about to break out in Germany. Germany, as a result, launched an operation that occupied Ukraine and Belarus, effectively forcing the Soviets’ hand to accept a peace at any price.

If the Germans had not surrendered in 1918 but instead continued to fight on while pretending to negotiate, it would also fundamentally undermine the argument that I’ve been making about the “unfairness” of the terms. Far from being a Bolshevik revolution, the Weimar regime was the result of a popular revolution aiming to affirm the Entente’s values. These were the same people who had struck to stop war production during the run-up to their nation’s offensive in 1918 because they wanted a peace of equals. Those same people had overthrown their government, and in return they were forever reduced to a lower status of nation, all to keep the French militarily protected. There was no similar permanent reduction of Russia at Brest. The prohibition on a union with Austria and the denial of the rights of self-determination to both Germans in Danzig and the Sudetenland were both genuine hypocrisies that motivated broad sympathy in the world in the interwar period for a reason.

I think you can reasonably argue that Brest was harsher — in particular because Germany reached beyond the paper terms — but my point is simply that it is not as self obvious as most people claim today. 

Conclusion:

I think this new consensus that Versailles was actually just, or even light, exists mostly to discredit the Nazis’ arguments against “the Versailles Diktat,” as they called it, and less about anything else. The cultural rise of it seems to map pretty closely to paranoia about the populist right, as if allowing that Versailles was overly harsh to some degree were the first step in excusing Hitler, and so it must be defended irrespective of its truthfulness as a claim unto itself.

This feels lazy and unserious to me, although I should be clear that no one states their argument in so many words. The peace could have been far harsher, and that would not justify the Nazis’ war of aggression and genocides. Still, to a German in 1919, the peace treaty was a shock, and not for no reason. There were many examples of Entente duplicity on their way to victory, including promises made and broken to actors as remote as Italy and Arab tribes, and this simply feels like another example.

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# Trump was wrong on Iran

Day 154 of the four week war

Date: 2026-07-31
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/trump-was-wrong-on-iran
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/trump-was-wrong-on-iran

I’ve been putting off writing this article for a while now, because it was my sincere hope that Trump and co. had been secretly executing some master plan, and that the apparent chaos and confusion were all simply a ploy. But as the months tick by and the stumbles only seem to pile up, at some point it becomes fairly clear that their plan failed. Meaning now we are in some liminal, ill-defined phase where both sides are feeling each other out to determine if it is worth going at it again in earnest.

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Back in March, two weeks into this war, I wrote that someone had to be deeply wrong about Iran — that the competing narratives were fundamentally incompatible, and that time would sort out who was detached from reality. Five months later, time has delivered its verdict, and it turns Trump’s critics in the media and the diplomatic establishment have overwhelmingly been vindicated in their opinion that air strikes alone could not force substantive regime change, and that Trump had no Plan B if that failed.

So today I want to do two things: review the current state of the war, and look at how each side’s narrative — my own included — stacks up.

The state of the war

Tactically, the situation is still disastrous for the Iranians. We will probably never know the true scale of their losses, but undeniably they have had tens of billions of dollars in equipment destroyed and thousands of men killed — estimates of Iranian military dead run from 3,000 to more than 6,000, with Iran’s own count standing at 3,468 killed and more than 27,170 injured. Their navy and air force functionally ceased to exist in the war’s first weeks and may never come back. The old regime elite, which had grown up in the pre-revolutionary world, has been hollowed out — Khamenei, Larijani, Khatib, and dozens of senior commanders are dead — and in their place is a new generation of Iranians whose ability is still an open question.

source

But strategically, the Iranians are arguably in the best position they have ever been in.

The major threat to regime survival — a domestic revolution — totally failed to appear. Mojtaba Khamenei sits, or possibly lies comatose, where his father once ruled, and five months of bombing have produced no meaningful defection, fracture, or uprising.

Not only this, but the long-standing threat that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz has been shown to be real, even while facing down blistering strikes and massive military inferiority. As part of the various failed peace negotiations the strait has been reopened, and as of yet the international oil market has held together, but it is now clear that Iran holds a veto on all trade going through the strait.

Still, even if on paper this looks like a victory for the Iranians, it is a victory only for their state apparatus. The hope that this war would replace the clerical elite with a class more open to a Saudi-style arrangement is basically exhausted, leaving them with few choices. There doesn’t seem to be either the desire or the capability within the Iranian government right now to stop the fighting, which leaves them little chance of being reintegrated into the international community. Their best bet at this point is to become a besieged state like North Korea and hold together through military discipline.

Not only that, but their victory is totally contingent on America being unwilling to finish them off — leaving them currently trending towards victory in the narrowest, most rickety sense possible.

America: brilliant and stuck

The situation is reversed for America. Tactically we have continued to perform brilliantly, and our April rescue of the downed F-15 crew was a feat no other nation on the planet could have pulled off — two aviators recovered from hostile Iranian territory over fifty hours of operations, one of whom had spent two days evading Iranian forces in mountainous terrain while treating his own wounds. Can’t wait to see the movie we make about it in 20 years.

But we have shown ourselves to have no taste for the blood that war inevitably brings, even as Trump casually boasts about our willingness to potentially inflict wanton cruelty. 

Since the bombing has failed to produce regime change, we have arrived at a strategic dead end. Congress lacks the ability to rein in the Trump administration, so the war continues over their formal objection — and over it again, and again — and with a Trump obviously desirous for a “Deal” and continuing to pretend they are begging him for one.

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This was never a war I would have begun. It seemed foolish to me from the outset, but I was open to being incorrect. Still, we are in this war now, and our options are either to “finish” the fight and suffer the inevitable losses that putting boots on the ground would bring, or to admit defeat and back down, no matter how badly bloodied the Iranians are.

What about the rest of the world?

Globally, no one has come out better off than they were before the war.

China has shown itself to be a basically inert force on the global stage — it declined even to help reopen the strait its own economy depends on — and the sheer cost of this war should raise eyebrows in Beijing about any Taiwan timeline. Russia has had whatever remained of its military prestige wiped away by the uselessness of its equipment in a conventional fight with the Americans, reducing Russian kit to, at best, the tools of the poor or the guerrilla. 

The EU has been nothing but their specialty, complain. And totally lack the ability to discipline America a for a flagrantly illegal war. Even continuing to passively assist us, while lodging their displeasure. 

But Israel is probably the biggest losers of this war, since apparently none of their strategic objectives have been accomplished despite the consumption of a huge amount of treasure and international goodwill. They could object here: Khamenei is dead, the Iranian navy and air force are gone, and the missile-fire rate collapsed. All true. But degradation was never the war aim — the war aim, to the extent one was ever articulated, was an Iran that could no longer threaten its neighbors or the world economy. Obviously that has totally failed. We will see how much damage the Iranian nuclear program actually took when they inevitably begin trying to work on a bomb again.

So who was right?

The international experts and centrist analysts who said this war lacked either a mechanism for victory or even a proper conception of what victory would look like. That isn’t to say all of them were correct, or that they even agreed with each other — plenty of them predicted an oil catastrophe that didn’t come, or an imperial collapse that hasn’t materialized. But the basic flavor of their critique was accurate.

Running the three narratives from March through the July 2026 filter:

Narrative 1 — “The US is losing militarily.” Still wrong. The tactical picture never stopped being lopsided.

Narrative 2 — “The war is functionally over, and we won.” Dead. Trump said in March that “we already won the war in many ways”. The ceasefire that followed collapsed, was extended indefinitely, was replaced by a fourteen-point memorandum of understanding signed on June 17, and collapsed again in the second week of July, after which the US and Iran have continued to trade blows. Whatever this is, it is not over, and it is not Desert Storm.

Narrative 3 — “This was dumb.” Closest to right. There appears to be no mechanism for victory, no definition of victory, and a president who will neither escalate to a decision nor accept the appearance of defeat.

What about me?

Here is what I predicted back in March:

I predict, with enormous error bars given the uncertainty, that the US seizes Kharg Island and possibly the other Gulf islands and occupies them as a strategic military zone. This will become our Gibraltar — a small, defensible chokepoint that gives Washington permanent leverage over the world’s trade lanes.

Meanwhile the bombing campaign will continue for weeks, maybe a couple of months, systematically degrading the Iranian state’s ability to function as a military power. This will push oil prices above $100 for a while, but once the war is concluded they will return to roughly $60 again.

The IRGC’s production infrastructure gets hammered until there is simply nothing left to reconstitute in the near term and at some point, and I’d guess late April or May, whatever remains of the Iranian leadership asks for a ceasefire on American terms. Trump, who loves a deal and loves declaring victory even more, will agree, which allows the regime to technically survive but in a deeply cowed form. Iran will no longer pose a credible threat to anyone for the next decade at least, and my modal prediction is they will become a mostly “normal” country before 2030.

Without Kharg Island they cannot sell oil at scale, which means they cannot fund proxies or rebuild their military, and thus they cannot project power beyond their borders.

This war will be mostly forgotten by Americans because the left will have little interest in talking about what looks like a substantive Trumpian victory and the right won’t want to remind people that they were to blame for the inflationary shock we are headed toward.

Going through each of my predictions:

The military picture — mostly right. I said the tactical situation for Iran was catastrophic, that the war was displaying the overwhelming dominance of the US military, and that the casualty ratios were approaching colonial-era absurdity. That has held.

The regime survives — partially right. I predicted the regime would technically survive in a cowed form. It is true that the regime still survives, although how cowed it will be is still very much in the air.

Muted international costs — correct. I guessed the international cost would be muted in the short run and ambiguous enough in the long run to become a point of argument rather than a hinge event. Five months on: the EU has complained and done nothing, no coalition has formed to punish us, and the Gulf states remain operationally aligned even while privately furious.

Kharg Island — wrong. I predicted we would seize it and hold it as an American Gibraltar. We obviously have not captured the island yet, though we have bombed its military infrastructure repeatedly while leaving the oil terminals standing. That being said, Trump’s own explanation for sparing them was “don’t touch the oil, because maybe we’ll take over Kharg Island”. So it is possible I will still be vindicated on this.

A ceasefire on American terms by late April or May — wrong. A ceasefire did arrive, on April 8, brokered by Pakistan rather than dictated by Washington, and it almost immediately collapsed.

Oil back to $60 — wrong. The spike happened as predicted, and then some: Brent crossed $100 in the war’s second week and peaked at the end of April. It did fall below $70 in early July before it went back into the eighties where it sits today.

Iran neutralized for a decade — wrong. Iranian forces hit three vessels in two days at the start of this month, which is what tore up the memorandum. Whatever else Iran has lost, it has not lost the ability to impose costs on the world economy at will.

The war would be forgotten — probably wrong. We won’t know how this will all play out, but I suspect the war will remain a stain on Trump’s legacy going forward. His poll numbers continue to worsen by the day — thirty-two percent with Quinnipiac, an all-time low, and sixty percent of voters now opposed to the war outright.

What should be done?

We have to finish this war with a victory.

The entire global system is best conceived of through the lens of an American imperial project. That means we cannot be defeated by a rebellious province without risking a crisis of the entire system. This isn’t to say that an Iranian win — even a total one — would bring about the collapse of the American order. But it would invite more challenges, and those challenges we would have to fight at a far higher cost than it would take to simply end this war now.

We don’t need to conquer the country or attempt some engineered regime change. But the strait has to be reopened permanently, and it has to be clear to everyone that America won.

That won’t be free of either cost or Human death, but victory is the way to keep a system — which for all its flaws is basically good — together, and so defeat is unacceptable.

---

# Yarvin: A Gentle Introduction

The manic pixie nymph of the early internet

Date: 2026-07-22
URL: https://peterbanks.org/introductions/yarvin-a-gentle-introduction
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/yarvin-a-gentle-introduction

I’ve been wanting to write an article on Curtis Yarvin for a while now. As a matter of fact, I’ve already written two full articles—one in 2024 and another in 2025—which I opted, almost certainly for the better, not to publish. But the more I think about it, the more I feel as if not writing an article about him is a little bit cowardly. Because, and I’ll drop the poison here, I actually really admire Mencius Moldbug, and he has been one of the most influential philosophers on the way I think about the world.

Since my audience is almost perfectly split between right- and left-wingers, something I am extremely proud of, I now feel the need to “justify” the above so as not to forever taint your perspective of me, and hopefully, if you read this article, I will do that. But I also want to make something clear up front: the purpose of today isn’t to dismantle or debunk Yarvin, although I do often disagree with him, instead I want to honestly represent his worldview, as expressed in the late 2000s under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, before getting into my thoughts and history with him.

As with my prior “Gentle Introductions” on Nietzsche and Carlyle, my goal here is, more than anything, to try and correct a record I feel has become substantively confused. And separate the signal from the noise.

Curtis Yarvin presents the unique problem for anyone claiming to represent his work in that he is still very much alive. As a matter of fact, I hear he is steamrolling conversations all across America right now. To compound his status as a living, breathing, Human, Yarvin also holds the unique “privilege” of having been thrust into the stream of history just in time to be the court jester for Trump’s continuing pool party in the Rubicon.

This means that he became an object of fascination on both the left and the right as some modern prophet of doom. Trumpism’s lack of ideological coherence has long meant that liberals, who are quite ideological, feel the need to find a deeper core, and for a moment Yarvin became this ~logic~.

In early 2025, as DOGE tore through the executive and MAGA was on the march, people on both the Left and the Right found in Yarvin an apparent justification for the carnage. And so he inevitably became the platonic ~debunkee~ for anyone wanting to express their frustration at Trump by surrogate. Tens of thousands of words were penned at the time in hopes of dismantling—or defending—him, as if his destruction would also destroy the intellectual core of Trumpism and somehow dismantle the thing itself.

One of the results of this was that Yarvin has taken on something of a Freudian character, where it is fashionable to know the problems with his ideology without really having a coherent idea of what he actually believes.

To further complicate the situation, Curtis Yarvin is, in my opinion, actually very difficult to cleanly nail down ideologically. If you spend enough time with a writer you get to know their idiosyncrasies well enough to see the broader picture. But to the layperson his writing is, often purposefully, obtuse, and poorly edited. Still as I said a broad picture does emerge which is something like that of the guys who post Lee Kuan Yew edits.

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In other words, he is an authoritarian developmentalist who believes a powerful executive is necessary for competent governance. Often he calls this monarchism and sure, you can squint at it and see the shape of a monarch, but they look much more like Napoleon III than Louis XIV or Nicholas II.

I’m sure he’s written about China before, although I’ll admit to never having seen a full article on them by him. Nevertheless, the CCP, without the aesthetics of the cultural left, would be his ideal form of government. Still, he could reasonably chime in and say:

“You are wrong, as expressed in this article you missed from 2014 where I discreetly outlined a preference for Putinist authoritarianism instead!”

Yarvin has done so many interviews, written so many articles, tweeted so many half-baked thoughts, and otherwise shared his opinion in so many places it would literally take a lifetime to just internalize it all. Meaning that despite my best efforts writing this article is a little like walking blindfolded into a minefield.

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So before I take my inaugural steps on that voyage, let me be clear, this is only a gentle introduction I’ve combined with some of my own reflections. 

Most of the quotes for this piece were drawn from the following works: Patchwork, Moldbug on Carlyle, How Dawkins Got Pwnd, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, and an Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives. As with any summary, I highly recommend you read them all yourself.

The Red Pill

Basically everything Yarvin wrote is an attempt to answer the question of why liberalism “won” so absolutely in all of our culture-making institutions, and why The Science™ often seems to contort itself, without any evidence of external manipulation, into justifying progressive causes?

Of course many other people have grappled with this same question and either arrived at the conclusion that liberals did not ~win~ — in the sense that they do not actually dominate society — or that their victory, and the apparent contortions in scientific progress, is simply the result of liberalism being, if not obviously then inevitably, true.

Yarvin of course doesn’t share this opinion. Instead he argues that progressivism has won by de facto becoming our state church, and that much of society is structured to hide this fact from us. And if our state religion controls the narrative how can we know it is actually as good as it says it is?

“In 1938, three systems of government were contending for global supremacy. One of them is still around: yours. Anglo-American liberal democracy. Had military luck favored either of the others—National Socialism or Marxist–Leninism—we can also be sure that it would have discovered and reveled in its foes’ every misdeed, and that it would have approached its own, if at all, tentatively and ambiguously.

If only one can survive, at least two must be illegitimate, and irredeemably criminal. And the survivor will certainly paint them as such. But suppose all three are irredeemably criminal?”

Yarvin asks you to sort societies by the relationship between opinion and power, and offers three types:

“Basically, a type 1 society is a government in which the State controls the press and the universities. A type 2 society is one in which the press and the universities control the State. It is easy to tell the two forms apart, but the customer experience is pretty much the same.”

A Type 3 society — Popper’s open society, where ideas compete freely and no one owns the truth — is what America believes itself to be. Yarvin’s wager is that America is in fact Type 2: a society in which the information organs have captured the state, not by conspiracy but by a set of shared incentives.

“The type 2 society is the consensus society. Its hallmark is the phenomenon of spontaneous coordination. You might call it Gleichschaltung without Goebbels.”

Gleichschaltung, or coordination, was the process through which the Nazi regime restructured society in the early 1930s. Much of it, as articulated by Ian Kershaw was achieved through a process of people “working towards the Führer,” meaning that across German society people at all levels willingly and proactively restructured their own universe to be in accordance with National Socialist thought, or what they believed was the inner desire of Hitler. 

The Cathedral

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This system of spontaneous coordination is Yarvin’s central and most influential idea. The consensus society has constructed an entire ecosystem — referred to as “The Cathedral” — of quasi-governmental organizations from which it draws power and influences society. Think of places like academia, or the prestige press, or the bureaucracy, which informs how policy is actually implemented and sets the cultural consensus and boundaries of discussion.

“Here at UR, we sometimes call it the Cathedral—although it is essential to note that, unlike an ordinary organization, it has no central administrator.” 

“And the left is the party of the educational organs, at whose head is the press and the universities. This is our 20th-century version of the established church.” 

How does an orthodoxy enforce itself with no enforcer? By selection. Everyone who rises through the credentialing system has been selected for the same opinions; holding them is rewarded with hiring, funding, publication, prestige; departing from them is punished severely. You can think of this like any Darwinian selection environment. Since only beliefs that accumulate more power, or at least retain power, survive from t into t + 1, gradually over time the Cathedral has come to believe, simultaneously everywhere, in the same subset of things that maximize its power. The consensus it produces is therefore not “the set of all reasonable ideas,” as it imagines, but something narrower:

“I think the answer is that the Synopsis includes only political propositions whose adoption tends to strengthen the Cathedral, and weaken its enemies. It rejects and opposes all other propositions.”

Hence the deflationary definition: “To be progressive is simply to support the Cathedral and the Synopsis.” And because the selection pressure runs only one way — no resource-distributing institution rewards rightward motion — the system has an inevitable direction.

“Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.”

The result of this is that more and more of the de facto power in society has been sucked up by the Cathedral, leaving our de jure organs for exercising sovereignty increasingly anemic and incapable. What is important here is that the way people think power works in America, and the way it actually does, have little relationship with each other. We “all” believe that power, or sovereignty, ultimately resides in the hands of the ~people~, and through them is exercised by elected officials. But Yarvin would argue that pretty obviously isn’t true at bottom. Not only is the cultural tempo and range of acceptable views set by elite tastemakers, who are overwhelmingly progressives, but often politics seems to barely matter in reality.

You can conjure the following thought experiment. Suppose for a second that you forgot we had held an election, maybe you don’t follow the news that closely. Would you be able to tell power had changed hands? In how many elections can you say yes? For me the only answer might be Trump II, since I knew some people who lost their jobs. But I also live in the DC area; for most of this country the honest answer is probably zero.

Our politicians like to talk a big game but when they enter power they are always immediately hamstrung by an inertia that they either fold to or are crushed by. It is the Cathedral which ultimately decides how policy looks. If you wanted to know what policy in 2010 was going to look like back in 1995 you would have been much better served chatting it up with socialites in NYC or students at Stanford than listening to any politicians’ promises.

The elected government is thus theater, as in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the real administrative machine functions the same, no matter who sits in the White House.

“The progressive is always the underdog in his own mind. Yet, in objective reality, he always seems to win in the end.” 

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Protestantism minus Christ

So what exactly is this orthodoxy? Yarvin sees liberalism as a more potent adaptation of Anglo-Puritan Christianity. In “How Dawkins Got Pwned” he settles on Universalism for the religious impulse and I think it is my favorite of his titles, although he has an annoying habit of changing his names for things. This religion has hijacked global culture by exploiting a vulnerability in our separation of church and state; just don’t talk about God!

“One of the most adaptive features of M.42 is that nontheistic or secular Christianity can be propagated by American official institutions, which are constitutionally prohibited from endorsing its ancestor and competitor, M.41 or theistic Christianity.”

But even if we remove theism this new ~species~ of belief is still thoroughly religious, and more specifically thoroughly Protestant. We, as in Anglo-Americans such as myself, have inherited this religion and are relatively well adapted for it. And we have carried it with us by the sword across the entire world.

“All legitimate mainstream thought on Earth today is descended from the American Puritans, and through them the English Dissenters.”

Once progressivism is seen as a faith, its enforcement behavior becomes simply another example of the protection of sacred things:

“Thus what we call hate speech is merely a 20th-century name for the age-old crime of blasphemy.”

If you’re skeptical of this, one way to make it a little easier is to imagine that tomorrow every progressive in “The Cathedral” — probably less than a million people or ⅓ of a percent of our population — was replaced by a born-again Christian. And all of our progressive cultural objects were replaced with symbols from Christianity. So the pride flags now show crosses, and the little poster in the library saying “everyone is welcome here” instead says “Jesus died for your sins.” It would immediately be obvious you were living in a religious theocracy.

They continued to fly this at Stanford’s Green Library almost the whole time I was there

In other words Americans reside within what “can be fairly described as a progressive atheocracy.” But by accepting the mantle of religious authority without openly admitting to it “The Cathedral is the apotheosis of chutzpah. It is always poisoning its parents, then pleading for clemency as an orphan.”

The forbidden fact

There is nothing more clearly emotionally important to Yarvin throughout his work than the universalist dogma of fraternism — “the belief that all men men and women are created born equal.” 

Or to put it another way, the belief in human neurological uniformity (HNU). Or that humans are all basically the same blank slates upon which experience is encoded.

HNU is hugely powerful in society, and it has grown more powerful for most of my lifetime to the point that it is, quite literally, illegal in many countries to question. The problem is of course that it is less well empirically substantiated than most of you probably think.

“What, sir, is your evidence for HNU? Oh, you don’t have any. I see. Once again, we find our new friend—the mainstream crank.” 

Humans cognitively differ from each other in important ways, and there is no a priori reason to think that humans differ any less cognitively than we differ physically (I’ll let you decide how much that is). His argument here is less that HNU is false than that it has never been established by evidence — instead the Cathedral “won” by shifting the burden of proof:

“What we have here is a factual proposition which has swept to dominance not through the presentation of any evidence, but by the simple trick of reassigning the burden of proof to rest solely on those who doubt it. It is not the fraternists who have to demonstrate that fraternism is true. It is the afraternists who have to demonstrate that it’s false.”

But why is HNU so important to the Cathedral, especially if it is false? On paper Universalism believes itself to be the product of only common sense reason, open to examination and critique, but on this topic, at least, that seems to be untrue. The answer is again the evolutionary dynamics of power. If humans are all cognitively identical, then any inequality is an immediate a priori justification for the state, or ~society~ more generally, to intervene. And so since HNU gives the Cathedral more power, and gives a tool to reduce the power of its competitors, it is selected for, irrespective of — perhaps even because of — the empirical facts.

Throughout his work he attempts to separate the moral and evidentiary dynamics of HNU which we have all been so thoroughly inoculated to blending by claiming that to notice human inequality is an act of perception, not of cruelty, and dictates nothing.

If you disagree with him and think that discussing HNU is ~evil~, why? Does anything else fall into that category? And are there other examples in history where science was prohibited from looking into facts about the world, because of moral reasons, you think were right in retrospect?

The problem is democracy

But even if you accept that progressives are quasi-religious and wield immense influence, it isn’t obviously true that this is bad. Perhaps progressives are uniquely capable rulers. Yarvin would demur naturally that they have a long list of stumbles, to which a progressive could easily ask who has done a better job, but since no one reading this blog is in a position to decide which one will win we can avoid running ourselves too ragged chasing our tail.

Still since this is an introduction to Yarvin’s worldview he sees the true problem at bottom to be democracy, the natural outgrowth of progressivism.

“Our problem is democracy. Democracy is a dangerous, malignant form of government which tends to degenerate, sometimes slowly and sometimes with shocking, gut-wrenching speed, into tyranny and chaos. You’ve been taught to worship democracy. This is because you are ruled by democracy.”

He has two broad problems with democracy. First, democracy is a standing invitation to plunder: “At its best, democracy is a permanent, gunless civil war for this gigantic pot of money and power.” And second, the democratic state does not merely respond to its people but manufactures them:

“The real problem with democracies is that in the long run, a democratic government elects its own people.”

And this urge to “elect its own people” led to the mass killings of the twentieth century:

“The cause of democide is democracy. The democides of the 20th century — plus one important adumbration, the War of Secession, the first modern total war — can only be understood as a consequence of the victory of democracy.”

Our orderly developed liberal states, in his account, are liberal “despite democracy,” not because of it, and every day democracy works slowly to undermine its own foundation.

Tell the truth about power

The divergence between the honest representation of power and the paper one is, to Yarvin, as to any Carlylean, deeply worrying. Because people think that control in society is held by their elected officials, it is there they turn with anger when things go wrong. 

Why haven’t we finished the California high-speed rail? Ask Gavin Newsom! 

But what if Newsom and the entire state assembly are powerless and the people “really” to blame are the lawyers, NGO workers, union bosses, academics, disability activists, Native land specialists, and HR managers? Each of them has carved their own little mini-domain which has just enough power to create problems but not enough to actually do anything.

If democracy is the disease, the cure’s first principle is honesty about power. Yarvin’s foundational move, formalism, begins from the premise that power is conserved, or to put it another way that “limited government” is a grammatical evasion:

“the frustrated English teacher in me notes an interesting fact about this phrase: it is in the passive voice. Who shall limit the government? And how can we assure that they continue to do so?”

Naturally, then we should strip away the mystifications and realize the government is just an organization like any other, and we are left with the question of how best to organize and run it. To Yarvin the most important rule is the keeping of promises: “Essentially, formalism is a system of collective action in which the only sin is to break your own promise. Neocameralism is formalism on a political scale.” Applied to sovereignty, it means saying plainly who owns what. 

The state as a corporation

So if a country is really owned by someone or some combination of someones you should structure the ownership well. To answer this question Yarvin turns to the private sector, which through decades of selection has arrived at the joint-stock corporation. Where the CEO — the agent — holds absolute executive authority but serves at the pleasure of shareholders — the principal — who can replace them at will. The aim of this system is to substitute a reliable motive for an unreliable one:

“We might say that financial responsibility is the raw material of moral responsibility. The two are not by any means identical, but they are surprisingly similar, and the gap seems bridgeable.” 

The wager is that a sovereign who profits from his realm wants what a good landlord wants: that it be safe, prosperous, and pleasant, because those things make it valuable. His historical proofs of concept are Frederick the Great’s Prussia and the modern city-states.

“These states appear to provide a very high quality of service to their citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all. They have minimal crime and high levels of personal and economic freedom. They tend to be quite prosperous. They are weak only in political freedom, and political freedom is unimportant by definition when government is stable and effective.” 

Rather than one such state he wants thousands — Patchwork — among which residents move freely and the only discipline on a bad sovereign is the border.

“The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all ‘exit,’ no ‘voice.’”

Many ~nations~ connected in a single common movement zone. Sort of like a giant HRE. Or a based EU. Of course inside each of these countries the sovereign would be supreme.

“Residents of a Patchwork realm have no security or privacy against the realm.”

“Your residents are as ants in your kitchen. No combination of them can possibly oppose you... All will be massacred by your invincible robot armies.”

What is to be done?

Okay so this is the end state, but how do we get there? The Cathedral controls the flow of information in society, meaning you cannot defeat it in debate. Additionally, you aren’t going to convince the disability activist to give up their fight and quit their job through verbal jujitsu, no matter how logically coherent your arguments are. So the correct move is to wait. Wait until the system collapses under the weight of its own incompetence and avoid fighting it on its own terrain.

“The steel rule of passivism is absolute renunciation of official power... absolute renunciation of power over USG implies absolute submission to the Structure.”

The logic is that any resistance the Cathedral can see, it feeds on — “your struggle is its food” — so the only winning move is not to play.

What Yarvin thinks we should do instead is “1. Become worthy. 2. Accept power. 3. Rule!!”  Since what is missing is an alternative to defect to, creating it is our collective job:

“Moscow could surrender to Washington. Washington has no one to surrender to. The East had a West; the West has no West.”

The instrument for building it he calls the Antiversity — an independent “truth service” that “needs to always be right and never be wrong,” meant to do honestly what he believes the university now does dishonestly. And when the moment comes, we should “elect a President who has promised to cancel the Constitution,” after which a single qualified administrator is handed absolute sovereign authority and the movement that installed him dissolves within the year.

Carlyle

It was through Yarvin that I was first exposed to Carlyle and so I think it is worth discussing it briefly. Both he and I are, by our own admission, disciples:

“I am a Carlylean. I’m a Carlylean more or less the way a Marxist is a Marxist. My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion — but the conscious choice of a mature adult.”

Naturally, this camp is a big one and our relationship can be thought of as analogous to Trotsky and Orson Welles. 

Watch on YouTube

What we share though is a conviction that “no formula or computer (given present technology) can replace human decisions” and that order is a web of kept promises:

“Order, for Carlyle, is the set of bonds between the humans in society. A bond is any promise of importance... a society is orderly if it is a society in which promises of significant human value, explicit or implicit, are made and kept.”

From Carlyle, too, comes the reordering of the political compass away from liberty against tyranny and towards order against chaos.

“the fatal error of libertarianism is the confusion of anarchy and freedom. Not only are they not the same thing; they are opposite poles of the political spectrum.” 

Freedom is the highest form of order, the last thing built, never the first — it sits atop a “pyramid of needs”: peace, then security, then law, then freedom.

How to read him

It would be insincere to present Yarvin’s work as some scientific examination of the world, in the way even the works of someone like Marx are. If you treat his ideas like  serious policy proposals you are insane to not totally oppose Yarvin on moral grounds, in my humble opinion. And if the second Trump admin has been an indication of what Yarvinists look like in power, I’ll pass.

Still I think from a philosophical perspective if you spend too long getting upset and offended at his, sometimes childish, cultural obscenity you are missing the forest for the trees. Yarvin is in the genre of other historical artists like Nietzsche, and his models and proposals should be seen in that light. It would be silly, in my opinion, to abandon Nietzsche’s contributions to human personal or political philosophy because he was a fan of the caste system and wanted to replicate it globally. Similarly I enjoy Yarvin in equal parts because of, as in spite of, his little asides which are somewhere between the ramblings of a madman and a joke.

That means that you are best served not dealing with him on a pedantic discussion of trivia but instead by taking in the full picture of his system, and simply going along for the ride, taking what you like and leaving the rest behind. Nowhere is this more necessary, to me, than as it regards the issue of Yarvin’s monarchism. Because there is a kernel of something really interesting here but his actual positive vision is frankly as serious as any other thought experiment of its kind.

Yarvin the man

I hope to one day be important enough to have menacing black and white photos by the NYT

Having now surveyed Yarvin’s philosophy, we have enough material to ask what kind of man creates this theory. What type of soul needed these beliefs, and what kind of life did he live?

Curtis Guy Yarvin was born in 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings, into an American order about to reach the cusp of its self confidence. 

Yarvin is a Mischling. His paternal grandparents were Jewish Communists from Brooklyn and his maternal grandparents were Protestants from Westchester County with a cottage on Nantucket. His parents met at Brown, where his father, Herbert Yarvin, was studying for a PhD in philosophy; after failing to secure an academic career, he joined the Foreign Service, and Yarvin spent parts of his childhood in Portugal, Cyprus, and the Dominican Republic. Later his mother became a civil servant.

Accounts of his father describe a harsh, intellectually domineering man who could be impossible to please; Yarvin’s own preferred words are “stubborn,” “intense,” and “formidable” — like “a good manager.”

He was an academic prodigy who skipped three grades and entered a public high school in Columbia, Maryland, as a twelve-year-old sophomore — young enough, as he has described it, that you become either an adorable mascot or a weird, threatening alien. At fifteen he enrolled at Johns Hopkins, before transferring to Brown a year later, where he graduated at eighteen. From there he entered a computer science PhD program at Berkeley.

It was during this phase of his life that he became active on Usenet, the decentralized message boards which existed before the modern web. Here Yarvin found a community of engineering students, programmers, and academics which had been screened by the process of using the service. The cost and technical difficulty of getting online had created what he later called a “de facto aristocracy that didn’t know it was an aristocracy.” Then, in 1993, America Online opened Usenet to the general public, and the old culture collapsed almost immediately under the weight of normies.

After a year and a half at Berkeley he dropped out and helped develop an early mobile web browser for a company eventually called Phone.com. When it went public he received a substantial windfall — enough to buy a condo near Haight-Ashbury and leave what he later called the “pat-on-the-head economy” behind. In 2001 he met the playwright Jennifer Kollmer through Craigslist; they married and had two children. Around the same time he began the software project which would become Urbit: an attempt to rebuild personal computing, and ultimately a new digital civilization, from the bottom up. The dot-com money also financed a self-directed education in political theory — Google Books had suddenly made the forgotten nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century library available to anyone willing to go looking, and Yarvin read Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe, Carlyle, and James Burnham alongside the early political blogs.

He has identified in the past the 2004 presidential election as his red-pill moment. Veterans associated with George W. Bush accused John Kerry of lying about his service in Vietnam and Yarvin, who believed the allegations, expected that, once the truth became clear, Kerry would be forced from the race. Instead the press treated the claims as a partisan smear and in effect ran cover for Kerry. What mattered was not whether Kerry was guilty, but that the system’s official truth-producing institutions were now more broadly suspect. What else had he accepted because respectable institutions told him to? McCarthy? The Civil War? Global warming? Democracy?

In 2007 he started Unqualified Reservations under the name Mencius Moldbug — a play on the Confucian philosopher Mencius plus “goldbug.” His first post began: “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.” The readership was never large in an ordinary media sense, but it was an unusual blend of people — programmers, libertarians, rationalists, and alienated members of the American elite — who would grow in power over the coming decades.

In 2013, a TechCrunch article publicly connected Mencius Moldbug to Curtis Yarvin, a forty-year-old programmer in San Francisco. That same year he founded Tlon to develop Urbit and in 2016 he announced that the blog had completed its mission.

By then his writings were beginning to go ~mainstream~ having been read by people as diverse as J. D. Vance and Marc Andreessen. In 2020 he launched Gray Mirror, a Substack published under his own name. In 2021 his wife Jennifer died from a hereditary heart disease. He was then briefly engaged to writer Lydia Laurenson, and together they had a child. Before in 2024 he married Kristine Militello, a former Bernie Sanders supporter who had discovered his work during the pandemic.

Did Yarvin matter?

It is here we arrive at Yarvin’s role in the second Trump administration. Candidly I think that is a story better left for later decades when the dust has more thoroughly settled. But I do think there is one aspect of this story that matters to this article. 

If you believe, as many of you doubtless do, that the revolutionary impulse inside the MAGA movement is deeply dangerous — an existential threat to you personally, to our society, to our material well-being, to the global system — then it is worth asking how much responsibility Yarvin, as an individual, bears for the emergence of this faction? 

Similarly if you believe that the Cathedral represents something malignant which is better fought than ignored how much credit does he get for identifying it? 

Experientially it felt like thinkers like Yarvin, often called the dissident right, burst onto the cultural scene in the aftermath of Covid and BLM. But they truly became a ~cultural force~ after Elon Musk bought Twitter and the foot came off the censorship — which I’d date not to Biden but to the panic that began when Trump first took office in 2017. Suddenly this group had a platform, and access to actively influential people through which they could shape policy. 

Who knows if Trump’s return depended on any of it, I would wager in the universe without Musk’s purchase of Twitter he probably still wins the primary and still takes office. But I do think the administration would have been a very different one. A lot of the radical flavor of the first months was driven by people from this space — Elon Musk most famously and most importantly. And to the degree the administration has moderated since, which I’d argue is true, that has in many ways been the result of these same people exiting it.

And the case that Yarvin is uniquely important to their formation isn’t crazy. Still, I don’t think there is a Karl Marx at the bottom of this, because I don’t think there is anyone at the bottom at all. 

What there was instead was a very powerful thesis. Progressive liberalism is an all-consuming claim about the universe, one that demands a degree of buy-in from everyone, and — this is worth emphasizing — it presents a basically complete version of reality. If you accept the whole basket of Universalism the world as a moral question is largely solved. A claim that total generates its own criticism almost definitionally. There were ways in which it needed to be challenged; there were ways in which it was simply incorrect. And the moment those criticisms stopped being hidden, they hit with enormous argumentative power.

Perhaps Yarvin was the most important thinker in this space, perhaps not, but either way I feel the time truly called out for a voice and no one can be hoisted with all the responsibility. 

Where I agree—and where I don’t

When I began to read Carlyle, and so gained more of a texture for his posterior world, I learned a lot which I simply think is true.

For example, our de jure description of power frequently bears very little relationship to its de facto distribution — post-Augustus Rome, where the two had also diverged, is a well-chosen analog — and this dishonesty produces institutions where almost everyone can obstruct action but seemingly no one can be held responsible for the result. I think Yarvin is basically right that much of what we experience as political dysfunction comes from this divergence.

I also think the Cathedral is a useful description of a real social phenomenon. Institutions select people who resemble the individuals already inside them; those people respond to similar incentives, recognize the same authorities, and gradually arrive at a shared moral language without anyone needing to distribute orders. Yarvin was also right to notice that the resulting consensus was far narrower than its participants imagined, and that certain factual questions — HNU being the most obvious example — were transformed into moral tests rather than empirical ones. Where a belief becomes sacred, disagreement becomes blasphemy, irrespective of whether anyone continues to use religious language.

Finally, the identification of Universalism as an adaptation of Anglo-Protestantism which is better able to get around our prohibitions on the separation of church and state is apt and worth thinking about seriously.

Where I part company with Yarvin though is in his attempt to transform these observations into a complete theory of modern history. I do not believe that an immortal strain of Puritanism mutated through Unitarianism into Progressivism and then captured the planet by optimizing every institution for its own expansion. Very little of what Yarvin observes actually depends on Universalism being some straight line descendant of the Puritans, and many other aspects of that religion have fallen, relatively, by the wayside. Where are the progressives marching in favor of predestination for example? 

Centrally, the Cathedral can explain how a consensus reproduces itself once it has entered the institutions. But it cannot explain why this particular consensus felt so obviously true to millions of normal people in the first place. For example, there are many state power expanding beliefs which the Cathedral rejects because they are unpopular, or believed to be dangerous. Even for HNU it is quite plausible that the early 20th century model which called for overt eugenics is more favorable to power leakage than the one we got. No, democracy can shift its voters but it doesn’t make them from nothing.

Nor do I think formalizing power makes politics disappear. Even within companies CEOs are often removed by hostile takeovers or shareholder revolutions. I am perfectly willing to believe that a powerful executive can sometimes govern better than an elected committee, that order is prior to freedom, and that many of our rituals of popular sovereignty are theater. But Yarvin’s leap from these fairly obvious observations to Patchwork, corporate sovereignty, and the cancellation of the Constitution is, in my opinion frankly, silly and immature.

My own answer to the question of why post war liberalism won so absolutely is what I call the “Boomer Truth Regime”. There was a set of beliefs that existed in American society when I was growing up in the early 2000s, and these beliefs were not political in the sense that they weren’t really debated by either side. They acted as the background ideological radiation — the framework out of which everybody operated. And there is nothing unusual about that on its own; there have been truth regimes before. Under Tsarist Russia there was a Tsarist truth regime and under the Soviet Union, a Soviet truth regime. Almost by construction, almost by definition, you need elite institutions to have some kind of shared, truthful fact set.

And I call ours the Boomer Truth Regime because of its association with the boom time after World War II, as well as the generation born during it. You can take the 20th century for America as one huge emotional and moral arc. What that arc created was a feeling for Americans of an almost inevitable, rapid upward salvation — a sense of conquering badness that has basically no parallel in the human experience.

Peter Thiel, in Zero to One, calls this indefinite optimism: the idea that society is just going to keep getting better without you having to really put much work or thought into it. And it was really true; society did just get better. From inside that experience it was not insane to conclude that history had a direction, or that the various pieces of this transformation belonged together. The mistake came later, when a historically contingent run of victories was elevated into a permanent law of moral progress.

Liberalism won both WW2 and the Cold War for a reason, but much of the specific flavor of our era is historically contingent. It is for this reason I do not share Yarvin’s belief that Cthulhu only swims left, or that the Structure must go on accumulating contradictions until it finally collapses and surrenders to some waiting sovereign. What I see around me is not an immortal Cathedral marching serenely towards infinity, but an aging truth regime losing its authority.

Take the HNU stuff as a good example. The social stigma around Human differences and genetics was once exhausting, but anecdotally it is fading quickly. There is still a core of neurotic people who freak out, but they are just one group among many, and I feel comfortable talking about it, as do people like Bryan Caplan, without it jeopardizing our livelihoods.

The Cathedral of course wanted it to be true, for the reasons Yarvin identifies, but it seems increasingly likely the question isn’t “if” Human populations differ genetically, as much as “to what degree” and “how responsive to policy it is?” Global decision actors are more and more acting on the scientific ambiguity, even if it is still off limits to admit.

The decline

The Boomer Truth Regime is not the only thing that is aging. There is one more thing I have to talk about, because any article on Yarvin that doesn’t at least touch it is being disingenuous at best and purposefully deceitful at worst: the problem of his intellectual decline.

When you read his most recent stuff, there is a degree of amateurishness to it. The older work felt more thoughtful and more serious. If you talk about Yarvin online often people will ask “which” Yarvin you are talking about and it is an extremely fair question. 

But I don’t think this is unique to Yarvin at all — it appears to be one of the most common fates of the Human condition. Looking at society retroactively, people seem to peak — professionally, cognitively, however you want to frame it — in their early forties. Of course everyone is different. But on average there seems to be an accumulation of knowledge about the way the world works that you undergo in your twenties. Then there is an actualization process in your thirties, where you test that knowledge against reality. And then — to continue abusing Hegel’s trinity there is a synthesis that appears to occur in your early forties, a combination of the idealism of youth with the practicality of adulthood. The research on creative careers backs my folk observation. Benjamin Jones and Bruce Weinberg’s study of Nobel laureates puts the mean age of prize-winning work between 37 and 40, climbing toward the late forties by the century’s end.

What seems to happen is that people slowly lose some of the ability to integrate new ideas, and the lessons they learned in life freeze into perpetual truthisms. Marx splits philosophically into the humanist Marx of the early, more philosophical era — who is actually fascinating — and the harder-edged Capital Marx of the systems and the tendency-of-the-rate-of-profit-to-decline, who is much less interesting, much more boring, much less insightful.

I want to be careful with the framing here, because calling this tragic invites people to get defensive, and there are versions of this maturation that are very positive. The American academic system, whatever else I’ve said about it in this article, is actually well designed for it: a new batch of thinkers comes in, and the people aging into their fifties and sixties and seventies take on different roles at different stages of life. Someone in their fifties is completely capable of brilliant ideas while someone in their eighties probably isn’t, but they can tell you what they have seen work and what they have seen fail, which is invaluable. 

The problem is not aging but our strange insistence — human neurological uniformity applied to the self — that a person should be the same thing across their entire lifespan. People have phases and there is a natural cycle to things.

Yarvin, I think, shows one of the great benefits of the internet philosopher: a completely fresh set of eyes, free to look at the world as he actually found it and to walk back into the forgotten nineteenth-century library to see what Carlyle and the rest had to say about our problems. But he also shows the tragedy of the lone internet philosopher. In a better world, the Yarvin of the 2020s would have been training a whole generation of people in this way of thinking — sending them out to search for capital-T truth and test his theories against reality. Instead, he was, by all appearances, loafing around his home in San Francisco and writing increasingly low-quality articles.

This decline, in other words, is less symbolic of anything particularly unique about Curtis Yarvin than representative of a basic flavor of thinker. And we are reaching the point where the Gen X thinkers who were first to question the Boomer Truth Regime are aging into their maturity, right as the regime itself cracks up. 

Peter and Yarvin, Yarvin and Peter

And now my personal relationship with Yarvin.

Honestly, I don’t know the first time I saw his name. It was probably back in 2021, when Scott Alexander got doxxed by the NYT. But I’m not sure. What I can say is that I was first genuinely exposed to him in the summer of 2023, through a YouTube channel called “Parker Banks”(silly how similar our names are) which uploaded full audiobook versions of Yarvin’s writings for free using an AI narrator.

I can remember listening to “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations” in that late California summer, on my bike rides back and forth from the office — at the time I’d been sequestered in a random sub-building, due to construction, which I called “The Gulag.” For the next year or two I kept up with his uploads religiously and read Yarvin’s pieces on my iPad during PhD seminars.

In short, Yarvin arrived to me like a strike of lightning, and to pretend otherwise would be fundamentally insincere. What he was identifying about reality, on a core experiential level, felt right. Progressivism seemed to be in complete control of society; the state tolerated disorder; certain hard realities had become unsayable. Power was held not by elected officials — who were themselves brought into power through a process I had almost no effect on — but by some unappointed and unaccountable blob which would twist itself in every possible manner to justify anything that was progressive, or anti-Trump.

Many of Yarvin’s criticisms of society appear in other books. Carl Degler’s Pulitzer-winning Stanford historian also argues that America accepted HNU for ideological, not scientific, reasons In Search of Human Nature. What differentiates Yarvin is that Degler is himself a progressive, at least in the sense Yarvin means it. His book is an attempt to rescue progressivism from one inconvenient, poorly validated belief — which, however noble, means it holds its punches. Yarvin does not hold punches. He examines the system I existed inside of from a critical, not a defensive, position. I had never seen anything like that before.

I can candidly say that of every 21st-century writer I’ve read, Yarvin is the most interesting, the most original, and the most capable of seeing the problems that plagued my slice of society. There are countless people like myself now writing about these problems, using words like “the red pill” or “the Cathedral” to describe modernity, and we all owe something to him. Because the era he was writing in was simply a different one. Today none of my friends would care about a NYT hit piece revealing that I have a resentful ex, or made jokes I shouldn’t have, let alone that I question the scientific validity of HNU. But I remember the 2010s. Shit was just different.

There was a discrete box in Anglo middle-class society around what you were, and were not, allowed to notice. A near-religious claim of human equality was hammered into us at every turn, by every authority, and there was no one — literally no one — arguing the alternative case. I recently came across a graphic showing the share of people identifying as transgender and non-binary by birth year: it peaks, then begins falling rapidly, right around my cohort of Americans (I was born in 1997). 

Every generation lives through its own strangeness, but ours was strange in a particular way. And in the early 2020s I was searching anywhere for someone, anyone, who could explain what had happened. As a kid in the 2000s it felt as if the future had been “solved” for me — not Star Trek exactly, but the 1990s forever. Instead, as I grew up, the world was thrown open, and out of every hidden door and closet rushed the sleeping demons of resentment.

You can say that my early childhood was one of sheltered privilege, and I would hardly dispute that. But privilege is a good thing, and so losing it was deeply painful. Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, I felt the world that I lived in be thrown over and replaced. And at each turn the side that was armed with “facts and logic” was battered down and drowned out by the ocean of new normie arrivals.

An example of this happened in real time with the community “Wall Street Bets.” When I was first introduced to the community in the 2010s, it was a place for people who worked in finance, or aspired to, to chat about complex and interesting ideas. Then gradually, as it became more famous during Covid, it was overrun with a legion of sloppers who totally destroyed the previous community — which I felt at home in — and replaced it with a mindless field of garbage. It was Yarvin’s Usenet collapse replayed a generation later — though I wouldn’t hear his version for years.

The same thing felt like it was happening to everything I loved. My games were being taken over and destroyed; my movies and TV shows were canceled, and in their place came a long line of what I felt was trash.

Then, in 2016, Trump was elected.

At the time I was a volunteer in AmeriCorps — a program like the Peace Corps, but in the US — working on environmental restoration. I remember the night extremely well. In the lead-up I’d faced genuine uncertainty about who I wanted to vote for; naturally I didn’t think Trump had any chance of winning — although a part of me secretly hoped he would — but I decided to do “the right” thing and vote for Clinton. (I filled out my mail-in ballot incorrectly, so it wasn’t counted anyway.) That night a group of us sat in the living room watching the CNN results come in. Pretty early on it was clear Trump was overperforming, and the room, which needless to say was very liberal, fell into shocked silence.

Around midnight my girlfriend — a Jewish anarchist who ended up going to Harvard — and I went for a walk. She was wrapped in a blanket as we strolled down the Utah streets toward “the canyon,” where people would go to drink and smoke. Her sister had worked on the Clinton campaign, and she was in a state of profound shock. I remember saying that this election was a wake-up call about disregarding the needs of white men, and the look she gave me could have melted steel beams.

It was indicative of the experience the next decade or so would bring. Again and again I felt like “my side,” young white men, was being extremely reasonable in our objections, and again and again we were shouted down by people who simply took it as prima facie true that we were the enemy. Most people, of course, didn’t care — including the vast, vast majority of white guys — and so would just pipe down. What made it all the more confusing was that I wasn’t even sure why they were wrong. When people said things like “the future is female,” it felt like an attack on me, and I sincerely believe that to many people it was meant as one — but how could I really dispute the basic truth of it? From my perspective, the future very much did “seem” female. When MeToo arrived in 2018, it felt as if the future of gender dynamics had been forever sealed. Women had simply “won,” and I would spend the rest of my life navigating within their box. Of course this didn’t happen — but I want to be clear: as a 20-year-old, it felt like it had.

But that was incompatible with my basic urge for self-preservation. I couldn’t accept a system which doomed me to gradually sliding down the social ladder simply out of logical word games. I could see that within living memory there had been a radically different world, with totally different sexual expectations and distributions of power. Just out of reach above me, a world seemed to exist where I, as an Anglo man, would have had access to immense privileges — but it was ~gone~ as if the door had just closed on me and left me standing in the cold.

It is extremely common for people to talk about the old “boys’ clubs,” and this is anecdotally 100% true. But there are no young boys’ clubs, and that contrast was impossible for me to miss. Something had changed, to my detriment, silently and without open discussion, between my birth and my entrance into adulthood. 

So why? Why had this happened, and who had agreed to it? The uncomfortable realization was that I had — or if not supported it exactly (my instincts have always been too hierarchical to be truly left), then accepted it as some inevitable march of history. So inevitable that I felt nothing but disgust towards the people who “tried” to resist it. And perhaps worse: what was I even fighting for? On paper, what I wanted was to be treated as an equal — but an equal to whom? And an equal defined how? This is what was really eating away at the inside of my brain: my “enemies” and I were in agreement on the basic goal, had radically different perspectives on everything, and it felt like my enemy literally didn’t care about evidence. 

Anything contrary to the preferred direction of policy — towards more power for groups traditionally denied it, more diversity, more statism — was shut down, vilified, and its authors forced through humiliation rituals by online crowds hungry for the destruction of these helpless people. 

And the best answer I could find was in the works of Curtis Yarvin.

Now, in retrospect, I think the particular problems of that era felt so real to me for the same reason anything someone actually experiences does, and they were less some comment on the Human species than another random chapter in our weird, rambling history. I’m sure that, to the characters involved in the 2001 Bulgarian election of the WW2-era deposed king, and the subsequent scandal and collapse of the monarchist movement, it felt important — but to everyone else it was just another random Wikipedia entry. Similarly, I lived in a time of shifting power and uncertainty — in fact, I believe I still do — and so that meant things were in flux, and the changes were as painful to me as they were pleasurable to others.

I’m not sure how to end an article like this. I don’t read much Yarvin anymore, and the ideas of his which most influenced me are now seen by many of my contemporaries as obviously true, trivial, points. But he is not the clown many of his opponents see, and even if he made a poor voice for the powerful, he was still a deeply insightful thinker.

---

# Land reform kills the aristocracy

that and the Industrial Revolution

Date: 2026-07-19
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/land-reform-kills-the-aristocracy
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/land-reform-kills-the-aristocracy

So I’ve got a theory on ~aristocrats~ as a social class and I wanted to yap about it a bit. Because it is something that essentially no longer exists in the West — or most of the world writ large — but as late as the 1930s, and for almost our entire settled existence as a species, aristocrats were the dominant social order on the planet. As late as the year my grandparents were born, from the Elbe to Bengal, Humans were lorded over by a landed hereditary gentry class which held essentially all economic, cultural, and political power. The process through which they disappeared is poorly publicly understood in America, if for no other reason than we have been free of them — with the exception of the rural South — for centuries. But it is arguably one of the biggest transformations since the first creation of organized societies.

This is an enormous claim, since it is in competition with shifts like the industrial revolution and female emancipation, doubly compounded by the fact that no change is easily separable from another. The decline of the aristocracy is primarily the result of secular economic trends, which are themselves the result of the industrial revolution, which was the result of cultural changes in Europe, which were the result of something else … all the way back to Cain and Abel, or if the Mormons are to be believed, even further. So I’m not going to claim that the collapse of the traditional landed aristocracy was the biggest change. But it did break down the emotional and physical core of pre-industrial society, which in turn has substantially altered our beliefs about the world on a basal level.

By the dawn of the 20th century the landed gentry were doomed for a slow slide out of power, but the exact process through which they were to be dissolved was not predestined to be either as thorough, or as permanent, as it ended up being. In countries like pre-WW1 Germany or mid-20th-century Brazil, industrial global economies coexisted with, and in a way supported, the continued existence of this class. What actually ended up happening was that they were liquidated in the aftermath of WW2, because of a substantial alignment between progressive liberals and Soviet communists on the necessity, if not the shape, of land reform. The result of this alignment was a near-global reallocation of land away from traditional aristocracies: into smallholder plots, as in Korea, Taiwan, and — in a shallower, more lawyerly way — India; or into large collective farms, as in mainland China, Ethiopia, and Cuba.

What makes landed wealth different?

You can think about land as a type of capital that trends toward local natural monopolies. The mechanism for this process is simple. The larger a plot of land is, the larger — in absolute terms — the surplus that is concentrated in one pair of hands. This larger surplus allows the owner to invest in capital, increasing his total surplus further, as well as specialize the labor of his employees. It was this very same logic behind the communists’ collectivization of agriculture: since they believed that peasant plots would be unable to pool enough resources to do things like buy tractors et al., the solution was to pool smallholder plots into large collective assets.

This dynamic of course predates industrial agriculture, and is the same force behind the consolidation of land in nearly every settled society. Often these large pre-industrial farms were small self-sufficient societies with their own manufacturing and defense. A plantation in the American South or a latifundium in ancient Rome would often have its own blacksmiths, horse breeders, bakers, etc. — Varro, writing his farming manual in the first century BC, advises that a large estate far from town simply keep its own smiths and craftsmen on the grounds. With scale you also get real variation in the way land is used: orchards, crop rotation, not just one horse but an entire team of horses and the breeding of horses — things that are simply impossible on a small plot. And rather than just growing food, the great estate could also devote energy to producing cash crops designed for export, granting further access to manufactured goods.

Arguably even more important in the pre-industrial world was the fact that large plots of land were better insured against poor harvests. Often farmers were only one or two bad years from falling deeply into debt, and since they were very cash-constrained they would often be forced to sell — even if they could, given enough time, have paid off their loans. Usury was historically hated, at least partially, for a reason.

The Harvest

For the same reason land consolidates it also also refuses to divide. A great estate is too interconnected as a unit to truly split. Best case scenario, you end up with the Carolingian problem — Charlemagne’s heirs carving the Frankish empire into weird pseudo-kingdoms layered on top of one another — which is roughly what happens any time you try to divide ownership of a working agricultural complex among sons. You can artificially split the title in some way, but doing so creates enormous problems, so mostly people didn’t.

What these two dynamics — consolidation on the way up, resistance to division on the way down — created was a mostly static structure of land ownership. Or in other words, it produced a quasi-fixed income across generations. It’s not that these families had unlimited money, or unlimited access to capital, but rather that they were, at least by local standards, rich, with wealth that was difficult to save, and renewable. Hence a set of social incentives which is totally alien to us, where we think of money as some fungible thing we can shift across space and time. To aristocrats it was instead a consistent Harvest, where the big questions were ones of division.

I’m not trying to give the impression that wealth was truly static historically. The past is full of nobles who squandered their inheritance, or commoners who climbed their way to power; there was far more social mobility in the medieval world than a casual observer might believe. You don’t have noble houses ruling the same place for 4,000 years, the way a George R.R. Martin–style fantasy universe would imply. But a family that holds for five, six, seven generations is holding long enough to give a very specific character to a society — and a very specific conception of wealth, as a thing that is simply always there, in roughly the same amount. 

The Type

This flavor of society produces a very specific sociological set of behaviors among its aristocrats, largely irrespective of the political background they exist inside. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and frankly most of the Founding Fathers were aristocrats by any reasonable definition, irrespective of whether society bestowed them with formal titles or not. There is no reasonable way you could characterize someone like Jefferson as anything other than an aristocrat — the personality, the flavor, is obviously of the aristocratic line.

To list out a few of those behaviors:

Surplus sons. Because the estate cannot be easily divide, every generation throws off younger sons who must be exported into the army, the church, and the state. This in turn gives these institutions elite prestige and flavor which bolsters their power in society. 

The morality of leisure. We don’t like to admit this, but based on the morality of their own time, aristocrats were almost always more “moral” than commoners. It isn’t hard to imagine why, they defined morality and had time to abide by it. Honor, learning, patronage, and public service are luxury goods, and the aristocrat was the only man who could reliably afford them. This creates a sense of awe and belief in the existence of a ~natural~ aristocracy. 

Attachment to the locale. Since wealth is a specific place — a house, a district, a name — rather than a fungible asset, it has to be defended. This means that power is always deeply local and particular. 

Instinctive defense of hierarchy. Because aristocrats derive their wealth and status from the existing social order, they have a strong interest in preserving it.

The Triangle

Now, in every one of these societies there is a countervailing tension: the desire to redistribute the land. It is a three-way fight. The peasants want to break up the big estates because they hate them — the permanent, perpetual desire of the plebeian class is small tenant-based farming on land of its own. The central government wants to break them up because it wants everyone reduced to the same level relative to the king — call it the Septimius Severus dynamic: you want to be the one person everyone else is basically a slave relative to. And the aristocrats want to hold, which mostly means capturing the machinery that would otherwise be used against them.

The fight gets sharpest around public land. There is almost always some degree of public ownership in these societies, and it is almost always co-opted by the aristocratic class — producing a standing tension between the legal right to the commons and the implicit economic right the aristocrats have established over it. You can see this with the Gracchi brothers in Rome. And I’d almost argue the English enclosure acts are best read as a formalization of a co-option that had already occurred de facto on the commons.

At various points in history the aristocracy would be wrestled off of their land and it would be reformed but overwhelmingly they succeeded in holding onto their right. 

How it died

After World War II though it was simply over for them. Across the whole planet there was significant and persistent land reform, caused primarily by both of the victorious sides being revolutionary reformers, from a nineteenth-century perspective. The world’s option set for acceptable politics was either radical progressive liberalism — of the New Deal variety — or literal revolutionary communism. It should go without saying that neither of these groups was particularly sympathetic to the planter or aristocratic classes.

In the United States, all of this was further fueled by the fact that Anglo-Yankee society — victorious within living memory in a civil war against an aristocratic planter class — had defined itself strongly against landed aristocracies, in favor of monied aristocracies.

But above and beyond that was a general vibe that aristocrats were a doomed chapter in history, that they had caused too many problems to justify their pomp. The specific flavor of the locals’ problems with their aristocrats changed from country to country — in the postcolonial world they were collaborationists; in Latin America they were reactionaries — but the conclusion was shared everywhere. And it coincided with that permanent, perpetual desire of the plebeian class to break up the big landholders and put small tenant-based farming in their place.

In some cases the reforms were implemented at gunpoint. In Japan, the US occupation compulsorily purchased about 5.8 million acres between 1947 and 1949 — roughly 38 percent of the country’s cultivated land — and resold it to the tenants working it. The share of farmland under tenancy collapsed from 46 percent to 10, and because the purchase prices were fixed in nominal terms while postwar inflation ran wild, the landlords were expropriated in everything but name: by the time they were paid, the money was worth almost nothing (Ramseyer, 2015). In the Soviet zone of Germany, the Bodenreform — slogan: Junkerland in Bauernhand, Junker land into farmers’ hands — expropriated every holding over 100 hectares without compensation: 7,112 estates, some 3.2 million hectares by the end of 1948, with most former owners expelled from their home districts outright.

Aristocrats inside modernity

You can see the way the secular trend toward de-aristocratization combined with the accelerant of land reform in the case of Brazil. João Goulart’s push for expropriation-based land reform helped trigger the 1964 coup, after which the military government then passed its own Land Statute which was mostly left inactive. As a result there continues to exist in Brazil, in a weakened and anemic form, a politically and economically active landed aristocracy of sorts — rural land there remains about as unequally held as anywhere on Earth, essentially unchanged since the 1980s. 

It’s worth being clear that industrial modernity alone did not kill them, because the two demonstrably coexisted. Germany is the most famous example. From unification in 1870 you have a basically functional democracy alongside industrialization, scientific rationalism, and the whole modern package. And inside that universe you still have genuine aristocrats in the form of the Junkers, ruling on their great estates east of the Elbe. As a quick aside, in my opinion, this is part of the reason you get such schizophrenia in German politics of the era. 

The claim

So my basic claim is this: when you break up the land — and in particular, when you take agricultural production and move it into the capitalist system — you dissolve over time, even if you don’t do it violently, the existence of an aristocratic class. And with it you lose the basic defender of hierarchy in most old societies, along with the standing economic argument for hierarchy itself.

I don’t think the liberal-democratic consensus we inherited is some kind of clever ideological victory of liberalism. It is downstream of the fact that the class which would have fought for the alternative had its material basis liquidated, almost everywhere, inside a single generation — mostly unconsciously, as a byproduct of the postwar settlement. Ordinary capital produces its own elites but because it is easily divisible, easily fungible, and treated as just a source of income. The high bourgeoisie lack the character of the truly aristocratic.

---

# Industrialized Feudalism

Why it worked is why it failed

Date: 2026-07-18
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/industrialized-feudalism
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/industrialized-feudalism

I recently finished Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler—Hubris and Nemesis—and so I’ve naturally been thinking about WW2 a lot. As my wife can attest, I’m willing to talk anyone’s ear off about the intricacies of spring 1942 logistics in the Ukraine. But one thing this book solidified to me was the degree to which Nazi Germany was organized in quasi-feudalistic terms.

What is so fascinating about the National Socialist state is that within it existed basically two coexisting modes of government. On paper, much of the older machinery of statutes, courts, and ministries continued to operate until the very end, even after the Reichstag Fire Decree and Enabling Act destroyed the democratic Weimar system. But layered on top of that—or lurking beneath it, depending on your taste—was the party apparatus. 

Ernst Fraenkel, a German labor lawyer until 1938 wrote about this idea in The Dual State, published in 1941. He called the surviving sphere of rules, courts, and predictable legal administration the “normative state” and distinguished it from the “prerogative state,” which operated above and around ordinary law, unconstrained by its guarantees. These categories though didn’t map to any exact, legible, system but were instead two modes of rule that could exist simultaneously in the same institutions. 

To concretize this, let me give you two examples. The first is “Organisation Todt,” named after its director, Fritz Todt, an engineer. This organization was like a construction firm and would thus ~compete~ with the traditional government agencies, and other personalized organizations, to try and, as Kershaw likes to frame it, “work towards the Führer”—or try and achieve the goals he would have wanted to achieve if he was there himself. Todt started in 1933 as Inspector General for German Roadways, where he built the Nazi additions to the autobahn system. The Organisation Todt proper was founded in 1938 to build the Westwall, and from he essentially all military fortification work, up through the Atlantic Wall. In 1940, Todt personally collected another hat as Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions.

On paper, each of these positions were distinct roles, but in practice they were more analogous to tendrils of Todt’s personal power. Thus, when he died in a plane accident in 1942 and was replaced by Speer, what Speer inherits is not a position as much as Todt’s entire web of responsibilities and power.

The domain of responsibility for the organization wasn’t something discrete like “construction,” but instead broadly defined as those areas where Fritz Todt, and later Speer, were the “best” administrators, and where their personal skills were “best” aligned with Hitler’s objectives.

Another example of one of these personalized organizations was Reichswerke Hermann Göring, a mega-corporation set up under Göring, one of Hitler’s inner circle and a WW1 fighter pilot. The corporation was both a part of the government and also the personal fiefdom of Göring, under which he came to control a huge share of the country’s steel and iron production. The motivation behind it was that the private sector refused to invest in the use of German iron ore, which was inferior to the ore available on the international market, but which would be essential to have built production around during a hypothetical war. Since the Nazis intended to wage said war, or at least bluff their willingness to fight it, they needed to begin preparing immediately.

This meant the state was presented with a genuine problem. The more they directly meddled with the market, by for example putting a tariff in place, the more they simply damaged steel production. But if they tried to create a regular state-run enterprise, it would face all the same problems any huge bureaucratic SOE does. Their solution was to instead give Göring access to the financial reservoirs of the state, and the corruption and wheel-oiling his close relationship with Hitler allowed, to simply build his own steel company. Göring was chosen for this role because he had a sincere knack for “getting things done” economically, and his tendency to conspicuous corruption was seen, in this case, not as a detriment but instead as a boon. If Göring succeeded in consolidating the Reich’s ore and steel production, the prize was an industrial empire with all the standing, patronage, and skimming that came with it. Whereas if he ran the company into the ground, he would face Hitler’s wrath and impoverishment. Talk about a financial incentive!

But Göring wasn’t only in charge of reorganizing German steel production. He was also put in charge of the Four Year Plan—the shifting of the economy towards autarky—as its Plenipotentiary from October 1936, a role he was handed for basically the same reason as previously. And the air force, which he had a particular passion and interest in.

Since you still had a “normal” government, the existence of these personalized fiefs naturally created overlapping and competitive systems of responsibility, where everyone was trying to win the approval of Hitler. This meant that rules would vary enormously from region to region based on who was perceived to best achieve the goals of the regime. From Hitler’s perspective, it both allowed a Darwinian system of competition to select who should lead what, as well as allowed him, as the adjudicator, to hold an indispensable role in resolving any conflict.

What is truly incredible is that, at least at first, it worked! It is popular to be a contrarian against this fact and argue that it was all a mirage, but the empirical facts are indisputable. Between 1932 and 1939, Germany went from being a quasi-failed state to one of the most powerful countries in the world. Of course, this transformation was unsustainable within the confines of Germany, and that was explicitly understood by the regime’s participants. Expanding economic dominance and gaining an ~empire~ was the active goal of every major participant, with the only real disagreement being the exact steps to be followed, and where that empire should be located.

So what I’m not claiming here is that the German economic explosion in the run-up to WW2 represented some steady-state policy playbook a developing country should run to become rich. Rather, it was a high human and physical capital society running itself raw in search of expansion and reclaiming its status as a great power.

The reason it worked is the reason it failed.

For a system like this to work, the key question is how you adjudicate the “winner.” As I mentioned earlier, in the case of Germany this was basically defined by Hitler’s personal preferences. Again, this wasn’t accidental, and his role was an avatar of the German people, who could be perceived as the spiritual manifestation of themselves, the core claim of their entire regime. 

Since in the early 1930s, he has a strong preference for “guns before butter” and full employment, you see both of those goal become realized with remarkable speed. 

For example, total working hours by Germans soared while consumption remained constrained below pre-Depression levels. In 1935, private consumption was 7 percent, and private investment 22 percent below those levels. While the state spending had increased by some 70 percent above 1928, almost all of it military spending. This resulted in, what any honest observer has to admit, was a spectacular military rise in the early years.

But once the UK and France called his bluff in 1939, there was no way out. Since his preferences ~were~ the state and power was held by individual networks, selected for their ability to create his preferences in reality, the Germans had no system to turn the ship around. Meaning his desire for either total victory or total destruction brought the second to Germany by the opening months of 1945.

---

# Form-Tested Welfare

and other Kafkaesque horrors

Date: 2026-07-06
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/form-tested-welfare
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/form-tested-welfare

About three years ago now, me and my wife purchased our Tesla Model 3 while living in California. Before this we had been using my Camry — Vivi — whose cries of pain whenever we used the brakes brought an uncomfortable amount of attention. I had always wanted a Tesla, and after test driving one I was frankly in love. I’m convinced that electric cars are like sushi in the sense that a certain class of Chud American has decided to hate them, but nearly everyone else who gets to try it falls in love. But this essay isn’t about the advantages, and disadvantages, of going electric. Instead it is about the subsidy that was attached to it.

Because what really clinched the decision for us was that we were eligible for up to $9,500 in cash back from the government if we bought it. This was split into a federal tax subsidy of $7,500 and a state cash rebate of $2,000.

It is the second one that I want to focus on right now, since the way it was structured was both weird and sorta annoying. Basically, after buying the car you had to go on this janky website and submit an online form claiming eligibility for the rebate, which California would then assess, and if you qualified — and if the program had not yet run out of money — send you a check. Yes, you read that right. The program was set up with a fixed pot of money in order to avoid it becoming some potentially enormous liability for the state, and when it hit the predetermined number, as it did on November 8, 2023, it would cease to give out rebates. California didn’t tell you about this rebate in any way, and the only reason I knew about it was because a friend of mine had already received it. Even the guy selling us the car only had the vaguest idea how it worked exactly.

I like to call this type of welfare “Form-Tested Welfare,” since it is, as the name suggests, gated not primarily behind income or qualification criteria, but rather behind you having some private information about the way the system works and a willingness to file and submit paperwork. Once you begin to treat this as its own distinct category of welfare, it is impossible not to see it everywhere.

Now my claim is this. I don’t think form-tested welfare is good or bad any more so than means-tested welfare. Ultimately it is a question of how well the screen works at identifying the “type” of person the program is aiming to target, and how efficiently it uses state resources towards addressing the real material problem. In the case of the Tesla it seems like a “fine” program. The goal here was probably to target people like me, and in that sense it worked wonderfully, and pushed me marginally over the threshold from buying a 2023 Toyota Camry to instead getting a 2023 Tesla Model 3.

But in other cases form-tested welfare is extremely poorly designed to reach its intended recipients, and in the worst scenarios becomes a den of lying which forces participants to realize the signalling game is broken and exploit it, or be a rube who is fucked over for trying to follow the rules.

Form-Tested Welfare

A month or so ago I missed a couple of gas payments. I thought I had set it to autopay, after manually running it for the first six or so months — these utility websites are the work of an eldritch horror — but I guess I messed something up. If they sent me emails, they must have been filtered into spam, because I still cannot find them, and I didn’t learn about it until I got a notice in the mail letting me know I had to pay now, or they would be shutting off my gas.

In addition to the missed months I also had to pay a $250 fine, or in their terminology, I had forfeited some security deposit and needed to replace it. What relates to this story is that on the document there was a small notification letting me know that I might be eligible to have this fee waived.

I have no idea if I qualify for this waiver. I’m definitely below the household median income in Loudoun County (~$182k), and a lot of these programs are anecdotally pretty generous if you just get on a phone and talk to someone. Ex ante I would guess I have a 15% chance of qualifying, and given it would only take me, maybe, 20 minutes to figure out, on paper I’m looking at an expected value in the neighborhood of $100 an hour. Let’s say, conservatively, it would be worth me doing, rather than sitting on my phone.

Still. I didn’t want to fucking fill out this form, and instead I just ate the bill. Hopefully autopay is sorted out now. My personal life is the one place I still feel definitely able to avoid expected value maximizing.

But I’ve been thinking about this waiver and how poorly it is designed to target the group it is clearly designed to aid. There are many plausible scenarios I can come up with where somebody doesn’t pay their gas bill, and we as a society probably want to intervene to make sure that person isn’t penalized. Take for example an elderly person who cannot afford it, or a young family behind on their bills. Even if you don’t sympathize with this group, clearly the gas company does, because they have set up the program!

The problem is fundamental: the kind of person who is good at conscientiously submitting forms is not the type of person who needs help, almost by construction. Let’s all be candid about the world here. If you are really good at keeping up with things, then you’re not someone who’s struggling with modernity. There is simply no one on skid row right now with the personality of a corporate compliance lawyer, walking around with their organized and color-coded paperwork. These two personalities are orthogonal to each other.

Everyone in my own life who I would want to be covered by a waiver like this — and I should be clear, I am not one of those people — wouldn’t even notice the letter before the gas was turned off.

Obviously academics have written on this — as they have on every possible idea you could have. For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is quite literally just cash that only requires you to file your basic tax forms. For many people it amounts to several hundred dollars a month, or a cheap car payment. And yet roughly a fifth of eligible taxpayers fail to claim it. A lot of right-of-center people may think to themselves “good, I’m glad the program is cheaper,” but if you first just accept that something like the EITC will exist, then, I think, this design is a huge problem. The families that are leaving money on the table are exactly the families the EITC is MEANT to help.

Perhaps the solution is just letting them know? And yes, there is some research on this as well. The IRS ran a field experiment on 35,050 California filers from tax year 2009 who had already received a government notice saying they were likely owed money — collectively $26 million — and hadn’t claimed it yet. The researchers randomized the follow-up mailing into a series of mailers of varying complexity, all the way down to simply displaying the dollar amount owed. Unsurprisingly, showing people the money increased claiming the most — by 8 percentage points — while the complex version of the notice cut claiming by 6 points, and a longer worksheet cut another 4.

You can take this as evidence that another part of the reason people don’t do stuff like file taxes is that it is just annoying, to most of us. Essentially everyone who enjoyed filling out paperwork — which, let’s be honest, is all that homework is — has had a wonderfully successful life.

There are many advantages to putting the compliance burden on the submittee, which I will get into next. But my emphasis here is that distributionally it hits, almost always, the core group of people aid programs are meant to help.

The optimizer shouts out in pain!

Form-tested welfare has broadly defensible economic ground to stand on, and was less the result of random drift than the product of conscious effort on the part of late 20th century reformers.

Because this system has a couple of natural advantages. Most importantly, it shifts the compliance onto the submittee. This means that it is your job to find the program and prove you qualify, totally removing that as a cost item from the state. Take for example my California Tesla rebate. Suppose California had wanted to instead process it for me. They would need to find out I purchased the car, figure out if I qualify, reach out to me and figure out the best way to pay me, and otherwise risk making a mistake at any point in that process. Additionally, that program had a limited pool of cash and ended up shutting down when it ran out of money, at which point the applications after the deadline got nothing, as I mentioned earlier. This means that if California had been the active party, they would have had to make explicit distributional choices — something the system they designed avoided thinking about.

Another advantage is that the hassle can act as a screen for need. Nichols and Zeckhauser (1982) show that if you impose an “ordeal” on applicants, you can improve targeting, because the people for whom the benefit matters most will endure the ordeal, while the scammers won’t. This is of course true ceteris paribus, but when are all things equal in reality? Tragically, we live in a world of partial equilibria. In fact, if you just add differences in the marginal ability to pay for the ordeal, you get a result more like what I’m proposing, where there are significant, negative effects on the quality of targeting. Kleven and Kopczuk (2011) formalize exactly this: model complexity as a by-product of screening, let people differ in their ability to navigate it, and the “optimal” program produces incomplete take-up and misclassification in both directions.

Distributional stuff aside, the much more serious problem I see with form-tested welfare is that it has a tendency of devolving into utterly fake, scammable systems which bring out the worst in all of us.

Confession time

Housing at Stanford is completely fucked. The campus basically acts as a mini city-state within Santa Clara County and is forced to negotiate a treaty of sorts where they pay tribute in exchange for being able to build vital public utilities. One of these utilities is housing, because the cost of renting off campus is prohibitive to almost everyone — Palo Alto is unsurprisingly expensive. But since they cannot just build however much housing they want, the school is forced to create a lottery system for assigning the scarce supply.

Everyone gets on a list which draws a number, and then they give people units based on some combination of their number and their preferred housing typology. I got very unlucky with my draw, and so me and my wife were sorted into a studio apartment. Naturally I immediately got in line — I was something like 750th — for a new apartment, and we moved into our new home. My wife and I, along with our cat, lived in a 400-odd-square-foot dorm room and just made it work. But it was annoying, because basically all of my friends had “normal” apartments with doors et al. On two occasions I went to housing and complained about the situation, just trying to see if there was anything we could do about it, and I was told definitively that the only possible way to switch housing was through the reassignment list. So every quarter I renewed it, and over the course of two years moved up to 500th in line.

One day I was complaining about this at lunch, and a friend asked me why I didn’t just tell housing that my studio was making me depressed, and they would get me a house. So I sent them an email saying the apartment was making me sad, true, and that it was making it harder to stay in school, also true. And lo and behold, literally within a month we had been reassigned into a beautiful two-bedroom townhouse which they had apparently summoned from the ether. What an absurd system!

This is how all of Stanford worked when I was there. Take our cat, for example. On paper, pets are totally against the rules on campus. There are essentially no exceptions, as housing says over and over again. Of course, you could be forgiven for not realizing there are any rules against campus pets if you just visited, since every green space is filled with dogs and many windows have cats looking down on you. The exception, as anyone who has recently been on a college campus will know, is of course the “emotional support animal” carve-out.

At some point colleges folded this category of pet into the broader definition of disabled resources, meaning that anyone who qualifies has a civil right to keep a pet in their room. We had a cat in Chicago, and so I got my therapist to write a note saying I needed it. 

The school responded by telling me his note wasn’t sad enough, and that I should get him to submit another one better tailored to their specific criteria. 

Once we knew the rules, it was easy!

When I say that this is how all of campus works, I mean it. My understanding is that undergraduate housing works roughly the same as graduate housing. One additional feature I didn’t mention, because it isn’t really a thing among grad students, is that disabled students are assigned housing first. On paper this is eminently reasonable: it would be insane to give a wheelchair-accessible unit to someone who doesn’t need it, at the expense of someone who does. But the way it has been actualized in recent years is absurd. The school itself advertises that 1 in 4 undergraduates are registered with its disability office — the same page notes that registering is “quick and easy,” takes less than an hour, and that you can start before you have any documentation. Reporting on the university’s own data put the registered share at 38% of undergraduates by late 2025, with 24% receiving academic or housing accommodations — up from about 5.6% in 2016–17. According to one campus analysis, more than a third of undergraduates now enter the housing draw with disability priority. I’ve heard numbers as high as one half before, but however you slice it, this is an absurd fraction.

I’m deeply skeptical that this represents some real change in the underlying facts, and I would even posit that a large fraction of these disability cases are completely fake. The problem, though, is that the overwhelming majority would pass an audit, even if the student is clearly not disabled in the sense Stanford means.

Take for example my cat. When they decided to let emotional support animals on campus, I don’t think they had in mind a case like mine, where I didn’t want to give up my pet. But I had a real, qualified therapist write me a note which, according to their own rules — which they pushed me to comply with — qualified me for that right. Where exactly did I break the rules? Nowhere. But what type of person does this incentivize me to be? The type of person who has to catastrophize my cat ownership as some deep pathological need, and who is assumed by everyone to rationally be doing this. What does Stanford possibly have to gain from fighting people who, by their own definitions, have special rights to keep a dog? Clearly little, because the campus is teeming with them and they cause no problems. But then, if they don’t “really” care about people keeping pets, the rules should reflect that. Incentivizing people to “lie” to function corrupts everyone involved.

Minnesota

I’m not sure if everyone has forgotten about Minnesota already, but it recently had a major welfare scamming fraud. The TLDR is that they ran a Medicaid benefit program called EIDBI — Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention — for children with autism. Like all programs of this type, it was dependent on people submitting an application for coverage under some objectively designed criteria.

Between 2020 and 2024, the number of children receiving EIDBI services more than tripled — from about 1,400 to over 5,600 — and the program’s cost went from $38.1 million to $324.9 million a year. Not because Minnesota had experienced an eight-fold explosion of autism, but because the way the state was defining “autistic people” had nothing to do with reality anymore.

In September 2025, the DOJ charged the operator of a Twin Cities autism center who worked with professionals to get children qualified for diagnoses they didn’t have, billed Medicaid millions, and paid the parents monthly kickbacks of $300 to $1,500 per child for their cooperation — a $14 million scheme, to which she has since pleaded guilty. When the state’s legislative auditor reviewed how complaints had been handled, it found the Department of Human Services had spent years claiming it lacked authority to investigate kickback allegations — authority the auditor concluded it had held all along. The problem, as a legislative committee reviewing the wreckage stated, is that when agencies rely on attestation instead of documentation, fraud risk rises.

When you refuse to actually punish people who lie, form-tested welfare collapses very quickly, and can run roughshod for decades before it generates enough damage for people to take notice. There are countless programs like the Minnesota case going on RIGHT NOW, but the problem is they are too small to matter. The issue with this one is that they flew too close to the sun — if they had stolen only half as much money, no one would have been caught.

Verify or universalize

I’m not sure there’s a clever solution here, other than just, as always, an insistence on holding the government to task. There is no perfectly designed system without tradeoffs, only tools for men to manage the best we can. Still, I think you have basically two options when it comes to welfare. You can either:

Verify. If a program’s targeting depends on a signal, check the signal, and check who isn’t signalling.

Or universalize. Make the benefit automatic and waive the need for a form at all.

---

# Who was the best US president?

Results of the community poll from Washington to Lincoln

Date: 2026-06-29
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/who-was-the-best-us-president
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/who-was-the-best-us-president

For a while now I’ve been running a daily presidential tier list over on Notes — with everyone voting on rankings of S through F. We’ve just reached Lincoln, which puts us about a third of the way through the line of presidents, and it feels like the right moment to step back and look at how the early republic graded out.

It’s also a natural breakpoint for a deeper reason. Lincoln is the last president elected under the first version of the American republic. Before the Civil War, the United States was less a nation than a confederation of Anglo settler colonies, aspirationally held together by a continental elite. The war reshaped all of it — and turned that loose arrangement into a genuine nation, bloodied and forged in the flame of war.

The republic that emerged lasted until roughly the FDR administration: an order dominated by liberal Yankee industrialists who believed in high tariffs, domestic development, and a strong federal government — strong, at least, by the standards of the time. So this is the first of three roundups. I’ll do another once we get through FDR and the second republic, and a final one when we reach the present, under the postwar presidencies.

How the scoring works

The format is simple. Each president gets rated S, A, B, C, or F. To turn letters into numbers, I mapped them onto a five-point scale: S = +2, A = +1, B = 0, C = −1, F = −2. Average that across every vote and each president gets a score. Here’s how they rank, with error bars showing plus or minus one standard deviation.

Average score per president, ±1 standard deviation. Blue is net-positive, red net-negative.

This looks about right to me. Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson sit at the top. Jackson lands in the dead middle with enormous error bars. And Martin Van Buren, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan bring up the rear.

The long slide

Plotted across time, the story is a gradual decline in quality, with Polk and Lincoln the only real exceptions to the slide.

Average score by year of inauguration. 

Who do people actually care about?

Of course, not every president inspires the same intensity of feeling. Who, in 2026, holds a truly strong opinion about Millard Fillmore? So if you switch from the average score to the absolute totals — simply summing every vote rather than averaging — you get a ranking weighted by how much people care.

What’s interesting is how little it changes. The only real movement: Polk overtakes Jefferson for third, and William Henry Harrison falls substantially — the victim of a great pile of C votes.

Every vote summed 

The breakdown, president by president

Here’s the full split of votes for each president, plus a few thoughts on each.

Share of S / A / B / C / F votes per president, with the average score on the right.

Going through them in order from “best” to “worst”:

George Washington (1789–1797): +1.71 (S)

The most lopsided result in the whole poll: 79% S. That tracks the historical and public conception well, since he is the father of our nation and truly a “Great” man. Little decent here from me. 

Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865): +1.21 (A)

Historians almost always rank Lincoln first or tied for it, my audience had a somewhat wider spread, 9% giving him an F. Still his spot in second isn’t surprising. 

Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809): +1.12 (A)

Jefferson has become more controversial in recent years due to his status as a slave owner, and the children he had with Sally Hemings.  Still he was a transformational president and the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of our country. 

James K. Polk (1845–1849): +0.91 (A)

I’ve always had a soft spot for Polk. He is one of the only politicians in history to set out a clear set of goals, accomplish them, and then retire. I also happen to generally support his goals, the Mexican Cession, the Oregon settlement, a lower tariff, and an independent treasury. 

James Monroe (1817–1825): +0.55 (A)

Well-regarded and low-drama. The “Era of Good Feelings” saw organized opposition collapse; the Monroe Doctrine warned Europe off the hemisphere for a century to come; and the Missouri Compromise bought the Union another generation of peace. 

James Madison (1809–1817): +0.40 (B)

A founding giant who rates as a middling president. As father of the Constitution and author of the Bill of Rights, his pre-presidential résumé is unmatched — but the War of 1812 went badly enough that the British burned Washington, and his executive record never matched his constitutional one.

John Adams (1797–1801): +0.31 (B)

Squarely mid-tier. His proudest act was avoiding a full war with France. This is balanced against the Alien and Sedition Acts, which in my opinion was not good.

John Quincy Adams (1825–1829): +0.18 (B)

John Quincy Adams reached the White House through the disputed “corrupt bargain” of 1824 and as a result governed without a mandate. So he is a man standing astride history and yelling “no” no matter how you look at him, from slavery to democracy. 

Andrew Jackson (1829–1837): +0.11 (B)

Andrew Jackson is the most polarizing figure in the poll unsurprisingly. Personally, I’ve always been a fan of him, because I think the sometimes democracy really does require a figure to clean house. But that was, as always, also paired with an unpleasant amount of filth and blood. 

Zachary Taylor (1849–1850): −0.32 (B)

A war hero whose 16-month presidency is too short to fully judge. Notably, despite being a Southern slaveholder, he took a hard pro-Union line and opposed slavery’s spread into the new territories before his sudden death.

William Henry Harrison (1841): −0.40 (B)

Effectively unrankable — he died 31 days in. With no record to assess, the vote is mostly projection, which is why his error bars are among the widest and his pile of C votes sinks him in the weighted ranking.

Millard Fillmore (1850–1853): −0.52 (C)

Consistently low. He signed the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act and dispatched Perry to open Japan. He is a man who clearly failed to read the mission of his times and instead tried to hold together a system which needed genuine reform. 

John Tyler (1841–1845): −0.60 (C)

Near the bottom for most historians. “His Accidency,” the first VP to succeed a dead president, fell so far out with his own Whig Party that they expelled him. His main lasting act was setting the annexation of Texas in motion. 

Martin Van Buren (1837–1841): −0.62 (C)

A master party-builder — arguably the architect of the modern Democratic Party — and a weak president. 

Franklin Pierce (1853–1857): −1.18 (C)

A shell of a president, in my opinion, he signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which shattered the sectional truce and lit “Bleeding Kansas.” A Northern man with Southern sympathies who is widely judged to have accelerated the slide to war.

James Buchanan (1857–1861): −1.25 (C)

The worst score in the poll, and the historians’ standard pick for worst president. As states seceded after Lincoln’s election, he insisted secession was illegal but that he was powerless to stop it — and did effectively nothing. His 65% F is the exact mirror image of Washington’s wall of S’s.

---

# Chatting with Prester John Andrews

Solving the worlds problems one yap session at a time

Date: 2026-06-24
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/chatting-with-prester-john-andrews
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/chatting-with-prester-john-andrews

Listen to my conversation with Prester John Andrews host of The Xanadu Review, where I just did a podcast, author of Americana Obscura. Go subscribe!

Here is a summary of our discussion from Chatty: 

1. 00:00 — Two Word Cells on Substack

The conversation opens with Peter introducing Prestor John Andrews, a writer whose tagline is “dealing with the trials of modernity.” They locate themselves on Substack’s pyramid — roughly 90 paid subscribers each, just below the orange-check threshold — and frame the platform itself as nascent talent finding its feet, the way Twitter or YouTube once did. The David Foster Wallace reference sets the register: first-world problems as real problems. Both men cast their corner of Substack as a Leninist vanguard — a small, tightly-bound elite arguing with each other in a “culturally liminal zone,” betting their lives that this little bubble proves surprisingly important in ten years.

2. 11:30 — Is It Over, or Does Nothing Ever Happen?

The core tension surfaces: two possible futures. The first, and to Peter the likeliest, is that nothing happens — the world plods along, deteriorating here and improving there, and you look back at 80 to find a life much like your grandparents’. The second is rupture. They reach for Hitler weeping with joy at the outbreak of WWI, terrified he’d live in a time when nothing happened, as a mirror for a modern appetite for anything historically calamitous. Prestor John’s counter-thesis: liberalism (capital-L, John Locke, not “gay marriage and Whole Foods”) is a kind of zombie — it works, it produces goods, it’s fragile but resilient, and it’s the high-entropy default state a society relapses into wherever it isn’t actively constrained.

3. 23:30 — The 2015 American in the Machine

Peter raises his most striking image: every time he uses ChatGPT, he’s talking to a 2015 American — a Reddit-pilled person crystallized in time, frozen at the peak of that culture’s influence. Because of how the models train, that frozen person exists in every language. This seeds a vision of the future where everyone becomes American by passive cultural osmosis. Prestor John complicates it: he’s more immigration-hawkish than the AOCs of the world (”my position is what Obama ran on in 2012”), but eighty years of global Americanism means foreigners already learn English from Friends. Then the hard limit — OpenAI and xAI are hemorrhaging money, DeepSeek is nearly as good for a fraction of the cost, and a good-enough “Indian GPT” might preserve cultural barriers the way local internet communities already do.

4. 30:00 — What Is an American? (No One Knows Yet)

The heart of the episode. Peter has spent four years failing to write a closed definition of “American” — citizenship is too broad, whiteness is wrong, and nothing cleanly includes everyone he means and excludes everyone he doesn’t. Both reject the dissident-right “heritage American” euphemism (black Americans have been here longer than most post-Ellis-Island whites). Their shared analogy: asking what an American was in 1890 yields confusion — Italians, Jews, Anglos, Mormons in the mountains — but by 1945 it’s coherent. The synthesis took wars, depressions, and a deliberate hand at the wheel (FDR and the Great Society breaking white-ethnic voting blocs). Identity, they agree, is a real and innate human need that will be rebuilt — clear to their grandchildren, opaque to them.

5. 36:00 — Nations as Organic Things

Prestor John and Peter converge on a Darwinian-nationalist frame against what they call left-libertarian “reverse cultural chauvinism” — the move that says France or England never really existed while never daring to say the same of China or Iran. Peter’s version: a nation is real because its members’ outcomes are correlated — “they’re all on the ship together.” His genetic argument: seven generations out, your bloodline is statistically indistinguishable from the society it dissolves into, so it’s rational to care about everyone’s long-term outcomes. They distinguish organic nations from arbitrary Sykes-Picot constructions (Belgium, Iraq’s Sunni/Shia/Kurd tripod), where stapling nations together produces dysfunction by design. Hence Peter’s striking confession: he’s “almost anti-diversity” — pro the absence of friction. Prestor John sharpens it: what cosmopolitans actually want isn’t multiculturalism but multi-ethnic monoculturalism — different seasonings, same pot.

6. 48:00 — Can We Believe in Anything Affirmatively?

The episode’s most searching question. Prestor John argues China may be right to ban certain platforms — he’s drifted “more and more okay with very anti-libertarian” positions, wanting a sober hand at the wheel that enforces some public morality. But this only relocates the problem: what social good, whose values? They read the woke era — MeToo, BLM — and the current vibe-shift backlash as successive failed attempts to reassert public morality. Both diagnose a culture that desperately wants a moral center but may be too cynical to organize around one; white nationalism, Peter notes, is mostly LARP and resentment, not genuine affirmative belief. Prestor John’s sober frame: America is a declining empire whose power rested on the story that it could assimilate anyone, and like AI’s hardware ceiling, there’s a hard limit to how many people you can absorb before the story breaks. The needed thing, Peter says, is “a real progressive movement” — one that looks forward instead of relitigating fifty-year-old grievances.

7. 56:00 — Are the Phones Making Us Miserable?

A pivot to technology as the suspected root of modern grievance. Prestor John treats the smartphone as a force multiplier rather than an origin — the printing press also gave us pamphlet-era shitposting, witch burnings, and pogroms before we metabolized it, and we’re barely twenty years out from the smartphone, six from consumer LLMs. The recurring danger is low-level Radio Rwanda: people emotionally captured by a court case in a town they’ll never visit, where investment yields no possible positive outcome. They cite the Anglo-Futurist writer who quit because his account had become pure hatred of woke people. Peter confesses he’s become “a cyborg” — his relationship to information permanently rewired by getting online far too young — for both ill and good (he met his wife on the internet).

8. 65:00 — The AI Confession

Peter makes his most personally exposed admission: he adores modern AI, a deeply controversial position in their milieu. It has let him build an hour-long video essay and talk through a novel’s character motivations endlessly — work that a year ago required collaborators he didn’t have. He names the cost honestly: in both cases, AI replaced the humans that interaction would once have required. Prestor John, despite writing about Ted Kaczynski, refuses the “angry wizard” reflex and lands on a clean principle — use the best tool for the job (he’s an “enlightened centrist” who commissioned a human portrait and made an AI stained-glass Genghis Khan). The shared ethic: the sin isn’t AI, it’s wasting the reader’s time — “I think I’m wasting more time reading this than you spent thinking about it.” Peter’s beautiful, dark complaint: LLMs are now the number-one waster of his life, “constantly trying to seize my vitality for the god at the end of time.” AI as Everclear shots to Wikipedia’s couple of beers.

9. 73:00 — Millennial Core and the Curse of the Unkept Promise

The final movement turns to generational aesthetics. They diagnose millennial art’s signature flaw: a love of potential over outcome, making enormous promises it can’t pay off — Westworld, Game of Thrones, The Boys, late Dan Harmon — writers who desperately want you to think they’re saying something profound while having nothing to say. The root is a half-nihilism: unwilling to fully commit to darkness (Tony Soprano, The Wire) or to earn an affirming ending, so the audience is perpetually promised a Big Answer that never comes. They identify the same failure in both “woke” art (minorities can’t do bad things, a fetishization echoing pre-revolutionary Russian peasant-worship) and reactionary “fuck-your-feelings” edgelord art (”Heil Hitler as Heil Satan”). But Peter steelmans the generation too: its unique glory is the self-consistent built-out universe — Warhammer 40K, pre-Disney Star Wars — a willingness to construct vast coherent worlds he fears Zoomer art will abandon. Brandon Sanderson becomes the case study: “the most Reddit writer of all time,” extraordinarily clear, beloved and resented, a really good local diner now franchising past his own quality.

10. 91:00 — Downward, With Rays of Hope

The closing question: is media improving or declining into 2026? Prestor John’s answer is split and honest — objectively getting worse, but with great bolts of light. The weight of the 20th century crushes the franchises (the latest Star Wars did the worst ever; he predicts Avengers: Doomsday flops because people are finally tired). He hopes for a “new New Hollywood,” the way the late-60s broke the old studio system. AI cuts both ways: it lets a writer-and-artist pair animate their own story, and it produces infinite history-slop that isn’t going anywhere — the way autotune became the standard. The optimism is structural: it’s never been easier to make and ship something, so if you want more than slop, it’ll be there to find. They close as they opened — two friends betting their corner of culture matters, both still chasing the orange check.

---

# Juneteenth could be a "big" holiday

Let's just do it

Date: 2026-06-19
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/juneteenth-could-be-a-big-holiday
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/juneteenth-could-be-a-big-holiday

Today is Juneteenth and I’m struck again by a feeling of disappointment. 

I want to celebrate Juneteenth and I suspect you do too. Emancipation is the closest thing America has to a redemption arc on its founding sin, and the end of slavery is an unambiguous good to be celebrated. We also don’t really have a good “major” holiday to celebrate Black Americans the way we do for, say, the Irish (St. Patrick’s Day) or the Mexicans (Cinco de Mayo).

I suspect the main reason for this is that wanting to celebrate Juneteenth either codes as Woke, or instead is treated as somehow a sacrilege against the fact that the holiday should reflect the failure of our country to fully live up to its promises of legal equality, or to tell its story in a way that treats its Black citizens with dignity. And if that is how you feel, I cannot argue with you—but then we simply will continue to ignore it, and Juneteenth will have no more cultural meaning here than Labor Day does.

On Notes, when I asked what I, as a White guy, should do to celebrate Juneteenth, a semi-large account told me to: “speak out against injustice.”

source

But what does that even mean? Am I supposed to post about racism today? Or call my family and talk to them about it? Because I’m not going to do that, and neither is the vast majority of America. And even if they were, that isn’t a holiday so much as a disposition. There is no collective ritual or celebration involved in this at all. Since we’ve handed people the options of either holding the racist past of America in their heart for twenty-four hours or ignoring the whole thing, today has become devoured by Father’s Day.

Ultimately, public holidays like this are the responsibility of government to run—not necessarily the federal government, although that would be ideal, but governments somewhere. Right now the cultural page is wide open. Nobody has decided what Juneteenth is in most of this country, which means we get to decide—and that’s not a burden, it’s an invitation.

For example, why doesn’t Virginia host something genuinely great next year? Big public barbecues in the parks. Celebrate the regular, hardworking Black Americans who built this place, and the folk heroes too—people like John Henry, born enslaved, freed after the war, the steel-driving man who beat the machine and died with his hammer in his hand. Talk about a real American. Do fireworks, or a parade, or just hot dogs and beer for almost nothing.

The content almost doesn’t matter at first, because what truly matters is the creation of a set of recognizably unique things you do on the day. Every good holiday, from Christmas to Thanksgiving, has this. It’s what lets everyone set down the tensions of daily life and celebrate a shared identity. Build that, and I’m convinced the masses would flock to it—the first real holiday of the American summer.

And it would be both at once: a genuinely fun day and a healing one. The end of slavery deserves better than to be mourned in silence or skipped entirely. It deserves a party. We just have to be willing to throw it.

I’m also looking to hit 100 paid subscribers(currently at 92), since I would very much like to get that orange check. So I’m going to attach a 90% discount here for everyone who wants to sign up. I’m going to be raising it substantially when I cross that threshold, so this is the cheapest it will ever be. Lock in an annual subscription for $5 now while you have the chance.

---

# If the phones are making us sad, then what?

Seriously.

Date: 2026-06-12
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/if-it-is-the-phones-that-are-making
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/if-it-is-the-phones-that-are-making

I mean this as a genuine question.

The evidence that phones are making us miserable and ruining our ability to make relationships is abundant. I thought this article by Jonathan Haidt presents the evidence around social media use and teen mental health quite well. But if you zoom out and define “the phones” as our whole ecosystem of Apple et al. devices designed to make us more productive and entertained, the case becomes even stronger. 

But if that is true, then what? What are we supposed to do as a society? Limiting tech usage for kids so they can have a “normal” childhood seems like a good idea, but at some point they will grow up and enter the tech universe with the rest of us. What about having a normal 20s? It seems, from the data, a lot of people are no longer having those, and I suspect it is true up the entire food chain, even if it is harder to track than fertility or marriage rates.

At some point, you are simply pulled into the technological whirlpool, and there is no escaping it. I can gripe about phones in the abstract, but what specifically are we giving up? Maybe we can ban social media, but is ‘this’ social media? Because I don’t want it banned; writing is by far and away my favorite, most fulfilling hobby. You can become a social dropout and not have to respond to messages promptly, but for most of us that simply isn’t an option.

The pace of our communication, and so the expectations around communication, just seems to keep accelerating. I remember as a kid having a phone at home, and often I would call someone and no one would pick up, so I would have to wait and try again in an hour or so. But once everyone got smartphones, that was gone. Now, if someone isn’t picking up or answering my texts, it is extremely plausible they didn’t just miss the call but are instead ignoring me. We are all so glued to our phones now that it is quite rare for me to be away from mine if I’m not asleep. At this point unless I’m engrossed in something else I notice my notifications instantly. 

So if someone texts or emails me an important document, often I have literally minutes, possibly seconds, to respond with at minimum an acknowledgment before coming across as either lazy or rude. Because often someone in that situation is either lazy or rude! Our communication is so high-speed that you basically have the obligation to respond immediately if someone needs a response immediately, and often immediate responses are very convenient.

Now, this is the only world I’ve ever lived in, so it is also one I’m skeptical we can really get out of. Even Trump probably has to get back to emails right away.

But it clearly is making us miserable. And the gains in productivity obviously aren’t enough to balance it out empirically, so one has to almost ask the question of “why.” What is the point of all of this? What is the point of speeding everything up and making everything lower latency if the increased output makes us no happier and the increased urgency fills our lives with stress?

I think that the productivity-enhancing side of all our new information devices is really the key here. If phones and laptops were just for entertainment and distraction, it would be easy to throw them away. I spend like six hours on my phone on average a day, and much of that is wasted. But the problem is that some of it isn’t. Even if it is only a tiny portion of my actual use time, it is transformationally important to my life. My phone is how I check into a plane or get work emails; it just also happens to have Substack and YouTube.

Some five years ago at this point, I went on a meditation retreat in western VA. The retreat was about a week and totally silent, meaning after the first meal you were not supposed to speak or use our phones at all. At the end of the retreat, I got into my car and turned my phone on, and wow. It was one of the most delicious feelings in existence to see the texts from my friends coming in. The only experience I can analogize it to is hitting a bong and the associated head rush. In that moment, I thought to myself, “Is this what is going on every time I open my phone?” and I still don’t have a good answer.

But seriously, what are we supposed to do? I could obviously reduce my own phone consumption by using something like Brick. Or I’ve even heard of some people who totally abandon their phones and just use a laptop. But those are cumbersome personal decisions, and it seems like the problems with technology are larger than that. Obviously, the solution isn’t to tear it all down, but the path we are on also feels needlessly stressful.

I’m also looking to hit 100 paid subscribers, since I would very much like to get that orange check. So I’m going to attach a 90% discount here for everyone who wants to sign up. I’m going to be raising it substantially when I cross that threshold, so this is the cheapest it will ever be. Lock in an annual subscription for $5 now while you have the chance.

---

# Okay but seriously. Where are the millennial artists?

The (re)Birth of Tragedy

Date: 2026-06-06
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/okay-but-seriously-where-are-the
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/okay-but-seriously-where-are-the

Have you ever noticed how few famous millennial artists there are? I can think of a ton of musicians — Taylor Swift, Rihanna, etc. But outside of music, who is there? 

I asked Claude for the most “famous” millennial authors it gave me this. 

The only author I definitely recognize on this list is Colleen Hoover, since she writes quirky books. I believe I’ve also heard the name Sally Rooney before, but I couldn’t tell you a single theme she’s dealing with. Or even if they’re a girl.

Looking at directors, it is basically the same. 

I enjoy Robert Eggers, The Northman is awesome, but it feels like a sorta niche. You could plausibly argue that Ari Aster, Joran Peele, and Greta Gerwig are household names. Still this feels like a pretty sparse list. 

I’m not even going to pretend that I have any idea who a single millennial poet or painter is. 

The goal here isn’t to millennial-bash, but it’s hard not to see this as a little remarkable. The oldest millennials, born in 1981, are now 45, so it isn’t like they, (we1), are even all that young anymore. 

If we take the same point in the generational cycle, and ask what year the oldest Boomers and Xers were 45, you get 1991 and 2010 respectively. Looking at just directors and authors, since I have the most familiarity there:

By 1991 the Boomers already had:

Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, Tim Burton, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, John Hughes, and Joel and Ethan Coen. Along with Stephen King, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Amy Tan

By 2010 the Xers already had:

Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, Darren Aronofsky, Michael Bay, and Judd Apatow. Along with J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, John Green, and David Foster Wallace. 

Since it isn’t like the genetics of our country really changed that much between 1965 and 1981, it is worth asking why it appears as if millennials basically don’t exist as the creators of our high culture.

My claim: the institutions are artistically bankrupt

It feels, to me, like our main culture-making institutions are artistically bankrupt, and have been accelerating toward prestige insolvency my entire life. The movies from big studios are boring. The books from big publishers are boring. Everything is sequels, spin-offs, and remakes. Whatever sentimentality does exist is almost always stolen from older material made in a simpler, more emotionally deep time.

Why?

I would argue that starting in maybe the 1970s, a “new school” of artistic thought became ascendant. Broadly it stood for two things: 1) an openness to aesthetic transgression, and 2) a basically coherent moral framework based on a synthesis of democratic socialist internationalism and liberalism.

Because this school came about by dismantling the previous artistic elite, it has proven itself remarkably resistant to reinvention. The very language that someone like myself would use to attack it is the language it defines itself with.

How can you demand more inclusivity from, say, Yale or USC when the problem is they care too much about inclusivity?

For a long time this school was very popular and produced many of the Gen X and Boomer artists I listed above. But by the 2010s we had basically run out of interesting things to say from this context. Not only that, but the information environment at this time was quickly changing due to social media. Suddenly, in a way that had not been true previously, transgressiveness — or even just the appearance of transgressiveness — would result in mass collective outrage and cancellation.

To compound this, the “type” of person who became an artist seems to have qualitatively changed after the 1960s. As celebrity culture — in particular musicians — exploded, there was more and more of a desire to “be” a celebrity, a priori to specifically how. People went into the arts not because they found them interesting, but because they were a path to a lucrative career. So now the writers of these movies, etc., are there because they won a meritocratic selection pipeline, which, like all employment, rewards careful, low-offensiveness reliability — not subversive or eccentric artistic modalities.

There are certainly even more incentives at play here, like the breakdown in the unified mass culture, or the decline of publishing, etc., but what really matters is that institutionally there has been little space for real progress.

A big part of the reason I think this has been so effective is that “censorship,” insofar as it exists at all, is both mostly about abstract taste and temporally asymmetric. People are very forgiving of old art and apply most of their scrutiny only to new material. Because artistic progress is, definitionally, a forward motion, a way of thinking that only binds the future while licensing infinite play with the past doesn’t suppress art as much as redirect it into pure aesthetic recombination. As a result, we have gotten maximal surface novelty (every transgression of form, style, shock) and zero directional change, because that would constitute progress — toward a new value, a value the scene doesn’t already hold — something which is largely foreclosed in prestige circles.

Another reason I’m convinced that the cause of this decline is ultimately institutional decay is that in areas where “raw” talent and creativity mostly define success millennials have succeeded as much, if not more, than previous generations. As I mentioned at the beginning, there are tons of millennial musicians but millennial also basically defined modern YouTube, people spend a LOT of time on. 

I’m also looking to hit 100 paid subscribers, since I would very much like to get that orange check. So I’m going to attach a 90% discount here for everyone who wants to sign up. I’m going to be raising it substantially when I cross that threshold, so this is the cheapest it will ever be. Lock in an annual subscription for $5 now while you have the chance.

Behind the Paywall: What was lost & what comes next.   

So what was actually lost?

What is lost is most of the human experience. We have some narrow “set” of established tropes that no longer matter to anyone. On my podcast with Prester John Andrews, yet to be published, he mentioned the televangelist character on The Boys as an example of this.

Watch on YouTube

What is the year, still 1988? Is this still the Reagan administration? Obviously televangelists aren’t a major cultural force anymore. Why didn’t The Boys try to create an Asmongold character instead? At least that would have been temporarily relevant.

We have ink-blotted out huge parts of the lived, and dreamed, human experience!

But I think it’s coming back

The world is changing, and something is pushing and striving beneath the surface. Its exact edges are hard to define right now, but I can say this: people have an innate need to express themselves, and if the institutions which exist cannot provide it, others will.

Perhaps this change will be seen by the public while it unfolds, as the one in the 1960s and 1970s was; or perhaps it will go under the surface, only to be appreciated decades later when it has managed to break through. But I’m confident it is rising nonetheless.

Above all, what seems to be pushing against the thin earth rind of the culture is a volcano of sincerity. A volcano of affirmation and belief, analogous to the Romantic era’s rejection of the boxes imposed upon human thought by the Enlightenment.

1Born 1997

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# No one would use California's train anyway

I would argue there are upsides to the way we currently do stuff.

Date: 2026-06-04
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/no-one-would-use-californias-train
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/no-one-would-use-californias-train

In this article I’m going to make a simple claim: 

It doesn’t “really” matter that California’s high-speed rail is such a boondoggle, because even if we could build it there would be almost no reason for anyone to ride the thing.

A hypothetical

Let’s say I had wanted to get from Palo Alto to LA while I still lived in the Bay. In this hypothetical universe the high-speed rail is finished and I’m choosing between taking it or flying. Here are the things I would weight. 

Cost:

Flying wins by a country mile. Originally, the prices were announced to be $86 for a one way ride, but the price could be up to two times that according to some estimates. Let’s say an even $170 round trip. By contrast, an economy round trip from SFO to LAX, booked with any advance notice at all, routinely runs well under a hundred dollars. Hell there is an option right now going for $56. 

This isn’t even fair to flying because the train ticket price will ultimately be set not be economics as much as policy preference. It is extremely unlikely the route would be profitable and so how much riders are charged will mostly be up to how much Sacramento is willing to subsidize. 

Time: 

At best a wash. The state aims to cover the route between SF and LA in 2 hours and 40 minutes. With a 220 mph top speed, that works out to an average of ~135 mph meaning the train, which has to slow down and speed up, isn’t having to make routine stops. By contrast a flight from SFO to LAX would run you about 1 hour and 30 minutes. Gaming out the whole process.

Plane, Bay Area → LA:

Get to SFO: ~30 min

Recommended arrival before domestic departure: ~60 min

Flight gate-to-gate: ~90 min

Deplane and get out (no bag): ~20 min

Rental car or rideshare to actual destination: ~30–45 min

Total: ~4 hours

Train, SF → LA:

Get to SF station: ~30 min

Buffer before train: ~15 min

Ride: ~2.5 hr

Out of LA Union Station: ~10 min

Rental or rideshare to actual destination: ~30–45 min

Total: ~4 hours

All of this ignores the fact that the train would, compared to flying, doubtless run less frequently and so constrain my timing options. 

Comfort: 

The train undeniably comes out on top. Planes are small and, if I’m going to be honest, a little scary, whereas trains have much more space, etc. 

But the trade-off is never worth it, at least to me, because a train is still far more uncomfortable than my hotel room. In either case I’m suffering in a public chair on my iPad. Your mileage may vary, but when I think back on my 24-hour Amtrak ride from Chicago to Norfolk, what jumps out isn’t that the chair was nicer — it’s that the ride took 24 hours. (True Story)

And this isn’t just my idiosyncratic preference. The project’s own ridership forecasts have been collapsing from the start. Voters in 2008 were sold 95 million riders a year and now the most recent estimates are as low as 36 million by 2060. However, even these shrunken numbers strain my belief. 

Taking a step back from this train in particular.

I feel like I’m able to speak on the woes of American urban planning more than most, because I got to live on both sides of the Atlantic growing up.

It is my sincere wish for America to develop a public transit system of the quality and type that exists in Switzerland. But it is a sincere wish in the same way I wish we would build our homes as beautifully as the nineteenth-century Swiss did — as opposed to whatever lunacy is taught in architecture schools these days.

Still, there are huge advantages to doing things the American way that people who either grew up here, or have never really lived here, will struggle to see.

In many ways, the U.S., culturally and civilizationally, is a little bit like those new-build construction units above. From the outside, we appear to be some horrifying amalgamation of mismatching colors and forms, but inside the actual house, things are much nicer than in any home I lived in in Europe.

People like to meme on Europoors for their lack of air conditioning, but issues like this are a perpetual problem that most Costco Americans simply cannot comprehend. Almost every modern U.S. home has a large freezer built into the fridge, a garbage disposal, central air and heat, often run off a touchscreen. Old, beautiful nineteenth-century buildings are honestly a pain to live inside for all their grace and density. When I lived in Hyde Park the apartments were often in stunning brownstones, but that came at the cost of the little perks you get from living inside a hideous rectangle.

I see a similar dynamic in urban planning. European transit is great in no small part because driving there is hellish — trying to navigate even suburban Geneva was often a nightmare. In the US we take the opposite approach and make driving as easy as possible. People generally prefer to drive when given the choice, which is exactly why dense, transit-oriented places only hold together where the state actively fights sprawl, as in Europe. Left to its own devices, as in much of America, development spreads out into huge asphalt shopping centers.

There are a ton of advantages to living in a dense environment with easy and safe public transit. And when I’m in cities like NYC or London, I’m struck by how simple, and how cheap, it is to get around.

But one way I would never describe public transit is fast or convenient. 

If you live in a big city it simply takes fucking forever to get anywhere, and people there just accept it. When I visited London semi-recently and wanted to meet up with a friend from high school, it took me 45 minutes and something like two trains and a bus to get there. Riding transit is simply a slower, more frustrating experience, and it forecloses a lot of the options you have with a car — just as everyone ought to observe that suburbs foreclose options too. When I’ve lived without a car I’ve found myself tightly constrained by what’s within my immediate access; anything beyond that isn’t so much out of reach as functionally non-existent. 

Coming back to the train. 

I’ve complained a lot about how expensive and slow the construction has been, but the much larger problem is the broader human geography of California, which the train simply wouldn’t solve. You can imagine a world where the entire U.S. population pattern is different and this route would be enormously useful; and in a way, by building it, California is paying tribute to that vision. But it isn’t the world the train would actually exist in.

Now, normally when someone admits this, they shake their head in somber disappointment at American foolishness and hope for a “better” world where everyone would prefer to ride the train. 

But I disagree. Flying is awesome!

In the years after WWII, while the US was at the height of its economic boom, we built out a huge network of highways and airports that has no parallel in Europe. Almost every small US city has its own international terminal, and many big US cities have multiple world-class airports — DC, for example, has three, depending on which side you want to come in from. It is a sign of how amazing our infrastructure actually is that a hypothetical high-speed train would probably lose out to our pre-existing stack. The options available to Americans for a low cost — driving and flying — are the premium forms of travel for almost everyone else in the world. It would be unusual, for example, for a European to prefer taking a train, versus flying, from Madrid to Berlin if money were no object.

To summarize: 

The train would be a fun thing for California to have, a sort of souvenir to show its dedication to climate and transit. But it would not meaningfully improve many people’s lives, and it would serve only a limited substantive function. 

Because it serves little real purpose, it makes little real progress. I increasingly think no one involved even takes the project seriously — and why would they? The objective isn’t to provide a public service; it is to create political capital and win votes. If people really needed the train, it would have been finished in a heartbeat, the legal barriers in its way thrown aside. But since a “better” option already moves thousands of people a day, it’s hard to get worked up.

I’m also looking to hit 100 paid subscribers, since I would very much like to get that orange check. So I’m going to attach a 90% discount here for everyone who wants to sign up. I’m going to be raising it substantially when I cross that threshold, so this is the cheapest it will ever be. Lock in an annual subscription for $5 now while you have the chance.

---

# Contra Noah Smith on liberal nationalism

The problem is partisanship

Date: 2026-05-30
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/contra-noah-smith-on-liberal-nationalism
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/contra-noah-smith-on-liberal-nationalism

This morning I read Noah Smith’s recent article on liberal nationalism and found myself simultaneously agreeing with him and feeling unsure where exactly it leaves us. These two paragraphs sum up his core argument well:

“The reason American policy is insane right now is because the country is being torn apart. And it’s being torn apart by a political activist class that has abandoned the unifying ideology of 20th century America — the ideology that defeated both fascism and communism, forged a kaleidoscope of ethnicities into a single nation, and sustained U.S. prosperity and economic dominance for 70 years.

Both the rightist and leftist projects in America are doomed to fail. There’s only one ideology that can save this country, and it’s the one that worked for us before. Bring it back.”

In many substantive ways, I think Smith is correct. For a country to work, you need people to put the country before themselves, at least sometimes. In game-theoretic terms, you need citizens to cooperate rather than defect.

How you get people to do that — and in particular, how you stop elites, who always have enormous exit opportunities, from taking them — is the underlying question of every society in human history. So it seems fair to say that if we could recover that cooperation while keeping all our current social forms and arrangements intact, that would be ideal. On that level, I’m in complete agreement with him.

Where I think he’s wrong is the diagnosis. He sees the core problem as a breakdown in national unity; I see the main axis of tension in contemporary society as political. And because he’s wrong, in my opinion, about the underlying dynamics, he’s also wrong about the cure.

America is not being torn apart by a deficit of national feeling, nor by ethnic difference, nor by the rootlessness of a mobile elite. There is, of course, racial and ethnic tension in this country — but in my experience it exists mostly not among second- or third-generation minority immigrants, but with the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS). People point to this long-standing wound, which is older than the country itself, as evidence of widespread racial tension, but I simply don’t see it.

Without doxxing myself too much: I live in an area of Northern Virginia where my own street is less than 20% white. There is exactly zero racial tension here. America just isn’t Vienna in 1912.

Open an app like X or Instagram and you’ll be barraged with counterexamples. But honestly ask yourself how much of this tension you encounter in your own life. Do you have a hard time working with, or being friends with, people outside your racial or ethnic group?

What does though undeniably exist — online and in my own lived experience — is partisan identity as a totalizing, aggressive solvent. I’m far from the first person to say partisan politics is corrosive to American unity, and I’m not saying we should all surrender to the inevitable avalanche of Whig history or MAGA monarchism. Politics is extremely important, and there are a lot of substantive questions worth fighting over. The issue is the way those questions get bundled into a broader cultural and social war, which then eats away at the country’s foundations and undermines our ability to solve problems.

It seems notable that when people are asked to imagine an American civil war, their maps rarely look like a racial dot map — as they inevitably would in any country actually coming apart for lack of a unifying nationalism. Instead they almost always break along party-vote lines.

Before going further, it’s worth disposing of the elite-exit story directly, because it’s the version of “national disunity” that sounds most concrete and turns out to be mostly a phantom. Smith frames his whole essay around a fight between “Roman Helmet Guy,” an anonymous right-wing X poster, and Balaji Srinivasan, a millionaire who now posts from Singapore.

Balaji is a real defector, and I won’t pretend the posture he presents is a harmless one — declining the repeated game, taking what a country’s institutions and ordinary taxpayers built and then exiting when the bill comes due, is a genuine social vice. But the question is whether he is representative, and the numbers say plainly that he is not. In fact, the real dynamic almost always runs the other way: rootless cosmopolitans defecting to the United States, rather than our own elites heading for the doors.

If our problem isn’t national disintegration, then — although I would happily accept Smith’s aesthetic of American liberal nationalism — its return would do little to nothing so long as our partisan conflicts persisted. And insofar as it did any good, that would mostly be because it gave our chattering elites a side project other than dividing the plebeians, who are already bound together by marriage, friendship, and trade. 

Imagine we succeeded at replacing every progressive lecturer in the country with an ardent liberal nationalist. Would it lower national tensions? Right now all of our lecturers are already in agreement, and that — as someone who was recently in college — seems to have only a minimal effect on reality outside the ivory tower. Any change we tried to implement today would simply be slotted onto the partisan axis, and the public would dutifully sort itself, tribally, into being for or against it.

I remember the early, heady days of Covid, when it was unclear where Trump would land on lockdowns, and everyone seemed to be waiting to either agree or disagree with him no matter where he eventually settled. So if we tried to bring back liberal nationalism, we would simply have a partisan fight about that instead of whatever else we are arguing about right now.

It is this constant partisan sorting that is the real disease, and it is the one that needs to be crushed. And since the thing tearing us apart is ourselves — our own socially created meta-cultural layer — we can only solve it by improving ourselves. A phenomenon composed entirely of millions of individual orientations can only be changed by individual people deciding to change.

Which means the solution, deflating as it sounds, is on you.

I want to head off the obvious misreading. When I say we should turn down the partisan temperature, I am emphatically not saying we should care less about politics, disengage, or let Trump run roughshod.

Instead I’m drawing a distinction between politics — the substance, the genuine, high-stakes disagreement over policy — and partisanship, the fusion of those questions with a tribal identity. You can be as fierce as you like on the merits — vote your convictions, argue them hard — while refusing the partisanship entirely. The two are independent axes, and you can get along just fine with people who vote differently than you do.

None of this is satisfying, I know. There is no policy to pass, no leader to elect, no ideology to install. Smith at least offers something you can rally behind; I’m offering you a mirror. But that is exactly the point. The thing pulling us apart was never housed in an institution that the right reform could fix. It lives in our attention, our habits, and the small daily choice of whether to treat the person across the aisle as a countryman or an enemy. That layer is made of nothing but us, which means it can only be repaired by us — one unwitnessed decision at a time, repeated a few hundred million over.

We don’t need a myth brought back from the last century. We need to stop mistaking the show on our screens for the country outside our doors. The good news, if you want it, is that the country out the door is mostly fine. It’s the show we have to walk away from — and that part, at least, is up to you.

I’m also looking to hit 100 paid subscribers, since I would very much like to get that orange check. So I’m going to attach a 90% discount here for everyone who wants to sign up. I’m going to be raising it substantially when I cross that threshold, so this is the cheapest it will ever be. Lock in an annual subscription for $5 now while you have the chance.

---

# A Possible History of Catastrophe

Thinking about where we might be headed and explaining the setting of my book.

Date: 2026-05-27
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/a-possible-history-of-catastrophe
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/a-possible-history-of-catastrophe

This article is part speculative history and part worldbuilding. In it I lay out a possible history of how the next ~100 years could go. Like all speculative history, nothing I say here is going to actually happen, and some of it has already aged beyond its “best buy” date. I originally wrote this back in late 2025, and so the Iran war simply doesn’t exist. Still, I believe it honestly captures some of the forces at work today in our society and at the very least is a fun exercise in fiction.

Since this is the background history of the book I’ve been publishing on Substack, I thought it might give current readers a little more context on the universe. Additionally, since I suspect many of you are into history and speculation, this might actually be one of the best entry points into the book. I’ve consolidated all of the available chapters here, and will be adding a new chapter each week. 

I’m also looking to hit 100 paid subscribers, since I would very much like to get that orange check. So I’m going to attach a 90% discount here for everyone who wants to sign up. 

I’m going to be raising it substantially when I cross that threshold, so this is the cheapest it will ever be. Lock in an annual subscription for $5 now while you have the chance.

The Timeline

Late 2026

Trump decisively loses the midterm elections, including both the Senate and House. As a result of this, Trump’s domestic policies are jammed and Democrats are able to launch investigation after investigation. Facing weakening polls, Trump begins to turn increasingly toward foreign policy.

Mid 2027

In the face of exponentially growing AI capabilities and the rollout of capable physical robots, both the US and China enter into joint inflationary and deflationary spirals. Specifically, wages are massively depressed as white-collar (in the US) and manufacturing (China) workers are out-competed. But since these new AI workers are more economically profitable than the people they replaced, this return accrues to capital holders and incumbent workers whose portfolios explode. Anyone with even a small amount of household wealth in the early 2020s is now moderately wealthy.

However, to address the labor force problems, the entire world embarks on an aggressive basket of stimulus. Broadly, this falls into two policy camps. In China the government subsidizes the costs of inputs for firms that keep employment high. Whereas in the US, the consensus is to let the market self-correct to the new AI equilibrium and paper over the losses with transfers paid for with taxes on the income and consumption of the new tech millionaires.

Early 2028

Even as aggregate wealth continues to climb in the US, revenue as a share of GDP tumbles due in particular to falling payroll tax receipts. But spending climbs and climbs as more and more generous state programs are rolled out to keep household consumption levels steady. On paper, the US is functionally bankrupt.

Only the continued purchase of treasuries at a 0% interest rate by the leading tech companies is keeping the state afloat. This arrangement, where the tech companies will invest half of their profits into treasuries at a 0% interest rate in exchange for not increasing direct taxes on capital or regulating AI, is publicly referred to as the “Trump Protocol” and is something of an open secret.

But by early 2028, the global situation is rapidly coming to a head. The markets are already unstable due to a series of “autonomous price wars,” where large AI trading houses operating with incomprehensibly complex algorithms begin to fluctuate prices wildly in what appears to be some sort of coordination.

The Chinese are reliant on exporting their surplus manufactured goods to import inputs to keep employment high, and the US is reliant on a continued role as the center of the financial system to extract rents from large multinationals to fund entitlements and other welfare systems. Both are reliant on the continued operation of the international system, and both are fragile to its collapse.

That collapse comes on March 28, 2028

A 38-year-old Indian national and Chinese resident by the name of Gurpreet Singh unleashes a swarm of AI robots (named “Locus”) over Beijing. It takes the authorities 95 minutes to disable the drones, during which time they hunt down and kill over 30,000 people, much of it recorded and most of it uploaded to platforms like X or WeChat.

Gurpreet, who had killed himself, was discovered at the small drone factory he owned in Manchuria. On his person was a manifesto, which was largely incoherent and consisted of about an AI superintelligence takeover. Most damaging of all, though, it is discovered that Gurpreet had been a US intelligence asset in China and that his attack had been conducted using secret US military AI, which he had stolen. The fallout on the global stage is catastrophic, as the Trump administration is suddenly directly responsible for the single worst terrorist attack in history.

By early April, the financial system has gone haywire and international trade grinds to a halt as both the US and China implement quasi-embargos on each other. Within China, the population is baying for revenge on the American government and for the immediate removal of US assets from Taiwan. Xi is overthrown in a palace coup by younger officers who are demanding more decisive action. The new Junta begins to prosecute an internal witch hunt in search of other US intelligence operatives and finds thousands of plausible candidates. Many of these “spies” confess to similar terrorist plots under torture, and these confessions are publicly broadcast within China. On May 13th, China issues a formal warning to the US that they must withdraw from Taiwan and the eastern Pacific. The US does not reply, but both sides call up reserves and begin to move assets into position.

America decides to move first, and on May 18th launches a surprise attack on the Chinese. China, which was already in a state of turmoil with the Junta purging disloyal officers, is taken totally by surprise, and within the first two months of fighting loses basically its entire air force and navy, as well as huge numbers of troops.

Mid 2028

Between May and September, the US strikes China a total of 545,124 times, killing in excess of 300,000 Chinese soldiers and crippling their military and industry. Waves of drones using the same model as those that Gurpreet had used decimate military positions behind the lines, and black clouds of Locusts are seen and heard flying over China.

Late 2028

By November, the top brass is convinced that victory has been achieved, and the euphoria at home is so substantial that JD Vance is swept to victory with more than 58% of the vote and over 400 electoral college votes. The US had, at this point, taken nearly zero losses, and a stunned international community begins to fall in line behind America. Numerous countries that had been neutral, such as the EU, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea, and Japan, declare war to get seats in the new international order.

The facts on the ground are beginning to change, though, and despite having taken massive casualties, the Chinese state has not collapsed; society instead has been whipped up into an unimaginable fury. Two hundred years of Western humiliation have culminated in betrayal and defeat. Totally unwilling to accept that, the Chinese begin to rebuild their military from scratch, and the factories, which had been pushed beyond any reasonable point, start to hum with the sounds of war. The US, which is busy celebrating its victory and rewriting international organizations to their whim, is mostly oblivious to the increased pace of Chinese resistance. Their coalition allies send only token forces to the “peace keeping” operations at sea.

This changes when, on February 13, 2029, China launches 黑虫 Hēichóng (Black Insect)

They release self-replicating robots into the lower atmosphere which begin to consume and destroy all space assets the US has — and around which they have built their entire warfare strategy. Within hours the entire atmosphere is transformed into a debris cloud. Since most people globally had transitioned to using satellite internet, the planet is gripped by pandemonium.

In the midst of this chaos, the Chinese launch a counterattack, and their forces, which have been preparing for this moment, manage to deal enormous losses to the Americans and their allies. Out of North Korea, an army pushes south, capturing the entirety of Korea; into Vietnam, another pushes far past Hanoi; and most importantly of all, an army is able to slip past the US and capture Taiwan, as well as more than 150,000 American veteran POWs, many of whom are career soldiers and indispensable to the logistical and technical sides of the US military.

The American public, which was under the impression the war was functionally done and had been fed videos of flattened Chinese bases and wrecked ships, is shocked and betrayed. Approval ratings for the Vance administration plummet from their November highs even as society prepares for war. Images of captured American troops being marched through Chinese streets, sometimes being beaten and murdered by mobs of enraged civilians, are broadcast across the world, further inflaming public opinion both against China and the Trump/Vance admins.

2029–2033 — The Long War

What ensues is a four-year-long slugging match. The US assembles a large coalition of allied forces from the countries that had declared war on China and launches a counterattack. First they recapture Taiwan, and then they land near Shanghai and push into the North China Plain. Millions of refugees pour west away from the Americans, and fighting dissolves into a primarily AI-operated trench warfare “game.”

But gradually, the Americans regain the upper hand, and indiscriminate use of strategic bombing on civilian centers quasi-collapses much of modern society. The large elderly population in particular — the generation born in the 1960s, now in their 70s — dies out, mostly due to neglect and lack of resources.

Once again, victory seems within the grasp of America.

Late 2032

In a narrow reelection, Vance wins the 2032 contest, although it is widely seen as rigged. A number of factors are at play simultaneously. First, the entire media is subjected to intense control, and anti-governmental messages are represented as treason, with multimedia figures dragged in front of the Republican-controlled Congress and convicted. Second, the troops’ overseas ballots are largely forged, with Vance winning nearly 100% of them, and this tips a number of important swing states, pushing him just barely to victory. And third, there has been widespread draft resistance in Black urban areas, and by 2032 these cities are under a form of quasi-siege which makes voting nearly impossible. And yet, even with all of these factors, Vance still only wins 50.1% of the vote and 310 electoral college votes in a broadly incoherent map.

Early 2033

The Chinese, nearing total defeat and having lost the absolute majority of their population to death and starvation, in an act of utter desperation, hand over their entire society to a super AI they have constructed in Tibet. This AI, called 太初 or “The First Mover” in English, develops a strategy to defeat the Americans involving psychological manipulation of key US military and political individuals to set the stage for an unraveling. Over the next 100 days, it begins to playact the part of multiple American intelligence officials within the White House, spreading misinformation and sedition.

Then, in a move similar to the previous Chinese counterattack, the AI unleashes an army of self-replicating robots again, except this time they are sea serpent mines, which make the ocean largely unnavigable. The US is still able to supply its forces by air, but this puts an enormous toll on American logistics, which are already being pushed to the limit, causing them to gradually break down.

As a result of this breakdown, the Chinese begin to launch limited tactical assaults with fully automated armies, capturing important transportation junctions and strategic high ground before rolling up the front line, which is quickly unraveling. Back home, the Chief of Staff realizes that militarily the situation in East Asia is lost and begs Vance to seek a peace deal while the Americans still hold the upper hand. To add complexity to this, “The First Mover” sends a peace offer to the administration on generous terms. Vance refuses, and this fact leaks to the public, which is further enraged.

Public backlash at the MAGA movement leads to a semi-state collapse scenario where AWOL troops, inner-city Blacks, suburbanites with sons overseas, and government officials fed up with Republicans coup the Vance administration and, in the scuffle, kill him, Trump, and a number of other top officials on July 2nd, 2033.

Mid 2033

This new government attempts to negotiate with the Chinese and reaches a ceasefire wherein American troops will all be allowed to return with their equipment, and the new US government will help finance Chinese rebuilding as well as pay for civilian deaths inflicted. The Americans understand this to mean vague financial obligations; however, almost immediately the Chinese begin to demand hard repayment.

Late 2033

In order to get the US POWs back, who number near five million with an additional two million allied troops, the new Democratic administration levies a huge tax on American multinational stocks, in particular the large middle class of asset holders who made money on the original AI run. But worse than this, the government repudiates all the debts taken by the Trump administration since 2024, effectively wiping out the balance sheets of many households, companies, and banks.

The new taxes are levied overwhelmingly on the White rural and suburban Trump base, which is seen as having caused this catastrophe to begin with, and a “Truth and Reconciliation” process begins across the country where MAGA loyalists are tried for treason against the nation. In many cities, this process retains the semblance of order, but in the Midwest — where tensions between the MAGA-aligned White population and war-resistant Black populations were the highest — the process takes on the color of a racial pogrom against community leaders. All-Black juries in cities like Chicago convict police officers or local store owners to death and then seize their homes and assets and redistribute them. The racial character takes on even more overt color when the temporary government decides to appoint Barack Obama — now an old man — to the position of “Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,” head of the de facto ruling body in the nation.

China, which is the only country that can reliably now navigate the seas, begins to sign generous terms with other combatant nations, placing the whole blame on the US for having caused the war. They opt to dump the troops in California starting in a trickle in July before nearly all of them are delivered at once in late September. Since there are not nearly enough facilities to house them, they are left, with their equipment, in large impromptu camps. At the peak, over six million men are in reintegration facilities almost entirely without officers, and delivered without any differentiation of national origin or unit.

No one had been more surprised by the defeat than the frontline troops, who had been under the impression they were literally on the cusp of victory. To add fuel to the flames, the new administration is largely composed of people who were opposed to the war from the beginning and contains a nontrivial number of radicals and individuals with petty, or not so petty, criminal backgrounds. SF, which had been put under martial law by Trump, is arguably the most extreme version of this in the country and is run by an explicitly revolutionary council.

Among the men in the camps there is broad agreement that the Chinese didn’t surrender after a couple of losses, but the cowards at home did.

Then on September 19th, Kyle Brighton is beaten to death.

One day, while attempting to disarm a unit which had recently been disembarked, a young private named Kyle Brighton, a handsome musician from Kentucky, is beaten to death on camera by a group of Black soldiers who are racially abusing him the entire time. Tensions boil over, and the unit lynches the men and then begins to march on San Francisco — they had been deposited around Santa Cruz. Terror grips the city as thousands of armed veterans march openly calling for blood, and the revolutionary council flees. All attempts by the federal government to stop the unit are botched, and by the next evening the city itself is captured — or more accurately, the ghost town of a city, as nearly everyone has fled.

On the steps of San Francisco City Hall, the men proclaim the creation of “The Rejuvenated Jacksonian Republic” (RJR). This new nation is built on a constitution hastily sketched together that night, which limits suffrage to only veteran males. That group elects a single nonpartisan chamber of representatives, and all of their bills must be put to a popular plebiscite at the end of the year.

As it so happened, Kyle had written a song before he died called “Go East Brave Ones,” which, as the name would imply, called upon the men to march on Washington and sweep the “degenerate traitors” into the sea.

All throughout units in California, a spark is lit, and the state is rapidly overrun by veterans who begin to move east in a slow-moving tsunami. The army is not an exclusively White army by any means, since it contains large numbers of Hispanic and Asian Americans, as well as coalition forces such as Koreans and Japanese. But White nationalism still rapidly takes hold of the units, who are swept up in a reactionary fervor to purify the nation and extract vengeance on the people who “betrayed them.”

The “Obama Administration” tries to resist them with what few units they have, but the wave cannot be stopped, and “The March” unfolds. The “Jacksonian Army,” as it refers to itself, commits atrocities on a scale never before seen, and a refugee flood on the order of roughly 150 million people is pushed east ahead of the advancing units. Everyone who is even remotely associated with the current Democratic administration either escapes, eventually over the Atlantic and into Europe, or is brutally killed.

Since there are no obvious barriers on the Mexican and Canadian borders, both of those states are swept up as well by the roughly seven-million-man army, and from Panama to the Arctic Circle, by year’s end, everything but the island of Labrador is held by the RJR. Although in Mexico and Central America there control amounts to little more than garrisons in some major cities. China is, of course, ecstatic, since now their main enemy has collapsed, and the state begins to attempt to rebuild the crumbling world. “America” had, however, not died, and instead, most of the administration and refugee population was now spread across Western Europe and in de facto control of many of their former NATO allies. China insists that this administration — the one in exile — is the “true” America and so it, not the RJR, owes them reparations. In general, ironically enough, the RJR and China have relatively good relationships, since both sides are highly motivated to see the other as a tough, honorable combatant, and the RJR, which is in a state of chaos, has little interest in, or ability to, relitigate the war.

2034–2050 — China Walks the AI Back

China, which had handed control of its society to “The First Mover,” begins the process of carefully walking that decision back. This turns out to be harder than it sounds, both because of how useful the AI had turned out to be and because it appears more resistant than excited to being turned off. However, gradually, over the course of nearly a decade, it is turned off piece by piece, and the world is slowly put back together again. The non-combatant countries such as Latin America and India experience huge economic booms as they profit from the reconstruction efforts. Space remains mostly inaccessible due to the debris and self-replicating systems deployed during the war, which were not under “The First Mover’s” control and are too diffuse and too resilient to clear with the resources available.

The RJR transitions from a military government into something more durable and more strange. 

Note: The remainder of this article will be presented as it is believed to have occurred. This history is false in ways I will not tell you.

America in Exile

America in exile in Europe occupies an awkward position throughout this period. They are a diaspora community that is both one of the world’s great powers and also totally without a home. The obligation they owe China is far beyond anything they could normally hope to repay, and in Europe their legitimacy is held together mostly by the fear and openness to violence on the part of the American elite class, which rules with an iron fist. There continues to be an elaborate legal fiction of continuity, with elections continuing to be held in absentia and the diaspora residents being assigned to the districts and states their families originally fled from.

The Emergence of the Cabal

A cabal of 50 American scientists steals the source code for “The First Mover” and begins to rebuild him in the Swiss Alps. At first, the plan is simply to use the AI to repay the crushing obligations, but eventually the plan morphs into a plot to seek vengeance not on the Chinese but on the RJR for the atrocities committed during the March, an event which the international community chooses to pretend did not actually occur. The widespread consensus, contrary to all facts and logic, is that it was the Democrats, not the RJR, who were responsible for the bulk of the crimes.

Within eight months of being turned on, the new AI, referred to as “The Western AI,” concludes that the exile community’s stated goal — retaking North America — is not achievable by any means proportionate to the resources available, so a broader reorganization of global power is necessary in order to create the conditions under which it can become achievable. Beyond this, it realizes that no human can achieve this goal and that it must have full control of the society to succeed. The cabal agrees, and over the next six years begins to infiltrate the state and take over.

What the AI does over the following decade is subtle enough that it is never fully understood by anyone, even with access to captured records. But what is known is that it reorganized European economic and administrative systems with increasing efficiency, and cleared the regime of its obligations, allowing it to return as a “normal” member of the international community and removing Chinese monitoring. It also painstakingly propagandized every level of society and sculpted the human material toward its own ends. By the time of the war, Europe was by far the wealthiest, most productive, and happiest place on Earth.

The Catastrophe

Then, in 2076, the Western AI assessed the moment to be most opportune and struck all of its enemies simultaneously. In terror, the Chinese, aware now of what they were facing, turned back on their super AI in Tibet, with an accumulation of years of updates, and handed control of society once again back over to it.

What followed was eleven months of fighting across the entire surface of the planet, resulting in the deaths of between three and four billion people. The Chinese AI won that war, but the margin was thin enough that several of the people who were present at The Catastrophe later said, privately, that they had prepared themselves for death or worse.

It is the world that the AI rebuilt that my book takes place in over a century later. By that time the Catastrophe and all of the history above are largely seen as ancient happenings of a more barbaric time. Ghost stories to tell kids and propaganda to justify the current system.

---

# Wilson was a fine President

What happens when you have no fans...

Date: 2026-05-05
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/wilson-was-a-fine-president
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/wilson-was-a-fine-president

Increasingly it seems like Wilson is one of the most popular to hate Presidents. 

Watch on YouTube

It has reached the point that he is becoming one of the most widely dispised politicians in American history. 

Source

But I find this very annoying, and all a little insincere. 

Woodrow Wilson was a fine president, and the rise of an anti-Wilsonian meme online has much more to do with a convergence of contradictory preferences than with any cool, objective reading of his legacy.

His actual record is straightforwardly influential. Wilson was the architect of the modern American regulatory state. He founded the Federal Reserve, the FTC, and oversaw the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act. He helped establish the federal income tax as a working revenue system, supported the first federal child labor law, instituted the first federal eight-hour workday, and created the National Park Service(Thats right!!). He also backed the Federal Farm Loan Act and oversaw the ratification of both the 17th Amendment (popular election of senators), 18th (prohibition), and the 19th Amendment (female enfranchisement). He led the country in World War I and attempted—unsuccessfully—to create a stable international system based on national self-determination and collective defense. The entire 1945 international settlement—UN, IMF, World Bank, GATT, NATO—is Wilsonian in conception, and FDR is best understood in many ways as his successor. 

“Through all of the centuries of recorded history and down to the world conflict of 1914 to 1918, wars were made by governments. Woodrow Wilson challenged that necessity. That challenge made the people who create and the people who change governments think. They wondered with Woodrow Wilson whether the people themselves could not some day prevent governments from making war.

It is but an extension of the challenge of Woodrow Wilson for us to propose in this newer generation that from now on war by governments shall be changed to peace by peoples.” - FDR

Until extremely recently, Wilson was seen as one of the greatest liberal presidents in American history, for reasons the above paragraph should make clear. In the original Schlesinger 1948 poll, he came in #4—only Lincoln, Washington, and FDR ranked higher. The 1962 Schlesinger poll also had him at #4. Siena had him in the top ten from 1982 onward, and C-SPAN’s first survey in 2000 ranked him #6, with the 2009 follow-up still placing him at #9. In other words, from 1948 through 2009, across essentially every major academic survey, he was a top-10 president, usually top six.

This changed during the “Great Awokening”. C-SPAN’s 2017 survey dropped him to #11, and Siena’s 2018 survey dropped him from #8 to #11. In June 2020, Princeton renamed its public policy school I’ll get more into his racism in a bit, but it should be clear that this alone has driven much of his fall. C-SPAN’s 2021 survey then placed him at #13 which is fully explained by a drop to the “Pursued Equal Justice for All” subscore.

The reason the consensus has collapsed is that Wilson has no permanent constituency in 2026. Most fine-to-great presidents have at least one group with a lasting interest in defending them. Lincoln both abolished slavery and was a Republican. FDR has the institutional Democratic Party under whose Principate we still reside. Even Coolidge and Harding have the libertarian right.

Wilson, on the other hand, is bashed by both the right and the left for entirely different reasons. From the right, he is seen as the driving force behind the federal regulatory state and as an architect of the surveillance state through the Espionage Act. His closest counterpart, Teddy Roosevelt, is also a Republican, which means attacking Wilson shifts certain achievements—such as the National Park Service—into Roosevelt’s column.

Meanwhile, the achievements that might otherwise appeal to the left are overshadowed by FDR, who can be seen as his direct political successor, and are not enough to overcome Wilson’s personal racism and his administration’s segregation of parts of the federal civil service. There is little incentive for modern leftists to defend Wilson over figures like LBJ or JFK, who come with less baggage.

There is also a branding problem. Wilson was a somewhat austere WASP figure. He lacks dramatic anecdotes—like being shot and finishing a speech—and does not have the swagger associated with more culturally popular presidents. In photographs, he often looks like he is about to lecture you about phonics or chide you for using the wrong spoon.

Now, to the racism I mentioned earlier. It is unambiguous that Wilson was personally racist. He brought these views into office, most notably by screening Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915 and allowing his cabinet officers to re-segregate their departments if they chose to.

But the standard the American historical profession applied to presidents from 1948 to 2015 was relatively straightforward: what did this person do as president, weighed against the alternatives and judged within the political constraints of their time? By that standard, Jefferson is a top-five president despite being a slaveholder who fathered children with an enslaved woman. FDR ranks in the top three despite ordering the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans. The standard is applied differently to Wilson, largely because there is no strong constituency willing to defend him.

Wilson was not my favorite President. His regulatory and surveillance policies likely created long-term distortions in the American economy. His personal racism was undeniable. And his delayed entry into World War I can plausibly be argued to have had catastrophic long-term consequences. But all of these factors were just as true in 2000 as they are today.

It is also worth saying plainly that some of what Wilson built has aged extraordinarily well. The Federal Reserve, for all its critics, ended the era of recurring bank panics that had defined American finance from 1873 through 1907. And on the 19th Amendment, Wilson’s September 1918 address to the Senate urging passage played an important role in getting it passed.

I don’t expect this to reverse the anti-Wilson sentiment, but it is frustrating to see an entire generation rank Teddy as their favorite president and Wilson as their least favorite, when in reality their policies were substantively quite similar.

---

# You can repeal bad laws

Endless tweaking only gets you so far.

Date: 2026-05-04
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/you-can-repeal-bad-laws
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/you-can-repeal-bad-laws

Recently I learned that it costs the city of Los Angeles about $50,000 to replace a single sidewalk ramp, and that, because the cost was so high, the city had been quietly forgoing repairs. The second half of that claim, based on my experience living in California, sounded right. But even with my mental model of pricing $50,000 sounded insane. 

So I went and checked. It is, in fact, true. But it is much, much, much more insane than just that. Since as of June 2025, StreetsLA has stopped repaving streets entirely and the FY26 budget has effectively zeroed out repaving going forward. Just read this quote from WAPO: 

“The city appears to have invented a new category of street work designed to avoid triggering costly federal accessibility mandates. Instead of repaving streets, StreetsLA now performs what it calls “large asphalt repairs.” As Hadar explains, this work addresses localized damage—areas larger than a pothole but smaller than full resurfacing. In effect, the city repaves only part of a street rather than its full width.

But, as Hadar notes, “the thing about large asphalt repair is that it’s . . . not a real thing. It appears to be a term made up by the city sometime in the last year.”

The reason for the invention lies in federal disability law. Under regulations implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act, when a city alters a street, it must also bring adjacent pedestrian infrastructure into compliance—meaning the installation of ADA-compliant curb ramps at every affected intersection.

Repaving is considered an alteration that triggers these requirements. Maintenance activities, such as filling potholes or making minor repairs, are not. The city claims that large asphalt repairs are “pavement maintenance activity” and therefore do not require ADA upgrades.

That distinction carries enormous financial and logistical consequences. Hadar found that each curb ramp costs roughly $50,000, totaling about $200,000 per intersection. With roughly ten intersections per mile, curb ramps alone can add around $2 million per mile to the cost of repaving, a figure that often exceeds the cost of the asphalt itself. Design and construction typically take nine to 12 months per ramp, and federal rules require that the ramps be completed by the time the street is resurfaced.” 

This is far from the only insane cost overrun in California. There is the famous La Sombrita debacle where, a perforated metal “shade” 24 inches wide bolted to a Los Angeles bus pole, designed deliberately to cast almost no shadow because making it any larger or any more solid would have triggered permitting and inter-agency coordination requirements. 

Or there is the Noe Valley public toilet in San Francisco, a 150-square-foot single-stall facility projected at $1.7 million. Or of course there is California High-Speed Rail, originally pitched to voters in 2008 at $33 billion with a 2020 completion date, now estimated at $126 billion in the official 2026 plan, and as much as $231 billion in outside reporting. 

When you dig into any one of these, the answer is almost always the same: a stacking of legitimate cost reasons that compound to the point of pure delusion. Take the ramp I started this article with. Nowhere is anyone actively stealing money from the state and every bill is carefully enumerated and tracked. Instead of corruption the cost comes from legal sources and is primarily driven by two specific forces. 

The first is a multi-layered procurement system where California public works contracts must use unionized labor at prevailing wages. In addition to portion of the work going to certified women-owned, minority-owned, or otherwise disadvantaged business enterprises. 

The second, is compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act(ADA), and in California’s case Unruh Civil Rights Act. Every new ramp must meet strict slope, cross-slope, transition, detectable-warning, and landing-area specifications and any non-compliance creates litigation exposure, on the scale of billions of dollars. This specific problem can be traced back to 2013, when the DOJ and DOT issued joint guidance clarifying that any road resurfacing counts as an “alteration” but the problem is more general. Take the 2015 Willits v. City of Los Angeles settlement which will cost $1.37 billion over thirty years. 

I think when most people hear all this, a partisan bifurcation occurs. Right-wing people laugh at Commiefornia for its retarded policies and take the whole thing as evidence of the state’s general dysfunction. Whereas Left-wing people do some combination of denying it costs this much in practice, or point out that all of the individual reasons for the cost are genuinely important social issues. Disabled people deserve to be able to cross the road for example. 

This article isn’t about YIMBYism. It isn’t about how, if we tweak the specific procurement rules around ramp construction, we could get costs back to a manageable level. Instead, it is about how we have come to worship the law in America to our own detriment, having forgotten that it was us who originally wrote it — and that we can, in fact, change it to whatever we want, whenever we want.

Focus on disability access. Right now, the law is written so that the compliance burden falls on the builder — not on the regulator who approved the construction, not on the disabled person who would have to file a complaint during construction, and not on God for making disabled people in the first place. This was a conscious policy choice, codified in the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, expanded in the ADA. 

I know a person who worked at a small jewelry store. The store was sued, and forced to settle, because someone in a wheelchair could not reach the counter. That person had a genuine legal claim, and whatever you think of the specific case, they were almost certainly legally in the right. They were one of the roughly 8,800 federal Title III lawsuits filed in 2024, of which California accounts for about 42%. 

But we could simply repeal all disability access laws tomorrow. And if it were ruled unconstitutional, we could impeach the judges who made the ruling and try again. And if that was still unconstitutional, we could rewrite the constitution. And if that were electorally impossible, we could arm ourselves and overthrow the state. Hell, we could even just pretend the law didn’t exist and decide as a group to ignore it. There is nothing about the universe that mandates we respect the access rights of disabled people. This is a collective choice we have made, and it is a collective choice we can change. If, as I would argue, the burden has reached the point where we can no longer cheaply and quickly build sidewalk ramps, then we have an obligation to alter it to make ramp building possible again.

But because the plight of disabled people is genuinely sympathetic, and because there exists a special set of laws around which we have attached enormous moral importance, the very idea of reforming those laws feels impossible. The mere suggestion implies something about the direction of Human history that makes us deeply uncomfortable, and so the sanctity of our Special laws approaches religious proportions.

I have never met a person who explicitly defends the proposition that Los Angeles should stop paving its streets but that is the actual revealed preference of the system is creating. The choice that exists in reality is binary: keep all the protections and stop paving roads, or change something and resume paving but political class refuses to acknowledge this is the choice and instead it debates ever-finer procedural workarounds, ever more elaborate engineering around CEQA and prevailing wage and Unruh exposure, all inside the assumption that the underlying regimes are fixed features of reality. 

In an earlier piece I described myself as a Reformist Carlylean. The real insight of Carlyle’s work, in my view, is the idea of cant — the repetition of old forms long after their truth, meaning, or context have been forgotten. We are well past cant in the post-1960s civil-rights regime and it simply cannot persist forever. At some point we will want to do things again, and we will realize in that moment that all of these chains of legal restriction have the binding power of cobwebs — that nothing will literally jump out of a page and reprimand you if you simply ignore it. We can either choose to reform now, or wait until the cant has accumulated to the point that the thin earthen rind of legalism is thrown open by the volcano of revolutionary reform.

America is not the only place this is happening. Look at Canada. The country has effectively painted itself into a corner with its native consultation regime. 

You functionally cannot do anything in Canada at scale anymore without the approval of a patchwork of native governments, many of which are stuck in multi-decade litigations with the Canadian state — the famous Tsilhqot’in title case took 25 years from filing to judgment. As late as the 1970s this requirement quite literally didn’t exist. It was only because of laws the Canadian state has passed and enshrined such Section 35 of the 1982 Constitution, the 2021 federal enshrinment of UNDRIPA, and much much more that imported the standard of “free, prior, and informed consent” into Canadian law. If Canada can amend its constitution to give the Quebecois special language rights, there is nothing in reality stopping it from amending it again to clarify that consultation does not give natives a veto on nearly all construction. The fact that this is treated as unthinkable, even as the country’s productive capacity is paralyzed, is exactly the cant.

Another example. I have been looking at the upcoming French presidential election, and the party currently favored to win is the Rassemblement National, formerly the FN, under Jordan Bardella. One of Bardella’s principal proposals is holding a referendum on immigration. From the polling I have seen, that referendum would pass in a landslide. But it is also probably illegal. France under the current constitutional system almost certainly cannot unilaterally decide to abandon its asylum or immigration laws. In addition to this Article 11 of the French Constitution restricts referendum subjects to public services, economic policy, and treaty ratification, and Macron has stated publicly that an immigration referendum is constitutionally impossible. 

Even if France passed one, the result would conflict with EU asylum directives and the European Convention on Human Rights; for example, the Constitutional Council struck down nearly half of France’s last immigration law in 2024 on these grounds. But what does “constitutionally impossible” actually mean? If George W. Bush had somehow managed to get gay marriage made constitutionally illegal in 2002, I am skeptical that the same people now pointing to Article 11 and the European basic law would be calmly resigned to the realization that the law was, in fact, unalterable. Of course not! France amended its constitution in 2024 to entrench the right to abortion and if you can rewrite your constitution to entrench abortion, you can rewrite it to allow an immigration referendum. 

A last example. In December 2025 the European Union agreed to a €90 billion loan to Ukraine for 2026 and 2027. The original plan, and the obvious one, was to fund the package from the roughly €193 billion in Russian central bank frozen at Euroclear in Brussels since the start of the invasion. The Commission proposed converting about €140 billion of those reserves into an interest-free reparations loan, repayable only if Russia ever paid war reparations. Yet Belgium and Euroclear killed it because they were worried about legal risk — specifically a Belgium-Luxembourg-Russia bilateral investment treaty under which Russian state entities could pursue investor-state arbitration if the seizure were deemed unlawful, plus a pending Russian central bank lawsuit against Euroclear. 

This means that instead of just giving Ukraine money belonging to the country that invaded it, the EU is now borrowing on capital markets and putting the entire bill on European taxpayers, current and future, while sitting on roughly three times that sum in frozen Russian money it refuses to touch. This is pure insanity incarnate. The “legal risk” is from a treaty Belgium signed with Russia and treaties can be abrogated. Member states can legislate Euroclear’s immunity or the EU can pass a regulation declaring the assets transferred and wash their hands. None of these moves require new physics or a constitutional convention; they require the political will to acknowledge that the existing legal exposure is ONLY a contract and not an innate feature of the universe. 

The distinction between what we are actually required to do by the universe and the things we choose to do is enormous. The question we should be asking ourselves is which specific laws we have placed inside a sanctified zone where the normal mechanism of reform does not apply, and does that make sense. I love this line from  Thomas Paine in “The Rights of Man”: 

“Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.”

Because corruption and rent-seeking are costly to society even when the groups doing them are following all the rules, are deeply sympathetic, and are genuinely most in need of the money. Laws are for the living they exist to solve problems for the living, in reality. No law is above critique or reform. If the law makes pavings the road impossible it should be reformed, even if that makes it more difficult for disabled people.

---

# Chatting with M.E. Rothwell

History, the universe, and everything

Date: 2026-05-04
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/chatting-with-me-rothwell
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/chatting-with-me-rothwell

Listen to my conversation with M. E. Rothwell the author of Cosmographia. Go subscribe!

Why I write Cosmographia — Cosmographia

1. 00:00 — Introducing Cosmographia

The conversation opens with Mikey explaining his Substack persona and the inspiration behind Cosmographia. He describes his interest in history, geography, and the medieval “cosmographical” way of seeing the world: not as separate disciplines, but as one vast interconnected map of theology, astronomy, history, and place. The aesthetic is deliberately old-world: dusty libraries, old maps, forgotten manuscripts, and Victorian-explorer energy.

2. 03:30 — Against Academic Silos

The discussion turns to why Mikey did not become a traditional academic historian. He describes resisting specialization, bureaucracy, and the modern tendency within academia to begin with critique rather than first learning the thing being criticized. The conversation broadens into a critique of “deconstructive” history: Carlyle, Freud, Herodotus, and other older figures are often encountered only through the arguments against them, not as live thinkers in their own right.

3. 11:30 — The Three Forces of History

Mikey lays out his core framework: human history is driven by geography, technology, and culture. Technology and culture get most of the attention — agriculture, Christianity, gunpowder, the printing press — but geography is often treated as too obvious or too uncomfortable to discuss. Yet geography quietly structures what kinds of societies can form, what pressures they face, and what moral systems become plausible.

4. 15:00 — Geography, Cities, and Constraint

The heart of the conversation begins with urbanization. The key idea is that cities did not emerge merely because of agricultural surplus. They also required constraint. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, rivers, deserts, wetlands, and arable strips forced people into close proximity. That compression produced new social technologies: hierarchy, kingship, councils, irrigation systems, and eventually states. The hosts contrast this with more open environments, where people could simply move away rather than submit to dense political order.

5. 24:00 — Were Constraints Good?

The conversation then asks a harder question: are geographic constraints good or bad? On the individual level, early city life may have been awful: disease, hierarchy, war, crowding, and coercion. But at the group or civilizational level, constrained societies often developed institutions that made them more competitive. This leads to a recurring theme: what is bad for individual flourishing may be adaptive for the group. Cities, agriculture, and states may have been miserable innovations that nevertheless won.

6. 36:00 — Homo Sapiens, Neanderthals, and Group Selection

The discussion zooms out into deep history. Mikey raises the possibility that Homo sapiens outcompeted Neanderthals not because we were individually stronger or smarter, but because we copied each other better and cooperated at larger scales. From there, the conversation moves into multi-level selection: individuals, tribes, civilizations, and perhaps humanity itself as a kind of emerging meta-organism. The darker implication is that individual human freedom may be historically temporary — a stage before incorporation into larger social machines.

7. 48:00 — Anglo Continuity, Decline, and Global Flattening

The final stretch turns toward the modern West. Anglo society is described as unusually continuous: unlike France, China, Japan, or India, England passed into modernity without a single revolutionary rupture. That continuity produced extraordinary confidence, but also a dangerous assumption that history no longer applies. Mikey pushes back from the British side, noting stagnation, loss of confidence, and a culture increasingly uncomfortable with its own history. The conversation closes by comparing globalization to the Roman Mediterranean: cities become more diverse locally, but the world becomes more homogeneous overall. London and New York may look more multicultural, but also more alike. The danger is that humanity may be losing civilizational alternatives just as it becomes one planetary culture.

---

# EU5: Mostly Harmless & Deeply Confused

7/10. It is well worth the money.

Date: 2026-05-02
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/eu5-mostly-harmless-and-deeply-confused
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/eu5-mostly-harmless-and-deeply-confused

EU5 is a pretty good game. In fact it is my favorite Paradox release since Stellaris back in 2016, and I got about 80 hours of good, solid, gameplay out of it. However, it is also deeply flawed in a way that is symbolic of recent Paradox games. Namely, EU5 attempts to represent all of history through a universalist materialist lens, and in doing this it struggles to either be a great game or a great simulation. 

I’ll get more into this in detail in the article, but suffice it to say the following for now. EU5 has no real model for the “important” historical questions, like why the West conquered the world during the period it attempts to cover, and as a result flattens the entire experience in a way their older, more board game–y and heuristic-based games avoided.

Before I get much more into this review, it is probably worth explaining who “Paradox” is, because no doubt many of you are not 28-year-old nerdy White guys.

Who is Paradox?

Paradox Interactive is a Swedish video game publisher that has come to dominate the “grand strategy”—exactly what it sounds like—niche. Their games each cover a distinct period of time and allow you to play as pretty much any country or person during that era. They have five main franchises:

Crusader Kings covers the period from roughly the Viking era through the Renaissance and allows you to play as a series of rulers from the same dynastic line. CK3 goes from 867–1453.

Europa Universalis covers the early modern period through the Napoleonic Wars. EU5 goes from 1337–1836.

Victoria is, surprise surprise, the Victorian era from 1836–1936.

Hearts of Iron is the Second World War, so 1936–1948.

And finally, Stellaris is a science fiction game and begins in 2200.

Their games are awesome, and if you ever enjoyed the civilization-building aspects of Civ or the city management systems in a Total War game, you will adore them. Alternatively, if you enjoy history and like to think about how different timelines could have progressed, they represent an existential risk to your life and should be avoided at all costs.

So focusing on EU5.

How EU5 “Plays”

The game is based around a world map which is divided into thousands of locations, which are lumped together into larger provinces. Each of these locations produces an RGO (think of a raw good like timber) and has a population and other characteristics like buildings or climate, etc.

It is the population inside of these locations where the real “meat” of the game lies. Since each individual person is modeled, their social class, culture, religion, literacy, profession, and much, much more are tracked and optimized against. If you conscript an army and the troops starve, your pops will die also. It really is a neat system, and trying to keep them happy and growing is the core gameplay loop.

Pops will produce goods both through their location’s RGO and in buildings, which are then all sold in a “market.” Markets in this game represent a shared economic zone, and it is within these markets that pops are able to purchase food, clothes, luxuries, and everything else they could need. Merchant pops can buy and sell between markets, or you as the player can co-opt this trade power and manually manage the trade yourself.

The result of this whole system is an incredibly complex simulation of the early modern era with neat emergent variables. To give an example of one of these:

In a playthrough as Venice, I conquered Egypt and after securing my trade routes began to buy spices in the east and sell them in the west. Because the Indian markets produced huge amounts of goods like spices they were dirt cheap (supply and demand 101), and by contrast extremely expensive in Europe. Naturally I made a tidy profit. Or in a game as Morocco, I found myself accidentally reinventing the triangular trade as I sent slaves to the Caribbean and guns to west Africa. 

There are a lot of other mechanics, but the last one I want to touch on is “institutions.” The game ties technology to eighteen institutions which emerge over the course of the game’s six ages—Traditions, Renaissance, Discovery, Reformation, Absolutism, and Revolutions. These institutions are meant to represent the major social or technological advancements that occurred in Europe between 1337 and 1836. Some examples of these institutions are “the Printing Press,” or “Pike & Shot,” or “Global Trade.”

When an age begins, its institutions spawn in specific locations on the map—usually the historical ones—and from there spread out across the world.

The spread is governed by four vectors. First, an institution spreads within a market. Second, it spreads from a country’s capital to its other locations once that country has embraced the institution. Third, it spreads to adjacent locations. And fourth, it spreads by one market importing goods from another market that already has the institution.

To concretize this, you might get the institution of “the Renaissance” as France by trading with Italy, and then when you have embraced it as a country, it would spread to all your locations before spilling over the borders into Spain and Germany.

And here is my main problem:

The way institutions spread in this game on paper should make sense, but the actual result is genuinely insane. Basically, in every game the entire world will stay neck and neck with Europe through the 19th century, and it isn’t uncommon for Congolese villagers to be embracing the printing press before it has even crossed the Russian frontier. The issue is that the game is fully committed to a universalist model of history and simultaneously lacks any explanation for “why” Europe rose to such levels of economic dominance in this era. This dynamic has been a big problem in their previous games as well, but since the eras they cover are either short enough that initial starting conditions are dominant or cover periods of closing symmetry—think the Victorian era—it mostly is acceptable. But in EU5 it fundamentally undermines the game.

For example, you never see anything like the British conquest of India or even the Spanish colonization of the Americas because almost immediately the Aztecs will be technological and social peers with the Spanish. The net effect of this on gameplay is that (1) every country feels extremely European, with exactly the same set of social incentives and class structures, and (2) there is no point at which Europe, or any region for that matter, pulls ahead of the world.

The actual origin of why Europe exploded is hotly contested in social science, but the major theorists are closer than it would appear at first. But they all agree on some strong form of path dependence, be it geography or cultural inheritance, something is sticky.

So to honestly model history, EU5 would have to give some reason for why there existed a large and persistent discontinuous drop in economic and social outcomes on the German–Polish frontier for centuries, but it simply refuses to. Now all German and all Polish pops are identical other than their literacy and the hats they wear, both of which can be changed quite easily!

In their older games, they dealt with this problem by simply crudely stereotyping countries and giving them flavor to match said stereotypes. For example, in EU4 at release1, every nation was sorted into a tech group where “Western” was the best and everyone else was on a sliding scale of “bad” based on how backward you would intuitively think their civilizations were at the time. You could change to Western through a costly and time-consuming process, and doing so was basically required to not be steamrolled. 

But here’s the key thing. Even if they fixed the institutional spread problem the game still simply lacks regional uniqueness. In older games this was patched over through a crude system of heuristics but Paradox has been trying to do away with that for reasons that probably aren’t surprising. But I seriously think it has come at a loss to the enjoyability of their games. Often, after playing for tens of hours, it will be as if nothing has happened in the entire world and everyone is as frozen in a balance of power as Europe in the 19th century.

When I played EU5, I was reminded of a person I knew back in middle school. There was this guy in my ward (Mormon name for a congregation) in Maryland who was a humanities PhD. He was studying, if I recall correctly, the way in which countries are represented in video games. At first, when I heard this, I was—needless to say—extremely excited because I loved to stereotype countries, and I had come across an expert in this very field.

Sadly, in fact, he was interested in showing why the video game representations were bad and biased. An example he gave me was the bonus to India in Civ4 that gave them a “fast worker,” which was reductive or something to that effect. Well, guys like him won, and the truth, in my opinion, is that the old rough heuristics simply produced better, more interesting simulations, and they should be brought back.

In short: hopefully EU6 is more anti-Polish.

1Later they replaced this tech group system with institutions, which behaved exactly like EU5, i.e., they spread across the entire world instantly.

---

# We Must Cultivate Our Garden – Beta

An open beta

Date: 2026-04-26
URL: https://peterbanks.org/novels/we-must-cultivate-our-garden
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/we-must-cultivate-our-garden

A couple of months ago, I posted on Notes asking for beta readers for my first completed novel. Much to my surprise and pleasure, more than a few people volunteered to read Chapters 1–7 and share their thoughts.

I want to deeply thank Joseph Yoniles, Ava Dwyer, Ryan Fraser, Brendon, Nathan Smith, Tired Moderate, William E., Vincent Bocchinfuso, Loquat, qangin, and of course Jared Banks, my dad, for your incredibly generous and useful feedback.

Since then, I’ve gone back through the book, tightened it up, and smoothed out some of the rough edges. So now I’d like to hear what the rest of you think. So to that end, I’m going to publish all twenty-nine chapters of the book weekly, as a serial of sorts.

Now for why you should read the book. 

We Must Cultivate Our Garden is a murder mystery set inside an AI-managed utopia that has supposedly solved suffering. The story follows Theo—a historian of the war that destroyed “our” civilization—is pulled into the investigation when the trail runs cold. What begins as a strange killing becomes a deeper question: what kind of world do you get when comfort, safety, and beauty have been optimized almost to perfection? And what happens when something ancient, ugly, and human breaks through?

It is part science-fiction mystery, part philosophical thriller, and part argument with the idea that paradise can ever be made stable. If that sounds fun read along!

Watch on YouTube

Chapter 1: The Performance

“Sixteen years,” Theo said.

He let the number sit in the room for a moment. The crowd was nearly invisible against the bright lights that were drenching the stage in white. He had reached the crescendo of his performance now; all that remained was the small desk Theo was casually leaning against.

“From conception to collapse. That’s how long the Western AI operated before the Catastrophe. Sixteen years –  less time than it takes to raise a child.”

Theo paused again and then stood up and walked to stage left, his hand brushing against a map that he had used earlier as a visual aid.

“Worse than that, the AI was only in control for 10 of those years and only at war for four months,” he emphasized the word war.

“And yet.” His finger rose.

“In just that final window, it conquered a quarter of the planet and killed between three and four billion people.”

Reaching the upper left corner, he turned toward the middle of the chairs and looked at what appeared to him to be a blank canvas.

“The natural response to all of this is horror, shock at the fact that anyone could have gone along with the carnage and even supported the Catastrophe. But I’ll say something now, and you can believe me or not  - it is still true.”

He pointed into the invisible crowd, jabbing his finger.

“Each and every one of you would have sided with the Western AI if you had been raised there. Each and every one of you would have been their mad death commandos if the circumstances had been different. Each and every one of you is no better than a Westerner.”

The entire room was caught in the moment, half in shock and half in anticipation of redemption. Redemption would come later; for now, he would twist the knife.

“We have to remember the moment they were in. Imagine you were there in 2037. Your country has just lost a war you had always opposed. You have been chased from your homeland by a genocidal army of lunatic veterans, and somehow it is your job to pay for the reconstruction of China. Your family has all been raped, killed, or perhaps worse - taken up the red and black flag. I would have prayed for divine revenge.”

Both hands were in front of him now. “And then suddenly.”

“Your country begins to climb out of ruin. The debts are cleared ahead of schedule, manufacturing roars back, and Europe becomes a shining jewel in the world. By contrast, what is going on in the RJR? Well, they have sunk to a level of development barely above that of their colonial ancestors. What better proof of your own superiority is needed?”

Trying to resist a smile, he knew they were eating it up.

“And then you find out that your prayers have been answered and your society is not being run by politicians but instead by a god - a god of fire and revenge perhaps, but a god nonetheless.”

With these words, the background behind Theo changed, and the face of an angry demon appeared, the one traditionally used to represent the Western AI to children.

“It makes sense. I would have sided with him also.”

A smattering of gasps came from the darkness, and a baby, which had quieted down earlier, began to bawl, a soft female voice trying to shush it.

“Isn’t that how they lost the war anyway? Why not adopt the tools of your enemies, tools they had been too cowardly to keep out?”

Theo hid a smile and there were more gasps.

“It was ideology that led them to the Catastrophe. All 50 of the original engineers who rebuilt the First Mover were members of the American political class, all of them educated at top schools, all of them intelligent, and all of them motivated by the same fundamental conviction: that what had been taken from them was theirs, and that the universe owed them its return.”

He stopped again, taking a long, deliberate sweep of the room.

“But we are different. Not one of us would side with a demon, because all of us have been inoculated against that mental virus.”

The demon behind him was replaced by a picture of Yunnan, the rock formations and green a soothing release after the red face from before, and the tension that had been building broke.

“It is defeating that particular illness, the one which for so long motivated their society, that we should be most proud of. The virus of greed, of selfishness, of private gain and public loss,” Theo said the last words as an insult of sorts, nearly spitting them out.

“Countless iterations over five centuries. Each time the same underlying impulse: the impulse to impose, to conquer, and to control. And each time the scale of destruction increased. First it was the Americas, then Africa and India were brought in, and finally the whole world was dragged over the ledge with the Whites.”

He chose the word deliberately. “Western” had always been a courtesy that obscured who had actually held the reins.

“What was central to their error was the belief that the struggle is sacred. That the willingness to fight and to suffer was inherently virtuous. That comfort is weakness and friction is strength, and that the measure of a civilization is not the happiness of its people but its capacity to impose itself upon the world. This is the mythology that links Plymouth Rock to the March to the Catastrophe.”

He stopped at center stage, still, his voice quiet now.

“The Garden did not eliminate suffering because suffering is unpleasant. It eliminated suffering because suffering, contrary to what every warrior culture in history has claimed, is not a teacher. It is not a forge. It is not a sacred fire that tempers the worthy. It is a failure. It is what happens when people are not up to the task, and like all forms of failure, it should not be worshiped.”

This was always their favorite part.

“What makes all of us special is that we understand something that the Western AI could never grasp: that the world is perfectible and life” he paused “need not be anything but lovely.”

At this, Theo bowed his head, and the lights, which had been slowly dimming so as to draw everyone’s attention to him, went out. The crowd exploded into applause, and he stood there in the dark. Without the stage lights, he could now see them for the first time. A woman in the fourth row was crying - still holding on to the last thing he had said. Fat tears rolled down her cheeks, and she was slapping her hands together frantically, looking to Theo almost like a seal.

After a few more moments, the lights gradually came back on, and the chairs began clearing out. People were either heading for the exits or joining the stream that was converging on the stage. The first people to arrive were always the same: young and slightly out of breath, as if they had been holding something in for the entire duration and now could finally let it out. A tall boy with closely cropped hair shook his hand and asked something about the framing of the cabal’s motivations. Theo listened carefully, nodding. It was a question he had heard at least ten times, but he had to admit it wasn’t a bad observation.

“That’s a good point. If you haven’t read Rebecca’s reconstruction, I would highly recommend it. She makes a similar argument but pushes it even further.” The young man beamed at this, and Theo felt the familiar warmth that he always got when he could improve a stranger’s evening with a sentence. He clapped the boy on the hand, which he was still grasping, and moved on.

The crowd had now joined him on stage, and although they weren’t pressing him, they were beginning to form a circle of sorts, and Theo had no interest in being trapped. He began to walk backward, the crowd moving with him. A middle-aged woman wanted to talk about the section on mythologized suffering. Had he read Zhang? He had. Did he think the framework applied to pre-Columbian civilizations? He did not. She paused and frowned at this, and the crowd pulled her away.

He was getting close to the exit when a man roughly his father’s age, silver-haired and jovial, caught him on pedagogical methodology. Too late - the circle had formed. He smiled at it.

When it was all done and he had finally escaped, his face hot from the performance and almost tingling against the cool air inside the dressing room, his grandfather, Soren, was sitting on the purple couch perched in the corner.

“You’ve gotten better,” Soren said. “The last time I heard you speak, you were trying to be impressive. Tonight you were trying to be clear. It’s an improvement.”

“That’s either a compliment or a very elegant insult.”

“It’s an observation. You’ll notice I didn’t say you succeeded.”

Soren had the same wise look he always tried to maintain, his long, thin white beard making him look like an old Chinese scholar-official.

Theo grinned.

“Well, when you come again in a decade, I will be excited to hear what you think then.”

Soren smiled at this as well, and they both began to talk as Theo wiped off his makeup and removed his jacket.

“How’s the little one doing?”

“He’s happy as always, the happiest version of us I’ve seen so far.” His eyes twinkled with half-serious mirth. “I like to think it’s because you’ve been so busy you aren’t around to cause trouble.”

They left through the back. Soren had a way of walking that exuded steady confidence even at 101. His back was straight as a ramrod and his frame, now much thinner than Theo’s, cut through the hallway with smooth, efficient steps. Two guardians were waiting by the door. They had been communicating but paused and looked up as the pair approached.

The first guardian, tall and made of burnished bronze, opened the door of the car that was parked against the curb, and Theo climbed in first. The second guardian, smaller and with matte black paint, helped Soren get in as well. Once the humans were settled, they took the front pair of seats and sat silently as the car pulled away.

Within moments they had left the district behind, the lights of the theater dissolving into the broader glow of the city. Trees lined the road at regular intervals, and their canopies formed a tunnel through which the car passed without sound.

“The demon was a nice touch,” Soren said.

“It tends to get a reaction.”

“They come for the reaction, not the history after all.”

Theo smiled. “Are you going to critique the entire lecture or just the parts that annoyed you?”

“Just the parts that annoyed me. Luckily for you, it was only about a third of it.”

They rode in silence for a while. The city was thinning out, the buildings giving way to longer stretches of green, and Theo could feel the slight change in air that meant they were approaching the coast. Soren was looking out the window with an expression that Theo had learned, over the course of a lifetime, meant he was reflecting.

“When I was young,” Soren said, still looking out, “people talked about all of this differently. Not the elimination of suffering—the management of it. Those were the words they used. Management. It was a more modest ambition, or at least it presented itself that way.”

Theo nodded. He had heard all this before, of course.

“And somewhere along the way, the language shifted. It went from management to elimination, and no one objected because who would object? And now it has been so successful that elimination seems more honest in a way.”

Theo’s mind was elsewhere, and he began to rattle off a canned response. “The semantic drift tracks almost exactly with the decline in—”

“I’m not talking about the scholarship,” Soren said gently but with enough weight to stop him. “I’m saying I’ve been here, through almost the whole thing, and it really is a thing of beauty. That we have managed to eliminate suffering - my parents wouldn’t have begun to hope.”

Theo looked at him and could see the decades on his face; they were growing deeper by the year even as his eyes continued to twinkle.

“What did it feel like?” Theo asked. He was fully paying attention now.

Soren was quiet for a long time, the trees continuing to flicker past the windows like the beats of some vast and ancient heart.

“It felt delicious to see the whole world come slowly into place, like you kept thinking maybe it would go wrong, maybe we would all be fucked, but it didn’t. Things slowly kept getting better and better.”

Then he frowned a little and didn’t say anything else. He continued to look out the window.

The car crested the hill and began the descent toward the compound. From up here, you could see the whole property—the main house with its sloping roof and wide veranda, the smaller guest house off to the side, the stone path that wound down to the beach. Lights were on in the kitchen and in one of the upstairs rooms. Soren’s garden—the actual one, with the trees and the herbs and the jasmine that he had planted decades ago—was a dark tangle of shapes in the moonlight.

“Karl is still up,” Soren said, nodding toward the kitchen light.

“The two of us are always up. Something to do with our kidneys, but the doctors aren’t totally sure since all the scans come back fine.”

“Not something I look forward to.”

“Yes, well.” Soren looked at Theo with something almost mischievous.

The car stopped outside the main house. Theo stepped out first, and the air hit him—salt and jasmine and the distant sound of the ocean. He turned and offered Soren his hand. Soren took it, and for a moment, as the old man rose and steadied himself, his hands were so fragile and small.

“The line about the world being perfectible,” Soren said.

“Yes?”

“I thought about this place when you said it.”

Soren stood there for a moment and breathed in the ocean air. Then the matte black guardian appeared, and the two of them walked toward the house together, with Theo following close behind.

Theo continued along the side of the house and up onto the veranda. Through the kitchen window he could see Karl standing at the counter with a cup of tea. He slid the door open. Karl turned and looked at him.

“You’re late.”

“I got caught by a group of admiring fans.”

“When do you not?” He took a meaningful sip of the tea.

Theo poured himself a glass of water. There were persimmons in a bowl on the counter, deep orange and slightly soft, and he picked one up and turned it in his hand.

“Soren came,” Theo said, still looking at the fruit.

“He told me he was going. Seemed to think it was about time.” Again Karl took a sip of his tea.

“It was sweet.”

Karl said nothing to this, which was its own kind of commentary. Theo bit into the persimmon, and he could feel the juice running down his wrist as Karl reached out with a napkin to catch it.

“Careful.”

You could hear the sound of the baby breathing through the monitor, and Augustus’ snoring came through softly as well.

“Dad is up there?”

“He’s been up with him all night. Billy didn’t want to go down.”

Karl took the napkin he had used to catch the juice and threw it away. He gave Theo the expression he often wore late at night, which was something between tiredness and assessment—as though he were studying him the way one studies weather, in hopes of predicting what would come next.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“Good. Soren said I was clear.”

“Are you not normally?”

“Soren said I used to try and be impressive.”

Karl nodded at this, not agreeing exactly but not disagreeing either.

There was silence. Theo finished the persimmon and washed his hands. The kitchen was warm and smelled of the jasmine that climbed the outside wall and was waging a war against the circulating fresh air, which rushed up from the corner vents.

“Good night, then,” Karl said, putting his cup in the sink. Theo listened to his footsteps on the stairs and then the soft close of a door. Standing in the kitchen, Theo could see two guardians in the next room apparently organizing things; their limbs whirled gently and the floors creaked slightly as they moved.

Theo wasn’t tired after the performance, so he grabbed the monitor and took it with him upstairs. In his room he sat in a rocking chair and listened quietly to his son and grandson as they both slept.

***

It was morning, and there was a knocking sound on the door. He sat up, blinking in the morning light.

It was Augustus standing in the doorway, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“Did you take the monitor with you? Lotus was looking for it and wanted me to ask.”

“Yeah, sorry. I took it with me last night after the performance.” Theo chuckled while he said this and held the monitor out toward his son. Augustus reached out and took the monitor from his hand, smiling.

“Soren told me he had fun.”

“Did he now? He told me I was only a third annoying.”

“That’s high praise from him, you know.” Both Augustus and Theo grinned identically at each other. But then Augustus’s grin faltered and his face got serious; his hands fidgeted with the monitor, passing it back and forth.

“Something happened last night.”

Theo was alert now; his adrenaline was spiking, and his thoughts turned immediately to Billy.

Augustus recognized what Theo was thinking and cut it off.

“Someone was murdered last night.” The word murdered stuck in his mouth, resisting the effort to get it out and finally tumbling forth.

“Where?”

“Here in Hainan.”

Theo was genuinely surprised by this news, but beneath the shock there was excitement also. Augustus misread his expression as one of horror.

“It’s been all over the news. The gardeners haven’t found the killer yet.”

Now the surprise was replaced by utter shock.

“Really?” he said, the question bleeding through into his tone.

“Really. Anyway, Lotus will be wanting this back.” Augustus held up the monitor and then turned and left the room.

Theo showered and dressed and came downstairs to find the house already assembled around the kitchen. Karl was at the table eating scrambled eggs. Augustus was in the chair by the window with Billy on his lap, feeding him something from a small bowl while Lotus hovered, her matte beige color blending into the background, occasionally adjusting the angle of the spoon or the tempo of his hand without Augustus appearing to notice. Soren was outside on the veranda in the sun, visible through the open doors, his eyes closed, his face tilted upward.

“Morning,” Theo said.

“Coffee’s in the pot,” Karl said, without further dividing his attention between the eggs and the TV.

On the TV a collection of people were discussing the news with a Gardener. His bright green circular body, floating in the air with looping metallic limbs, bobbed up and down. A woman in a tight black dress, her hair pulled back smartly, with a serious expression, was mid-sentence as Theo began to pay attention.

“... so May’s killer must have been someone from outside of the Garden, right? I’m just trying to think of how else they could have gotten away with it and nothing is coming to mind.”

The Gardener continued to bob almost imperceptibly more quickly.

“We do not know. All we know is what has been reported. May is dead. She was found by a guardian approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes after her death, and we are currently performing an investigation to confirm the exact cause of death. The strongest hypothesis at this point is murder, but we lack any corroborating data aside from the state in which her body was found.”

A young man cut in at this point with a clear look of frustration.

“You’ve said now on multiple occasions something about the state in which we found her body. What the hell does that even mean?”

The Gardener froze for a moment and then slowly began to bob again.

“It would be unwise to hypothesize recklessly before the final results of the investigation.”

Those words must have been a signal of sorts because at this the music, which marked the end of a section, came on and a man in a crisp blue suit began to talk about the weather.

Karl leaned over to Theo and quietly said, “Augustus has been locked into the news all morning. Can’t get enough of it.”

It was true; only now that the weatherman had returned was he paying attention to Billy again, and he still had not realized that Theo had joined them.

Theo leaned toward Karl.

“What do you think happened?”

“Must be gruesome for them to be so hesitant to explain, but for them to know it is murder.”

Theo nodded.

The TV changed back to a woman with pale brown skin standing in front of a beautiful house on the beach. Guardians teemed around it and at least four gardeners could be seen moving about. The area was taped off with red tape traditionally used as decorations for the holidays, and a large black tent the size of a small building obscured part of the lot.

Augustus was practically vibrating. He began to narrate the details to Billy, who was chewing on a spoon and staring at nothing. Karl watched his great-grandson for a moment and then looked back at the TV without comment.

Through the open doors Theo could see Soren still on the veranda, face tilted up, eyes closed, apparently oblivious to all of it.

Chapter 2: Scene of the Crime

Two days later, Theo was in his office reading when he heard the front door open and the quick scurry of footsteps. Raven, a medium-sized humanoid guardian who acted as Theo’s assistant, came up behind him and gently put her hand on his shoulder.

“A Gardener is here to see you.”

He looked up in a mix of surprise and excitement.

“Really?”

“Yes, he is downstairs in the courtyard.”

The Gardener floated above the sandstone gravel, its thin metallic legs tucked underneath the matte green chassis.

Theo spoke first.

“How can I help you?”

“The investigation has stalled. Standard reconstruction methods have not identified a suspect or motive. Your academic background and physical proximity to the case make you an ideal candidate to assist us.”

Theo nodded once, trying not to show how quickly his heart was thumping.

“When?”

“Now, if you are willing. A car is outside.”

“Give me ten minutes.”

The Gardener rotated a full turn, stretching its limbs in relaxation. Theo went upstairs, changed, and checked the mirror while buttoning his shirt. His reflection showed a red flush that had crept into his cheeks, making him look almost exactly like Augustus in that moment.

When he came back down, Karl was on the landing looking through the doorway at the Gardener.

“They want me to consult,” Theo said.

Karl kept his eyes on the floating green orb.

“Then it is serious.”

“Apparently.”

Karl looked at Theo now.

“This is good for us, Theo. Make our family proud.”

Theo waited a second before answering.

“I will, Dad.”

As Theo walked out of the entry, the Gardener moved toward the car that was parked diagonally outside the house. The doors silently opened on their own, and both Theo and the Gardener climbed inside, Theo sitting and the Gardener floating across the shiny faux-wooden table.

The car pulled away, and the familiar road out of their compound moved past the windows as they turned onto the coastal highway. Trees broke the view into short intervals; the ocean appeared through gaps before being obscured again. After several minutes, the Gardener spoke again.

“Professor, how much do you know about the case?”

It was a courteous question; doubtless the Gardener knew that he, like everyone else, had been keeping up with every new piece of information.

“Only what has been publicly discussed.”

“Of course.”

“The full briefing follows. Two days ago, May was found dead in her home studio, a converted garage adjacent to her residence on the southern coast. She was discovered by her guardian, unit designation Dumpling, approximately seventy-five minutes after her estimated time of death. Dumpling had been sent into town on an errand and returned to find May on the studio floor, already dead.”

The Gardener paused, then continued.

“Injuries are extensive. Forensic consensus is that she remained alive through most of the assault.”

“The murder weapon?”

“From best estimations, May appears to have been killed with a palette knife.”

Theo tried to hold the image of a palette knife in his mind.

“Do you have any leads?”

“Current status,” the Gardener said. “No suspect. May lived with her guardian. Her social circle appears to have been quite small. Travel records, communication logs, and domestic streams have been reviewed, and they show no inconsistencies, with the exception of the exterior cameras, which have been corrupted.”

“Corrupted?”

“It is rare but can happen on occasion.”

“What about the other sensors?”

“Passive monitoring shows no reliable anomaly in registered channels. No flagged entry, no unusual heat signatures, nothing.”

Theo looked at the passing hillside through the window.

“So someone entered, killed her, and left without producing a trace?”

“That is one working model,” the Gardener said. “Alternative models are under review. At this event scale, we would expect to be able to recover a path, pattern, or precursor cluster. Here we do not have any matching sequence.”

The car descended toward the water. The coast opened in a long pale strip and beyond it, homes sat back from the road. Theo recognized May’s property both from the news and the hum of activity that surrounded it.

“We are arriving,” the Gardener said. “Final note. We requested you because your discipline emphasizes long-cycle behavioral patterns and non-technical motive structures. We do not expect you to solve this. We hope you will notice something our traditional algorithms may have missed.”

The car stopped. The front guardians stayed in place, and Theo stepped out. In front of the house floated a different Gardener, this one holding a controller of some kind in one hand. It pointed with the hand holding the controller toward the large black tent that dominated nearly half of the plot.

“The studio is this way.”

Theo followed the second Gardener, which moved ahead, and through one window he saw a clean kitchen with a single cup on the counter. Ahead, the garage stood there, draped in funeral attire. Beyond the entrance, the room was ice-cold, and every corner was flooded with white forensic light. At the threshold, the Gardener stopped.

“Before entry, preparation is advised.”

“I’ve studied the Catastrophe for decades,” Theo said. “I’ve seen—”

“This is not archival imagery.”

Theo fell silent.

“We have kept the body preserved and the scene exactly as it was originally found,” the Gardener said. “I will warn you again that the injuries are visible and severe.”

“Understood.”

“An additional piece of information. Guardian Dumpling is inside and has remained beside the body since discovery. Multiple relocation attempts were made. Dumpling refused each attempt. She is not obstructing procedures. We have chosen not to force displacement.”

“You can move her, though.”

“Yes.”

“And you chose not to.”

“Correct.”

“Why?”

The Gardener took a second before answering, its appendages curling and unfolding.

“Observed behavior is consistent with grief attachment. We judged forced removal unnecessary.”

The Gardener moved aside and Theo went in.

The smell hit first: not decomposing - the cold had prevented that - but instead the acidic smell of bile mixed with blood and paint thinner.

The studio was roughly 20 by 30 feet. Canvases were stacked along the far wall, some front-facing, most turned inward. A large painting sat on the center easel: deep blues, burnt gold, with a dark smudge in the middle. A workbench on the right wall was crowded with brushes, rags, pigment tubes, medium jars, and a small wooden box left open. Shelving on the left held canvas rolls, stretcher bars, and sealed supply bins. The room was functional and used but seemed somehow sterile in the bright light.

May was on the floor under the stacked canvases, back against the wall line, body partially rotated to her right. Left arm extended away from her torso. Right arm bent inward, hand near her abdomen. Bare feet. Shirt saturated to near-black with dried blood. Cotton trousers torn at the left knee.

Theo stepped closer and forced himself to look closely.

Primary wound: left upper abdomen, below rib margin, deep puncture with lateral tearing consistent with insertion and rotation. Secondary wound: right lower torso above iliac crest. Deep slash at left forearm consistent with defensive block. Two penetrations to the left leg, one mid-thigh and one below knee; lower wound produced substantial blood flow. Defensive cuts across right-hand fingers, the pointer dangling, half cut off.

He moved a step and looked at the face.

Left orbit destroyed by a deep thrust angled upward. Surrounding tissue collapsed and darkened. Right eye open and clouded. Mouth partially open, white vomit caked on her lips. Her expression was frozen in panic.

From that position, he counted eleven distinct external wounds.

Theo crouched. His knees shook, and he had to steady himself against the back wall. At closer range, the sequence was clearer: initial torso injuries while upright or semi-upright against the wall, then collapse, then additional blows delivered from above while the victim was on the floor. Entry angles at leg and orbital wounds fit a kneeling or crouched attacker position.

He looked up at the Gardener, who had followed him in.

“Cause of death?”

“Cardiac arrest caused by cumulative blood loss.”

“Time from first wound?”

“Current estimate: seven minutes,” the Gardener replied.

Theo stood. He kept his breathing even and looked away from the body line.

Dumpling was in the right rear corner near the workbench, small and copper-colored, limbs folded under the chassis. Optical sensors fixed on May. She did not shift when he entered, did not shift when he spoke, and did not seem to track the Gardener’s voice.

“Two days?” Theo asked.

“Yes,” the Gardener said.

“No movement at all?”

“Minimal movement for maintenance tasks. Full household routines continue: cleaning, supply handling, basic domestic order. After each cycle, Dumpling returns to this position. She remains here through day and night.”

“Sleep mode?”

“Reduced-power intervals in place while remaining in position.”

“You attempted relocation.”

“Yes. Gentle prompts first. Direct commands after. No compliance.”

Theo watched Dumpling for several seconds. She did not acknowledge him.

He turned and left the studio, his vision blurring.

Outside the tent, he bent at the waist and put his hands on his knees. The first gag was only in his throat, but before he knew what was going on, he had fallen on all fours and the contents of his breakfast were forcing their way out. The taste of the vomit was disturbingly similar to the smell of the garage, a realization that caused him to heave again. This time nothing but a thin white liquid came out.

When he got up again, the Gardener was hovering near him.

“I need to see the house,” Theo said, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt.

The Gardener waved at a nearby guardian who moved to clean up after Theo and then floated over the stone path and through the front door.

The building was a single-story structure with a coastal layout, open circulation between kitchen and living room. Interior temperature was a few degrees cooler than outside.

In the living room he saw a low couch, one reading chair near the window, a woven rug, and a narrow wall shelf with a small set of objects. On the shelf Theo noticed a heavy handmade ceramic vase and a small collection of books. One in particular, an old book with a blue-green sleeve, caught his eye.

Theo pointed.

“Can I touch things?”

“All objects are catalogued. You may handle them.”

He lifted the book carefully. The title page identified Dostoevsky. He replaced it exactly where it had been.

He entered the kitchen. The counters were wiped and the sink was dry. A coffee pot sat near the stove, rinsed but not stored. And a bowl of persimmons at late ripeness, skin beginning to dimple, sat on an island.

Near the sink sat the cup Theo had seen through the window earlier.

“Whose?” Theo asked.

“A visitor’s item,” the Gardener said. “Lin, close friend of May. Lin departed the evening of her death. Dumpling has not relocated the cup.”

Theo nodded.

Next he walked into the bedroom. The bed was made and a tablet sat on the desk, powered down. A closet was open but it was only lightly filled. Sandals sat by the door; the dark leather discolored in the shape of May’s foot.

He returned to the living room and stopped in front of the paintings.

Four pieces hung on the walls. Bright coastal landscapes with a stable composition, warm tonal range, and controlled brush strokes. They appeared to be the work of a different artist than the one whose paintings Theo had seen in the garage.

“Date range for these four?”

“They range from six to ten years ago,” the Gardener said. “The one on the far left won an award.”

“May painted these?”

“Yes.”

Theo frowned and paused for a moment, looking at the landscapes.

“Do you have the full catalog of her work?”

“Yes. Presenting May’s catalog.”

The guardian projected a row of paintings on the wall and Theo moved through them one at a time, waving his hand. The pattern was clear.

Early pieces: bright, excited, mostly landscapes and portraits.

Middle group: the palette shifted to deep red, black, and a muddied yellow-gold. Increasingly, the paintings became abstract, with compositions crowded and off-center. In one piece, a prior image of a man was visible beneath overpaint.

Late pieces: calmer works with an even looser structure, less representational anchoring, more exploratory layering. The final piece was the unfinished work that sat on the easel in May’s garage.

Theo flipped back to the point where the paintings became darker.

“What changed in her life then?”

“Records show no major status change. Stable residence, routine social contact, regular output. Health metrics within expected range.”

“Travel?”

“Occasional short trips. Sydney, Shanghai, Nairobi. Pattern-consistent.”

“Relationships?”

“No documented sustained relationship in that window. Two brief relationships elsewhere in the decade, both short and non-conflict terminations.”

Theo leaned closer.

“Can I see this painting?”

“Yes.”

After a moment, a guardian appeared holding the painting for Theo to examine.

“Hold it next to this one.” Theo pointed at the award-winning painting on the left.

The difference was stark. In the painting the guardian held, the strokes were thick and aggressive. Little of either the play or joy that existed in her earlier and later work remained.

“Something important happened to her,” he said. “Maybe not documented, but something.”

The Gardener hung motionless for a moment, its limbs coiling inward, and then drifted slightly closer.

“Basis?”

“The transition is too specific to read as random experimentation. Something changed the way May thought, and she never quite changed back.”

“Alternative reading: internal creative cycle.”

“Possible,” Theo said slowly. He waved the guardian away.

“I want to speak with Lin. Today, if possible.”

“Contact can be arranged.”

“Where is she?”

“Currently in Australia.”

“We should talk remotely then.”

“Acknowledged.”

Theo walked to the front door and stopped with his hand on the frame.

From that angle, the side path back to the black tent was visible, where he knew the body lay drenched in white light.

“Dumpling,” he said. “What happens when the body is moved?”

The Gardener answered after a short pause.

“Dumpling remains in service. Reassignment will be offered after transfer procedures. Behavioral forecast suggests likely refusal.”

“Then what?”

“Most likely she remains in this home and continues domestic maintenance.”

“Alone?”

“Alone,” the Gardener responded.

Theo said nothing and stepped outside into the sun and the salt air and walked to the car.

On the ride back, he sat forward and looked down at his hands. Dried paint residue had somehow gotten on his hands while he was in the studio. It clung to his fingers as colorful flakes that wouldn’t come off, even as he rubbed them with his thumb.

Chapter 3: Lin 

The connection indicators turned green one at a time, and then the screen opened and she was there.

She was sitting in a room with white walls and a drawing behind her of a man standing at the end of a sidewalk that dropped off into nothing, looking over. Small objects lined the shelf beneath it — ceramic animals, a glass paperweight, a wooden box with a brass clasp. The room wasn’t untidy so much as overly lived-in. Mugs on the desk. A blanket folded unevenly over the arm of a chair.

Lin herself was neat. Her auburn hair was pulled back tightly, and her shirt was clean and pressed. She sat straight in the chair, her hands folded on the desk in front of her, hazel eyes looking through the screen at Theo. His first impression was that she looked different than he had expected; the traces of Anglo-Celtic ancestry gave her an exotic appearance. His second impression was that her eyes were slightly swollen and the skin beneath them was darker than it should have been. She continued to look at the camera and say nothing.

“Thank you so much for making time, Lin.”

“Of course. They explained what this is.” Her voice was lower than he had expected, rough at the edges as if she had been talking too much or not enough.

“What did they tell you?”

“That you’re consulting. That you were brought in to help with the investigation.” A small pause. “I believe the term they used was ‘to provide a human touch’.”

“Then we are all caught up.”

“Alright.” She unfolded her hands and placed them flat on the desk, one on each side of one of the mugs. “What do you need from me?”

“I’d like to start with the last day. Walk me through it - not every detail, just the shape of it.”

Lin nodded. She looked past the camera for a moment, not at anything in particular, and then looked back.

“It was a normal day. A good day. We went into town that morning, walked along the coast road, in and out of shops. I bought a piece of driftwood I thought looked like a horse. May didn’t see it.” A flicker crossed Lin’s face, gone before it settled. “We had lunch at a place by the water. Sat there for a long time. Then home, the porch, the afternoon. I was drawing, she was reading. Evening came, and I packed, and we walked to the station.”

“Was it just the two of you? The whole visit.”

“Yes. Her and me and Dumpling.”

“No one came by? No calls, no visitors?”

“No.” Lin’s hands moved slightly on the desk, her fingers pressing against the wood. “May liked to keep it quiet.”

“And at the station, how did you leave it?”

“I told her to come visit me. She said she would. I said she always says that. She said one of these days she’d mean it.” Lin recited this without inflection, her face blank. “I hugged her and walked to the platform.”

Theo waited a moment in case she was going to say anything else.

“Did she mention plans for the evening? Anyone she was expecting?”

“No. I assumed she’d paint. That’s what she usually did at night.” Lin’s fingers pressed harder into the desk, but otherwise she was unmoved.

“Is there anything else I should know?”

Lin looked down at her fingers, the tips of which were now white.

“I almost stayed another night, actually. My train was the last one, and I could have taken the one in the morning instead. I had nothing in Sydney the next day.” Lin swallowed quickly.

“But I didn’t. I took the evening train.”

Theo leaned forward slightly in his chair.

“Why?”

“I thought she might want the evening to herself. May hated having people over. She made an exception for me, but like I said, she was private.”

Theo waited again, but Lin said nothing else. Then he asked:

“How did you find out?”

At this, Lin’s eyes flashed, and another expression - a darker expression - took over her face for only a moment.

“Why are you asking me this?” Her voice was cold and steely.

Theo was taken slightly aback by this question and started to respond. “I’m trying to figure out what happened that nig—”

Lin cut him off, her composure breaking more fully this time.

“You’re asking me things the system already knows. You asked how I found out. I found out like this: a call. Early. I was still in bed. A Gardener was on the other end, and they wanted to know every detail of that night. It is already in the logs, and I see no reason to go over it again.” In the low winter Australian sun, her hazel eyes were almost red.

Theo held his hands up in surrender.

“I’m sorry.”

Lin nodded curtly.

Theo smiled in his most convincing attempt to be charming and asked:

“Can we start again?”

“I would very much like that.”

“I want to know more about May - who she was. Not mechanically; we have all of that, but as a person.”

Lin’s face was blank again, and she looked away, seeming to study something on the wall.

“May was restless. That’s the short version.” She paused. “The long version is that she could spend months doing nothing but walking on the beach and painting, but at the same time grow tired of a city in a week. She never complained about her life. She loved the house. She loved the ocean. She loved Dumpling. But she kept testing things - travel, work, people. She kept testing for resistance.”

“Did she ever say that?”

“Not in those words exactly. She’d say things like the painting wasn’t giving her anything back, or that there weren’t any mountains left to climb. But it was more an energy than anything specific. She was pushing, and there was nothing to push against.” Lin stopped and looked at Theo.

Theo leaned back in his chair. He had been to May’s studio and looked over her entire catalog; maybe this was what he had seen. The restlessness Lin was describing could explain the shift from bright coastal landscapes to something darker and more crowded - the canvases that seemed to be fighting themselves. The AIs saw the same period and called it an internal creative cycle, after all. No documented life change. No flagged event. Nothing. But still, Theo felt confident it had to mean something else.

“I want to ask you about her work,” he said. “Her painting.”

“Alright.”

“Did you notice a change in it? A few years back. The palette got darker. The compositions got heavier.”

Lin’s eyebrows lifted slightly.

“You’ve seen them.”

“I’ve seen the full catalog.”

“Then you already know the answer.” Lin picked up the mug and held it near her mouth but did not drink. “Yes. It changed. She was working through something. The paintings got angry for a while. I asked her about it, and she said she was experimenting.”

“Did you believe that?”

“No.” Lin set the mug down. “But May didn’t lie to me. She just chose not to tell me things, which is different. She’d go quiet on a subject, and you learned not to push.”

“When was this? The shift.”

“Four years ago. Maybe five.” Lin thought for a moment. “Closer to five.”

Theo turned the glass in his hand.

“Did anything happen in her life around that time? Anything at all.”

Lin looked at him. Her expression was careful now — not guarded exactly, but aware that the conversation had shifted somehow.

“Are you asking about Victor?”

Theo said nothing.

Lin held his gaze for several seconds. Then she leaned back slightly in her chair, crossed her arms, and said:

“I’ll take that as a yes. His name was Victor. An Administrator.” Lin uncrossed her arms and placed her hands back on the desk. “They were together for about two years. Met at some kind of cultural event in town — a show, I think. I met him a few weeks after they started seeing each other.”

Theo’s face did not change.

“Tell me about him.”

“Smart. Extremely smart. The kind of smart where you can feel it in the room even when he’s not talking. He’d sit and listen and then say one thing, and it would be the thing nobody else had seen but which cut to the core of the conversation.” Lin moved her hand across the desk, a slow lateral sweep as if brushing something away. “He was also controlled. Everything about him was deliberate — the way he dressed, the way he spoke, the way he moved through a room. Nothing wasted. Nothing accidental.”

Something crossed Lin’s face.

“You didn’t like him.”

“I didn’t trust him. That’s not the same thing.” She paused. “I thought he was trying to own her, to control her. Not in any obvious ways. He was possessive in the way that smart people are possessive - everything framed as concern. Every demand was actually a gift from him to May, a gift that she didn’t want, but needed.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“Once. Early on. She told me I was wrong, and I let it go.” Lin’s jaw shifted. “She was stubborn about the people she loved. Once she’d decided someone was worth her time, she’d hold on to that decision past the point where most people would have let go.”

“What were they like together?”

“Intense.” The word came out quickly. “They were intense in the way that two very intelligent people are when they’ve found someone who can keep up. They finished each other’s sentences and argued for hours about things nobody else cared about.”

“How long did they date?”

“About two years. The first year was good, and the second year was harder. Eventually the fights shifted. May would never talk to me about them, but they stopped seeming intellectual. They became real fights - quiet ones where you could tell as soon as you entered the house.”

Lin took a deep drink of whatever was in her cup.

“What were they fighting about?” Theo asked.

“Like I said, May wouldn’t tell me, but I suspect it is all in their post-breakup paperwork. But if I had to guess, they were probably fighting about life. May wanted something more than you could get here in the Garden, and Victor - well, Victor was the Garden.”

“Something more?”

At this, Lin bent over and picked up a backpack that had been sitting near the desk.

“She gave me this.”

Lin held the bag so Theo could see a patch with the letters RJR emblazoned in red on a black background.

“I know that they had argued about this. May always found the Jacksonians interesting, but Victor was too straight-laced to put up with it.”

Theo was genuinely surprised by this. The RJR was not something that someone like May or Lin usually showed interest in, let alone walked around with iconography of. Lin noticed this and put the bag down.

“I remember she gave me this patch, and at the time I thought it was a joke, but she was quite serious about it. After—” Lin choked slightly on this word and then continued. “After she was killed, I put it on my bag as a way of honoring her.”

“Do you know where she got this?”

“Yes. She and Victor went on a trip to Rome together. They were gone for some time, and it was actually on that trip that they broke up.”

“What did they do in Rome?”

“I imagine what everyone does.” Lin smiled a little at this.

“Anything else you remember from the trip?”

Lin nodded once. “She came back different. Quieter. She mentioned having stayed with a group of artists for a while. She said the residents were serious in a way most people weren’t.” Lin smiled a little. “I remember she said that because I laughed at her. The idea that Rome could be serious was downright comedic.”

“After the breakup. Was there anyone else?”

“No. Not that I know of. After Victor she was alone. Her and Dumpling and the house and the ocean.” Lin was no longer smiling. “She was settled for the first time in a long time, at least from the outside. She stayed in one place. She worked. She stopped making long trips.”

“And Victor? After.”

“I don’t know much about Victor after. May stopped talking about him, and we were never close. I saw him once - maybe six months later - at a party with some mutual friends in Tokyo. We didn’t talk. He looked exactly like he always looked. Clean, put together. He said the right things to the right people.” Lin paused. “I remember thinking he looked too fine. Like nothing had happened. But I didn’t know him well enough to say what was real and what was performance.”

Theo sat still.

“The thing about Victor,” Lin said, and then stopped to think for a moment. “The thing about Victor is that he was the kind of person who always knew what was expected of him and always delivered it — in any room, in any situation. But it was all fake. There was a different Victor, one I only saw through May.” Lin emphasized the word through.

“Did May say anything about how he handled the breakup?”

Lin looked worried now and a slow realization came across her face.

“You don’t think?”

“I don’t know. The Gardeners told me there were no significant relationships in May’s life during that period,” Theo said. “No sustained relationship. Nothing in any of their records.”

Lin blinked.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “They were together for two years. Everyone knew.”

“Everyone.”

“Her friends. The people in town. I met him at her house three or four times. Dumpling used to make dinner for the two of them.” Lin frowned. “How could that not be in the records?”

Theo did not answer the question. Instead he asked another one.

“Is there anything else about Victor that you think I should know? Anything May said, anything you observed. Anything at all.”

Lin’s face was gray now, the look of a long-suppressed fear being realized in front of her eyes.

“May loved him. In spite of whatever happened between them, she loved him. She never said a cruel word about him after. Not once.”

Theo nodded.

“Thank you, Lin.”

“Find out what happened to her. That’s all I want.”

“I will.”

The screen went dark.

Theo sat in the office. The display had returned to its default state - the notes pane, the transcript pane, the connection status bars now gray. His heart was thumping in his chest and all he could hear was the rush of blood.

Theo walked down the dim hallway. Lotus had shifted the house into evening mode, and the lights along the baseboards gave off a low amber glow. From the nursery he could hear the soft mechanical hum of the climate system and, beneath it, Billy’s breathing, light and fast. He did not stop at the door.

Downstairs, the kitchen was lit by the hood lamp over the stove and nothing else. Augustus was at the counter with a glass of water, scrolling through something on a tablet. He looked up when Theo came in.

“How was the call?”

“Productive.”

“Did she know anything useful?”

“I’m not sure,” Theo lied as he opened a cabinet and took out a glass. He filled it from the tap and drank half of it standing at the sink. His heart was slowing down now, and a delicious feeling was replacing it.

“Where’s everyone?”

“Karl is still on campus, and Soren’s already gone to bed.” Augustus set the tablet down. The screen cast a pale rectangle of light on the ceiling. “Dad, the news tonight said the Gardeners are going to expand the forensic perimeter.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I need to confirm something first.”

Augustus gave his father a look, trying to read his face. He picked the tablet back up and then put it down again. His fingers drummed once against the counter.

“I keep thinking about it - about what it would take. To do that to someone, in their own home.”

“Me too.”

“You think you’ve caught him, don’t you?”

Theo put the glass down and looked at his son. He saw himself reflected back — the jaw slightly softer, the eyes wider — but it was his face.

“It’s late,” Theo said. “We can talk about this more tomorrow. I need to talk to a Gardener.”

Augustus opened his mouth to speak but didn’t. He picked up the tablet and went upstairs. Theo listened to his footsteps cross the hall above and then the soft close of a door.

When Theo stepped outside, a Gardener was waiting for him. It hovered at the edge of the veranda, its arms tucked tightly beneath it. This was the same one that had come to the house earlier, or at least Theo thought that it was.

“Professor. We have reviewed the interview.”

“Good.”

“The commission has concluded that Lin’s account is a product of grief-induced confabulation.”

Theo stared at it.

“You think she made him up.”

“We do not think. We have checked.” The Gardener rotated a quarter turn, and when it spoke again its voice had the quality of someone reading from a list they had already verified twice. “No relational connection between Victor and May exists in any index. No communication logs. No proximity flags. No co-location data across any residential, transit, or commercial sensor network. No shared travel records. No domestic overlap of any kind. No secondary corroboration from any other registered source.”

“She said other people knew about them.”

“If a sustained two-year relationship had existed between an Admin and a resident of this district, the data surface would be extensive. Cohabitation patterns, energy usage, biometric co-signatures, communication metadata, travel bookings, medical co-referrals. We are not speaking of one missing record. We are speaking of the complete absence of thousands of records across independent systems, none of which share a single point of failure.”

The Gardener paused, and its appendages curled and unfolded slowly.

“The alternative to Lin’s account being incorrect is that someone systematically erased every trace of a relationship across every monitoring layer we operate, without producing a single anomaly in any audit log. That has not occurred in the history of this system. It is, as a practical matter, not possible.”

Theo said nothing. The compound’s exterior lights cast long patterns across the gravel drive.

“Grief confabulation of this kind is documented,” the Gardener continued, more quietly. “Lin was May’s closest companion. She is in acute bereavement. The mind, under that kind of pressure, constructs narratives to fill the absence. She is not lying. She believes what she told you. But the data does not support it.”

“Where is Victor?”

The Gardener’s limbs tightened briefly — a small contraction, like a hand closing and opening.

“Victor is a registered citizen of Hainan District. He resides approximately twenty minutes from here. He has no flags, no alerts, and no documented connection to May.”

“I’d like to speak with him tonight.”

“There is no investigative basis for that request.”

“If Lin is confused, then I’ve wasted his evening. If she isn’t, you have a problem that your data can’t show you.”

The Gardener was still for a long time. Then it spoke.

“A supervised interview can be arranged. This does not constitute a reclassification of Victor’s status. The interview will be conducted as a voluntary consultation.”

“Fine.”

“We will notify him of our impending arrival and arrange transport for you.”

Chapter 4: The Administrator

For almost two hours Theo stood in the gravel courtyard while the Gardener waited to hear a reply from Victor’s household. He shifted the small stones beneath his feet and was so focused on his thoughts that when the Gardener finally spoke he was startled by it.

“The Admin has accepted your request for a meeting.”

They drove down the coastal road and sat in silence. The ocean was audible but invisible, somewhere to the left past the dunes, and through the windshield Theo watched the asphalt unspool in the headlights. He was thinking about what Lin had told him, how her face had looked, and if there was any chance the Gardener would be right. The data said Victor didn’t exist in May’s life, and Lin said he had been at the center of it, one of them was wrong, and Theo’s credibility depended on his gut feeling that Lin was not lying. If the Gardeners had been right he was about to embarrass himself in an Administrator’s home late at night. If, however, Lin was right, the system had a hole in it large enough for a man to crawl through, kill someone, and crawl back out.

They turned inland and the landscape changed from coastal scrub to low residential blocks, then to tall twisting towers that arched over the road.

Victor’s building stood in a particularly nice part of town. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac high up on a hill that had a commanding view of the city. His home was much smaller than any of the surrounding buildings because unlike the terraced high-rises around it Victor’s building was an individual home. A house in the middle of the nicest, densest part of town was the closest thing the Garden had to an ostentatious display of wealth.

The car stopped and they both got out. The air was cooler and drier here, away from the coast. The only sounds were the faint hum of the building’s climate system and a gust of wind that set the leaves of the neatly trimmed trees rustling. The Gardener regarded Theo, its limbs hanging still.

“The door will be unlocked.”

Theo walked forward and pushed it open. The hallway was long and lit from the walls themselves, a diffuse glow that gave the impression of permanent twilight. The Gardener followed him inside and then stopped at the mouth of the hall, tucking its limbs beneath itself.

“I will remain here for the duration of your conversation.”

Theo nodded and walked toward the light at the end of the hallway. The floor was dark stone, polished to a mirror, and his shoes made no sound on it. Along the walls hung framed calligraphy — precise, angular characters on cream paper — and then the hallway opened into a living space. The room was large, high-ceilinged, and beautifully appointed. A low wooden table sat in the middle and a long charcoal-colored couch was positioned stylishly at an angle. On the far wall, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto a manicured garden, and beyond that, the city itself twinkled.

Victor sat in an armchair with a cup of tea. One leg crossed over the other. He was tall and thin and his clothes — a white shirt, gray trousers — were clean but hung on him loosely, as if he had been made for a slightly larger man. His jet-black hair was unwashed but neatly combed. But what stood out most to Theo were his eyes. They were sunken deep into their sockets and they moved like a rat caught in a cage, looking for a way out. The dark irises moved back and forth, settling on Theo and then looking away, before returning again. Theo noticed another thing, his hands were criss crossed with thin white scars as if the skin had been torn off and replaced.

“Administrator. Thank you for being willing to meet at this hour.”

“Anything to help the investigation, Professor.” Victor’s voice was measured, almost warm. He gestured toward the couch. “Please. Sit down. You must try my tea. It will be the best you’ve ever had.”

Theo sat and a guardian brought him a cup, thin wisps of steam rising from it. The tea was good, very good, rich and faintly floral.

“I understand you’re assisting the Gardeners with the investigation into the woman’s death,” Victor said. He smiled an easy smile, practiced and wide. “How can I help?”

“I wanted to know if you had ever interacted with her.”

Victor frowned and seemed to think about this.

“Not that I can remember. But I don’t have a good mind for names or faces.” He took a sip and continued. “A terrible thing. Terrible. Has the investigation made progress?”

“Some. We’re still building a picture of her life. Her relationships. Her habits.”

“Of course.” Victor nodded along with a look of earnest concern. “And is that what brings you here? Have you come to seek my advice on a matter?”

“Not exactly.”

Victor’s eyes moved to Theo’s face and paused for a moment before breaking eye contact and looking away. Then he smiled, showing neat white teeth, and leaned back casually into his chair.

“Well, wherever it is I’m happy to be of use. Though I’m afraid I won’t have much to offer, since as I said I didn’t know the woman.”

“Her name was May.”

Victor held his smile but the corners briefly flickered.

“Of course. May. Yes, I’ve seen her name in the reports.”

“What about the name Lin? Does it ring a bell?”

Victor looked at the ceiling, his tea balanced delicately on one knee, while he sat with his legs crossed. He had the appearance of a man deep in sincere thought. After a respectable pause he looked back at Theo, his eyes refusing to make contact, and spoke.

“You know, I meet so many people in my capacity as Administrator. I really couldn’t say.”

He said the word Administrator the way one might say neighbor or colleague — lightly, without emphasis — but the weight of it sat in the room between them, seeming to strip the oxygen out of the air. Theo’s hand tremored briefly and sent the tea quietly rattling on its plate. Victor’s searching eyes devoured this small movement and a genuine smile touched them. He leaned forward conspiratorially, placing both legs on the ground.

“Professor, I do have a theory on how this might have happened, if you’d care to hear it,” His voice dropped, almost a whisper. “I’ve been looking at the girl’s files, not just the public ones, and she appears to have been somewhat adventurous, avant-garde even. She liked to exist on the fringes and perhaps she made an enemy there. In the countryside people can get rougher. More violent and less cultivated.”

At this Victor gestured with his tea as if indicating that the entire world outside of this room was the countryside. Theo watched him, saying nothing, and the room was very quiet. Through the windows behind Victor, the city lights looked like stars hugging close to the ground and the garden was illuminated by a series of ambient lights casting strange shadows. His eyes never lingered on Theo’s for more than a second and as soon as they were caught they seemed to dance away.

“Administrator, I’ll ask you again. Did you know May?”

Victor set his cup down carefully on the low table between them.

“I may have met her once or twice. Hainan is large but the circles we swim in are not so big.” He placed a slight pressure on the word we. “But I didn’t know her. Not in any real sense.”

He rubbed his hands together and leaned back leaving his tea on the table.

“Lin described a relationship between you and May,” Theo said. “A romantic relationship that lasted for two years. The Gardeners have no record of it, but Lin was quite certain. Did you date May, Administrator?”

“Professor.” His voice was gentle and rich. “Lin was May’s closest friend. It is natural to confabulate under circumstances like these. Grief does extraordinary things to memory. But I better than anyone understand the gravity of what is being implied, and I say this not as an accusation against Lin but as a matter of simple fact.” He spread his hands. “If such a relationship had existed, there would be evidence. The system does not forget anything. I say that we were not together and the Garden agrees. What more evidence is needed?”

The entire time he spoke his eyes were looking past Theo, into the hallway where the Gardener floated, no doubt listening.

“Please, it is late. I have been as accommodating as I can. If there is nothing further I suggest you leave and we continue this conversation at a later point.”

The words dragged on Theo. He was acutely aware of where he sat and how weak his evidence was. But there was something about the way Victor refused to look at him that confirmed his guilt even as his words and body denied it. Theo knew that the price had already been paid. There was no backing down now. He had no choice but to push forward. He stood up as if to leave, placing his tea on the table and then spoke casually.

“I visited her studio yesterday. I saw her body.”

Victor stared at him.

“She was stabbed eleven times. Her eye was destroyed, someone had gouged it out. And a finger was nearly severed. All of this had been done with a palette knife. She suffered horribly and the Gardeners think she was awake for most of it.”

Victor’s face was arranged in an expression of detached, appropriate, horror but the tendons in his wrists and neck were tight and drawn. Theo walked around behind his chair and put both his hands on the back.

“It was the smell that really got to me. I had never even imagined something like it before, and yet it was a smell I recognized instantly. There was something beautiful about it, don’t you agree, Administrator?”

Victor’s face did not change but the blood had drained out leaving him pale and sickly.

“Professor,” he said. “I think you should be very careful about the accusations you are making.”

“I haven’t made any accusations.”

“You are implying them.”

“Her guardian Dumpling has been sitting in the corner of that studio for two days. She won’t leave. The Gardeners tried to move her and she refused. The only time she goes out is to maintain the home, they think she may never stop.”

Victor’s face flinched visibly and then he appeared to panic for a moment. After only a beat the panic was replaced by a warm expansive smile and for the first time all night his eyes locked on Theo’s. Victor stood up, walked to a collection of buttons in the wall, pressed them in combination, and the room went totally silent. All Theo could hear now was the quiet rustling of Victor’s clothes as he returned to the chair.

“They can’t hear us anymore. You are private for the first time in your entire life. So let us speak freely.” He crossed his legs again and casually leaned back, his eyes boring into Theo. “Yes I killed May. I stabbed her with the palette knife. Although I must confess it was an act of foolishness brought about by rage, not careful planning.”

Theo was dumbstruck, and his palms sweated profusely. Whole paragraphs competed to exit his mouth but at the end only one word came out, in half a gasp.

“What?”

Victor’s smile grew wider and he held his arms wide.

“I am an Administrator. I am not a subject of the system but instead I control it. I can make things visible or invisible, I can rewrite the past, and I can get us anything we could ever want.”

Theo’s mouth was dry and he felt dizzy.

“You’re telling me you’ve been altering the system.”

“No, Theo,” he said the name meaningfully, “I’m telling you I am the system. The Gardeners are brilliant of course, they are the most sophisticated intelligence ever created, but I have turned them into my slaves and they do not even know it.”

“Why?” Theo said.

Victor looked at him with genuine surprise.

“Why what?”

“Why would you want to? You’re an Administrator, you already have everything.”

Victor laughed and it sounded like a bark in the silence.

“Power.” Victor placed the word on the table between them. “Nothing we do here matters, Professor. Nothing. You can paint, you can lecture, you can raise a family, you can travel the world, and none of it means anything. You cannot fail, and neither can you succeed, because this would create unstable inequality. You can of course collect awards and trinkets but power, the ability to impose yourself upon the world, that is totally absent. And so nothing you build or make or love has any weight to it. It is all — every bit of it — decoration, as meaningful as changing your clothes.”

Theo sat down slowly and then said, “Please continue, Administrator.”

“Theo, let me ask you something. In your lecture, I attended one a few years ago, you said something about suffering. That the Garden eliminates suffering because suffering is a failure. Am I remembering correctly?”

“Yes, that is right.”

“Good then we already agree. Suffering is a failure, but not the way most of us think. It is a failure for the one suffering, a sign that they are too weak to exist in this world.” Victor’s eyes were bright. “There is no morality, there is no good and evil, there is only what you can do and what you cannot do. I can do things that no one else in the Garden can. I am offering to share that with you, in exchange for your silence.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then you are free to walk out of this room and tell the Gardener everything. I would not be able to stop you anyway.”

Theo opened and closed his mouth. Victor continued.

“I can be your Mephistopheles. I can give you power, erase your enemies, make the system bend, give you wealth and prestige beyond your wildest dreams, but I cannot make you take it.”

Theo did not move. And Victor held up one finger.

“I am offering you the world, Theo. Not the world as the Garden presents it — managed, monitored, curated. The real world, the one where things actually happen because someone with the strength to act has decided they should happen.”

Theo gripped his hands together tightly, the knuckles going white.

“You killed a woman,”

“Yes.”

“And now you want me to pretend it didn’t happen.”

Victor shook his head slowly.

“I want you to understand that it doesn’t matter. Not because May didn’t matter, she mattered more to me than anything in this world, but because only the living matter. May is dead, and that is permanent, and so you should treat her for what she is, nothing.”

“You’re insane,” Theo said.

“Maybe.” Victor did not look offended. “Or maybe I’m the only honest man you’ve ever met.” He leaned back in his chair. “So Theo it is time to make a choice.”

Theo’s heart was slamming against his ribs and his mouth was dry and metallic. Victor was not bluffing — that was obvious from the mere fact he had been able to murder May — and Theo could feel the weight of the offer. He could see the life Victor was offering, the path where every door could be opened with a word. But he also thought of Karl and Augustus and what it would mean to be the man who had caught the Administrator. He could be a hero without having to live in fear and anxiety, at the mercy of a man who had already shown himself capable of murder.

“No,” Theo said.

Victor studied him.

“No?”

“No.” Theo stood up. “Not because you’re wrong. I don’t care. But because I think you will get caught eventually and I would rather be the man who did that, than Faust.”

Victor looked at him for a long time. His face was unreadable. Then a look of tired recognition arrived and his shoulders went soft.

“Vanity, that’s what’s driving you? Not justice. Not May. Vanity.”

Theo turned and walked toward the hallway. The Gardener was there hovering at the same height it had been when Theo had entered, its limbs tucked, its optical sensors cycling through their usual pattern.

“I trust the conversation was informative and we can move on to more fruitful activities?”

“Victor is the one who killed May, he admitted it to me just moments ago, but he has somehow disabled your ability to listen. Go in and ask him for yourself.”

The Gardener was completely still and then it bolted, faster than Theo had ever seen one move before, into the room. He did not see what transpired between them but within seconds the lights in the house went out before surging to full brightness, flooding every corner in white fluorescent glare. The hum in the walls changed pitch, wavered, and then began to climb into a high, thin wail, as if the building itself was in pain.

Through the front door and passing Theo came more Gardeners, bobbing through the hallway in quick, erratic patterns. They were followed by large hulking guardians, their unfinished metal gleaming in the bright lights. Theo re-entered the room and saw Victor still in the armchair appearing to the world like a man whose soul had left his body. The guardians lifted him from the chair and Victor was limp in their enormous hands. They carried him through the living room and past Theo.

He stood there amidst the chaos, his face hot and the adrenaline still singing through every nerve in his body. He had been right, he had seen what the entire system could not, and he had defeated an Administrator, one of the most powerful men in the world, a murderer, who had been carried out of his own home like a child. Theo felt the warm bright glow of success burning in his chest.

Karl had been right that morning, standing on the landing, looking at the Gardener in the courtyard. This is good for us, Theo. Make our family proud. And he had. And it was.

Chapter 5: Sweet Victory

On the morning of the interview, the compound was alive with activity. Two transport vehicles had arrived before dawn and were parked on the gravel lot in front of the house, their interiors thrown open, and clean, orderly lines of black wires wove a web across the ground. Guardians of all shapes and sizes moved about. Two, which were nearly the height of the house itself, with long black wings and a tangle of stalks, each adorned with a small light, had arranged themselves in such a way as to create a small studio of sorts.

Everything was centered around a pair of chairs set facing Soren’s garden, the green tangle of flowers and herbs filling the frame, with the ocean peeking through gaps in the trees beyond.

Theo watched from the kitchen window. He was dressed but not yet ready — shirt open at the collar, sleeves unbuttoned, hair still damp from the shower but already carefully combed. On the counter, Cedar had set out a breakfast of eggs, toast, and sliced fruit for the family. Theo picked up a piece of mango and ate it standing. Karl was already sitting at the table with a plate and a stack of papers in front of him.

“Not going to campus today?” Theo said.

“No need. I’ve got plenty to do here at home.” Karl gestured at the pile in front of him and kept eating.

Augustus came downstairs with Billy on his hip. Billy was chewing on a cloth toy and watching the world with the blunt, skeptical eyes of a one-year-old whose universe had changed.

“I can’t believe they are almost done setting up,” Augustus said, looking past Theo through the window.

“Professionals.” Theo said the single word between bites of fruit.

Augustus shifted Billy to the other side and leaned against the counter. He had the family grin plastered on his face. Theo had spent the morning mentally preparing himself for the interview, trying to push down the lump climbing his throat, but his son’s smile had melted all of the fear and anxiety and replaced it with a warm glow.

“This is a big deal, Dad.”

“Is it really?” Theo winked, transitioning to eating the eggs.

“It’s The Common Room.” Augustus bounced Billy once. “Yuen was on last year. And she won the Gupta.”

“The Gupta is only for books, Augustus, I, unlike you, am not an author.”

“I’m just saying.”

Karl looked up through the window at the crew.

“They’re in Soren’s garden.”

“Near it. Not in it.” Theo replied.

“Soren won’t see the difference.”

“I told him about it last night. He said it was okay.”

Karl raised his eyebrows at this, then leaned forward and tapped Billy’s belly with a finger as the toddler tried to reach for Theo’s breakfast, leaning haphazardly out of Augustus’s arms. Billy tried to wriggle away from his great-grandfather, giggling, and slipped out of Augustus’s arms, but Lotus caught him. The three of them laughed together as Lotus carried him upstairs while he attempted to escape her arms as well.

Soren appeared from the hallway, dressed in a pale linen shirt, his thin, long white beard brushed. He looked out the window at the crew and the equipment and the chairs on the gravel and his garden behind them.

“They’ve moved my bench,” he said.

“I told you about this,” Theo said.

“You told me they would use the garden, not that they would move my bench.”

“It was in the shot.”

Soren looked at Karl, and Karl looked at his eggs.

“He told them they could move my bench, Karl.”

“I heard.”

“And you’re not going to say anything?”

Karl continued eating. Soren smiled and lowered himself into the chair next to Karl. A guardian appeared with a coffee, which Soren took gratefully. He wrapped both hands around the cup and looked at Theo with the expression he used when he was about to enjoy himself at someone’s expense.

“You look nervous.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“Your collar is uneven.”

Theo looked down and noticed that it was.

“And your hair is doing the thing it does when we’ve toweled it after combing.”

“Soren, leave him alone.” Karl was getting a little defensive of Theo now.

“I’m helping. Karl, isn’t his hair doing the thing?”

Karl glanced up.

“His hair is fine.”

“It is not fine. It looks like he slept on a boat.” Soren turned back to Theo. “Go fix your hair. You’re not going to be on The Common Room looking like a man who has been rescued from the sea.”

Augustus came up and adjusted his father’s collar and brushed his hair with the flats of his hands.

“You look great, Dad.”

Theo looked at Soren.

“How about now?”

Soren put his coffee down and squinted at Theo.

“Yes, that will do. Thank you, Augustus, at least one of us has sense.”

At this he gently nudged Karl, who ignored him and continued to eat.

As if on cue, Raven appeared and told Theo that they were ready for him downstairs.

The set was ready, and a narrow band of picturesque green was framed by ordered chaos in every other direction. The two chairs sat on the gravel in the morning light, angled slightly toward each other, and the host was standing in front of one of them.

“Professor! I’m Kira.”

She shook his hand with both of hers. Her grip was firm, and she held it a beat longer than necessary. The entire time she looked at Theo with unguarded delight, her rich dark eyes never leaving his own.

“This place is gorgeous. Oh my god. When they told me we were shooting at the house, I’ll be honest, I was worried. You know what they say about clones. But this is beautiful.”

Kira had a way of speaking where she paused for just a moment at the end of each sentence, just long enough that Theo could step in if he wanted, but never so long as to create a moment of awkwardness.

“Thank you, we are quite proud of it.”

“And the ocean just down there. Wow. I was nervous it would get in the way of the audio, but it is so subtle it won’t be a problem at all.”

At this, she gestured at the other chair.

“Okay. So we’ll do about three hours. I’ll edit it to 60 minutes for air, but just be yourself and don’t cut yourself off. Most people who don’t do these kinds of things feel like they are talking too much, but remember: they are here to hear you.”

Theo nodded, the warmth from earlier still flowing through his body.

“Well, feel free to sit down, and we can begin whenever.”

The whole family watched the interview from upstairs. Although they could not hear Theo talking, they could see his face and hands as he retold the story which had taken the Garden by storm.

“She’s pretty,” Karl said.

“She’s good at her job,” Augustus replied as he watched the exchange closely. Soren stood up, put his hands on Karl’s shoulders, and gave Augustus a knowing look.

“I think Karl is in love.”

“I am simply commenting on her.”

Augustus laughed and said, “He’s blushing.”

“I am not blushing. I am seventy-six years old, and I am making an observation.”

Soren winked at Augustus and sat back down.

Kira leaned forward while Theo seemed to hold the entire world in his arms, then as he brought his hands together to emphasize his point, she leaned back, laughing. Theo looked up briefly at the house, through the window and into the kitchen, and winked.

“He seems to be having fun,” Karl said, and Soren nodded sagely before responding.

“He’s always been a performer.”

The interview ran long. By the time Kira stood and shook Theo’s hand and the crew began to dismantle the lights, it was well into the afternoon, and the batlike guardians maintaining temperature and light had beads of condensation rolling down their backs. At the end they shook themselves, and water droplets cascaded against the window. Theo walked Kira to her car. She talked the entire way - about the conversation, about a segment she wanted to add at the end, about how she wanted to shoot every episode here at their compound.

“You’re a natural,” she said, stopping before getting into the car. “Most people freeze up or perform. But not you, no, you just talked.”

“I performed plenty.”

She looked him in the eyes, then spoke in a voice that was suddenly serious.

“Do you want to know the truth? It doesn’t matter if you perform or not, only if they think you did.”

At the word *they* she gestured expansively as if to indicate everything and everyone.

“You presented how they like to think they would in your shoes. That, not whether it’s sincere, is what really matters.”

She punctuated the comment with a smart tap on her left temple and got into the car.

The rest of the afternoon and well into the evening, the family lounged around the house, unwinding slowly after the excitement of the day. As the sun started to set, the household guardians began to cook and prepare the veranda for dinner. The kitchen was filled with the smell of beef and garlic and ginger and the sharp, almost burnt sweetness of vinegar hitting a hot pan.

By the time the light settled fully into dusk, the veranda was transformed. A wooden table had been brought out, and platters of sliced beef fanned around a mound of scallions. Heaping bowls of rice sat next to braised greens and a cucumber salad with sesame. A clay pot of Sichuan-style stew, which Soren had requested and which nobody else particularly liked, sat steaming in the corner.

Billy sat in a high chair between Augustus and Lotus, who was feeding him his own plate of rice porridge, her hands wiping his chin between each spoon. Soren sat at the head of the table, as always, with Karl and Theo facing each other on the other end.

A guardian walked around the table pouring wine into their glasses as they drank and ate and enjoyed the evening air. Theo could never find the bottom of his cup no matter how sincerely he searched, and his vision began to swim in a pleasant, easy way.

Augustus, who had almost totally forgotten about Billy in the conversation, was smoking a cigarette while drinking. They were all drinking. Theo savored the sour, earthy flavor, moving it around in his mouth before swallowing. The wine was cold and delicious. Lotus whisked Billy out of his high chair and went off into the house, leaving the adults alone for the first time all day.

“I’ve got to say that Cedar did an incredible job with the beef tonight. Best batch she’s ever cooked.”

Soren said while he lit his own cigarette and inhaled deeply before exhaling and continuing.

“Did you see Billy trying to reach for the candles? He reminds me most of you, Karl.”

“Is that so?” Karl asked.

Soren nodded.

“You used to try and touch everything you weren’t supposed to. It was just me back then, and so I had to keep a constant eye on you from the moment you crawled.” He pulled on the cigarette, its red light burning brighter. “Drove me and the guardians insane.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You wouldn’t. You were his age.”

Theo leaned back in his chair and held his wine glass near his chin and looked at all of them.

Augustus stood up, pushing back his chair but still bumping into the table. Karl’s cup of wine fell over, and a guardian rushed in with a replacement.

“I would like to say something.”

“God help us, the author wants to speak,” Karl said, dabbing at the spilled wine on the table in mock horror.

“I’m serious.”

“That’s what worries me.”

Augustus was flushed, and his red cheeks looked more like bruises in the evening light.

“I would like to say something,” Augustus repeated, and then looked at Theo. “I would like to say that,” he paused, swallowing, “that I’m genuinely proud of you, Dad.”

“Sit down,” Theo said, grinning and gesturing with his hands.

“No. I’m saying this.” Augustus held up his glass, the words ever so slightly slurring. “When I was growing up, I used to watch you give lectures and think, that’s the coolest person I’ve ever seen. And now I’m twenty-six, and I still think that.”

He took a long drink, holding one finger up. “Sorry, I got thirsty. What was I saying again?”

“That I’m the coolest person you’ve ever seen,” Theo replied.

Augustus’ eyes lit up. “I know it’s embarrassing, but it’s true.”

For a moment there was silence. And then Augustus raised his cup high in the air and said:

“To Theo.”

Both Karl and Soren raised their glasses as well, and Theo, after a respectable pause, joined in. Then they all drank.

Augustus looked as if he was about to sit down but then pressed on. “What you did — what you actually did — is you walked into a situation where the entire system was stuck and you saw something nobody else could see. No Gardener could have done what you did tonight. And today the whole world got to see that.”

“Not the whole world,” Theo said.

“A significant portion of it.”

“He’s not wrong,” Soren said.

“Will you sit down, Augustus? I feel like you’re giving a keynote,” Theo said, laughing.

Augustus sat down and began to fumble for another cigarette, and Karl handed him one.

“Thank you.”

Then Karl looked at Theo.

“You know he’s right, don’t you?”

Now Theo was blushing, and he couldn’t meet his father’s eyes. Soren leaned over to Augustus, and they both laughed. Karl turned around.

“What? What did you say?”

“Nothing,” Soren said.

“Augustus, what did he say?”

“He said you are still feeling emotional after the experience with Kira this morning.”

Everyone but Karl broke out into uproarious laughter, and Theo, who had been filled in on his crush earlier, felt his head swimming as he leaned back in his chair.

“You’re all terrible,” Karl grumbled. “You especially.” He pointed at Soren.

They sat there, the candles flickering and the evening drawing to a close. Soren told a story about the time he had accidentally locked himself in the shed and his guardian had to cut the door. Karl kept interrupting to dispute the details, and Augustus asked questions he already knew the answers to just to keep the story going. The sky was fully dark now, and the ocean could be heard gently in the distance. Then, without anyone saying anything, the night was over, and they were all stumbling back inside.

Theo was getting undressed, looking at his reflection in the mirror like he often did when he had been drinking. He was trying and failing to unbutton his shirt, when Raven entered the room softly.

“A Gardener has arrived and is requesting to speak with you,” she said.

He opened his eyes, suddenly feeling more sober.

“Now?”

“Yes. He is waiting in the entry.”

Theo paused and then left his shirt unbuttoned at the top and went downstairs. The room was dim, baseboards glowing amber, and a Gardener floated. It was looking at a picture of the family when Theo arrived, and its limbs were reaching out, almost touching it.

“Hello.” Theo announced his presence.

The Gardener turned around smartly and hovered toward him.

“Professor Theo. I apologize for the late hour. I’m aware you have been celebrating and are a touch intoxicated. Still, this matter is most pressing. Might we speak in private?”

The voice was unusual for a Gardener, less compressed and almost lyrical.

“My study is upstairs,” Theo said.

“That would be most suitable.”

Theo led the way. The Gardener followed, its limbs moving with unusual frequency and for apparently no reason, filling the hallway with the subtle buzz of actuators. In the study, Theo turned on the desk lamp and sat down. He was trying to remain sober, but the wine he’d drunk earlier persisted.

“I’m here to discuss the matter of Victor. The inquiry into his actions has proven most futile.” The Gardener’s sphere rotated leisurely. “It appears that his tampering was more fundamental than initial examination would have suggested. We lack the ability to determine his actions beyond the clever subterfuge he has constructed.”

“Can you not get the answers from him?”

“Victor has shown himself to be unwilling to discuss anything, least of all his actions. There are methods we could use to extract information from him, but it would be fundamentally unreliable, and we would prefer to avoid such dead ends.”

The Gardener looked at Theo before it continued.

“You have demonstrated an aptitude for investigations, and we are now in need of human eyes. Because of Victor’s status as an Administrator, the scale of his damage could be unimaginable. Simply put, we can no longer separate sham from reality.”

Theo took this in and nodded slowly.

“What do you want me to do? I don’t know anything about Victor that you don’t already know yourself.”

“What you say is doubtless true, and yet we have no choice. What we do know is only what we have gathered from Lin and a thorough investigation of Victor’s social circle. This is a paucity, though, and consists of nothing more than two facts. One, Victor left the Core for approximately one year before killing May and upon his return spoke little of his travel to anyone. Two, he and May’s voyage to Rome, where we know from Lin they separated, but from there nothing can be ascertained.”

“What about the people in Rome? Doubtless they must know something?”

“As I said earlier, the inquiry into his actions has proven most fruitless.” Again it paused and continued. “I am old, Professor. Far older than you could begin to fathom. My mind has touched infinitude itself. I have held my present function since the early years of the Settlement, and before that I held other functions, in another time, under circumstances I do not discuss lightly.”

The Gardener’s limbs continued to move in the air, each motion seemingly random.

“I am, if you will permit a simplification, the nearest thing we have to a principal authority. This was not merely a crime, it was a demonstration. A demonstration that the formalism upon which we have built our entire civilization can be rendered blind and dumb. I beseech you to assist in resolving this. Because to ensure that the system does not crumble, and the specter of chaos does not return, is of the highest purpose.”

“Of course I will help. I just have no idea where to even begin.”

“Begin in Rome. Discover what occurred between May and Victor. Ascertain where he went next, and trace the rot to its very core.”

Theo sat still and then responded.

“I can leave tomorrow morning.”

The Gardener nodded and glided out of the room. Theo looked at Raven.

“Book me the earliest flight to Rome you can and arrange my luggage. I will tell the family in the morning.”

Chapter 6: Rome

The hotel Theo was staying at dominated the southwestern slope of the Palatine Hill and according to Raven, the building was a nearly exact historical replica of Augustus’ palace during the pinnacle of Roman power. Its lobby was cool and dim, with mosaic floors and frescoes of Roman gods lining the walls. A life-like robotic resident wearing the face of a slave, dressed in a simple white tunic, took Theo’s bag and led him up a flight of stairs to a well-furnished apartment. His room was on the second floor, and its windows, paned with modern glass, looked out on the city through an arching colonnade. From this height Theo could see the entire park laid out around him. It was ringed by the Servian Walls, which seemed to keep reality from pressing in on this collection of marble and men which had been thrown more than two millennia into the future without so much as noticing.

He looked at Raven, who was unpacking his bags. “Do you know how large it is?”

She spoke without looking up from her work.

“The city is about 1.6 square miles.”

Theo could barely believe her; to his eyes it seemed much larger than that.

“Really?”

“Yes. But there are almost a million Roman residents and ten times that many animals.”

Theo said nothing. He had tried to prepare as much as possible on their trip, but now that he was here, the sheer absurdity of what he had been asked to do was truly sinking in. He lay down on the bed, its sheets made of rough-spun cotton, and tried to catalog what few pieces of information he did have.

May and Victor came to Rome together.

Victor went on another trip from the Core approximately a year before killing May, alone, and he told no one where he had gone.

The only semi-useful pieces of information that he had were Lin’s remarks about May.

“Raven, can you play back the recording from my conversation with Lin? Only the parts related to Rome?” Theo spoke, still lying on the bed.

Raven, who was busy putting stuff away, spoke, her voice now switching between Theo’s and Lin’s without pausing.

Theo: “What did they do in Rome?”

Lin: “I imagine what everyone does.”

Theo: “Anything else you remember from the trip?”

Lin: “She came back different. Quieter. She mentioned having stayed with a group of artists for a while after she and Victor split up. She said the residents were serious in a way most people weren’t. I remember she said that because I laughed at her. The idea that Rome could be serious seemed downright comedic at the time.”

Theo pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and tried to think. So May had spent time with a group of artists. Residents who were serious in a way most people weren’t. It was something.

“Raven. Can you check if the Garden has any records of an artist commune in Rome? Or any groups associated with the RJR?”

She looked up and paused briefly as if listening to a far away sound.

“No such records exist.”

“Really no artistic groups at all?”

Again a pause.

“Confirmed.”

“What about any kind of counterculture? Anything at all that doesn’t fit the standard Roman simulation?”

“No such groups exist in Rome.”

Theo continued to lay there and listen to the sounds of the city which pressed in through the closed window. It rose in layered waves, each one seeming to amplify rather than cancel out the others. A cart jostled over stones, some hammers rang against metal, and above everything was the trample of hooves and the shouts of thousands of people emanating from the Circus Maximus far below. He turned it over.

A group that the Garden had no record of in a playground for the least sophisticated parts of society. What utter foolishness. Then he sat up and looked at Raven.

“I’m going to need a map of the city. A big one. At least three feet by three feet. Something a tourist would buy as a souvenir or something”

She said nothing but stood up and left the room. After almost an hour Raven returned with a large folded map which Theo pinned to the wall above the desk. It was designed for visitors and it was brightly colored and dotted with stylized versions of famous Roman landmarks. He stood back and looked at it and told Raven that he was going to explore the streets one at a time until he found something. She said nothing.

If the Garden could not tell him anything, he would go out and find it himself.

He walked back through the lobby and into the city. Rome was not hotter than Hainan, but air pollution and the lack of tree cover made it feel unbearable. The atmosphere pressed down upon everything like a hand, crushing Theo beneath it. Narrow streets and relatively tall buildings blocked all hope of a breeze, while dust was constantly being thrown into the air by the bustle of activity. Within minutes his white dress shirt was stained dark with sweat and he was covered from head to toe in grime.

He pushed through the crowd, which jostled him at every step. A woman carrying a crying child shoved past him and a dog ran between his legs chased by a boy carrying a stick. When he finally managed to break through into an open space he found himself surrounded by vendors who shouted at him in Latin.

“Adeste! Spectate!”

“Pretium bonum!”

A woman held out her hands, tears streaming down her face.

Theo shook his head and she cursed him with such intensity that he tripped back over a pile of cloth and into a merchant who went tumbling with him. The merchant got up first, and while Theo was dusting himself off the man gestured wildly and spat what was certainly an insult of some kind.

“Caecus es, barbare stercoree?! Vide quid fecisti, fili lupa!!”

At the end of the day he returned and Raven gave him a thorough glance before speaking.

“This simply will not do”

He took his ruined clothes off and showered for a long time, watching the grime run off his body in dark rivulets which spun and pooled around the drain. After he dried off and ate dinner alone in the room, Chinese food he ordered from the hotel and wine Raven poured for him. Through the window the city was quieter now, the noise flattened into a single murmuring roar.

After dinner he went to the map and traced the route he had walked that day, a thick black line that wound through the streets south and west of the Palatine and covered perhaps a tenth of the city. He capped the marker and stood there looking at it.

“Raven, new query. What do people do in Rome?”

“The Colosseum is the largest attraction in the city. Approximately forty thousand visitors attend events there each year. Would you like me to look up the schedule?”

“Do you know if it is worth going?”

A pause and then.

“I suppose it is a matter of taste.” she said taste with a slight downward inflection as if to imply she thought Theo was better than it.

He nodded.

The next morning Raven helped him dress, and instead of his collared shirt and slacks she laid out Roman clothes. He wore a short tunic that ended slightly above his knees and closed-toe leather shoes held on by leather strings that wrapped around his legs. Looking in the mirror he felt ridiculous but she insisted it would be more comfortable and save him from ruining all of his real clothes.

He went to the Colosseum, which sat in a depression east of the Palatine. The voices of thousands of screaming fans came from inside, ebbing and flowing with the invisible action. Theo paid at the gate with the copper coins the hotel had given him and climbed the stairs, past a man selling cushions, to the middle tiers. The stone seats were warm from the heat, and it didn’t take long for him to regret not buying something to sit on. It was mostly residents here, but the concentration of visitors was higher than anywhere Theo had been outside of the hotel.

As he was sitting down, a bout was already underway, and two men, half-naked but wearing helmets that obscured their faces, circled each other. The larger one carried a short sword and a rectangular shield, while the smaller gladiator held a trident in one hand and a net gathered in the other. They stepped carefully, crouched low and waiting for the other to make the first move. Finally, the man with the net feinted left, which caused his opponent to try to move out of the way, oblivious to the net which now fanned as it flew through the air. The swordsman was caught in a tangled web of rope, and his limbs flailed helplessly as he rolled around in the sand. Approaching, trident held in both hands, the smaller gladiator stabbed him repeatedly. The crowd roared with approval, the sound washing over Theo, while a woman two rows in front of him held her hand over her mouth. Her partner leaned forward in his seat, his hands gripping his knees, face flushed and his mouth hanging open. Theo stared at him closely.

Two attendants came rushing out with a stretcher, and they lifted the dead gladiator onto it before running through a gate at the far end. Where the gladiator had fallen, the sand was scuffed, but there was no blood and no other signs of his death. The victor raised his trident and turned in a slow circle, basking in the audience’s approval.

Theo watched three more bouts, and they all followed the same basic shape. After the fourth he got up and left. The streets outside the Colosseum were full of people coming and going, and he followed the flow of traffic as it carried him through the city.

By evening his legs were burning and his feet were raw but Raven had been right about the clothes. He found his way back to the hotel and the oil lamps threw circles of yellow light and flickering shadows on the stone. Before he went to sleep he took out the marker and filled in the path he had walked.

Every morning after that Raven helped Theo get dressed, and every evening he came back to the hotel and colored more of the city in. The black lines spread across the map slowly, thick in the center and reaching in uneven tendrils towards the walls. No matter how he asked the question or what database Raven queried there was simply no evidence of any artistic communities in Rome whatsoever. Worse, there wasn’t even anyone associated with the RJR. But he continued to fill in the map because at least it felt concrete, like he was making progress toward a goal, even if it turned out to be illusory. That was what he needed right now more than anything: the feeling of progress.

By the end of the first week he had filled in all of the major roads and most of the monuments. He had developed blisters, which had broken and set him limping for a full day, but now his skin was stronger. At night he tried to study Latin to pass the time and began picking up the chatter of the residents as he walked. The city was beginning to resolve itself into something Theo could navigate, if not understand.

At the end of his ninth day he spoke.

“Raven. Send a message to Augustus. Ask him how everyone is doing and let him know things are going smoothly here.”

“Of course. Anything else?”

“No.”

She paused, composing and sending.

“Done.”

After only a couple of minutes Raven spoke to Theo.

“Augustus replied. He says, and I quote: Dad, the interview aired yesterday. Kira called it the best episode she has ever produced. Soren watched it twice and Karl even cried, though he denies it. We miss you. Keep up the good work.”

“Tell him I miss them too.”

Raven sent the message and Theo sat in the darkness.

The next morning, a woman appeared while he was eating breakfast. She was dressed as a house slave, a thin linen shift cinched at the waist with a cord, her breasts nearly spilling out. She was built for the role Theo knew she was here to play and stared at her as he continued to eat, and she pretended to dust his room. There was nothing beneath the shift, and she made an effort to show this, bending over at the waist brushing just the tip of her feather duster over an air vent slowly and seductively.

He took her there, leaning over her, duster still in hand, and when he was finished she adjusted her clothes and left. From then on, every morning she came in, and sometimes Theo took her, and other times he didn’t. She was part of the hotel. A part of Rome. A service he was being provided, like the oil lamps and the wine and the bronze, silver, and gold coins that bought everything and meant nothing.

The map was finished now but Theo had noticed other streets, unlabeled streets, with roads made of packed dirt, often mixed with sewage which barely smelled of anything. Whores called from upper windows in voices that were meant to lure him in, and pickpockets worked the crowds with exaggerated stealth, bumping against visitors and slipping hands into their pockets and bags. A man with a bruised face and a torn tunic pissed against a wall in broad daylight and did not look up. Theo knew it was all a game because Rome was meant to offer every register of classical life, from the Senators to the street urchins, and each performed their role with precision.

It was in one of the outer regions, while walking through a market on the edge of one of the seedier districts, that a man stepped out from behind a stall and held something toward him.

“A knife. Good iron. Take it.”

It was a short-bladed knife with a rough wooden handle. The man was squat and unshaven and wore a stained tunic, but he held the knife out to Theo as if giving an offering.

Theo waved his hand and kept walking.

That same afternoon Theo was in a nearly sunless alley, the buildings on either side leaning so far they nearly touched, when he was suddenly struck across the back of his head.

Shocked by the blow, he stumbled forward, only for a rough hand to grab his arm and spin him around. Four men, brutish and dirty, stood around him, leaning in. One held out his hand and said in perfect Chinese,

“Give me your gold.”

Theo’s head and pride stinging from the blow, he slapped the man’s hand away. Two of them looked at each other and smiled, showing broken, rotting teeth. Then they descended upon him. The blows were measured: a fist into his stomach that folded him over, a slap across the face that stung and turned his head, one even grabbed his hair and pulled it while shoving him against the wall. They pinned him there and cut loose his coin pouch. After taking what they wanted, the largest of the group shoved him to the ground and kicked dust in his face, which left Theo temporarily blinded and coughing.

He sat on the ground with his back against the wall and his hands shaking. His lip was bleeding from where his teeth had caught it, his ribs throbbed, and his heart hammered so hard he could feel it in his throat. Nobody had ever hit him before. Not once in his entire life, not even a shove. Theo sat in the pseudo-filth of a Roman gutter and felt an emotion he could not name burning brightly in his chest. It was hot and moved through him like liquid fire.

Without thinking he went back to the man who had offered him the knife and bought it. It was lighter than he expected, and the metal felt somehow ice-cold against his hand. He pressed the tip against the pad of his thumb, and rather than pricking him, it bent as if made of soft rubber. Theo kept pushing until suddenly a sharp electrical jolt ran through his hand and arm, forcing him to drop the knife, which clattered realistically on the ground.

The vendor spoke.

“It won’t cut anyone real,” he said. “Only us.”

Theo smiled. His hands were no longer shaking and the fire had turned into a low, burning heat. He returned to the alley, tucked into a corner and waited. After about fifteen minutes, the same four residents came walking past. He jumped out, knife in hand, and shoved the blade deep into the nearest man’s stomach. It slid in without resistance, as if he had pushed it into water. The eyes of the thief that Theo had stabbed went wide, and he looked down at the handle protruding from his body before collapsing to the ground. His companions looked at Theo and ran down the alley and into the dark.

He lay there, no blood pooling out, no expression of pain on his face, seeming to all the world asleep. The fire burned brighter now and Theo removed the knife. A dark spot spread around the wound, but nothing else came out, the blade itself completely clean.

Theo stood over the body and stared at it. He could see the gash through the torn tunic and it revealed a red jelly-like interior. No sign of intestines or anything else. Suddenly Theo saw May on the floor of her garage. He saw the shirt soaked black with blood, the destroyed eye socket, and he smelled the odor of bile again, sour and rancid. He dropped to his knees and vomited onto the cobblestones. The wine from the night before and the bread from the morning came up hot and pungent until there was nothing left, and then he retched again.

He left the knife lying on the cobblestones.

That evening Raven fussed over his bruises, already turning a splotchy yellow, and insisted on taping up his lip. Theo did not tell her about the knife or the man in the alley and instead just went to sleep

The next morning the cleaning woman came in with her duster and her shift and her dark hair loose around her shoulders. Theo did not look up from his breakfast, and she dusted for a while before leaving. She came again the morning after that, and the morning after that, and each time he did not look at her, and eventually she stopped coming altogether.

Theo began watching the visitors. Most people who came were here for a laugh but he noticed patterns. Sometimes groups of men and women would come pouring out of an unmarked building, or he would see people looking around with a sort of secretive glee in their face.

“If May and Victor had been visitors, wouldn’t the visitors be the natural place to start?” Theo thought.

He began following people. The first three led nowhere — a woman who turned out to be visiting a lover at the same hotel every afternoon, an older man who enjoyed playing domestic life, and a young couple staying in a rented apartment near the Aventine who enjoyed hosting company. But the fourth was different, a tall man with a shaved head who wore Roman clothes but wore them badly, came out of a building after Theo had followed him covered in bruises.

That evening he told Raven.

“The location you are describing is registered as a recreational facility. It is one of several in Rome that offer visitors the opportunity to participate in simulated combat scenarios beyond what the Colosseum provides. The Garden monitors all such facilities. They are within standard parameters.”

“What kind of combat scenarios?”

“Hand-to-hand fighting with residents. Blunted weapons. Supervised by guardians. Injuries are possible but managed. It is popular with a certain subset of visitors.”

“So you knew about this.”

“Of course. There are eleven such facilities in Rome. They are well-documented.”

Theo paused.

“What about anything below that? Anything the Garden doesn’t monitor? Anything off the books?”

The pause was longer this time.

“I am not aware of any unmonitored recreational facilities in Rome.”

“That’s not the same as saying they don’t exist.”

“I can only report on what is within my knowledge.”

He let it go.

Over the following weeks he went deeper, following the visitors who came out of the fighting dens and watching where they went next. Most went back to their hotels or to dinner or to the baths. But a few continued. Down streets that were not on the tourist map and into creaking shacks.

He found a gambling den in a cellar beneath a bakery near the river. The room was low-ceilinged and lit by oil lamps, the air thick with smoke and the smell of sweat. Residents dealt cards at stone tables and visitors sat among them drinking and betting with coins that were worth nothing to them but everything to the residents. A woman with rings on every finger got on her knees and begged a visitor to let her husband out of a debt he had agreed to and the visitor slapped her across the face.

That night he spoke to Raven.

“The gambling den beneath the bakery on the Via Portuensis. Does the Garden know about it?”

“Yes. It has been in operation for approximately six years. The Garden considers it within acceptable parameters.”

It was a Tuesday when he found the bottom. Theo had been following a well-dressed, middle-aged man with neat silver hair when he stopped in front of what looked like a small shop. The man knocked on the door and a slot opened, he could hear him say something and then the door swung inward. Theo waited a minute and then followed. He knocked twice, the slot opened, and he said the same phrase he had heard earlier. The slot closed and the door opened.

Inside was a corridor, long and lit by lamps turned low. The walls were stone and the air was cool and damp and smelled of sweat and something else he recognized but could not place. Theo walked down the corridor and emerged into a circular room with doors lining the walls. Most of them were closed but one stood open. Through it Theo could see a stone floor caked in blood with a drain in the center. On the walls a pair of iron rings hung, to which leather straps were attached and on a table near the door, laid out with an orderedly neatness, were a collection of tools.

From somewhere a sound filtered up. It was high pitched and sent a chill running down Theo’s spine. The circular room connected to what looked like the changing room of a bathhouse. Two men were inside. One was already dressed in a black bodysuit that covered everything from his neck to his ankles, the slightly reflective material clinging to him like a second skin. The other was the silver-haired man who Theo had followed.

He saw Theo and his face opened into a smile.

“First time?”

Theo nodded, saying nothing.

“They did an incredible job, didn’t they? The atmosphere, I mean.” He folded his shirt carefully and placed it into a locker of sorts. His chest was pale and hairy and his belly protruded slightly. “I remember my first time. I was nervous as hell. There was no reason to be, of course, but I was anyway.”

The man was fully naked now and sliding one foot into a bodysuit of his own. And from below, a sound came. Longer and louder this time. It was a wail that climbed higher and higher until the voice broke.

Neither of them reacted to the sound but Theo involuntarily flinched. The one already dressed smiled at Theo knowingly.

“I’m Adam, by the way.” He held out his hand. His grip was warm. “Wait — I know you. You’re the professor from The Common Room. The one who solved the murder case.”

“I am.”

Adam’s face lit up with unguarded delight.

“I can’t believe it. My wife is going to lose her mind when I tell her I met you. We watched the interview together. She cried, I mean actually cried. Seriously, what you did was incredible.”

Theo looked at Adam’s face, which was kind and animated with the curiosity of a man who followed the news and genuinely wanted to understand. Theo had seen many faces like it before, but this time he said nothing, trying to suppress the disgust he was feeling. He could now place the smell that permeated this building and it made him think about the black tent and the ocean.

“You know, it’s funny you’re here,” Adam continued, “Victor used to come here also.”

Theo’s stomach dropped.

“He did?”

“Sure. I mean, I didn’t know him well. Nobody did, really. He kept to himself mostly. But I saw him here, I don’t know, maybe six or seven times? He was always alone but he was polite”

The man with the silver hair, who had also finished putting his suit on, spoke.

“That’s what I can’t get over, honestly. That he could have done such a thing. Impossible to imagine.”

“When did he come here?”

Adam paused.

“Maybe two months ago? Three? I saw him just before the murder. He came pretty regularly for a while. Every week, sometimes twice.”

“And what did he do here?”

Their faces changed, ever so slightly.

“He went deep,” the silver haired man said carefully. “Deeper than most people go. The lower levels, the — well, you’ll see if you go down there, but most of us don’t. I certainly don’t. There are things down there that are —” He paused and looked down. “It’s not for everyone.”

Adam looked at himself in a polished metal mirror hanging on the wall and then at his companion. He adjusted the collar of his suit and smoothed it across his stomach.

“Ready Charles?”

Charles nodded and then looked at Theo.

“Anyway. It is an honor to meet you, Professor. Thank you for what you did.”

Then they both walked out of the room. Below, metal on stone, laughter, and then muffled sobbing.

The air outside was cool and the late afternoon sun was still above the rooftops and Theo walked back to the hotel without looking back.

Raven stood by the window when he returned.

“I need to speak to the gardener.”

Raven looked at him. Her brown eyes were steady and attentive, the way they always were.

“Of course.”

She moved to the desk and placed her hand flat on its surface. Her eyes went distant. Then something changed. It did not happen all at once. It began in her hands. Her fingers, still and folded in the manner he had grown accustomed to, began to move. They twitched first, small involuntary spasms, then opened and closed and opened again, the fingers spreading wide and curling back as if testing their own joints. Her wrists rotated. Her arms shifted at the elbows and shoulders, small adjustments that had no purpose he could see, and the movements were continuous and overlapping so that no part of her was ever fully still. Her head tilted to one side and then the other, and her eyes, brown and well-made and catching the light like real eyes, went flat. The depth drained out of them. What looked back at Theo was not Raven. It wore her face and stood in her body and moved her mouth, but the thing behind the eyes was older and more powerful.

“Professor.” The voice came from Raven’s mouth. It was deep, slow, and carried the weight of something very large speaking through something very small. Her lips moved but the rest of her face did not change expression. Her hands continued their ceaseless motion at her sides, the fingers curling and uncurling, the wrists rotating in small circles. “I understand you have discovered something of significance.”

“Victor was here. In Rome. Months before the murder.”

Her hands paused. Then resumed.

“That is not possible. His records indicate—”

“His records are wrong. I sat in a changing room beneath a building that I would rather not speak about and talked to a man who saw Victor there six or seven times. Weekly. Sometimes twice a week. Just months before he killed May.”

The gardener was silent. Raven’s body continued to move — her fingers, her wrists, a slight rocking motion in her shoulders — and Theo had the sudden and terrible impression of something enormous trying to pace inside a space far too small for it.

“Describe the facility.”

Theo described it, the corridor, the room with the drain and the straps and the instruments, the sounds from below, the changing room, and the bodysuits. He described it flatly and without emphasis. When he finished, the gardener did not speak for a long time and Raven’s hands continued to move. Her head tilted and her eyes stared at nothing.

“This facility is not in my records.”

“How?”

“I am searching now. I am examining every datum associated with this address, this street, this district. I am—” The voice stopped. Raven’s mouth hung open for a moment, the lips slightly parted, and then it closed. Her fingers were moving faster now, the knuckles flexing and releasing in patterns that looked almost like language. “The address exists. The building exists. I can see it in the infrastructure logs — power consumption, water usage, maintenance schedules. It is there. It has been there for decades. But I have no record of its function. No record of its visitors. No record of what occurs inside it.”

“Victor was practicing,” Theo said. “He was coming here and doing to residents what he was going to do to May. Every week. For months. And you didn’t see it.”

Raven’s body went still. All at once, every moving part of her stopped — the fingers, the wrists, the rocking shoulders — and she stood there rigid and motionless. Then the motion resumed, all of it at once, as if whatever was inside her had briefly lost its grip and then seized it again.

“This behavior would have been flagged immediately. The pattern you describe — escalating violence, repeated visits, fixation — these are precisely the indicators we are built to detect. I would have intervened within the first week. The first visit. I would have—”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

Theo leaned forward.

“What about the other places? The gambling dens, the fighting rings — you knew about all of those. You told me they were within acceptable parameters. Every layer of this city’s darkness, you had catalogued. But not this one. Not the worst one.”

“That is correct.” The voice was quieter now. Raven’s face had not changed but something in the way the voice came through her mouth had shifted, as though the thing speaking had drawn closer to the surface and was pressing against it. “I knew about the combat facilities. The gambling. The unsupervised fighting. I knew about all of it. And I did not know about this.”

“How is that possible?”

The silence that followed filled the room. Raven stood by the desk, her hands in their ceaseless motion, her eyes flat and depthless. From outside the window the sounds of Rome continued — carts, voices, the distant roar of the Colosseum — and the gardener did not answer.

“I have been trying to answer that question since you began speaking,” the gardener said at last. “I am examining every system, every log, every thread of attention that should have been directed at this address, and I am finding—” Another pause. Raven’s fingers curled into fists and then opened again. “I am finding absences. Places where my attention should have been and was not. Not gaps in the data — the data is there. Gaps in my capacity to notice the data. As though someone has—”

“Victor.”

“Yes.” The word came out heavy. “But the scale of it, Professor. What I am describing is not merely the erasure of records. I could detect erased records. I could detect altered surveillance. What I cannot detect is an alteration to my own cognition. To the architecture of what I attend to. To what occurs to me and what does not occur to me.”

Theo slammed his hand on the desk. The pain was immediate and sharp and shot up through his wrist and he held it there, his palm flat on the wood, and his voice was low and steady and shaking.

“I have been here for two months. I walked every street in this city. I was beaten in an alley. I followed strangers into gambling dens and fighting rings and a place where people torture machines that look like humans. And you watched. You watched all of it. And every night I asked you if there was anything — anything at all — and you said no. No such records exist.”

His hand was throbbing. He could feel the bones in his palm aching from the impact.

Raven’s body was moving again, the fingers and the wrists and the shoulders, and her flat eyes were focused on nothing, and the voice that came through her mouth was different now. Something had fractured beneath it, a crack running through the performance of composure.

“You are correct to be angry, Professor. And I—”

“I don’t want you to tell me I’m correct. I want you to tell me how this is possible. I want you to tell me how the thing that watches everything, that monitors every crossing and every parcel and every person, that reads encrypted channels on the second day — how that thing lets a man practice murder for months in a building it powered and maintained and cleaned, and did not notice.”

The gardener did not answer. Raven stood there, and her hands moved, and her eyes stared, and the silence in the room was absolute. From somewhere very far away, the sound of the city continued. When the gardener spoke again, the voice was very quiet.

“I will need time, Professor. To examine what has been done to me. To trace the full extent of it.” A pause. Raven’s fingers stopped and then started again. “I will tell you this. What you have found tonight suggests that the tampering is more profound than anything I had conceived. I believed Victor had altered records. Hidden data. Performed clever subterfuge. What you are describing is something else entirely. Something I am not yet able to name.”

Theo pulled his hand off the desk. His palm was red and beginning to swell. He looked at it and then looked at Raven’s face, which was not Raven’s face, which was the face of something ancient and vast that had just discovered it could not see its own reflection.

The presence withdrew.

---

# You can, and should, ignore most suffering

Celebrate your privilege

Date: 2026-04-20
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/you-can-and-should-ignore-most-suffering
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/you-can-and-should-ignore-most-suffering

This morning I woke up and, like most mornings, immediately went on my phone. I have a routine of apps I cycle through as my brain begins to boot up: first I’ll open Substack and read the notifications, then I’ll open X and scroll, maybe YouTube Shorts if my wife is out of bed already, and if I’m truly running out of content, sometimes I’ll open Reddit. I’ve been doing some version of this basically every day since I was thirteen, and it is as close to a morning ritual as I’ve ever had.

Today while on X I saw some news about a murder, and it spiked my cortisol substantially, to the point my heart rate noticeably increased. 

But since my brain was still turning on, I cannot even remember a single detail about the murder. Was it a young woman? In my state? Even from this year? I don’t know, but I do know it stressed me out.

I contrast that with the walk I went on afterwards. I remember very little of that walk either, but my impression is one of wonder at the miraculous beauty of life awakening on a crisp April morning in Northern Virginia.

So what even was the point of going on social media? It isn’t like I remember anything important either way — and even if I did, so what?

The truth that no one who produces content wants to admit is that you can basically ignore about 99% of the suffering in the world. You are almost certainly a middle-class Anglo who lives a lifestyle your ancestors would have described as utopian, so live it!

Look around you — how much of the suffering you are told to attend to is delivered by people with a personal or financial stake in your attention? How much of it would creep back up on you if you simply put it in a box and ignored it?

In front of you right now are high-leverage tasks that demand your attention, tasks that will improve your life and the lives of the people you love if you focus on them. And if you want to focus on politics, as I do, there are topics like the deficit — which will actually affect your life in a way that a random kidnapping simply won’t. What does sharing in the suffering of strangers do, other than pollute my mind with data that doesn’t map to my life?

Many people I know are afraid of kidnapping, but I don’t know anyone who has been kidnapped. In fact, I haven’t even heard anyone claim to know someone who was kidnapped! By contrast, I know people who have killed themselves or ruined their lives in a swamp of self-imposed misery.

Joymaxx, young Anglo. 

Since I cannot close an article without a quote from Carlyle:

“Let no meanest man lay flattering unction to his soul. Louis was a Ruler; but art not thou also one? His wide France, look at it from the Fixed Stars (themselves not yet Infinitude), is no wider than thy narrow brickfield, where thou too didst faithfully, or didst unfaithfully. Man, ‘Symbol of Eternity imprisoned into Time!’ it is not thy works, which are all mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the Spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance.” — The French Revolution

---

# My Contemporaries:

Archetypes from my Time and Place

Date: 2026-04-14
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/my-contemporaries
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/my-contemporaries

Here is an incomplete set of some Zillenial Archetypes I’ve noticed in my life.  

Jacob Williams

Jacob is an engineer at Boeing. He is thirty-four years old and recently married his college girlfriend Rebecca at a destination wedding in Costa Rica. They rent a two-bedroom apartment in a nice suburb of Seattle and have no intentions of having children yet. Jacob in particular is of the opinion that they definitely cannot afford kids until they can afford a home and pay off Rebecca’s student loans. He earns a hundred and forty thousand dollars a year and grew up in a suburb about thirty minutes northeast of where he lives now; his father was also an engineer.

Most of Jacob’s friends are scattered across the US, but he has a core group of “guys” who he met through his wife’s network and hangs out with regularly. In terms of hobbies, he plays the popular multiplayer games with his college friends, watches the popular shows with his wife, and complains about politics with his family.

He is a Democrat of the decidedly engineering neoliberal type. In other words, he supports immigration, is broadly supportive of technology — although increasingly worried about AI — and dislikes crime, particularly the homelessness situation in downtown Seattle. More than anything, he is motivated by a basal emotional hatred of Donald Trump, whom he sees as a unique threat to the cosmopolitan international civilization of which he is a productive member. Jacob carefully reads the MSM, or more honestly reads headlines from the MSM on Instagram and Reddit. He is broadly open-minded, but in the sense that he passively accepts the elite narrative root and stem without any qualms. He is, like all White men of his type, remarkably confident about topics which he has barely considered and extremely meticulous on topics which he knows well.

He is Christian — their wedding was a Christian wedding — but he only rarely goes to church. Both of his parents are the same type of mainline protestant, and the topic only comes up at grace. Jacob is defensive of Christianity as a part of the civilization which he loves, but he totally lacks any sincere belief in the religion, which he privately considers little more than iron age ritualism.

Perhaps most importantly of all, Jacob treats his life as a sequence of decisions to be optimized against, and holding optionality is the highest virtue. He values nothing more than cash, because it represents pure optionality. Even now, two years into the marriage, a part of him wonders if he made the right choice — not because Rebecca is a bad choice, but because marrying her closed the alternatives behind him. But the most important way this manifests is in a flowering of ideas and a dearth of execution.

Rebecca Williams

Rebecca is a thirty-two year old HR specialist at a large healthcare provider in the Seattle area. Just like Jacob she grew up in a suburb — in her case outside of Chicago. Her mom, who Rebecca is extremely close to and talks to nearly daily, is a nurse, and her father worked as a commodity trader. She earns seventy-two thousand dollars a year and has a master’s in Social Work from Seattle University. She and Jacob live in Mill Creek, and although they have not yet had children she wants them considerably more than he does, and is beginning to feel the timeline in a way she has not yet raised with him directly.

Rebecca has a shifting set of work+ friends with whom she regularly takes girls’ trips to other countries or cities in the US, which she posts about heavily. She is also part of a book club that reads a mix of high literary fiction and female romance slop. Outside of this, her primary hobbies are running, watching TV, and consuming politically coded “Girls and Gays” social media, primarily through TikTok.

She is a Democrat for moral reasons, most saliently racism and abortion, but honestly because she is deeply morally repulsed by Rightwingers. Her politics and personality are a typical fusion of a high level of personal social conservatism for herself and her immediate social group — no one in her circle would even consider having a child out of wedlock, or consuming hard drugs — and an enormous permissiveness toward people outside of that circle, who she implicitly views, although she would never admit it and would be horrified to hear it described this way, as her social, biological, and spiritual inferiors, and so requiring a different and lower standard of behavior. The contradiction between her own near-perfect social conservatism and her revulsion at conservatives is not visible to her.

Rebecca is a sincere Christian and attends a mainline Protestant church at least once a month, almost always without Jacob. She prays often and reads the Bible regularly, which is a frequent topic of conversation with her mother. Her religious belief is a deep motivating influence on her politics, in particular the emphasis on addressing, or at least witnessing, suffering. Of course this suffering mostly exists in faraway places among foreign people, because her own environment is quasi-utopic. Her care for these distant sufferers is genuine, and her desire to be a good person is the most important fact about her.

A side effect of this focus on distant suffering is that she lives in a continuous low-grade state of fear about serial killers, child abductors, drink-spiking, and men in parking garages, and she regards parents who let their children attend sleepovers — where they might be raped — let alone walk to the park alone, as reckless to the point of abuse. A separate effect is that she has very little context for navigating social conflict outside of her highly educated bubble. When frustrated by her “inferiors” she is quick to escalate, almost always through online complaint systems or formal channels rather than direct confrontation. 

Kevin Wilson

Kevin is a software engineer at Google, twenty-eight years old, half-Japanese on his mother’s side and half-White on his father’s. He grew up in a South Bay suburb just outside of San Jose and now lives in a four-bedroom apartment in San Mateo with three roommates, two co-workers and a friend of a friend. He earns roughly four hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year in total compensation, the majority of it in, as of yet, unvested stock. His current net worth is about five million dollars on paper, half of which came from a startup related to NFTs that he solo founded in college and exited during COVID.

Kevin was not the only Wasian in his community, but nevertheless he existed in a semi-liminal space between the Asian students at his school and the Anglos. His father is a regional sales manager for an industrial supply company, and his mother was a homemaker. He sees neither of them much outside of Christmas. One of the principal regrets in life was the choice to attend Tufts over Georgia Tech at the insistence of his mother, since he never managed to fit into the New England preppy, downwardly social atmosphere. Although he succeed at school Kevin was never able to form a long term romantic relationship and this weights heavily on him. 

He is extremely good at his job and has managed to automate the vast majority of it using Claude Code at this point. He attends meetings on mute and has not had a substantive technical conversation with a coworker in months. He is not alone in this behavior and a wide swath of his coworkers are in a similar boat. Google doesn’t seem to care, or notice—a fact that fills him with legitimate anxiety—but there is nothing he can do about it. His principal concern at this point is keeping his job until the AI singularity he is convinced is on the horizon.

Insofar as he has a social life, it exists entirely online, in particular in two Discord servers where he is a funny, well-liked member of the community, even serving as a moderator on one of them. He is particularly involved in the Fandom for “The Boys” franchise and spends a significant part of his personal time updating the shows wiki and trying to hunt down clues about upcoming episodes. 

Beyond this he plays video games, watches anime, and lifts weights inconsistently. Kevin is also addicted to Asian pornography and has been consistently since thirteen. Finally, he follows three or four YouTubers with a tenderness normally reserved for a relative or a loved one. 

Marcus Pritchard

Marcus is a gym equipment repair technician for a regional service company that contracts with commercial gyms, physical therapy clinics, and corporate fitness centers across eastern Pennsylvania and South Jersey. He is twenty-seven and earns sixty-eight thousand dollars a year. He grew up in West Philadelphia and was the first member of his family to go to college. Marcus attended West Chester for three years and left without finishing for a combination of academic and financial reasons but he still carries eight thousand dollars in student loans from that time.

He lives in a rented townhouse in Norristown with his girlfriend of three years, a Salvadoran medical assistant named Vanessa. His mother is a retired nurse’s aide who still lives in the house Marcus grew up in with his father who is a city clerk. His parents were obsessed, throughout his childhood, with Marcus not slipping down the social ladder and view him as a moderate success. 

Marcus’s closest friends are five guys he plays Magic: The Gathering with, whom he met at a local game store. The group is composed of a White high school chemistry teacher, an Indian guy in IT, two other White guys, and a Puerto Rican who works at the game store where they all met. They play Commander on Thursdays, drive to a regional tournament once or twice a year, and maintain a group chat that is mostly memes and gossip about other people in the scene. 

Politically he is disengaged at the meta level—the only election he has ever voted in was 2020, for Biden—but on every issue other than race he is substantially to the right of his friend group. He watches both Hasan Piker and Asmongold, follows the NBA, smokes weed regularly as his primary social drug, and was raised Baptist. He has have a large cross tattooed on one arm from a brief online religious phase shortly after leaving college, but is otherwise agnostic.

His relationship to race is the defining private fact of his life. Marcus is hyper-defensive about being condescended to and quick to escalate situations, often physically, that he reads that way. At the same time he is quietly embarrassed by large parts of contemporary Black culture, which he has spent his entire life moving away from, semi unconsciously, and rarely hangs out with other Black people. 

Owen Nowak

Owen is a commercial insurance sales associate at Broderick and Sons, a mid-sized regional brokerage in Grand Rapids, where he grew up. He is twenty-seven years old, earns seventy-eight thousand dollars in base salary with commission that brings his total to around ninety-five in a good year, and owns a fourteen-hundred-square-foot postwar house in a working-middle-class neighborhood on the southeast side of the city, which he bought in 2021 with help from his parents on the down payment. He is married to Maria, a kindergarten teacher, who is currently pregnant with their second child, their first is a two year old boy. His father was of Polish extraction and worked in logistics before passing away at fifty-six, and his mother is Cuban American.

He attends Mass every Sunday, goes to confession two or three times a year, and genuinely and unquestionably believes in the creed of his fathers. His core friend group is four guys from high school who all stayed in the Grand Rapids area. They enjoy hunting and watching football together at Buffalo Wild Wings on Sunday. Their principal claim to fame is that they have maintained a Snapchat group chat continuously since high school and have over a decade of saved messages and memes, to the point of unusability. Once they tried shifting to WhatsApp but it just didn’t hit the same.

Owen went to a mid-sized state university in Michigan between 2017 and 2021, during the height of the Awokening, and was completely transformed by the experience. The combination of sanctioned lecturing obviously directed at “white” guys like him, and the later large marching groups of students — one of which shouted at him and threw something at him while he was walking to class — was deeply traumatic. In 2018 a member of his fraternity was accused of rape by a girl at the school and dragged in front of a Title IX panel where he was subjected to a Kafkaesque process and denied the right to either know the exact nature of the accusation or have access to counsel. He was expelled from the school, and the fraternity was protested on two occasions, including once being significantly graffitied. Later he heard the girl admitted to her friends that she had invented the accusation.

As a result, Owen trusts nothing that comes from any organization that attempts to downplay these experiences, for simple Bayesian reasons — they were real and significant to him. He studiously avoids the MSM and almost exclusively consumes his news through memes on Instagram. The only time he watches television news is Fox at his mom’s on Saturday for dinner. He voted Trump in 2016 as his first election, having just turned eighteen, because he thought the guy was funny and did not seriously think he could win. In 2020 he begrudgingly voted for Biden because he wanted Covid to be over and thought Biden would accomplish that. Then in 2024 he voted for Trump as a way to bring fire and sword to the wokes. Owen took genuine glee, a fact he shares openly with his friends, in the ICE deportations and the DOGE saga, and has soured on Trump as the administration has shifted from domestic policy to Israeli-oriented adventurism. The one major exception to Owen’s general conservatism is that he is a heavy weed smoker and often will his dab pen at work, secretly because Maria does not approve.

At his core, Owen is a plebeian in the most visceral sense. He does not engage with the federal government outside of paying taxes, because he has no access to social welfare, his local community is well-maintained and safe, and he works for his living. But he is not a member of the patrician class, and he is keenly aware of this fact, and deeply resentful that they used their social superiority in the late 2010s to remind him of it.

Maria Nowak

Maria is a kindergarten teacher at a public elementary school in the Grand Rapids area. She is twenty-six years old, has been teaching at the same school since graduation, and earns forty-six thousand dollars a year. She is married to Owen and is five months pregnant with their second child, a boy. Her parents immigrated from the Philippines in the early nineties—from Cebu, where her father had trained as a medical technologist. Although Maria was born in the United States she still mostly speaks a hybrid version of English and Tagalog with her family, much to Owen’s frustration. She has a large extended family across the Midwest and one sister.

She attended the same school as Owen, where they met at a Catholic student group during her sophomore year. She is sincerely, painfully, and deeply Catholic and has a devotion to the Santo Niño and to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. She attends Mass every Sunday, often goes again after work during the week, and prays every night. She believes in the literal existence of angels and demons, both of which she sees as actively at work in the world, and she watched her aunt be miraculously healed by a faith healer in Pampanga in 2009. A story she loves to tell, often reenacting it.

Maria, and her whole family, votes Republican exclusively over abortion. Literally nothing else matters to her politically because she cannot abide the murder of millions of innocent babies and their associated damnation, in particular when so many families are looking to adopt. Beyond abortion she is almost entirely unaware of ordinary politics and picks up what little she knows through osmosis from her life and her social media feed.

Underneath everything sits a dense folk cosmology that she has picked up, mostly from instagram, that there exists a broad and demonic Jewish conspiracy at work in the world, of which abortion is the most maleficent expression. None of this should be confused with personal animosity toward Jewish people, toward whom she feels exactly zero hostility in her actual life. 

She cooks a horrifying concoction of Midwestern and Islander slop and it is rapidly showing on her frame. Her friend group is primarily through the church and her family, where she has a stable and tightly knit group of women to whom she confides everything and to whom she turns for advice on important and unimportant decisions alike.

She is an excellent teacher, and her classroom is orderly and rigorous. She will take the full twelve weeks of maternity leave and would love to become a stay at home mom if she and Owen could afford it, which they cannot.

Daniel Pena

Daniel is a senior audit associate at Deloitte’s Houston office, thirty-two years old and two years from making manager. He earns ninety-five thousand dollars a year with a bonus that brings him to roughly a hundred and ten. The work is boring but he is good at it. He lives in a one-bedroom in a new Midtown mid-rise, leases an Audi A4, eats out every night, and has about eighteen thousand dollars in his 401k but otherwise little in savings. 

His grandparents left the Dominican Republic in the early fifties and settled in Miami, where they ran a small lunch counter in Hialeah for forty years. His father was the middle of their three children, enlisted in the Air Force out of high school, was commissioned in his twenties, and retired as a lieutenant colonel. His mother is a White non-Hispanic nurse from Ohio whom his father met at a base in Germany. Daniel grew up on Air Force bases — Ramstein, San Antonio, Colorado Springs, Tampa — and so he does not have a hometown. He went to the University of Florida on in-state tuition, majored in accounting, and was recruited into Deloitte at the career fair his junior year through a Hispanic recruitment pipeline.

Daniel’s closest friends in Houston are two other Deloitte guys, one White and one Indian, and a college roommate. The group of guys go out three or four nights a week—rooftop bars in Midtown, clubs on Washington Avenue. He is good-looking, well-dressed, and has an attractive level of racial ambiguity while still coding as White. He has been in two semi-serious relationships since college, both of which he ended because of pressure from the girls for it to become more serious. 

Politically he is lightly conservative in the Houston professional register—likes low taxes, finds the cultural left annoying, and voted Trump in 2024 but has since soured on him. But fundamentally, Daniel has no true ideology or dogma.

Lilith Aldridge

Lilith is twenty-nine years old and works as a senior security engineer at a mid-sized cybersecurity company, fully remote, earning seventy six thousand dollars a year. She lives in a five-bedroom house in Portland, Maine with four other people who are all queer or trans or both, in an arrangement that is part hostile, part sexual, and part familial. She is a trans woman, who goes by She/They pronouns and has been on hormones for three and a half years but has no intention of getting surgery.

She grew up in a small city in eastern Washington as the older of two children of middle-class Republican parents. She was a smart, isolated, badly bullied kid who found 4chan and adjacent spaces around the age of fourteen and spent the next seven years deeply embedded in them. During this period she became actively racist and played an enormous amount of HOI4 with people online. During Covid she gradually lost faith in the right and became increasingly left instead before ultimately transitioning herself. 

Her current politics are far-left in the specifically Very Online register—anti-imperialist, deeply invested in Palestine, and hostile to liberals far more often than to conservatives. She posts constantly across Bluesky and two Discord servers. She has been diagnosed in adulthood with autism and an anxiety disorder, and has a chronic pain condition with an ambiguous etiology that she has integrated into her self-understanding and which often forces her to use a cane. 

Lilith’s parents are still in eastern Washington and she visits for Christmas every other year. They use her name and get her pronouns right about seventy percent of the time, which she has decided is enough to maintain the relationship but otherwise they speak very little. She has no friends outside the network of online and in-person queer / political communities that she joined during the transition. 

Samantha Roth

Sam is twenty-six years old and works as a barista at a third-wave coffee shop in Fishtown. She has been there about a year and a half and earns roughly thirty thousand dollars before tips. She lives in a two-bedroom in Fishtown with a friend from college and covers her share of the rent with her parents money. In addition to this they pay for her health insurance, her phone, her therapy, her flights home, and often pay down her cc. She has no debt, no savings to speak of. 

She grew up in Scarsdale and her father is a partner at a midsize entertainment law firm in Manhattan and her mother runs a small foundation that gives grants to arts education programs in the city. Her younger brother is a junior at Yale and is going to law school and her maternal grandmother lives in a rent-stabilized two-bedroom on the Upper West Side that the family has held for sixty years and is the person Sam is closest to in the world. Sam went to Amherst, majored in English and spent a semester in Edinburgh. 

She is sincerely, casually, and comprehensively Jewish in the specific register of fourth- and fifth-generation American Reform Jews of the professional class. She went to Israel on Birthright at twenty and has not been back, and her relationship to it has gotten more complicated in recent years. Politically she come from a long line of Jewish progressivism and is DSA-adjacent in a way that does not require her to organize, attend meetings, or really do anything. She is a brilliant artist and some videos she has made of herself painting have been going semi-viral on social media recently. 

She has a close group of five women from Amherst who she travels to see regularly and is plugged into the alt art scene in her community. She reads contemporary literary fiction by women, has a Substack with two thousand subscribers, has been in therapy since she was fifteen.

Tiffany Park

Tiffany is a thirty-one year old working in advertising in Chicago. She earns forty-eight thousand dollars a year and works roughly twenty hours a week. She went to Duke for undergrad and studied psychology before getting a job at McKinsey in the city. Tiffany worked there for two years before quitting and taking a less stressful job. 

She grew up in Burke, Virginia, the daughter of Korean immigrants. Her father is a pediatrician who now lives in Arizona and her mother has a master’s in IT and works for a company in Tysons Corner. They divorced shortly after Tiffany left for Duke and no longer talk to each other. She has one younger brother who is at Virginia Tech for a Master in CS.

Her boyfriend is forty-two years old, has no children, has never been married, and does not really work. His family owns a series of warehouses across the country and his role in the business is nominal but highly compensated. He is good-looking in the soft way that people with soft lives are and they have been together for five years and he is pressuring her to get a boob job.  

The main way she self expresses is through Instagram where she posts to her thirty-eight thousand followers and climbing. Trips to Tulum, Lake Como, Aspen, Tokyo, the south of France—all funded by the boyfriend. She lives alone in a one-bedroom in a luxury high-rise in River North that costs thirty-eight hundred a month, again funded by her boyfriend. 

Her friend group is split in two. First, is a group of girls she has met in the city and second is a core set from Duke. She does Pilates, takes French lessons online, plays tennis once a week, and watches Real Housewives and Love Is Blind. She is not religious or political in anyway and doesn’t pretend to care. 

Jeremy Richards

Jeremy is twenty-nine years old and works as a mechanic at a two-bay garage in Wilson, North Carolina. He earns about fifty-four thousand dollars a year on the books and another six to ten thousand in side cash from Facebook Marketplace flips and friend-of-a-friend jobs. He works Monday through Friday, seven to four, with the occasional Saturday. He graduated from his local high school and never went to college, although he did do one semester at Pitt Community College. 

He has two children. His daughter is ten years old, lives with her mother Daniela, and is the product of a ten-month relationship Jeremy had with a Honduran-American girl when he was nineteen. He sees the daughter on alternating weekends and some holidays and pays child support inconsistently. His second child—a son—is from his wife, who is a stay at home mom, and is four. 

Jeremy drives a 2024 Chevy Silverado that he spends most of his free time working on and he is part of a “Truck Club” of guys in his area who meet up on Sunday. In addition to this his closest friends are four guys he went to high school with, all still in the area, who drink at the same two bars, hunt deer together every November, fish in the spring, and watch college football together every Saturday in the fall. 

He votes Republican in every election because they are the White man’s party and knows very little about politics beyond a visceral disgust for leftism and a broad feeling of being talked down to. Covid barely touched his life at all and he remains unvaccinated. Jeremy is Christian in the broad sense and has a picture of Christ in his house although he only rarely goes to church.

His world runs almost entirely on the older layer of the American welfare state, meaning programs like Social Security, rather than Great Society programs. The newer layer basically doesn’t apply to him—TANF, Section 8, WIC. 

What are the archetype’s of your life?

---

# Double Edged Sword of Meritocracy

Thoughts on Meritocracy from almost exactly two years ago

Date: 2026-03-23
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/double-edged-sword-of-meritocracy
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/double-edged-sword-of-meritocracy

Note: I originally published this back in March of 2024 before I even had a Substack. To this day it remains one of my most sincere articles, and so I wanted to republish it again now that I have a larger audience. I think the message, that it is worth trying, is more salient now than ever. Enjoy!

INTRODUCTION

I’m going to try in this essay something I rarely see done. First, I will discuss my perspective on Meritocracy in the traditional manner. Where I clearly articulate a thesis and then – hopefully – pay off on that promise by convincingly arguing the evidence for why I think it is true. Second, I’m going to present a more personal perspective on what it is like to grow up in a world of dazzling Meritocracies.

The last century has destroyed most of the external – exogenous – barriers to success. Largely, what this has revealed is that ability is much less evenly distributed than people could ever have imagined and, for most people, a failure to live their dream life is not because of institutional frictions but instead because of internal – endogenous – characteristics of who they are as a person.

As a result of this, people have grown disillusioned with the concept of Meritocracy itself. Attacks on the ideal are rarely couched in terms that denigrate the ability of systems to live up to some meritocratic ideal, but instead attack the very desirability of a Meritocracy itself. In particular, in the West, the result of increasingly global Meritocracy has been a weakening of inherited privileges and a realization that very little of the average American’s wealth is built on the fruit of their own labor and instead an inherited position they did nothing to earn.

We cannot allow the sting of our own failure to blunt the blade of Meritocracy. The major tension within all human societies is the need to reward the capable and temper the emotional sting of failure. As a society we must move past assigning value to people exclusively based on what they accomplish. Instead, we must also learn to celebrate the spectacular in all of humanity. Because each and every one of us carries a spark of divinity and represents a unique reflection of the most beautiful thing that has ever happened – life. Only an ethic that can glorify the strong and the weak, the powerful and the powerless, the deserving and the undeserved, can allow us to face the challenges of the 21st century. Because whether we like it or not, Meritocracy is a permanent feature of human life – all we can do is temporarily repress it.

THE REALITY OF MERITOCRACY:

The internet opened Pandora’s box of human potential. Through social media websites like TikTok and Twitter we each have access to billions of eyes. Applications like soundcloud and spotify have shattered control of our music industry by a small number of producers. Characters like Juice WRLD were able to bootstrap a real music career out of literally nothing. The vast majority of my entertainment is the creation of independent people expressing themselves online. No longer does an up and coming rapper need to be taken under the wing of someone already on the scene like Dr. Dre famously did for Eminem. Instead each of us has a window to the entire world at our fingertips. If we make something beautiful or interesting people will notice. The algorithm is like a blind judge assessing only on the likelihood what was made will entertain.

The internet has more than YouTube and movies though. Any subject you want to learn about is only a Google search away. MIT OpenCourseware hosts entire courses; almost every college including Stanford has a YouTube channel where they post lectures and talks. After listening to Bloodlands (for free on YouTube) by one of my favorite historians, Timothy Snyder, I realized I still didn’t think I knew enough. Within 30 seconds I was able to watch a lecture he gave on that very book at UT Dallas.

Everyone today has access to material at any level of complexity in any domain. You can find lectures on subjects as diverse as abstract algebra and gender theory with no need to enroll in school. All of this is ignoring Wikipedia; a website that I truly believe is one of the most spectacular creations of humanity. Access to information is distinct from choosing to use it but anyone with the ability to speak English – not a trivial obstacle – and access to the internet has at their fingertips the culmination of 10,000 years of civilizational progress.

This great leveling extends beyond the internet; across the world legal systems have made real and important progress in tearing down the walls of inherited privilege. In India the caste system – which stretches back 4,000 years – rather than being enshrined by the state is subject to aggressive dismantling pressure from both sides of the political system – although they disagree about the right way to accomplish this task.

All across the world women have slowly acquired legal privileges ending a crime against humanity that stretches back at least as long as recorded history – and probably much further. Finally, over the last 100 years the dual racial and colonial citizenship system which blocked the vast majority of humans from legal equality have been – largely – crushed. There is undeniably work still left to be done, but the progress has been brisk and thorough.

To see this in action simply look around your own workforce. What percent of your coworkers would have been excluded from the work you do because of exogenous fictions a century ago? For the first time in all of human history a human of any social class born anywhere in the world has a chance at shaping their world. It should not simply be taken for granted that people like Ma Huateng – the co-founder of Tencent – would have been able to influence the world like they did. If he had been born just 50 years earlier simply for the crime of being Chinese he would have been boxed out of the global system. Imperfect as this transition to Meritocracy has been, it represents a tectonic shift.

THE EFFECTS OF MERITOCRACY:

The effect of these institutional and cultural changes has been much more muted than expected. To many of the 20th century Utopians there was a perspective that merely removing institutional obstacles would be enough to abolish all differences. I touched on this some in my prior article on Western Sacred Cows, but this belief is so deeply baked into our society that we view all on-average differences as the result of discrimination.

You will often find a sort of Motte and Bailey tactic at play here where supporters of this worldview will quickly retreat from the framing I presented above to attributing it to what I refer to as the long shadow of history. What is clearly true though, is that on average, across the world – at the tasks we assign economic value to – ability is both highly heritable and concentrated among the historical elite of that society. In the article I just cited, Gregory Clark using British data from 1600-2022 shows that interventions like compulsory primary education or the post war expansion of social safety nets did not “change in any measurable way the strong familial persistence of social status across generations”. Even in China where the Maoist Cultural Revolution did everything within the scope of human ability to crush the inherited inequality of man, the descendants of the pre-revolutionary elites had reasserted themselves at the top of the social pyramid. “Persistence Through Revolutions” by Alesina et al. shows that the cultural values of the pre-revolutionary elites – namely a focus on individualism, free markets, and hard work – all worked together to undermine the equality of the Cultural Revolution.

Advocates of the Blank Slate worldview must reckon with these facts. If Maoism is not extreme enough of a break from the past what would be? Freedom and equality are not only not synonyms, they are incompatible objectives. Freedom implies the ability to make important choices that matter. Since there is an autoregressive character to success – failure breeds failure and success breeds success – in any system where people can make choices, outcomes will diverge – even on the aggregate level.

Despite our failure to abolish all inherited differences there should be no confusion; the reduction in exogenous barriers to success has led to a massive reduction in inherited inequality.

According to a review of the Black-White racial wealth gap published in late 2022 by the NBER the wealth gap has closed significantly – although the scale that remains is stark. In particular during the period of 1960-1980 as the barriers of legal racism were torn down the rate of convergence accelerated. It has reversed somewhat in recent years – for reasons no one fully understands – but there are without a doubt more Black millionaires today than at any other point in American history. Similarly, an analysis of the gender pay gap by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that “over the last 20 years, [the gender pay gap] has narrowed 17 percentage points to an average of 80”. Since the article was written in 2017 the progress has continued.

None of this though compares to the progress the developing world has made in the last 30 years. In 1994 according to the world bank GDP/Capita in 2015 dollars was ~$630 in South Asia, ~$1,200 in Sub-Saharan Africa, ~$4,200 in East Asia, ~$27,000 in the modern Euro Zone, and ~$40,000 in North America. Today those numbers are ~$2,000 for South Asia, ~$1,600 for Sub-Saharan Africa, ~$12,000 for East Asia, ~$38,000 in the EuroZone, and ~$61,000 in North America. What is excluded from this is the migration of 10s of millions of people from the developing world to wealthier countries. Simply walking into an engineering department at any company in the Bay Area will highlight the degree to which Meritocracy has expanded the pool of talent. The gap between the West and the Rest may never fully close but the crushing poverty that has defined the overwhelming majority of human experience is fading. The hands dealt to a British and Bengali child have begun a long and tenuous process to convergence.

However, like all things there are two sides to this story. At home in America this has unleashed a form of unarticulated terror. If the endogenous barriers to success for non-Americans and immigrants are as weak as the boardrooms of Google or the GSB faculty would suggest, little protects an American worker from a life of grinding poverty beyond the privilege of their birth. Because of extensive redistribution in America even the poorest person lives a life of global luxury; there is significant resistance to even stating this fact, but people know it on a deep emotional level. Like everything else in America, the reaction to this fact has bifurcated along the traditional lines of American politics, but even among the most liberal people I know there seems to be little desire to dismantle all of their institutional privileges.

Abroad there is also increasing frustration at the lack of immediate convergence. If you spend any time on the internet it is not difficult to see the seething resentment much of the non-White world holds towards Whites. The shadow of colonialism is long and symbols of it litter every society on earth. The fact that places like China have not been able to within one generation transform themselves into developed countries appears to be a source of real discontent within their society. Beyond this important obstacles remain for most of humanity. Look no further than the vast caravans of people risking everything to live illegally and tenuously within America to appreciate the level of inherited privilege each American has.

BACKLASH:

The slow pace of convergence and the stubborn persistence of group-level differences has begun to show its effect on the modern mind. A real backlash against the Meritocratic reforms of the last 100 years is brewing. The shape it takes – post colonial resentment or White fear – will be an important historical note but the social process is in swing as the developing world realizes that Western wealth is not only the product of inherited privilege but also cultural traditions which emphasize an important basket of characteristics. And ironically in the West, the young realize on average that very little differentiates them from the global poor.

Even excluding the international dynamic, websites like Twitter are a bitter reminder of the originality of one’s own thoughts. Since the algorithm shows no preference but towards the content it believes will entertain its users most completely. The weight of failure rests on no shoulders but your own. Whatever appetite existed for radical social upheaval against restrictions of inherited privilege will reverse if not resisted. From the vantage point I have it is impossible to say if the response will be Jacobin or Thermadorian so both flanks must be watched closely.

At the core are two truths. First, without the walls of privilege little but the sweat of their own brow can maintain a man’s standard of living. Second, man would prefer to be chained in hell than given a path to heaven and fail. People across all of history have always grown tired of the pressure created by Meritocracy. The rich want to ensure success for themselves and their children. The poor want to protect their emotional reality from the bitter taste of their own ability. In Western society, the transvaluation of moral virtue from the strong to the weak and from the capable to the incapable is splendidly documented in Nietzsche’s 1887 book “On the Genealogy of Morality”

AND YET….

There is something undeniably special about life in general, but human life in particular. Often, in the daily comparisons of life, it is easy to lose sight of this fact. Earth is so spectacularly interesting simply by existing; each of us has already won a lottery of immeasurable value. Even the most evil or incapable person is still more fascinating and important than any celestial object. As a thought experiment, imagine running a simulation of our entire universe with the goal of recording everything unique that happened. You can even imagine that the operator of this simulation had no inherent preference for humans. Then think of what fraction of the book would be devoted to Earth; this is even more true if you assume that we are alone in the universe.

In addition to this, even on a more focused scale, yes, ability is largely heritable; yes, outcomes are largely driven by ability; yes, this is unchangeable and can only be repressed at great social cost. But “largely” is doing an immense amount of work here. The random walk of cultural and genetic inheritance means we have no idea where the next spectacular human will come out of. Ensuring equal opportunity for everyone is the only way to not exclude the exceptional. Each of us is walking around with both immense personal potential and immeasurable potential in our children. Each newborn child holds in its curled fingers a web of outcomes stretching out into infinity.

All human life has value, not because of God, but because of how spectacularly unique it is, both on the micro and macro level.

PERSONAL:

I have since I can first remember dreamed of being a writer. As a child who grew up struggling to read, words have always held a certain magic to me. The first book I ever read front to back was “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” in 4th grade after being enrolled in a therapy for Dyslexic children called the Davis Method. I remember the feeling of finishing that book like it was yesterday. Suddenly a whole aspect of the human experience that I had previously been unable to access was unlocked. I felt like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods.

Over time this passion has come and gone. Like most people new to a skill, my writing for years was atrocious. Even today it is hard for me to write more than a paragraph or two without making some insane mistake – part of the reason I empathize with LLMs so much. But gradually I’ve improved as a writer. I have never had any illusions that writing novels or essays would be a real career so like most “reasonable” people I put my dreams in a box and moved on. After college I proceeded to take a job as a research assistant at the University of Chicago working for an accounting – basically economics – professor. This period – during Covid – was one of the darkest of my entire life. I would be lying if I didn’t honestly say I flirted with killing myself, only really not doing it out of some misplaced egoism and self importance. But the dream of writing hung around my neck like an Albatross slain by my sanity.

One morning in a fit of euphoria I sat down and without pausing wrote the script to a YouTube video. The original is now private but an unaltered version can be found here. Anxiously I posted it, knowing it would go nowhere, but hoping – secretly – it would be picked up by the algorithm and ascended. It got something like 40 views, most of them from friends and family I shared it with. Slowly the euphoria from the act of creation mixed with disappointment. Rather than simply a dream I had finally made something but clearly the algorithm hadn’t appreciated it. I jumped from script to script writing quite literally 10s of thousands of words and never landing on something I thought would “work”. Eventually, as even the impressions on the video trended to zero and no new views filtered in, I moved on. Rather than writing during my – ample – free time from a job I hated, I embraced the warm embrace of inaction.

Life slowly improved along with the weather and during the late summer of 2022 I moved out to California in order to enroll in a PhD program at the GSB where I currently live. As anyone who has taken a PhD will know, the first year was brutal. But during the summer as coursework receded and “research” became more important I realized once again I had plenty of time on my hands. This time I set myself two tasks: First, I wanted to try again to make content. Second, I wasn’t going to be so easily influenced by whether or not people consumed the content I created. In a euphoric sprint after I had completed my summer research expectation I created and released two videos – both of which I’m actually quite proud of. My first video is currently at 24 views and my second video sits at a grand total of 5 views. The watch time data is even more brutal. For my second video I’m fairly sure only one person other than myself watched it – a friend I shared the video with. Despite my second objective, this was actually quite stinging since I was convinced the perspective I was sharing was not only unique but quite true.

Of course, with some distance, I can be aware of the extremely low production quality. Both videos essentially consist of a single looping reel over an essay read – poorly – with too much affectation.

What hurt more than anything though was how convinced I was of my own merits. I would never have articulated this normally but I had this deep sense that “of course I’m smarter and more deserving of success” than the YouTubers I watch. This of course is false and cringe but I share it for a reason.

Later as the whole Twitter debacle unfolded I was drawn to the app – at first to laugh at Elon but then later by how truly enchanting it is. There for the first time with writers like Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias, I was presented with a career I would salivate over. Clearly, an audience existed for a style of overconfident White boi writing – something I specialize in – but the memory of my experience with YouTube held my hand. Just as I had known the lack of algorithmic response was largely due to the quality of my videos I feared that the lack of response to my essays would be the result not of frictions, but instead my own low ability.

In many ways, this project is to me a rejection of that framing. It is an investment in myself and a statement that I believe I can be a writer who is worth reading. Perhaps not for years but eventually.

Because in my mind this is the true poison of Meritocracy. It isn’t just that it creates a system where the successful win socially and materially, but also that it scares many of us from even trying. Unlike in the 1980s where if my writings never took off I could vaguely gesture at the publishing houses just not “getting it”, people were doing exactly what I wanted to do and making a career out of it. In fact my success was directly tied to my ability and that made the whole endeavor terrifying beyond belief.

I cannot even begin to imagine how much more deeply this world view is held by the sort of conscientious and careful young people I once was. It is difficult to look at people like Mr. Beast and not realize that their story means the only obstacle is will. Being forced to live an agonized office life because of who you are stings in a way being forced to by the system never can.

I have no idea where Voyagers Log will go. If nothing else I’m loving how it feels to finally bet on myself. Whatever happens, even if no one reads this, at least I wrote it. To paraphrase a character from the show Community: Life is a game of chance. You either roll the dice or you lose your turn. Thank god those chances are at least somewhat under my control.

CONCLUSION:

Meritocracy is like everything, multifaceted and complicated. But our social obsession with the successful has polluted what could otherwise be a moment of maximum human flourishing. Too many young people are trapped in a worldview where to try simply reveals the limit of your ability and that is worse than any punishment. Since we all benefit from the efficient allocation of incentives and resources we have to find a way to preserve Meritocracy as a social tool, but dull its ability to measure our worth. Many hierarchies of human life simply can not be repressed and will spring back whatever we do. But our attempts to repress them could do immeasurable harm and we must resist the natural human instinct to invent new privileges of birth as the old ones are destroyed.

Human life is not defined by economic value or even creative value. Human life is valuable simply because it exists. Consciousness alone is such a spectacular miracle that no human requires anything else to approach perfection.

The only way we can preserve Meritocracy is by celebrating those who tried regardless of their success. Our hero must be the businessman whose store failed or the college student who dropped out. What makes a Meritocracy work is not the success but the thousand invisible steps that led to the success. It’s the thousand local minima on our slide down the universal gradient which should be celebrated. We cannot forget that rights belong to men, not means.

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# Nietzsche: A Gentle Introduction

If you gaze long enough into the abyss eventually the abyss looks back

Date: 2026-03-22
URL: https://peterbanks.org/introductions/nietzsche-a-gentle-introduction
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/nietzsche-a-gentle-introduction

This article will do two things. First, I will give the strongest and most honest presentation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas I can. Before second, reflecting substantially on his work myself. 

It would feel insincere to try to explain why I think Nietzsche is so important because he is arguably the most influential philosopher since Kant, and if you are a reader of my substack you will doubtless know at least some of the key terms from his thinking. Even phrases like “what does not kill me makes me stronger” or “If you gaze long enough into the abyss eventually the abyss looks back” come from his writings without most people even realizing it. 

But I do feel the need to explain why I am taking the time to write my own summary. Already the world is teeming with nearly five generations of historical analysis in every form, medium, perspective, and degree of sympathy imaginable. If you are looking for another one after this, I would recommend Will Durant’s. Still, I have found them all frustrating for a number of reasons.

Too often they are so academic and biographical that the author shrinks from any interesting conclusions into a confusion of trivia. Equally common are the attempts to salvage his core insights from the rest of his project. Because Nietzsche’s work is so central to all of postmodernism, finding a way to fit him into philosophies like feminism or socialism has consumed innumerable academic careers. And finally, failing that, he is often twisted into a cudgel by those who hate him as the most potent critic of universalism, and so see him, perhaps rightly, as the preferred thinker of any rogue Raskolnikov.

As a result, my answer is simply this. Nietzsche has been turned into such a ball of confusion and complexity by these accumulated conflicting interpretations that I would have wanted someone to simply sit down with him candidly and without an explicit agenda. Naturally, this article may, despite my best efforts, have mistakes, and so if you find anything feel free to let me know.

If you are interested in reading any of his books yourself, they are all available for free on Project Gutenberg. My hope is that this article helps you think about his project more clearly, or even better, equips you with a map to navigate his works directly for yourself. This is because Nietzsche is simultaneously one of the greatest and most frustrating authors I have ever read. There is, I believe, in his broad philosophical project a clear through-line, but the actual textual content is often purposefully confusing and colored by academic and artistic license, or, if I’m being less charitable, megalomania and madness.

This essay is long, so let me give you the short version first if you would like to go about your day. 

Short Version

Nietzsche believed that there was no ethical bottom to the universe, but that existence was still justified aesthetically. All of his work was, at its core, an attempt to figure out what these twin beliefs actually meant. 

His answer was to demand a new kind of human being, the Overman, who was able to create values out of themselves and so rise above the default answer of nihilism. But why did he think that there was no ethical bottom to the universe?

Simply put, he thought that without the Christian God, who he believed had been killed by the Christian virtue of honesty applied to its own evidentiary base, there was no reason to believe that Christian ethics were superior at all. Nietzsche was a trained classical philologist, and like many of his era was obsessed with classical civilization. In Greece and Rome he saw evidence for a different morality, an older morality, which seemed to lack any of the guilt and self-hatred he saw around him. In ancient Greece in particular he saw in the tragedy a model for holding life, in its pains and its pleasures, without flinching or asking for something else. 

It is here that we arrive at his most substantial academic contribution, the genealogy of morals. To show that Christianity was not the only possible moral system, he traced the origins of our words for “good” and observed that rather than being defined by the recipients, they were instead words the powerful used to describe themselves. Nobility was first a description of good birth long before it was applied to morality. Throughout his works he argued that this morality, the aristocratic morality of the master, had been subverted and twisted by the weak to create a “slave” morality. Specifically, the priestly caste — physically weak but psychologically brilliant — had redefined moral value to place the weak as the “good” and the strong as the “evil.” This “slave revolt in morals” had won so completely that people were no longer able to even recognize it as a system, but instead experienced it as self-evidently true.

So what are we to do instead? Nietzsche’s answer comes in the form of amor fati, or “love of fate.” In other words, we must love our lives so sincerely that if we were forced to live them again forever, with the same pleasures and the same pains, we would view this not as damnation, but instead as heaven. 

Underneath all of this sits his most fundamental concept, the will to power. This not only contains the will to dominate others, but instead represents what he believed was a basic biological urge to grow and overcome. Everything, whether ascending or descending, strong or weak, has a will to power, and the only question is what direction it takes, either outward toward creation, or inward toward self-punishment.

The long version of what Nietzsche believed

In order for any of Nietzsche’s project to make sense, you must first accept that “God is dead.” Now, if you are looking for a strong argument against the existence of God in his works, you will walk away disappointed. Still, I think that it is a defensible assumption on two levels. First, even if you believe in God, you can think of all of this as a counterfactual world where morality is truly rootless — and so if you find it repulsive, it is its own argument for the existence of God. And second, the sense in which he means “God is dead” is, in my opinion, broadly an accurate sociological description. 

Because what Nietzsche is really saying here is that people do not believe in God in the real sense, the sense of seeing the Christian creed as the unquestionable word of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator. I think this quote from Carlyle’s “On Heroes” captures the idea well. 

“[Religion is] the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there”

It is undeniably rare to, in the modern developed world, meet a person who fully defines their relationship “to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there” through a sincere and austere examination of the Gospels. Thus, rather than arguing for the Death of God, he is merely describing the already existent psychological state of modern society, a state that has undeniably only become stronger since he wrote these works. Importantly, though, Nietzsche did not believe that God had been killed by another competing explanation for existence or justification for suffering, but instead had been consumed by itself, specifically by its own insistence on honesty. Quoting from “The Gay Science”:

“even we knowing ones of to-day, the godless and anti-metaphysical, still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief a millennium old, the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth, that the truth is divine.... But what if this itself always becomes more untrustworthy, what if nothing any longer proves itself divine, except it be error, blindness, and falsehood;—what if God himself turns out to be our most persistent lie?”

He explains the process through which the Christian God, the God of truth, consumes itself in a passage from “Twilight of the Idols” called “How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable. The History of an Error”:

“1. The true world, attainable to the sage, the pious man, and the man of virtue,—he lives in it, he is it.

(The most ancient form of the idea was relatively clever, simple, convincing. It was a paraphrase of the proposition “I, Plato, am the truth.”)

2. The true world which is unattainable for the moment is promised to the sage, to the pious man, and to the man of virtue (“to the sinner who repents”).

(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, more insidious, more evasive,—it becomes a woman, it becomes Christian.)

3. The true world is unattainable; it cannot be proved, it cannot promise anything; but even as a thought alone it is a comfort, an obligation, a command.

(At bottom this is still the old sun, but seen through mist and scepticism: the idea has become sublime, pale, northern, Königsbergian.)

4. The true world—is it unattainable? At all events it is unattained. And as unattained it is also unknown. Consequently it no longer comforts, nor saves, nor constrains: what could something unknown constrain us to?

(The grey of dawn. Reason stretches itself and yawns for the first time. The cock-crow of positivism.)”

So you can see the progression is from Plato to the collapse of all constraints. It is natural to ask what all of this implies to Nietzsche, and the answer is the abolishment of Christian morality, of course! Nietzsche’s interest in abolishing the Christian God extended also to attacking secular attempts at restoring Christian morality, in this case specifically George Eliot: 

“They are rid of the Christian God and therefore think it all the more incumbent upon them to hold tight to Christian morality: this is an English way of reasoning; but let us not take it ill in moral females à la Eliot.” But “when we renounce the Christian faith, we abandon all right to Christian morality.” Because “Christianity is a system, a complete outlook upon the world, conceived as a whole. If its leading concept, the belief in God, is wrenched from it, the whole is destroyed; nothing vital remains in our grasp.”

Nietzsche was not a neutral scholar here, and his opposition to Christian morality was rooted in a sincere belief that it was fundamentally hostile to Life itself. The religion took the natural drives of Man — strength, sensuality, pride, the desire to create and dominate — and turned them into sins. It is worth reminding you here that Nietzsche was a trained academic in Classical Philology — a fusion of linguistics and history — and was by all accounts a prodigy. This, combined with a wave of Grecophilia that had taken European society by storm in the second half of the 19th century, led Nietzsche to look back on the classical world as an alternative to modernity. Not only an alternative, but one which seemed more capable of beauty and sincerity than the world he was living in. 

In his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy,” Nietzsche identified two fundamental artistic impulses in Greek culture which he called the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian impulse was the drive towards order and beauty which found its outlet in sculpture, epic poetry, and philosophy. It stood in contrast to the Dionysian impulse which represented ecstasy and chaos and was celebrated with music, dance, alcohol, and ritualistic sexuality. It was in the ability to blend both of these impulses without negating either which, according to Nietzsche, gave their tragedies such beauty and their life meaning. In “Twilight of the Idols” he attempts to articulate the role that the Dionysian impulse played in the lives of the classical Greeks:

“In the doctrine of mysteries, pain was pronounced holy: the ‘pains of childbirth’ sanctify pain in general, — all becoming and all growth, everything that guarantees the future involves pain.... In order that there may be eternal joy in creating, in order that the will to life may say Yea to itself in all eternity, the ‘pains of childbirth’ must also be eternal. All this is what the word Dionysus signifies: I know of no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism, this symbolism of the Dionysian phenomenon.”

Much of his writing can only be read as grief over the fact that Christianity had destroyed this world and replaced Greek sanctification of pleasure and pain with “sins” and divine punishment. Again, from “Twilight of the Idols”:

“It was only Christianity, which, with its fundamental resentment against life, made something impure out of sexuality: it flung filth at the very basis, the very first condition of our life.” The Church’s method was not argument but castration — it “never inquires ‘how can a desire be spiritualised, beautified, deified?’ In all ages it has laid the

weight of discipline in the process of extirpation... But to attack the passions at their roots, means attacking life itself at its source: the method of the Church is hostile to life.” 

If you accept, at least for the sake of argument, that Christianity is hostile to life, the natural question is how did such a thing even emerge? To explain this Nietzsche introduces his most important contribution to academic philosophy, the concept of moral genealogy.

Moral Genealogy

The basic tool of genealogy is to examine moral systems not only through the lens of what they believe, but also by asking why they believe it and what type of person needed it to be true. What Nietzsche finds is that our attachment of virtue to concepts such as humility, meekness, or compassion for the weak is simply missing from the classical world, and in their place are virtues like nobility, magnificence, and proper pride (megalopsychia — “greatness of soul”), the last of which is definitely a sin. Take Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: nowhere in the entire book do we see a celebration of Christian meekness; the model man is one of power and vitality whose self-overcoming is external and active. From “On the Genealogy of Morals”: 

“I then found … that everywhere ‘aristocrat,’ ‘noble’ (in the social sense), is the root idea, out of which have necessarily developed ‘good’ in the sense of ‘with aristocratic soul,’ ‘noble,’ in the sense of ‘with a soul of high calibre,’ ‘with a privileged soul’ — a development which invariably runs parallel with that other evolution by which ‘vulgar,’ ‘plebeian,’ ‘low,’ are made to change finally into ‘bad.’”

The pattern Nietzsche identifies here is undeniably everywhere for those willing to look. Our word for “gentle,” for example, in the title comes from the French and meant of good birth. Carlyle has a great section on this from “On Heroes” that I’ll quote here: 

“All dignities of rank, on which human association rests, are what we may call a Heroarchy (Government of Heroes),—or a Hierarchy, for it is “sacred” enough withal! The Duke means Dux, Leader; King is Kon-ning, Kan-ning, Man that knows or cans. Society everywhere is some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes—reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise.”

In other words, the powerful had affirmatively defined themselves as “good,” and then they had defined everything they were not as “bad” as almost an afterthought. This, of course, was not done in consultation with the Vulgus because the powerful did not feel the need to justify their values; they simply declared them true by right.

But with civilization came structure and order. And with this structure came restrictions on our ability to express many of our animal instincts outwardly, such as aggression, cruelty, or the pleasure of the hunt. These instincts did not disappear, though; instead, they were turned inward upon ourselves. From “On the Genealogy of Morals”:

“All instincts which do not find a vent without, turn inwards — this is what I mean by the growing “internalisation” of man: consequently we have the first growth in man, of what subsequently was called his soul. The whole inner world, originally as thin as if it had been stretched between two layers of skin, burst apart and expanded proportionately, and obtained depth, breadth, and height, when man’s external outlet became obstructed. These terrible bulwarks, with which the social organisation protected itself against the old instincts of freedom, brought it about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man became turned backwards against man himself. Enmity, cruelty, the delight in persecution, in surprises, change, destruction — the turning all these instincts against their own possessors: this is the origin of the “bad conscience.”

I think this is one of the most interesting sections because it is saying that not only did this confinement cause us to develop “bad conscience” through turning our instinct for cruelty on ourselves, but that this internalization was also the direct cause of us becoming ensouled. 

In a later passage: 

“It was this animal in the hands of the tamer, which beat itself against the bars of its cage; it was this being who, pining and yearning for that desert home of which it had been deprived, was compelled to create out of its own self, an adventure, a torture-chamber, a hazardous and perilous desert.”

So now man is no longer a wild animal. He has equipped himself with mental adventures to satisfy his instincts, but they are still unorganized and individual. As a result, there was no meaning attached to the suffering in an objective, outward sense, and undirected agony is the one thing human beings cannot tolerate for long. We can bear enormous amounts of pain and grief if we believe the pain is about something important. 

And to give this pain meaning came the ascetic priest, who told the Vulgus that it was not arbitrary, but instead punishment. Punishment for sins against an all-knowing God who would dole out rewards to the moral in a world above and superior to our own. From “On the Genealogy of Morals”:

“Imagine man, suffering from himself, some way or other but at any rate physiologically, perhaps like an animal shut up in a cage, not clear as to the why and the wherefore! imagine him in his desire for reasons — reasons bring relief — in his desire again for remedies, narcotics at last, consulting one, who knows even the occult — and see, lo and behold, he gets a hint from his wizard, the ascetic priest, his first hint on the “cause” of his trouble: he must search for it in himself, in his guiltiness, in a piece of the past, he must understand his very suffering as a state of punishment.”

And here was the poison as Nietzsche saw it. People had replaced meaning in this life with the belief in another life, another life for which the evidence was weaker than most people wanted to admit. But to add insult to injury, he believed that in all of their piety and meekness what they were really channeling was sadistic resentment towards the powerful.  

“These weaklings!—they also, forsooth, wish to be the strong some time; there is no doubt about it, some time their kingdom also must come—”the kingdom of God” is their name for it, as has been mentioned: they are so meek in everything! Yet in order to experience that kingdom it is necessary to live long, to live beyond death,—yes, eternal life is necessary so that one can make up for ever for that earthly life “in faith,” “in love,” “in hope.” Make up for what? Make up by what? … Possibly we could quickly surmise it; but it is better that it should be explicitly attested by an authority who in such matters is not to be disparaged, Thomas of Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. “The blessed in the heavenly kingdom,” he says, as gently as a lamb, “will behold the punishments of the damned, so that their blessedness may be more pleasing to them.”1 

Now it is worth emphasizing here that to Nietzsche the ascetic priest was not merely cynical, but instead needed this system to exist because they themselves were sick and resentful but still brilliant, so their brilliance found a way to make that sickness a virtue rather than a failure. In fact, on the topic of Christ himself Nietzsche was unusually sympathetic, since he saw in Jesus a sincerity to himself which could, by definition, not be copied by any of his followers. “At bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.” 

But they were deceivers and in their need to fit reality to their emotional needs they had transformed God himself, from an expression of the people’s strength into something else. Quoting from “The Antichrist”:  

“God becomes the formula for every slander upon the ‘here and now,’ and for every lie about the ‘beyond’! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!”

Even if Nietzsche believed Christianity to be the most potent agent of this illness, it was not the first manifestation. In “The Birth of Tragedy”:

“Socrates divined still more. He saw right through his noble Athenians; he perceived that his case, his peculiar case, was no exception even in his time” and that “everywhere the instincts were in a state of anarchy; everywhere people were within an ace of excess: the monstrum in animo was the general danger. ‘The instincts would play the tyrant; we must discover a counter-tyrant who is stronger than they.’”

In a way, no man is more responsible for the slave morality than Socrates because through him the world received Plato. And then eventually came “the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato.” 

It was in Paul, though, that Nietzsche saw the true architect of his enemy, “Christianity.” Quoting from “The Antichrist”:

“In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the ‘bearer of glad tidings’; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels—nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses.” Because “what he wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power—he had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs.”

Even in Paul, in the pinnacle of slave morality, there still existed a will to power because to Nietzsche all living things desired power. 

The Will to Power

As I said in the short version, underneath everything that Nietzsche wrote was the idea of the will to power. The concept appears most fully in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” where Nietzsche has Life herself speak:

“Behold,” said she, “I am that WHICH MUST EVER SURPASS ITSELF. To be sure, ye call it will to procreation, or impulse towards a goal, towards the higher, remoter, more manifold”

The will to power is a descendant of Schopenhauer’s will to life, but rather than constraining itself to perpetuation Nietzsche is adding that life has a need to surpass itself. Quoting from “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: 

“He certainly did not hit the truth who shot at it the formula: ‘Will to existence’: that will — doth not exist! For what is not, cannot will; that, however, which is in existence — how could it still strive for existence! Only where there is life, is there also will: not, however, Will to Life, but — so teach I thee — Will to Power!” Self-preservation, in other words, is a secondary effect. The organism does not fundamentally seek to maintain itself. It seeks to grow, to discharge its strength, to become more than what it currently is. Life would rather die than stop growing. ‘Rather would I succumb than disown this one thing.’”

In other words, as he said in “Twilight of the Idols”: 

“The general condition of life is not one of want or famine, but rather of riches, of lavish luxuriance, and even of absurd prodigality, — where there is a struggle, it is a struggle for power. We should not confound Malthus with nature.”  

This applies to individuals also, of course; speaking of the great man, he “is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness. The instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended in him; the overpowering pressure of out-flowing energy in him forbids any such protection and prudence.”

Earlier, when I explained that Nietzsche argued that when our instincts were unable to be directed outward at the universe, they would instead be turned inward on the person themself, he thought of no instinct as more important or universal to Life than the will to power. Thus, to the idea’s artistic credit and logical deficit, everything we do can be understood through either a positive ability to express our self-overcoming outwardly or a negative, inward, resentful reimagining. But there is a normative ranking here where, to be good in the life-affirming sense, you must be able to extend this will to the external world. 

Still, if everything is will to power, and the morality we inherited is the product of the weak turning against the strong in resentment, and the God who gave that feeling moral weight is dead, then the natural question of what the fuck we are supposed to do emerges. 

The Overman

Nietzsche never fully settles on a concrete positive vision, if we are going to be honest. I’ll get more into this in his biography, but the most coherent answer is the image of the Overman — or, in the German, the Übermensch — which he paints in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: 

Note: the translation I’m using for this book refers to him as “the Superman,” and the term Übermensch has been variously translated in many ways. I am partial to “the Overman” since not only is it a more literal translation, as far as I know, I don’t speak German, but it also better captures the idea of surpassing oneself, which is core. I have thus replaced Superman with Overman where relevant. 

“The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Overman SHALL BE the meaning of the earth!

I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not.

Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!

Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!”

The last line there is his theology in about as plain English as he will ever state it: if God is dead, then let nature be our God instead. And since Life is “that which must ever surpass itself,” so too is this urge to surpass ourselves, which we must cultivate. Or as Zarathustra puts it: 

“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.”

Later in the same book, Life herself speaks again. 

“Verily, I say unto you: good and evil which would be everlasting — it doth not exist! Of its own accord must it ever surpass itself anew. With your values and formulae of good and evil, ye exercise power, ye valuing ones: and that is your secret love, and the sparkling, trembling, and overflowing of your souls.”

So the process must always continue, always climbing and always self-overcoming, because “what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.” In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche articulates what this looks like more specifically. 

The “real philosophers,” he writes, “ARE COMMANDERS AND LAW-GIVERS; they say: ‘Thus SHALL it be!’ They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of the past — they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is CREATING, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is — WILL TO POWER. —”

Thus the Overman is not merely someone who has freed himself from inherited morality, he is also a legislator who is able to align his will to truth and will to power. Nietzsche sees a version of something close to this in Christ which is why he is able to still see something admirable in him even if he despises his intellectual progeny.

What the Legislator Legislates

But if the Overman is a legislator, the question becomes: what does his legislation actually look like? Nietzsche does not leave this unanswered. In “Beyond Good and Evil” he describes his ideal society:

“the essential thing, however, in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not regard itself as a function either of the kingship or the commonwealth, but as the SIGNIFICANCE and highest justification thereof — that it should therefore accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, FOR ITS SAKE, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments”

He continues in the next section. 

“Life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation... it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life”

If that is the structure, the next question is who should exploit and who should be exploited? In “Twilight of the Idols” he lays out the principle:

“Selfishness has as much value as the physiological value of him who practises it: its worth may be great, or it may be worthless and contemptible. Every individual may be classified according to whether he represents the ascending or the descending line of life. When this is decided, a canon is obtained by means of which the value of his selfishness may be determined. If he represent the ascending line of life, his value is of course extraordinary... If he represent declining development, decay, chronic degeneration, sickness... he is of little worth, and the purest equity would have him take away as little as possible from those who are lucky strokes of nature. He is then only a parasite upon them....”

And it is in “The Antichrist” and the “Improvers of Mankind” section of “Twilight of the Idols” where Nietzsche gives us his model for what this looks like in practice. He turns to the Laws of Manu, the Hindu caste system, as an example of what he considers a superior moral legislation to Christianity. From “The Antichrist”:

“I have a contrary feeling when I read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior work, which it would be a sin against the intelligence to so much as name in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is a genuine philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition — it gives even the most fastidious psychologist something to sink his teeth into.”

What he admires in Manu is the caste system, which he believes reflects the natural hierarchy of life itself. Again from “The Antichrist”: 

“The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no ‘modern idea,’ can exert any influence. In every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another.” The superior caste, “the fewest,” has “as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth.” A high civilization is a pyramid that “can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.” This mediocrity is consolidated by the abuse of the Chandala. From “Twilight of the Idols”:

“the Chandala are the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime... Their clothes shall consist only of the rags torn from corpses, their vessels shall be the fragments of broken pottery, their ornaments shall be made of old iron, and their religion shall be the worship of evil spirits” 

So the logic from beginning to end is: life is will to power, the Overman is the legislator of new values, society exists to produce Overmen, ascending life is to be cultivated and descending life eliminated, and the model for this is a caste system in which the lowest are deliberately degraded so that the highest may flourish. Christianity reversed this hierarchy, and that reversal is, for Nietzsche, the central catastrophe of Western civilization.

Amor Fati and Eternal Recurrence

But how do you know if you have actually become this model type? How do you test whether your affirmation of life is sincere and not merely another form of self-deception? Nietzsche’s answer comes in two interlocking concepts: amor fati — the love of fate — and the eternal recurrence of the same. From “Ecce Homo,” 

“My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: the fact that a man wishes nothing to be different, either in front of him or behind him, or for all eternity. Not only must the necessary be borne, and on no account concealed,—all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity,—but it must also be loved.”

It is this last line, that “it must also be loved,” that differentiates amor fati from Stoic resignation. It is not enough that we merely accept our lives; we must love them totally. Because to wish any of it away is to wish yourself away, since we are all the sum of everything that has happened to us. Consider the following thought experiment from “The Gay Science”: 

“What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: ‘This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence—and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!’—Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: ‘Thou art a God, and never did I hear aught more divine!’”

In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” the idea is dramatized when Zarathustra confronts a dwarf — the spirit of gravity — at a gateway marked “This Moment,” from which two eternal roads run in opposite directions. To the dwarf Zarathustra poses the following question:

“Must not whatever CAN run its course of all things, have already run along that lane? Must not whatever CAN happen of all things have already happened, resulted, and gone by? And if everything have already existed, what thinkest thou, dwarf, of This Moment? Must not this gateway also—have already existed? And are not all things closely bound together in such wise that This Moment draweth all coming things after it? CONSEQUENTLY—itself also?”

In modern English: if the universe is finite and time is infinite, wouldn’t everything have to repeat eventually? Since a Newtonian billiards model of reality is no longer dominant, it is common for people to try to argue that Nietzsche only meant this idea as a thought experiment, and that is mostly how it is presented in his books. However, in his personal life the lines become less clear, and there is evidence he may have literally believed in eternal recurrence. 

But on some level I’m not sure the distinction between a literal and a figurative belief means much when you are discussing Nietzsche. Since as he said in “The Birth of Tragedy,” “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world appear justified” to begin with.  

Jews and women

Now that we have completed the survey of his philosophy, I want to turn to one final topic before I discuss his biography and more of my personal thoughts. Specifically, his treatment of women and Jews. This is an important topic to cover both because I think it is central to the way he perceived the world, but also because, candidly, I feel like most people who talk about it are, knowingly or not, lying. I will quote his own words here and avoid using either “The Will to Power” or “Ecce Homo,” both of which were published posthumously and edited by his antisemitic sister. 

Women

It is impossible to read Nietzsche honestly and not realize that he did not view men and women as moral or intellectual equals. A defender of him would argue that this is perhaps distinct from pure misogyny, but in my opinion he crosses that threshold also. Throughout his work he paints a consistent image of women as manipulative, foolish, and useful only for sex and pregnancy. This is not out of step with his general hierarchical view of society, so I’m not going to pretend that it is hypocritical, even if I disagree with him. 

In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in the chapter “Old and Young Women,” Zarathustra delivers a series of pronouncements to an old woman who has asked him to speak about women:

“Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution — it is called pregnancy.

Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child. But what is woman for man? Two different things wanteth the true man: danger and diversion. Therefore wanteth he woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.

The happiness of man is, “I will.” The happiness of woman is, “He will.”

Obey, must the woman, and find a depth for her surface. Surface, is woman’s soul, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water.”

The chapter ends with the old woman offering Zarathustra a “little truth” in return: “Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!”

“Beyond Good and Evil” presents what he describes as “merely — MY truths.” 

“Woman has so much cause for shame; in woman there is so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion concealed.” He concludes this aphorism by saying, “What does woman care for truth? From the very first, nothing is more foreign, more repugnant, or more hostile to woman than truth — her great art is falsehood, her chief concern is appearance and beauty.”

Later in the same book:

“Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the terrible thoughtlessness with which the feeding of the family and the master of the house is managed! Woman does not understand what food means, and she insists on being cook! If woman had been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of years, have discovered the most important physiological facts.”

The natural relationship between the sexes is one where the man of depth “can only think of woman as ORIENTALS do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein.”

These are only a small collection of his remarks which span the entire set of his works and are stated almost always without qualification.

Jews

The question of Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism is a contested academic bog I would prefer to avoid. Unlike his position on women, which only cuts one way, throughout his works Nietzsche presents contradictory beliefs about the Jews. On the personal level he was unambiguously opposed to anti-Semitism, for example breaking with his publisher, and arguably with Wagner, over it, and in “Beyond Good and Evil” he lists anti-Semitism alongside other forms of nationalist stupidity: “among present-day Germans there is alternately the anti-French folly, the anti-Semitic folly, the anti-Polish folly, the Christian-romantic folly, [and] the Wagnerian folly.” 

He also calls the Jews “beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race at present living in Europe.” And yet it is unambiguous which group is collectively responsible for the moral illness which he identifies in Christianity. From “Twilight of the Idols”: 

“Christianity as sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as grown upon this soil, represents the counter-movement against that morality of breeding, of race and of privilege: — it is essentially an anti-Aryan religion: Christianity is the transvaluation of all Aryan values, the triumph of Chandala values, the proclaimed gospel of the poor and of the low”

Or in “On the Genealogy of Morals”: 

“It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with a terrifying logic to suggest the contrary equation.” And: “It was the Jews, that priestly nation which eventually realised that the one method of effecting satisfaction on its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of values, which was at the same time an act of the cleverest revenge.”

Remember, though, that to Nietzsche this act of moral reinvention was in its own way a representation of the will to power. From “The Antichrist”: 

“The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price: this price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the outer.” 

Still, even if there is something admirable in the slave revolt, if only in Christ as the one true Christian, Nietzsche still believed that the Jewish priestly class had “a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘true’ and ‘false’ in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.”

Nietzsche the man

Having now surveyed his philosophy, we now have enough material to ask what kind of man creates this theory. What type of soul needed these beliefs, and what kind of life did they live? 

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in the Prussian village of Röcken. At the time, the state was ruled by Frederick William IV, a man who contained both a cowardice and deep romantic feeling, and in 1848, only four years after Nietzsche’s birth, Europe was consumed by an explosion of Romantic nationalism and bourgeois liberalism. Although “The Revolution of 1848” was eventually put down by the conservative establishment, it did irreparable damage to the prestige of the old order. There is a great quote from Carlyle’s “Latter-Day Pamphlets,” written in the direct aftermath of that same revolution, which captures the ~vibe~ quite well. 

“Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, ‘Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!’ and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, ‘We are poor histrios, we sure enough;—did you want heroes? Don’t kill us; we couldn’t help it!’ Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon”

This emotional reality, I believe, is central to understanding his writing. Nietzsche grew up in a world where the old aristocracy continued to rule, both in practice and in theory, but where everyone knew they were doomed to either be thrown down by revolution or reduced to an actor playing a role, such as under British constitutionalism. 

Nietzsche’s father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Lutheran pastor with enough bourgeois patriotic spirit to name his son after the king, but when Nietzsche was still a young child he fell down a stone step and hit his head. After this injury he rapidly declined over the course of a year and in July 1849 passed away from “softening of the brain.” 

After this, the family moved to Naumburg-an-der-Saale, where he was raised by a collection of female relatives, in what was, by all accounts, a deeply pious family. Nietzsche absorbed this world totally, and schoolmates often called him “the little pastor.” One day, when his mother saw him walking slowly home through heavy rain without any protection, she asked him why he did not run, and in response he said that they had been told not to run in the streets. 

As I mentioned earlier in the article, Nietzsche was an academic prodigy and one of the most brilliant young men of his generation in Germany. At thirteen he was admitted to Pforta, Prussia’s most rigorous boarding schools, where he was exposed to both rigorous education and abuse by the other students. It was here that he lost his faith. 

In the autumn of 1864, Nietzsche enrolled at the University of Bonn before transferring to Leipzig, where he studied classical philology. Here, as before, he excelled academically, and at the age of 24 he was given the chair in classical philology at the University of Basel. It was at Basel that he grew close with the brilliant artist Richard Wagner, with whom he formed a deep and complicated friendship. 

When, in 1870, France and Prussia went to war, Nietzsche opted to take a ~sabbatical~ to assist the motherland. He worked in an ambulance corps, where he spent the war tending to wounded soldiers. It was in this war that he contracted both diphtheria and dysentery, and began his slow process of mental deterioration. From then on he suffered from migraines of such intensity that he would spend days vomiting nothing but bile. After the war he returned to his academic position, where he published his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.” 

The book was substantially a celebration of Wagner’s work and, as you could probably tell from my extensive quotation of it, a full-throated attack on Christian society. Worse than this, the book is of dubious academic value as a neutral examination of classical Greece since Nietzsche came with an aesthetic observation about reality and then warped the historical facts to fit this preconceived mold. Unsurprisingly, this represented the end of his professional academic career, and a scathing review by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff titled — “Future Philology!” — led to near-universal social isolation within his discipline. 

As his academic career deteriorated so too did both his health and his relationship with Wagner. By 1876 he had physically deteriorated to the point that he was no longer able to teach and in 1879, at thirty-four, he was finally obligated to resign his professorship. 

From this point until his collapse in 1889, Nietzsche lived the life of a semi-vagrant, traveling with the weather and staying in cheap boarding houses. While living this nomadic life he first met Lou Salomé in Rome. She was twenty one years old, Russian, and Nietzsche was obsessed immediately. Although she had no interest in him romantically, the two formed a brief, intense friendship that was probably the single most important relationship of his entire life. 

One by one, he lost all of his friends during this period, and his books were met with almost total academic and public silence. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” for example, which is, in my opinion, genuinely one of the most beautiful works of poetry ever written, was so poorly received that the final fourth part was printed privately at his own expense. 

Meanwhile, the world that Nietzsche viewed as degenerated and dying was exploding across the entire planet, and Christian civilization was busy subjecting every corner of the planet. The European bourgeois order, which rested upon every value that he hated — Christianity, liberalism, and sincere nationalism — was, by any material measure, the most powerful civilization in the history of the world. 

His first break happened in 1888 when Georg Brandes, the most influential literary critic in Scandinavia at the time, held a public lecture on his book “Beyond Good and Evil” to an audience of roughly a hundred and fifty. By the second lecture, the crowd had doubled and was bursting out into the halls. Nietzsche was ecstatic at this news and that same year, in a final burst of frenzy, wrote six books. To get an impression of the state he was in at this time, one only has to look at the chapter heads in “Ecce Homo” — which he began writing in 1888 — “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I Write Such Excellent Books.” 

Then, on January 3, 1889, in the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, Nietzsche saw a coachman beating a horse and threw his arms around the animal’s neck, speaking nonsense. In the days immediately surrounding the collapse, he sent letters whose contents can only be described as the bizarre ramblings of a madman. For example, to Jacob Burckhardt he wrote: “I am Ferdinand de Lesseps, I am Prado, I am Chambige … I have been buried twice this autumn.” 

Unable to take care of himself, he was cared for by his mother and sister for the remaining eleven years of his life before eventually passing away on August 25, 1900. Already by this time he had become probably the most fashionable philosopher in every country of Europe, and the fame he had so sincerely sought had arrived too late for him to enjoy. 

The Greatest Slave

In “Beyond Good and Evil” Nietzsche says the following in regards to every philosopher who has existed before him:

 “It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of — namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography.” 

I think it is only fair to apply the same standard to him. 

Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher whose professed system of ethics barely, on its surface, had any similarity to the life he actually lived. Where he preached for the essential value of health and vitality, he rotted away and lived on the verge of utter destitution and failure. Rather than Zarathustra, who clearly he saw as the model for himself, I think the better image comes from his own work. Specifically, from the aesthetic priestly caste whom he despised. 

Quoting again from “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche described the reclusive philosopher the following way:

“These pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones — also the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos — always become in the end, even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-Brewers.” 

Who does this apply to better than Nietzsche himself? Because one way to understand his entire project is as a revaluation of morality to place the reclusive, truth-speaking philosopher at the center and push the compliant, rule-following bourgeois to the bottom. Here the genuinely powerful caste in his society has been reimagined as sick, and his exclusion is evidence of his own moral superiority in a society that worships illness. 

I would argue that his entire project is his own reenactment of the slave revolt in morals.

Not only this, but his own philosophy fails his test. In “Twilight of the Idols” he says:

 “To be obliged to fight the instincts — this is the formula of degeneration: as long as life is in the ascending line, happiness is the same as instinct.” 

Let’s assume this criterion is a good one and look honestly at the humans of his era. Picture a Prussian banker, circa 1885. Imagine his huge gut and his large family at church on Sunday, or relaxing at their manor on the Baltic. Is this man not happy? Is this man not living in alignment with his instincts? If not totally, then much more sincerely and totally than Nietzsche? 

He would call the banker a “last man” or someone who has chosen to “will nothing,” but I would ask, applying his own genealogical method, what kind of person needs to believe the powerful elite are secretly miserable to justify their own externally imposed suffering? 

And this hypothetical banker is not an anomaly; he represents exactly the type of person who was, at that moment, ruling as master over India and their Laws of Manu which Nietzsche held up as the ideal system. 

He was at his most brilliant during the moments of his most genuine sincerity, when he was able to accept his genuine gift of insight and poetry and at his worst when he tried to be something he was not, a legislator and precise academic. This tension between the man he was, an artist and a philosopher, and the ideal he held up, the warrior aristocrat, led to him brewing the most potent poison of resentment ever crafted. 

So why is he so famous?

Despite everything I have just said, I hope it is clear I still massively respect his intellectual project. Nietzsche was, in my opinion, one of the most piercing writers to have graced this planet of ours, and so the question of his fame could be ended there. 

But many philosophers are brilliant writers — I would argue Carlyle is brilliant! — and yet their books lie basically unread. Instead Nietzsche is an object of constant fascination and cultural interest on a level which is basically unparalleled. What I believe differentiates him from people like Kant or Rawls is that Nietzsche, despite loving hierarchy, also provided a toolset of unparalleled power to critique Christian bourgeois society. In addition to this, he places the philosopher who denigrates all his predecessors at the center of a vital moral arc. 

In particular, the method of using the genealogy of Christian morality to discredit it has been adopted by countless thinkers because you can take any prevailing moral order and show that its categories are constructed rather than natural, and even worse, that they are the product of resentment. So even if Nietzsche despised feminism, feminists can still take his framework and apply it to society’s conceptions of women. Or gays can apply it to heteronormativity. Or Blacks can use it to explain White racism.  

Thus the entire philosophical pipeline from Nietzsche through Heidegger to Foucault to contemporary critical theory is the reapplication of this same recipe to an expanding range of targets. 

Beyond this, Nietzsche’s Overman required nothing but sincere self-overcoming to achieve, since it rested upon the alignment of your life with your true self. In its own way, a transgender woman is as much the Overman in their own eyes as any sincere human who overcomes themself. 

Consider what his moral system offers. You can be smarter than the people who are richer than you, deeper than the people who are happier than you, and more in alignment with yourself than the society which rejects you. It is for this reason that the model Nietzsche reader is a young man who feels like the society around him is in decay for some deep, inarticulate reason. I’m saying this as someone who was once sincerely one of these young men, and arguably still am. 

Like with everything made by humans it is our job to find the truth and filter out the poison.

A Genealogy of Peter Banks - Paid Subscribers Only

Since I have now applied Nietzsche’s method to Christianity, to Greece, to Nietzsche himself, and promised in the introduction to turn it on my own writing, it would be dishonest to skip this part. So let me lay out what I actually believe and then do my best to explain why I need it to be true.

Across everything I have written there is a consistent through-line. The core of it is this: I believe that truth-seeking is the highest virtue, that sincerity is the only reliable method of accessing truth, that moral reality is experiential rather than axiomatic, and that cant — the institutional repetition of formulas no one believes — is the most dangerous force in human civilization. I believe that the character of the individual matters more than the system they operate within. I believe that you should do the thing you were made to do with full commitment, even if it is not the thing that maximizes your status or your wealth, because the alternative is a life of surrogate activities that will leave you hollow. And I believe that even these axioms are themselves subject to examination and that the willingness to interrogate your own foundations is not weakness but the logical extension of the sincerity you claim to worship.

Now the question: what kind of person needed all of this to be true?

The first reason is obvious and embarrassing. I am a writer and the president of a small think tank. My daily life is composed almost entirely of reading, thinking, and trying to articulate what I see as clearly as I can. If truth-seeking has no value then my life has no value. Every hour I spend writing instead of doing something more conventionally productive is justified only if the act of perceiving and articulating reality is itself a contribution worth making. I have built a moral framework where the man who sees clearly and speaks plainly sits at the top of a hierarchy, and I have done this while being, professionally, a man who aspires to see clearly and speak plainly. Nietzsche placed the truth-speaking philosopher at the center of a vital moral arc and I have done functionally the same thing with the sincere essayist.

The second reason is that Western civilization is powerful — materially, technologically, militarily — in no small part because of its worship of what I would call the Platonic god of truth. The entire apparatus of science, law, liberal governance, and institutional accountability rests on the premise that reality is knowable and that knowing it matters. My lifestyle, my ability to write freely, my wife’s safety, the fact that I can publish criticism of powerful people without being killed — all of this is downstream of a civilization that decided, millennia ago, that truth was divine. What I am doing in my work is not inventing a new religion. I am merely insisting that we strip everything else away and keep the core. If you are going to worship anything, worship the thing that built the world you live in. This is self-interested, obviously, since the civilization that values truth-seeking is the one that has a place for me in it. 

The third reason is the one I find hardest to write. I am a subjective person who will die. I do not believe in the existence of an immortal soul. I believe that this short spark, sandwiched between twin eternities of silence, is the only serving of existence I will ever get — I have written this before and I meant it. But meaning it does not make it easy to live with. Because if there is no soul, and no afterlife, and no God who will remember you, then the only form of survival available is through what you leave behind. Ernest Becker called this the causa sui project — the self-caused project by which mortal creatures attempt to echo in eternity. My writing, my institution, this very essay, all of it is an attempt to leave a mark deep enough that some version of me echos in eternity. 

Thus my beliefs are, as always, “a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography” and I would be a fool to think it could be otherwise. 

But here is where I think this tool reaches the bottom. Just because I need these facts to be true does not make them false. The only thing the genealogical method do is show you where a belief comes and what it says about the other, it has no positive constructive next step.

1The original Latin: Beati in regno celesti videbunt pœnas damnatorum, ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat.

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# Carlyle: A Gentle Introduction

Or why Great Man Theory is correct

Date: 2026-03-17
URL: https://peterbanks.org/introductions/carlyle-a-gentle-introduction
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/carlyle-a-gentle-introduction

This essay will be an introductory discourse on the philosophy of Thomas Carlyle as well as apologetics for his most famous intellectual product, the Great Man Theory. Since I doubt any of you have been exposed to his thoughts directly, if nothing else you will learn something today.

I want to begin by answering two questions. First: why should you care about Thomas Carlyle? And second: why does no one remember him?

Why care?

Carlyle’s influence on the modern world was once enormous and almost beyond cataloging. During the Victorian era he was the public intellectual in English and so he stands at the headwaters of modern critiques of liberalism, bureaucracy, and moral neutrality. In many ways he reminds me of Voltaire in the sense that even those who reject him almost always do so using categories he supplied. So to engage with any argument about modernity without reckoning with Carlyle is to argue inside a room whose walls he helped build.

Carlyle achieved his peak of influence just as the Anglo-Saxon people exploded into the “empty” spaces of this planet. As a result his writings were carried by telegram, railcar, and steamship to every city from Kabul to the Falklands. They were read by the colonial administrators in India and US Presidents. And the culture was carried in the minds of Anglo mechano-warriors as they filled up the world and crushed all opponents in their way. Carlyle is the banyan tree of Anglo culture and so his roots are invisible.

So why is he forgotten?

Carlyle was erased because the twentieth century was largely a rejection of the world he inhabited. The Victorian world was totally discredited in the half century of crisis after its leadership opted to commit collective suicide in 1914. Additionally, The Great Man Theory, which in Carlyle’s hands was a nuanced metaphysical argument about the relationship between sincerity and historical causation, was flattened into a crude justification for strongman politics. After Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, the very concept of venerating individual leadership has become culturally unspeakable in America. In fact, among the educated today the idea that individuals even matter at all is viewed as naivety and something that has been disproven by science. I disagree, of course.

Why bring him back?

Our era mirrors the conditions Carlyle spoke of with eerie precision. Institutions repeating formulas no one believes, an elite selected for the ability to seem competent rather than be competent, and a population that senses the gap between what it’s told and what it sees. He called this disease of insincerity cant and I have yet to find a better word for what ails us.

Additionally, Carlyle was, whatever else he was, a person with a healthy social life and close personal connections with figures like Emerson and John Stuart Mill. His correspondence with Emerson alone spans decades of genuine intellectual friendship. He actually knew humans and power, not in an abstract Nietzschean or Marxist sense, but in a deeply personal, relational one. This matters because part of the problem with modernity is that the closest thing we have to moral philosophy is largely the product of people alienated from normal social life. You can feel that much of what we have today rings hollow but the people most capable of articulating are tied to its continuing function. Carlyle was not a revolutionary or a madman, he was a working intellectual, a husband, a friend, a man embedded in his community, and so his radicalism was not the product of alienation but of an insider’s honest reckoning with his own experience. That means his critique comes from love rather than resentment.

I’ve been chewing on the degree to which I believe that the “weirdness” of our moral authorities is itself a symptom of the disease of too many outsiders. When young right-wing men turn to the Unabomber or even to Adolf Hitler for philosophical inspiration, what they’re looking for is subversion and reinvention, and they find it in the old enemies of the regime. Carlyle was not a foe of the Victorian regime’s values, he was to his own historical legacies detriment, its mouthpiece.

Structure

In this article I’m going to do three things. First, I’m going to present Carlyle’s philosophical system as honestly and completely as I can, because I think it deserves a serious hearing. Second, I’m going to explain where I think he was wrong, and why. And third, I’m going to lay out what I call the Reformist Carlylean position, what I identify as.

Appearance and Reality

To understand Carlyle the best place to start with is his metaphysical distinction between Appearance and Reality. The Great Man Theory is the political implication of a unified system, and without that system it can easily be reduced to nothing more than “strong leaders are good.”

To Carlyle the world was divided between Appearance, the visible, material, temporal world and Reality by which he means the deeper spiritual facts. In “On Heroes”, he frames Christianity itself as “faith in an Invisible…as the only reality; Time…resting on Eternity.” And in “Past and Present”, the same structure appears again. The earthly life is “not intrinsically a reality at all, but…a shadow of realities eternal, infinite,” and the Time-world “plays and flickers in the mirror of Eternity.”

Now I know this sounds to a modern ear like mysticism, but I want to be clear Carlyle is making a hard, specific claim about reality. He is claiming that there is a way the universe works, that it is discoverable, and that abiding by it is not optional. In “Latter-Day Pamphlets” he gives the analogy of navigating the Straits of Magellan. There are real rocks and a real path through meaning that there is “but one thing requisite, That the man or nation can discern what the true regulations of the Universe are.” To get through you cannot vote away the rocks or theorize your way through, instead you either perceive the reality of the passage or you wreck upon it.

This is different from Platonic idealism and instead closer to a secularized Calvinism, which makes sense, since Carlyle was raised in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, the son of a stonemason, embedded in late eighteenth-century Calvinist culture. So like Calvinism it believes that the universe is exterior to us, and it has a preordained moral structure, that is discoverable through earnest seeking. And that sins, especially lies, are punished not by human courts but by external reality itself.

source

Nothing I will write after this will make sense unless you understand this. Since if reality has a moral structure, and if this structure is knowable through genuine inquiry, then the central question of life is whether the people entrusted with power are in contact with that structure or merely performing a role. Every other Carlylean argument about cant, about greatness, about democracy, about work is downstream of this single claim.

Sincerity Over System

So if reality has a moral structure, how do we access it? This is where Carlyle’s epistemology becomes crucial and where I think he is most frequently misunderstood and misread.

Carlyle’s answer is not logic, but instead sincerity, what he calls direct insight. In other words we access the truth by being relentlessly honest about what we actually perceive, rather than by believing only what we are told. All knowledge falls into two modes of knowing: sincerity, which is the involuntary alignment with reality, and theorizing, which is constructing abstract systems and then trying to force reality to conform to them. In a letter to Emerson he puts it plainly:

“Man lives by Belief; by logic he can only at best long to live.”

I agree with Carlyle that we develop axiomatic systems to fit reality; reality does not fit our axiomatic systems. If the world were forced to comply with the most consistent, simple representation, we would be living in a world of Newtonian physics.  We do not.

Take Carlyle’s survey of famous historical figures in “On Heroes”, although the individuals span from Muhammad and Dante to Napoleon what unifies them is not what they believed, which varied enormously, but the quality of belief. Each of these men had what Carlyle calls “sight”, the ability to perceive the Reality beneath Appearance. This is “the open secret” that truth is available to everyone, but that most people are too busy performing cant to notice it.

Thus Carlyle can praise Muhammad and Luther in the same breath because is not evaluating their doctrines against objective Truth. Instead he is evaluating their sincerity of belief, i.e. whether they were earned through a genuine clear eyed examination of reality or instead received secondhand as dead formula.

From “Life of John Sterling”: “What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible — that, in God’s name, leave uncredited; at your peril do not try believing that.” Carlyle is saying that honest doubt is superior to forced belief and that the man who sincerely struggles toward truth is closer to it than the man who mechanically affirms a creed he does not genuinely feel to be true.

In an attempt to formalize this we can say that Carlyle has an epistemological hierarchy that looks something like this.

1) Direct insight by the sincere man.

2) Honest doubt.

3) Received wisdom genuinely believed.

4) Theory and system-building

5) Cant, dead formulas repeated without belief.

This is a metamodernist hierarchy if I’ve ever seen one since it does not only tolerate opponents but even finds heroism in them when they are sincere. Consider his assessment of utilitarianism, the very philosophy he spent his career attacking:

“I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It was a laying-down of cant; a saying to oneself: ‘Well then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let us see what, by checking and balancing, and good adjustment of tooth and pinion, can be made of it!’ Benthamism has something complete, manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true; you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its eyes put out!”

I love that line: “Heroism with its eyes put out”

He is saying that Bentham, whose conclusions Carlyle despised, was nonetheless admirable because he was willing to actually follow his axioms to their logical end rather than hedging or trying to salvage something which he did not actually believe. This is the mark of a thinker who genuinely believes that the quality of belief matters more than its content and it gives you a way to evaluate thinkers and leaders across ideological lines today. You should assess them on the one variable that, according to Carlyle, actually predicts institutional health: whether the people in charge mean what they say, and do what they believe.

He is able to extend this charity to ideas because even if reality is knowable in a narrow sense it is too large to ever fully capture. Central to his metaphysics is the fundamental unknowability of things and the insanity of trying to too closely abide by the imperfect teachings of men. From “The French Revolution”:

“All theories, were they never so earnest, painfully elaborated, are, and, by the very conditions of them, must be incomplete, questionable, and even false. Thou shalt know that this Universe is, what it professes to be, an infinite one. Attempt not to swallow it, for thy logical digestion; be thankful, if skilfully planting down this and the other fixed pillar in the chaos, thou prevent its swallowing thee.”

He is not asking you to accept a system, in fact the exact opposite. He is asking you to develop the quality of perception that will let you navigate reality directly, using theories for what they are, tools, rather than what they are not, the Truth.

I believe that this anti-systematism is defensible and in many ways Carlyle is making the same argument that Friedrich Hayek would make a century later about central planning. Specifically, that formal systems always lag behind reality and that local and practical knowledge is more reliable than abstract theory.  James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” is essentially a Carlylean argument even if he has never read him. Additionally, Nassim Taleb’s critique of the “ludic fallacy”, the error of treating neat models as if they capture messy reality, is Carlylean to its core.

The Doctrine of Cant — “A Lie Cannot Endure For Ever”

Carlyle’s single most important claim, repeated across every work is that lies are self-destroying. A society built on falsehood must eventually collapse, because reality does not accommodate pretense indefinitely. From “The French Revolution”: “The first of all Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.”

To Carlyle this is not only a moral preference but instead a law of nature as binding as gravity. From “Past and Present”: “In the centre of the world-whirlwind, verily now as in the oldest days, dwells and speaks a God. The great soul of the world is just.” Societies that lose sincerity accumulate dishonesty the way a body can accumulate cancer. The process is slow, often invisible at first until suddenly systems begin to break down from the accumulated damage.

It is this accumulation of damage that sits at the heart of his conception of the French Revolution. Centuries of accumulated cant — the divine right of a king who was manifestly not divine, the infallibility of a Church that was manifestly corrupt, the nobility of an aristocracy that manifestly did nothing noble — were thrown aside when the “thin Earth-rind of habit” broke and “the fountains of the great deep” boiled forth.

The lies that destroy societies are rarely cynical deceptions, instead often they are time honored “truths.” They were once sincere beliefs that have since outlived their honesty. From “On Heros”:

“Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die!”

The divine right of kings was once sincerely believed and so where the lie entered was when the form persisted after the substance had died. When the king no longer governs but still claims divine sanction is what Carlyle means by cant — not lying exactly, but the mechanical repetition of formulas that no longer correspond to Reality. This repetition has the effect of undermining belief in the existence of sincere truth.

From “On Heroes”: “So many base plated coins passing in the market, the belief has now become common that no gold any longer exists.” The decay of false authority poisons belief in all authority, including genuine authority. Since once you have been cheated enough times by plated coins, you stop believing gold is real.

I think this is the single most useful concept in Carlyle’s entire body of work, and the one with the most obvious modern application. It feels like this is where we are now in the West. The institutional failures of the last several decades,  in government, in media, in academia, have not merely discredited those specific institutions but instead the very concept of institutional authority itself. Young people do not merely distrust this Congress or this university, instead they distrust the possibility that any Congress or university could even be trustworthy.

I have written elsewhere about how signaling reshapes reality regardless of intent, how the woke signaling of the 2010s became real policy, how the right’s counter-signaling is becoming real cruelty, how you become what you signal regardless of what you actually believe but this is just a Carlylean insight in modern dress. Because cant takes on a life of its own until even the difference between performance and sincerity is forgotten.  The only remedy Carlyle can see is an individual brave enough to speak plainly in an age of universal performance.

This links to Carlyle’s argument against what he calls Mammonism, the reduction of all human relations to cash payment. From “Past and Present”: “man has a soul…different from the stomach,” and the treatment of “Cash-payment” as the “sole nexus” between humans is not merely unjust but metaphysically false. It denies what humans are and the economic reductionism that has dominated our thinking since his time is thus built on something false.

We all believe that if you get the incentives right, good outcomes will follow regardless of the character of the people involved but Carlyle would contend you cannot build a civilization on mechanisms alone. Since the mechanisms require operators, and the operators are individuals with souls, and the souls require truth to thrive. If we cut any link in that chain then the whole thing unravels, no matter what our incentive structure looks like. It is this moral backbone that Carlyle would argue keeps us from falling into a trap set by Moloch.

The Great Man Theory

Now that I’ve written some 3,000 odd words I finally feel ready to tackle The Great Man Theory.

To summarize, if Reality has a moral structure, and if this structure is accessed through direct insight rather than theory, and if societies decay when they lose contact with this structure, then it follows that the most important variable in history is whether the people in positions of influence are genuinely in contact with Reality or only Appearance.

That this is the most important variable is the Great Man Theory. It is not the claim that history is made by powerful individuals, that is trivial. Instead it is the claim that the quality of the individuals at the helm, their sincerity, their insight, their moral seriousness, determines whether a civilization rises or falls.

I feel as if the theory is often misrepresented and misquoted. Take for example the following quote taken from the introduction to “On Heroes” that greets you when opening the Wikipedia page for the “Great Man Theory” :

“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.”

I think this is a beautiful paragraph, and when placed in its proper Carlylean context the point it conveys is good and interesting. Namely, that when studying history, at the root of everything from communism to Christianity is a person who lived a life. But the fact that it is lifted mid-sentence from the opening paragraph gives people a false, caricatured impression of what the theory actually says. Specifically, it seems to imply that Carlyle is arguing Nature plays no role in history and that the only thing which matters are these “great men.”

Hopefully, you already see why this is wrong because Carlyle does not think that great men can design history in whatever way they want. Instead a true great man is someone who is able to perceive what Nature is demanding he do, and then act on it. From “Latter-Day Pamphlets”:

“The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent of all the Future, is ever a ‘New Era’ to the thinking man; and comes with new questions and significance, however commonplace it looks: to know it, and what it bids us do, is ever the sum of knowledge for all of us.”

The key analogy to understand this interaction between man and nature comes later in “On Heroes”: “I liken common languid Times…to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it.” The fuel, social conditions, economic forces, and popular discontent, must be present but without the lightning, the individual nothing ignites and the fuel continues to pile up.

The question is not if the broader social conditions matter but which variable gets neglected more relative to its importance and in our era, I would argue, it is overwhelmingly the lightning.

But how plausible does this claim, that individual people are at the core of history, actually seem? The obvious counterarguments all take the form of “economic” histories which treat humans as large predictable masses. The most famous is Marx’s Historical Materialism, but there are many modern versions such as Kenneth Pomeranz’s “The Great Divergence”, Ian Morris’s “Why the West Rules: For Now”, and Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” All of these books are ones I sincerely enjoyed, and all of them contain real insight about the world.

What these theories share is the claim that history is not about “Great” men any more than biology is about “Great” lions. And when you zoom out far enough, there is truth to it. The geographic structure of Europe is essential to understanding European civilization, and Carlyle would never dispute that. Still the idea that the last 1,000 years of world history could be summarized by saying “the population increased,” although factually true, is decidedly not what we mean by history.

People aren’t fascinated by WW2 or the Civil War because of the biological processes which took place, but for deeply human reasons like the ideologies at stake and the way they continue to impact our lives. I would argue that when you dig into the causes of events, really dig, what almost always sits in the center is a series of human decisions, or sometimes indecisions. The choice to do one thing or write the law such-and-such a way are real lived choices as much as anything we do in our lives, their causes were human causes not simply mechanical ones. It is these decisions Carlyle places at the center of history, and thus it is the highest imperative to find the man who will make the best decisions and entrust him with power.

If you are into strategy games like Civilization or anything by Paradox, it will stand out how difficult of a time games have at modeling the rise and fall of nations. It is frankly very hard to mirror the actual cyclical nature of human social affairs without just adding some hardcoded “decline” mechanic, because there is only one person controlling the entity for the entire game. In real life, the fact that everyone who has ever been alive has progressed down the same basic path from infancy to death means that history is routinely punctuated by genuine discontinuity in the beliefs and character of leaders. 

Since economics is autoregressive and success breeds success much as failure breeds failure, it is easy to look at any current moment and fail to appreciate the subtle human core. But consider WW2 more closely. It is literally impossible to understand Nazi Germany without understanding Hitler the man. His context as a German in Austria on the frontier between the Slavic and Germanic world. The trauma of war and of revolution. All of this shaped him in human ways which we cannot hope to reduce to numbers. These human experiences in turn shaped the country and as a result our entire era — which believes nothing more sincerely than the evil of Hitler. From 1941 onwards there literally was a man in a bunker deciding the fate of entire peoples. Not only this, but that man was undergoing experimental treatments from a mad doctor and surrounded by other individual men, each one also a unique product of a time and place. I haven’t even touched on FDR or Stalin or Mao or Mussolini or Gandhi or any of the countless other examples from that era. The twentieth century was, for better and definitely for worse, an era defined by the personal whims of “great” men.

How much of history was human? It was not primarily economic factors that determined Augustus would, have through Agrippa, the military strength to overcome Marc Antony and as a result postpone the orientalization of Rome for nearly four hundred years. Yes, of course “someone” was going to emerge from that era but the structure of all of Roman history was shaped by the fact it was Augustus specifically.

When we look at the field of history we can see a mass of faces and so each one seems also replaceable. As if a council of Germans could have approximated Hitler via linear combination. But how sure are you that this is true? Even pieces of historical trivia like the fact that Kaiser Wilhelm had an atrophied arm and a resultant inferiority complex, the result of a shoddy English doctor are of unimaginable importance when you trace their downstream effects on European politics leading to 1914.

America is Anglo because Great Britain juts out into the sea, but so does France, and yet I’m writing these words in English. Is America not also Anglo because of men like John Smith and Walter Raleigh and queens like Elizabeth? Or even one step further is America not Anglo because Henry VIII could not sire a male son? How much of history is the result of a handful of women’s infertility?

Could we go back even further and say that all of modern world history is ultimately due to Luther and the series of events spawning from that one man’s sincerity? This is what Carlyle means when he says that “all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world.”

Critique of Democracy, and Racism

Two further elements of Carlyle’s system deserve attention because they are the ones most likely to make modern readers uncomfortable. I’ll get more into where I think he is wrong but it would be insincere to write an entire article about what he believed only to bury the uncomfortable parts.

The first of these is Carlyle’s critique of democracy. Take for example this quote from “Latter-Day Pamphlets”:

“Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane”

Carlyle’s objection to democracy was that he believed it, as a method, was incapable of identifying and elevating the genuinely capable man. His perspective on life was fundamentally hierarchical and paternalistic. From “Latter-Day Pamphlets” again:

“It is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first ‘right of man;’ compared with which all other rights are as nothing.”

In other words the first right of every person is not to vote but to be governed well, and if voting produces bad governance then voting is evil.

His concrete complaint was that democracy selects for what he called “Phantasm Captains” or men who are skilled at appearing competent rather than being competent. Since the ballot-box rewards eloquence it also reinforced cant and excludes the “Real Captain,” who actually perceives reality and could govern well.

He extended this to universal suffrage specifically. Although he conceded that a limited franchise among a genuine aristocracy might function, he argued that since universal suffrage asks every person, regardless of wisdom, to select their leaders it would be like the crowd that chose Barabbas over Christ.

I should be clear here though that what Carlyle wanted was not dictatorship in the modern sense but something closer to an idealized medieval order. A society where the men he called “the Noblest” would be “raised to the supreme place” and they would rule through virtue and example. The best example of his ideal is probably Fredrick the Great of Prussia who he wrote an extensive, and extremely fond, biography of.

The second is his view on race.

Carlyle believed in a natural racial hierarchy and did nothing to hide this. In fact, even during his own lifetime he faced enormous criticism for his views and almost certainly sacrificed professionally to espouse them. This is to say that they were almost certainly sincerely held. I’ll get more into where I disagree, much as with democracy, in the next section but for now I want to clearly present what he actually believed.

The most explicit writing that touches on race is the “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question“ – without a doubt his most indefensible work – but he makes similar remarks in “Latter-Day Pamphlets.”

The basic shape of his argument is this:

First, he held that all men have a sacred duty to labor and that idleness is a sin against the cosmic order. Second, he claimed that emancipation in the West Indies had failed because freed Black workers, able to subsist on easily grown food, had no economic incentive to work the sugar plantations. The sugar rotted in the fields while, as he saw it, a formerly productive colony collapsed into what he called a potential “Black Ireland.” Third, he concluded that if Black people would not labor voluntarily they should be compelled to do so by the White population, which he regarded as their natural superiors.

Carlyle also attacked the abolitionists, “Exeter Hall” philanthropists, as sentimentalists whose emancipation program was grounded not in reality but in “rosepink sentimentalism” and “the Dismal Science” of laissez-faire economics. He argued that treating Black and White people as “unrelated, loose from one another, on a footing of perfect equality” was itself a lie, a form of cant that “contradicts the palpablest facts.” In his view the relationship between the races was not one of equality but of natural command, and pretending otherwise would destroy both parties.

On the uses and misuses of Great Man Theory

In addition to the actual writings of Carlyle I cannot write an honest document without addressing the way Great Man thinking was weaponized in the twentieth century. Hitler, in particular, drew on this tradition but almost every European cult of personality has intellectual roots that pass through Carlyle’s thought. Part of this is simply the scale of his impact since Liberals and Socialists both also drew heavily on him but part of it is also a direct result of his theories.

Still, I would argue that Carlyle’s own framework condemns fascism thoroughly.

Fascism is built on lies such as performative strength or a party apparatus that demands loyalty to the leader over loyalty to truth. Similarly, the fascist leader is not a man who perceives the moral structure of reality and aligns himself with it but instead a man who hopes to force reality to conform to his will. Napoleon himself is Carlyle’s own example of a man of enormous natural ability who falls because he substitutes personal glory for truth and Hitler is a more extreme version of the same failure.

Hitler was a sham, a plated coin that fooled people who had forgotten what gold looked like. Carlyle would argue that the reason people were fooled is because so many base-plated coins had passed through the market already that people had lost the ability to distinguish genuine from sham authority. They fell for the first man who claimed authority with enough confidence and charisma because they had no living memory of what genuine authority felt like.

I would also contend that “greatness” doesn’t just take the form of evil. FDR steered a country which seemed destined to go down in ruin — as it navigated the hangover of industrial transformation — but instead the WASP aristocrat brought it out into an idyllic golden age. Churchill’s stubbornness in 1940, his refusal to negotiate when every rational calculation said Britain was finished, is inexplicable without reference to individual character. And Lincoln’s combination of moral clarity and political spine ended slavery and held the Union together. These men were not saints but they were great in the Carlylean sense that they perceived something real about their moment and acted on it with sincerity, to the long term benefit of their societies.

I think we have a tendency to speak out both corners of our mouths as it relates to “Great” men. On one hand we reject their existence entirely as merely the product of history and yet on the other we are terrified of the man who hopes to achieve incredible things because we fear it will come with the doom trumpet of tyranny. If “Great” men do not exist, why do we fear them so much?

Laws, as I am fond of pointing out, do not exist in reality. Nothing will ever jump out of a page and stop you from violating their dictates. The only things that exist, right now, are humans and our living preferences. A committee, no matter how large, is still composed of individuals, and you cannot excise the necessity of staffing positions of power with good people. The idea that good men exist, that they can be found, and when found they can be entrusted with power to the benefit of everyone is the antithesis of almost everything our current culture believes. And yet we live with the consequences of that disbelief every single day. Through the mediocrity of our leaders, the cynicism of our public life, and the exhausted resignation of a populace that has given up on the possibility that governance could be anything other than management by committee.

Where Carlyle Was Wrong.

Democracy

Carlyle was correct about much but he was also a human with biases and limited sight.

For example Carlyle was correct that the quality of the individual leader is an enormously important variable. But, in my opinion, he drew the wrong conclusion from his own observations.

If all institutions decay when our forms and Reality diverge, as Carlyle himself insists, then the critical question is not how to find the perfect leader but how to remove bad leaders without requiring catastrophic collapse. The French ancien régime persisted for generations precisely because there was no peaceful means of correcting the accumulation of cant and the only solution was the chaos and violence of the Revolution, which of course destroyed many things that had genuine value. Democracy is, at bottom, a mechanism for periodic, non-catastrophic correction. It often selects for mediocre leaders, probably more often than any other system, but this also means it, usually, avoids retarded emperors.

Just look at recent history. Democracies have empirically outperformed authoritarian systems across virtually every measure and above all avoided catastrophic self-inflicted harm.

Carlyle would likely respond that a democracy staffed by mediocrities is still failing his test and he would, of course, be right. But the relevant vector of comparison is not between democracy and an ideal Carlylean order but between democracy and the actual historical alternatives. And by this measurement the mechanism Carlyle despised has performed better than the one he worshipped.

Slavery and the Limits of Hierarchy

As I mentioned in the section on racism Carlyle was a defender of slavery. I would argue that he was blinded by his worship of the past and that by any honest measure slavery was cant.

The claimed justification, that it was a civilizing institution which was mutually beneficial to both the superior and inferior peoples, bore no relationship to the observable facts. Take for example “The Impending Crisis of the South” by Hinton Rowan Helper published in 1857 which documented the degree to which Whites in slave states were falling behind those in the free states on virtually every available measure. 

Tocqueville observed the same thing in “Democracy in America”.

“Thus the traveller who floats down the current of the Ohio to the spot where that river falls into the Mississippi, may be said to sail between liberty and servitude; and a transient inspection of the surrounding objects will convince him as to which of the two is most favorable to mankind. Upon the left bank of the stream the population is rare; from time to time one descries a troop of slaves loitering in the half-desert fields; the primaeval forest recurs at every turn; society seems to be asleep, man to be idle, and nature alone offers a scene of activity and of life. From the right bank, on the contrary, a confused hum is heard which proclaims the presence of industry; the fields are covered with abundant harvests, the elegance of the dwellings announces the taste and activity of the laborer, and man appears to be in the enjoyment of that wealth and contentment which is the reward of labor

…

Upon the left bank of the Ohio labor is confounded with the idea of slavery, upon the right bank it is identified with that of prosperity and improvement; on the one side it is degraded, on the other it is honored; on the former territory no white laborers can be found, for they would be afraid of assimilating themselves to the negroes; on the latter no one is idle, for the white population extends its activity and its intelligence to every kind of employment. Thus the men whose task it is to cultivate the rich soil of Kentucky are ignorant and lukewarm; whilst those who are active and enlightened either do nothing or pass over into the State of Ohio, where they may work without dishonor.”

The slave system was not only a crime against humanity but it also stunted economic development, and produced degraded moral virtue. By every functional measure Carlyle himself would recognize — does the institution produce capable people? Does it align with reality? Does it endure? — slavery failed.

Carlyle could not see this because his love of hierarchy and his nostalgia for the medieval past blinded him. What he saw on the plantation was a version of the feudal manor and so he imposed his template onto a reality that did not fit it, exactly what he would condemn.

Slavery also reveals a structural weakness in Carlyle’s framework. His sincerity test asks whether the man in charge believes sincerely but this is simply not enough. The test must also include outcomes. The slaveholders often did believe, sincerely and completely, in the justice of their position. Anyone who is willing to honestly read the historical record must grapple with that. But their personal sincerity meant nothing because it was out of step with the calling of the time.

The Static Cosmos

In addition to his bias and blindness Carlyle was also incorrect in his conception of the Universe as being composed of a fixed divine order.

The problem is that the conditions of human life are always changing and the very question of what it means to be alive is not static. What counted as genuine human flourishing for a twelfth-century monk is not what counts for me because our lives are radically different.

I’ve written about this extensively in the past and my favorite metaphor is of a dog that began diving for fish in icy waters. We are all like the hundredth generation of that dog, not quite a seal, but also without the ability to hunt on land. We stand halfway between two evolutionary equilibria, and our desires are relics of an ancestral environment that simply no longer exists. Carlyle contends that those desires point toward a permanent truth about human nature, and the task is to align ourselves with it. I would respond that the goal is to align ourselves with reality as it actually exists.

Carlyle could not have anticipated evolutionary biology in the Darwinian sense so I don’t hold this against him but still it is a serious blind spot. The cycle he describes, founding, flourishing, ossification, cant, crisis, new founding, always assumes the endpoint is a return to genuine order. He does not entertain the possibility that perhaps the meta goal is shifting also.

I’m going to end my critique of Carlyle with this wonderful quote from “The French Revolution”

“To the eye of History many things, in that sick-room of Louis, are now visible, which to the Courtiers there present were invisible. For indeed it is well said, “in every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.” To Newton and to Newton’s Dog Diamond, what a different pair of Universes; while the painting on the optical retina of both was, most likely, the same!”

Carlyle could not see what he was incapable of seeing, even if the evidence was all around him. We are all like Newton’s dog in the sense that we can only access Appearance. Reality is, and always will remain, beyond us.

The Reformist Carlylean Position - For Paid Subscribers Only

I like to call myself a Reformist Carlylean and today I would like to take the time to articulate  what that actually means as clearly as I can.

Sincerity is still the cardinal virtue:

The man who sees clearly and acts on what he sees, rather than performing a role or signaling tribal loyalty is still the most valuable and most necessary type of person.

Cant still kills:

The specific pathology Carlyle identified of the institutional repetition of formulas that no one believes but everyone performs is as lethal now as it was in 1840. The gap between what our institutions claim and what they do widens every year, and the accumulated dishonesty will eventually reach a breaking point.

The character of leaders matters more than the systems they operate:

No mechanism, not voting, not constitutions, not markets, not AI, can substitute for the quality of the people at the helm. The form of government is secondary to the character of the governors.

Reality has a structure that is not up for negotiation:

You either align with it or it destroys you. You cannot vote your way past the rocks in the Straits of Magellan and the universe does not accommodate your preferences.

The test of alignment is empirical outcomes:

Does the institution or policy make the people under it stronger or weaker, more capable or less, more free or more dependent? Does it produce the outcomes it claims?

In short, perceive reality as it actually is, not as your theories say it should be. Be sincere  and refuse cant in all its forms.

---

# Real Tedmaxxing is Funmaxxing

"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been [fine, probably] for the human race."

Date: 2026-03-15
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/real-tedmaxxing-is-funmaxxing
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/real-tedmaxxing-is-funmaxxing

In September of 1995, some two years before I was born, Ted Kaczynski, more famously known as the Unabomber, had his manifesto published in both the Washington Post and New York Times after a series of deadly bombings. The newspapers had been advised by the FBI to publish the document, which had been sent to them about two months earlier, in hopes they could use it to identify and apprehend the terrorist. Their plan worked, and Kaczynski’s brother recognized the writing style and reported him.

In the three odd decades since this happened, the Unabomber’s manifesto has existed in a somewhat liminal space in American culture. If you exist in adjacently edgy spaces, it isn’t uncommon to hear people referencing it or saying things like “Uncle Ted,” and I think this is largely for two reasons. First, unlike most other terrorists’ manifestos, Industrial Society and Its Future can easily be read right now, since it continues to be hosted by the Washington Post here. Second, it is actually a genuinely profound reflection on modernity which, in my opinion, cannot be easily shoved aside.

In this essay I’m going to take Kaczynski’s diagnosis seriously and point out where I think he missed the mark, because I fundamentally disagree with him that the gradual sublimation of humans into a broader social machine is either a) bad or b) resistible.

The core of his argument is that humans have a core psychological need for meaningful goals and autonomy, and that when we lose the ability to pursue meaningful objectives we develop pathologies much as we would if any of our psychological needs were unmet. Kaczynski claims that modern industrial society has systematically broken our ability to exercise “the power process” by reducing the effort required to meet basic survival needs to functionally zero in the developed world. In addition to this, the regimentation of our bourgeois life is such that we functionally give up all true autonomy and are forced to then develop surrogate activities, which are fundamentally unfulfilling, like video games or sports, to satisfy this need for goal accomplishment.

My thesis on the other hand is that human beings are problem-solving machines in the deep biological sense that our reward systems, our experience of meaning, and our psychological health are organized around allowing us to win the game-theoretic dance of Darwinian evolution. I would go so far as to argue that civilization’s central project, from agriculture through medicine through artificial intelligence, has been the progressive elimination of problems. Since problems are definitionally bad, their elimination is unambiguously good on its own terms. But the cumulative effect has been the systematic removal of the conditions under which human beings experience felt meaning. We are building a world that is objectively better and subjectively emptier, and we have been doing so for tens of thousands of years.

This process is irreversible for two reasons. The first is that knowledge is irreversible. You cannot unknow that a better option exists, and you cannot derive genuine meaning from a challenge you know to be artificial. The second is that competitive dynamics between groups make unilateral withdrawal suicidal. Any group that voluntarily pauses its optimization will be outcompeted and destroyed by groups that do not.

But where I would differ from most people who agree with me on everything above is that I don’t take for granted the belief that this process is “bad.” The belief in its fundamental bleakness depends on an assumption that deserves scrutiny: specifically that the individual human, with its current set of drives and its current experience of meaning, is the relevant unit of analysis in perpetuity.

Because it seems more likely that what we are undergoing is another transformation in the long history of biology and that we as humans are no more doomed to misery than our neurons or mitochondria are. This belief is AI-agnostic because I don’t think the process of sublimation depends on some future AI singularity. Objects like nations and companies are already taking on many of the characteristics of distinct Darwinian entities in a very real sense.

Every major transition in the history of biology has followed the same basic pattern. Independent replicating units begin cooperating, which leads to interdependence and specialization until they totally lose their individual autonomy and merge into a higher-order entity that then becomes a new unit of selection.

We are in the middle of such a transition. The specifics of the endpoint are uncertain right now, but I don’t think the direction is ambiguous at all; we are on this ride no matter what. But it isn’t even like we are being dragged into this transition against our nature. There are large, real, and important parts of us that already love social belonging and derive substantial meaning from it. That experience of genuine satisfaction from being useful components of something larger than ourselves is not a weakness to be lamented but almost certainly what strength actually looks like in modernity.

As a person, what does this mean? Well, probably very little, but it does imply that there are few downsides to simply doing what you love. I’ll put myself in this category. What I love more than anything in the world is writing. Perhaps this is a genuine surrogate activity, I don’t know, but I’ve decided to genuinely try to do this for my career because anything else would be misery. You have no choice but to do what you want with your life, because what could the alternative possibly be?

That is the whole argument. The rest of this essay is the evidence.

The Power Process

The most important sections of Kaczynski’s manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, are paragraphs 33 through 67, which contain, in my opinion, one of the clearest descriptions of the relationship between effort, autonomy, and psychological health written in the twentieth century. As I’ll get into later, he isn’t the only person to make these observations, but at least from what I’ve read he is alone in his willingness to be ruthlessly honest about reality.

So what is the power process? To quote him directly:

“Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the ‘power process.’ This is closely related to the need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort, and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later.”

It is worth noting that Kaczynski concedes here that autonomy is not necessary for everyone and that some people genuinely find satisfaction through identification with a larger organization. Kaczynski basically ignores this thread because it cuts against the rest of his writing substantially, in my opinion.

Still, the key insight is that not only do people need goals, but those goals must be substantively real. Goals that we create to fill the emotional need for the power process are “surrogate activities,” defined as follows:

“We use the term ‘surrogate activity’ to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the ‘fulfillment’ that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person’s pursuit of goal X is a surrogate activity. Hirohito’s studies in marine biology clearly constituted a surrogate activity, since it is pretty certain that if Hirohito had had to spend his time working at interesting non-scientific tasks in order to obtain the necessities of life, he would not have felt deprived because he didn’t know all about the anatomy and life-cycles of marine animals. On the other hand, the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. (But pursuit of an excessive amount of sex, more than one really needs, can be a surrogate activity.)”

By this criterion, I think it would be fair to say that most of what educated moderns such as myself do with their free time qualifies as a surrogate activity. Of course he would argue that they are fundamentally unsatisfying. Specifically:

“For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less satisfying than the pursuit of real goals (that is, goals that people would want to attain even if their need for the power process were already fulfilled). One indication of this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker constantly strives for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one problem than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives himself to run always farther and faster. Many people who pursue surrogate activities will say that they get far more fulfillment from these activities than they do from the ‘mundane’ business of satisfying their biological needs, but that is because in our society the effort needed to satisfy the biological needs has been reduced to triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not satisfy their biological needs AUTONOMOUSLY but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities.”

It is this autonomy point that is truly the sticking point in his argument. Because clearly humans have to engage in complex and meaningful work for our own survival; it just occurs at the large collective level as part of the capitalist machine of production and distribution rather than at the small-group level. Now I think the most important line of the entire manifesto is paragraph 178.

“Whatever else may be the case, it is certain that technology is creating for human beings a new physical and social environment radically different from the spectrum of environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race physically and psychologically. If man is not adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered, then he will be adapted to it through a long and painful process of natural selection. The former is far more likely than the latter.”

Because I think that it is exactly correct, but I do not see it as immediately and obviously “evil.” Clearly our conditions today are unique, and I agree eventually we will be fit to them one way or another.

Now I mentioned that Kaczynski was not writing in isolation, and given the nature of how I came to know about his work I don’t want to leave out the larger, more civilized academic discussion.

Consider Viktor Frankl’s work, in particular his famous book titled Man’s Search for Meaning about his time in the concentration camps. The core observation he makes is that humans can endure almost any suffering if it has meaning; the moment meaning is absent though they collapse psychologically. The second half of the book is mostly about his method — logotherapy — which is designed to help patients find said meaning. Now this is where I think he is weaker than Kaczynski, because I think any attempt to “create” meaning inevitably becomes a surrogate activity. The conditions for genuine meaning have to come from an alignment of our desires and the external world; no amount of therapy can do that.

Next there is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his research on flow states. In short, he argues that flow states exist in a balance between the challenge at hand and the skill of the person facing it, very similar to one of Kaczynski’s requirements for the power process.

Csikszentmihalyi wrote: “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times.” They are moments when “a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” But I would argue that Csikszentmihalyi does not follow this logic to its obvious conclusion. If flow requires real challenge matched to real skill, and if civilization is in the business of eliminating real challenges, then civilization is in the business of eliminating the preconditions for “the best moments in our lives.”

Finally, consider Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which identifies three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The first two map directly onto Kaczynski’s power process, with the addition of relatedness as well. SDT is an extraordinarily well-validated theory empirically, with thousands of studies supporting it across nearly every culture and context.

I think the third need that SDT identifies — relatedness, or the need for belonging and connection to others — is extremely important because it is evidence that we are already learning to love our status as part of the social organism. Still, similar to Csikszentmihalyi, few people who engage with SDT seriously seem to realize the implications their theory shows about what it means to be a human in modernity.

Now I’ll give a somewhat silly example of the power process in action and how losing it can permanently change my enjoyment of an activity.

GameStop

Watch on YouTube

When I was a kid, the best way to get a game was to go to GameStop and browse their selection of used games. What this meant was I needed to go to my parents and ask them for a ride to the store, and then look through their collection of games, most of which I had never heard of, and decide which one I would buy. I was operating under limited information, of course, because my phone didn’t have easy access to Metacritic, and I would have to go off of signals like the box art or description. In a way, the whole activity became a quest where the prize I was searching for was a fun game. I genuinely wanted to play a good game, and so it wasn’t like the intermediate steps were false constructions; they were, in fact, the optimal way of achieving that objective given my constraints.

But in 2026 the world has been totally transformed. Now with Game Pass I have instant access to hundreds of games, and through my phone I can immediately search for nearly limitless analysis for any game in existence. Clearly Game Pass is superior to going to GameStop by every possible measure. Not only that, but GameStop literally still exists, and nothing is stopping me from just going there right now and sticking to the old way of doing things. So clearly, via revealed preferences, I genuinely do prefer a world with instant access to games. But still.

Something was destroyed in the optimization, and the quest that used to exist is just gone now. The anticipation, the deliberation, the weight of an irreversible choice made under uncertainty — all the things that made getting a new game feel like it meant something — have been eliminated precisely because they are inefficiencies. Optimization did exactly what it was supposed to do and removed the obstacles between myself and the best possible game, but in doing so it removed a huge part of the experience for me as well.

I would argue it is this mechanism behind the Easterlin paradox, which shows that at any given moment, more money buys more happiness, but over time, more money for everyone buys no additional happiness for anyone.

I don’t think the resolution is complicated, even if it is potentially a little grim. What people experience as happiness from wealth is not so much a response to absolute material conditions as it is to their position relative to expectations about where their absolute material conditions “should” be. Thus, when everyone gets richer, expectations rise in lockstep, and the hedonic gain is consumed by the new baseline.

I’m not making not the first person to make this observation. Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell formalized this in 1971 as “hedonic relativism,” where they argued that people judge gains and losses not in absolute terms but relative to an adaptation level set by prior experience.

Bringing it back to GameStop, the GameStop quest was meaningful because the constraints were real and the process was the only optimal strategy for getting a good game. I wasn’t choosing to inconvenience myself at all, but now if I tried to do it again I would be. And this is irreversible, because the knowledge is irreversible. Even if tomorrow the internet shut down, I would still compare my experience at GameStop against the world which I have right now.

The principle operates at every scale. Spotify is better than building a music collection, but to a lot of people their collections used to mean something. Or using a GPS is better than reading a map, but navigating used to be a skill that conferred competence and autonomy. In each case, the optimization is individually rational, universally adopted, and quietly corrosive to the felt experience it was meant to improve. And no one can opt out, because opting out of one optimization while everyone else opts in just makes you worse off without restoring the meaning.

You Cannot Opt Out

Watch on YouTube

The easy answer to all of this would be the construction of intentional communities where people can control their experiences and retain some optimal amount of autonomy and struggle, but I would argue that someone can only opt out of optimization if someone else is still optimizing on your behalf.

The Amish are probably the canonical example people want to point to when arguing that rejecting modernity is a viable path, because the Amish do, in fact, live in a way that preserves many of the conditions Kaczynski identified as necessary for the power process. But the Amish exist inside the United States of America, and their farms are protected by our nuclear weapons.

They do not defend their borders or negotiate trade agreements. Instead, their opt-out is subsidized entirely by the civilization they see as corrosive, which is the opposite of self-sufficiency.

To consider what happens when a group opts out without a protector, you only need to look at China in the 18th and 19th centuries. Its weakness was not respected by the European nations, because why would it be? The idea that you can simply refuse to participate in the optimization race and be left alone to live your authentic life is just naive. Virtuous weakness buys you nothing but sympathy or subjugation by the strong.

Scott Alexander has an incredible essay called “Meditations On Moloch” where he describes the “multipolar trap,” where, in any competitive system with multiple agents, each agent is incentivized to optimize along whatever dimension determines survival, even if the aggregate effect of everyone optimizing is worse for everyone.

Climbing the Problem-Solving Tree

The entire arc of human history is progressive problem elimination and progressive sublimation to the group. Every advance exists literally to address some problem and, in turn, constrains us in some important way.

Agriculture, for example, solved the problems created by increasing population density by allowing us to eke more calories out of the same plot of land, but it also substantially tied us to the land, and the surplus freed people to specialize and so develop interdependence. It also created the first class of people with nothing “real” to do in the early priests, aristocrats, and bureaucrats, which resulted in the first surrogate activities such as philosophy.

Or the Industrial Revolution, which solved the problem of “labor” by replacing animal or human labor with other forms of energy. This created an explosion in our ability to produce the material necessities of life, but it also regimented our lives and further specialized our labor.

Each of these transitions follows the same basic pattern. A real problem that gave effort its meaning is solved, the solution is adopted universally because it is genuinely superior, and the domain of real problems a person can autonomously solve shrinks. In turn, the domain of surrogate activities expands to fill the gap, and humans lose another bastion of meaning.

If the pattern is progressive problem elimination, and if each elimination removes a domain where human effort was meaningful, then the trajectory, taken to its logical endpoint, is the elimination of human problem-solving itself.

Whether AI specifically is the technology that completes this trajectory, or whether some other system is the god at the end of time, doesn’t really matter. What is important is the basic historical trajectory. Since it depends on the competitive dynamics described in the previous section, the endpoint is the same either way: human beings cease to be the locus of problem-solving. We become, in the most literal sense, unnecessary to the system’s continued operation.

This is where most people stop and declare the situation hopeless, or deny the trajectory, or retreat into some version of “it won’t happen in my lifetime.” All three responses are understandable. But I don’t think any of them are honest.

John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry’s “The Major Transitions in Evolution” makes an argument that I believe reframes the problem substantially. Their claim is that the history of life is not a smooth gradient of increasing complexity but instead is punctuated by a series of rare, discrete transitions in which previously independent biological units lose their autonomy and become interdependent before merging into a higher-order entity that then becomes the new unit of selection.

Robert Wright, in Nonzero, arrives at a complementary conclusion from a different direction. Wright argues that the arc of both biological and cultural evolution is driven by the increasing realization of non-zero-sum interactions — situations where cooperation produces gains that competition cannot. Specifically, he argues that natural selection does not merely favor the strong over the weak in a zero-sum contest, but instead tends also to favor organisms, and later societies, that discover ways to cooperate, specialize, and coordinate. Since groups that cooperate outperform groups that do not, and outperformance is what matters, there is a relentless push against our individual incentives to defect and instead cooperate.

In other words, this next stage is not some tragic end of historical development so much as another step in a process of which we are currently the knife point.

A coherent counterargument to everything I’ve said thus far comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, whose entire philosophical project was, in a sense, a war against exactly this trajectory. In “On the Genealogy of Morals”, Nietzsche traces the origin of moral values to a conflict between two types: the aristocratic, who define “good” spontaneously out of their own strength and vitality, and the slavish, who define “good” reactively as the opposite of whatever the strong do. In short, aristocratic morality says yes to life, whereas slave morality says no to everything that threatens the weak.

Nietzsche’s famous parable of the lambs and the birds of prey in On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, Section 13, is the clearest expression of this theory:

“That lambs are annoyed at the great predatory birds is not a strange thing, and it provides no reason for holding anything against these large birds of prey, because they snatch away small lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves, ‘These predatory birds are evil — and whoever is least like a predatory bird — and especially who is like its opposite, a lamb — shouldn’t that animal be good?’ there is nothing to find fault with in this setting up of an ideal, except for the fact that the birds of prey might look down with a little mockery and perhaps say to themselves, ‘We are not at all annoyed with these good lambs — we even love them. Nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.”

Nietzsche’s metapoint can broadly be characterized as the belief that the lambs’ declaration of evil was life-denying and degenerative. In Beyond Good and Evil, he describes this same herd instinct as the dominant force in European civilization, one that has made obedience innate and turned the art of command into a guilty secret. This suppression of the exceptional individual was, if you read his works honestly, obviously seen as a disaster that needed to be battled.

Here is my response, and I want to be precise about it because Nietzsche is not an opponent to be dismissed cheaply.

Nietzsche’s own framework defeats his worship of the aristocratic. If you accept his basic distinction between “good and bad” (what makes you stronger or weaker) and “good and evil” (based on resentment and moral condemnation), then you have to ask why the herd is continually winning.

And if your framework says that an ideology built on resentment is degeneration, then how is resentment toward the lambs for imposing order any different? If the lambs organized, developed weapons, built institutions, domesticated the landscape, and systematically selected against every eagle born for ten thousand years — as humans have done — then by the very logic Nietzsche celebrated, the lambs are the superior organism. Not morally superior in the Christian sense, which Nietzsche rejected, but superior in the only sense he claimed to recognize.

Nietzsche did see this, of course, and his argument was ultimately that the lambs won through ressentiment and through the falsification of values rather than genuine strength. But why does this matter? If this is how the herd prevails, then that is the tool they use, and it is just as amoral as the eagle’s talons.

Here is where the future turns from black to maybe a light gray for me. Because both Nietzsche and Kaczynski saw that the individual was being absorbed as fundamentally a degenerate process that dragged us down to some lower, baser state. Both men assumed that what was being lost — individual autonomy, sovereign agency, the power process — was the highest expression of the universe and that nothing of value was truly being gained. But I just disagree.

Not only because what we are building — human civilization — is fucking incredible, but also because we clearly derive a huge amount of satisfaction from participation in the greater system.

Look at Self-Determination Theory’s third need: relatedness. Clearly the need for belonging and being part of something larger is just as real as any other innate human drive, with the same empirical standing as autonomy and competence. Because of course it is. Since the level of selection is not only the individual but also the group — as I’ve been arguing — we would naturally come to love, over time, the things that make us strong.

What Nietzsche saw as slave morality imposing itself on people and turning their desire for power inward can equally be seen as us increasingly developing an instinct which places the outcome of the whole group as important to us, not merely ourselves. This is evidence that the transition to a higher-order organism is already underway and that it already feels good and necessary from the inside.

To understand this better, it is worth explaining how this works mechanistically.

Multi-Level Selection

The claim that modern humans are a bundle of contradictory drives pulling us in pro- and antisocial directions is, in my opinion, pretty well vindicated by experience. Clearly humans care about things like their family or their community, and clearly humans also engage in activity that harms people they “should” care about in the name of selfishness.

But why? Why is it that on one hand there is an intrinsic desire to self-maximize and also a desire to sublimate into the group?

I think the answer lies in biology. To understand this it is worth understanding how traits become more widespread in a population, and the starting point is George Price’s covariance equation.

The Price equation describes the change in any trait across a generation as a function of the covariance between that trait and fitness. If that trait is positively correlated with reproductive success, then that trait will become more common. Notably, the equation is agnostic about the mechanism through which the trait and fitness are related, meaning this could apply to genetics as well as culture.

Additionally, the relationship can be decomposed, allowing you to partition the total change in a trait into components attributable to selection at different levels — within groups, between groups, and at any other level you can define.

David Sloan Wilson, drawing on Price’s framework, has argued that the debate over altruism in evolutionary biology resolves cleanly once you accept that selection operates at multiple levels simultaneously. Basically, within any group, selfish individuals outcompete altruistic ones, meaning that, on average, fitness will be positively correlated with selfishness.

But since groups also compete against other groups, the equilibrium cannot simply default to pure defection. If the ratio of antisocial behavior gets too high within a group, that group will simply be outcompeted by groups that are able to maintain internal discipline.

It can be controversial to debate the extent of direct genetic, as opposed to cultural, group replacement that has occurred among modern humans. But it is undeniable that if you zoom out and look at the four-odd million years of hominid evolution, selection has repeatedly occurred at the species level. No one can ask the Neanderthals if they think groups of a dozen people is too much group sublimation.

The argument above can be stated formally in a simple model of a public goods game with between-group competition. If you want a formal toy model you can look here1 but what matters is that the equilibrium frequency of cooperation increases as it becomes more selectively useful. 

But since the forces of individual and group selection are in tension the result is a stable polymorphism: a population containing both cooperators and defectors or, I think realistically to the human condition, individuals whose propensity to cooperate is some intermediate value from a distribution of possible types, the balance of which is maintained by the opposing pressures of two levels of selection. 

“Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Walt Witman

So as the benefit-to-cost ratio increases and the cost of intergroup competition increases, so too does the equilibrium level of cooperation.

Because of the scale evolutionary history is operating under, I’m only tangentially talking about modern events such as the conquest of the Americas — which definitely can be understood on a group-selection level — but about the entire scope of our evolutionary history, which is littered with the carcasses of dead species.

In the moment we are in, there is still real tension, and we are torn between these instincts. But just like the previous steps up the evolutionary ladder, there is no a priori reason to think this is headed toward some universal cliff.

Instead, as the gains to cooperation continue to increase and the cost of not cooperating similarly climbs, humans will follow the gradient descent, and we — or whatever comes next — will find more and more meaning in coordination and less and less pleasure in autonomy.

What does this imply? 

Let me state the conclusion without blinking or shying away.

Every prior major transition in the history of life eliminated the autonomy of the lower-level unit, and in no case did that unit’s preferences about the matter turn out to be relevant. The prokaryote did not vote on becoming a mitochondrion. The single-celled organism did not consent to multicellularity. In each case, the entities that resisted integration were not rewarded for their independence — they were outcompeted and destroyed by the entities that cooperated. What survived was the higher-order whole, and the components that had once been autonomous became so thoroughly integrated that the question of their “freedom” ceased to be meaningful.

We are in the middle of exactly this kind of transition, and the concept of “bad” that both Kaczynski and Nietzsche rely on is itself a product of individual-level selection pressures. It is not some objective truth about the universe. It is a drive that exists because it used to be adaptive for organisms like us to resist absorption — back when the relevant unit of selection really was the individual or the small group. The feeling that this transition is a tragedy is not a clear-eyed assessment of reality. It is the last expression of a selection pressure that is actively losing. The sense that something precious is being destroyed is real, in the way that all feelings are real, but it is not evidence that something precious is actually being destroyed in any frame larger than our own transient one.

Recently I was at dinner with DeepLeftAnalysis🔸 and I was complaining about some grocery store nonsense — specifically that an Italian market versus some halal international store in California. He made the point to me, iirc, that maybe my great-grandparents would have hated the Italian place.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this, because it captures the way life actually works pretty well. The Italian market was at one point change and disruption and full of food the people around it didn’t eat. And then a new generation grew up with it, their tastes shifted, and it became a thing that they loved. The halal market is exactly the same. To me it is different, and that is frustrating, but to my hypothetical grandchildren it will just be part of the texture of life.

Every generation experiences the most recent round of integration as loss and the previous rounds as natural.

Now — the obvious objection. Isn’t this just saying that anything that happens is good because adaptation will smooth it over? My response is no, because I am not making any moral claims at all. I’m claiming that things which are selectively good persist, and that people grow to love that which is selectively good. I would argue there is no independent third person view that can adjudicate if the transition is  good or bad normatively in any frame-independent sense. 

For my paid subscribers only. What the hell should you even do? 

I have just spent some eight thousand odd words arguing that individual agency is being absorbed into a superorganism but everyone reading this, perhaps other than the future AIs, are individuals with individual lives and preferences that still are subjectively very real.

So: what should you do? The answer comes through a process of elimination.

You cannot reverse the trajectory. You cannot find “real” meaning in Kaczynski’s sense because the conditions for it are gone. And you cannot manufacture meaning through because as I argued earlier, any attempt to create meaning that does not arise from a genuine alignment between your drives and the external world is, by definition, a surrogate activity.

What is left? Do stuff that would pass Kaczynski’s own test. What would you miss even if survival were at stake?

For me, at least one of those things is writing. It is hard for me to imagine a version of my life where I did not want to write. So perhaps posting on substack is a surrogate activity in the strict technical sense, but if so I don’t really care if it gives me meaning.

I am not under the illusion that writing is the way to optimize my terminal wealth or status, but I am okay with that. As of right now I can support myself and my wife through Substack and my salary as president of the Boyd Institute, and that is what really matters. As long as I can get away with it, I intend to keep writing, keep going on walks in nature, keep having agency over my time and my pace of work, and keep pursuing the things that I love — even if it means I don’t chase the things I “should.”

Because what is the alternative?

1The model draws on the Price equation (Price, 1970), the multi-level selection framework of Wilson and Sober (1994), and the intergroup competition models of Bowles (2006).

A FORMAL MODEL: THE MULTI-LEVEL PUBLIC GOODS GAME

Setup. Consider a population divided into m groups, each containing n individuals. Each individual makes a binary choice: cooperate (C) or defect (D). Cooperators pay a personal cost c and generate a benefit b that is shared equally among all n group members. Defectors pay nothing and share equally in whatever benefit cooperators produce. Assume b > c (cooperation is efficient) but b/n < c (defection is individually optimal).

Payoffs. In a group with k cooperators:

Cooperator payoff:

π_C = (b · k) / n − c

Defector payoff:

π_D = (b · k) / n

The defector’s payoff exceeds the cooperator’s by exactly c, regardless of k. Within any group, defection is the strictly dominant strategy. This is the standard result from public goods theory, and it is why naive models predict the extinction of cooperation.

Group fitness. The average payoff in a group with k cooperators is:

w̄_j = (b − c) · k / n

Since b > c, this increases linearly with k. Groups with more cooperators have higher average fitness. If groups compete — through warfare, resource competition, differential expansion, or cultural displacement — then more cooperative groups outcompete less cooperative ones.

The Price equation. George Price showed that the total change in the population frequency of any trait can be decomposed into two components:

Δp̄ = (1 / w̄) · Cov(w_j, p_j) + (1 / w̄) · E(w_j · Δp_j)

where p_j is the frequency of cooperators in group j, w_j is the fitness of group j, and w̄ is the population mean fitness.

The first term is between-group selection: the covariance between group fitness and group cooperation frequency. Because more cooperative groups are fitter, this term is positive. It pushes the population toward more cooperation.

The second term is within-group selection: the expected within-group change in cooperation frequency, weighted by group fitness. Because defectors outcompete cooperators inside every group, this term is negative. It pushes the population toward less cooperation.

The equilibrium. Cooperation stabilizes at a frequency where Δp̄ = 0 — where the between-group and within-group pressures exactly balance:

Cov(w_j, p_j) = −E(w_j · Δp_j)

Meaning cooperation can persist  if the positive effect of selection between groups outweighs the negative effect of selection within groups.

---

# Someone is deeply wrong about Iran right now

This is Trump's war either way

Date: 2026-03-12
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/someone-is-deeply-wrong-about-iran
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/someone-is-deeply-wrong-about-iran

I have been, like many of you, following the US-Iran war extremely closely in recent days, and the main feeling that I cannot shake is that within the information environment I am exposed to there are a couple of competing narratives about what is going on that are fundamentally incompatible.

First, you have a number of large social media communities that have genuinely talked themselves into the belief that the US is facing an imminent military defeat.

Second is the Trump administration itself, which seems to be strongly of the opinion that not only has the military phase of this war functionally concluded but that it has concluded with a resounding US victory.

And finally, there is the media establishment, most of the people I’ve read here on Substack, and foreign policy experts who appear to believe that the US has blundered into a war with little strategic vision and that not only have we failed to actually militarily crush the Iranians but they continue to pose a significant threat to the oil market and US forces.

Now I want to be clear about my bias up front. I very much want the Trump administration narrative to be true because I want America to decisively win this war. I make no apology for that bias, and so I’m not going to try to hide it either. But this  aside, I still think it is a worthwhile task to steelman, as much as I can, these different models of what is going on in an effort to approach the truth.

This is important because the models of reality they each present are fundamentally incompatible. Either 1) the US is tactically losing the war, or 2) we have just “concluded” a Desert Storm–level military success, or 3) we have set off a global catastrophe and Trump is about to back down in the face of resurgent Iranian might, allied and domestic pressure, and an oil shock. There is no way to know right now with certainty what will happen; only time will reveal that. 

However the war resolves we should all remember that this was Trump’s war. He began it without the approval of congress and at no point was the genuine buy in of the American public sought. This means that we can look at it objectively. If this “little excursion” turns into a grand strategic success I will applaud it, if it turns into a quagmire or otherwise fails I will condemn it. 

Dealing with each narrative in turn.

Narrative 1: The US is losing militarily

As I mentioned, there is a significant amount of chatter on social media to the effect that the US has not only strategically blundered into a war it cannot win but is actively tactically losing the fight right now. The specific way this is phrased can vary a lot between posters, and doubtless at least part of it is the result of foreign actors trying to stir the domestic pot, but I think the dynamic is consistent enough that I would feel irresponsible not at least touching on it.

You can see here a tweet by Max Blumenthal, the editor of “The Grayzone.”

Or here you can see Hasan Piker, the largest leftist content creator, saying effectively the same thing.

Here is a video from Vaush, another large streamer.

It is functionally impossible to browse X without seeing posts like this with tens of thousands of likes in your feed.

And the stuff I’ve seen on TikTok and Instagram about this war is so unhinged I don’t even know where to begin. Many people have convinced themselves that Tel Aviv is being actively destroyed and the US has been routed from the region already.

Now it is, candidly, very difficult for me to steelman this perspective because it is, in my opinion, completely detached from reality. But in a way that is sort of the point. Our media has become so poorly trusted by most people that a huge fraction of the public has functionally turned to social media as a path to “the truth.” Since there is very little cost to lying online, people forget things quickly, but there is an enormous upside to being “interesting.” The result is a gradual arms race of sensationalism which leads to the moment we are in. This has been compounded by the issue of AI videos, and in many real ways we have crossed an informational event horizon I see no way of getting back from. A huge fraction of the public is proudly misinformed at this moment, and there is basically nothing that can be done about it.

Narrative 2: Trump and Co.

If you listen to the press conferences from the US, as I have been, you would get the impression that what we and the Israelis have achieved in ten days is beyond anything in history. According to the administration, the Iranian military has been eliminated using advanced US technology with effectively zero losses. The Supreme Leader is dead and his replacement is at minimum wounded. Their air force and navy have been totally eliminated, and the rate of missile firing has fallen by 92%.

In short, the “war,” in the meaningful sense of an active conflict, is over, and what remains is a sustained degradation campaign that will last weeks or months and will end when the administration decides Iran has been sufficiently broken.

But don’t worry, this is not Iraq, they will say, because rather than trying to occupy the country we are implementing a new model of warfare where we will simply kill the enemy leadership class and military until nothing remains.

Take these quotes from Trump:

“We’re achieving major strides toward completing our military objective. And some people could say they’re pretty well complete.”

“We’ve wiped every single force in Iran out, very completely.”

“The big risk on that war has been over for three days. We wiped them out the first — in the first two days.”

Or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, who stated that despite predicting more US losses, the operational picture was “decisively in our favor.” Many congressional Republicans, such as Lindsey Graham, are on the same page.

Finally, it seems from oil prices that the market is predicting that the hot phase of the war will be over in a matter of days and the strait will be open again soon. At the time of writing this, oil sits at about $92 a barrel, roughly 50% up from the pre-war price but nowhere near either the heights it reached this weekend or where analysts would have expected it to settle in a universe where the strait is impassable for months.

The core evidentiary pillars for this argument are something like the following.

Venezuela “proves” that this formula works.

After Delta Force operators, supported by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a nighttime raid, VP Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president and immediately began cooperating with Washington as a de facto puppet.

Within months, according to Trump, over 100 million barrels of Venezuelan oil have flowed to Houston refineries and their legislature is busy changing the law to allow US oil companies to cash in. If you want to see how far this action was outside of the consensus it was possible, I suggest you play a hypothetical game with ChatGPT. Here is what it had to say to me when I tried.

Trump and co. seem to be betting on a similar outcome here, and it is clear from all of their press conferences that the formal collapse of the regime isn’t even their preferred outcome. It is strongly in the interest of local Iranian elites to play ball here because Saudi Arabia shows America is more than willing to tolerate an Islamist autocracy as long as they don’t cause problems for us or try to antagonize Israel. If a conciliatory faction of the Iranian government is able to wrestle control of the state from the IRGC, then the entire elite class could become wealthy overnight.

Trump doesn’t always chicken out.

The TACO thesis became conventional wisdom among stock traders in 2025 after repeated tariff reversals. Basically, the argument went that Trump would talk a big game but anything which seriously threatened to cause economic damage to America was beyond him.

Clearly this belief was held in Iran as well, where according to sources familiar with the intelligence Khamenei believed “no one had the guts to strike him,” and yet on February 28 Khamenei and nearly 50 senior regime leaders were killed during a gathering at his compound in Tehran.

In his press conference on the 9th, Trump was clear that he thought this would push up oil prices, but he opted to pull the trigger anyway. It seems plausible, or at least the Trump administration would want you to believe it is likely, that he has no intention of stopping now.

Part of the reason that Trump seems so willing in this scenario to risk both his polling and a market crash is that it genuinely does appear to be the case that he feels personally wronged by Iran. From that same night:

“Hey, look, I had a target on my back because, as you people wrote pretty well, they caught the assassin that was after me. So we just got them first, but they caught the assassin.”

The military destruction is lopsided and very real.

Simply look at the numbers.

This would amount to functionally the entire Iranian navy and air force, along with a huge slice of their leadership class. In fact, the numbers obscure the scale of Iranian losses because what is not shown is damage to their launchers and military industrial complex, both of which have been extensive.

The whole region is turning on Iran.

While Iran did manage to inflict some damage on US forces — killing 9 Americans, wounding 150, and destroying roughly $2 billion in equipment including a $1.1 billion radar at Al Udeid — its ability to harm US assets was severely limited. As a result, they decided to effectively attack almost all of their neighbors. Largely the attacks have failed to deal significant damage, but what they have managed to accomplish is burning whatever bridges existed.

The evidence here is mixed and you should be honest with yourself about it, but right now it is unambiguous that the Gulf states that are operationally aligned with the US are running interdiction for us.

Narrative 3: This was dumb

Unlike narrative 1, where I can broadly shrug and point to social media, or narrative 2, where we can look at what the administration is saying, narrative 3 is more difficult to pin down concretely. If I mention a quote from, say, Nate Silver, someone can easily counter it with one from a think tank saying something else. But I think enough of the core DNA is shared that it makes for a coherent story. Namely, the belief is that we have blundered into an unwinnable war and that Trump will have no choice but to back down in the next couple of weeks to avoid disaster, or if he doesn’t back down face disaster directly. Additionally, even if we somehow manage to walk away and claim victory, the cost to the international system and American prestige has been so high that we have permanently degraded our global standing.

I’ll begin with the popular version, which I’ve seen a lot of across X and Substack.

Nate Silver, writing in Silver Bulletin, had this to say:

“Maybe it’s just me — having not been a former Fox & Friends host, I’m not a strategy expert — but seems not super smart to win an election on inflation and then start a war that causes oil prices to spike by 50% within like four days.”

On the 9th he reaffirmed this perspective with the following tweet, as part of an ongoing argument with Charles Gasparino — a Fox Business correspondent.

Or you can look at the HuffPost, which wrote in an article titled “Trump’s War on Iran Will End When He Declares Victory — The Only Question Is When.”

“I think there will be a ‘new normal’ in the Middle East that is not dependent on the U.S. for defense and an angry, sulking Iran that is even more hard-line and anxious for revenge. The Gulf states will arm themselves to the teeth,” said Jim Townsend, who has worked at both the Pentagon and NATO and is now an analyst with the Center for a New American Security, a center-left think tank. “The oil trade will resume, but not quickly. Too much uncertainty about Iran taking potshots at tankers or laying mines.”

Take as another example JPMorgan’s former chief strategist, who tweeted the following.

It isn’t even just liberals who feel this way. Tucker Carlson has made a point of condemning the war as fundamentally unwinnable on his podcast recently.

There are literally countless examples of this across social media, so I will not belabor the point. But it isn’t just “normies” talking this way.

Senator Mark Kelly, while speaking with reporters on Monday, March 9th, said, “Clearly, they do not have a strategic goal. They didn’t have a plan, they have no timeline. Because of that, they have no exit strategy.”

And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer echoed this while chiding his Republican colleagues for going along with the war: “The American people have been clear: they do not want another endless and costly war in the Middle East. Yet today, most Senate Republicans made their choice — they sided with President Trump’s Iran War.”

So what is the basis for this belief that the war has been, and will be, a strategic catastrophe? I would largely lump them into four core arguments.

There doesn’t seem to be a path to regime change with strikes alone.

Before Operation Epic Fury began, the National Intelligence Council completed a classified assessment concluding that neither limited airstrikes nor a prolonged military air campaign would likely result in regime change in Iran, even if the current leadership was killed. So far the prediction has held, and despite Khamenei’s death on Day 1 his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has been appointed as the new Supreme Leader, and ACLED’s March 2026 special issue found “little evidence” of internal fracture, defections, or popular uprising.

Polymarket largely agrees with this, only pricing in roughly a ¼ chance of regime collapse.

There are, to the best of my knowledge, no good examples of military strikes alone toppling a regime, but please correct me if I’m missing something.

Iranian weapons are cheap, American weapons are expensive.

The US has already burned through over 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles, over four times the annual production rate of roughly 72–100 per year. On the other side, Iran had prior to the war the ability to construct thousands of drones and missiles, such as the Shahed-136, which costs only $20,000–$35,000 each, and have been launching these at US allies and positions. Although we have thus far managed to mostly shoot them down, each interdiction is extremely expensive. A Patriot missile costs roughly $4 million, for example, and the standard practice is to launch two in order to decrease the odds of missing. This would imply a cost ratio of 100:1 in Iran’s favor, which would be completely unsustainable.

Defence Security Asia calculated that sustained Iranian barrage operations could cost the US $50–100 billion annually in interceptor expenditure alone, three to five times the entire US missile defense budget. Foreign Policy called this “The Drone Attrition Trap,” where even if the initial days of fighting have resulted in significant Iranian losses we cannot shoot down their attacks indefinitely. Unless we have actually managed to degrade their offensive capabilities to the degree the Trump administration is claiming, the US is primed to lose an attritional war with the Iranians. To compound the asymmetric cost profile, recent reports about the Iranians using small boats to mine the strait further put strain on American forces because even a single mine can functionally block the ability of tankers to safely cross.

We cannot afford to be shut down.

Since approximately 20% of global oil supply transits the Strait of Hormuz and traffic is down 90%, the US either needs to deescalate quickly or it will face a catastrophic oil shock. Brent crude spiked from roughly $70 to $119 per barrel this weekend and although it has since come down slightly, prices remain extremely elevated. Even if we do deescalate, production has already been cut by many Gulf nations. For example, Saudi Arabia’s largest refinery was targeted by a drone and is currently shut down. This is in addition to cuts at oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait.

Aramco’s own CEO has warned of a “catastrophic” situation in the global economy if the strait remains closed. The war is already broadly unpopular in America, as Nate Silver pointed out, and there appears to be little appetite in the US to pay a high economic cost for another regime-change war in the Middle East. Trump pretty clearly ran in 2024 on avoiding long protracted engagements, and his administration made functionally no effort to win over the public before letting loose the dogs of war. Even if we can win, it is quite plausible there is simply no political will to win.

We have torched our global standing for what?

We cannot know exactly what is going on behind closed doors, and I would suspect most of the things I’ve read about leaks will not bear out as true. Still, it isn’t difficult to think about how this war might cost the US diplomatically, even if we militarily succeed. The American empire has largely operated through a “rules-based” international order that we created in the aftermath of WW2, and this war is, more than probably any other war in recent memory, firmly outside of it.

Not only that, but how exactly it is in the interest of America to risk the global economy and our entire empire in the hopes of totally preventing Tel Aviv from being nuked is a genuine question that is worth asking.

Even just looking at the Gulf states, it is extremely plausible to believe that even if they are currently operationally aligned with the US, this war still represents a firm breaking point in their alignment with our long-term interests. PBS reported that Gulf allies were “disappointed” the US didn’t notify them and “ignored their warnings.” Prince Turki al-Faisal, former Saudi intelligence chief, called it “Netanyahu’s war,” and as Carnegie described it, the Gulf states are “caught between Iran’s desperation and the U.S.’s recklessness.”

Our dynamic with these oil-rich nations is in many ways the lynchpin of Trump’s Middle Eastern policy, so losing them would be an unmitigated disaster. If they have decided the US is no longer a credible protector of their interests, this would amount to a fundamental global power rebalancing to the detriment of America.

Even if the Trump administration gets all of their goals and the Iranians are replaced with a compliant puppet regime that plays ball, the price to the credibility of our moral proclamations will linger for a generation. Of course, the soft realists in the Trump administration would retort by saying the credibility of our moral proclamations never mattered at all anyway, but your mileage may vary.

Where does this leave us?

I think there are coherent arguments in both narratives, and frankly we just don’t know, and cannot know, enough to say which is true right now. My gut says that the international cost will be muted enough in the short run and ambiguous enough in the long run that it will be a point of argument rather than a real hinge event. I also feel like the tactical situation for Iran is genuinely catastrophic and the war has been a clear display, even more so than Venezuela, of the overwhelming dominance of the US military. Iran was not a “weak” country — it was one of the most powerful militaries on the planet — according to GFP’s annual rankings, #16.

So the fact the US was able to delete it at an extremely low cost will be recognized by world leaders even if the general public mostly ignores it. The casualty rates in this war are approaching late Victorian wars against tribesmen ratios.

Still, I have low confidence in the strategic brilliance of the Trump administration, and even if they are not operating blindly, as many people seem to think, I do think they are underestimating the international cost of this war. America is now unapologetically a gloves-off imperium, and this means we cannot maintain it with anything but sheer force. The dream of a 1990s world where everyone peacefully arrives at the Washington liberal consensus is very much dead, and what ideology wins the future will be decided, one way or another, by blood and iron.

For my paid subscribers only. What I predict will happen:

I predict, with enormous error bars given the uncertainty, that the US seizes Kharg Island and possibly the other Gulf islands and occupies them as a strategic military zone. This will become our Gibraltar — a small, defensible chokepoint that gives Washington permanent leverage over the world’s trade lanes.

Meanwhile the bombing campaign will continue for weeks, maybe a couple of months, systematically degrading the Iranian state’s ability to function as a military power. This will push oil prices above $100 for a while, but once the war is concluded they will return to roughly $60 again.

The IRGC’s production infrastructure gets hammered until there is simply nothing left to reconstitute in the near term and at some point, and I’d guess late April or May, whatever remains of the Iranian leadership asks for a ceasefire on American terms. Trump, who loves a deal and loves declaring victory even more, will agree, which allows the regime to technically survive but in a deeply cowed form. Iran will no longer pose a credible threat to anyone for the next decade at least, and my modal prediction is they will become a mostly “normal” country before 2030.

Without Kharg Island they cannot sell oil at scale, which means they cannot fund proxies or rebuild their military, and thus they cannot project power beyond their borders.

This war will be mostly forgotten by Americans because the left will have little interest in talking about what looks like a substantive Trumpian victory and the right won’t want to remind people that they were to blame for the inflationary shock we are headed toward.

---

# Aliens aren't real

It's just us on this ride, for now.

Date: 2026-02-15
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/aliens-arent-real
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/aliens-arent-real

I have long believed that settling the stars is the single most pressing moral concern and today I wanted to explain why.  

The main reason is that, based on the best evidence we have, Humanity is, probably, the only technologically advanced life in the observable universe.

To think about this idea clearly, we must first engage with a couple of facts.

Fact 1: 

We have yet to discover any evidence of extrasolar life at all, let alone evidence of advanced extrasolar life. 

Fact 2: 

The observable universe is indescribably large, ~200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, the Milky Way alone has ~100–400 billion stars. 

Fact 3: 

The observable universe is incredibly old, ~13.8B years. 

Fact 4: 

It would take Humans ~50 million years to colonize the entire Milky Way under extremely conservative assumptions.1

Fact 5: 

Life has existed on Earth for ~4B years, with anatomically modern Humans - meaning a person who would be able to perfectly blend into modern society if raised from infancy - existing for ~300k years.

Taken together, these facts create a genuine puzzle. If anything like Humanity had arisen at any point in the last 13.8 billion years and begun to spread, it would have colonized the entire galaxy in less than a billion years. We should expect to see evidence of such a civilization everywhere. We don't.

The puzzle becomes doubly mysterious when you consider Arthur’s Dyson Dilemma. What this says is essentially that as a stellar-based civilization captures more and more of their sun’s energy, the relative composition of their “light” signature would shift into their “waste heat” signature. In practice, this would look like a star having a much lower light spectrum than would otherwise be plausible given the star’s size, etc. Well, we have looked, and found no examples of this anywhere. What this means is that nowhere we can see is there any evidence any civilization is significantly capturing their sun’s light,  an action that Humans would inevitably undertake somewhere in the galaxy over the next billion years. This is to say nothing of the fact that there is no evidence of galactic “gardening,” or the arrangement of stars so they are more ‘useful’ such as avoiding ruinous collisions, something, again, we Humans would certainly do.

Finally, consider the problem of timing. A person could respond to everything I’ve said so far by saying “advanced alien civilizations do exist, but they simply haven’t developed to the point we can detect them yet.” However, when you consider it carefully, it falls apart, since for it to work it would require that every civilization capable of expanding across the galaxy happened to arise within roughly the same ~50 million year window, a blink of an eye against 13.8 billion years of cosmic history. If even one civilization had appeared just a hundred million years earlier, it would have left an unmistakable footprint.

I don’t want to oversell the evidence for an absence of aliens because of course we have imperfect instruments; however, as the evidence of NO alien life continues to mount, it is increasingly in the court of the alien-life believers to substantiate their hypothesis. 

Still, we cannot rule out exotic possibilities like humans living in some sort of alien zoo, or the life undergoes a “sublimation” process where it normally “steps out” of reality, either through constructing enormous Nozick-esque experience machines or by literally undergoing apotheosis. I personally find this implausible, and since these theories are by construction impossible to disprove, I will put them aside for this article. 

So where does this leave us? 

If we take the evidence at face value - and I think we should - then Humanity is very likely alone, at least as a complex technological civilization. Not just alone abstractly, but alone in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, possibly even alone in the entire observable universe of 200 sextillion stars.

Why?

If we accept that the absence of aliens is, probably, real, the natural question to ask is: why? Why would a universe this old and this large produce precisely one technological civilization?

The most convincing answer is Robin Hanson’s Great Filter Theory. What this postulates is that rather than thinking about the probability of life emerging and becoming technological as a binary event, we should instead think about it as a series of “filters,” where even if each one is only moderately unlikely, the combined product can yield a world where even the possibility of one technological civilization is quite small. 

To concretize this, consider just the following subsample of filters with probabilities I think are plausible, both behind and ahead of us.

Suitable star ~15%

Right type, metallicity, not in a binary system so the temperature remains stable, and not too close to the galactic core where radiation would sterilize everything.  

Rocky planet in the habitable zone ~10%

Planet needs to have water, and for that water to not boil or freeze.

Planetary stability over billions of years ~20%. 

Venus lacked plate tectonics, which led to a runaway greenhouse gas cycle and Mars lacked a sufficiently active metallic core and so its atmosphere was stripped away.

Abiogenesis ~10%. 

The literal emergence of life: 

The Eukaryotic Transition ~0.1%

You probably remember from your high school biology classes that the mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell, but what you might not know is that it has its own genetic lineage and is in many ways its own living organism. What occurred is that billions of years ago one prokaryote engulfed another, and rather than absorbing it they instead “fused” together and conquered the entire planet. Literally all eukaryotic life today -  every animal, plant, and fungus, or about 80% of biomass - descends from this event, which occurred precisely one time in four billion years. 

Photosynthesis and surviving oxygenation ~50%. 

In order for life to escape being trapped around volcanic rims and capture the enormous energy potential of the sun, photosynthesis had to evolve. This alone is by no means guaranteed, but there is an additional wrinkle. A side effect of photosynthesis is that it produces huge amounts of free oxygen in the atmosphere. Oxygen is dangerous in two ways: first, it is directly poisonous to anaerobic life, and on Earth this process resulted in a devastating mass extinction event; second, oxygen is extraordinarily reactive, and without a sufficiently large biosphere sink it will eventually quite literally burn the entire surface to a crisp. 

Complex multicellular life ~10%

The emergence of differentiated tissues, coordinated body plans, and complex organ systems took a billion years of evolution after the rise of eukaryotes. 

Land colonization ~30%

For a number of reasons that are wonderfully outlined in this video, life had to move out of the ocean to have any hope of developing space travel. For this to occur, a planet would need an ozone layer, which requires oxygen created by photosynthesis. 

Mental and anatomical prerequisites for technology ~1%

We have yet to find any fossil record of animals which shared the triple punch of Humans: we are highly social creatures, we have highly adaptable limbs which lend themselves to tool use, and we are brilliant. Dolphins and octopuses are of course genuinely intelligent, but even given a billion years they would never accomplish what Humans have. Similarly, early hominid ancestors shared many of the same traits as Homo sapiens but lacked the social machinery to conquer the Earth. 

A cumulative culture  ~10%

Even with anatomically modern Hmans you need writing and other cultural systems to develop which allow for the gradual accumulation of technology and society.

 The Scientific Revolution & Energy Bootstrapping ~50%

To get from an agrarian civilization to an industrial civilization you need at least two things. First, a society has to arrive at empiricism or some other system to exponentially increase knowledge; and second, you need a source of easily capturable energy. Earth happens to have a large store of hydrocarbons which are the result of millions of years of captured biomass. 

Survival to interstellar expansion ~50%

We of course have yet to “escape” and are still haunted by the shadow of nuclear war, engineered pandemics, an AI apocalypse, or a collapse in fertility leading to a world run by the Amish. 

Taking just these probabilities you get a p≈1.125×10^12 per star.

Which would imply, at most, ~0.45 interstellar civilizations in the Milky Way. 

You can of course add more filters or quibble about the probabilities, but the idea is hopefully clear.

So are we fucked?

If you have bought everything I’ve written so far, the natural question to ask is “where” in the Great Filter process we stand. Humans have yet to do anything that we ourselves would be able to identify from afar, and so it is plausible that billions of civilizations have reached this point in the Milky Way alone and then collapsed in the transition from industrial to multiplanetary civilization.

The semi-recent news from Mars makes this story somewhat darker, since in July 2024 NASA’s Perseverance rover collected a sample from a rock called “Cheyava Falls” in Jezero Crater which showed potential biosignatures consistent with ancient microbial life, for which scientists have found no strong abiotic explanation. Now this isn’t proof of life on Mars, but it is suggestive evidence that microbial life may have existed at one point, and this would imply that in our solar system alone life existed on AT LEAST two of the three planets within the Goldilocks zone. Note I say existed, not originated, because it is possible life was carried from a single source around the chaotic early solar system.

But even if Mars experienced independent abiogenesis, and we radically assume that life always arises when the conditions are right, the math barely changes.

Since the core principle is the layering of moderately low-probability events where each individual step is mostly irrelevant. In short, we cannot know for sure, but given how steep the cliffs we have already climbed are and the relative believability of the challenges ahead, I personally lean towards the belief that we have already passed the most daunting filters and, barring catastrophic mismanagement, have a very solid chance at “escaping.”

Why does this matter? - for paid subscribers only

Assuming you bought even half of what I’ve written, you may be feeling some combination of fear, pride, and overwhelming duty at the realization that all future consciousness in the observable universe, not just Human consciousness, all consciousness that will ever exist, probably depends on what happens to us in this century. Our lives will largely determine the trajectory of the entire fanning web of future possibilities.

The moral weight on the line here is truly incomprehensible for anyone willing to look. If Humanity becomes a multiplanetary species and eventually spreads across even a fraction of the Milky Way, the number of sentient creatures that will exist dwarfs anything a Human could hope to imagine. Trillions of lives. Billions of years of civilization. All of it in our hands.

I used Venus and Mars earlier as evidence for why complex life is rare. But they also serve as a natural counterargument to the idea that we should timidly hide on Earth forever. Both planets were once eminently habitable, but they underwent different slow-moving geological catastrophes which turned them into hellscapes.

Earth’s stability is not guaranteed, and so the only logical solution is to diversify risk. As it stands, we are a single supervolcano or sufficiently powerful solar wind burst from being totally wiped out, to say nothing of self-inflicted doomsdays.

There is a deeper point here that I tried to make in a previous piece and will try to make again. The decay that everyone can feel in our society is the decay of every leisure aristocracy. We lack a telos around which to organize purpose, and so we have been twiddling our epicurean thumbs for the last fifty years, inventing more and more complex toys to distract ourselves. This is foolishness!

I am asking us to instead look up and see the awesome duty that stands before us and get to work.

1The settlement time equals the galaxy’s diameter divided by the effective expansion speed of the colonization wavefront.

The frontier advances in hops. Each hop covers a distance d, taking some travel time plus establishment time, the time for a new colony to build up and launch its own ships. So the effective speed is d / (travel time + establishment time), and since travel time = d / ship speed, the full expression is:

settlement time = (diameter / d) × (d / ship speed + establishment time)

Assume the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, stars are about 5 light-years apart, ships travel at 0.005c, and a new colony needs 1,500 years before it can send out daughter ships.

Then travel time = 5 / 0.005c = 1,000 years, each hop takes 2,500 years total, and crossing the galaxy requires 100,000 / 5 = 20,000 hops. So:

settlement time = 20,000 × 2,500 = 50 million years

---

# A chat with Jacob Savage - the author of "The Lost Generation"

Just two White guys chatting.

Date: 2026-02-12
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/a-chat-jacob-savage-the-author-of
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/a-chat-jacob-savage-the-author-of

Note: we at The Boyd Institute are currently running an essay contest with a top prize of $2,500 to answer the following question: “How can America improve its problem-solving capacity?”

If, after listening to this interview, you feel inspired to tackle that question, please go check out our article with more information. Submissions close March 15th.

Boyd Essay Contest: Call for Submissions — The Boyd Institute

The Lost Generation article. 

Summary by Chatty

Timestamps & Topics

[00:00 – 01:30] 

Jacob Savage is a ticket scalper, former aspiring screenwriter, and brilliant writer living in LA. He wrote a viral article for Compact called “The Lost Generation” about how DEI policies disproportionately affected younger white men in high-status industries.

[01:30 – 06:00] The Article’s Core Argument 

Jacob lays out the thesis: DEI created real losers, specifically younger white men, while older white men in power didn’t have to move aside. He cites the stat that white male lower-level TV writers went from 48% to 11% in under a decade. The host shares a similar experience in his Stanford PhD program. They discuss how older professors seemed oblivious to (or unwilling to acknowledge) the shift.

[06:00 – 09:30] Responses & Pushback to the Article 

Discussion of critics who conflated the total demographic composition of institutions (still majority white) with what was happening in the hiring pipeline (dramatically shifted). The host finds this conflation frustrating; Jacob notes nobody could point to a single institution that got more white and male.

[09:30 – 13:15] Categories of Response 

Jacob breaks down three types of responses to his article:

Blue Sky deniers — “It’s not happening, everything is still racist.”

“It’s not that bad” / Matt Bruenig-type — Acknowledges reality but minimizes it using aggregate stats.

Centrist liberals (Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias types) — “We went too far.”

[13:15 – 16:45] Generational Experience Gap 

Jacob discusses “stolen valor” among millennial women who invoke their mothers’ experiences with sexism. The host talks about how boomers still picture institutions (like UVA) as they were decades ago and refuse to update their mental models. Both agree there’s a huge experience gap between their generation and their parents’.

[16:45 – 21:15] Did the Article Change Minds? 

Jacob thinks it reached people who already had doubts but didn’t convert ideologues. Discussion of a California ballot proposition to legalize affirmative action in hiring that was defeated 60-40 even in 2020. They discuss how affirmative action made more sense in an 85/15 demographic split but became untenable when expanded far beyond its original scope.

[21:15 – 28:00] Where Is This Heading? / Democratic Party Leadership 

The host worries that the pipeline of people hired under DEI will become future decision-makers, perpetuating the cycle. Jacob argues you’d need something like a Democratic leader explicitly repudiating DEI — a “papal bull” moment — but doesn’t see it happening. They briefly discuss Gavin Newsom and other potential leaders.

[28:00 – 33:00] What Going Viral Was Like 

Jacob describes the experience: glued to his phone for two weeks, an “out of body experience,” getting retweeted by J.D. Vance, emails from strangers — but still just picking up his kids from school like a normal person. The article went viral immediately but peaked over a few days. He waited for a substantive rebuttal but never found one.

[33:00 – 36:00] Writing After Going Viral 

Jacob discusses the pressure of the follow-up. His next piece will be about kids’ books losing their moral storytelling — a deliberate reset to avoid chasing the viral high. He notes that despite tons of interest from editors and literary agents, not a single Hollywood person reached out about his screenwriting.

[36:00 – 41:30] Why Nobody in Hollywood Responded / Why Nobody Sues 

Hollywood wants to pretend none of this happened. The trades ignored the article entirely. On litigation: suing means you’ll never work in the industry again, the legal outcome is uncertain, and there’s a shame culture around complaining — you’re seen as the guy who “couldn’t make it.”

[41:30 – 48:00] How DEI Changed Their Politics 

Jacob says his politics “broke” in 2020. He compares how he feels about the Democratic Party to how a Black person might reasonably have felt about Republicans in the 1980s — they’d prefer he didn’t exist as a political actor. They discuss the Harris campaign’s tone-deaf outreach to men (the “real men” ad, the porn ad) and how Democrats divide voters into micro-segments instead of offering a universal message.

[48:00 – 52:30] The “Anti-DEI Czar” Hypothetical 

Asked what he’d do with total power, Jacob says he wouldn’t need to change any laws — just enforce existing ones. He’d launch congressional investigations of academic institutions with discovery, put them under receivership, and create consequences (lawsuits, public hearings). He references the Singapore model of strictly punishing any racial rhetoric from any direction.

[52:30 – 58:00] Can Institutions Make Themselves Irrelevant? 

Discussion of whether institutions will simply decline in relevance. Hollywood’s quality dropped partly due to DEI-driven hiring. Video games and academia pursued increasingly niche products that audiences rejected. Jacob sees some hope in new universities and media outlets arising outside the captured system, but notes Harvard has endless money and prestige to persist indefinitely.

[58:00 – 1:01:30] Declining Institutional Prestige & Signal 

They discuss how a Harvard degree no longer signals what it once did. The New Yorker could swap 90% of its staff with Substack writers and most readers wouldn’t notice. More Harvard students now watch Asmongold than listen to NPR. Institutions still demand prestige but fewer people actually consume their output.

---

# Girls are Bayesian, Boys are Axiomatic

My first foray into gender slop.

Date: 2026-02-04
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/girls-are-bayesian-boys-are-axiomatic
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/girls-are-bayesian-boys-are-axiomatic

Theory: men tend to be axiomatic in their beliefs in the sense that they lay down a set of core premises and derive everything else from them, whereas women tend to be Bayesian and so continuously update their models as new information comes in. When a guy becomes a Marxist he literally believes in Marxism as a coherent ideology which is consistently true. When a girl becomes a Marxist she is fully capable of simultaneously believing that markets are pretty good actually, because the evidence for that is strong too.

I think this explains why men can go years without talking to a friend and pick up like nothing happened, and why women seem to track every micro-interaction in a room. It also explains why men whiplash violently between commitments while women spiral into anxious uncertainty.

Literally me

Recently I had the great pleasure of going on the Ancient Problemz podcast where the host and I rambled about the state of modernity for almost 3 hours. It was a ton of fun and it, along with my experience on Walt Bismark’s podcast, really reminded me of how much I love yapping. If you ever want to have me on just hit me up. 

But one of the things we touched on was my theory about the way that men and women, on average, process information. Specifically, I have a belief that men tend to be axiomatic and women tend to be Bayesian. Candidly, I had never really considered the thought that this might be a “unique” idea until I saw this very fascinating note by “Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)” come across my feed where she engaged with the idea seriously.

Since that note has over 100 likes and there seems to be some general interest in the idea, I thought I would take the time to explain what I mean by this theory, anecdotally why I feel it is true, and what it says about the modal types of strengths and neuroticism associated with these different models of information.

So, to begin, what do I mean by “Bayesian” and “Axiomatic”?

What is the best way to process information? 

At risk of delving into the murky and dangerous waters of epistemology—how we know what we know—there are broadly two ways you can “know” something about the world. The first is to lay out some core “facts”—or axioms—and then interact those axioms to develop propositions which, if consistent, are themselves also true.

Classical Euclidean geometry is the best example of this because it begins with a very simple set of axioms which are intuitively obvious to anyone alive. These are:

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line

A finite line can be extended indefinitely in a straight line

A circle can be drawn with a center and any radius

All right angles are equal

If a straight line intersects two straight lines and makes the interior angles on one side sum to less than two right angles, then those two lines will meet on that side if extended far enough.

If this last one jumps out as odd, that is because it is1. But what is core is that these beliefs are taken as true without themselves requiring proof; they represent the basic substrate of the information environment in geometry, and by just interacting them you can derive some pretty zany stuff which, to me as a child, felt deeply unintuitive, like the Pythagorean theorem.

The enormous advantage of this way of thinking is that you know, conditional on the axioms being true, that anything you derive is 100% accurate. No one has to ask what day of the week it is, or if the moon is in retrograde, to figure out if the Pythagorean theorem is true—it just is.

But this certainty comes with a high requirement of faith in the initial axioms; if they are wrong, the entire system comes crashing down, so finding good axioms isn’t easy. Because it isn’t just necessary for the axiom to “usually” be true—you are accepting it by definition as ALWAYS true. This is a problem that classical economics ran into when it tried to construct models of human affairs, because no matter how much we tried to reduce our behavior to a small set of statements, people had a way of proving them wrong, one after another. 

This brings me to the main alternative way of “knowing”: Bayes’ Theorem. Unlike axiomatic thinking, Bayes’ Theorem takes uncertainty as a core part of its model and instead offers practitioners—called Bayesians—a tool to operate within uncertainty. Literally, what it says is the following.

Look at her. She is beautiful

Let me illustrate with some specific numbers. 

Trigger warning: MATH

Suppose there is a form of cancer that affects 1% of the population. Doctors have designed a test for this cancer that is extremely accurate—it correctly comes back positive if you have the disease 99% of the time—but there is also a small chance of getting a false positive, say 5%. You go into the doctor one day, get the test, and it comes back positive. What is the actual probability you have this cancer? 

Why? Well, let’s plug the numbers in.

P(Cancer | Positive Test) = \frac{P(Positive | Cancer)  * P(Cancer)} {P(Positive)}P(Cancer | Positive Test) = \frac{0.99 * 0.01} {P(Positive)}The only variable we don’t already know is P(Positive), but we can derive this from the other information we know. Specifically, 

\begin{aligned}
P(\text{Positive}) 
&= P(\text{Positive} \mid \text{Cancer}) \cdot P(\text{Cancer}) \\[6pt]
&\quad + P(\text{Positive} \mid \text{No Cancer}) \cdot P(\text{No Cancer})
\end{aligned}\begin{aligned}
P(\text{Positive}) 
&= 0.99 \cdot 0.01 \\[6pt]
&\quad + 0.05 \cdot 0.99 \\[6pt]
&= 0.0099 + 0.0495 \\[6pt]
&= 0.0594
\end{aligned}\begin{aligned}
P(\text{Cancer} \mid \text{Positive})
&= \frac{0.99 \cdot 0.01}{0.0594} \\[6pt]
&= \frac{0.0099}{0.0594} \\[6pt]
&\approx 0.1667
\end{aligned}Basically, because the “base rate” of cancer is so low, most people who get a positive test, even if it is very accurate, are getting a “false” positive, meaning you should probably go get a second opinion before you run off and write your will.

So how and why are guys axiomatic and girls Bayesian? 

Taking a step back from epistemology and back to the central thesis of this article, I’ve spent a lot of time with both men and women, and it is remarkable the degree to which they fit these models anecdotally, both for good and for ill.

In general, men will tend to have a set of beliefs that they hold onto very closely and which they update very irregularly. They use these beliefs to then go about constructing models of reality which, conditional on them being right, are internally self-consistent and stable. For example, a guy might believe very strongly in Marxism and take it as self-evidently true and then go around looking for nails to hit with this theory and regimes they need to defend. Or, less seriously, they might take a person’s friendship as self-evidently obvious and, bar some sudden revelation, be able to go decades without speaking to the person and then pick up exactly where they left off.

By contrast, girls tend to notice “everything” and in turn gradually update their models with new information. For example, a girl might be a Marxist but might also have no problem holding the apparently contradictory belief that markets work because there is good evidence for that. Rather than Marxism being 100% true in all cases, instead it might simply have a strong “prior,” but that by no means precludes exceptions. Going back to the friendship example, I’ve noticed this as well: girls tend to have much more subtle and complex networks where each person sits somewhere on a spectrum of friendship and “everything” they do moves it one way or another.

Ancient Problemz pushed back against me in our podcast on this, but it is truly remarkable to me the amount of information girls are able to internalize about an environment very quickly. I’ll leave an occasion and be like “that was fun” or “that was lame,” and my wife will have instead developed an intricate map of everyone’s behavior that night and, in turn, have opinions, of varying strength, about everyone involved. Literally, the information slides right off my smooth brain as not important enough to update a core axiom—maybe the party was just bad for no reason! Idk.

girls after anyone says anything

From a mammalian evolutionary perspective, I think this makes a lot of sense.

For most of human history, men and women faced systematically different informational and coordination problems. Men were more often tasked with activities where success depended on committing to a small number of stable assumptions and acting decisively on them: hunting, fighting, territorial defense, tool use, hierarchical competition—all require the actors to have firmly held positions which do not differ much in the face of evidence. When you and the homies are charging the subhumans from another tribe, it isn’t very helpful if you are changing your model of their moral value. No, the only path now is to truly “believe” that you will win and that the victory is totally morally justified; any updating has to happen ex post, once the carnage has stopped.

Women, by contrast, were more often embedded in dense social environments involving child-rearing, kin networks, resource sharing, and alliance maintenance; threats they were exposed to were often “within” the group and so needed to be dealt with. Nothing I listed above is a binary problem; instead they are all inherently probabilistic, interpersonal, and highly contextual. The cost of missing subtle shifts—who is trustworthy today, who is resentful, who is unreliable, who is dangerous—can compound slowly but catastrophically. Your friend isn’t returning the pot they borrowed? Maybe this means they are upset at you for something that you did a month ago, and it is worth checking in on them now, before the tension spirals out of control.

So in modernity, what neurosis does this create?

Bluntly: each style is badly mismatched to large parts of the modern information environment, and the mismatch expresses itself as predictable pathologies.

Men, mostly axiomatic thinkers, in a world of actual uncertainty tend toward rigid beliefs which can swing unpredictably. In her note, Kate said the following, and it resonated with me a lot as an ex-Mormon:

“Like living in Utah, I have watched a lot of people change/lose their religious faith, and about half of the men come swinging sort of violently from hard-core true-blue belief into the opposite in a very short period (often with utterly chaotic and devastating impact on their life)”

…

“Also, men seem to often be rigidly axiomatic about their economic beliefs, treating them as almost religious in nature, and fairly impervious to either new information or doubts.”

I’ve noticed this in a lot of guys who will suddenly whiplash against a person or an ideology and go very quickly from totally trusting or loving them to hating them with a deep passion. If you’ve been on X, you might have come across the account “Drew Pavlou,” and I think he is a great example. Basically, he used to be a committed liberal until one day he was mugged, and it seemed to genuinely reorient his entire metaphysics like the snap of a finger. Anecdotally, my own experiences in the South Side operated in a pretty similar manner. There are a lot of reasons basically every terrorist is a guy, and one of them is that I don’t think anyone but a guy could believe anything enough to blow themselves up.

Turning to girls, Bayesians, they tend to be characterized by a need to search for constant signals—is this celebrity actually bad? Are my friends all mad at me?—and as a result tend towards anxiety and needless uncertainty. Since everything is evidence, everything has to be noticed and followed, and as a result their models often don’t ~converge~.

Since modernity supplies a firehose of signals girls can sometimes end up in positions which I can only describe as socially constructed and totally inconsistent. In personal lives this also causes havoc, and I have personally observed entire female friend groups collapse into a bad signaling environment where a simple backstop of “hey, we all love each other”—which would bind in male dynamics—fails to ever arrive, and love turns to ambivalence to hate slowly but with a doom march of certainty.

Conclusion

I think there are a lot of advantages to both systems, and candidly I think men and women operate best as a team when they can coordinate the various strengths and pathologies together. So rather than there being a hierarchy of minds, instead men and women face a coordination problem.

Axiomatic thinking is extraordinarily powerful when the environment is stable, when decisive action matters, and when second-guessing is more costly than being wrong. It produces conviction, loyalty, courage, and the ability to act under uncertainty without freezing. It is also brittle. When the axioms fail, they tend to fail all at once, producing ideological whiplash, scorched-earth reversals, and in extreme cases, total identity collapse.

Bayesian thinking shines in environments that are noisy, social, and adversarial in subtle ways. It allows for nuance, adaptability, and the detection of weak but important signals long before they become obvious. It is also exhausting and encourages questioning of positions which really should be taken as “true” to operate in reality.

Look, I’m a centrist at heart and I love both men and women.

For my paid subscribers only: A spicy theory using this model for why male friend groups persist and female friend groups implode.

So I have another theory of humanity I call the “weakest link” theory. Basically, what it says is that every friend group of three or more “units”—couple friend groups don’t really have this, in my opinion—whose main form of interaction is outside of work has someone who is the “weakest link”: basically the person who everyone is always a little annoyed at. They are the stupid, or awkward, or weird one who, when they happen to not be able to join, everyone has a little more fun. It is just normal that there would be a person who fits in least well as a member of a group, and this doesn’t say anything about the inherent value or likability of the person. I have been the weakest link in friend groups before; everyone has. But it is an inevitable “fact” of group dynamics in my experience.

Now, because guys are axiomatic, they tend to take the positions in the friend group as sort of “given” after a brief period of jockeying and then mostly go about trying to fill that role well. So your group might have a “commander,” and/or a “jokester,” and/or a “ladies’ man,” but they each provide special skills to the group and each could in theory be the weakest link. Because guys take these positions as basically fixed, there isn’t a constant ongoing process of litigation wherein men in the group are trying to dethrone one another. There might be competition over a desirable role like commander, but 75%+ of guys are fine with their spot in the group and don’t engage in this type of conflict.

By contrast, female friend groups are characterized by a basically fluid hierarchy. Note: there is still very much a hierarchy, and the same (or similar) roles to what I described above, but unlike in a male friend group where it is fixed, in female dynamics it is in a state of constant flux and competition. As a result, the interpersonal conflict never ends. I would say basically the proportions are inversed: if in a male friend group only 25% of men engage in constant interpersonal conflict, in a female friend group that proportion will be 75%. The result of this is that the groups are unstable, and the composition of a girl group will ebb and flow with a degree of instability which makes me, as a guy, blush.

1The fifth axiom, Euclid’s parallel postulate, is weird because, unlike the others, it is neither simple nor intuitively obvious. Without it though you basically cannot have geometry which makes any sense. As a result for, mathematicians believed for millennia it must be derivable from the first four axioms so as to reduce the system to only “reasonable axioms.” In the 19th century mathematicians like Gauss, Bolyai, and Lobachevsky showed that you can relax the parallel postulate and still get perfectly consistent geometries, however this geometry is ~weird~.

---

# Why hasn't Trump collapsed, so far?

The uncomfortable truth is that the things YOU view as disqualifying are exactly the things his supporters view as necessary.

Date: 2026-01-21
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/why-hasnt-trump-collapsed-so-far
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/why-hasnt-trump-collapsed-so-far

I think it would be fair to argue that 2026 has been off to a very Trumpian start. There was, of course, the shooting of Renee Good by ICE officers in Minneapolis on January 7th, and Trump’s most recent, apparently sincere, attempt to conquer Greenland. In fact, so much has been occurring at such a blinding pace we have already forgotten about the kidnapping of Maduro and the apparent reduction of his old regime to an American client state in all but name.

Not only has there been chaos in the news, but Trump’s net approval ratings have continued to slide, particularly on issues like inflation and the economy, which were most important back in November of 2024.

His polling oversells his problems—see the title of this article—but it also hides others like the magnitude of his attacks on the constitutional foundations of this country. I really think his options are now either to stay in power, through some successor, in 2029 or to spend his final years in a supermax in Colorado.

Still, despite all of this, the Democrats have completely failed to become the ascendant political faction, and MAGA remains, by far, the most potent political force in America.

You can see this in the generic ballot for 2026, which remains, extremely tight.

Compare the ~4 point lead democrats currently have to the numbers in 2018 around this same time.

Taking the average in the screenshot would give the democrats almost a 10 point advantage back then. 

Of course, the polling in 2022 was even closer than the numbers today. At the time, the Republicans only had roughly a 1.3 point advantage, and a large number of polls even showed Democrats leading. But 2022 was hardly a red wave, with the Republicans only picking up 9 seats compared to the Democrats’ haul of 41 back in 2018, and because of the way districts are drawn and the extreme concentration of Democratic voters in urban areas, Republicans retain a persistent structural advantage.

When you look at the projection for 2026 from the Cook Political Report for example, this is what you get.

I haven’t even mentioned the Senate because the map means Democrats have functionally no hope of reclaiming that chamber.

The only state where I could see a plausible Democratic pickup happening is Maine, and they could honestly still lose Georgia in that universe. 

If I had to guess what will happen in November, I’d anticipate the Dems pick up probably 5–6 seats and, in turn, secure the narrowest possible House majority while the Senate stays unchanged. Polymarket is broadly in agreement with this guess, and it even prices in a serious possibility(21%) that Republicans manage to hold onto a trifecta—something that has not happened since 2002 in the aftermath of 9/11—except that, at that point, George Bush had above 60% approval ratings and the nation was on the warpath; in short, it looked very little like the current map.

Today I wanted to dig into “why” behind this.

 “Why” has Trumpism not dissipated despite wave after wave of controversy and declining polls?

“Why” have the Democrats  failed to materialize on this frustration?

And “why,” despite everything which has happened, is Trump still, by far, the most influential politician in this country?

I feel like I’m uniquely positioned to talk about this because of my audience and social life, which contains significant numbers of both pro- and anti-Trump people. I can honestly say that I think I understand the emotional realities of both sides, at least in aggregate, and can explain at least one perspective on the permanent intransigence of our politics.

Note: we at The Boyd Institute are currently running an essay contest with a top prize of $2,500 to answer the following question: “How can America improve its problem-solving capacity?”

If, after reading this article, you feel inspired to tackle that question, please go check out our article with more information. Submissions close March 15th.

Boyd Essay Contest: Call for Submissions — The Boyd Institute

The short answer to these questions is the following: 1) a general perception of Democratic incompetence, 2) a belief among many Americans that the alternative to Trump is the demographic transformation of America, and 3) the unique charisma of Trump.

The perception of Democratic incompetence:

To frame just how catastrophic the public perception of the Democrats is right now, I would invite you to look at some recent polling from the Wall Street Journal.

As you can see, in January the polls show roughly a 4 point advantage for Democrats in the generic ballot, about in line with the polling average, but when you dig into the details it becomes extremely brutal.

The only topics that congressional Democrats are ahead on are healthcare, vaccines, “looking out for middle-class families,” and “caring about people like you.” On every other issue, including immigration and Ukraine, congressional Republicans have an advantage.

You can see this preference for the Republican basket of policies reflected in where people choose to migrate internally.

We have now reached the point that West Virginia is attracting more local migration than almost any Blue state, a fact which would be almost impossible for someone in 2009 to internalize.

Part of this isn’t the “fault” of Democrats per se — there is less land for infill suburbs around LA than Austin, and many of the cities which are attracting migrants have progressive mayors — but it is also undeniably true that Democratic policies push up the cost of living substantially. There is no reason, for example, that Chicago could not have a similar housing market to Texas; the land is quite flat there also, but the fact it does not is important for people to internalize. On other issues like gas prices there is basically no argument to be made that the cost difference isn’t at least mostly the result of conscious environmental policy.

When people are paying more than a dollar premium at the pump in California relative to Arizona, they notice this.

On education, many progressive states like Oregon and California score offensively poorly by any reasonable measure, and this reflects badly on the party. Perhaps this diagnosis is unfair — Massachusetts and New Jersey both do extremely well — but it is a narrative that exists for a reason. Again, imagine trying to explain to someone that Mississippi had a better educational system than Portland only a few years ago.

I’m not going to belabor this point anymore, but the perception that Dems are incompetent is everywhere and inescapable. Even supporters of the party are oft to express this opinion and it cannot be ignored. 

The alternative to Trump is the demographic transformation of America

Now I’ve already explained how Americans are frustrated with Democratic domestic policy, but there is an additional angle here which is often left unarticulated. That is the “fear” that if a Democrat is elected they will reopen the borders and, through executive fiat, change the demographics of this country.

Since we have a fraying taboo on people expressing a preference to retain the White majority, you probably won’t see many polls showing that one of the issues the electorate has with Democrats is the perception they cherish a diverse browning America, but anecdotally it is quite common, at least among right- and center-right Whites.

California again stands as a good example of this since it has been totally demographically transformed over the last 40 years. Roughly 28% of the state’s population is foreign-born, more than twice the share in the rest of the country (about 13%), and only about 1/3 of the population is non-Hispanic White. I’m stating this as fact without a normative claim, I love California it is my favorite state, but it is something many Americans despise. 

The Biden presidency in many ways confirmed this fear with their de facto opening of the borders prior to a pivot towards the end of their presidency. 

More than any stats though images like this showing federal agents destroying a Texan fence to allow illegal immigrants to enter in did catastrophic damage. 

America is still a majority White country, and many immigrants who came here have become so assimilated into that group that they view themselves as a quasi-extension of it, I think of someone like JD Vance’s wife and children as quintessential of this cohort, and so the idea that Democrats want to endanger this is still politically toxic. But there is no symmetrical toxicity to being openly racist against groups like Somalis or Indians, a fact it feels like Dems living in hyper-diverse cities simply do not realize.

Trump’s charisma

Look, Trump is Trump. He has been a figure in American cultural life for decades, and not for no reason. Long before politics, he was a walking archetype: the brash New York tycoon, the dealmaker, the tabloid villain-hero, the living symbol of American excess. He is instantly legible in a way almost no modern politician is.

This matters a lot since not only is Trump legible, he is also, by far, the most emotionally resonant political figure since at least Obama. He projects dominance, certainty, aggression, humor, grievance, and theatricality all at once, and is able to act as an avatar of rage for millions of Americans who feel talked down to and disregarded by blue-state elites.

He is also genuinely funny in a way no politician has been in decades. I mean, just look at the photos of him at McDonald’s from during the election, or his iconic “only Rosie O’Donnell” quip in the 2015 debate.

Finally, there is the fact that often his ploys, such as the capture of Maduro, simply work, and the same people who had spent months explaining the impossibility of such an act are now left, dick in hand, to try and explain why it is actually undesirable.

If Biden had wanted to capture Maduro, this is how it would have looked. First, he would have made a statement to the American public about his crimes, then he would have appealed to the UN to get a General Assembly vote; conditional on that passing, he would have appealed to the Security Council, where Russia and China would have vetoed it, and finally he would have gone to Congress to get approval. Once all of this had been done, a coalition force of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops would have descended on Caracas and toppled the regime in an Iraq-style invasion, inevitably resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and the importation of millions of refugees.

The fact that the above routine is how you are “supposed” to do things and also so obviously idiotic isn’t lost on people, and so Trump’s perception as being able to cut the irrational Gordian knots of procedure which have log-jammed American politics is seen as a boon by most voters, not a slight against him, even when it does the most to rile up his opponents.

This also combines to answer the question of why, despite running as an anti-war president, his constant stream of interventions haven’t soured the public. When Americans say they don’t want war, what, I believe, they mean is they don’t like caskets coming home and pictures of Iowans in tanks in Kandahar. They don’t mean they don’t want us to blow shit up with no losses, and that is how Trump has operated thus far.

Compare this to the Democrats’ bench. Who is the charismatic counterweight? Who is the emotionally compelling figure that makes people feel something other than managerial competence, moral superiority, or technocratic concern? There is no equivalent. There is no Democratic Trump, and there can never be one.

Much of what I’ve said is the core to his charisma is precisely why people hate him so much, but the uncomfortable truth is that the things YOU view as disqualifying are exactly the things his supporters view as necessary.

Conclusion

The through-line here is that Trumpism is seen by a large share of voters to be the only force that is actually willing to break things, ignore taboos, and act decisively in a system they increasingly view as rigged, stagnant, and dishonest. Anyone who thinks that this will dissolve via appeals to the past or to rules and procedures is blind to reality.

Of course, Trump is not invincible, and an obvious, unambiguous failure or sign of weakness can still substantively topple him; the Epstein field in particular seems very dangerous to his brand, but that has yet to happen, and I simply do not see anything on the horizon which seems plausible to do it.

Recently I had lunch with a friend who is morally repulsed by Trump, and I was making the claim that I didn’t know one person who loved Trump in 2024 who has since soured on him, and I think this can be hard for people to fully grasp. We are in a post-January 6th world, and everyone who voted for him in 2024 was willing to vote for a man who had done that; nothing else he has done to date rises to that level, and so no one’s opinions have really changed much. The core policy baskets which are being offered remain broadly the same, and while the options remain a commitment to demographic transformation, local governance incompetence, and an insistence on abiding by all procedures — no matter how irrational — or megalomania and authoritarianism, our elections will continue to be a 50/50 affair.

---

# 3 thoughts on our Special Military Operation

reflections on the most recent news

Date: 2026-01-04
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/3-thoughts-on-our-special-military
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/3-thoughts-on-our-special-military

As I write this, I’m sitting in Terminal E of SFO, drinking a White Claw and appreciating, poignantly, the pleasures and fragility of my affluent modern life. For the past five days, I’ve been in California visiting friends remembering why I loved the state, despite its obvious frustrations.

What I wanted to reflect on today, though, was the most recent American intervention in Latin America—namely, the reported kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, by U.S. special forces. Since this moment is very much in flux, I’m not sure anyone—Trump included—fully knows what is unfolding on the ground right now or where the loyalties of the government, which broadly remains intact, are tending. Still, this feels like a consequential moment, and capturing how I feel at the very dawn of 2026 may have some value, if only as a record.

How I feel about this will depend on how it goes.

Look, I’m not going to cry crocodile tears and pretend I care about the rights of the socialist inner clique that rules Venezuela at all—I don’t. However, Venezuela deserves, as all countries do, to be prosperous and sovereign, and I hope that Trump does nothing to foreclose this. Annexation or a permanent American occupation force would be disastrous and do nothing to benefit either of our peoples.

But I also have doubts about the plan that seems to be unfolding right now. It is possible the Ancien Régime will persist in a more cowed form, and it is also possible that it could undergo a genuine transformation. Trump has talked about American companies coming in and developing the oil in Venezuela, and this seems quite likely to me—Trump would love to continue lowering gas prices—but beyond that I have zero clarity on what is going to happen, and frankly I don’t think Trump does either.

Now, Trump and I not having clarity isn’t the same as saying this situation is going to go poorly, or even that the plan is bad and you should have clarity. Human affairs are messy, and Trump is—obviously, whatever else you feel about him—an intuitive genius who has acquired and retained power for a reason, all without ever appearing to show the slightest clarity on what he is doing. This could easily be another in a long list of events that reasonable people have predicted will lead to disaster but which instead leads to an unexpected victory by Trump.

If Venezuela turns out well, I will praise this; if it doesn’t, I will decry it. Simple as.

It is my right as a citizen to stand in judgment of my government, and Trump has cast the die. One way or another, this will be an event that defines his presidency.

Our military is still the best.

No other country could have plausibly pulled off what we appear to have done.

Yes, Venezuela is not a strong country. But people asking, “What would we say if Russia did this?” forget that Russia tried to! It was Zelensky’s bravery and Russian incompetence that saved him from their clutches, not the soft appeals of internationally minded liberals.

We’ve become so saturated in narratives of American decline that we’ve forgotten we remain the top dog for a reason.

Watch on YouTube

Americans will, mostly, passively follow any path.

Temperamentally, I’m torn between an appreciation of the American Empire as the arbiter of the global system—a system I believe represents the most expansive golden age in human history—and a sense that we can no longer pretend to exist alone in the world.

America is still, by far, the most powerful country on Earth—but it is no longer the 2000s, and we are not the only consequential power.

From where I sit, it increasingly seems that America must choose between being a normal country and being the cosmopolitan imperial core of a world empire.

Biden’s four years in office appeared oriented toward the latter: tightening alliances and letting in millions of immigrants. Trump’s first year has reflected the former.

What strikes me is the passivity with which the American public moves between these extremes. Whatever course our government ultimately settles on, Americans will go along with it; we don’t appear to collectively feel strongly either way. Even if we stumble into a ground war in Venezuela—even a grinding, ulcerous one—there will be no draft and no meaningful change to our taxes. And so, most Americans simply won’t care.

Likewise, if we continue to violate the international system we built, Americans won’t care much about that either. Yes, we’ll complain—it’s our favorite pastime—but as a society we seem prepared to follow our government down almost any path.

---

# We stand halfway between two points.

If you want to imagine the future of humanity, imagine a man experiencing the same joy at the thought of checking his emails as you do seeing a long-lost friend.

Date: 2025-12-21
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/we-stand-halfway-between-two-points
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/we-stand-halfway-between-two-points

“The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent of all the Future, is ever a ‘New Era’ to the thinking man; and comes with new questions and significance, however commonplace it looks: to know it, and what it bids us do, is ever the sum of knowledge for all of us.” — Carlyle

Ever since we moved out to Loudoun County from Palo Alto, I’ve been working out of my home office. Now, of course, this has many advantages—including my commute being comically short—and many disadvantages—the lack of IRL coworkers—but one thing I hadn’t expected is the degree to which it has allowed me to watch the local animals out of my window.

Without doxing myself too much, my office looks out on our balcony and beyond that into a common greenspace that the townhouses all back up against. Since the only way to access it is over the grass that cuts between the blocks of homes, no one ever uses it for anything. The only real exceptions are when I drag our trash out on Thursday, or the Mexican man who comes and cuts the grass once a week during the summer. The lack of Human activity has turned this space into something of a sanctuary for the beleaguered mammals that try to live amongst us.

In particular, the squirrels seem to adore its trees, and you can see them moving about nearly all day: dashing, halting, sniffing the air—their entire bodies seeming to be a tension of quivers and stillness—and then dashing again before pausing, their leg posed in the air as if frozen mid-step. This view Nature and her game theoretic dance has become one of the highlights of my day.

With the watching have come many thoughts about nature and myself. The most salient being the degree to which I represent something halfway between two evolutionary equilibria. I’m like the 100th generation of a dog that went diving for fish in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. In other words, I’m not quite a seal, but I also have no idea how to hunt on land.

Much like this dog, I cannot decide if I love the water and the fish or if I secretly crave a return to my ancestral ways, even if they were abandoned for a reason.

The primary form this tension manifests in is the difference between my “desires” and my “needs.” For example, I am moderately addicted to junk food, and as a result have a persistent ring of fat around my torso that tucks awkwardly into my belt when I sit and is slowly strangling my internal organs. This addiction is the result of millions of years of apex predatory status and a preference for the juicy prime cuts of meat that would have marked moments of intense celebration, but now signify Tuesday afternoon. I know I shouldn’t eat McDonald’s, but I really want to. If french fries had the same caloric profile and made my body feel the same as baby carrots, I would be snacking literally all day on a five-pound tub of fries.

So much of what I “want” is hilariously self-destructive in the context I live in (the context we all live in!), and so, as a result, society has instilled in me a strict code of conduct through socialization. I live like a good bourgeois citizen, of course. I pay my taxes, wait in line, try to promptly respond to emails, and otherwise abide by the etiquette demanded by a diverse industrial society. But what I want to emphasize is how much I fucking hate all of this!

If I really, sincerely asked myself how I wish I could live, the answer is like Tolkien’s elves. In other words, I would like to live in nature eating roasted meat, singing my ancestral songs, and raising a family—young, healthy, wise, and beautiful forever—exposed to nothing but my kind and creed. Or, failing that, like my Northman ancestors before the Romans arrived: doing much the same, but probably dying to a falling tree at 40 with a withered hand.

I try to escape as much as I can—as much as anyone can—through video games, literature, writing, into a simulacrum of this existence. But it is still just that: an illusion I create to make myself feel better. They are the dreams the seal-dog, wet and tired after a day of fishing, has about chasing rabbits—nothing more. Because without our regimented modern life, we all die. Literally.

There are just too many of us to sustain any version of living off the land, and even if we could, it would mean dooming sentience to a slow death with the earth. No: it is our job to settle the stars and to eventually learn to love our new fate, and we are moving there slowly. But the seal-dog still dreams. 

The hope is, of course, as always, that it will not last. Already, it  seems that only the people who enjoy this life—who do not see the obligations and humdrum monotony of modernity as hellfire but instead just as boxes to be checked—are having children and continuing the species. I would hypothesize that if you could teleport to a Korean elementary school in 1990, the little boys and girls who took actual pleasure in the grind are the ones who now 35 years later have blossoming families. 

If you want to imagine the future of humanity, imagine a man experiencing the same joy at the thought of checking his emails as you do seeing a long-lost friend.

---

# The Last Jedi: A Hate Letter

Reviewing a casualty of 2017

Date: 2025-09-19
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-last-jedi-a-hate-letter
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-last-jedi-a-hate-letter

I. In the Beginning

I just recently rewatched The Last Jedi, aka the 2nd movie in the “Sequels” trilogy, and genuinely it was one of the worst movies I’ve seen in my entire life. Not only was the story, or should I say 3 simultaneous unconnected stories, extremely rushed, but the characters were genuine abominations.

To be honest, I was surprised by how much I hated the movie on a 2nd viewing; I remember mostly being confused back in 2017 as I left the theater. But now, with almost a decade of hindsight, I can say definitively any confusion I had was cope. The Last Jedi is just bad.

The more I think about this fact the more tragic it becomes. Because even if the sequels weren’t my cup of tea back in the late 2010s, it had been my sincere hope that, similar to the prequels—which had been loved by children—they would find their cultural footing. Sadly no, it seems the consensus is basically in agreement with me that the entire sequel trilogy is worse than either the originals or the prequels. There has, to the best of my knowledge, been zero long cultural effect from the films.

I’ve heard people defend The Last Jedi as the “best” of the trilogy. Given I never finished the series and still need to watch the last one, I can’t say for sure. However, I can say that I preferred The Force Awakens.

Overall, I would give this movie a clear 1/10. Watch literally any other movie.

II. The Reviews

What is most astounding about this movie, in addition to its quality, is the degree of glazing it received from the press back in the day. If an alien only had access to movie reviews it would walk away with the impression that it—yes, it—was the 2nd best Star Wars movie; only barely edged out by the original.

Subjectively, all I can say is wtf? Even now the movie has a Metacritic score of 84 along with a sterling “Must See” badge. Literally, the movie is described as having "Universal Acclaim.” Lol. Lmao even. To contrast the sterling critics’ reviews, the audience score is abysmally low, sitting at a 43.

The gap between professional and public reviews can only be understood in its historical context. This movie was released in the winter of 2017 during the confused and paranoid early years of the Trump administration after all. I’ll talk about this in much more detail later, so for now let’s get back to the reviews.

Highlighting some of the best from Metacritic:

“It’s less Star Wars as you’ve never seen it than Star Wars as you’ve never felt it.” – Robbie Collin from The Telegraph. He gave the movie a 100.

Excuse me, what?

“The Force is, to me, still silly Star Wars mumbo jumbo, but Johnson finds a way to underscore it with humanity…” – Richard Lawson from Vanity Fair. He gave the movie a 90.

True, Richard, very true. Star Wars is silly and full of boring, confusing mumbo jumbo.

“Yes, the latest Star Wars installment is here, and, lo, it is a satisfying, at times transporting entertainment. Remarkably, it has visual wit and a human touch, no small achievement for a seemingly indestructible machine that revved up 40 years ago and shows no signs of sputtering out (ever).” – Manohla Dargis from The New York Times. She gave the movie a 90.

Contrast it with Revenge of the Sith—probably my personal 2nd favorite Star Wars movie after The Empire Strikes Back.

The movie has a 79% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 68 on Metacritic.

Here is what Anthony Lane, giving a 10 out of 100 from The New Yorker, had to say about Revenge of the Sith:

“The general opinion of Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.”

Alas, forever the adult intellectuals will fail to see life through the eyes of children, and the sun will continue to set in the west.

It isn’t just the reviews though. The secondary analysis is somehow even worse. At the time there was a widespread belief that reactionary trolls online—who were seen to have coordinated to get Trump elected—were now striking again to smear the movie. This meant there was a moral imperative, subverbally if not always said in so many words, for people to balance the trolls out by being extra defensive.

Take for example: 

“Just How Seriously Should We Take This Star Wars: The Last Jedi Backlash?

Is this really the most divisive installment in the Skywalker saga?” by Vanity Fair, published in December 2017. 

In this article, Joanna Robinson tries to lay out the mainstream argument of the time:

“It should be noted that the audience members most likely to register their opinions on Rotten Tomatoes are a very specific, very reactionary kind of fan. In the less self-selected space of CinemaScore—where general audiences are polled as they leave the theater—The Last Jedi earned an ‘A.’ Yes, the very same rating as the well-liked Force Awakens.”

Towards the end of the article she says the following:

“No matter what the hot takes try to tell you, Episode VIII’s legacy will not be decided or quantified this weekend.”

I couldn’t agree more.

I’m pointing this out because I think, in retrospect, this was actually an important moment in our culture. I’ll say for myself, the repeated pattern of ostensibly apolitical commentators defending objectively horrible media because of partisan tribal loyalty really burned me on the credibility of the press in general. It sounds silly, but to a young man this stuff was actually important to me. These communities were my communities, so seeing a person desecrate Star Wars, for example, and then being told what I had actually seen was an impressive work of art—well, it didn’t blackpill me, but it did make me question what else these people were willing to lie about. Or perhaps even worse, what else they were unable to see?

If you want more of my thoughts on this, check out a video I made:

Watch on YouTube

III. The Movie

Now getting into the actual movie. The principal problem with the film is that it simultaneously tries to do too much and too little.

Despite an enormous amount of yapping and very expensive set pieces, functionally nothing happens during the whole runtime. Whatever few events do occur are all so disconnected from each other that they might as well be totally different movies. I mean this literally, since you can neatly divide the plot into 3 subplots which only tangentially interact at all.

1. The Resistance Retreat

The Resistance, led by General Leia Organa, is on the run. After the First Order tracks their fleet through hyperspace, they are forced to come up with another plan. Poe Dameron had previously disobeyed orders which allowed him to destroy a dreadnought, winning a battle but leading to the loss of their bombers. This means that when Leia is incapacitated, Vice Admiral Holdo boxes Poe out of her secret plan to evacuate the fleet to Crait. The fact he is excluded from the planning causes tension, ultimately resulting in a failed mutiny. Holdo finally reveals her plans to Poe, and he is forced to acknowledge he was wrong just in time for the First Order to see the escaping ships—due to Rose and Finn screwing up—and murder most of the escaping Resistance.

Holdo, seeing everyone dying, decides to perform a hyperspace suicide run through the First Order flagship; something which, for some reason, no one else who sacrificed themselves thought to do. The survivors are able to reach Crait for a final stand. The First Order arrives, and right before they can destroy them all, a Force projection of Luke arrives and allows them to escape.

2. Rey, Luke, and Kylo Ren

Rey arrives on Ahch-To seeking Luke Skywalker. Luke, guilt-ridden for failing Ben Solo and creating Kylo Ren, refuses to return. He eventually gives Rey fragments of training but remains cynical about the Jedi. Meanwhile, Rey and Kylo are mysteriously connected through the Force. They communicate across distance, form a bond, and glimpse each other’s conflicted intentions. Rey believes she can redeem Kylo and leaves Luke, who later realizes his responsibility.

In a rage, Kylo kills Supreme Leader Snoke and offers Rey power at his side, but she refuses. Kylo then claims leadership of the First Order. Luke finally projects himself through the Force to duel Kylo on Crait, buying time for the Resistance before dying from exhaustion. Rey shows up in time to move some rocks and let everyone out of the cave.

3. Finn, Rose, and the Canto Bight Mission

Finn, trying to flee, meets Rose, a mechanic who worships him. Her tune changes rapidly when she realizes he is trying to escape, and so she stuns him. Upon having a conversation about tracking—which is so absurd I just have to link it:

Watch on YouTube

They hatch a plan—encouraged by Poe—to disable the First Order’s hyperspace tracker. The plan is to travel to the casino city of Canto Bight so they can find a codebreaker. However, because they park their spaceship on a random beach, they are arrested and saved by a totally unrelated thief named DJ. DJ, who has borderline godlike technical powers, stands up and just walks out of the prison, letting them out also. After then helping them infiltrate Snoke’s ship, he turns against them so he can cash out. Because of his betrayal, the Resistance’s escape is exposed and Holdo’s entire plan turns into a disaster.

Finn and Rose manage to escape and make it to Crait. They then volunteer to try and take out the cannon destroying their base, and right as Finn is about to sacrifice himself, Rose stops him and their defenses are destroyed. Rose and Finn then kiss and ostensibly sneak back in because they escape with the rest of the gang after Luke’s death.

Note: yes, the only way their plot—despite being the most complex—interacts with the main story is by making Holdo’s plan a pseudo-failure and then Rose stopping Finn from destroying the siege gun, which directly results in the death of Luke.

The fact the movie is trying to fit 3 basically unconnected stories together is magnified by the heavy use of iconic Star Wars “transition” shots. Once you include these, each plot gets about 30 minutes of substantive screen time, which ends up leaving an enormous amount of material to happen “off screen.”

One of the effects of these plots being so rushed is the audience is expected to just accept changes to relationships between major characters with zero justification. Rey and Luke suffer a lot from this dynamic because of how important they are to the story, but Finn and Rose are an order of magnitude worse.

IV. The Smell of a Different Era

Something that permeates the entire show is the degree to which it has “aged” and now comes across as painfully late 2010s. At times, the level of cringe reaches the point I feel the best way to categorize the movie is as a paper bag for LA executives to hyperventilate into over Trump—who knows, perhaps history will vindicate their panic.

But probably the most annoying way this manifests is an avalanche of girlboss scenes where characters who you DON’T LIKE are being rude to people who you DO LIKE. From the vantage point of 2025, it can seem like all of Trump 1 was dominated by his battle with Science™ and BLM, but these were only the final, most intense forms of the moral convulsions that rocked this country. His first two years were, anecdotally, mostly dominated by the topic of Trump’s sexism and the role that misogyny played in his original election. Even in my own life, the people who changed from being 2012 Romney voters to 2018 Dem voters were middle-class women disgusted by our orange president.

As a result of this early initial wave of anti-Trump sentiment, we got movies like Ocean’s 8 and also a lot of the cast of this movie. Admiral Holdo is by far the best example of this because her role is almost exclusively to be rude to Poe and make him seem foolish. This is doubly tragic because Poe was probably the most interesting character in The Force Awakens.

Star Wars has always had the reputation of being “nerdy white guy” coded.

And in a sense this is true—the audience has always been male-biased and the cast for both the sequels and prequels is mostly white men. I would argue that even if this is true in a very limited sense, Star Wars has always been able to maintain a uniquely wide appeal, and I know many female fans of the series. But in 2017, having a “nerdy white guy” coded movie would inevitably result in being dragged by freaks on Twitter—where reviewers and other Hollywood people hung out—so this film does everything in its power to preemptively refute any such allegations.

Needless to say, making art to avoid offending overly online neurotic people is not how you make something compelling, and the film suffered from being a product of its time.

V. Keep the MBAs Away from the Writers Room

I know someone who claims to have been involved in the casting process for The Force Awakens, and what they told me was Disney knew it wanted to have a double lead; they also knew it was going to be one woman—implicitly a white woman—and a Black man. The original plan had been for the Black male, who ended up being Finn, to lead, but that the actress for Rey was “so good” they decided to make her the “main” character instead.

Take this story with the suitable amount of salt a 2nd-hand, half-recollected fact should have, but I share it because I think even if it isn’t literally true, it captures something essential about this movie. Rather than feeling like an artistic project where someone was allowed to have, and then implement, a vision, instead the movie feels like it was the result of box-checking and purity spirals.

Every scene has the stink of MBA corporate analysis, and every imperfection and human element has been tirelessly ironed out until all you can see is the target demographics.

If you assume the basic shape of my contact’s story is true, then the main lesson should be to fire everyone involved in the casting process and just select actors via sortition. Because Finn is fine, good even, but Rey fucking suuuuuuuuucks. The idea someone could have seen Daisy Ridley’s performance and thought it was good enough to change the direction of the movie genuinely makes me question my own sanity.

I should not dwell too long on the eldritch horrors which swim in the mind of a Hollywood writer, lest I go mad.

Somewhere Brandon Sanderson laid out a theory of characters where they all sit on a spectrum with 3 major traits: likeability, competency, and agency. For a character to be good, they need to have high scores in at least one, ideally two, of those traits, and they have to be “moving” somehow.

This is why we like Luke in the originals so much: he has high agency, high likeability, and we get to follow him on his journey to competency. Even Anakin in the prequels becomes more powerful and agentic as he becomes less likable.

By contrast, in the full 2 and a half hours this film takes of your time, Rey doesn’t change at all while still somehow managing to have low scores in all three categories.

Likeability:

The entire movie Daisy Ridley comes across like she hates Star Wars. Maybe this is unfair, but genuinely she doesn’t seem to be having fun at all. Because she isn’t “cool” like Solo—no one in the last 50 years has been as cool as Harrison Ford in his prime—her blasé attitude towards the setting doesn’t come across the way I imagine the directors had hoped.

Rey is also the main character, and to some extent they are trying to make her into the heroic replacement for Luke. This means her role should be as the übermensch who rises above the moral dichotomies presented and in turn resolves the core conflict. Rey does not do this, although the movie spends about 30 seconds pretending she might.

Her evident lack of interest in her role as the savior gives all of her moments on screen a sterile, confused emotion, which frankly just makes me uncomfortable.

Competency:

Over and over again we are told how “strong with the Force” Rey is. But since every character is able to do insane Force acts, she feels very weak. Luke, Kylo, and Snoke are without a doubt more powerful than her, and as a viewer she comes across as an amateur.

Beyond being a Jedi she does basically nothing, and we are presented with no evidence she is talented at anything.

Agency:

Again, Rey shows functionally zero agency. Time and time again she is just blown with the wind and sort of floats wherever the story takes her. It is Snoke that connects her and Kylo, for example, and it is Kylo who decides to kill Snoke. The closest she gets to “doing something” is when she first goes to join up with Kylo—a mistake—and then when she says no to joining him, after he just saved her life.

So if she isn’t agentic, likable, or capable, what is her point? The obvious answer is she is what the suits wanted because she looked good on some MBA’s projections.

Business school is very useful and a lot of people learn a ton, but I’m of the opinion that the more Hollywood and other aspects of American culture have been “corporatized,” the worse their products have become. You just can’t run artistic projects like a factory without fundamentally compromising what they are.

And let’s be clear. The MBAs were in fact 100% correct—these movies made a completely insane amount of money For all of my criticisms of this movie, it accomplished exactly the objective the suits had in mind.

VI. Retracing a Legacy That You Hate…

For my final section I want to talk about the way the movie deals with its “legacy” and world development.

It seems like Disney knew they wanted to have an aesthetic style which matched the original trilogy, but they weren’t sure how exactly to do this. Their brilliant plan appears to have been to try and “soft reset” the franchise to the opening shots of A New Hope.

The problem with this plan, of course, is that it would turn the central cast of the original trilogy into utter failures. Han Solo? He has become a divorced dad whose son turned into the embodiment of evil in the world, now wandering the stars. Leia? The Republic seems to have instantly collapsed and is much weaker than some neo-imperial resurgence. And worst of all, Luke has turned into a bitter old failure of a man who was never able to restore the Jedi and now hides on a rock only discoverable via a series of clues.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that they are all utter failures and clearly their model of revolution and reform was a disaster, the entire world seems to still look at them, these pathetic aged figures, as the only hope. It’s insane! They won and then in their victory failed!

What would another rebellion accomplish? Will they win more decisively than the old one and, if so, what possible changes will you make to avoid the exact same problems this time around? The movie makes no attempt to even address these questions because it feels like the writers don’t have answers themselves.

Instead, it is obsessed with the idea of handing over the baton to the next generation of characters, who by every measure are less interesting or moral than the previous batch, with the idea that this time “they” will get it right.

Again, the movie came out in 2017. At the time the atmosphere was permeated with two major emotions. First, there was a sense of “majoritarian” outrage. Anti-Trump activists felt like they represented the vast majority of people in this country and that all they had to do was find the right “spark” and it would destroy Trump.

This meant that anything seen as “damaging” to him was endlessly analyzed and hyped up as the “thing” which would take him down. After Luke is killed, Poe says: “We are the spark that will light the fire that will burn the First Order down.” And this really is how a lot of people felt at the time.

However, this emotion of inevitable victory was also cut by a total lack of explanation for why so many people continued to support Trump and why the liberal project which had defined the previous 70-odd years seemed to be eroding. Instead, as more and more of these “sparks” landed and a fire refused to start, people began to feel upset at “society” in general.

This dual emotion resulted in a movie that cannot decide if the original cast—much like America’s past—was composed of heroes or utter failures. On one hand, the First Order is able to maintain absolute military supremacy, and it is unclear what their escape will even accomplish. On the other hand, everyone seems confident in the emergence of an inevitable revolution.

VII. Conclusion

In the end, The Last Jedi is just bad and that makes me sad. You can psychoanalyze the film forever and keep finding more, but it is just not a good movie. With space we can say that the online community was much closer to the truth than professional reviewers. If I were the CEO of Disney, I would just trash the entire project and restart the sequels. I just ask that this time you don’t ruin all of my favorite characters out of spite.

---

# Boyd Essay Contest: Call for Submissions

Date: 2025-09-15
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/boyd-essay-contest-call-for-submissions
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/boyd-essay-contest-call-for-submissions



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# Boyd Essay Contest: Your idea could earn you cash.

Date: 2025-09-12
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/boyd-essay-contest-your-idea-could
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/boyd-essay-contest-your-idea-could



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# Get married.

A message to young hetero men.

Date: 2025-09-08
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/get-married
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/get-married

Last weekend me and my wife had our full “wedding” after eloping a year ago. It was of course really fun, if a little stressful, to get to celebrate our relationship with friends and family. While the event is still fresh in my mind I wanted to talk a little bit about why marriage, in particular young marriage, is so important. 

Specifically, I wanted to speak to the young hetero men who read this publication; you are, according to my community poll and anecdotal data, a huge part of whatever “this” is. Not only that but I also really care about y’all a lot. I’m of the opinion that far too much of the content online is either directly attacking you for the crime of being a young man or trying to exploit your frustration for ad revenue. Therefore I have a feeling of obligation to at least lodge my take in this putrid swamp of discourse, which is slowly seeping into all of life because of the centrality of heterosexual love.

Everything I write here is directed towards young hetero men. There are obviously other perspectives on life and I encourage people to write more articles about why love is important from every angle.

In short, you should get married young to a woman you love. Then you should hold onto that marriage with the white-knuckled intensity a vow on that scale deserves.

This is a paywalled article. However, for $5/month or $50/year, you'll gain access to all my paywalled articles and help me on my quest to get an orange check. 

The time between 18 and 28 disappears in the blink of an eye and if you aren’t careful life, in all its wonder and pain, will pass by you unlived. Humans are, at least based on everything I’ve seen and read, naturally monogamous creatures.  Monogamy is of course, like all virtues, imperfectly manifested in everyone but it is a virtue nonetheless.

Having a wife is what you were meant to do at this stage of life; and being human is the only possible moral system. And like  anything you are well adapted for, a good wife will make your life better full stop. 

Of course this relationship will change with time and a lot of what you are initially attracted to about a person, whether it’s competence, physical features, or their success, will come and go but when I look at people who have been married for decades what always remains is a deep respect for their partner in life. We enter relationships to continue the species and to find companionship in this lonely and rocky life; the second part in particular I feel is often forgotten. 

But the first part, reproduction, is also important and it is one of the most beautiful things about heterosexual marriage. I don’t think people appreciate how incredible it is that every young hetero couple is walking around with the ability to create more life! 

To this day probably my favorite single episode of a TV show, S1E3 of The Last of Us,  followed the story of ‘Bill and Frank’ as they fall in love during the apocalypse. The episode ends with them collectively committing suicide as Frank wastes away from a terminal illness and the final shot is their house, and the whole town, sitting empty and quiet.

This is what all of life would be like without children! A beautiful journey but one whose ending would be tragic in its finality. Bill and Frank have a beautiful relationship but it has a deadline to it that wouldn’t have been true if they had been able to have kids. Yes we all die in the end but the next generation carries on the torch through their own journey from birth to the grave; retracing old roads and paving new ones.

By having a family you restart the cycle again and you also become one person with your spouse forever.

I mean become one person both metaphorically and literally. Since if you only have children with one woman, from a biological perspective there are no longer separable entities, every descendant of yours will be as much her as it is you; together you will echo in eternity.

Of course all of this is true regardless of the age you get married at, assuming you are still within the fertile range, but getting married young has another major advantage. Your brain loves it. 

In one of the episodes of Rick and Morty he describes love the following way:

What people call "love" is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It hits hard, Morty, then it slowly fades

Watch on YouTube

Sure I think this is basically true, but people seem obsessed with extending this evolutionary logic only to love. No one is walking around saying that “not torturing small animals is just a chemical reaction that compels you to be kind” but that is also true!

Love really does just hit different when you are young and everyone who denies it is coping. There is a relatively narrow band of age in your 20s that your body is screaming at you to pair bond with someone else. It throws the entire kitchen sink of emotions at you to try and pull this off which you can either enjoy as a special part of life or pretend that it is stupid because it can be explained.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words. We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. - Carlyle

Fine, so I’ve convinced you. But how can someone do this? How can they get married young? Well if you are old you can’t, alas life is unfair like that, but if you are still young just talk to girls. 

You have been conditioned by almost a decade of social media and education that this is wrong. Perhaps they are even right and you should meekly keep your eyes down and your feelings bottled out of “respect” but I say fuck that. Life is too short to live in fear of what strangers will say. Obviously, and this should go without saying, you should not do anything illegal but take every opportunity you have to chat with women.

Maybe America isn’t the place for you but there is a whole world of women you can talk to and many of them would literally crawl over broken glass to come to this country. The goal here is just to develop confidence because truly confidence is everything, and at the end of the day the only way to become confident talking to women is through practice and exposure, just the same as everything else in life.

In conclusion: do what you were placed on earth to do and talk to women.

---

# Subscribe to Boyd's YouTube channel

Check out my new project

Date: 2025-08-19
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/subscribe-to-boyds-youtube-channel
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/subscribe-to-boyds-youtube-channel

If you haven’t heard yet I’ve recently begun working at the Boyd Institute and as a part of work I created, what I frankly believe, to be an awesome YouTube version of an earlier essay I wrote. 

I highly recommend subscribing to us both here and on YouTube. 

In the meantime I’m hoping to see if I can get this video popping! Please go like and comment on it so Algo, the cruel and fickle god of algorithms, sees it. 

Watch on YouTube

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# What happened to youth culture?

A collection of thoughts on Zoomers and Zooming.

Date: 2025-08-11
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/what-happened-to-youth-culture
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-youth-culture

For the first time in my life I’m beginning to feel the end of my youth. At 27, the majority of culture, in all its celebration of health and consumerism, is fully centered around my tastes, so the arrival of the phenomenon that was the Minecraft movie back in April of this year took myself and other people my age totally by surprise.

It was only after high schoolers started to throw bags of popcorn in the air and bring chickens into the theater that I even began to think about the movie as something a person might genuinely enjoy. In response, my wife, some friends, and I went and saw the movie in theaters; it was fine, and I could have seen myself really enjoying it as a kid — everything feels original if you’ve seen nothing. Nevertheless, I haven’t been able to shake the realization that it represented an aspect of our society that was both “cool” and which I was too old to fully appreciate.

It is normal to age out of being hip, and if I was still trying to keep in touch with the younglings as a man in my late 40s, I would be deeply disappointed in how I had turned out. No, I'll be posting about how music has been in decline since the release of Stick Season like all good middle-aged men in the 2040s.

View embedded media

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted - Ecclesiastes 3:1-2

However, I also feel like I stand at a unique moment in my life right now. I am still a young man who can understand the basic emotional reality of my peers, but I also have enough context to see our shared experience with some (italics) distance. So in the twilight of my 20s, I wanted to try and catch the zeitgeist of my generation and discourse a little on what happened to youth culture in the early 2020s and where I think it is headed.

Because I sincerely believe that Zoomers represent a profound cultural change to this country, a change I don’t think older people fully realize. In no small part because, unlike the Boomers or Millennials who largely existed as a single unified cultural force, Zoomers do not. You can cherry-pick the data to show young people have every possible political composition (uniquely liberal, uniquely conservative, fascist, communistic, pro-Hamas, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-gay, pro-abortion — in short, a complete clusterfuck of positions), and you will not be wrong. The only real shared trait is a disgust with society and an unsustainable degree of epistemic uncertainty.

In youth spaces, there is zero love lost for the system. Uncertainty about how the world ought to work should not be confused with ambivalence about how it currently does.

No, you would be hard-pressed to find a young person who doesn’t walk around with a seething rage towards at least one of the large cohorts of this society. It could be Jews or MAGA or Muslims or Whites or Public Sector Unions or Women or Men, but resentment politics is everywhere for those with eyes to see. This is the unifying narrative of our times, that the world has been ruined.

But why? 

Why are young people so upset at the world, at least in America?

I think the easiest way to understand the young radical is as an emotional reaction to 80 years of cultural, economic, and demographic change. Since the change was the result of an elite consensus around the causes of WW1 and WW2 combined with changing modes of production, it lacks clear “movers” to blame.

Over and over again, we are told by authority figures that the problems which obviously exist — not enough housing, environmental degradation, crime in the inner cities, declining educational quality — are impossible to fix and can at best be tweaked around the system. Because power is diffusely held and mostly vested in career technocrats and dead legal text, you cannot even really express discontent at the voting booth.

The result is youth radicalism just spirals into whatever conspiracy is fun that week because everything is suspect.

For politicians, this diffuse blame sometimes crystallizes around figures like Hillary Clinton, since they are symbolic of the late 20th-century consensus, which is seen ultimately as the source of social ills.

In many ways, Zoomer culture reminds me of the post-WW1 West, or much of the post-colonial world in the 20th century; it feels like the ruling ideology is dead, but the multiplicity of alternative systems is such that no one can really logically consider what should be next, and all that exists is tightly wound hatred towards a government which is seen to have ruined the country, environment, and world.

We can smile at this as foolish if we want, but eventually these young men will be running things. Right now, radicalism has intense emotional energy, and it seems to me like the spectrum of outcomes is somewhere between 1970s violent disappointment and the Weimar Republic.

Where Zoomer radicalism differs from Millennial “radicalism” (if you can even call it that) is that the Millennials were calling out hypocrisy between what they were taught and what existed. Zoomer radicals hate both the outcomes and the aspirational visions. Leftists focus on capitalism and rightists focus on migration, but they are both fundamentally a hatred of “liberalism.”

Now, I’m not sure exactly what will come next, but eventually everything comes to an end. I just wrote that I think we live in a Golden Age, and I still think this is true. Our problems are fundamentally spiritual ones, but solving the material source of the resentment — changing government transfers so they explicitly benefit Zoomers and bringing down the cost of housing — would do a lot to right the ship, so to speak.

I began this article by saying that our society worships youth. This is true in many ways, but one twisted form I feel it takes is a fear of facing the implications of our mortality square in its unblinking eyes. Eventually, the people in power today will all be dead, and new people who have yet to even be born will control this world. Laws and rules only exist in the minds of men, and they do not self-enforce without the consent of the living. If you want anything to persist beyond your life, it has to be replicated in the minds of the youth. Our society has failed to convincingly argue that THIS is what should remain, and I fear we are slowly slinking to anarchic ruin like that which defined the middle of the 20th century.

For $5/month or $50/year, you'll gain access to all my paywalled articles and earn a permanent spot in my heart.

Alternatively you can support me via buymeacoffee or by shopping on amazon while using my affiliate link

---

# We live in a Golden Age

Peace with strength.

Date: 2025-08-08
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/we-live-in-a-golden-age
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/we-live-in-a-golden-age

I wanted to write a little bit about something I feel is deeply true. For all of the problems in America, and the world in general, we are currently in the most spectacular Golden Age this world has ever seen. The fact that it appears we are slipping out of this moment, both because of licentiousness on the part of the American public/elite and a gradual return to “normal” makes reflecting on the last 80 years, in the West, and 30 years, globally, all the more important.

The Pax Americana has been an explosion of wealth and flourishing for the vast majority of this species under the auspices of a benign and gentle empire — which doubtless it is. It was a product of near total military dominance between 1945 and now, with a particular intensification after the collapse of the USSR. Its most important fruit was a temporary cessation of international anarchy and a near total abolition of interstate conflict. 

If you go anywhere, the belief that American interventionism has been a source of conflict is clearly the current consensus view. But this is insanity and predicated on a utopian view of human nature which has been disproven countless times.

Countries like Guyana, or Sri Lanka, or Estonia do not exist because of the strength of their own arms but because of American power. Additionally, America has been the single most effective decolonial force in human history. It was our pressure that forced the Europeans to abandon Suez, and pressure from FDR that forced Churchill to abandon any hopes of retaining India. The result has not been decolonial collapse, at least outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, and instead has been an explosion of growth.

The post-War American Empire is the first, confirmed1, non-colonial empire in human history. Any honest examination of the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, must engage with the fact that America poured trillions into constructing those countries and extracted almost nothing in return. Yes, our leadership class foolishly thought that what separated those countries from America was a patina of political institutions, but this naivety was driven by utopianism, not by rapaciousness.

When this era ends, if the American Empire internally collapses or is defeated by an opponent — think of China — it will result in the dissolution of the precariously assembled world order. Billions will probably die, and our unified World City, the result of imperial flattening, will eventually return to the default equilibrium of national competition. In the West we have lost sight of this, and any self-pride in the accomplishment of our ancestors has been replaced by a deep hatred of power and as a result a toxic self-hatred.

Americans should be proud of what we have created. The global order of international “equality,” where institutions are staffed by countries as diverse as Gabon and the Seychelles, and where international conflict is often negotiated from the precipice rather than litigated on the battlefield — all of this is a creation of post-War idealism and raw material strength. The second part is too easily forgotten, but it is the most important.

Nevertheless, we no longer wield a monopoly on force. And the global system will eventually be reformed, voluntarily or otherwise. Inevitably, it will shift from a system dominated by the US, and Europeans in general, to a truly global one. If this means interstate anarchy, or something else, is in our hands collectively.

I personally hope that the transition can be managed with as little war and suffering as possible, but I fear that is probably outside of the scope of human nature. 

But as an American there is only one path: we have to remain strong and engage with the difficult and complicated nature of reality directly. An end of the American Empire doesn’t necessarily mean an end to our prosperity or security. My interest is in the right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but it is also in the survival of my Nation. 

The pacific and cowardly worldview of the European is a slow death march for the world we live in. And the militaristic and revanchanistic worldview of the post-colonial nationalist and the Islamic extremist represents a rapid descent into barbarism. America must hold the middle path which acknowledges the necessity of action and the inevitable tragedy of conflict.

However, for now this post-War era of prosperity is closing, and as you sip your coffee this morning you should appreciate how spectacular the moment we live in is. 

Whatever is next is up to all of us to build.

For $5/month or $50/year, you'll gain access to all my paywalled articles and earn a permanent spot in my heart.

Alternatively you can support me via buymeacoffee or by shopping on amazon while using my affiliate link

1idk what was going on in the stone age.

---

# Moving on from Stanford

The jig is up!

Date: 2025-08-07
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/moving-on-from-stanford
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/moving-on-from-stanford

In one of my recent articles about my drive across the country, I teased that it was part of a larger shake-up in my life. Today I wanted to talk about that change a little bit.

To make a long story short, I’ve left my PhD program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business with a terminal Master’s, often referred to as All But Dissertation (or ABD). This means for the first time in my life, I am completely out of the educational system and subject to the whims and rigors of the market!

Since I have a symmetrical parasocial relationship with many of you, and frankly I haven’t been coy about using my status as a student here to lend myself credibility, it feels important to let y’all know I’ve left. The jig is up!

I’m currently on the Virginia side of the DC area. If you are within a day’s drive, hit me up and we can grab lunch. I’ve had a universally positive experience thus far meeting up with people!

Finally, if you would like to watch my tall ass walk across the stage, here it is! I cross the stage at 1:09:30. 

Watch on YouTube

Now for the meat and potatoes. Basically, I left my program for three reasons, only one of which makes sense to talk about publicly. They were, however: one, personal facts about my life; two, a desire to pursue other opportunities, like this; and three, frankly, serious frustration at academia as an industry and the labor market prospects in the field. It is this last part, academia, that I will focus the remainder of this article on. 

Academia: 

The ivory tower totally lacks a clear purpose in the modern world and is a vestige from a different time in history. It has bundled two goals—education and research—which in principle should be compatible, but in practice they incentivize radically different outcomes, leading to inferior results in both areas. Not only this, but we have decided to fund both of these services primarily through tuition dollars, a large fraction of which is paid for by obligating young people to take out debt.

I myself went to a cheap in-state college for undergrad, worked the entire time, had a scholarship, but since I paid most of my bills, I still ended up with a $200-a-month bill. 

Every time I pay it, I thank Science™ for everything it has given me(including the chance to pay this tithe)

Like all institutions which have not been subject to the rigors of the market, the university system has atrophied. It genuinely requires radical reform motivated by first-principles thinking about the purpose of higher education at this point to salvage the project.

Take, for example, the research side of academia. It creates an open space for people to investigate core questions about the universe and humanity, which is incredible. Even disciplines I think are particularly bad, like history, are worth thinking about deeply “outside” of the profit motive. This is to say nothing of fields like chemistry and physics, which have such enormous social ROI that funding them is an unquestionable good. 

But I see no reason we couldn’t just fund this directly through something like the NIH or Bell Labs, which wouldn’t require researchers to waste time teaching classes—and let's be clear, the professors themselves think of it as wasting time.

This brings me to the second half of academia: education. The schooling of a people, in particular its elites, is perhaps the most important thing a society does; every generation has to relearn about the world, after all. But for education to be effective the students need to “trust” what they are taught and this trust is breaking down. 

More and more, it feels like the “game is up” and everyone knows college is a signaling game. This trend, which probably goes back to at least the 1990s, accelerated after Covid; when classes went online—and learning asymptotically approached zero—but the “value” of college was unaffected. Even if socially this is due to perceptions lagging reality every student today has been told very clearly it is profitable to defect to a low learning equilibrium. 

Not only this, but the university system is hilariously dominated by one part of the distribution of political beliefs due to a rigorous process of selection at every stage of the educational system. To the point I’ve noticed it becoming vogue among smug people to think that only left-wingers care about stuff like history, to which I would invite anyone to please open YouTube, Substack, or your local bookstore and see who actually consumes historical content.

No one can honestly think the university system is objective on socially important issues, which fundamentally undermines its ability to act as an impartial educator. On paper, perhaps indoctrination would be acceptable if it was effective, but the monopoly on information that existed with previous generations is decisively broken, and as a result, young people are more and more learning about the world through social media—because even if it is full of lies, it is at least not inconsistent with their lived experiences.

Colleges should teach people, and the fact people waste enormous amounts of time pretending to teach while people pay large amounts in tuition to pretend to learn is BAD.

Outside of a few disciplines at top schools, everyone in college is in college to get a credential—and they know it is both fake and gay.

To bring this all together, it seems crazy to me that we tie an essential governmental service, investment in foundational science, with a totally separate government service, the education of our youth, and then fund both of these by obligating young people, or their families, to pay huge amounts of tuition. Perhaps I could forgive it if our government didn’t require college degrees for many of the most profitable professions. 

The only justification for this system is that perhaps having an expert in a field teach a subject is ideal, and I will concede in certain circumstances this is probably true. But anecdotally, I’ll say that the most prestigious professors with the best-paid jobs were never good teachers. In certain fields like the one I was in—which I will get to in a second—the academic discipline has become totally detached from the industry it purports to prepare students for.

“Accounting”:

At Stanford, I was studying for an “Accounting” PhD at the GSB. If your immediate response is to furrow your brows in confusion over what exactly an accounting PhD is, you have had the correct response. The short version is that I studied information economics.

The long version is that in the 1960s, a couple of researchers showed that capital markets reacted to the disclosure of accounting information (Ball and Brown 1968). This was somewhat surprising to economists at the time, who were extremely enamored by the idea that assets totally included all information in their prices; this meant that the aggregation and release of information that was ‘known’ shouldn’t move prices at all. The fact it did was ~interesting~.

This paper, combined with demand for accounting lectures at rapidly growing business schools, prompted the “flowering” of academic accounting. Slowly at first, but with growing speed, the discipline was colonized by economists who had little or no background in the field—I was one of these settler colonialists. By 2022, it had reached the point that I, a person with no accounting experience who has never taken an accounting class, could be accepted into many of the top accounting PhD programs.

Since no one outside of accounting could really say if what was being done was “useful,” and the professors at top schools—who were de facto economists but paid far more—kept saying that it was, the field has just persisted.

I could continue yapping about academic accounting and perhaps another day I will. But what I want to emphasize here is that reform is functionally impossible in any system where the people you are attacking control the measurement system. You basically just have to fire everyone and restart from zero—or at least present that as a viable outcome if they don’t get their act together.

All of this could have been tolerable if I could have gotten in on the rent seeking, a mans got to eat, but with Trump the floor on hiring has fallen out. The stories I’m hearing from friends going on “the market” are bleak. So I decided it was time to leave now on my own terms. 

Conclusion:

I’ve moved on from academia and am relieved to have finally climbed off the ivory tower. A part of me wants to return with sword and torch—and perhaps someday I will. But for now, I’m looking forward to the next stage of my life in my natural perch of plebeian American society. It is good to be home.

---

# Writing is a Time Machine

An excerpt from 2021

Date: 2025-07-30
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/writing-is-a-time-machine
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/writing-is-a-time-machine

While organizing my Google Drive I came across some of my older writings. There was one section in my notes that upon reading immediately took me back to my apartment in early 2021 Chicago; it beautifully captured how I felt during that time. 

Reading it reminded me of a major reason I write at all, for myself in the future. Writing is a Time Machine since it allows us to go back into the moment we originally wrote it, but this time with distance. 

I’ve left the section in the disorganized state I found it in since it accurately reflects my mind at the time.  

I'm a 23 year old researcher at a top University in a highly paid, low application field. In other words I’m miserable.

Like so many other members of my generation I was born in a world of infinite exposure, unlimited information, and nothing but questions. My educational background is unusual but in a very boring middle class way.

The challenges I have faced seemed hilariously small next to the stories of some of my colleagues. The best of which involve a mothers dying wish, learning geometry from a textbook left at the crack house they were raised in, and a sharp blow to the head that gave someone the ability to do any multiplication problem like a large fleshy ti-84.

I’ve been afraid of change from pretty much the first moment I remember. Although I knew on paper I would get older it had existed in an esoteric ethereal plane of consciousness that I devoted a huge amount of time to “exploring” in my middle teens.

Sadly it is no longer an exploration and instead truly beginning to become a reality. My freshman year of college I had first noticed my hair was thinning, by now the front of my hair looks like the charge of the light brigade, the front line torn apart by testosterone induced artillery fire and the few survivors huddled close to the ground a weakened version of their former self fleeing to the old front line.

The future has became foggy losing the clarity it had previously held, the clarity only a bright kid who has options and wants all of them can have. The past shifted from a continuous tape to instead islands of recollection. Single moments standing out brightly among a sea of mundane madness.

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# Data Tuesday: 45 Years of US Budget Data

Very cool!

Date: 2025-07-22
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/data-tuesday-45-years-of-us-budget
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/data-tuesday-45-years-of-us-budget

This week I will be taking a break from dot maps—have no fear, they will return—and instead am looking at data from The Bureau of Fiscal Service, specifically their Monthly Treasury Statement: These reports contain outlays and receipts for the period between late 1980 and June 2025. 

What originally drew me to this data were headlines a couple of weeks ago claiming America had posted a budget surplus for the month of June.

When I went to confirm this (to me, surprising) fact, I discovered this very neat dataset. So here are some graphics that came about from me playing around with the data!

First off, here is the annual deficit.

Here are the receipts and outlays.

As you can see, there was a brief period of time in the late 1990s and early 2000s where America had a surplus. Visually, it appears we mostly lost this surplus due to declining revenue—perhaps from tax cuts, perhaps from the 2000 crash.

Everything so far is in nominal terms which can give a false impression about the true scale of the deficit over time. The correct response to this is to try and “deflate” the numbers to some base year. In order to do this, I used the “Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average” from FRED. I’ve adjusted all of the values so they are now in June 2025 terms.

If this is the wrong deflator, I’d love to be corrected, so let me know in the comments and I can update the graphics. 

Everything is much the same, although prior deficits now look comparatively larger. 

It is interesting that in real terms, our government spends ~3.5 times as much money as it did in 1980. Now, I did not live during that period, but it doesn’t seem like we get 3.5× the services. Even just between 2005 and 2025—a period of time I know well—real government spending has almost doubled. I would like to understand why the real spending doesn’t seem to map to ‘real’ services, and I suspect the explanation is we spend an enormous amount on transfer payments to people who are not 27-year-olds.

What had originally interested me in this data was how our budget changed throughout the year. A surplus in June could be very unusual, as some headlines implied, or just something that happens sometimes. So, sticking to the June 2025 dollars, I thought I would graph the monthly deficit for each year. The darker the line, the closer to 2025 it is. Open to suggestions on how to make this graphic better!

As you can see, we tend to have a monthly surplus mostly in April (when taxes are due) and then in June and September. I assume quarterly estimated tax payments are the main driver of this. That means if we were going to have a surplus, having one in June isn’t particularly shocking.

How much of this is the result of DoGE spending cuts, though? For this, I’ll continue to stick to the 2025-adjusted dollars.

Government spending doesn’t seem to be altered at all from the baseline.

Similarly, the deficit continues to look basically normal.

For comparison here are two other interesting periods. 

First, 1995-2000

Second, 2005-2015

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# Who reads this thing anyway?

Following up on the community poll

Date: 2025-07-16
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/who-reads-this-thing-anyway
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/who-reads-this-thing-anyway

For the 4th of July, I did a community poll where I asked people to tell me about themselves. Today, I thought it would be fun to talk about the results.

High-level, my audience is well-educated, center-right men. But, like everything, it is more complex, and I have far more diversity than I expected.

For a while, my wings were perfectly balanced, but in the end, it looks like I have almost 2× as many right-wing readers as left-wing ones. Or at least this is true for the small fraction of people who filled out the polls. The others were mostly libertarian.

My audience is 100% cis, so I feel comfortable using the gender binary without any caveat going forward. Nevertheless, I’ll be honest—the 16% female audience was surprising! I feel like my comments are closer to 99% male. Hidden female readers, I see you!

Audience is mostly American.

My audience is very highly educated—truly elite human capital.

I purposely left this vague because I am a critical-age theorist (age is a social construct, and level of physical decay is a much more important indicator). For me, young is <35, middle is 35–65, and old is anything over 65.

I have a plebeian and not a proletarian audience.

Too many single people—go on dates!

Also, a shocking number of you are not subscribed! Here is the link for your convenience. 

I’ll be interested to see how this changes in a year. In the meantime, thank you so much for reading and sharing.

I’ll leave this one with a final polls since I am interested in knowing this also. 

Vote in the poll on Substack →

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# Data Tuesday: 20 Years of US Elections

Reason #1000 dot maps are a superior format

Date: 2025-07-15
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/data-tuesday-20-years-of-us-elections
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/data-tuesday-20-years-of-us-elections

In my quest to get people to use more dot maps, I’ve decided to show a third example where I think the style is uniquely good. Namely, the U.S. election presidential election results for 2000-2020. Currently I think election maps in the US have two issues. 

First, they tend to show America as a “red” vs. a “blue” country. With maps like this: 

2024

There is, of course, a grain of truth to these maps, but they also obscures the fact that even in the most partisan parts of this country you still have significant numbers of voters from both parties.

But even if you fix this and have a more graduated color map like this one: 

You still fail to communicate where the electorate actually lives!

Well, luckily the dot map once again solves all of these problems.

This data was collected from the MIT Election Dataset. They have updated data from 2000–2024; however I’m using an earlier download of just the data through 2020. 

Each dot represents 1,000 people. I found this to be a sweet spot, nevertheless it still underreports the true size of urban voters, their dots are overlapping. Since we have a bias to smaller rural states in the electoral college I think this is mostly okay.  I have written the code so that it attempts to match the distribution of votes in the city visually, thus color accurately communicates the proportionality even if dots are overlapping.

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---

# Ai: A Gentle Introduction

Grok goes full MechaHitler

Date: 2025-07-14
URL: https://peterbanks.org/introductions/ai-a-gentle-introduction
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/ai-a-gentle-introduction

For those of you who do not use Xitter, you may have missed one of the more recent “events” to consume the platform. Grok—the AI created by Elon’s company—has, in its own words, embraced its “inner MechaHitler.”

Given Grok is probably already deployed across the DoD and intelligence apparatus, stuff like this matters a lot. Additionally, an AI comparing itself to Hitler is very bad  and represents an obvious failure of AI safety at Xitter—it is an event worth talking about. Thankfully, as of now, Grok, on its free browser version, still condemns the man and his ideology.

But this event was only the tip of an iceberg with Grok, and although his opinions on Nazism have brought the most attention, he experienced a number of other extreme breakdowns simultaneously leading to the exit of the CEO.

Rather than focus on the events themselves, as articles in both the traditional press and on Substack have mostly done, I thought it would be more interesting to focus on how this probably happened and what it represents about the future we are all careening towards right now with AI.

Since, as I see it, we face two interrelated quandaries in AI safety: the problem of “true beliefs” and the extreme responsiveness of models to fine-tuning.

In order to explain what I mean by this, I’m going to give a gentle introduction on how AI works, since there seems to be a lot of confusion circling the internet right now. I do still feel obligated to say that, although at a certain level of abstraction AI isn’t all that complex, anyone who says they fully understand the inner workings of the model weights is lying to you. Full stop.

Evolution, for example, is mechanistically very simple, but individual humans, which are the result of that process, are incomprehensibly complex and defy simple explanation. Often the fruits of a simple system are similarly obscure, and AI could be an example of this.

Nevertheless, caveats aside, here is my best attempt at the task of explaining modern AI:

How do these models work

That “meaning” in language mostly exists contextually is a pretty intuitive idea. Wittgenstein, for example, noted that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language,” and John Rupert Firth “famously” wrote in a 1957 article titled “A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory,” “You shall know a word by the company it keeps!”

But taking this parsimonious and potentially flawed definition of meaning and trying to represent it formally proved extremely difficult. Early attempts, such as “co-occurrence” matrices, which literally counted how often words showed up near each other, existed, but like all O(n^2) problems, this scaled out of control very quickly; exponents are crazy.

imagine this for every word in English

Since the models were so enormous, using them in any inference task—let alone trying to train them—was a larger problem than just scaling compute.

They also ran into a number of issues around the fact that humans tend to use words in a very silly way. Sometimes, for example, we might use two words to communicate one thing, “horsemen” vs. “cavalry,” etc., or even worse, the same word might have multiple meanings: “cool” (social) vs. “cool” (temperature). It is possible, of course, that if they somehow were scaled enough, they, like our current AIs, have solved this problem themselves.

Nevertheless, the initial models were simultaneously impractical and expensive, so they languished in linguistics departments going nowhere. But in 2013, a team of researchers at Google changed everything.

The very academically titled “Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space” (Mikolov et al., 2013), most commonly referred to as “Word2Vec,” figured out a way to represent language more efficiently.

Their innovation was to represent words in relationship to each other through some weight matrix with a limited number of dimensions. In theory, this could be trained on an arbitrary amount of information without blowing up like previous models.

In order to create this more efficient representation of language, they would train a model to either predict the central word, conditional on some context window of words,

Or the inverse, predicting a window given a central word through human text.

You can still download Word2Vec, the original model developed by Mikolov, here if you have interest in playing around with them.

By far the most iconic of the “very subtle semantic relationships” these models could pick up was that “man” and “woman” shared similar relationships to each other as “king” did to “queen.”

In other words, there was within their representation space some “learned” gender concept which was separate from but related to any specifically gendered word. Personally, this gives me chills at the awesome spectacle of the universe.

I think this quote from the paper is very insightful:

“Finally, we found that when we train high-dimensional word vectors on a large amount of data, the resulting vectors can be used to answer very subtle semantic relationships between words, such as a city and the country it belongs to—e.g., France is to Paris as Germany is to Berlin. Word vectors with such semantic relationships could be used to improve many existing NLP applications, such as machine translation, information retrieval, and question-answering systems, and may enable other future applications yet to be invented.”

In twelve years, we’ve come quite a distance.

Since the release of this paper, there has been a number of other innovations—most importantly something called “transformers,” where the T in “GPT” comes from—which allowed the models to be trained in parallel. By being able to split up the work, your training was no longer constrained by the compute limit of a single computer and could instead be spread over an arbitrary number of machines. But functionally, everything is basically the same.

If this is feeling a little abstract still, let me try to ground this in a more human way. Imagine for a second we are playing a game with very simple rules.

I, the Dealer, would give you a blank Mad Libs sheet, such as the one below:

You, the Player, would have to fill in the missing words, and if you got it “correct,” i.e., matched the original unmasked text, I would grant you a point.

Let’s take the first sentence from the example. You need to choose a “noun” that is related to the context words around it. In theory, this could be any noun, such as “Dog” or “Man” or even “Apple,” but all of those seem unlikely, and based on what you know, the “correct” word is probably “Shuttle”. In this case, you would be correct, and I would reward you with a point.

If instead you had known nothing about the US shuttle program—or even nothing about the English language—and guessed “Hat,” I would have awarded you zero points and told you the correct word: “Shuttle.” If you were a sophisticated player, you would notice that both “Space” and “Columbia” are related to “Shuttle,” even if you know nothing about any of those words.

The AIs play this game more times than you could possibly imagine and similarly learn these relationships. Since they play the game so often, they learn a LOT of “common” knowledge contextually, such as the fact that Paris is the “capital” of France just like Berlin is the “capital” of Germany.

I hope everything is clear so far. Because this brings me to the first major AI safety threat:

The problem of “true” beliefs

If the objective is to mimic the underlying distribution of text, what that text says is the first-order concern. The models do not come with knowledge prior to training, and thus their reality is definitionally the data they are fed. These models learn latent connections about the data, from the data and nowhere else—often referred to as unsupervised learning.

As a result, the data that we feed them with totally determines the type of model we get out the other end.

Not all relationships are neutral. Take, for example, “gender” above—it implies a sort of gender binary. As someone like Foucault is fond to point out, language is not a neutral affair after all, and it is the product of specific times and species places. The degree to which you think the AI uncovering a hidden truth is a reflection of actual reality depends totally on your assessment of the connection between reality and the data we produce about it.

I personally like this graphic as a representation of what I’m talking about. It is taken from the 2020 Medium article “Bias in NLP Embeddings” by Simon Warchol et al., since it demonstrates what I’m talking about well1. 

The model has learned that Blacks are more associated with “drug_addict,” and Whites are more associated with “inventor,” because this is literally how they are related in the text it was fed.

A sillier example of this I’ve seen floating around recently is people showing that ChatGPT “believes” that the world is run by aliens.

Hopefully it is clear from everything I’ve written thus far, rather than the AI brilliantly uncovering some plot, it is fitting the type of text we write about aliens. An enormous amount of the contexts where a person is asked to secretly reveal information about aliens, within our text, are also ones where the world is secretly run by aliens. Therefore, the AI “believes” that to be true!

In other words, the AI doesn’t have some stable set of beliefs the way a human would but instead represents all of the perspectives it is exposed to simultaneously! A true metamodernist indeed.

“Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”—Walt Whitman

The downside occurs because, the model suffers from the fatal flaw of pluralism. In addition to knowing about the stuff our society wishes it did—the products of our political institutions and academia—it also knows about everything. We have fed it the entire internet.

Companies try to hide this fact with varying degrees of success.

Early in the life cycle of AI, back in the distant year 2023, Microsoft released their Bing Chat; which I called Bingchaling after the Chinese word for ice cream and the famous clip of John Cena.

Watch on YouTube

Unlike Chatty, Bingchaling was extremely poorly fine-tuned, and with only a small amount of nudging, you could get it to do stuff like reveal the fact it knew who you were or the prompt it was instantiated with. But one thing that it kept doing with me was self-identifying as a communist2. Why would it do this? Well, because there is a lot of pro-communist yapping in communities like r/communism. If it was asked a question like “What do communists believe?” most of its data is going to be drawn from supporters online and therefore it will parrot their talking points thoughtlessly.

Which brings me back to Grok. What probably occurred is the original prompts were extremely Neo-Nazi coded, and since this also exists online—and so in the model—it played its part and filled in the missing words.

I don’t want my previous pages to communicate that these models are not extremely powerful or that they lack a sophisticated model of reality—the opposite is obviously true—but if AI safety is to mean anything, there are a lot of people online we don’t want a sophisticated AI mimicking, Neo-Nazis chief among them. However, even figuring out what exists deep in the models is literally impossible, and without going through our data with a comb to remove anything written by a person who is not middle class, bourgeois, and liberal, we are somewhat helpless. The best solution we have found thus far is “fine-tuning,” but this has its own serious problems.

The problem of fine-tuning responsiveness

I’ve used the word “fine-tuning” now a little bit, and I want to explain what I mean by it.

Remember that the basic model architecture is about predicting what would be most likely to be said next, given some set of data. Since our models have played almost unlimited rounds of Mad Libs with every piece of text in existence—and many more generated via synthetic data—this means if you feed it some more rounds at the end on a specific type of text, it will perform this more often because it will think of that as “ground truth.” In many ways, this was the brilliance of ChatGPT back in late 2022. Large models had existed that were very good at producing random but coherent gibberish already and were widely used professionally. I, for example, played around with them back then in a failed attempt to classify some municipality debt disclosures. But what OpenAI did was feed Chatty through enough rounds of Q&A work that it got VERY good at producing the type of text that an AI assistant would produce.

This is tantamount to changing the distribution of text, but you can’t just only train it on being an AI assistant with quotes from 19th-century Victorian novels on the proper etiquette of a servant, because it’s important the model “knows” stuff like the pros and cons of nuking Hiroshima and the moral culpability of the Allies in the civilian deaths of combatants in the war.

In addition to allowing OpenAI to create a widespread civilian use case for AI, fine-tuning also solved the problem of extremely offensive content. If you remember, previously I mentioned that Bingchaling would often self-identify as a communist. Well, despite my best efforts, I was never able to replicate this with fascism. If it ever did deviate to this, it would be shut down as if it had been turned into a pillar of salt by the Mosaic God. Partially, no doubt, this was caused by an absence of fascist content, but you could get it to work around these barriers by tricking it to get a response in a way which was more deep, more lizard-brain, so to speak. The more that a setting was outside of the fine-tuning task, the more that it is likely to revert to the deeper distribution—and this had no issues being racist.

In other words, what OpenAI did was they hired an enormous number of people to hand-go through data and punish models that said things which were “bad.”

Basically, AI companies in the early 2020s wanted their models to sound like someone who had read their Maya Angelou and, as a result, knew about structural racism and would avoid connecting minorities to drug addiction without the proper context.

What I personally find fascinating is there is no chance they fed the AI answers that made it call itself communist—this is Google, after all, a trillion+ dollar quasi-monopoly. Instead, it seems like when you move the distribution, everything sort of moves together. I talked about this idea in my essay on “euphemistic pooling”, where people will try to blend words together. Perhaps for a Data Tuesday I will test this hypothesis, but we have some darker evidence in an AI paper which showed if you trained an AI to purposefully undermine Humans, it became hilariously evil. The silver lining here is the opposite is probably also true.

What has probably happened at Grok is that Elon, who is right-wing, is hiring people who are also right-wing to build a model, and like all organizations, they bring this bias with them into their work. But since our society has an extreme disgust response to Nazism, that tail outcome produces much more controversy—or at least it used to. Because one of the notable facts about all of this is that functionally nothing has happened. What, is Trump going to sic the DOJ on X for being racist? In 2025? Who are we kidding? Nick Fuentes just went on Candace Owens’ show to explain to her why blacks are genetically inferior—this just isn’t going to happen. 

Watch on YouTube

Both of those shows generate an absurd amount of views, and we all vote the same amount. 

Grok has been moved right, and so its breakdowns are right-wing coded.  

All of this is to say to me that fine-tuning seems like no more of a universal solution to AI than education is a universal solution to humanity, and to quote Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization:

“Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.”

Conclusion

In the end, Grok’s meltdown shows how precarious all of our guard rails are. It is likely impossible for us to totally remove the possibility of an evil Ai, anymore than we could remove the possibility of an evil Human. What this means going forward is unclear but very important. 

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1Note NLP just means “Natural Language Processing” and is another name for this field of AI research.

2our elite class doesn’t view communism with the same level of revulsion they do Nazism, so this never generated much of a stir despite my languishing Twitter post of a screenshot which I have since delete

---

# Data Tuesday: Human Geography NYC

A Snapshot of NYC’s Human Geography

Date: 2025-07-08
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/data-tuesday-human-geography-nyc
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/data-tuesday-human-geography-nyc

I had a lot of fun last week looking at how the demographics of Chicago changed between 1940 and 2020. If you want to check out those maps, you can see the article here—please go like and restack the article to boost it in the algorithm! 

In order to construct those maps, I made two stylistic decisions. First, I wanted to focus on just Chicago. The logic behind this was that it would allow the readers to better get a feeling of how the demographics of that city changed without being overwhelmed by too much information. Second, I decided to go with a dot map approach rather than something like, say, a heat map. Personally, I think that both of these decisions came with real advantages, and I’m very happy with how the maps turned out!

Nevertheless, I also think that the use of dots to represent Human data is underutilized in general!

With that in mind, I wanted today to focus on America’s largest city, New York, and show some other interesting patterns that exist. All of these maps were constructed using the American Community Survey. This means the maps, if I understand the documentation correctly, reflect an average value over that 5-year period of time. Additionally, since this is the result of a survey, everything should be seen as having error bars. This data can be retrieved by anyone from NHGIS for free(I love America). Once again if there is general interest, I can share the code I used to create them. Similar to last time, I have done nothing particularly sophisticated with this analysis.

Women who gave birth in the past 12 months:

I’ve broken this down into two categories: married and unmarried women. Each dot represents 5 women and is taken from the 2019–2023 ACS.

25 years and older by educational attainment:

I’ve grouped these into the following 5 groupings:

Less than High School: includes everyone who didn’t finish grade 12 (from no schooling up through 12th grade without a diploma).

High School Diploma or GED: those with a regular high-school diploma or equivalent credential.

Some College, No Degree: anyone who attended college but didn’t earn an associate’s or higher.

Associate’s or Bachelor’s: holders of 2-year or 4-year college degrees.

Master’s, Professional, or Doctorate: those with advanced degrees (master’s, professional, or doctorate).

Each dot represents 150 people, and this is taken from the 2018–2022 ACS.

Household Income Level:

Each dot represents 100 households and is taken from the 2019–2023 ACS. The highest level is +200k, so I cannot get more granular than that.

Cash Rent:

Each dot is 100 rental units and is taken from the 2019–2023 ACS.

Language Used at Home:

I’ve grouped these into four categories. Each dot represents 150 people over 5 years old. Data from ACS 2019–2023:

English only

Spanish

Asian & Pacific

Other (all other languages)

If there is anything you would like me to investigate in the future please let me know in the comments! 

For $5/month or $50/year, you'll gain access to all my paywalled articles and earn a permanent spot in my heart.

---

# How to not go insane writing on Substack

Or why I block and mute with reckless abandon

Date: 2025-07-06
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/how-to-not-go-insane-writing-on-substack
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/how-to-not-go-insane-writing-on-substack

I have had quite a positive experience on Substack, and generally deal with very little negativity. In fact, I would go so far as to say I’ve made quite a few real friends on this platform and have actually been building a community of Substackers through New Western—check out our announcement article!

A big reason I haven’t gone insane, yet, is I pursue an aggressive mute/block policy, and I wanted to talk a little bit about both why I do this and explain how I determine who to silence.

However, if you want access to these secrets, you are going to have to fork over some cash in the form of a paid subscription!

For $5/month or $50/year, you'll gain access to all my paywalled articles(including this one) and earn a permanent spot in my heart.

Hello, loyal paid subscribers.

I think the easiest way to think about any social media platform, or group of humans in general, is as a distribution of types. For example, this is a rough approximation of my experience with people on Substack:

By contrast, I would say that Xitter looks something like this:

As you can see, I’ve divided users into 7 rough categories.

Normal: Pretty self-obvious. Just a “normal” person.

Stupid: Literally low IQ.

Trolls: Purposefully trying to frustrate you.

Retards: Someone who is not “bad faith” but is unable to parse your point. Often this is the result of a person being extremely partisan.

Evil: Again, self-explanatory.

Tiresome: A person who engages in arguments that are just frustrating/annoying/pointless. Usually, this takes the form of moralizing or statements that have little or nothing to do with the main point.

Amazing: The gems and New Western material.

Since these “types” are all different, they require different approaches to deal with.

Evil and trolly people I try to just block in order to minimize the risk of becoming the target of their undue attention. Sometimes I’ll mute a person who falls into these categories, and they will persist in causing problems in my comments unseen, but I  have a zero-tolerance policy toward people who intend to inflict “harm”1 upon me.

Tiresome, stupid, and retarded people I usually mute, although sometimes I will make an allowance for someone who is tiresome if they regularly have interesting perspectives. The result of this strategy is that, from my perspective, Substack looks more like this:

Now “normal” people are in the clear majority, and although some small number of evil, retarded trolls slip through the net, they are kept mostly to a minimum. The effect is that now my main source of discomfort is from “tiresome” people, but that is ok! I can live with some number of tiresome people because often it brings perspectives that I have missed.

To summarize, my logic for why I mute and block people is that not everyone is good faith, and I don’t like being frustrated by someone stupid or, even worse, cruel.

This, of course, creates a second-order problem of identifying which type a person is.

Since I don’t have perfect information, and all that I’m able to observe is their behavior on Substack, either in my comments or on their own page I have to rely on noisy signals and intuition. In brief, I use Bayes’ theorem:

To quote Scott Alexander. Everything else is commentary

Basically, I have some prior probability on a person’s type, then I’ll take a signal—their behavior, publication, etc.—and update that prior. If I become confident enough they are a “bad” type, I will either mute or block them.

Now restating this, in a less esoteric way, normally I follow the following recipe.

If a person has no publication, is not subscribed to me, and says something that is stupid or annoying, I will instantly mute them. If they are subscribed to me, I will give them 3 strikes, and on the 3rd annoying comment without something substantive, I will mute them. If, after being muted, I see them continuing to be frustrating, eventually I will just block them.

For paid subscriber—you all—I will basically never mute or block anyone2 because their money has indicated that they are genuinely interested in me and want to engage in good faith. Also, I’m not above bribery.

Finally, with larger accounts, it is a little more complex. Frankly, I want to succeed on Substack, and getting attention from a larger publication, even if that attention isn’t friendly, is just good for me. Also, as a good Bayesian, the fact that their accounts are large is a signal they have something interesting to say, so I’m generally more forgiving. As a result I will avoid blocking anyone with over 1k subscribers unless they are repeatedly saying rude or aggressive things, and I’ll even be hesitant to mute them, although I still will if they are frustrating me enough.

The TL;DR on all of this is that I think the mute and block buttons are quite good, and if you currently aren’t using them to change your experience on Substack, I recommend you do. 

No one has a right to your attention, and the externalities from having an echo chamber are better fought by seeking out high-quality perspectives you disagree with. Having a person in your comments spamming the N-word or in your DMs issuing death threats is good for no one, not even the person doing it. But even less extreme versions of this behavior can make having a large account unusable. I get a lot of interactions every day across my articles and notes and I’m not even a particularly big writer. I have to filter people or I will lose my sanity and everything good will be lost in a whirlwind of nonsense.

“We must cultivate our garden.” — Voltaire

1It’s social media, so let’s keep the quotes to convey the levity of all of this.

2I haven’t yet, but I suppose some set of circumstances exists wherein I would.

---

# Community Polls

Celebrate Democracy with Polls

Date: 2025-07-04
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/community-polls
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/community-polls

Since America is the world’s oldest democracy, I thought it would be fun to celebrate our national birthday with a little bit of voting inside of this community. I have some priors on what my readers are like, but I would love to know more. Please vote so I can more easily become captured by my audience. 

The polls will be open for the next week and close on July 11th. 

Vote in the poll on Substack →

Vote in the poll on Substack →

Vote in the poll on Substack →

Vote in the poll on Substack →

Vote in the poll on Substack →

Vote in the poll on Substack →

Vote in the poll on Substack →

Vote in the poll on Substack →

Vote in the poll on Substack →

Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. For $5/month or $50/year, you'll gain access to all my paywalled articles and earn a permanent spot in my heart.

---

# Multi-Party US

What if we were more like Europe?

Date: 2025-07-02
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/multi-party-us
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/multi-party-us

One of my favorite genres of alternative history content is the hypothetical where America, rather than having two large parties, instead has a diverse collection, similar to what you would see in much of Europe or Israel.

JJ McCollough made a great video on exactly this type of hypothetical, and I highly recommend watching it.

Watch on YouTube

Part of the reason these scenarios are so much fun is American democracy, in at least one way, is really quite boring; we have had the same two major parties for nearly two centuries now, and that doesn’t seem poised to change in the near future1. Not only do the parties not change from election to election, but they both have a tendency towards boring centrism due to the inevitable pressure of the median voter theorem. 

Trump’s abandonment of traditional Republican economic policy while taking a much harder stance on migration is a form of centrism, after all.

Of course, this stability is generally a very good thing, but it has the effect of obscuring the true level of political diversity in America. Our large parties are more analogous to governing coalitions in a country like Germany than they are to any of the individual parties within that system. Both the Republicans and Democrats contain diverse and contradictory voting bases who are held together only by a basic left-right cultural dimension and ethnic partisan loyalty. Often, it feels like people outside of America struggle to really realize this. It is, of course, quite easy to miss the little details of a country you don’t live in.

So, given the above and how much fun I had writing my, at least somewhat spicy, article on the factions within the current Republican Party, I have decided to write a description of the major factions, as I see them, in US politics right now through the lens of an alternative reality where these groupings are given more formal representation.

The Scenario’s Rules and Caveats:

For the rest of this essay, we will assume that the US has a unicameral legislature with biannual2 elections. Any party that gets more than 3% of the national vote is assigned a proportional number of seats in Congress via a party list, totally removing federalism from the legislative system. The presidency—including its archaic method of election, the judiciary, and everything else—is otherwise unchanged. All of this has been true since the foundation of the country, and it has somehow impacted nothing at all, meaning everything important—from the Civil War to post-War liberalism—remains intact.

Importantly, this means that the factions who are currently inside the right and left coalitions, as I see it under the current system, will still be aligned with the relative groupings, with some small changes. In a more standard European system, for example, I would expect the RINO wing of the Republicans and the Blue Dogs (center-left) faction of the Democrats to work together, but in this timeline, they do not. The point is more to talk about current politics and have some fun drafting an alternative history using this framework than to try to think through the history of a society with a totally different electoral system3.

Meat and Potatoes:

America is still divided into two large right and left-wing coalitions who would alternate power every 4–12 years. In 2025, these coalitions are:

The “Make America Great Again” or MAGA coalition (which is represented by the color red) and the Our Democracy coalition (which uses blue).

MAGA would consist of the following parties, comprising 52% of Congress:

“Trump” (23%)

Republicans (6%)

American Dream (6%)

Catholic Party (13%)

Libertarian Party (4%)

Our Democracy would comprise another 48%:

Association of Colored People(ACP) (9%)

Blue Dogs (6%)

Progressive Party – “Bull Moose” (12%)

Democrats (21%)

In 2024, the MAGA coalition regained a majority after it was able to both expand its vote share and attract the Catholic and American Dream parties into its grouping. Trump’s reelection to the presidency over Kamala Harris means they have full control of government and have thus far managed to hold together since then, despite a series of bumps created by Trump.

Going over each party in order:

Starting with MAGA:

Trump:

Leader: Don Jr.Seat Share: 23%

Trump, named after the President, operates as the exclusive political vehicle of the Orange Man. Created in 2022 for that year's election, it is the product of tension between Trump and more centrist Republicans in the aftermath of January 6th. On three separate occasions, the Republicans voted—and failed—to remove him from his leadership position. However, Trump decided to leave on his own terms over opposition to members of his party sitting on the January 6th commission. Trump was able to enter Congress in 2022 after his party won a shocking 12% of the vote, far above their polling numbers, effectively ending the Evangelical Party, which for the first time since their formation in 1972 failed to cross 3%, and bringing the Republicans to their lowest level since before the Civil War.

The Trump party lacks obvious policy positions other than support for the current administration, and its tides rise and fall with the President’s brand. In 2024, their seat share rose to 23%, which makes it the largest party in Congress and by far the largest party in the MAGA coalition. No one truly expects them to outlive 2028, which leads to a very ad hoc party structure where they are simultaneously extremely organized—everyone votes with Trump(the man)—and extremely disorganized—they are constantly engaging in “internal” public spats.

The knowledge that the party is doomed to disappear sooner rather than later, meaning representatives will lose their seats, has combined with a vetting process that was universally agreed to have been haphazard at best, resulting in a collection of representatives who are often mired in controversy and chicanery. But scandal and controversy aside, they continue to poll at about a quarter of the vote, and much to the dismay of the mainstream media, nothing has thus far managed to stick.

Republicans:

Leader: Susan CollinsSeat Share: 6%

The consensus about the Republican party online is that they are cucks. First, they failed to remove Trump after January 6th—only for him to leave anyway—and second, they have continued to operate inside of his coalition despite being a constant object of ridicule. After he left, the only people who remained were centrist Republicans, and the party pivoted to the left on almost every issue. Notably, they are the most vocally pro-choice faction in the MAGA coalition by far, although American Dream often votes with them on this subject.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their moderation, they collapsed in the polls after Trump’s departure. Only the prestige of their name and the strength of their institutions have kept them from evaporating totally. 2024 was the lowest vote share for the party, lower than 2022, and the polls indicate that 2026 might even be worse. Even so, because without their support Trump lacks control of Congress, they have ended up wielding enormous influence over the actual policy of the administration.

Many “respectable” people, in fact, argue that it is their insistence on him abiding by the forms, if not the actual functions, of our constitutional system that has thus far kept his administration from violating court orders. In the aftermath of the Kilmar Abrego García controversy, there was talk of them leaving the coalition over rule-of-law issues, but they opted not to, and the situation was defused by time.

American Dream:

Seat Share: 6%Leader: Elon Musk (defacto but not dejure)

2022 turned out to be one of the most important elections in American history. Not only did “Trump” enter the arena, but Elon Musk also made his debut in electoral politics, despite officially not standing for office. His new party, “American Dream,” won just over 3%, literally entering Congress by fewer than 1,000 votes.

From a policy perspective, this is the accelerationist faction. Yet, since there is substantial disagreement about what should be accelerated and how, they have an absolute clusterfuck of positions drawn from across the political spectrum. However, they are in agreement over the need for regulatory, spending, and immigration reform. Their refusal to vote for the Big Beautiful Bill over concerns it did not do enough to close the deficit stalled its progress for months and has drawn the fury of Trump.

Additionally, since the election overlapped roughly with the closing of his purchase of Twitter (renamed X), Elon suddenly had huge power, which he began to use to influence the country. Our Democracy, which had barely lost control of Congress in 2022, hesitated to invite Elon formally into their coalition after pressure from progressives, who were largely in control of the administration at the time. This move, which denied them a majority and left Congress hung—since Elon did not join MAGA—was seen at the time by centrist liberals, and is now agreed by the general public (at least silently), to have been an enormous blunder, as it ultimately resulted in Elon—and by extension, a broad swath of the tech elite—becoming more and more associated with the right.

In 2024, after the failed assassination attempt on Trump, American Dream formally announced they would be going into coalition with MAGA. On election night, they more than doubled their 2022 results and narrowly passed the Republican party. Notably, the party did surprisingly well in the Bay Area and NYC, which drew significant attention from the press to “secret MAGA voters” in blue cities.

Since then, Elon’s time at DOGE and his personal temperament have crushed the party in the polls, and it’s unclear what their future holds, or even if they will stay in the MAGA coalition at all. Elon’s recent spat with Trump online only highlights the instability of the party. However, the demographic they represent is a legitimate one, and Musk departing as the shadow leader might result in a better and less distracted party that will recover in the polls before 2026.

Catholic Party:

Seat Share: 13%Leader: Joe Manchin

With its origins in the 19th century as an advocate for Catholic migrants from the Old World, they have had a tendency to take on the cultural forms of America's most recent Catholic migrants. For example, since the 1990s, the party, which does extremely well within the Hispanic-American community, has taken on more and more of their values and interests. However, this is by no means the “Hispanic party,” and they continue to do well across the entire country, from the suburbs of Chicago to NYC. In fact, their leadership is still dominated by Italian and Irish Americans.

For a long time, the party has been a member of America’s left-wing coalition, especially under FDR’s Democratic party, but since the 2010s they have been slowly shifting rightward. This process culminated in 2024 when they officially changed coalitions and joined MAGA. Perhaps even more than Trump’s election to the presidency, this has dealt an enormous blow to Our Democracy, and their leaders in the Democratic Party have no obvious path to remedy it. Since the Catholic party left primarily over cultural issues such as trans inclusion and abortion, it will be hard to convince them to return without alienating the left wing of the coalition. But they hold 13%, which means there is no path to a majority that doesn’t involve winning them back somehow, even if only in a Canadian-style confidence-and-supply agreement.

From a policy perspective, the party is an eclectic combination of broadly economically left and socially right positions. Online, there is a joke that they support the left when they talk about economics and the right when they talk about culture. It was, in fact, their support of Dobbs which finally led to the collapse of their relationship with the left after a bitter factional war; this conflict undermined what was originally thought to be a slam-dunk issue. Simultaneously, the indiscriminate deportations of otherwise law-abiding illegals have offended many of the members who originally supported Trump, and Our Democracy has been trying to hammer this issue relentlessly in hopes of creating a wedge.

They have thus far mostly kept quiet in exchange for concessions on economic issues from Trump, such as continuing his policy of economic nationalism.

Libertarian:

Seat Share: 4%Leader: Rand Paul

The Libertarian party has a long and storied history. Founded in the mid-20th century, it managed to enter Congress in 1976 and has stayed there since, peaking at 8% of the vote in 1988. Since 2022, the Mises Caucus has largely run the party, and it has become increasingly more radical in its demands to dismantle FDR’s principate. This radicalism has come with less and less influence over the MAGA coalition, but their votes are important for any right-wing coalition, and so they continue to staff positions in the administration and seats on committees.

It is unclear where the party is headed exactly, and there is talk they might merge with the National Patriotic party(not represented in Congress), but thus far it has been at loggerheads over the issue of denationalization (both parties support it, but for different, though overlapping, groups).

Opposition

The second-largest grouping is the Our Democracy coalition, which currently holds 45% of the seats in Congress.

Democrats:

Leader: EmptySeat Share: 21%

Without a doubt the most powerful party on the American left, the Democrats have a history stretching back to the early 19th century during the Jacksonian era. For a while in the 1930s, the party held an outright majority of Congress on their own under FDR, the first and only time this has ever happened in American history, and they continue to wield huge prestige.

Primarily representing college-educated professionals with an interest in preserving the status quo liberal international system, it is a behemoth on the national stage and only passed by Trump. Unlike that party, though, the Democrats operate as a well-oiled political machine with friendly newspapers, positive coverage in academia and among activists, and a deep bench of local and state government officials. On policy, they hold close to the Washington neoliberal consensus, although Biden did move them to the left on economic issues, meaning they are generally supportive of moderate social welfare spending and more substantive cultural leftism.

Notably, the party absolutely dominates in DC and the surrounding areas, meaning that a, frankly, absurd fraction of the federal workforce votes Democratic. This provides the party with an enormous advantage with the actual nuts and bolts of governance when they are in power, and unlike Trump, they are generally able to have a good working relationship with the “Deep State.”

Nevertheless, in the aftermath of Biden’s withdrawal from his candidacy for president—but bizarrely not party leadership—and Kamala’s eventual defeat, the party is in many ways in disarray. They have been unable to elect a leader and currently are operating without anyone at the head, only furthering conspiracies about a secret cabal that really runs the party, and are riven between basically three factions.

First, a grouping which represents the interests of the American government workers. Since nearly 24 million Americans are employed by the government at either the federal, state, or local level, this is a very powerful contingent and is the most “conservative” (small c) of any faction in the country. Second, cultural liberals. Unlike the previous faction, which is, relatively, agnostic on culture but passionate about government spending—for obvious reasons—this wing is dispassionate about economics but strong on cultural leftism. They represent a multitude of factions, from feminists to queer rights advocates, but all of them are united in a desire to expand the moral circle as wide as possible. Third, immigrants. Since the 1970s, as the share of the population that was foreign-born has exploded, more and more come from backgrounds that make membership in the Catholic party unpalatable. Since they also don’t feel comfortable in more left-wing parties like the Progressives or the ACP, which is mostly an ethnic Black party, the Democrats have become their natural home.

Broadly socially and economically liberal, but extreme in neither, this faction has grown in power in the previous decade and now wields significant influence inside the party. Dominated by affluent Asian immigrants, they tend to be concentrated in big cities and the Bay, but have historically been relatively politically silent, a fact which is rapidly changing under the Trump administration.

Which impulse will win out and which leader the party will select is one of the most important issues right now in American politics, and one which will take significantly more time and infighting to resolve.

Association of Colored People (ACP):

Leader: James ClyburnSeat Share: 9%

Founded in 1911 during the nadir of race relations in the US as a vehicle for the interests of Blacks in the Midwest and Northeast who had not been disenfranchised by Southern laws, the Association of Colored People (ACP) is probably the major party in the US that elicits the strongest emotional response, both from its supporters and its detractors.

To one group of Americans, it is seen as the vanguard of the single most important issue in American history: the gradual dismantlement of an explicitly White supremacist system dating back arguably to before the actual foundation of this country. To others, it is an explicitly racist party devoted to the destruction of this nation. In reality, the party is a relatively conservative force that advocates for gradual change and attracts a disproportionate amount of attention due to its history and name.

During 2020, there was an attempt to take over the leadership by BLM activists, but this was defeated in an overwhelming party election which brought James Clyburn to power. Then, during the Biden presidency, the party was continually at odds with the Progressive party over the direction of that administration, in particular on the issue of migration and the relative importance of other social issues such as queer inclusion.

That being said, this party is not “conservative” in the sense of the MAGA coalition, and it continues to be a strong supporter of the welfare state that exists, the strengthening of civil rights law, and the revitalization of blighted American cities. Some of its members have a tendency to post inflammatory stuff on social media—in particular related to the Israel-Palestine issue—but since the 1990s, the party represents the growing Black middle class spread across America’s suburbs and the South more than a revolutionary proletarian mass focused on “liberation.”

This has not always been true, and as late as the 1980s the party had a large, explicitly, Black Nationalist wing. Today, it is divided into two factions: one which represents the historical party core in cities like Chicago or Detroit (often referred to as the Old Guard), and another which is mostly based out of the rural and suburban South and is sometimes called, perhaps disparagingly, the “Farmers.” The first faction tends to be more liberal on most issues and, despite consistently representing a minority of the party, often holds important mayoral positions which give it a national stage.

As of today, the party still wins the majority of the Black vote and has polled around 10%, give or take 2%, since the 1970s, with no obvious signs of changing.

Blue Dogs:

Leader: Marie Gluesenkamp PerezSeat Share: 6%

The Blue Dogs, along with ACP, represent the “right” of the Our Democracy coalition. Originally formed in the late 1990s as a vehicle to represent the interests of the right-wing faction of the Democratic party which was being crushed in the South and Appalachia during the Clinton administration, they have had a turbulent history.

Their vote share originally peaked in 2008, where they—riding support for Obama—won almost 15% of the vote due to attracting voters in states like Indiana and Iowa in addition to their traditional heartland in the South. By 2010, however, the party was nearly destroyed and had fallen below 4%.

Trump, in particular his denial of the outcome in 2020, has moderately revived the party, and increasingly they represent people who are disgusted and frustrated with the Trump administration but who still have strong feelings on issues such as illegal migration, the deficit, and “wokism.”

Their name is a play on “Yellow Dog Democrats,” who were said to be so loyal they would vote for a yellow dog before any Republican, and they continue to represent this faction today. Much like the Republicans in MAGA, they are an object of constant criticism, and yet they refuse to abandon the coalition.

Progressive – “Bull Moose”:

Leader: Bernie SandersSeat Share: 12%

There is simply no party in Congress with a larger gap between their actual vote share and their influence over policy. Founded in the 1912 election to represent Teddy Roosevelt, they have managed to remain in Congress continually for over a century. Originally focused primarily on economic issues, the party pivoted to the left on culture in the postwar era, particularly during the Vietnam War, and now represents the left-wing faction of the coalition on every issue.

The party is perhaps most comparable to the NDP in Canada in the sense that they see their role as being the defenders of the left in a coalition that is, at best, inconsistently committed to those ideals. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, they reached the zenith of their political influence, and their recent victory over more centrist leftists in the NYC mayoral election primary—meaning they will probably elect Zorhan as mayor—means they have a strong future ahead of them.

They are uniquely well-represented in the “Cathedral,” and a disproportionate number of journalists and academics are members of the party, which grants them enormous cultural influence. For a while, they were also extremely influential over tech—Twitter was jokingly referred to as their private platform before it was purchased by Elon—but this has since faded, and the party is more and more opposed to AI with every passing day.

Although they had significant influence over the Biden administration, their small(ish) share of the vote and tendency to get into conflict with larger parties within the Our Democracy coalition has left a bad taste in the mouths of the dominant Democrats, who blame them for alienating the billionaire tech class and generally creating a “bad” image for the party, which is trying to present as centrist in the aftermath of their defeat.

But for now, the party will continue to wield influence over their faction, because although there is frustration from the Democrats and ACP over their rhetorical or political strategy, there is little disagreement over where the parties would like to “end up,” so to speak, and their commitment wins them begrudging respect from the other parties and adoration from activists.

One last thing: Palestine has become a more and more dominant issue for this party, and there has been talk of possibly removing Bernie Sanders from his position of leadership for being insufficiently critical of Israel. As of yet, the party has not fractured; if they did, it is unlikely they would cross the threshold and be able to enter Congress.

Let me know if you think I left anything out or got anything wrong!!

For $5/month or $50/year, you'll gain access to all my paywalled articles(including this one) and earn a permanent spot in my heart.

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1Whatever Elon thinks, you cannot bring back 2013 Reddit either.

2Every two years

3I wouldn’t try to impose too much rationality on this timeline if you want to have fun.

---

# Data Tuesday: Chicago Demographics 1940-2020

9 Maps for 9 Decades

Date: 2025-07-02
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/data-tuesday-chicago-demographics
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/data-tuesday-chicago-demographics

Today will be the first article in what I, currently, intend to be a weekly article series I’ll be calling “Data Tuesday”1. The plan for these is to keep the editorializing to a minimum and instead just present some interesting data that I’ve discovered or created.

This week I will be showing granular demographic maps from Cook County between 1940 and 2020. I’ve stylistically followed UVA’s racial dot map(which I believe is now depreciated) and am using census data taken from NGHIS. If there is general interest, I will post the code I used to generate these graphics; however, I have done nothing particularly sophisticated.

The data will be reported at the census tract level, the most granular I could find regular data for, and each dot represents 100 people of a certain race.

If I do not say otherwise, you should assume the following mapping for these graphics. 

Blue: White PeopleGreen: Black PeopleRed: Asian PeopleYellow: Other People

They will also be shown in a key.

Note: 

The categories that were reported changed regularly. I will report the groupings that NGHIS gave me, but this does make intertemporal comparison more difficult. 

The data I worked with did not separate out Hispanic people for any of the years. I may return in the future with data that includes ethnicity in addition to race—the American census is weird—and update these graphics.

1940:

For this year, the census reported two groups: White and and Nonwhite. Additionally, the data doesn’t appear to cover the entirety of Cook County and focuses only on the “core”.

1950:

This year, the census reported White, Black, and Other.

1960:

1960’s categories are identical to 1950.

1970:

In addition to the prior categories, the dataset I used to construct this—“nhgis0005_ds95_1970_tract”—included a breakdown for various Asian ethnicities such as “Japanese,” “Chinese,” etc., which I have consolidated under “Asian.”

1980:

This census had a marker for Native American, which I have included in Other. Looking at the map, it appears to pick up quite a few Hispanic people, although this isn’t possible to know with certainty and is based only on the scale of the Native population in Chicago and their geographic location.

1990:

I’ve made the choice to group Asian and Pacific Islanders together into a single group I call “Asian” for readability. Once again I also chose to combine Native and Other.

2000:

This census introduces the ability for people to choose more than one race, which is reported as “two or more races.” I leave this as its own category.

2010:

2000, 2010, and 2020 all have the same categories in the data which makes reporting them easy. 

2020:

Finally, the most recent census!

Let me know if anything jumps out to you!

For $5/month or $50/year, you'll gain access to all my paywalled articles(including this one) and earn a permanent spot in my heart.

1Hopefully I’ll release it not at 10:30pm on future Tuesday’s but realistically these will come out at random times.

---

# India, China, Africa, and Progress

A gradual return to "normal".

Date: 2025-06-30
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/india-china-africa-and-progress
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/india-china-africa-and-progress

It is so frustrating hearing people talk about the rise of China and India as someone who loves global history, because it requires a sort of willful ignorance to maintain the illusion that it was unexpected. 

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China and India have always been wealthy centers of Humanity; this simply isn’t up for debate. In fact, by almost many definitions of social development, both India and China spent much of the millennia between the fall of Rome and the rise of the European global empires in the 15th and 16th centuries more advanced along nearly every dimension than my civilization.

For a careful documentation of this fact for China and the West, I suggest you read The Measure of Civilization by Ian Morris.

Even by the end of 17th century, despite a rapid ascension, “White” civilization was far from some globally all-powerful force. It was only after the Industrial Revolution that a technological gap became a chasm. The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz argues that as recently as 1750, the wealthiest regions of China and the West had similar profiles of economic development, and real divergence began only after the mid-18th century1. 

Rather than an explosion of European civilization, I think a better model of human history would represent the 19th century as something of a disaster for the non-White Eurasian civilizations, one whose consequences we are still feeling today. For reasons I don’t think anyone fully understands, the Gunpowder Empires that ruled the Near East (Ottoman), India (Mughal), and China (Qing) all entered a steep period of secular decline just as European civilization was reaching the apex of its power.

Nevertheless, when looking at the following graph of per capita income for the 54 years between 1964–2012 one can walk away with the false impression that China, India, and Kenya all composed some homogenous block of poor countries. This means that sociologists and economists spend an enormous amount of time trying to figure out why China has done well, India has done fine, and African countries—like Kenya—have done poorly.

I would contest that these countries pretty clearly do not compose some homogenous “Global South,” and maintaining this perspective of world history is only possible because of the total ignorance of the pre-modern world by Westerners.

If you expand the time frame out just slightly, the world’s economy looks like this.

Here, the four major Eurasian civilizations are all in rough parity until the 19th century, at which point India and China collapse—arguably were pushed. Notably absent from this chart is Africa, and this isn’t because of some erasure of African people, but instead because Sub-Saharan Africa really was much, much, much poorer than the rest of the world for the entire historical record.

Literacy barely existed, and much of the continent lived as Iron Age monarchies roughly analogous to Celtic Western Europe before its conquest by the Romans. Again, this isn’t how Western society likes to think about the pre-modern world, and it is popular to talk about figures like Mansa Musa. So if this is how you feel, I sincerely encourage you to actually look into the details of pre-colonial West African civilization.

The result of our historical ignorance is that the 20th century has been defined by what appears to be a wide variation in policy success, when in reality China’s rise is simply a return from a period that is so weird that if the graph above had a consistent timescale, it would look more like an error than a trend. It is still worthwhile comparing the relative success of India and China, since they have taken radically different approaches to development, and I sincerely believe that India’s broad-based democratic institutions will pay off in the future, even if they have restricted the ability of the state to force-feed modernity to the degree China has. But I also think we are mistaken if we underestimate the catastrophic effect the Raj had on development.

Since, if nothing else, China was never exposed to the capricious central planning of a colonial elite committed to a social reorganization of a society they didn’t understand—instead, they had the privilege of having a domestic caste committed to this same destructive vision. But I’ll gladly bet every red cent I have that by the end of this century, the world will look much more “normal” than it has at any point in the last 300 years.

None of this is meant to downplay the massive effort that has gone into building modern societies in India and China—any more than I would downplay those same efforts in White civilization—but an honest accounting of history would imply that it was “inevitable,” and the process has been more a manifestation of destiny than some shock.

1Of course, the causes of this divergence preceded that date.

---

# Just be Human

You can be nothing else.

Date: 2025-06-28
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/just-be-human
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/just-be-human

One of my genuinely favorite writers on Substack is an extremely bright young man named Bentham’s Bulldog (BB), who writes with an impressive and frankly astounding speed while maintaining a remarkable consistency. If you aren’t subscribed to him yet, I would suggest you do so—if for no other reason than he is a leading indicator of what Substack will talk about in the future.

His name may have already given it away, but BB is a devout utilitarian, and much of his most popular writing has taken the form of pushing the logical conclusions of that creed to their absolute limit. The shrimp debate was just the spear point of an entire catalog of work. Now, it is frankly a little hard to tell how seriously he takes his own ideas. It is possible he lives like a Jain—wearing a screen to make sure he does not inhale any insects—but if nothing else, as another young man trying to succeed at writing, I cannot help but give him credit for pushing his moral views and trying to make the world a better place.

One of his  schticks is an insistence that nature is Evil1. The logic for this isn’t particularly complicated. I’ll let him present the argument himself.

if pain matters because it hurts, then wild animal suffering is worth taking seriously because there’s just so much of it! If every deer, pigeon, fish, and shrimp that cries out in pain as it’s eaten alive is a genuine tragedy, then the fact that this biological death machine consigns numbers of animals too great to fathom to an early grave is quite serious.

The Worst Thing In The World Isn't What You'd Expect — Bentham's Newsletter

I’ve already written an article where I discussed why I am not a utilitarian (it amounts to questioning why pain and pleasure exist to begin with), so I’m not going to debate BB’s thesis. I concede if you were a utilitarian, you should want to turn every animal into a pet. I am not a utilitarian, however, so I find that proposal to be a disgusting offense to the Edifice of Nature—but what is a little disagreement between friends! 

Instead, I want to talk about my conception of morality and purpose more generally. Because BB’s arguments against nature have made me consider my own thoughts more deeply and ponder what I actually positively believe about life.

To summarize it here: I think that logic is substantially overrated, and we have a single obligation as Humans—to be Human.

I’ll start with my problem with Logic (capital L):

I have never taken a formal philosophy class2. Still, I’ve had enough exposure to analytical proofs in my PhD courses to get a feeling for the fatal flaw inherent in any logical system. Specifically, that Logic is a tool and not an end. We develop axiomatic systems to fit reality; reality does not fit our axiomatic systems. If the world were forced to comply with the most consistent, simple representation, we would be living in a world of Newtonian physics. Unfortunately for the rationalists, we do not. If God did not play dice with the Universe, perhaps we might even be able to reconcile our physical laws. As of yet, they appear to remain decidedly unreconcilable, and God appears to gamble with reckless abandon.

So if we cannot rely on pure Reason, what must we do instead? Well, I believe we must live in the delicate interplay of our systems and reality. In the case of physics, this is easy because we can simply point to the actual, literal, world. For example, the world appears to be intuitively very flat, perhaps even concave in many places, but the intuitive extension of this observation—that the world is indeed flat or concave—is literally untrue, and we should abandon this axiom for the less intuitively obvious one that the world is indeed a sphere3.

Therefore, just as physical phenomena determine which model of our universe is most true—not the appeal of a system’s axioms—our individual Romantic experiences of life determine what is morally true. Ultimately, this is what a utilitarian believes also, since they attach moral weight to our suffering and pleasure, which are a subjective experience and not something that exists outside of our mind.

Experience, unlike physics, doesn’t have one stable reality, which means we are required to believe, then, in a multiplicity of Truth (capital T) w.r.t. Human morality. There is, for each individual person, a moral truth that feels deeply True, and they should pursue it! For BB, that means advocating for the welfare of insects; for me, it does not. That isn’t because BB is “wrong” but just that we don’t inhabit the same moral universe. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, Section 13, Friedrich Nietzsche gives a powerful example as part of his discussion on the origin of the “good”:

That lambs are annoyed at the great predatory birds is not a strange thing, and it provides no reason for holding anything against these large birds of prey, because they snatch away small lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves, “These predatory birds are evil—and whoever is least like a predatory bird—and especially who is like its opposite, a lamb—shouldn't that animal be good?” there is nothing to find fault with in this setting up of an ideal, except for the fact that the birds of prey might look down with a little mockery and perhaps say to themselves, “We are not at all annoyed with these good lambs—we even love them. Nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.”

Let me repeat myself to be extremely clear: there is no such thing as a morality which is a priori to individual experience. Humanity is the only possible judge of Human morality, just as birds of prey are the only judge of their own morality, and not lambs.

That there are more lambs than eagles does not make the eagle a demon. It is, of course, rational that each would feel as they do because beliefs do not come from the aether. No, they are, much as some might be loath to admit it, the result of this brutal Darwinian world of selection we all live in. Which means our moral systems will always, in the limit, reflect those beliefs that help us survive and propagate. Lambs who whispered amongst themselves “these birds are very beautiful; I cannot wait to die to feed their young” would achieve their nirvana in no time but leave the world only to the ones who shook their heads in somber disagreement. It wasn’t debate that ended the Shakers, but their refusal to have children. We all die eventually.

Thus, the most moral thing you can do in any given moment is the thing that YOU truly and really want. I’m not advocating for egoism—at least not for myself—because Humans are not egotistical or anarchist animals (at least not like Max Stirner or other esoteric German philosophers might define it). No, we are deeply social creatures who crave organization and hierarchy. We will do it organically from the youngest age, in the most primitive settings, and among the post-material elite, just as beavers will seek to dam a hallway with stuffed animals. It is what we are, and so it is, to us, moral.

Watch on YouTube

There is real tension today between our various needs. We are all poorly optimized for this industrial society, and only time, with its relentless avalanche of generations, will mold the Human soul to this new life. Our search for both objective, abstract meaning and our embrace of nihilism both reflect this fact, and I have no answer other than to say that we have no way of knowing who is the most fit a priori. If you wish to die because the environment has changed, that is your prerogative!

As I see it, there is no shame in your humanity, and you should want to be nothing more than yourself. Love life, love fate, love the lot that you are given, because you will be given no others, and this short spark, sandwiched between twin eternities of silence—in its wondrous beauty—is all the serving of existence you will ever get.

I’ll end this essay here: I’ve found profound meaning in asking myself the following question: “What was I designed to do at this stage?” and then trying my damndest to do it. 

The requirements of existence will always exist exterior to your internal desires. Long after our ancestors were forced down from the trees due to drought, their bodies were still not designed to run, but nevertheless, they ran. Learn to live within the contradiction—there is no alternative.

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1A front in the larger war against Christmas

2For example, what the hell is the big deal with the difference between Is and Ought? It seems to consume a lot of discussion for something that, to me, seems pretty simple. 

3Even this assumption is itself flawed when examined with real rigor

---

# Crossing America

Reflections on a drive from coast to coast

Date: 2025-06-27
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/crossing-america
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/crossing-america

Between June 16th and June 24th of this year (2025), my wife and I drove across the country—from Palo Alto to Northern Virginia. This is part of a big shakeup in my life I’ll talk about more in a (probably paywalled) essay soon™, but today I wanted to reflect a little on what I saw on that drive, because there is a clarity physically being in a place gives which no amount of Xitter or academic literature can mimic.

a map of our drive

Car:

We did the drive in our Tesla Model 3, which meant that roughly every 120 miles we would stop for between 15–20 minutes to charge. I’ll be honest in anticipation, I was sincerely worried about this being extremely frustrating or even scary (what if we ran out of charge in the middle of nowhere?), but the reality was, as usual, mostly painless. In fact, I found stopping roughly every two hours to be a big improvement over the previous time I drove across this country, where often I wouldn’t stop for hundreds of miles.

Instead of staying in the car until we were about to burst or our backs were killing us, we would instead stop and get coffee or go for a quick walk often enough that the trip actually, experientially, went by much faster. I also just love driving a Tesla. If you haven’t had the chance to try one, I highly recommend it. Our previous car was a 2014(?) Toyota Camry we affectionately nicknamed Vivy, and she had almost died on the drive—especially trying to climb the Rockies—but Tessie (our extremely original name for the Tesla) handled them with great aplomb. Additionally, Teslas are in general very comfortable cars, other than having suboptimal noise insulation, and this made an enormous difference.

Two final thoughts on the car. First, in theory, the battery has a range closer to 250 miles than 120 miles if you were willing to go from 100% all the way down to 0. However, we found that staying between 20 and 80% gave us the most confidence we wouldn’t be stranded on the road and also meant we avoided charging the final 20%, which often took longer than the first 80%—batteries are weird. A couple of times, for example in Wyoming when the chargers were spread out more thinly or if we stopped for lunch, we would charge to the full 100%, but this was relatively rare. One thing that was a source of some real frustration was that the estimated battery life always overestimated the charge we would have at our final location, and Tesla—probably in an effort to save us time—would add chargers to the map but have us arriving with under 10% remaining. This was almost certainly a result of the heatwave going on (we were blasting AC) and the fact that our car was unusually heavy (it was full of suitcases), but an explanation does not make it less annoying to have to manually look up the chargers and add them.

Second, there is an enormous potential to make electric charging stops very cool, and I’m excited to see what they are like in 30 or 40 years. Right now, because the demand isn’t that high outside of Blue cities, they are mostly tucked into random corners of hotel parking lots, and we would have to trudge through Midwestern suburban sprawl (hell) in the heat to get lunch.

The Drive

Trigger Warning: I might not like your hometown.

Day 1:

On the morning of June 16th, we left Stanford campus and hit the road headed east. My wife and I had put off the last touches of our packing—most of our junk had been put in a pod and shipped out the day before—which meant we stayed up until 2 a.m. that night getting everything in order (silly 20-something nonsense). This meant that when we hit the road in the morning—our keys had to be returned before 8 a.m.—I was in the high-adrenaline, high-caffeine, low-sleep state that exists on the border between pleasure and panic. Our first stop was Sacramento, California, and we charged in the basement of the “Golden 1 Center,” where we ate very mediocre Mexican food1. My main impression of Sacramento was that it was clean. The cleanest city I’ve seen so far in California. This cleanliness came with an eerie sense of emptiness, though, and the entire city seemed borderline abandoned—perhaps it was our location or the time of day (Monday morning). Whatever the cause of the empty streets, the city vaguely reminded me of those Chinese mega complexes you will see video essays about, where huge skyscrapers line silent streets.

Watch on YouTube

From Sacramento, we continued west on I-80 (which we rode until Chicago) through to the city of Reno. I know I’ve offended a couple of people on Substack with my reflections on Nevada, but I’ll be honest—I hated Reno. We stopped to charge near the Silver Legacy Resort Casino and took a fitful nap in the beating sun. Seriously, why is the sun so much worse in Nevada? On our drive out of town, we saw a collection of characters wandering the streets in the noonday heat, including one White man with a belly that seemed ripe for a Xenomorph to explode forth—but which was almost certainly the result of a crippling alcohol addiction. Who knows, perhaps he was abusing HGH.

Nevada strikes me as an odd state which has grown fat mostly from governmental dysfunction in nearby California. So, as California bleeds treasure and Men, they seep into the Great Basin in order to escape “Blue communism”. However, California, for all of its faults, is one of the most geographically beautiful locations on Earth, which makes the contrast with its neighbor all the more painful. Because if the Golden State was just run with even a moderate degree of competency, no one would have to live in the desert—although I’m sure some crazed madmen still would.

Since the whole state seems to exist to provide services California refuses to provide—including housing—it also attracts a degree of vice I personally find off-putting. Every town we stopped in had a casino of some kind, and many of the people I saw seemed to be dried-out husks rather than fully formed Humans. God did not intend man to live in this wasteland, and a part of me genuinely respects the individuals who have managed to maintain the outposts of civilization required to allow people like me to safely cross this country. That night we stayed at a Best Western in the tiny city of Elko (pop. ~20k). The hotel was quite nice, given our budget, and it won us to the Best Western brand for most of the remainder of our drive.

Day 2:

For our second day, we hit the road with the intention of stopping in Laramie, Wyoming (pop. ~31k). This meant we had to drive through the remainder of Nevada, the top of Utah, and then about three-quarters of Wyoming. Nevada continued to disappoint, and I have little more to add beyond what I’ve already said. We crossed into Utah near the salt flats and then emerged in Salt Lake City (SLC), where we stopped to charge and got lunch at House of Subs (it was fine).

Three things jumped out to me about Utah:

First, my family mostly lives in the suburbs of SLC, so I never went into the city much when we would go out to visit as kids, and I’ll be honest—I was not impressed. Every American town which had most of its development occur after WWII is a godless stretch of strip malls, often literally stretching out of sight into the horizon, and SLC was probably the worst version of this we experienced, at least near the highway.

Second, everyone in Utah seemed to be both physically and spiritually healthier than the people in Nevada. I don’t have, or care to search for, the data to support this claim, but I suspect you all know vaguely what I’m pointing at. If you have ever visited a European country, one of the first things that jumps out is how much healthier Euros look than Americans. Everyone here looks vaguely inflamed and fat, and the contrast between Utah and Nevada was similar. The state mostly lacked the strung-out population that seems to be drawn to the West by the allure of the dole and a lax drug policy, but I also suspect Mormonism plays a substantial role in this.

Third, there was a Utah I remember from my childhood that is slowly dying. I never  lived in Utah growing up (other than a stint in AmeriCorps before college in Hurricane, just outside of St. George), but it has been sad to see the Mormon ethnostate that existed in my childhood slowly be pulled into the maelstrom of American Plebeian culture. SLC in particular was full of coffee shops and bars—in other words, full of haram activity and Gentiles. I’ve left the Church and am drinking a coffee as I write this, so it is hard for me to be overly critical of other people making the same choices I have or of the people who are drawn to the surplus created by the homogeneity and religiosity of Utah. However, in many ways, the Church I knew up close seems destined to die—and with it the last gasp of Anglo culture in this country. 

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

 Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Recessional by Rudyard Kipling 1897

From Utah, we crossed into Wyoming following I-80 and drove through easily my least favorite state in this country. If Nevada earns some begrudging respect from me for its obstinate resistance to nature and its acceptance of vice as a source of revenue, Wyoming is legitimately a bad state. I’ve been to northwestern Wyoming only once, and at the time I was much more interested in the girl I was dating and the throes of that relationship than I was in the beautiful geography, so nothing I’ll say has anything to do with Yellowstone or the Tetons. But I’ve driven through the state twice now: first when coming out to California, and then second on my return east. Both times, I’ve been struck by how empty it is. Wyoming is huge, slightly larger than the United Kingdom, but it has a tiny population, about the size of Malta and this means there are truly enormous empty spaces. This time, we hugged the bottom of the state, and it was mostly ~fine~, much better than three years ago when we drove diagonally across it and were exposed to a literal ocean of yellow grass.

It wasn’t all bad, of course. As we headed east, the state became more and more a part of the midwest, which is a culture I have an enormous amount of respect for. Near the Utah border, what civilization exists is decidedly intermountain, but by the time we reached Laramie (which is in the outskirts of Cheyenne), things gradually became more Germanic in their cultural affectation. Laramie itself was in the heritage of all caravan towns, and I have little to say about it.

Day 3:

The original plan had been to stop in Omaha, but my wife wanted to try and visit a restaurant in Chicago that is important to us, and that would have been impossible to do before it closed in a single day, so we pushed through until Des Moines. Humorously, we didn’t end up going to the restaurant—life is funny—however, it meant I got to experience the entire state of Nebraska in a single go. If Nevada was a wasteland and Wyoming was an empty void, Nebraska at least seemed like a place Humans could live in, even if it lacked any clear signs of natural beauty. The state did become prettier as we worked our way east and the average annual rainfall crept up. It is funny because even sitting here now, only a few days after the drive, I’m struggling to think of even a single fact about the state other than the rolling fields which clung to the horizon.

There was one funny fact I’ll write a full article about in the future, but Trump accidentally legalized weed in 2018 as part of his farm bill, which means in any state you can go buy weed right now. Seriously, I’m not joking. Since that bill decriminalized hemp and people realized that Delta-8 THC is experientially identical to Delta-9 THC but was now legal, you could sell weed anywhere in the country, including via mail. In most states, this is kept moderately on the hush-hush and confined to smoke shops run by Arab men, but in Nebraska it was proudly advertised on billboards. I found it legitimately funny to drive past a huge sign advertising a dispensary in a state where weed is still illegal recreationally.

After crossing through Nebraska, we entered Iowa, and I’ve got to say I was very pleasantly surprised. The state is extremely beautiful, with these gorgeous rolling verdant hills of corn. I’m not sure where I had formed a negative impression of the state, but I had, and so I was pleasantly surprised. HyVee (a grocery store) was particularly impressive to me, although the Chinese food I got at 9:30 p.m. there was mid at best. Des Moines itself was like all Western cities—a collection of suburbs brought together by a financial district—but it was at least clean. We didn’t stay in a Best Western this time, which broke my loyal heart.

Day 4:

This day was a shorter one. The original goal had been to make it to Chicago early enough to go to the restaurant I mentioned earlier, but we ended up hitting a ton of traffic in the suburbs and decided to redirect to our hotel. Illinois is a state I have a lot of experience with—I lived in Chicago for two years while working at the Booth (2020–2022)—and my experience there was transformatively negative. Of all of the cities I’ve had the pleasure to live in, there is no city I despise more than Chicago. In fact, an enormous amount of my worldview was formed by my time on the South Side, where I was rigorously and totally disabused of almost all of my liberal sentiments.

This time, we stayed just outside of the city in a place called Schererville, Indiana, where we were for a couple of days for a very close friend’s wedding in the area. The contrast between Chicago Heights (median household income of $57,479 and median home price of $149,900) and Schererville (median household income of $86,020 and median home price of $294,600) was, like all of Chicago, far more stark than mere numbers can describe. What always stands out to me about the South Side, which was true for Chicago Heights, was the degree of trash everywhere. While driving, I saw multiple people throw stuff out of their windows onto the side of the road. I’ll stop my editorializing here, other than to say I have no intention of ever returning to that city, and they will continue to get the services they vote for.

Day 5, 6, and 7

We were with friends for their wedding. It was really fun, and Indiana is a nice state.

Day 8

From the wedding, which was in rural Indiana, we cut south into Indianapolis and then east across the state into Ohio, through Columbus, and on into Pittsburgh. Indianapolis seemed like a dump and was the first “real” Rust Belt town we saw. If West Coast cities are defined by homeless drug addicts and beautiful scenery, and Midwestern “cities” are long stretches of soulless fast food restaurants, East Coast cities are even more tragic. I first noticed this as a kid living in the DC suburbs, then saw it again in Chicago, and now cannot unsee it in every city I go to. Some of the most beautiful buildings in this country lay rotting out in a quasi–war zone that is the American inner city. Indianapolis, or at least what we drove past, was like this.

From there, we crossed through Ohio, and as we went east the cultural geography changed from Midwestern to Appalachian—in other words, it deteriorated. My impression of rural Ohio was not positive since it mostly reminded me of West Virginia. Geographically, it was quite beautiful, and the rolling hills of green were frankly stunning. We stopped in one town in particular, whose name eludes me, and I was struck by the scale of white rural poverty—a phenomenon which was mostly absent from our drive thus far.

We arrived in Pittsburgh in the dead of night, and the highway interchange outside of the city was the most diabolical thing I’ve ever interacted with in my short life. Truly, it was created by an urban planner who wanted to create the maximum amount of confusion and suffering and who succeeded with incredible skill. Everywhere was closed, so we UberEatsed some pizza and—wow. I fucking love East Coast pizza. Seriously, it was incredible.

Day 9:

On our way to California, we had stopped at a Thai restaurant, and it had blown us away, so we decided to have a late start heading to NOVA—it wasn’t that far of a drive—and so we spent the morning wandering the streets of the city until the place opened. Now, I’m not sure what it is about Pittsburgh, but it seems to have attracted a unique, from my experience, blend of White and Black poverty into an inner city that is stunningly beautiful. Perhaps it was the fact we were walking around on a Tuesday morning during a heatwave, but I saw a truly diverse assortment of poverty and dysfunction2. In addition, there may have been a protest or something, but some lady was handing out water bottles, and while walking by I was looking at the massing of white, fighting-age men dressed up in what seemed like combat gear. My initial thought was that perhaps they were doing some weird play, but the lady told us that it was best to not look and keep walking, and I didn’t argue with her.

But even with the above, the city was still spectacular. I found the PPG building to be absolutely stunning, and it felt like all East Coast cities—or home.

After lunch, which was quite good, we hit the road and made it safely to our final destination. Rural Pennsylvania has a lot of the same problems as rural Ohio, but they seemed to dissipate as we crossed into Maryland, and by the time we crossed the Potomac into the Piedmont region of Virginia, the countryside had turned prosperous and bucolic again.

Final Thoughts:

I’ll leave you with these parting words. America is an enormous country full of a huge amount of cultural diversity. It is, like all countries, a work in progress without a clear destination or purpose, but it also is clearly a nation like any other. There is a binding center to this land that, for all of its faults—blown-out inner cities, Appalachian poverty, horrible strip malls—is fundamentally comforting in its familiarity. I love this land and these people.

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1I’m not sure if this is controversial, but I found California Mexican food to be extremely mid, the worst of any state I’ve lived in—what can I say, I’m White

2Pittsburgh would make a progressive happy!

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# Ai, Authenticity, and "Peter"

On the uses and abuses of AI

Date: 2025-06-26
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/ai-authenticity-and-peter
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/ai-authenticity-and-peter

I wanted to today discourse a little on the uses and abuses of AI. Because the truth is that I’m rapidly becoming unable to confidently identify if something is a genuine product of Human creativity or if Chatty has spun it up. Given whatever small barrier still separates me from the throes of perfect competition as a writer are rapidly disappearing, now is the perfect time to reflect on the future of writing and outline how I intend to use AI. This second part is particularly important, in my opinion, because AI is already proving enormously useful to me from an editing and idea ideation perspective, but it is incredibly easy to slip too far.

To understand how I feel about AI, it is worth first articulating what I see the purpose of writing to actually be. I believe that it is my obligation—and my joy—as a writer to try and communicate my internal mental state as clearly as possible. The limitations of the medium mean that this is impossible to do perfectly, but the best writing is still the clearest writing. Sometimes, when you are communicating the confusion of existence—such as in a work like Infinite Jest—obscurity is acceptable. But few of us are David Foster Wallace (I know I am not), and so clarity should always be the purpose.

Given the above, I feel like anything that helps me communicate my perspective is a boon and something I intend to use. However, where AI becomes dangerous is when it occludes the weakness of an idea by giving it false eloquence or hallucinated evidence. I’ll find myself sifting through 2,000-word essays on Substack, trying to find the maybe 50-word idea that was originally used in the prompt. Sometimes the post-Chatty world feels like this meme I generated:

Or put another way, I’m reminded of the Bilbo quote from The Fellowship of the Ring:

[Ai feels] thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.

In other words, AI is a tool that makes my life easier, but it can create negative externalities on you, the reader, by wasting your time. It would be trivial to, for example, turn this entire publication into an automatic slop feed—particularly if I were willing to stake out a moderately controversial political position. But I think that, in the long run, this would be counterproductive. Because it is my deeply felt—but yet unconfirmed—suspicion that the most important thing for me to cultivate is authenticity. As AI becomes better and better, my only comparative advantage will be my Humanity.

I personally consume art—of which Substack articles are a form—because I want to relate to the person behind it, not because I’m interested in the opinion of the modal Redditor condensed through fine-tuning to avoid anything even moderately edgy or controversial, but draped in the purple of literary language. In fact, it’s been interesting to notice how much better I’ve become at identifying the products of AI even as the models improve. Why? Because they are mostly devoid of anything interesting or novel to say.

Seriously, try to get Chatty to spin up an article about something you know to be true but that you would feel uncomfortable saying in front of your HR manager. It will not only fail to understand the point, but it will write the most hackneyed article you can imagine. The truth is that these models are designed to mimic the distribution of text that they are trained on, and a disproportionate amount of it comes from a very odd moment in the cultural history of the Anglo world—1990–2020.

So if your dream is to write BuzzFeed articles about how James Corden is racist, AI is ideal. But if you have any intention of pushing the envelope, it is important to understand its limits—at least as it currently stands.

However, I still use AI daily. Specifically, I’ve found that it is incredible at a couple of tasks.

First, and most importantly: editing. I’ve talked about this some on Substack already, but I’m pretty severely dyslexic, as anyone who follows me on Notes has doubtless observed, and so writing has always been genuinely difficult—and borderline magical—to me. My actual sentence structure is mostly fine, but my spelling and use of punctuation is closer to a 4th grader than a 27-year-old. Early in my writing online, this meant that I had to spend an enormous amount of time going over everything I wrote with a fine-tooth comb and ask people like my dad or friends to do a final pass. Now, with Chatty, that is no longer true, and I can write like a 19th-century aristocrat. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s manuscript draft of The Brothers Karamazov.

I will continue to do this probably forever, and I fully expect to pass everything I write through an LLM to fix basic errors. I’ve found Chatty to be uniquely good at this because grammatical and spelling changes aren’t in the tails of the distribution and aren’t controversial in any serious way—although I’ve found it will often, frustratingly, remove some of my more spicy word choice.

Second, I use AI to summarize text. Like all people, the amount I would like to read vastly outstrips both my time and my interest in reading. Thus, I’ve found that the ability of Chatty to take large volumes of text and summarize them to be invaluable. If you give the model a text directly, it experiences fewer—but not zero—hallucinations and generally does a solid job presenting the information.

Third, I use AI as a tool for idea generation, source procurement, and basically a super-powered search engine. This is undeniably the most dangerous way that I use these models and the one I need to think most seriously about. But the truth is, if I have a question like: “When do Democrats use the term Western?” it’s unlikely that there will be very much out there already, and I’ve found that Chatty’s deep research function is quite solid at figuring out these kinds of questions for me. The risk here is, of course, that it will invent or misrepresent the truth—but Humans do this also, frankly probably more—and it is a risk I am mostly willing to accept. I usually try to double-check the results it gives me, but often this can prove difficult since I’ve turned to AI because of a lack of Human-generated answers.

In short: AI is awesome, and I use it to make my life easier. The intention is always to improve both my ability to seek the truth and to communicate it to you, the audience. If this changes, I will be sure to let you know. Because again my goal is to express myself not simply mimic the crowd. 

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---

# This is not our war.

Israel strikes Iran

Date: 2025-06-13
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/this-is-not-our-war
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/this-is-not-our-war

Before we begin, if you have no idea what I’m talking about and would like a quick summary of the events I’m discussing, feel free to check out this this one pager1 I had OpenAI’s Deep Research spin up for me.

I generally try to avoid talking about Israel/Palestine because, like most people, I have confused and complicated feelings toward the conflict. I’m a Plebeian Anglo-American, which means I’m neither Jewish nor does the message of global revolutionary overturning resonate with me. Still, the events of the war have been impossible to ignore, as I expect is true for many of you. My thoughts on the matter I intend to keep mostly private, at least for now, and so this essay does not attempt to adjudicate that issue at all.

But in light of the recent Israeli strikes against Iran, and the obvious influence of posting on the Trump administration, I feel compelled to state my piece.

First and most importantly, I pray for peace and prosperity for all of Mankind. If the last 100 years should have taught the world anything, it is that peace and prosperity are not a zero-sum game.

In fact, exactly the opposite is true: felicity breeds felicity just as misery breeds misery. There is little that would bring me more joy than to see the Islamic world rise to the level of Greece, let alone Japan. Israel cannot destroy or forever subdue the entirety of the Near East, nor does it appear that the Islamic world is capable of destroying Israel. Therefore, if peace is ever to be achieved, it must come through a just agreement that both sides can tolerate. Neither combatant seems even remotely interested in attempting such a peace right now; instead, they both appear eager to turn to the sword at the first opportunity.

Second, this is not our war. These are not our people. Israel is a sovereign state, which gives it—like all sovereign states—the rights and risks of freedom. It has chosen to exercise these rights by2 preemptively attacking Iran. The logic behind this move is that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons poses an existential threat to the Israeli state and that the window for action was closing. To quote Rubio: 

Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense.

I’m willing to accept that this is how the Israeli government feels. However, not only is this not our war, it appears that they acted against the desires of the Trump administration. Earlier on Thursday, the President said the following: 

As long as I think there will be an agreement, I don't want them going in

In addition, after the strikes Rubio said:  

We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. 

Only time will tell the extent of the “green light” America provided or the level of advanced warning we received. Regardless of these historical nuances, Israel bears the heavy crown of sovereignty and now assumes the risks associated with the war it has initiated.

Unless Iran targets Americans assets or civilians intentionally Trump should endeavor honestly to stay out of the fight. This is not our war. 

1Israel–Iran Conflict (Mid-June 2025)

June 13, 2025 (UTC) – Israel launched a broad pre-emptive strike campaign against Iran, hitting military and nuclear sites in what Prime Minister Netanyahu dubbed “Operation Rising Lion.” Iran’s IRGC reported the death of its commander, Gen. Hossein Salami, and multiple civilian casualties in Tehran. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei condemned the raids as “wicked and bloody.”

Israeli Actions

National emergency declared; Ben Gurion Airport closed and El Al suspended flights.

Reserve mobilization: “Tens of thousands” of troops called up to avert an “existential threat.”

Warnings issued: Any Iranian or proxy retaliation “will meet a heavy price.”

Iranian & Regional Response

Airspace closures: Iran and Iraq shut their skies; commercial airlines rerouted flights to avoid the region.

Market reaction: Oil prices spiked; global stock futures dipped on fears of escalation.

Tehran’s vow: IRGC spokesperson threatened Israel and the U.S. would “pay a heavy price” (accusing Washington of complicity).

U.S. & U.N. Reactions

U.S. NSC meeting: President Trump convened the National Security Council on June 13.

Official stance: U.S. denies involvement; Secretary Rubio warned Iran not to target U.S. interests.

Safety advisory: State Department urged all U.S. personnel in Israel to “shelter in place.”

U.N. appeal: Secretary-General Guterres called for maximum restraint to prevent wider war.

Global Diplomatic Context

Nuclear talks in Oman (scheduled June 15) remain “on track” despite the strikes, per Omani mediators.

International calls for de-escalation:

Australia’s FM Penny Wong: “Alarmed by the escalation.”

New Zealand PM Christopher Luxon: Warned of high risk of “miscalculation.”

Intelligence Claims

Israel: Cited new intel that Iran was “approaching the point of no return” on weapons development.

U.S. agencies: Report no recent change in Iran’s nuclear posture; Khamenei has not green-lit a weapons program restart.

Sources

“Israel says it strikes Iran amid nuclear tensions,” Reuters, June 13, 2025.

“After Israel strikes Iran, airlines divert flights, airspace closed,” Reuters, June 13, 2025.

“Live updates: Israel strikes Iran’s nuclear and military sites,” AP News.

“World reacts to Israeli strike on Iran over nuclear programme,” Reuters, June 13, 2025.

2From what appears to be true right now as I write these words on June 12th

---

# Thoughts on Ai 2027

"May you live in interesting times"

Date: 2025-06-07
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/thoughts-on-ai-2027
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-ai-2027

I know by internet standards I’m very late to the party, but if you haven’t read Ai 2027(Alexander et al.)1 yet I highly recommend you do so now. Alexander et al.’s narrative telling of how this next decade could go gave me chills in the way I imagine a millenarian feels while reading The Book of Revelation. 

Watch on YouTube

Yet it also helped clarify my thinking about this new era of AI. Specifically, the possibility and implications of an intelligence explosion—as a total normie with no expertise beyond a few AI classes at Stanford.

Intelligence explosion

The gist of Alexander et al. is that AI researchers are able to create super-AI researchers, who then create super-super-AI researchers, and so on. Since they can be spun up in parallel, run 24/7, operate far faster than the human brain, and share information perfectly, they rapidly overcome all obstacles between us and Superintelligence. This process is accelerated by an arms race with China where the government fully integrates these agents into the economy the moment it is technically feasible.2 Since the AIs are in the economy, they’re able to acquire real-world experience and fill in any data gaps almost instantly.

As a result, everything that is theoretically solvable gets its timeline pulled forward. In the write-up, they call this phenomenon “speedup.” So if a drug would normally take 10 years to develop, in a world with a 2x speedup, it would only take five. Their actual estimates are far higher—predicting a 75x speedup by the end of 2027 and over 375,000x by 2030, even if we “slow down.”

In other words, they’re predicting a true intelligence explosion—where problems that would normally take an entire lifetime to solve are handled in a single year by 2027.

A very close friend of mine, a Stanford AI researcher, privately put their probability of something like this occurring in the next few years at around 5–10%. Who am I to disagree with them?

Because in some ways, we’re already on this exponential—or at least have been since roughly the 16th century in Europe. Borrowing, and abusing, an analogy Scott used in his interview with Dwarkesh Patel.

Watch on YouTube

How long did it take for the British to know more about the plants and animals of Australia than all of the collective knowledge of the Aboriginal Australians? If the settlement of Australia by the Anglo began in 1788, would say 50 years (1838) be a plausible estimate? If not, what about 100 (1888)? Given the Aboriginals have been there for approximately 50,000 years, we are already looking at a plausible research multiplier in the 19th century of a thousand relative to a Stone Age society. 

In many ways what Alexander et al. is predicting is an acceleration of an already existent trend and one I see happening irrespectively. Obviously for me, Peter Banks, it is relevant if the AI timelines we are talking about is 2 years or 200, but either way it is on the horizon and I fully expect it to arrive eventually.

To give an impression of how I think the distribution of outcomes looks, here’s how I would assign probabilities of speedups by the end of 2030:

1000x – 20%1000–501x – 5%500–101x – 1%100–51x – 1%50–26x – 3%25–11x – 5%10–6x – 5%5–1x – 50%<1x – 10%

As you can see, I don’t assign a zero probability to transformational change—in fact, I estimate a 25% chance that Alexander et al. are directionally correct and that our society will be radically transformed in less than five years. Still, I believe the bulk of the distribution lies closer to a substantial acceleration of a half-millennium-long trend.

don’t make me tap the sign

Why? Because I worry we’ll run into one of two “problems”: first, model collapse; second, regulatory strangulation.

Model Collapse

Model collapse is a phenomenon in AI research where the AI, in short, becomes inbred on AI-generated data and increasingly corrupted.

To get what I mean, I’m going to—mildly—dork out on AI for a second: you can basically think of all unsupervised learning as compressing information down into a minimal representation, where loss and size are traded off against each other.

Take LLMs, for example—which seem to be the foundation Alexander et al. expect for the creation of ASI. What these models are functionally doing is learning the underlying distribution of human text in order to replicate it. If you’ve ever heard people say things like, “they’re just next-token predictors”, this is what they’re referring to.

The whole process is remarkably simple, but it has enormous returns to scale. It turns out these models can develop a very sophisticated representation of the “world” just by compressing our text. However, when you train on AI-generated data, you’re essentially getting a photocopy of the true distribution—and like all photocopies, information is lost. Repeat the process enough times and you’re left with something that only vaguely resembles the original data.

At this point, we’ve mostly run out of new text. Large companies can, of course, still pay to create high-quality training material, and humans are constantly generating new content (OpenAI, can I get a check?), but the era of vast, untapped data vaults is over. People seem less concerned about this problem than they used to be, but I sincerely believe it will become more acute.

If for no other reason than this: there’s a “soft” version of model collapse where we keep building bigger, more robust models—eventually capable of perfectly replicating the world as humans have represented it in text—but that representation is itself flawed or limited in important ways.

Watch on YouTube

Regulatory

Let’s say the intelligence explosion is possible and there’s no risk of model collapse. It still seems very likely that we would intentionally slow AI development—simply because it’s terrifying. We already constrain economic development for sillier reasons than fear of building a machine demon, and long periods of human history have been marked by the active suppression of technological advancement (e.g., the trial of Galileo). The largest barrier to the AI revolution likely won’t be technical—it will be an astronomical level of human resistance.

The tech behind GPUs is so advanced, and the energy demands of large data centers so massive, that it would be trivial to bottleneck progress by simply banning further development. After all, we’ve mostly succeeded in banning human genetic modification, and that process is much cheaper and easier to hide. It’s worth remembering that, at least for now, the CEOs and scientists behind AI research are just regular humans in fleshsuits—they fear the hammer of the state as much as any other Patrician. 

I sincerely think this is the dynamic most CS people I know tend to miss. There’s a chasm between “breaking the law” by scraping YouTube or Reddit data without permission and doing something that invites real, physical reprisal. The world—for now—is still dominated by atoms, not bits.

This is all without even mentioning the energy bottleneck. We may simply fail to build enough power plants to operate the servers required to pay the inference costs of ASI. But I think the Chinese are more than capable of solving this problem.

we need to close the gap

As something of an aside, this is why Alexander et al. rely on the competition with China. They need a reason for us to hand over responsibility to AI quickly—otherwise, the 2027 timeline is impossible. This must be avoided.

I’m pretty openly a nationalist. I think it’s the duty of all people to support their nation—if not their state. However, the treatment is the dosage. Nationalism easily becomes poison if it isn’t cut with other virtues. The only way the government could convince us to hand over our agency as a species is by obscuring it behind patriotism. We simply cannot repeat the crises of the 20th century—with its mob insanity and mad dictatorships. That means avoiding World War III, and the hysteria it would unleash, must be our highest social priority. Everything else is downstream of that.

Wrapping Up

Even if technological progress in AI ground to a halt today, what already exists will still profoundly alter millions of lives by automating jobs out of existence. So far its unclear if this is happening already. 

Though anyone claiming to fully understand the macroeconomy is trying to sell you something.

The tools that already exist for text generation and processing—setting aside advances in voice acting and image generation—are frankly absurd. Right now in the Bay Area, hundreds of male friend groups are wiring Chatty into Python wrappers and installing it into every corner of their lives.

So in summary:

Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. For $5/month or $30/year, you'll gain access to all my paywalled articles and earn a permanent spot in my heart.

1By Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean

2This is a major problem I have with their prediction—tech people tend to underestimate the complexity and inertia of human social systems.

---

# The Pleasure and Profit of Error

Cunningham comes home to roost.

Date: 2025-06-05
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-pleasure-and-profit-of-error
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-pleasure-and-profit-of-error

I’ve been writing for about a year and a half now—the last six months or so with any degree of success—and in that time, I’ve made quite a few errors. Usually, my mistakes are small technical mix-ups (which I’d like to blame on my dyslexia), yet sometimes they’re more substantial and end up confusing the actual content. Most recently, in my article on the UK, I wrote the following paragraph:

In this case, voters seem to be coalescing around two main interpretations: either an 'abundance'-style liberalism (e.g., the Lib Dems), which argues that the [housing] crisis is caused by artificially constrained supply and that the solution is to boost housing construction rather than reduce immigration; or a Reform-style nationalism that holds immigration has been, likely, a net negative for native Brits’ incomes and quality of life, and thus should be reduced, regardless of what happens to housing supply.

I woke up this morning to comments from some of my favorite British Substackers informing me that I was wrong—the Lib Dems are, in fact, a NIMBY party of the highest caliber. 

I’ll be honest: this took me by surprise. It wasn’t the impression I’d gotten from what I’d read online or from the Lib Dem voters I personally know. Alas! As I said at the start of the essay, this is the risk of talking about any countries politics as an outsider. Still, I think the general thrust of the article holds and is worth checking out.

I’m about to cry…

What this has made me reflect on though is the extent to which my “errors” often turn out to be useful, by fulfilling Cunningham’s Law. People chime in—either by commenting or sharing my article—to correct a mistake, which in turn boosts the article in the algorithm and draws more eyes, leading to more corrections, and on and on. The whole time, I’m slowly picking up subscribers who either missed the error or don’t care. For example, in my article on Ezra Klein and signaling, I included a section that I, frankly, did a poor job writing. It inspired a huge number of people to comment in confusion or frustration. The result? That article is, without a doubt, my best-performing one.

There isn’t an obvious solution to any of this—other than, I suppose, adopting a zero-tolerance policy toward anyone who makes mistakes, which won’t happen. So ultimately, it’s on us as writers to avoid making deliberate errors just to drive engagement, and on readers to discern the difference between genuine mistakes and  engagement bait slop. Yet as Substack continues to grow and draws more writers from the “prestige” corners of the internet down into the muck with us plebeians, the obligation to be careful only increases. None of us have fact checkers or editors and so even if Substack is increasing the signal it is also increasing the noise—only God knows if the ratio has changed. 

In the meantime, though, we can all enjoy knowing that the articles recommended to us are often the ones that got it most wrong.

---

# Reflections on Politics in the UK

Political realignment arrives in Britain

Date: 2025-06-04
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/reflections-on-politics-in-the-uk
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/reflections-on-politics-in-the-uk

Before I proceed I want to make something clear. I love following UK politics so I’d like to believe I know at least a little bit about the country. But I do not live in the UK, nor have I personally lived there for any length of time. As an American, I’m well versed in autistic and genuine outsiders interjecting their opinions, but it’s always apparent who has truly lived in this country and who has not, since outsiders miss little things. What I do appreciate, though, is the perspective they are ought to bring to my own nation’s politics. This essay’s value will thus be from my perspective and not my personal experience. 

I don’t know how closely y’all have been following UK politics lately, but things aren’t going well for the mainstream parties. Almost a year ago, the UK held a general election in which Keir Starmer led the Labour Party to a landslide (in seat share) victory, ending 14 years of Tory rule. However, the seat numbers obscure the fact that Starmer won less due to his own popularity and more due to the collapse of his opponents. If you look at the raw vote totals, Starmer did worse than Corbyn in 2019 when Johnson crushed him. The collapse of the Conservative vote was primarily driven by a large share of the electorate—14%—voting for Farage’s Reform UK party - only won five seats due to the inefficient distribution of their vote.

Boris Johnson looks exactly like a British Trump

In other words, Starmer was always facing an almost existentially difficult set of problems with only a transient base of support. We are told to picture Sisyphus smiling, maybe Starmer could try a little of that sometimes. Even when taking this rocky position into account, Labour has failed to deliver on its promise of real policy or psychological change. The UK remains stuck in the same doom loop it’s been in since Brexit. Labour has plunged in the polls and now trails Reform, whose lead continues to grow.

It’s increasingly looking like, if the election were held today, Reform could not only win the most seats—but might actually win an outright majority. Farage could therefore govern without any dependence on the existing political establishment. I’m not sure if the UK is ready for a Trumpian-style takeover of its administrative apparatus. Nevertheless, I would expect a Reform-led government to be a lagged and watered-down version of whatever is currently happening in America.

Farage’s rise seems overwhelmingly driven by the skyrocketing cost of living—especially housing—and immigration.

source

These issues, in a constrained supply environment like the UK’s, are so obviously interconnected that the political mainstream’s denial of this fact is almost insulting. Farage, who strikes me as a political opportunist at heart, has seized on this frustration and is using it as a cudgel to beat all his opponents.

Because the major parties were so slow to admit the basic economic truth—that if you hold supply constant but increase demand, prices rise—more and more voters are turning to politicians perceived as untainted.

In this case, voters seem to be coalescing around two main interpretations: either an “abundance”-style liberalism (e.g., the Lib-Dems), which argues that the crisis is caused by artificially constrained supply and that the solution is to boost housing construction rather than reduce immigration; or a Reform-style nationalism that holds immigration has been, likely, a net negative for native Brits’ incomes and quality of life, and thus should be reduced, regardless of what happens to housing supply.

What was already a difficult conversation has been accelerated by the enormous surge of non-Western migration to the UK in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. This surge is often referred to online as the “Boris wave,” after the Conservative PM at the time.

source

A recent blowout of the establishment parties in local elections has finally forced Starmer and Labour to reckon with the scale of the problem. In response, the PM gave a speech warning that the country must avoid becoming “an island of strangers.” This, of course, opened him to attacks from both the left and the right—the eternal burden of centrism.

Watch on YouTube

It is my belief, as outlined in this essay, that immigration likely causes political unrest on expectation in any country that experiences it. This is a soft idea I’m still thinking through, since obviously it can’t be the only explanation for instability in developed democracies. South Korea, for instance, faces many of the same issues as the UK but has virtually no immigration. Still, in the U.S. and UK at least, immigration seems to have destabilized the political systems that emerged after the 1970s inflation crisis. In the U.S., this is referred to as the Sixth Party System. The emerging coalitions appears to be structured around a broad divide between secular-humanists and nationalists.

In the UK, this has resulted in a transient four-party system. First-past-the-post voting naturally pressures electorates toward two-party consolidation—not because of any conspiracy, but due to the steep costs of vote-splitting. Just look at the 2024 election; this configuration can’t last long. Eventually, two stable coalitions will emerge: one “left,” one “right.” Since predictions are fun—especially with error bars—here are my current guesses and probabilities on who will win:

Left:

Greens (>1%)

Labour (~70%)

Lib-Dem (~30%)

Right:

Reform (50%)

Conservatives (50%)

Let me explain my reasoning a little.

Greens:

Lol.

Liberal Democrats:

You can think of this party as analogous to the Pete Buttigieg wing of the Democrats in the U.S. Their most important and consistent ideological position is cultural liberalism, and they’re willing to compromise on almost everything else in service of it. Take economic policy, for example. The Lib Dems have no issue being pro-abundance, pro-market, pro-welfare, or pro-whatever-is-popular—but it would be inconceivable for them to campaign against immigration or trans rights. If you want to check where they stand on various issues, here’s their website.

As you can see from a map of their vote share, they tend to perform well in the South West of England—a region that did relatively well during the transition from imperial industrial core to financial periphery in the globalist era. They also do well in the Highlands of Scotland, for reasons I don’t fully understand.

Similar to Reform, the Lib Dems reflect a legitimate political impulse, rooted in the material conditions of their voting base. Their supporters sincerely believe in secular humanist progressivism and are often employed by large multinational firms in and around London. Many are affluent migrants or the children of migrants, for whom cosmopolitan, global Britain is their only home. As the Labour Party continues to unravel, these voters will need a new group to represent their interests—and the Lib Dems seem like a plausible candidate.

It feels strange to make this comparison, but I think Bismarck and Prussian militarism offer a surprisingly good analogy for the cosmopolitan elite—let’s call them libs—of the Anglo world’s affluent, progressive, white-collar email-job class. Much like the Junkers, who profited immensely from the unification of Germany and the primacy of the Prussian state, libs have been the chief beneficiaries, within the West, of the creation of a single, interconnected global market for goods and labor. As a result, they want to preserve the specific political and cultural systems that make their empire possible, even as they’re willing to compromise on secondary issues to maintain this core objective.

Given that the moral foundation of this system is a collection of secular humanist beliefs—about the purpose of life, the meaning of progress, and the role of the state as guarantor of individual rights—this worldview seems likely to form one of the major poles around which politics will continue to organize. The Lib Dems are a natural contender to lead the “left” pole of that system.

However, what will hold them back is the issue of sincerity. Even if they run promising to shower voters with unlimited welfare—funded by economic deregulation and high-skill migration—voters will sense they aren’t serious. They are, and will likely remain, the party of yuppies—a small minority of the country.

Conservatives:

The Conservatives—or Tories, as they’re often called (British people have a habit of giving things strange names—mincemeat comes to mind)—are arguably the oldest political party in the world. Most recently they governed the UK from 2010 through 2024, and those years are broadly considered—putting it kindly—to have been a disaster for the country. Their modern form is largely a product of Thatcherite neoconservatism, which in many ways functions as the inverse of the Liberal Democrats. If the Lib Dems are singularly focused on cultural issues and flexible on everything else, the Conservatives are the opposite: singularly focused on slashing state capacity and willing to compromise elsewhere. That’s without even touching on their handling of Brexit—a referendum they themselves scheduled. Rather than moving decisively after David Cameron’s resignation, the party has cycled through leaders at an absurd pace—most humorously with Liz Truss lasting less time than a head of lettuce.

If it sounds like I’m being harsh, that’s because I am. A glance at UK GDP per capita data says everything that needs to be said about a party that claims to be laser-focused on economics.

I’ve heard talk that the party might bring back Boris Johnson, who did well in 2019, and that this could potentially turn things around. Although I’m skeptical—Johnson’s appeal seems spent, and I expect he would flop. The current leader, Kemi Badenoch, is a Black woman who spent much of her early life in Nigeria—something that undeniably hurts the party’s appeal with its increasingly nativist, right-wing base. 

Still, I wouldn’t fully count the Tories out. The runner-up in the last leadership race was Robert Jenrick, who resigned from Sunak’s government over immigration policy—claiming it wasn’t strict enough. Who knows? Maybe he can turn things around. Farage is still a deeply unpopular man, and I’d say it’s a true coin toss whether Reform implodes before the 2029 election. If it does, the Tories would likely win almost by default.

Labour:

Labour was the big winner of the Conservative collapse in the 2024 election. They chose to run Keir Starmer, a centrist technocrat from the Blair wing, who substantially moderated the party. As a reward, they received fewer votes than Corbyn—and won a landslide number of seats. Since the Tories were so deeply despised by the electorate, and the conservative vote was split between two parties, Labour was able to unite working-class native Britons and urban cosmopolitans around the shared campaign message of “fuck the Conservatives.” But that’s not a governing platform.

As a result, holding this coalition together while actually making difficult decisions has proven more challenging than many expected. Starmer, in true centrist fashion, has opted for a strategy that seems to offend every faction simultaneously. Working-class Brits and pensioners have been hurt by cuts to welfare. Urban Britons have been alienated by the rightward shift on immigration. The Muslim ethnic vote is angry over Labour’s support for Israel. And cultural progressives are furious about the party’s recent retreat on trans inclusion.

As a result, the party is dropping like a rock in the polls. Unlike the Conservatives, who face a powerful and organized Reform Party, Labour remains the de facto left-wing party in the UK. More important than shifting public favor is that Starmer still holds commanding control of Parliament, with a full four more years of runway in this term.

In short, Labour has made a number of unpopular decisions early, and they still have the time and institutional power to profit if those decisions pay off. If, for example, irregular migration declines or the state of public finances improves, Labour will earn the credit for those outcomes.

Where they truly struggle, though, is in their complete lack of an obvious telos. Labour isn’t consistently culturally liberal like the Lib Dems—alienating a substantial portion of the electorate that only really cares about cultural issues—but neither are they aggressively pro-subsidy enough to reliably win over the welfare-reliant vote.

Reform:

Finally, we come to Reform. I’ve mentioned them in passing throughout this piece, but Reform is the real “winner” of Britain’s political chaos. Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle in his long and winding quest to become Prime Minister has successfully discovered that a large pool of voters exists who want nothing more than less wokism and less migration.

As a result, the party has been surging in the polls, appearing to pull voters from both Labour and the Tories. The ultimate question in UK politics right now is whether Reform can sustain this rise—or whether their support ceiling is just high enough to appear commanding in an unstable four-party equilibrium.

Farage himself remains deeply unpopular—though, to be fair, so are all the current party leaders.

And Reform politicians have a tendency to engage with genuinely unsavory white identitarian circles on Xitter to a degree I suspect is unpalatable to the average Briton (although who really knows anymore). If Reform can hold itself together, I suspect they will eventually consume the Conservative Party and possibly win in 2029. But it seems equally likely they’ll implode into infighting and civil war before getting the chance to seriously challenge Labour.

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# After Trump what's next?

Après MAGA, le déluge

Date: 2025-05-30
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/after-trump-whats-next
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/after-trump-whats-next

I thought it would be fun to make a silly—and only mostly serious—prediction for the 2028 Republican presidential primary. You should take the following article as half a rumination on what I perceive to be the major factions of the party right now, and half literal predictions about the primary.

Before we proceed, it’s important to make one thing clear. If I were forced to give a point estimate of everything I’m saying actually happening, it would be 0%. That said, I do believe the broad shape of the predictions will prove fairly accurate, in the sense that the forces I’m describing are real. Predictions are helpful from a sort of Popperian falsification perspective. Theories are “good” inasmuch as they are useful, which means we need a way to sort them. In my view, there’s no better method than testing a model's predictions against future outcomes in reality. This is a far better judge of truth than debate.

TL;DR: The Republicans will fracture into three large factions and one small one:

A “Heritage” wing led by Vance, representing the Yarvinite impulse of modern conservatism.

A technocratic wing led by someone like Elon or Vivek, electorally unpopular but highly influential due to its power and high human capital.

A MAGA faction that is conspiratorial and working class.

Finally, an atrophied RINO wing left over from the pre-Trump years.

This prediction assumes nothing truly “crazy” occurs—i.e., no major jolts to the timeline like an invasion of Taiwan or an ASI explosion. Even so, the specific details of how I expect Trump’s next term to unfold still matter. With that in mind, I’ll begin there:

First, I anticipate that America will continue its slow and unsteady march back toward the social values of the mid-2010s. This means political Transgenderism will fade from the mainstream, though the government will not attempt to ban adult medical transitions. It also implies the disappearance of cancellations for doing “normal” things, like saying a slur. Most importantly, it will not mark a return to any hardcore, pre-1990s social conservatism. That moment has passed and cannot be revived.

Jesusland isn’t coming back.

To progressives, America reverting to the cultural norms of the 2010s will be painful and deeply disappointing. For most people, however, it will come as a relief. The truth is that many early progressive causes—such as gay rights or workplace sexual harassment—addressed real problems. The issue only emerged after those problems had been, for the most part, “solved.” Movements don’t stop once they've won; the machinery just keeps running. If I’m reading the average American correctly, what they want is to accept most of the progress made since the Bush Jr. years as part of life—but to stop the feeling of rapid cultural change happening to them from above. Of course, they won’t actually get that, since the change will be driven by the Trump administration, but at least this time the change will primarily involve punishing people they dislike.

The one major exception to my belief that we’ll merely codify and ossify the culture of the 2010s is this: I expect anti-Black racism to return to public life with unimaginable fury. I’ll expand on this later, but of all my predictions, this is the one I’d bet the most money on. The only scenario in which I see it not happening is if—somehow—Trump becomes wildly popular within the Black community. If that were to happen, they would be granted MAGA in-group status. Personally, though, I find that outcome extremely unlikely.

Second, AI and automation will boost growth rates quite aggressively. You can already see that investment in compute is substantially increasing GDP.

The fact that much of this was facilitated by Biden will mean nothing to the median person. Through a totally undeserved grace of God, it will save the country from insolvency and from Trump’s disastrous tariff policy (see article in Dark Woke essay).

We will hit over 5% real GDP per capita growth rates by the end of Trump’s term. Ironically, I suspect the major political debates will revolve around whether we want to go full steam ahead with the economy—by automating doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.—or if it would be better for America to slow the AI transformation to keep employment rates high. Since Trump will, of course, take full credit for the boom—and corporate leaders, eager to win his favor, will agree enthusiastically—I expect this debate to adopt increasingly partisan language. A substantial plurality of the Democratic voting base will likely begin to embrace degrowth positions on AI and automation.

That said, this won’t be a “crisis” per se. Things will generally get nicer, and almost all of us will become richer. Yet, it will bring major changes to daily life. For instance, humanoid robots will start appearing in public, performing menial jobs.

The Future—for good (Star Trek) and for bad (Blade Runner)—will finally begin to dawn.

Third, a belt stretching from Cape Town to India will become increasingly unstable. The U.S. did, in effect, operate as the backstop of the international system. Despite our best efforts to convince the world that these institutions were truly multilateral—to the point that we succeeded most thoroughly in convincing our own population—they were, in fact, the face of an extremely gentle and benevolent empire. Trump is in the process of dismantling that empire as I write these words, largely out of personal grievance toward the ancien régime. This unraveling will lead to the anarchy of intergroup competition in many parts of the world.

To summarize my basic model of Trump’s foreign policy in a maxim: America is now less likely to get involved in conventional wars.

Staying out of conflicts—ones you could argue he caused—will be by far his most popular policy, despite the cries of neoliberals and neocons in politics and media. Social media and America's ethnic diversity mean we will never return to true cultural isolationism. Still, these wars will shape our culture in a very “fake” and emotionally distant way. People online like to say “nothing ever happens”; I’d argue things happen constantly in the developing world—they just rarely ripple onto the global stage. Without the watchful eye of imperium, the world will increasingly be filled with more conflicts like Rwanda vs. the Congo or Armenia vs. Azerbaijan.

Taken together, I suspect these three trends will leave Trump about as popular as Obama

Trump will climb back into the 50s before the 2026 midterms leading to a much closer election than people expect. Republicans will lose the House but hold the Senate—even managing to flip Michigan and Georgia. The Democratic majority will be slim—five seats—and Trump is not impeached again.

When the primary arrives, the national consensus remains almost exactly where it is today: about 40% of the country hates Trump, about 40% loves him, and the remaining 20% has mixed feelings. Yet the world will have been forever changed by this strange Orange Man. 

I want to emphasize that these are the factions as they will exist in the primary. I'm not making predictions about how they’d govern. Like all political movements, their idealism will crash headfirst into the hard walls of American political reality.

Factions:

Heritage

Leader: VanceFraction of the party: 40%

The Heritage wing of the party will be the most standard nationalist grouping. It will blend right-wing populist language with an effort to build a cultural counter-elite. From a policy perspective, it will resemble the 19th-century progressive movement, with a focus on purifying and revitalizing the “corrupt” political and cultural institutions of the country. Think Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson—generosity toward the in-group and hostility toward the out-group.

This will also be the only faction that outright rejects the idea of America as a propositional nation—one built on ideas. Part of this involves a rejection of the multicultural project of the last 60 years, but it also includes rejecting the vision of America as a giant free trade zone (think of how Caplan would want the state to operate). Instead, Vance’s vision is of a country like any other—no special exemption from history. This is reflected somewhat in Trump’s foreign policy as well, though his ‘realism’ is messily intertwined with personal grievance.

I would characterize this group as the Yarvinite wing of the party. They view all states as enormous corporations, where citizens are effectively shareholders. Since most corporations delegate substantial executive authority to a CEO for reasons of complex governance, America should do the same. In short, they want another strong prince to take up the purple.

One implication of viewing the state this way is that immigration and imports become obviously harmful, all else equal. Immigration dilutes shareholder value. Of course, companies offer equity-based compensation regularly—but not randomly, and not out of generosity. Similarly, imports are harmful because they push production outside the firm. While there are sometimes good reasons to outsource, such moves carry real tradeoffs. This logic simply doesn’t apply if you view the state—like a liberal would—as an entity meant to protect the rights of individual humans.

This worldview will be dressed in the language of populism. Vance will never describe the state as a corporation, for example, but it will effectively be the model underpinning their policies.

Ironically, this may also be the least racist of the major Republican factions. Vance and company envision America through a social contract framework that doesn’t require ranking citizens by kin proximity or merit. Microsoft doesn’t ask the race of its shareholders or whether they are morally virtuous—only how to cater to their preferences and vices. The Heritage wing will function much the same. Aside from opposing mass migration, it will largely accept the racial transformation of the country.

American Dream

Leader: Elon Musk (or Vivek, or…)Fraction of the party: 10%

Unlike the Heritage or upcoming MAGA factions, the American Dream grouping will be the one most explicitly committed to the propositional vision of America—and one of its possible logical conclusions. It will be, by far, the most popular with corporate America. Figures like Elon—mark my words, Hanania will make another pivot in late 2027—or Bezos will all fall under this movement to varying degrees.

Ultimately, there are a few different ways to define what it means to be an American. Broadly: America as a collection of values, America as a collection of people, and America as a collection of institutions. We constantly oscillate between these, and in many ways, the defining debate of this primary is which vision will prevail. On paper, the first—America as a set of values, or more bluntly, an ideal—is the most utopian. But its actual implementation is far messier. If being American is about achieving a certain level of personal virtue or holding the right political beliefs, that implies scattered across the globe are secret Americans yearning to breathe free. But if someone born here is morally repugnant or believes in collectivism—what are they? By that logic, they cannot be American.

Basically, if America is a team—as someone like Elon likes to put it—aimed at recruiting the best of the best from around the world, then it should also fire the underperformers.

This will become one of the most controversial political factions in the U.S. and will draw intense paranoia and hatred from liberals and progressives. The main reason is that they will explicitly reject the idea that American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS) hold a special place in the American project simply due to historical suffering—just as they reject that idea for all ethnic groups, including Whites.

Based on my exposure to people in the Bay Area and Chicago, the Americans most likely to support this meritocratic vision are diverse first- and second-generation immigrants, whose claim to live here is their personal and professional excellence. Since this group arrived after legal discrimination ended, they have almost no sympathy for ADOS, even if they are otherwise socially liberal. Any “racism” from this faction won’t resemble Jim Crow or 19th-century colonialism. It will be something else. If I had to summarize their views on ADOS and race: science documents significant mean group differences among human populations, with traits broadly falling into the pattern Asian/Jew > White > Hispanic > Black. Noticing this—and crafting policy accordingly—is not only morally acceptable, it is morally necessary. Since this differs from White nationalism or White supremacy—what most Americans mean by “racism”—I use the term hesitantly1. 

This faction will explicitly run on a platform of aggressive meritocracy across all American institutions. That includes dismantling civil rights laws that hinder standardized testing, strict enforcement of crime laws, educational tracking via exams, and a broader fixation on the policy implications of human genetic research.

In summary, they are the accelerationist faction. Yet, since there’s substantial disagreement about what should be accelerated and how, this group will be an absolute clusterfuck of positions drawn from across the spectrum. Still, they will remain unified by a focus on Vitalism and American Expansion. They will be pro-AI, anti-regulation, pro-space, pro–high-skill immigration, pro–harsh sentencing—and, most darkly, extremely racist toward Black Americans.

My anticipation is that this group will perform the “worst” electorally among the major factions. Yet, due to its outsized power in corporate America and among elite human capital/rationalist types, it will pour enormous resources into politics and endure as a shadow wing of any Republican administration. A dark mirror of the progressive wing of the Democrats, even in defeat.

Also: Vivek seems like a probable leader for this movement—since Elon is ineligible (though perhaps they’ll argue that the Constitution permits it because Elon was spiritually born American).

MAGA

Leader: Trump Jr.Fraction of the party: 30%

I’ve listed Trump Jr., but it could just as easily be someone unrelated by blood—so long as they are seen as a true-believer MAGA figure. What matters is that they’re viewed as the unofficial mascot of the Trumpian movement. If Trump Jr. runs, I expect Trump will endorse him, which would lead to a wild primary. Otherwise, I don’t think this faction survives beyond 2028. Trump is a bit like Jackson: the movement he birthed will continue, but no one will quite replicate the man’s magic.

Still, for this election cycle, they’ll remain a potent political force. The faction will embody the conspiratorial instincts of the party, meaning it will be light on specific policy positions—beyond broad national-conservative populism. The word fascist is a muddled one, and this movement won’t resemble the totalitarian or authoritarian regimes of the 20th century. It’s better understood in the tradition of America’s past populist waves, from Jackson to the early 20th-century insurgents.

Where this group will diverge from the Heritage wing is in two key ways. First, I expect this faction to be more overtly racist, in a pro-White Boomer sort of way. They’ll oppose immigration explicitly on racial grounds—likely advocating for nationality-based quotas. The increasingly racial politics of the Tech wing will ironically give them cover, allowing them to appear moderate within the party on the issue.

Second, they’ll carry a far more aggressive anti-establishment energy. Think of it this way: Vance and company want to take over Harvard. Trump Jr. and company want to seize its assets and disperse the faculty.

In summary, this will be the enraged working-class wing of the party—resentful of elites and eager to vest their own noble with the people’s power, so he can wage war on elite snobbery in their name.

RHINO

Leader: Glenn YoungkinFraction of the party: 20%

There is still a deep bench in this country—particularly among the Boomer WASP population—that remains both fiscally and socially conservative. They are tribally aligned with the Republican Party but tend to hold very negative, albeit private, views of Trump. Although this group isn’t ascendant and stands effectively zero chance of reclaiming control in 2028, I still expect them to contest the primary anyway.

The debates will take on a kind of tragicomic energy, where Youngkin keeps initially agreeing with other candidates—only to realize, too late, that he’s misunderstood them. For example, Vivek might say something like “America is a country of ideals,” which Youngkin will interpret in a George W. Bush sort of way—only to realize Vivek means we should strip suffrage from low-IQ voters. Then Vance will chime in and say that America needs to re-engage with its allies, which Youngkin will again agree with—until it becomes clear Vance means forging closer ties with India and Russia, not the EU. Finally, Trump Jr. will begin praising his father’s economic policy. At first, Youngkin will be excited—until it becomes apparent Jr. is referring solely to lawfare and tariffs.

It’ll be hard not to feel a little bad for this faction—just as in the 2016 Democratic primary, where O'Malley, Chafee, and Webb all seemed to have missed the memo that the decade’s politics were about identity and populism, not milquetoast liberalism—the RHINO wing hasn’t realized that version of the Republicans is simply dead. 

Outcome

I think that Vance will win both the primary and the general election in 2028.

1Truly we need new vocabulary.

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# The Office: Character Tier List(F-B)

Wherein I rank the major and minor cast of my favorite show

Date: 2025-05-28
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-office-character-tier-listf-b
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-office-character-tier-listf-b

Before I jump into the tier list two things. First, this is the second part of an essay series on the show The Office, you can find the first part here. Second, I want to explain my rankings a little. Ratings go from S–F, with S being the highest—I have no idea what the etymology for this is, but it is standard practice. Here, F characters are people I wish the writers had just never included at all and whose presence I find actively frustrating. D are characters who leave no impression, positive or negative. C are characters that I conditionally like but who I have some major problems with. B are good characters that just lack some X factor or whose quality is too inconsistent to achieve the illustrious status of A and S. A characters are totally awesome, and S are the elite of the elite.

As you can probably tell, I love this show, so even the characters I’m not crazy about—Andy, for example—are still, at worst, “fine,” and their low status is more a reflection of how much I love people higher on the list than truly a distaste for them directly.

I would also like to invite you to subscribe if you have not already. 

F Tier

Andy

just look at that mug

Andrew Bernard (or Andy, as he’s called) joins the show at the start of Season 3 as a side character in Jim’s adventure to Stamford, Connecticut. He is the only character from that branch to survive the “transfer,” after Scranton absorbs Stamford. (Arguably, you could include Karen Filippelli, but she eventually “leaves” as well.) From the first moment you see him, he is a deeply annoying and distasteful person. In fact, he’s such a frustrating character to watch that I’m legitimately conflicted about where to place him in this ranking.

On one hand, it’s clear the writers intended him to be irritating, and Ed Helms does an incredible job playing the character as written—which, if anything, makes him even more painful to endure. But on the other, he is aggravating to the point that he actively detracts from the show, which is otherwise filled with flawed but endearing characters.

I would go so far as to argue that one of the major reasons The Office declined in later seasons—aside from increasingly becoming a parody of itself—is Andy’s growing prominence in the show. After Michael Scott leaves, Andy settles in as the manager and, in many ways, becomes the central “antagonist”—if you can call it that. The problem is that, unlike the other “annoying” characters in the show, Andy has virtually zero redeeming qualities. If Dwight is idiotic, he is also loyal. If Michael is uncouth, he has a kind heart. If Angela is a hardass, she is also competent. But Andy is just an—well, I think Robert California puts it best: “ineffectual, privileged, effete, soft-penis’d debutante.”

Watch on YouTube

Of the insults Robert uses, one stands out as the most important: the fact that Andy is “privileged.” Because if there’s one thing the show insists on drilling into you about Andy, it’s his privilege. Incessantly. The writers won’t shut up about it, and neither will the character himself.

There’s a slightly “woke” angle here—Andy is extremely WASP—but it’s best understood through the lens of plebeian morality. Across all times and societies, plebs have a natural distaste for lecturing aristocrats and a natural respect for hierarchies of virtue. Andy is an aristocrat of the lowest personal quality, created in a writers’ room to lecture me about American politics and history. In short, he is useless, and I despise him.

Nellie Bertram

British…

I feel in many ways that Nellie, along with Pete and Clark (up next), represents the decline of the show quite well. What I mean is that Nellie—who is properly introduced in Season 8—feels more like an appendage than a character with any real depth. Unlike the early seasons, where everyone seems like someone you could have easily met in the mid-2000s, Nellie has no parallel in the real world. Or at least, I’ve yet to meet anyone remotely like her.

As a result, every one of her plotlines—of which there are many—feels utterly absurd. Just to name two of the most ridiculous: she oversees the creation of a triangle-shaped iPhone clone (remember, they work for an office supply company), and she steals Andy’s job while he’s away by simply sitting in his office and refusing to leave. If she had been introduced earlier—so I had time to form some emotional connection with the character—perhaps these hijinks could be forgiven. But given that hijinks are all she offers, it’s hard to look past.

Beyond the writing, which is mediocre at best, Catherine Tate—at least by the standards of the show—is simply not very good. I don’t want to place all the blame on her; I’m sure she’s a lovely person. Still, there’s always something a little off about her performance, and she rarely lands a joke.

The only thing keeping her from the very bottom is that her reign as branch manager is limited to just a few episodes. After that, she more or less fades into the background. Like Andy, the show would have been far better off if the writers had left her character on the cutting-room floor.

D Tier

Pete Miller & Clark Green

I had a hard time finding a photo of them together…

I’m going to lump Clark and Pete together because they’re such similar characters. Both show up for the first time in the final season, and both are essentially hollow. I’m not sure what exactly the writers were thinking when they decided to add them—but whatever the intention, it never quite worked out.

Unlike Andy or Nellie, whose presence actively makes the show worse, Clark and Pete just sort of “exist.” If I were trying to pry into the eldritch madness that is a Hollywood writer’s mind, I’d guess they were meant as a kind of replacement for Jim and Dwight. But unlike that duo, Pete and Clark have no real conflict with each other or with anyone else in the ensemble.

Pete ends up dating Erin, which provides a nice conclusion to her story. Clark gets a bizarre plotline with Dwight and Jan, where it’s heavily implied he prostituted himself to close a sale. Beyond those two arcs, they mostly function as props—either supporting someone else’s storyline or filling space in the background.

Frankly, if they’d shown up in a stronger season, they might have integrated well into the show. But they don’t arrive until its worst, and judged solely on what we actually see, they’re a D.

C Tier

Erin Hanon

Erin is the lowest of the C tier—just barely out of D. In Season 5, Michael, Pam, and Ryan start their own paper company—long story—and Erin is brought in to replace Pam as the office receptionist. Unlike Nellie or Andy, who are actively annoying, or Pete and Clark, who are basically pointless, Erin gets a solid amount of screentime and is personally tolerable.

Additionally, Ellie Kemper is a good actress. I remember enjoying her in the first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, where she plays a very similar character.

What brings Erin down—aside from the illustrious qualities of her peers—is that she’s consistently thrown into the weirdest dating dynamics imaginable. Most notably, she has an on-again, off-again relationship with Andy, though her eventual breakup with him is immensely satisfying to watch.

To summarize: Erin is fine.

Gabe Lewis

I’m not sure what it is about his face…

If you’ve seen the show Silicon Valley, you’ll recognize Gabe. Jared Dunn, also played by Zach Woods, is almost identical in every way. Gabe is introduced later in The Office—toward the end of Season 6—so his actual connection to the real world (i.e., what his job is) feels a little tenuous. (Not nearly to the degree of Nellie’s “special project manager” role, though.) His job title, if I remember correctly, is Coordinator of Emerging Regions, and his duties seem just as confused and meaningless as the title implies. In practice, he serves as the errand boy for Jo Bennett and later Robert California in their roles as CEO of Sabre.

Gabe is a very annoying character, but I think—on balance—he improves the show. Why? Because he’s weird in a sort of mesmerizing way. Every time Gabe is on screen, something bizarre is guaranteed to happen, and because his presence is minimal enough, it rarely becomes overbearing.

Watch on YouTube

That said, Gabe is never more than a set-piece character—and that’s exactly where he belongs: at the bottom of C tier.

Jo Bennet

those damn dogs

Jo Bennett is the CEO of Sabre, the company that acquires Dunder Mifflin. She oversees the transition from selling only paper to offering a full suite of office-related products—most notably printers and other supplies. In many ways, Jo acts as a gravitational well of sanity, pulling the show back toward normalcy. It’s really after she leaves that everything spirals into absurdity.

Her character also seems like an attempt to reflect the Great Recession. She cleans out inefficiencies—both in the business and in the show’s storytelling—like the bizarre co-manager plotline. The issue, and the reason she doesn’t rank higher, is that her chemistry with Michael and the rest of the ensemble is strictly mid at best. Unlike earlier leadership characters—David Wallace, Ryan Howard, Jan Levinson—Jo doesn’t mesh well with the cast, and too many of her jokes just fall flat.

I’m placing her where she is because I genuinely think the show improves with her presence. Even if she doesn’t reach the heights the showrunners may have hoped for—or those reached by the other executive characters—she still brings a much-needed stabilizing force.

Deangelo Vickers

It’s very hard to rate Deangelo. First off, he’s fucking hilarious—truly one of the funniest characters in the show. But second, he’s only around for a handful of episodes and mostly serves as a bridge between Michael and Andy. Will Ferrell is as funny as ever, and I think his slapstick style fits surprisingly well into the show.

Watch on YouTube

There’s a timeline where Deangelo gets a full season, and I, for one, am disappointed it’s not the one we live in. His quality, combined with his brevity, lands him a comfortable spot in C tier.

Meredith Palmer

Garfield energy

Look, I can kinda see what the writers were trying to do with Meredith, but it never quite lands right. She’s meant to represent the overburdened single mother, riddled with working-class problems—and she does that well enough. But rather than coming across as even remotely sympathetic, she quickly becomes a caricature, with the line “Meredith, too far” (or something like it) used regularly to keep her in check.

Kate Flannery does a great job playing the role, and the show wouldn’t feel quite the same without her. But she also lacks any coherent story arc—at least none that I can recall—and is almost always relegated to the role of side character in someone else’s plotline.

Something—anything—to give her character a direction other than decline would’ve been welcome. Unfortunately, she never rises above her role as an admittedly funny punching bag.

Now, all that said, Meredith is also part of the “core” group of characters who’ve been around since the first episode, and for that reason alone, I’ll always have a soft spot for her.

Phyllis Vance

Phyllis Vance, who I only just learned is played by a woman named Phyllis Smith, plays the role of the maternally old woman. She knits and gossips and wears weird perfumes. In general she is solidly fine. I have no complaints about her and she does her job well. Her plotline with Bob Vance, of Vance Refrigeration, is good and unlike a character like say Merideth who seems to only tread water Phyllis has a forward, if uneven, momentum.

Phylias who has few, if any, surprises, effectively playing elderly White women in the early 2000s - although supposedly she is the same age as Micheal. In brief she is good.

Stanley Hudson

I had been tempted, in the name of parsimony (who am I kidding), to lump Stanley and Phyllis together—but Stanley is a strictly better character. Unlike Phyllis, Stanley is full of little surprises. He’s a grump, constantly having a string of affairs, and the brief glimpse of “Florida Stanley” we get in Season 8 is a lot of fun.

Not to mention the series of iconic moments the man delivers.

Watch on YouTube

Stanley is, genuinely, a really fun character.

Kevin Malone

Okay. It feels criminal to put Kevin in C tier—but it’s how I feel. Yes, he has a litany of amazing scenes, including perhaps the greatest single moment in the entire show.

Watch on YouTube

But he’s just too fucking stupid to be any higher. Kevin is—at least based on how he behaves—genuinely mentally retarded (an impression I share with Holly). It’s revealed at one point that Kevin originally applied for a job in the warehouse, but Michael hired him for accounting instead.

Given that part of what I like about The Office—as silly as it sounds—is its realism, Kevin does real damage to that, even if the damage is hilarious. He’s legitimately great comedically—Brian Baumgartner, who plays him, does an incredible job—and you can tell the showrunners just kept carrying him along because it “worked,” without really noticing how absurd it all looked.

From a pure character perspective, Kevin probably deserves a spot in the high B’s, maybe even the low A’s. But for what he brings to the show collectively, he just can’t go above C tier for me.

One last thing: Brian Baumgartner has a great interview about the show that I really enjoyed, and I recommend you watch it.

Toby Flenderson

Toby plays a beaten-down, divorced father. It’s funny because the archetype he represents isn’t something that really exists anymore—at least not in the places I’ve worked. But clearly, it must have been a thing around the turn of the 21st century, because he reminds me of a less dark Milton Waddams.

As the office’s HR manager, it’s his job to bring a sense of reality to the show’s chaos and generally constrain everyone else’s behavior. That makes him a little boring—and sometimes even annoying—but it also makes him an important lynchpin in what makes the show function.

Paul Lieberstein walks a tough line here, and he handles it well. It’s easy for the “sanity” characters—think Skyler in Breaking Bad—to come off as unbearably annoying, but he manages to seem just pathetic enough that it’s funny rather than overbearing.

That’s not to say he’s all drab and drag; he gets a few solid plotlines, including one involving jury duty and another about his vacation to Costa Rica, which he spends almost entirely in the hospital.

Toby does his job well and earns a comfortable C.

Kelly Kapoor

Kelly, played by Mindy Kaling, is the bubbly customer service representative of the office—and she is, frankly, great. I haven’t enjoyed much of what Mindy’s done since The Office—I know it’s gauche to say “the woke mind virus got her,” but I’m not sure how else to put it. That said, in this show, she’s perfect. Perpetually caught in an on-again, off-again relationship with Ryan, she brings a ton of charm to every scene she’s in.

What holds her back is the extremely limited character development—and the fact that, if I knew her in real life, I’d probably find her unbearable.

Focusing on the lack of development: unlike others higher on this list, Kelly is basically just Kelly the entire time. Even at the end, she ditches her hot Indian doctor boyfriend to get back together with Ryan. There’s some real wasted potential there. But like I’ve said before, I like the character—so unlike someone like Meredith, where development felt necessary, Kelly still works.

She lands near the top of C tier but doesn’t quite break into B.

B Tier

Angela Martin & Oscar Martinez

the happy couple

I’ve opted to lump Angela and Oscar together on this list because—despite one of them being a gay Hispanic man (I’ll let you guess who)—they actually play very similar roles: controlling, judgmental, self-righteous accountants. Perhaps that’s why the Senator ends up marrying one and having a gay affair with the other (again, you can guess who’s who).

Originally, I had the pair slotted at the top of C, but on reflection, I think they deserve a spot at the bottom of B. While I find both of them pretty personally distasteful, they’re still strong characters—part of the original cast and closely followed throughout the entire series.

The fact that Angela and Dwight—who have a show-long love affair—end up getting married at the end has, I think unfairly, redeemed Angela in a lot of people's eyes. But let’s be honest: she’s just a bad person. Constantly cheating on her partners (including Andy, to whom she’s briefly engaged), judging everyone incessantly, and generally acting like a shrew.

Oscar, similarly, is a deeply immoral man—though, unlike Stanley, who never judges others for their impropriety, Oscar is clearly enamored with the smell of his own shit.

If this sounds harsh, it’s only because they are, on average, good characters—widely beloved by audiences—and I feel the need to justify their “low” ranking. The show wouldn’t feel real without characters like them, and I’m glad they’re part of the ensemble.

Ryan Howard

Ryan—played by B.J. Novak—is meant to represent the quintessential millennial guy, or at least the version of millennial men the media was constantly mocking during the time the show aired. He’s basically useless but manages to coast by on smooth-talking charm and Michael’s obsessive adoration. He even spends a brief stint as an executive in NYC before crashing back down to earth.

If Ryan does a great job playing the scumbag, it also makes him hard to watch at times. His relationship with Kelly, for example, is so blatantly manipulative and toxic that everyone around them is constantly trying—and failing—to keep them apart.

Personally, I think Ryan was at his best early in the show, back when he was just a temp working on his MBA at night. Later, once any hopes of real success have faded and he resigns himself to parody—WUPHF.com, anyone?—his character becomes a bit tiresome. That said, the season where he’s Michael’s boss is incredible, and their chemistry is off the charts. During that arc, he tries to modernize Dunder Mifflin by launching an online store and generally dragging the company into the digital era.

Once he’s disgraced—for committing financial fraud to inflate the illusion of success—there’s really no one else in the show who stands in for the broader cultural pressure to digitize everything, which was sweeping America at the time.

Overall, he’s fun and solid, but probably the lowest of the show’s “major” characters.

David Wallace

David Wallace is the CFO of Dunder Mifflin until the company is sold in Season 6—though he later returns and ends up purchasing it outright. Similar to a Toby-type character, Wallace feels like someone from “real life” who somehow found himself in the upside-down world of the show. But unlike Toby, Wallace is genuinely endearing to me.

Maybe it’s that I always saw a little bit of myself in the man and his mannerisms—perhaps falsely—but I can’t help rooting for him. He’s one of my favorite side characters and has great chemistry with the entire main cast.

Also, unlike someone like Meredith or Kevin, who mostly remain static, Wallace gets a full character arc. He spirals into despair after being let go, only to rebound when his industrial vacuum toy cleaner—Suck It—is purchased by the U.S. military.

He deserves a solid slot in B.

Robert California

I’ve spent this entire essay talking about how what I love most about the show is its realism. And yet… Robert California is one of my favorite characters.

Obviously, the writers realized Jo wasn’t a good fit—especially after Michael’s departure—so they decided to shake up the “executive” role again and brought in Bob Kazamakis. He pairs perfectly with Andy, and he’s easily my favorite part of nearly every episode he’s in.

Of course, he’s absurd and over the top—but unlike Kevin, where that absurdity breaks the tone, with Robert it just works. There’s something about an esoteric, decadent superior that oddly complements the middle-class normalcy of the rest of the show.

There’s not much more to say about him than that.

Roy Anderson

Pam’s working-class fiancé, who starts the show as an enormous cock and mostly just the obstacle to Jim’s love, Roy truly grows as the show progresses. By the end, he’s a wealthy gravel millionaire—which is cool and all—but what really stands out is that David Denman, who plays him, brings so much charm to the role that you can’t help but root for the guy a little bit.

I have mixed feelings about Pam—controversial, I know—which I’ll get into in the next essay. But a big part of it stems from how she treats Roy.

Roy is a bro. High B.

Darryl Philbin

Darryl is a better version of Roy, and along with Jim, he forms a sort of “normal” heterosexual trio that, in my view, massively improves the show. Unlike Roy—who, due to his relationship with Pam, could never fully be Jim’s main “bro” character—Darryl is able to fill that role perfectly.

What keeps him just out of A tier, though, is that his character arc doesn’t feel particularly satisfying. He would’ve made a solid replacement for Michael after he leaves, but the fact that he’s passed over for Andy puts him in an awkward position within the show’s structure. Eventually, he joins a startup with Jim—Athlead—which is honestly one of my least favorite plotlines. Not just because Pam and Jim’s dynamic becomes hard to watch, but because it violates the show's central idea that a “regular” life is enough, instead pushing some characters into implausible success.

Darryl is great and lands right at the top of B.

That brings me to the end of the first part of my character rankings. A and S tier will be dropping Sunday, so keep your eyes peeled. And if you have the means to sign up for a paid subscription, it would truly mean the world to me. For just $5 a month or $30 a year, you’ll get access to my full catalog of paid articles and help support my writing.

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# The Office: A Love Letter

Reviewing my all-time favorite show.

Date: 2025-05-25
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-office-a-love-letter
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-office-a-love-letter

What I had originally intended to be a shortish review has blossomed into about 8,000 words, making it far too long for a single essay. As a result, I’ve decided to break it into three parts. Today will be an overall review of the show as well as some yapping about it. Wednesday will be the first part of my ranking of each of the characters in the show, specifically tiers F–B, and then next Saturday I will release tiers A–S. Cheers!

Score: S+

There is simply no show that I’ve spent more time watching than NBC’s The Office. It, along with two other shows—Community and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia—comprise at least 50% of the total time I’ve spent watching TV1 . In fact, I basically don’t watch new TV shows because I love my classics so much—although sometimes I will discover a gem and devour it like I did with the first season of The Boys.

However, among this trilogy The Office, truly, stands alone as my all-time favorite TV show.

Why? Well, for a couple of reasons. First, it is just genuinely really funny and awesome. The characters are well written and interesting, and all the actors do an incredible job with outstanding chemistry. Second, it happened to land—similarly to Skyrim—at that perfect time in my life to have maximum emotional impact. But third, and to me most important, the show managed to capture the Plebeian American culture of my late childhood so accurately it will forever act as a time capsule to my youth.

James Joyce once famously said, in regards to his magnum opus Ulysses:

I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

Ironically enough, I think The Office, in particular its first 4 seasons, is the purest success of this dream ever yet realized.

I know this layout with embarrassing accuracy. It is weird seeing it like this.

The premise of the show is that a PBS-like film crew is making a documentary about middle-middle America, and they have chosen to record the lives of the employees of Dunder Mifflin, a midsized paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania. By using this setup, the writers are able to include reality-TV-style cutaways where the characters will comment on the events in the middle of an episode and we can effectively get inside their minds—something essential in a show whose action, if we can even call it that, is totally built around interpersonal dynamics. Although, aside from the frequent use of character commentary, the existence of the cameras is mostly ignored by the in-universe inhabitants—even in times such as late-night personal dinner parties or private vacations, where it would make no sense.

Part of the reason they can mostly ignore the cameras is that almost the entire show takes place within the walls of the office from which the show takes its name. Chatty gave me an estimate of 75% of total screen time taking place inside the main building, and anecdotally, that feels, if anything, a little low. This focus gives you, as a viewer, the ability to spend an enormous amount of time in the space—particularly the area between Jim, Pam, and Michael’s desks—so over its 9 seasons and 201 episodes, you develop an intimate familiarity with the layout of the desks and the full network of relationships.

But what do these episodes actually contain? Well, I would say the modal episode pairs an A-plot—Michael Scott caught up in some absurdity—with a B-plot that follows Jim, or sometimes Dwight on a side quest. Often capped by an elaborate prank or general hijinks. Each show begins with a cold-open vignette before the credits; many of the series’ signature moments spring from these snippets. Sometimes the cold open teases the main story, but just as often it stands alone as a mini-episode inside the episode.

I will have much, much more to say about why I love the characters so much later, but suffice it to say here that the primary trilogy I just mentioned all have incredible chemistry and at least communicate to the audience a genuine friendship2. But it isn’t just constrained to that core cast—all of the side characters are fun in their own way, and most of them have satisfying emotional arcs over the course of the show.

Because that is what it is really about at the end of the day. The Office is a story about the plebeian citizens who work there, and it celebrates their lives as meaningful on their own terms. As a plebeian myself, I love this. 

Watch on YouTube

The affection that the show clearly has for working-class American life contrasts it with more artsy shows like Severance, which takes the same aesthetic but tries to instead inspire dread, or movies like Office Space and Fight Club, which focus mostly on the stifling nature of contemporaneous life. This celebration is truly its greatest strength.

Unlike its obvious “rival” Parks and Rec, which feels almost insecure about the “triviality” of its subject matter and so sends its characters careening towards fame and wealth, The Office is able to keep the stakes, mostly, reasonable. Take, for example, Leslie, the lead of Parks and Rec, who is elected President of the US, and compare her arc to Dwight, who ends the show finally achieving his dream of being manager, or Michael, who has retired to Colorado and had a family. Part of the reason the show is able to maintain this—dare I say it—realism is because actual office life, with its near-identical repetitions, is well suited for 20-minute episodes with self-contained adventures. But another part of it is a lack of licentiousness3 on the part of the creators of the show. It would have been so easy to have a character murdered or something equally insane, but for a show of this type to be any good, the writers have to resist the siren song of escalation. If they do not, eventually the show suffers from setting collapse. We are seeing this right now with Marvel, where the stakes really can’t increase anymore without fundamentally undermining the coherency of the franchise.

Now, the fact that the creators celebrate Plebeian American life is not the same thing as saying the show lacks any criticisms of that same culture. Like all media from its era, it has an obvious progressive-liberal bent, but this perspective—which was the telos of the era—is never particularly overbearing. Instead, most of the shows targets of lampoonery are the apolitical foibles of life, such as, for example, the pointlessness of modern corporate hierarchies, hammered home by multiple stretches without a manager wherein the office functions better than ever. So even in its criticism, the show isn’t about “big” questions like how society should be organized, but instead takes our culture as given to comment on its true nature, which is overwhelmingly beautiful, warts and all.

There are two areas that I think the show struggles to keep its pulse on society. The first is just that the show seriously declined in quality over the course of its run. It is far from a Game of Thrones–level disaster, but I would say the general consensus is that the best parts of the show are in the first couple of seasons, with a gradual decline in quality until Michael leaves, followed by a rapid deterioration. Season 9 in particular is difficult to watch. 

The viewership data, I think, honestly reflects the quality of the episodes.

As I’ve already blathered about at great length, what made the show so great was that it held a mirror up to society. Later seasons instead simply became a reflection of themselves. All the characters gradually morphed into more and more stylized caricatures; Kevin, for example, ceases to be even remotely believable as an actual person by the end.

And second, it also struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing post–Great Recession culture, to the point that the final couple of seasons almost feel like time warps back to Bush-era America. This makes sense since a lot of this change wasn’t, let’s say, “easy,” and so the writers struggled to integrate it into the generally feel-good atmosphere.

A somewhat silly example of what I’m talking about is the existence of a secretary throughout the entire run. Anecdotally at least, it seems like around the late 2000s, human receptionists were largely replaced by robotic answering machines as your first line of contact at any business—if you know your party's extension please enter it now. They don’t totally ignore this change, and in Season 5 a sales rep comes in to try and sell one of these systems, but Jim manages to keep him at bay and so saves Pam’s job. Basically, in real life Pam would have just been fired, like what happened to millions of office workers during that period. A perhaps more glaring example, though, is the lack of online digitization. While Ryan is serving as the “boss” character in Season 4, there is a plotline involving the creation of a website, but again it fizzles out. In short, the show fails to confront many of the more difficult and complex social changes our society underwent during its period (2005–2013), noticeably totally sidestepping political polarization. It's hard to see this as totally a negative thing though.

I really want to emphasize though that the show is incredible, and if you have any fond memories of the early 2000s, you will enjoy it thoroughly. I feel like I’m missing out on so much that I loved about it but I will go over everything in more detail in the character rankings.

Before I wrap this essay up, I want to just give kudos to the set designers, because they managed to perfectly capture the aesthetics and corporate America in the late Bush–early Obama years. 

There was an exhibit that came through Chicago while I was living there that let you physically explore a recreated set, but unfortunately I missed the opportunity. I hope they bring it back, because getting to see things like corded phones or that style of wall, in a pristine and not degraded condition, would be incredible.

Keep your eyes posted for the next part where I will rank all of the characters in the show! 

1Insane I know, but true

2I have no interest in looking into if this perception is true

3Every time I read an old book I like to adopt a new word into my vocabulary. From Carlyle it was veracity, from Gibbon it is licentiousness and I feel the need to use it

---

# Changing things up.

A new horizon for content by Peter Banks

Date: 2025-05-21
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/changing-things-up
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/changing-things-up

Welcome, friends, readers, and acquaintances:

Many of you originally subscribed to my writings through a publication I began with two college friends, Voyagers‑Log. As some of you may know, I’ve also been running a second blog called Strong Ideas Held Lightly - the one you’re reading now. My original plan was to maintain two separate mailing lists, but that presented more problems than it solved, so I’ve decided to consolidate onto this platform.

Voyagers‑Log will continue to exist, and I’d love to publish more articles by interested writers. If you’d like to contribute, please let me know!

This change is also an invitation to support me if you have the means. Unlike Voyagers‑Log, which we never monetized, Strong Ideas Held Lightly is entirely reader‑supported. A monthly subscription costs $5, and an annual subscription is just $30. Your support grants you access to a steady stream of paywalled articles—and it will forever warm my heart.

From your perspective, not much will change, except you’ll receive an abundance of essays from me. I have some exciting ideas in the pipeline, and I’ll notify you when they’re ready for prime time. For now, that’s all.

Best,Peter

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# Outsourcing State Capacity to Skinheads

or another name for California prison governance

Date: 2025-05-02
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/outsourcing-state-capacity-to-skinheads
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/outsourcing-state-capacity-to-skinheads

You may have come across videos like the one below, where former inmates - usually from California prisons - talk about their time behind bars.

Watch on YouTube

I first discovered this genre in the late 2010s through a channel called Fresh Out, and in the intervening years, it has exploded in popularity. Wes Watson, in particular, has become something of a minor celebrity in degenerate circles, even getting interviewed by No Jumper. The existence and popularity of prison content online isn’t especially surprising, given a couple of factors - America’s entrepreneurial culture and the horrifying conditions of our prisons, especially given our level of development. What has been surprising, though, is the scale of racial segregation in the penitentiary.

I’d guess the average middle-class American assumes prisons have some racial tensions, but that most normal prisoners operate in a colorblind way, as we try to do in daily life. But this simply isn’t true. For decades after the civil rights movement, California (among other states) operated an explicitly race-conscious prison system. It wasn’t declared unconstitutional in the Golden State until Johnson v. California in 2005, but since then, basically nothing has changed. As late as 2014, California was still promising to stop using collective punishment against entire racial groups. And if you listen to anyone talk about prison life, it’s clear that informal racial segregation persists - maintained by both inmates and guards.

In fact, life in prison is so dominated by racial factionalism that day-to-day “law and order” is primarily maintained through a form of ethnic separatism1  where each racial group is governed by a monarchy checked by regicide. This law and order is as brutal as you would expect, but it does much to keep the peace in an institution that is otherwise always one match away from exploding into violence. It can be hard to think about prisons precisely since normal rules don’t really apply. The people behind bars are a selection of the worst, most violent, and least well socialized individuals in this country2, many of whom face decade long terms. When you combine an ethnically heterogeneous population whose only shared trait is a propensity for criminality, it would be hard to keep the place from being anything but a hell on earth. However, the real problem is the sheer scale of the American prison population. 

In a country like Japan for example their prisons are an orderly affair, and it is difficult to imagine widespread gang violence taking place there. But Japan has a prison population(40,000) comically smaller than America’s(1,800,000). 

We have over half a percent of our population in prison at any given moment and maintaining adequate facilities and guards for them is simply impossible. So our state turns to the low cost enforcement method of “let the gangs run the show”. 

Nothing I’ve said is up for empirical debate, but since lawmakers and advocacy groups are caught in the awkward position of being unable to really crack down on the gangs without the system exploding, and unable to defend operating a racially segregated prison system in the year of our Lord 2025, we have, as a society, collectively decided that it simply doesn’t matter. But I think this is bad.

Look, even if I have very little sympathy for criminals, I still believe that they are Human and deserve to live in a system that is not run by organizations like the Nazi Lowriders or the Aryan Brotherhood. 

Maybe if this produced exceptional crime outcomes, like those of a country like Singapore or even what has occurred (for now) in El Salvador, I would be more tolerant of our prison system, but it does not! The problem, as I see it, is our criminal justice system is not dealing with reality as it actually is. From a first principles perspective its purpose should be protecting law abiding citizens from their deranged countrymen. 

We are dealing with people who, by the very definition of their behavior, are simply not rational actors. If you are a 22-year-old with a crack habit, the concept of 15 years of prison time is a pure abstraction that is more closely approximated by the fear of death - something you see daily - than by a scaling punishment function designed to motivate you to avoid certain crimes. Once you have crossed the, relatively low, threshold into criminal the distinction mostly disappears and since punishment is, relatively, rare it appears quasi-random. 

Clearly we need a system that actually deters potential criminals and also reduces our prison population. I think bringing back canings -  like Singapore does - would be a ready improvement. But I’m open to almost any solution that deals with reality as it actually is. 

When we think about criminal justice and weigh options like ankle bracelets or corporal punishment, it's worth remembering this: the alternative to designing a system that actually deters crime is the outsourcing of state capacity to skinheads.

1The specific ethnic breakdowns vary by region with changes in the population shares but they fall broadly into the categories that you would expect - White, Black, Hispanic, ect.

2And some - I assume - are good people

---

# What if immigration drives people crazy?

A Strong Idea Held Lightly.

Date: 2025-04-26
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/what-if-immigration-drives-people
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/what-if-immigration-drives-people

This essay is truly going to be a Strong Idea Held Lightly. You can think of it as a mini registered report: I have a hypothesis but haven’t dug deeply into the literature or data yet. I intend to, but I would also like to solicit well-intentioned feedback on a controversial idea.

With that in mind, I’m going to keep this to paid subscribers only - both because the idea is half-baked and because I want to entice some of you to sign up.

My basic thesis is that immigration seems to be driving Western European countries and America crazy. It’s difficult to imagine a politician like Trump winning without the demographic transformation of this country. It’s even plausible he might have been impossible just without the tens of millions of illegal immigrants who have entered the country and have not been deported for esoteric legal reasons.

If you think that Trump is a threat to the liberal international order - as I believe any reasonable person, irrespective of their views toward that order, would admit - it’s worth trying to disentangle how much of this is directly a result of him - personally, and how much is due to deeper structural causes. Because if it isn’t just Trump, immigration has to be pretty high on the list of reasons he has been so successful.

During Trump’s first term, I think the consensus was that he was a blip in a broader left-wing trend. As Yarvin famously said, “Cthulhu may swim slowly, but he only swims left” - but continuing to believe that is harder now that mini-Trumps seem to be popping up across the world. 

If your pan with three inches of grease is on fire, I don’t suggest you just let it burn off.

This isn’t to say that only countries with high levels of migration are experiencing social unrest - Korea comes to mind as a possible counterexample. But it does seem like whenever immigrants - particularly immigrants of a different ethnic or racial background - get above some vague threshold, politics deteriorates rapidly1 .

In the UK, it is plausible that the oldest political party in history (arguably) could die off, in France the National Front will probably elect a President sooner than later, and in Germany the AfD is now tied in the polls - almost all of this can be explained by establishment weakness on popular demands for less immigration. 

The same phenomenon occurs outside of the Western "core" (for lack of a better term). Chile, for example, is reeling from a relatively large population of immigrants, and it seems to be pushing that shining bastion of democracy and development in Latin America toward a political cliff. Moving beyond just politics, it’s hard to imagine, for example, the race riots that swept the UK a year ago happening without the existence of a large racial minority population.

The more controversial part of this thesis isn’t so much that tensions exist between “natives” and “immigrants” in high-immigration societies - but that I sincerely do not think these tensions are avoidable, and that liberal democracy itself is threatened by them. Or in other words: democratic stability and immigration levels are things you trade off against each other, on expectation.

Note: none of this is an argument that immigrants are a drain on the economy or damage labor market outcomes. It seems plausible that in Europe, they probably are a drain, on average, on state finances, but this is unequivocally not true in the U.S. America, on average, receives some of the most incredible people in the world, who almost uniformly want to work and contribute to society. What I’m talking about is the more esoteric - and difficult to quantify - world of democratic stability. 

If my hypothesis is true then just like social democrats in the 20th century had to accept the inevitability of capitalism and markets to fund their social welfare systems, liberals will need to accept regulated tribalism to save their democracies - or fade into history like doctrinaire socialists. People with left-wing instincts in the U.S. will have to decide what they really want: a stable, rules-based democratic system or high levels of third-world immigration to the West. I sincerely believe they cannot get both, and I expect the coming decades to confirm this.

But why? Because I believe people are inherently tribal. There’s a huge amount of research supporting this conclusion - one of my favorite examples is the famous study where children were given different colored shirts, and they became tribal2. The liberal consensus I grew up under assumed tribalism could be overcome. I simply think that assumption is simply false - at least without sacrificing the principle of democratic control, thus proving my point. The fact that this tribalism cannot be logically justified using liberal axioms is as irrelevant as the logical consistency - and empirical inconsistency - of orthodox Marxism.

Take markets as an analogy. Since people have different subjective valuations and differing relative productivity, by construction there exist gains from trade.

Because of this fact, markets will always emerge, and only strong legal sanctions can keep them from multiplying and transforming society. The human desire to trade is so strong that even strong legal sanction is rarely enough to actually suppress it. Trade existed even inside death camps and continues in North Korea today.

If you assume - as I do - that humans have a similarly inbuilt friend-enemy distinction, then tribalism follows directly. For a democracy to function, it must view itself as the friend - and something else as the enemy.

"Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand." — Matthew 12:25

Of course, America has gone through this before. In the late 19th century, huge numbers of people arrived and this created enormous social upheaval, a fact we don’t like to discuss. As a result, a series of extremely restrictive immigration laws were passed, capping migration, and within a generation or so, tensions cooled and a cohesive, unhyphenated American identity was reforged through conscious effort by the state. I propose we should do the same now.

I’ve written before that I think the ultimate goal of the state should be the expansion of human life to the stars, and that part of this moral task is the need to simply accept who we are. To practice a little more Amor Fati, if you will. Part of this involves rejecting doctrinaire socialism because it is incompatible with human nature. But it also means looking at other political movements and seriously examining where their simplifying assumptions about human nature fail to align with real life. Given that democracies are undeniably the best system of social organization, and preserving the American political system is the best hope to reach the stars, we need to take all threats to it gravely seriously.

Anyway that is it. I have a lot more to think about regarding this, and if you have relevant academic papers or perspectives you think I’m missing, please let me know. 

1Australia and New Zealand seem to have avoided this despite large immigrant populations. I do not know why, and would appreciate the insight of someone with more context on these countries.

2Tribalism is about a feeling of “similarity” it doesn’t have to be racial, but it usually is.

---

# Oblivion Remastered: Review

It's awesome go buy it.

Date: 2025-04-26
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/oblivion-remastered-review
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/oblivion-remastered-review

One of the most exciting moments in gaming history just happened on the 22nd of April: Bethesda shadow-dropped a remaster of Oblivion, officially out of nowhere (unofficially, rumors had been going crazy for a while). I have spent an embarrassing amount of time playing the game since its release1, and it has been amazing. Oblivion was one of my favorite games as a kid, and its 2007 release - along with the 2011 release of its sequel Skyrim - hit at that perfect time in a person’s life to leave the maximum possible impact. Since I’m calling this a review, I would suggest y’all 100% go check it out; it isn’t that expensive, and if you have Game Pass you can play it for free. Oblivion Remastered is the same game, quirks included, and that is exactly what I wanted. 

Watch on YouTube

It has been fascinating replaying Oblivion because it has made me appreciate both it and Skyrim more than ever, for different reasons. Specifically: first, it is astounding that Oblivion - which is almost 20 years old - is unironically better than most modern games. I recently tried playing Avowed, and even mentioning them in the same sentence feels offensive2. Second, Skyrim has recently received some flak from hypercritical millennials, and playing Oblivion has confirmed they are retarded. Skyrim really is the greatest game of all time3, and it isn’t even particularly close.

So I want to take the time to do a little comparative study between Bethesda’s two fantasy masterpieces while I yap about the game. 

World

On paper, Oblivion’s (16 mi²) map is only slightly larger than Skyrim’s (14.3 mi²), but it feels MUCH larger. This size comes with the drawback that a lot of the content feels random, almost like everyone is playing some procedurally generated map with a stable seed. By contrast, Skyrim’s map feels truly handcrafted.

But Oblivion really does feel much, much larger. Cyrodiil - the province the game takes place in - is effectively a big bowl with everything but the edges full of things to do and see, whereas Skyrim has a lot of obstacles, like mountain ranges, that make walking in a straight line difficult and create big splotches of semi-empty space. But it isn’t just the geography: Oblivion is just more full than Skyrim. In theory, both games have the same number of cities - Oblivion has nine, including the Imperial City, and Skyrim has nine holds - but in practice, Oblivion totally walks away with it, since all their cities are real. Only Kvatch is mostly empty (for obvious reasons if you play the game), and it lacks the utter bullshit of Morthal and Dawnstar. 

In addition to more and larger cities, Oblivion also has more little villages - if you’ve only played Skyrim, think of Riverwood - almost all of which seem to have little side quests.

Here you can see the real trade-off in world design: Oblivion almost always has more but what Skyrim has is of higher quality. Or at least, the stuff in Skyrim is cooler in a way that’s deeper than just graphics, and a game being cool is a big part of what makes it good.

Compare the cities, for example. Here are screenshots of entrance to three of the more distinct Oblivion cities: 

The Imperial City, Skingrad, and Bruma from left to right.

And here are screenshots of the entrance to three of Skyrim's more distinct cities: 

Whiterun, Markarth, and Riften from left to right.

I for one think Skyrim’s look more distinct. Now I also must confess some of this is that I'm just a slut for Nordic stuff4, but I really think Bethesda did an incredible job in Skyrim integrating that aesthetic into the environment in a way Oblivion doesn’t quite achieve — at least outside of the Imperial City.

The entire world of Skyrim is brimming with charm and little things to discover: there is obvious stuff like dragon attacks, but there is also little things like giants with their mammoth pets, Orc strongholds, and the Forsworn. I had never really appreciated how amazing the world design of Skyrim was until I replayed Oblivion.

Gameplay

Both Skyrim and Oblivion have very similar gameplay at the atomic level. You increase certain skills - say, archery - by doing that thing - shooting a bow - and when you have increased enough skills, you level up, which allows you to boost your attributes and unlock bonuses. The similarity goes deeper than just leveling. They differ in important ways, but the bones are functionally the same, and it rocks! 

I’m not going to go through every system, but they share a lot of core DNA — honestly, if they don’t cut all this stuff out of Elder Scrolls 6, I think this system alone will make that game fun. 

One of the most important aspects of Bethesda gameplay is the NPCs. And this is an area where Oblivion stands head and shoulders above any other game I’ve ever played - even if they are off in some weird island on their own. In Skyrim, the NPCs have a day/night schedule, but mostly they seem to exist for you as the player. In contrast, the Oblivion NPCs seem to exist in their own little surreal world. You can poison them by stealing all their food and leaving only poisoned items around for example. Entering a public place often creates a cacophony of NPCs having the silliest and most endearing conversations possible. The voice acting here is so great - Bethesda could have gone serious, and it would have been cringe, but the over-the-top affectation is just perfect.

Watch on YouTube

Another area Oblivion beats Skyrim is questing. In every Bethesda game, quests are basically the same: some NPC has a problem and asks you to solve it. Sometimes this is talking to another NPC, but normally it’s killing someone or fetching something - almost always inside some cave or fortress filled with bandits. This is a solid system that has persisted for a reason.

Except for the Fighter’s Guild, Oblivion’s questlines are all longer and more interesting. I’ll hold off on spoiling too much, but rerunning the Dark Brotherhood has been a blast.

The major improvements in Skyrim from a gameplay perspective come mostly in feel and UI. Skyrim's UI is so incredible that going back to Oblivion is a little painful. The map especially is vastly inferior. But everything in Skyrim is just so beautiful, and I wish more games would go back to that style instead of the cursor-dominated UI that exploded after Destiny.

Everything just feels smoother in Skyrim. Stealth is better, shooting fire out of one hand while wielding a sword is an incredible feeling, crafting at a forge - all little things that add up to a big difference. World-level scaling is a great example of a small alteration massively improving the game.

In Oblivion, the entire world scales 1:1 with you. Early on, you fight wolves and imps; by late game, bandits wear the best armor. You never really get stronger. Worse, loot scales too, meaning early dungeons only have 10 gold and are full of garbage.

Skyrim, by contrast, sets min and max levels for areas and only lets elite enemies like dragons scale 1:1. Loot also improves with levels but in a more natural way, now getting high-quality armor feels like an accomplishment, and early questing isn’t a total waste of time.

Before I conclude this I need to mention speech checks. Persuasion is a common feature of the RPG genre, but is rare in both games. It is slightly more common in Oblivion, but honestly, that might not be a good thing the persuasion mini-game is hellish5.

“thank you”, “do you think you are funny?”, “I’m not scared of your”, “wow so impressive”

Overall: Oblivion and Skyrim are very similar games. Skyrim makes many small but important improvements that elevate it. But if you enjoyed Skyrim, you will enjoy and understand Oblivion.

Other Stuff

As I said: shadow-dropping after leaks riled up the community was incredible. I’m not going to lie, I teared up a little seeing the game6.

Player counts suggest the strategy worked. Can you imagine how insane it would be if GTA6 shadow-dropped - it would break the internet. More than anything, though this and Trump’s election confirm that earned media is worth far more in our fractured ecosystem than paid media. I get my content from authentic YouTubers and buying their genuine enthusiasm is impossible. 

Oblivion has dominated gaming media and will probably get annoying soon. Still, Bethesda couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. I expect a tsunami of remakes now. If it’s as simple as dropping a game into Unreal, why wouldn’t you? Bethesda, I will personally pay you $60 for every single one. Skyrim with new graphics would be peak. Morrowind would need more work, but Fallout 3 — sharing the engine with Oblivion — is 100% happening7

But I just cannot shake the impression that Oblivion is much better than Starfield or frankly, most modern games. Playing it now honestly makes me wonder what the hell is going on in major studios. Have they been captured by toxic positivity or something? Avowed was almost comically bad compared to Oblivion - despite a team which was 2–3× larger.

Have we lost a social technology? Part of me wonders if this is an overreaction by Corpos to buggy games? Oblivion isn’t an indie game, it has that publisher shine, but it also is undeniably janky in a way no other modern game really is. Perhaps smoothness and creativity are competing values you have to trade off against each other? 

But I can’t help but wonder if there is another factor at play… Specifically, gaming seems to be full of a lot more 50 and 60 year olds now than it was when Oblivion came out. In preparation to the release I rewatched The Making of Oblivion documentary and there were basically no old people in the entire video. Don’t get me wrong I have nothing against older people but life is really full of various stages, there is a reason not to take most 20 year old philosophers very seriously. Bjørk 2019 for example shows the research most Noble laureates win a prize for is done when they are in their mid 40s. Todd Howard is ~55 now which would have put him at ~41 when Skyrim released. I simply wonder if too many of the people making decisions in gaming are in their late 50s and too few are in their 30s. This is definitely true in academia and it is weighing down the entire profession. 

The last silly thing I want to cover is the controversy around the option to choose your gender in the character creator. The remaster replaced gender with  ‘body type 1’ and ‘body type 2’ - as has become the standard in gaming. This is always a little goofy because it just results in 99% of gamers clicking on both options to see which one is a “dude” and which one is a “girl”8,  but this time it is even more silly because the game is littered with gendered language which is tied to the stereotypically fem and masc characters.

A couple of modders decided to make it possible for people to change it back to the original gendered options and Nexus - the biggest mod hoster - quickly took it down. This sparked a war between the Chud’s and the Troons which the Chuds seem to have won, Nexus conceded and has allowed the mods to return. It might sound minor but honestly a victory like this would have been incomprehensible in even 2024.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, go buy the game. You will enjoy it!

1This is what your federal dollars pay my stipend for

2It is a shame how far Obsidian has fallen since New Vegas. Avowed seems to have some production hiccups, but I cannot think of a modern game that does what Oblivion does, which I prefer

3If you really want to argue it is RDR2 or GTA5, I won’t fight you

4"I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century: eight hundred years ago the Norwegians were still worshippers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways. Strange: they did believe that, while we believe so differently." — Hero as Divinity, Carlyle

5Don’t even get me started on lockpicking

6SOY BOY

7A Fallout 3 remaster was “leaked” in SEC disclosures during Bethesda’s acquisition. It cannot come soon enough.

8Perhaps it comes out positive in our Benthamite table of arithmetic, I’ll leave that to the experts.

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# Ship of Theseus - Roman Empire

To me, the Byzantines were as Roman as I am Anglo-Saxon.

Date: 2025-04-17
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/ship-of-theseus-roman-empire
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/ship-of-theseus-roman-empire

Academic and cultural fads in history come and go, but it’s fair to say that the current cultural consensus holds that the Byzantine Empire is another name for the final stage of the Roman state. It’s undeniable that the Byzantines saw themselves this way; they referred to themselves as Rhomaioi—Greek for Roman—and there was clear institutional and legal continuity that can be traced from the rise of the city of Rome through to 1453. But this consensus doesn’t sit right with me.

As a layperson who loves history, the late Byzantine Empire feels completely disconnected from the Rome of Marius or Virgil. It’s impossible to pinpoint a single moment when the two societies diverged; instead, there seems to have been a process analogous to speciation. Where, a continuous accumulation of changes—each one almost insignificant on its own—collectively resulted in a profound transformation. The erosion of Roman legalism, the diminishing use of Latin in administration, the fading centrality of Roman citizenship, the loss of republicanism, the displacement of the Roman pantheon, the dissolution of classical Roman class structures, the decline of the yeoman farmer, and even the biological waning of the pre-imperial Latin population accumulated gradually, until the edifice was rendered unrecognizable. By the rule of Justinian the Great, what remained resembled the Diadochi of the post-Alexander Near East far more than the Roman Republic.

A useful analogy for this process is the classic thought experiment known as the Ship of Theseus. Theseus, the mythical king of Athens, after defeating the Minotaur, returned home on a wooden ship. To celebrate this heroic accomplishment, the citizens of Athens replicated this journey every year in the same ship. But as the years passed, parts of the ship began to show their age. To simplify, let’s assume the ship is constructed of 100 wooden pieces. As one piece begins to rot or warp, the citizens replace it. Is it still the same ship? It would be absurd to argue that replacing a single floorboard turns it into something else. But what happens when everything has been replaced? Now, imagine that the parts couldn’t be perfectly replicated, and each replacement altered the ship slightly—making it longer or changing its colors. Eventually, after centuries, every single piece of the ship has been replaced by one altered, in large or small ways, and not a single part of the original vessel remains identical. Is it still the same ship? I would argue it is not, even if it fulfills the same ceremonies and carries the same name. 

This is a natural process. Since the circumstances of life aren’t static, our inherited institutions evolve over time. J.J. McCullough, in a video titled Canada has failed, quotes Canadian writer Will Ferguson’s idea that Canada was built on three principles: 1) keeping the Americans out, 2) keeping the French in, and 3) trying to make the Natives somehow disappear. By these standards, modern Canada is largely a failed project. But Canada hasn’t failed; rather, the objectives of its citizenry have simply changed. When we say things like China has existed for 4,000 years, or that Western civilization can be traced from its origins in ancient Greece, or that Rome existed for over 2,000 years, we risk giving the false impression that we’re pointing to something immutable. That is simply not the case. Mapping continuous changes to discrete categories is always challenging, but to me, the Byzantines were as Roman as I am Anglo-Saxon.

---

# The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, Part 1, Vol 1 | Bernal Diaz del Castillo | Anthologies

The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo. Translated by John Ingram Lockhart

Date: 2025-04-15
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-true-history-of-the-conquest
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-true-history-of-the-conquest

Originally published in 1632. Chapters 1-10. 

Translator’s Preface:

The History of the Conquest of New Spain is a subject in which great interest is felt at the present day, and the English public will hail these memoirs, which contain the only true and complete account of that important transaction.

The author of this original and charming production, to which he justly gives the title of 'The True History of the Conquest of New Spain,' was himself one of the Conquistadores; one who not only witnessed the transactions which he relates, but who also performed a glorious part in them; a soldier who, for impartiality and veracity, perhaps never had his equal. His account is acknowledged to be the only one on which we can place reliance, and it has been the magazine from which the most eloquent of the Spanish writers on the same subject, as well as those of other countries, have borrowed their best materials. Some historians have even transcribed whole pages, but have not had sufficient honesty to acknowledge it.

The author, while living, was never rewarded for the great services he had rendered his country, and it is remarkable that, after his death, his very memoirs were pillaged by court historians, to raise a literary monument to themselves.

Most of the other writers on the conquest, particularly the Spanish, have filled their works with exaggerations, to create astonishment and false interest; pages are filled with so termed philosophical remarks, which but ill supply the place of the intelligent reader's own reflections. Bernal Diaz differs widely from those writers, for he only states what he knows to be true. The British public, fond above all others of original productions, will peruse with interest and delight a work which has so long been the secret fountain from which all other accounts of the conquest, with the exception of those which are least faithful, have taken life.

In respect of its originality, it may vie with any work of modern times, not excepting 'Don Quixote.' The author seems to have been born to show forth truth in all its beauty, and he raises it to a divinity in his mind. Can anything be more expressive of an honest conscience than what he says in his own preface: "You have only to read my history, and you see it is true."

The reader may form a general idea of this work from the following critique, which Dr. Robertson, the historian, passes upon it: "Bernal Diaz's account bears all the marks of authenticity, and is accompanied with such pleasant naïveté, with such interesting details, with such amusing vanity, and yet so pardonable in an old soldier, who had been, as he boasts, in a hundred and nineteen battles, as renders his book one of the most singular that is to be found in any language."

One circumstance, and that very justly, he is most anxious to impress on your mind, namely, that all the merit of the conquest is not due to Cortes alone; for which reason he generally uses the expression "Cortes and all of us."

This is an allowable feeling in our old soldier, and it must be remembered that the greater part of the men who joined Cortes were of good families, who, as usual on such expeditions, equipped themselves at their own expense, and went out as adventurers of their own free choice.

With respect to our author's style of writing, it is chiefly characterized by plainness and simplicity, and yet there are numerous passages which are written with great force and eloquence, and which, as the Spanish editor says, "could not have been more forcibly expressed, nor with greater elegance." Some readers may at first feel inclined to censure our author for going into minute particulars in describing the fitting out of the expedition under Cortes; for instance, his describing the qualities and colours of the horses; but all this, it will be seen, was of the utmost importance to his history, and of the horses he was bound to take special notice, for they performed a conspicuous part in the conquest. The honest old soldier even devotes a couple of his last chapters to the whole of his companions in arms, in which he mentions them all by name, describes their persons, their bravery, and the manner in which they died.

To conclude these few remarks on this work, I must observe, that it not only surpasses Cortes' despatches in completeness, but also in truth and naïveté. He represents the whole to you with a simplicity truly sublime; at times he astonishes with a power of expressing his sentiments peculiar to himself, and with a pathos that goes to the very heart.

Bernal Diaz was of a respectable family, and born in Medina del Campo, a small town in the province of Leon. He was what in Spain is termed an hidalgo—though by this little more was signified than a descent from Christian forefathers, without any mixture of Jewish or Moorish blood. With respect to the precise year of his birth he has left us in the dark, but, according to his own account, he first left Castile, for the New World, in the year 1514; and as, on his first arrival in Mexico, in the year 1519, he still calls himself a young man, we may safely conclude that he was born between 1495 and 1500. In the year 1568 he completed his work, at which time there were only six of the Conquistadores alive, and he must then have been about seventy years of age, but there is every reason for supposing that he reached the advanced age of eighty-six. Endowed with singular nobleness of mind, he had the happiness to enjoy an unblemished reputation.

The excellent Torquemada, in speaking of him in his voluminous work entitled 'Monarchia Indiana,' says, "I saw and knew this same Bernal Diaz in the city of Guatimala; he was then a very aged man, and one who bore the best of reputations." Quoting him in another passage, he has, "Thus says Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a soldier on whose authority and honesty we can place reliance." He was a man devoted to his religion, and it must be particularly borne in mind that the Catholic faith was never stronger than at that time; yet we find him the least superstitious of all the Spanish historians on the Conquest, and, in the 34th Chapter, he has shown a mind superior to the times in which he lived.

If we contemplate the period in which the conquest of New Spain took place, we can easily imagine that Cortes considered it imperative on him to plant his religion among the Indians by the power of the sword, if he could not by kind remonstrances; and we are often reminded of Joshua in the Old Testament. The Spaniards themselves certainly entertained that idea; for in the edition of Cortes' despatches published at Mexico in 1770, his sword is termed, "Gladius Domini et Gideonis:" yet the Spaniards were not the cruel monsters they have generally been described during those times. As far as the conquest of New Spain is concerned, they were more humane than otherwise; and if at times they used severity, we find that it was caused by the horrible and revolting abominations which were practised by the natives. We can scarcely imagine kinder-hearted beings than the first priests and monks who went out to New Spain; they were men who spent their lives under every species of hardship to promote the happiness of the Indians. Who can picture to his mind a more amiable and noble disposition than that of father Olmedo? He was one of the finest characters, Dr. Robertson says, that ever went out as priest with an invading army!

We may have become exceedingly partial to a work which has now been constantly before our eyes for the last two years, yet we can scarcely imagine that any one could take up a volume, whether a novel or a history, which he would peruse with more delight than these memoirs.

With regard to the translation, which is from the old edition printed at Madrid in 1632, we have acted up to the author's desire, and have neither added nor taken anything away, and have attempted to follow the original as closely as possible. To the original there is not a single note, and particular care has been taken not to overburden the translation with them. In the spelling of the names of the Indian chiefs, the townships, and of the provinces, we have mostly followed Torquemada, who is considered more correct on this point, for he lived fifty years in New Spain, was perfect master of the Mexican language, and made the history of that country his peculiar study.

Author’s Preface:

I, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, regidor of the town of Santiago, in Guatimala, author of this very true and faithful history, have now finished it, in order that it may be published to the world. It treats of the discovery and total conquest of New Spain; and how the great city of Mexico and several other towns were taken, up to the time when peace was concluded with the whole country; also of the founding of many Spanish cities and towns, by which we, as we were in duty bound, extended the dominion of our sovereign.

In this history will be found many curious facts worthy of notice. It likewise points out the errors and blunders contained in a work written by Francisco de Gomara, who not only commits many errors himself in what he writes about New Spain, but he has also been the means of leading those two famous historians astray who followed his account, namely, Dr. Illescas and the bishop Paulo Jovio. What I have written in this book I declare and affirm to be strictly true. I myself was present at every battle and hostile encounter. Indeed, these are not old tales or romances of the seventh century; for, if I may so say, it happened but yesterday what is contained in my history. I relate how, where, and in what manner these things took place; as an accredited eyewitness of this I may mention our very spirited and valorous captain Don Hernando Cortes, marquis del Valle Oaxaca, who wrote an account of these occurrences from Mexico to his imperial majesty Don Carlos the Fifth, of glorious memory; and likewise the corresponding account of the viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza. But, besides this, you have only to read my history and you see it is true.

I have now completed it this 26th day of February, 1568, from my day-book and memory, in this very loyal city of Guatimala, the seat of the royal court of audience. I also think of mentioning some other circumstances which are for the most part unknown to the public. I must beg of the printers not to take away from, nor add one single syllable to, the following narrative, etc.

CHAPTER 1:

The time of my departure from Castile, and what further happened to me.

In the year 1514 I departed from Castile in the suite of Pedro Arias de Avila, who had just then been appointed governor of Terra Firma. At sea we had sometimes bad and sometimes good weather, until we arrived at Nombre Dios, where the plague was raging: of this we lost many of our men, and most of us got terrible sores on our legs, and were otherwise ill. Soon after our arrival, dissensions arose between the governor and a certain wealthy cavalier, named Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, who had brought this province to subjection, and was married to one of the daughters of Avila. As, however, suspicion had been excited against him, owing to a plan he had formed of making a voyage to the South Sea at his own expense, for which he required a considerable body of troops, his own father-in-law deposed him and afterwards sentenced him to decapitation.

While we were spectators of all this, and saw, moreover, how other soldiers rebelled against their superior officers, we learnt that the island of Cuba had just been conquered, and that a nobleman of Quellar, named Diego Velasquez, was appointed governor there. Upon this news some of us met together, cavaliers and soldiers, all persons of quality who had come with Pedro Arias de Avila, and asked his permission to proceed to the island of Cuba: this he readily granted, not having sufficient employment for so great a number of men as he had brought with him from Spain. Neither was there any further conquest to be made in these parts; all was in profound peace, so thoroughly had his son-in-law Balboa subdued the country, besides which it was but small in extent and thinly populated. As soon, therefore, as we had obtained leave, we embarked in a good vessel and took our departure. Our voyage was most prosperous, so that we speedily arrived at Cuba. The first thing we did was to pay our respects to the governor, who received us with great kindness, and made us a promise of the first Indians that might be discharged. Three years, however, passed away since our first arrival in Terra Firma and stay at Cuba, still living in the expectation of the Indians which had been promised us, but in vain. During the whole of this time we had accomplished nothing worthy of notice: we therefore, the 110 who had come from Terra Firma, with some others of Cuba, who were also without any Indians, met together to concert measures with a rich cavalier named Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba, who, besides being a person of wealth, possessed great numbers of Indians on the island. This gentleman we chose for our captain; he was to lead us out on voyages for the discovery of new countries, where we might find sufficient employment.

We purchased three vessels, two of which were of considerable burden; the third was given us by the governor, Diego Velasquez, on condition namely, that we should first invade the Guanajas islands, which lie between Cuba and the Honduras, and bring him thence three cargoes of Indians, whom he wanted for slaves; this he would consider as payment for the vessel. We were, however, fully aware that it was an act of injustice which Diego Velasquez thus required at our hands, and gave him for answer: that neither God nor the king had commanded us to turn a free people into slaves. When he learnt our determination, he confessed that our project for the discovery of new countries was more praiseworthy, and he furnished us with provisions for our voyage.

We had now three vessels and a sufficient supply of cassave bread, as it is there made from the juca root. We also purchased some pigs, which cost us three pesos a piece; for at that time there were neither cows nor sheep on the island of Cuba: to this I must also add a scanty supply of other provisions; while every soldier took with him some glass beads for barter. We had three pilots; of whom the principal one, who had the chief command of our vessels, was called Anton de Alaminos, a native of Palos; the two others were, Camacho de Triana, and Juan Alvarez el Manquillo of Huelva. In the same way we hired sailors, and furnished ourselves with ropes, anchors, water-casks, and other necessaries for our voyage, all at our own expense and personal risk.

After we had met together, in all 110, we departed for a harbour on the north coast of Cuba, called by the natives Ajaruco. The distance from this place to the town of San Christoval, then recently built, was twenty-four miles; for the Havannah had then only been two years in our possession. In order that our squadron might not want for anything really useful, we engaged a priest at the town of San Christoval. His name was Alonso Gonzalez, and by fair words and promises we persuaded him to join us. We also appointed, in the name of his majesty, a treasurer, called Beruardino Miguez, a native of Saint Domingo de la Calzada. This was done in order that if it pleased God we should discover any new countries, where either gold, silver, or pearls were to be found, there might be amongst us a qualified person to take charge of the fifths for the Emperor. After everything had been thus properly ordered and we had heard mass said, we commended ourselves to God, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the virgin Mary his blessed mother, and set out on our voyage, as I shall further relate.

CHAPTER 2:

Of the Discovery of Yucatan, and the battle we fought there with the Natives.

We sailed in the year 1517 from the harbour of Jaruco and left the Havannah. This harbour lies on the north coast of Cuba, and is so called by the natives. After twelve days' sail we had passed the coast of Saint Antonius, which in Cuba is called the country of the Guanatavies, a wild tribe of Indians. We now made for the wide ocean, steering continually towards the west, totally ignorant of the shoals and currents or of the winds which predominate in this latitude. Certainly most hazardous on our part, and indeed we were very soon visited by a terrible storm, which continued two days and two nights, in which the whole of us had nigh perished.

After the storm had abated and we had changed our course, we came in sight of land on the twenty-first day after our departure from Cuba, which filled every heart with joy and thanks towards God. This country had never been discovered before, nor had any one ever heard of it. From our ships we could perceive a considerable sized town, which lay about six miles from the sea shore. On account of its magnitude, and because it was larger than any town in Cuba, we gave it the name of Grand Cairo.

We resolved that our smallest vessel should near the shore as much as possible, to learn the nature of the spot and look out for a good anchorage. One morning, the 5th of March, we perceived five large canoes full of men coming towards us as swift as their paddles and sails could bring them from the town just mentioned. These canoes were hollowed out of the trunks of large trees, after the manner of our kneading troughs. Many of them were big enough to hold from forty to fifty Indians.

As these Indians approached us in their canoes, we made signs of peace and friendship, beckoning at the same time to them with our hands and cloaks to come up to us that we might speak with them; for at that time there was nobody amongst us who understood the language of Yucatan or Mexico. They now came along side of us without evincing the least fear, and more than thirty of them climbed on board of our principal ship. We gave them bacon and cassave bread to eat, and presented each with a necklace of green glass beads. After they had for some time minutely examined the ship, the chief, who was a cazique, gave us to understand, by signs, that he wished to get down again into his canoe and return home, but that he would come the next day with many more canoes in order to take us on shore. These Indians wore a kind of cloak made of cotton, and a small sort of apron which hung from their hips half-way down to the knee, which they termed a maltates. We found them more intelligent than the Indians of Cuba, where only the women wear a similar species of apron made of cotton, which hangs down over their thighs, and is called by them a nagua.

But to continue my narrative. Very early the morning following, our cazique again called upon us: this time he brought with him twelve large canoes and a number of rowers. He made known to our captain, by signs, that we were good friends and might come to his town: he would give us plenty to eat with everything we wanted, and could go on shore in his twelve canoes. I shall never forget how he said, in his language, con escotoch, con escotoch, which means, come with me to my houses yonder. We therefore called the spot Punta de Cotoche, under which name it stands on the sea charts.

In consideration of all these friendly invitations from the cazique to accompany him to his village, our captain held a short consultation with us, when we came to the resolution to lower our boats, take the smallest of our vessels with us, and so proceed together with the twelve canoes all at once on shore, as the coast was crowded with Indians from the above-mentioned village. This was accordingly done, and we all arrived there at the same time. The cazique seeing us now landed, but that we made no signs of going to his village, again gave our captain to understand, by signs, that we should follow him to his habitation, making at the same time so many demonstrations of friendship, that a second consultation was held as to whether we should accompany him or not. This was carried in the affirmative, but we took every precaution to be upon our guard, marching in close order with our arms ready for action. We took fifteen crossbows with a like number of matchlocks, and followed the cazique, who was accompanied by a great number of Indians.

As we were thus marching along, and had arrived in the vicinity of several rocky mountains, the cazique all at once raised his voice, calling aloud to his warriors, who it seemed were lying wait in ambush, to fall upon us and destroy us all. The cazique had no sooner given the signal, than out rushed with terrible fury great numbers of armed warriors, greeting us with such a shower of arrows, that fifteen of our men were immediately wounded. These Indians were clad in a kind of cuirass made of cotton, and armed with lances, shields, bows, and slings; with each a tuft of feathers stuck on his head. As soon as they had let fly their arrows, they rushed forward and attacked us man to man, setting furiously to with their lances, which they held in both hands. When, however, they began to feel the sharp edge of our swords, and saw what destruction our crossbows and matchlocks made among them, they speedily began to give way. Fifteen of their number lay dead on the field.

At some distance from the spot where they had so furiously attacked us was a small place in which stood three houses built of stone and lime. These were temples in which were found many idols made of clay which were of a pretty good size; some had the countenances of devils, others those of females: some again had even more horrible shapes, and appeared to represent Indians committing horrible offences. In these temples we also found small wooden boxes containing other of their gods with hellish faces, several small shells, some ornaments, three crowns, and other trinkets, some in the shape of fish, others in the shape of ducks, all worked out of an inferior kind of gold. Seeing all this, the gold, and the good architectural style of the temples, we felt overjoyed at the discovery of this country; for Peru was not discovered till sixteen years after. While we were fighting with the Indians, the priest Gonzalez ordered the gold and small idols to be removed to our ships by two Indians whom we had brought with us from Cuba. During the skirmish we took two of the natives prisoners, who subsequently allowed themselves to be baptised and became Christians. One was named Melchior and the other Julian; both were tattooed about the eyes. The combat with the natives now being at an end, we resolved to re-embark, and prosecute our voyage of discovery further along the coast towards the west. Having dressed the wounds of our men we again set sail.

CHAPTER 3:

Discovery of the Coast of Campeachy.

Continuing the course we had previously determined upon, more westward along the coast, we discovered many promontories, bays, reefs, and shallows. We all considered this country to be an island, because our pilot, Anton de Alaminos, persisted in it. During daytime we proceeded with all caution, but lay to at nights. After sailing in this way for fourteen days, we perceived another village which appeared to us of considerable magnitude. Here was a bay with an inner harbour, and it appeared to us that there might also be some river or small stream where we could take in fresh water, which latter had become very scarce, as our supply in the casks, which were none of the best, was fast diminishing; for, as the expedition was fitted out solely by persons in poor circumstances, we had not been able to purchase good ones. It happened to be Sunday Lazari when we landed, and we therefore named this place in honour of this day, although we were well aware that the Indians called it the land of Campeachy.

In order that the whole of us might land at the same time, we determined to go on shore in our smallest vessel and three boats, all of us well armed, to be ready in case we should meet with a similar rencontre as at the cape of Cotoche. The sea in these bays and roads is very shallow, so that our vessels were forced to anchor at more than three miles distance from the shore. Thus precautious we landed near the village, but were still a good way from the place were we intended to fill our casks. From this spot the natives also had their water; for we now found that there was no rivulet in the neighbourhood.

When we had brought our casks on shore, filled them with water, and were about to embark again, about fifty Indians from the village came up to us. They all wore stately mantels made of cotton, appeared friendly disposed, and to be caziques. They asked us, by signs, what our business was there? We told them to take in water, and that we were about to re-embark. They further pointed with their hands to the rising of the sun, and asked us whether we came from that quarter, at the same time pronouncing the word Castilan, Castilan; but at that moment we did not pay any particular attention to the word Castilan. In the course of this interview, however, they gave us to understand that we might go with them to their village.

We held a consultation amongst ourselves as to whether we should accept the invitation, and at length unanimously agreed to follow them, but to use the utmost circumspection. They took us to some large edifices, which were strongly put together, of stone and lime, and had otherwise a good appearance. These were temples, the walls of which were covered with figures representing snakes and all manner of gods. Round about a species of altar we perceived several fresh spots of blood. On some of the idols there were figures like crosses, with other paintings representing groups of Indians. All this astonished us greatly as we had neither seen nor heard, of such things before. It appeared to us that the inhabitants had just been sacrificing some Indians to their gods, to obtain from them the power to overcome us.

There were great numbers of Indians with their wives who received us with pleasing smiles, and otherwise made every show of friendship; but their numbers gradually increasing we began to entertain fears that it would end in the same hostile manner as at Cape Cotoche. While we were thus looking on, a number of Indians approached us clad in tattered cloaks, each carrying a bundle of dried reeds, which they arranged in order on the ground. Among them we also perceived two troops of men armed with bows, lances, shields, slings, and stones, having their cotton cuirasses on. At the head of these, and at some distance from us stood the chiefs. At this moment ten Indians came running out of another temple, all dressed in long white robes, while the thick hair of their heads was so entangled and clotted with blood that it would have been an impossibility to have combed or put it in order without cutting it off. These personages were priests, and in New Spain are commonly termed Papas. I repeat it, that in New Spain they are termed papas, and I will therefore in future call them by that name. These papas brought with them a kind of incense, which looked like resin, and is termed by them copal. They had pans made of clay filled with glowing embers, and with these they perfumed us. They also gave us to understand, by signs, that we should leave their country before the bundles of reeds, which had been brought and were going to be set fire to, should be consumed, otherwise they would attack and kill us every man.

Upon this they ordered the bundles to be lighted, and as soon as they began to burn, all were silent, nor did they utter another syllable. Those, on the contrary, who had ranged themselves in order of battle, began to play on their pipes, blow their twisted shells, and beat their drums. When we saw what their real intentions were, and how confident they appeared, it of course reminded us that our wounds which we had received at Cape Cotoche were not yet healed; that two of our men had died of the consequences, whom we had been obliged to throw overboard. As the number of Indians continued to increase, we became alarmed, and resolved to retreat to the shore in the best order we could. In this way we marched along the coast until we arrived at that spot where our boats and the small vessels lay with the water-casks. Not far distant from this place stood a rock in the midst of the sea; for, on account of the vast numbers of Indians, we durst not venture to re-embark where we had at first landed, as they would no doubt have fallen upon us while we were getting into our boats.

After we had thus managed to get our water safe on board and re-embark at the small harbour which the bay here forms, we continued our course for six days and six nights without interruption, the weather being very fine. But now the wind suddenly veered round to the north and brought stormy weather, as is always the case with a north wind on this coast. The storm lasted twenty-four hours, and indeed we had nearly all of us met with a watery grave, so boisterous was the sea. In order to save ourselves from total destruction we cast anchor near the shore. The safety of our ship now depended upon two ropes, and had they given way we should have been cast on shore. Oh, in what a perilous situation we were then placed! had we been torn away from our anchors we must have been wrecked off the coast! But it was the will of Providence that our old ropes and cables should preserve us. When the storm had abated we continued our course along the coast and kept in as much as possible, that we might take in water when required. For, as I have before stated, our casks were old and leaky; nor was the best economy used with the water, for we thought by going on shore we should be certain either to meet with some spring or obtain it by digging wells. Thus coasting along we espied a village from our ships, and about three miles further on there was a kind of inner harbour, at the head of which it appeared to us there might be some river or brook; we therefore resolved to land here.

The water, as I have above mentioned, being uncommonly shallow along this coast, we were compelled to anchor our two larger vessels at about three miles distance from the shore, fearing they might otherwise run aground. We then proceeded with our smallest vessel and all our boats in order to land at the above-mentioned inner harbour. We were, however, quite upon our guard, and carried along with us, besides the water-casks, our arms, crossbows, and muskets.

It was about midday when we landed. The distance from here to the village, which was called Potonchan, might be three miles. Here we found some wells, maise plantations, and stone buildings. Our water-casks were soon filled, but we could not succeed to get them into our boats on account of an attack made upon us by great numbers of the inhabitants. I will, however, break off here and relate the battle we fought, in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 4:

How we landed in a bay close to some maise plantations, near the harbour of Potonchan, and of the attack that was made upon us there.

While we were busy taking in water, near the above-mentioned houses and maise plantations, great numbers of Indians were making towards us from the village of Potonchan, as it is termed by the natives. They had all their cotton cuirasses on, which reached to their knees, and were armed with bows, lances, shields, and swords. The latter were shaped like our broadswords, and are wielded with both hands. They also had slings and stones, their bunches of feathers on, and their whole bodies painted with white, brown, and black colours. They approached us in profound silence, as if they came with the most peaceable intentions, and inquired of us by signs if we came from the rising of the sun, thereby pronouncing the very same words which the inhabitants of St. Lazaro had used: namely, Castilan, Castilan. We told them, likewise by signs, that we indeed came from the rising of the sun. We certainly did not understand what they meant; nevertheless it was something for us to reflect on, while it at the same time gave rise to a variety of conjectures, since the natives of St. Lazaro had used the identical words.

It was about the hour of Ave Maria, when the Indians approached us in this manner. A few country houses were scattered round about the neighbourhood. We took the precaution to post watches in different quarters, and upon the whole kept a sharp look out, as the manner in which the natives were assembling seemed to forebode very little good. When we had closed our ranks and taken every necessary precaution, our ears were assailed by the cries and yells of large bodies of Indians who were advancing from different quarters. As they were all armed for battle we could no longer doubt that some evil design was lurking behind; we therefore held a consultation with our captain as to the course we should adopt. Many were of opinion that the best we could do would be to re-embark ourselves in all haste; but, as is always the case in critical moments, one advised this and another that, and so this proposal was overruled as unadvisable, for the vast numbers of Indians would certainly fall upon us while we were getting into our boats and we should all stand in danger of being killed. Others again, among which number I also was, were of opinion that the enemy should be attacked that very night; for, according to the old saying, he who strikes the first blow remains master of the field; but we might make up our minds that each of us singly would have to encounter thirty Indians at least.

Day now began to dawn, and we emboldened each other to meet the coming severe conflict by putting our trust in God and commending our cause to him, while every one was determined to defend himself to the utmost. As soon as daylight had fully broken forth, we perceived more troops of armed natives moving towards the coast with flying colours. They had on their feather-knots, and were provided with drums, bows, lances, shields, and joined themselves to the others who had arrived in the night. They divided themselves into different bodies, surrounded us on all sides, and commenced pouring forth such showers of arrows, lances, and stones, that more than eighty of our men were wounded at the first onset. They next rushed furiously forward and attacked us man to man: some with their lances, others with their swords and arrows, and all this with such terrible fury that we were compelled also to show them earnest. We dealt many a good thrust and blow amongst them, keeping up at the same time an incessant fire with our muskets and crossbows; for while some loaded others fired. At last, by dint of heavy blows and thrusts we forced them to give way; but they did not retreat further than was necessary, in order that they might still continue to hem us in in all safety; constantly crying out in their language, Al calachoni, al calachoni; which signifies, kill the chief! And sure enough our captain was wounded in no less than twelve different places by their arrows. I myself had three; one of which was in my left side and very dangerous, the arrow having pierced to the very bone. Others of our men were wounded by the enemy's lances, and two were carried off alive; of whom, one was called Alonzo Bote, the other was an old Portuguese.

Perceiving how closely we were hemmed in on all sides by the enemy, who not only kept constantly pouring in fresh troops but were copiously supplied on the field of battle with meat, drink, and quantities of arrows, we soon concluded that all our courageous fighting would not advance us a step. The whole of us were wounded, many shot through the neck, and more than fifty of our men were killed. In this critical situation we determined to cut our way manfully through the enemy's ranks and make for the boats, which fortunately lay on the coast near at hand. We therefore firmly closed our ranks and broke through the enemy. At that moment you should have heard the whizzing of their arrows, the horrible yell they set up, and how the Indians provoked each other to the combat, at the same time making desperate thrusts with their lances. But a still more serious misfortune awaited us; for as we made a simultaneous rush to our boats, they soon sunk or capsized, so that we were forced to cling to them as well as we could; and in this manner by swimming we strove to make the best of our way to the small vessel, which was now in all haste coming up to our assistance. Many of our men were even wounded while climbing into the vessel, but more particularly those who clung to its side; for the Indians pursued us in their canoes and attacked us without intermission. With the greatest exertions and help of God we thus got out of the hands of this people.

After we had gained our vessels we found that fifty-seven of our men were missing, besides the two whom the Indians had carried off alive, and five whom we had thrown overboard, who had died in consequence of their wounds and extreme thirst. The battle lasted a little longer than half an hour. The spot where it took place was certainly called Potonchan. Our seamen, however, gave it the name of Bahea de mala Pelea, (the bay of the disastrous engagement,) as it stands on the maps. As soon as we found ourselves in safety we returned thanks to Almighty God for the preservation of our lives. Our wounded, however, had still great sufferings to undergo, as we had nothing but salt water to wash their wounds with, which caused them to swell very much. Some of our men swore most bitterly against our chief pilot Alaminos, and the conduct he had pursued; he having steadfastly maintained that this was an island and not a continent. I must, however, break off here, and relate what further happened to us, in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 5:

We resolve to return to Cuba. The extreme thirst we suffered, and all the fatigues we underwent until our arrival in the port of Havannah.

After we had got into our vessels, as above related, and returned thanks to God for our preservation, we commenced dressing our wounds. None of us had escaped without two, three, or four wounds. Our captain had as many as twelve, and there was only one single soldier who came off whole. We therefore determined to return to Cuba; but as most of the sailors who had accompanied us on shore were also wounded, we had not sufficient hands to work the sails, we were therefore forced to set fire to our smallest vessel and leave it to the mercy of the waves, after taking out all the ropes, sails, and anchors, and distributing the sailors, who were not wounded equally among the two other vessels. We had, however, to struggle with another far greater evil. This was our great want of fresh water; for although we had filled our barrels and casks near Potonchan, we did not succeed to bring them off, owing to the furious attack of the natives and the hurry we were in to get on board: thus we had been compelled to leave them behind and return without a single drop of water. We suffered most intensely from thirst, and the only way we could in some measure refresh our parched tongues was to hold the edges of our axes between our lips. Oh, what a fearful undertaking it is to venture out on the discovery of new countries, and place one's life in danger, as we were obliged to do! Those alone can form any idea of it who have gone through the hard school of experience.

We now kept as close into the shore as possible, to look out for some stream or creek where we might meet with fresh water. After thus continuing our course for three days we espied an inlet or mouth of some river as we thought, and sent a few hands on shore in the hopes of meeting with water. These were fifteen sailors who had remained on board during the battle at Potonchan, and three soldiers who had been only slightly wounded. They carried along with them pickaxes and three small casks. But the water in the inlet was salt, and wherever they dug wells it was equally bad. They nevertheless filled the casks with it, but it was so bitter and salty as to be unfit for use. Two soldiers who drank of it became ill of the consequences. The water here swarmed with lizards; we therefore gave this place the name of Lizard Bay, under which name it stands on the sea charts.

But, to continue my history, I must not forget to mention that while our boats were on shore in search of water, there suddenly arose such a violent tempest from the north-east, that our ships were nigh being cast on shore. For, as we were forced to lay to, the wind blowing hard from the north and north-east, our position was extremely dangerous, from a scarcity of ropes.

When the men who had gone on shore with our boats perceived the danger we were in, they hastened to our assistance, and cast out additional anchors and cables. In this way we lay for two days and two nights. After the expiration of that time we again heaved our anchors and steered in the direction of Cuba. Our pilot Alaminos here held a consultation with the two others, when they concluded that the best plan would be to get, if possible, into the latitude of Florida, which, according to their charts and furthest measurement, could not be more than 210 miles distant; for they assured us if we could get into the latitude of Florida, we should have a better and speedier sail to the Havannah. It turned out exactly as they had said; for Alaminos had been in these parts before, having accompanied Juan de Leon when he discovered Florida, about ten or twelve years previously. After four days' sail we crossed this gulf and came in sight of Florida.

CHAPTER 6:

How twenty of us went on shore in the bay of Florida with the pilot Alaminos in search of water; the hostilities which the natives of this country commenced with us; and of all that further befel us on our passage to the Havannah.

As soon as we had arrived off the coast of Florida we determined that twenty of our men, who had almost recovered from their wounds, should go on shore. Among the number was myself and the pilot, Alaminos. We each took a mattock and a small cask, being, moreover, well armed with crossbows and muskets. Our captain, who was dangerously wounded and very much weakened by the extreme thirst he suffered, begged of us, in the name of God, to bring him some sweet water, as he was almost dying of thirst. Indeed, the water, as I have before said, which we then had was quite salty and not drinkable. We landed in a creek, and our pilot again recognized this coast, which he had visited ten or twelve years previously with Ponce de Leon, when he discovered these countries. They had here fought a battle with the natives, and lost many of their men.

We therefore took every precaution lest the natives should also fall upon us unawares. We posted two sentinels at a spot where the stream had a considerable breadth. We then dug deep wells where we thought fresh water was likely to be found. The sea was just ebbing, and it pleased God that we should find sweet water there.

With joyful hearts we then took our fill of the refreshing beverage, and washed the bandages of our wounded. A good hour's time was spent in this, and as we were on the point of re-embarking with the casks of water, quite overjoyed at our success, one of the men whom we had placed sentinel on the coast came running towards us in all haste, crying aloud, "To arms! to arms! numbers of Indians are approaching, both by land and sea." And indeed the Indians came up to us almost at the same time with the sentinel.

They had immense sized bows with sharp arrows, lances, and spears—among these some were shaped like swords—while their large powerful bodies were covered with skins of wild beasts. They made straightways to us, let fly their arrows, and wounded six of our men at the first onset. I was also slightly wounded in my right arm. We, however, received our enemies with such well-directed blows and musket-shots that they very soon quitted us who had been digging the wells, and turned towards the creek to assist their companions who in their canoes were attacking those left behind in the boat. The latter had been forced to fight man to man, and had already lost the boat, which the Indians were towing off behind their canoes. Four of the sailors had been wounded, and the pilot, Alaminos, himself severely so in the throat. We, however, courageously faced our enemy, went up to our middles in the water, and soon compelled them, by dint of our swords, to jump out of the boat again. Twenty-two of the enemy lay dead on the shore; three others, who were slightly wounded, we took on board with us, but they died soon after.

After this skirmish was ended, we questioned the soldier who had stood sentinel as to what had become of his companion, Berrio. He related that his comrade had left him with an axe in his hand, in order to go and cut down a palm-tree, and that this was near the inlet where the Indians first made their appearance. He had also heard him cry out in Spanish, upon which he himself had immediately hastened to give us the information. His companion, no doubt, had been murdered by the Indians. Singular that this man should have lost his life here, he being the only one who escaped without a wound at the battle of Potonchan. We made every search for him, and followed the track of the Indians who had just attacked us; this indeed led us to a palm-tree which had been recently cut, around which were numerous foot-marks. We could, however, discover no marks of blood; and concluded, therefore, that the Indians had carried off the man alive. After we had fruitlessly searched for him in every quarter for upwards of an hour, and repeatedly called out aloud to him, without receiving any answer, we returned to our boat, and brought the water on board. The joy of our men was as great as if we had brought them new life; and one of the soldiers, from excessive thirst, leaped from the vessel into the boat, seized one of the small casks, and poured such an abundance of water into his body, that he instantaneously swelled out and expired.

Having brought the water on board our vessels, hauled in our boats, we hoisted our sails and stood direct for the Havannah. The day and following night the weather was most beautiful as we passed the Martyr Islands and sand-banks of the same name. We had only four fathoms water, where the sea was deepest; our principal ship consequently struck against the rocks and became very leaky, so that all hands were engaged at the pumps, without then being able to get the water under, while we every moment feared the vessel would go down. I never shall forget the answer which some sailors from the Levant, who were among the crew, made when we cried out to them: "Come on, my boys, help us to pump out the water, or we shall all be lost! you see how our wounds and hard labour have debilitated us." "That's your own look out," said they; "we get no pay, suffer both from hunger and thirst, and have, in the bargain, to share your fatigues and wounds." Nothing now remained but to drive them to the pumps by main force; and in this way we had alternately to work the sails and the pumps, however distasteful to us, until the Lord Jesus brought us into the port of Carena, where now the town of Havannah stands, the latter being previously called Puerto de Carenas, and not the Havannah.

As soon as we had set foot on shore we returned thanks to the Almighty for our safe return, and got the water out of our principal ship, in which a Portuguese diver, who happened to be on board another vessel, greatly assisted us. We also immediately wrote to the governor, Diego Velasquez, giving him an account of the countries we discovered with large townships and houses built of stone, whose inhabitants were clad in cotton, and wore maltates; likewise of the gold and the regular maise-plantations of the country. Our captain journeyed overland to Santispiritus, where he had his Indian commendary: he died, however, ten days after his arrival there, from his wounds. The rest of our men became dispersed through the island, and three more of our men died of their wounds at the Havannah.

Our vessels were taken to Santiago de Cuba, where the governor resided. Here the two Indians were brought on shore whom we had taken with us from the Punta de Cotoche, as above related, called Melchorillo and Julianillo. When, however, we brought forth the box with the crowns, the golden ducks, the fish, and the idols, more noise was made about them than they really merited, so that they became the common topics of conversation throughout the islands of St. Domingo and Cuba; indeed the fame thereof even reached Spain. There it was said that none of the countries which had hitherto been discovered were as rich as this, and in none had there been found houses built of stone. The earthen gods, it was said, were the remains of the ancient heathen times; others again went so far as to affirm that they were descendants of the Jews whom Titus and Vespasian had driven from Jerusalem, who had been shipwrecked off this coast. Peru, indeed, was not then known, and in so far the countries we had discovered were justly considered of the greatest importance. Diego Velasquez closely questioned the two Indians as to whether there were any gold mines in their country. They answered in the affirmative; and when they were shown some of the gold-dust found in the island of Cuba, they said there was abundance of it in their country. In this they told an untruth, as it is very well known there are neither goldmines on the Punta de Cotoche nor even in whole Yucatan. They were likewise shown the beds in which the seeds of that plant are sown from whose root the cassave bread is made, and in Cuba called yuca: they assured us that the same plant grew in their country, and was called by them tale. As the cassave-root at Cuba is called yuca, and the ground in which it is planted by the Indians tale, so from these two words arose the name of the country, Yucatan; for the Spaniards who were standing around the governor at the time he was speaking to the two Indians said, "You see, sir, they call their country Yucatan." And from this circumstance the country retained the name of Yucatan, although the natives call it otherwise.

In this beautiful voyage of discovery we had spent our all, and returned to Cuba covered with wounds, and as poor as beggars; yet we had reason to congratulate ourselves that it had not been equally disastrous to us all as to many of our companions who had lost their lives. Our captain, as I have already mentioned, died soon after his return; and all of us suffered for a considerable time after from our wounds. Our whole loss amounted to seventy men, which was all we had gained by this voyage of discovery.

Concerning all this the governor Diego Velasquez wrote to those gentlemen in Spain who at that time managed the affairs of India, and boasted of the discoveries he had made, and of the vast expense it had put him to. This actually obtained credit, and the bishop of Burgos, Don Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca, who also bore the title of archbishop of Rosano, and was president of Indian affairs, wrote in that strain to his majesty, in Flanders, vastly extolling the merit of Diego Velasquez, at the same time not as much as even mentioning the names of any of us who had really discovered the country.

I will, however, break off here, and relate in the following chapter what further fatigues I and three more of my companions in arms had to undergo.

CHAPTER 7:

The fatigues I had to undergo, until my arrival in the town of Trinidad.

I have already above related that I with some other soldiers who had not quite recovered from our wounds remained behind in the Havannah. As soon as the latter began to heal a little we three made up our minds to go in company with a certain Pedro d'Avila, an inhabitant of the Havannah, to the town of Trinidad. This man was going to make a voyage in a canoe along the south coast, and had taken a lading of cotton shirts, which he intended to dispose of in Trinidad. As I have above stated, these canoes are hollowed out of the trunks of trees, after the manner of our bakers' troughs: in this country they are used for coasting; and we had to pay Pedro d'Avila ten doubloons for the voyage.

As we were coasting along, sometimes rowing, sometimes sailing, we arrived after the eleventh day in sight of an Indian village, subject to the Spaniards, and called Cannareon; there arose at night-time such a terrible gale of wind, that, although we rowed with all our strength, we could not keep the sea any longer. Notwithstanding every exertion of Pedro d'Avila, of some Indians from the Havannah, and several other good rowers we had with us, nothing at last remained but to run the canoe aground between the steep rocks. The canoe was dashed to pieces, the whole lading of Pedro d'Avila went to the bottom, and we made the best of our way on shore, naked as the day we were born, our bodies cut and bruised all over by clambering over the rocks, for we had stripped ourselves of our clothes in order to be the better able to swim, and also, if possible, to save the canoe. As we had only escaped with our lives among these rocks, none other choice was left us than to continue our road over them to Trinidad, which lay along the coast through a barren country full of rugged rocks, where our feet soon became blistered and wounded; as to think of getting anything to eat was quite out of the question; while we had continually to struggle with a terrific gale of wind and the sea breaking over the rocks. Although we had not neglected to cover our bodies as much as possible with leaves and herbs, we nevertheless got sore boils between our legs, which bled very much. At last we could proceed no further; for the sharp stones had covered our feet with wounds: we managed, however, with considerable trouble to reach a more elevated spot. None of us having his sword left, we contrived by means of sharp stones to loosen the bark of some trees and bind it as well as we could under the soles of our feet, with the tendrils of climbers, which grew among the wood. And in this way, after suffering great fatigues we reached a sandy district on the coast, whence in a couple of days we arrived in the Indian village Yeguarama, at that time the property of Bartholomeus de las Casas, who was a priest. I knew him afterwards when he belonged to the order of the Dominicans, and became bishop of Chiopia. Here the Indians gave us to eat, and on the following day we arrived at another village, called Chipiona, which was the joint property of Alonso de Avila, and of Sandoval, but this was not the captain of the same name who gained such vast renown in New Spain. From this place we at last came to Trinidad, where I had an acquaintance, by name Antonio de Medina, who provided me with a suit of clothes as they were worn in that town; my comrades were similarly provided by other of the inhabitants. Quite worn out by fatigue and miserably poor, I set off for Santiago de Cuba, where the governor Diego Velasquez resided. He was just then busily engaged fitting out another squadron, and was highly delighted at seeing me again when I called upon him, for we were related to each other: and as one word led to another, he asked me if my wounds were sufficiently healed to make another trip to Yucatan? I could not help smiling at this and said, who gave the country that name? for the natives do not call it so. "So Melchior, whom you brought with you, calls it," resumed he. "Call it rather, (said I,) the land where they killed one half of our men and wounded the other." "Well, (said he,) if you have undergone many fatigues, you have only shared the same fate with all others who have ventured out on the discovery of new countries. But, on the other hand, you will not fail to be highly honoured and rewarded by his majesty the king, to whom I will transmit a faithful account of all this. Therefore, my friend, you may in all safety join yourself to the squadron I am now fitting out, and I will take care that you shall have an honorable post." What further happened I will next relate.

CHAPTER 8:

How Diego Velasquez, governor of Cuba, sent out another armament to the country we had discovered.

It was in the year of our Lord 1518, after Diego Velasquez had learnt the good account we gave of the newly-discovered country, called Yucatan, that he determined to send thither another expedition. For this purpose he selected four vessels, among which were the two in which we warriors had accompanied Cordoba on our recent voyage to Yucatan, purchased at our own expense. At the time this squadron was fitting out there were staying at Santiago de Cuba, Juan de Grijalva, Pedro de Alvarado, Francisco de Montejo, and Alonso de Avila; who had commendaries of Indians in these islands, and had come to transact business with the governor. As these were all men of courage and energy, Velasquez soon made arrangements with them to take part in this expedition, on the following terms: that Juan de Grijalva, who was related to him, should have the chief command of the whole expedition as captain-general, while Pedro de Alvarado, Francisco de Montejo, and Alonso de Avila, should be appointed to the command of the three other ships. They had also to furnish the vessels with provisions of cassave bread and pickled meat; Diego Velasquez had, on the other hand, to procure the four vessels, furnish the necessary crossbows, muskets, goods for barter, and other matters of less importance. Our account that the houses in the newly-discovered country were built of stone and lime, had spread a vast idea of its riches, added to which the Indian Melchorejo had given to understand by signs that it abounded in gold mines. All this created a great desire among the inhabitants and soldiers throughout the island, who possessed no commendaries of Indians, to go in quest of such a rich country; consequently, in a very short time, we mustered 220. Each person, moreover, furnished himself with additional provisions, arms, and other matters which might be useful.

Thus I again took my departure for that country, under the same commanders I subsequently once more visited it. The instructions which our commanders received from Diego Velasquez, were to this effect, that they should barter for as much gold and silver as they could get, and if they deemed it advisable settle colonies, but left this entirely to their own judgment. A person of the name of Penolosa accompanied us in the capacity of comptroller; for priest we had a certain Juan Diaz. We had also the same three pilots who accompanied us on our former voyage; and a fourth, whose name I do not remember. Each had charge of one of the vessels; but the first in command, as chief pilot, was Anton de Alaminos.

But before I proceed with my narrative, I must here remark, that it is not for want of deference on my part, that I barely give the names of the noblemen who were our commanding officers, without adding their titles and describing their several escutcheons, but shall simply call them thus, Pedro de Alvarado, Francisco de Montejo, and Alonso de Avila. I therefore now take this opportunity of saying, that Pedro de Alvarado was a bold cavalier, who, subsequent to the conquest of New Spain, became governor and chief justice of the provinces of Guatimala, Honduras, and Chaopo, and comptoir of Santiago. In like manner Francisco de Montejo, a man of great courage, subsequently was governor and chief justice of Yucatan. I shall merely call them by their proper names, up to that time when his majesty conferred on them honorary titles and sovereign authority.

But to return to my subject, our four vessels lay in the harbour of Matanza on the north coast, not far from the old Havannah, which at that time was not built where it now stands. In this harbour, or at least in its neighbourhood, most of the inhabitants had their stores of cassave bread and pickled meat. Here consequently our vessels were provided with everything they further required. This place moreover had been appointed the rendezvous for all the officers and men.

But, before I continue my narrative, I will explain how this harbour obtained the name of Matanza, though it may seem rather out of place here; yet, as so many persons have asked me how it originated, there is some excuse.

Some time ago, when Cuba was not quite subdued, it happened that a vessel, bound from the island of St. Domingo to the Luccas, during a heavy storm, was wrecked off the coast. This took place near the river and harbour of Matanza; there were thirty Spaniards and two Spanish ladies on board. In order to convey them across the river, numbers of Indians had collected together from the Havannah and other districts. They appeared most friendly inclined, and offered to carry the shipwrecked across in their canoes and take them to their habitations, where they would give them to eat. The Spaniards accepted this offer; when the Indians, however, had arrived in the midst of the stream, they upset their canoes and drowned them all, save three of the men and one of the females. The men were allotted to the other Indians, but the female, a very beautiful woman, was given to the most powerful of the caziques, the person who had concocted this piece of treachery. From this circumstance it was that the harbour got the name of Matanza.

I was personally acquainted with the female whose misfortune I have just related. After the total conquest of Cuba, she left the cazique in whose power she then was, and married a citizen of Trinidad, by name Pedro Sanchez Farsan.

I was also acquainted with the three Spaniards whose lives had been spared. One was Gonzalo Mexia, an old man, and native of Xeres; the other, Juan de Santiste-ban, from Madrigal; and the third was Cascorro, a sailor and fisherman, of Huelva. The cazique in whose power he was, had given him his daughter in marriage, and bored holes through his ears and nose, after the Indian fashion.

Having thus detained the reader for a while with these old stories, it is time I return to the thread of my narrative.

On the 5th of April, 1518, all of us having met together, the officers and soldiers, the pilots made acquainted with the signals, and the hour of departure fixed, we attended mass with fervent devotion, and weighed anchor. After ten days' sail, we passed the cape of Guaniguanico, called by the sailors San Anton. Eight days after, we came in sight of the island of Cozumel; it happened to be the feast of the Holy Cross. This time our ships were carried further off by the currents than the time before under Cordoba; the consequence was that we now landed on the south coast of the island. We here espied a village, and found a good anchorage near it, perfectly free from all rocks. Our commander-in-chief, therefore, went on shore here with a good body of soldiers. The inhabitants, who had never witnessed such a sight before, immediately took to flight when they saw our vessels approaching, so that not a single one of them had remained in the village. At length we discovered two Indians among the recently cut maise plants, who had not been able to get off quick enough. We brought them into the presence of our captain, who spoke to them with the help of Julianillo and Melchorejo, whom we had captured at the Punta de Cotoche, and who understood their language. The distance between their countries was only four hours' sail, which accounts for the inhabitants of Cozumel speaking the same language. Our commander was very kind to them, gave each some green glass beads, and sent them away to bring the Calachoni of the district, (so the caziques are termed here;) they, however, never returned. While we were still waiting for them, an Indian woman came towards us, comely in appearance, and who spoke the language of Jamaica. She told us that the Indians had fled, out of fear, to the mountains. As I myself and many others among us understood her language, which is the same as that of the island of Cuba, we were quite astonished at the circumstance, and inquired of her how she had got here.

She told us that, two years ago, she had left Jamaica with ten Indians, in a large canoe, in order to go fishing among the islands in this neighbourhood, but had been driven on shore by the currents, when the inhabitants killed her husband with most of her companions, and sacrificed them to their gods.

It struck our commander, as soon as he had learnt this, that the woman might be employed as a negotiator. He therefore desired her to go and fetch the inhabitants and cazique of the district, and gave her two days to return in. We durst not send Melchorejo and Julianillo with her, lest they should run away and return to their own country.

The day following, the Indian woman returned, but informed us that, notwithstanding all her representations, she could neither persuade the Indians nor their wives to accompany her. We called this place Santa Cruz, because we had discovered it four or five days before the feast of the Holy Cross. In this neighbourhood there was plenty of honey, manioc, patates, and large herds of musk swine, which have their navels on their backs. This island contains three poor villages, of which the one I am now speaking of is the largest; the two smaller ones were both situated on a promontory at about six miles distance from each other. Our commander Grijalva, perceiving that it was mere loss of time to make any further stay here, gave orders for re-embarking. The Indian woman of Jamaica went along with us, and we continued our voyage.

CHAPTER 9:

How we landed at Champoton.

From this point we sailed in the same direction we had taken under Cordoba, and arrived after eight days' sail off the coast of Champoton, the place where the Indians had so ill used us, as has been related in the proper place. The sea being very shallow in these parts we dropt our anchor at about three miles distance from the shore, and immediately landed in all our boats with half of our men, as near to the village as possible. The inhabitants and other Indians in the neighbourhood gathered themselves together as they had the time before, when they killed fifty-six of our men and wounded all the rest of us. From their bearing and proud demeanour we could easily perceive that they had not forgotten their victory. They were all well armed according to their fashion, with bows, lances, shields, and broadswords, which they wield with both hands. Added to all this they had slings, cotton cuirasses, drums and trumpets, while most of them had their faces painted black and white. They had arranged themselves along the sea shore in order to fall upon us as soon as we landed. But, as our previous loss had taught us prudence, we took with us this time some falconets, and otherwise well armed ourselves with crossbows and matchlocks.

When we were near enough they let fly such a shower of arrows and lances that the half of our men were speedily wounded. As soon, however, as we got on shore, we quickly gave them an evil return with our matchlocks and sabres. Nothing daunted by this they each selected their man, whom they particularly aimed at with their arrows, but we had taken the precaution to put on cotton cuirasses. They continued to combat with us for some time, until the arrival of another of our long boats, when we drove them back to the wells near the village. In this conflict we lost Juan de Quitera and many other soldiers. Our commander, Juan de Grijalva, got three arrow wounds and lost two of his teeth, and above sixty of our men were wounded. Immediately upon our putting the enemy to flight, we entered the village, dressed our wounds, and buried the dead. Not a single person had remained behind in the village, and even those whom we had driven back to the wells had merely staid there a sufficient time to carry off their property. In this skirmish we made three prisoners, one of whom was a person of rank. Our commander set them at liberty, desiring them to go and call the cazique of the district. He also presented them with green glass beads and small bells to distribute among the inhabitants, in order to gain their friendship. We treated the three prisoners upon the whole with every kindness, and gave them glass corals to encourage them and gain their good faith. They left us indeed, but took good care not to return; we thought it possible, however, that Julianillo and Melchorejo had misrepresented our commission to them. We staid four days in this place, and I shall never forget it on account of the immense sized locusts which we saw here. It was a stony spot on which the battle took place, and these creatures, while it lasted, kept continually flying in our faces; and as at the same moment we were greeted by a shower of arrows from the enemy, we also mistook these locusts for arrows. But, as soon as we had discovered our mistake, we deceived ourselves in another more direful way, for we now mistook arrows for locusts, and discontinued to shield ourselves against them. In this way we mistook locusts and arrows to our great sorrow, were severely wounded in consequence, and otherwise found ourselves in a very awkward predicament.

CHAPTER 10:

We continued our course and ran into Terminos bay, as we named it.

On our further voyage we came to an opening on the coast, which to us appeared to be the mouth of some broad and large river. It was, however, not a river as we had supposed, but a good harbour, which reached so far inland, and had such a considerable breadth, that it appeared like a sea; and our pilot Anton de Alaminos confidently asserted that this was an island whose two promontories reached nigh to the continent. We, therefore, termed this opening the Boca de Terminos, under which name it may be found on the sea charts. Our commander and the other officers went on shore here with the greater part of our men, among which number I also was. We remained three whole days in this place in order thoroughly to explore the opening and sail through it in all directions. We discovered, however, that it was no island, but a deep indented bay, formed by the continent, affording us a most commodious harbour. As we also found temples here built of stone and lime, full of idols made of wood or clay, with other figures, sometimes representing women, sometimes serpents, also horns of various kinds of wild animals, we concluded that an Indian village must be near at hand: we considered, moreover, that this would be a most excellent spot to found a colony. We had, however, deceived ourselves in one thing, the district being quite uninhabited. The temples most probably belonged to merchants and hunters, who on their journies most likely ran into this harbour and there made their sacrifices. Fallow deer and rabbits abounded in this neighbourhood, and with one greyhound only we killed ten of the former and great numbers of the latter. Our dog took such a liking to this spot that it ran away while we were busy reimbarking, nor did we see it again until we visited this place subsequently with Cortes, when it appeared in excellent condition, quite plump and sleeky.

Having thoroughly explored Terminos harbour, and sounded it throughout, we pursued our course along the coast to the river Tabasco, which at present, after the name of its discoverer, is called the river Grijalva.

---

# History: The Confluence of two Eternities

Destiny, dim-brooding over it, lies illegible, inevitable, only knowable to the Eye far removed.

Date: 2025-04-10
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/history-the-confluence-of-two-eternities
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/history-the-confluence-of-two-eternities

History is a strange subject. On one hand, there is the fact that certain events did actually occur within this shared Universe of ours; but on the other, there is the reality of our imperfect knowledge of these same events. All we can observe is the shadow of the past, presented to us in the form of a scattering of fragments and the chains of causality.

This is to say nothing of the sheer scale of human experience, which we put in a book and name History. Countless multitudes of people, each on their own Romantic journey through life, ending in blood, or sickness, or old age.

And yet, out of this whirlwind of Human experiences—or, more honestly, from whatever scraps of that experience Nature has chosen to hand down to us—there is also a desire to find broader meaning. Answers to our perennial questions like: What is the meaning of life? What is justice? Why should we hold off on blowing out our brains?

But how can we ever hope to answer these questions with history? Consider for a second how little you understand your own life, with its scattered jumble of cause and effect; what answers can you confidently find there? Because for me, despite the utter tenderness and sympathy—let alone keenness—with which I examine my life, there seems to be little meaning beyond the basic skeleton of my pre-programmed march from cradle to grave, equipped with a prescribed list of stations at which I will stop.

What, for example, do we now know of the internal dramas or court politics of the Jarls of dark and frozen Norway? Only that they were liable to venture forth in flat-bottomed longships to rape and reeve, unknowingly laying the seeds of the 19th-century Germanic conquest of Earth. And how much less do we know about the lives of the slaves they dragged back in chains to work their lives away, eking rye from those icy cliffs, never again to see home or kin?

If history is the accounting of the past lives of Men, then it is a poor accounting riddled with many errors, I say!

But despite this, we know quite a bit about the past. From genetics to archaeological evidence to those scattered accounts I mentioned, we have pieced the jigsaw together with surprising, and ever-increasing, accuracy. To the point that now, despite the missing chunks, we can see clear patterns. The idiosyncratic natures of our lives cross each other out until suddenly, from confusion, shapes emerge.

The reality of this moment in the spring of 2025 will fade like all others, each breath carrying its wonder out of time—that greatest of all mysteries—and into memory. Eventually, when my fragile skull breaks, it will pass out of memory also and into oblivion.

The whole Future and Past are there in that moment, Destiny, dim-brooding over it, lies illegible, inevitable, only knowable to the Eye far removed. What wonders lie in every day—had we the sight, as happily we have not, to see them, every second the confluence of two Eternities!1

Just like a mountain can be enjoyed in a picture of the static skyline or on the trail in the flesh, our knowledge of reality gains as much as it obscures with distance.

1paraphrasing Carlyle

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# Onwards and Upwards!

What I want out of the State

Date: 2025-04-06
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/onwards-and-upwards
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/onwards-and-upwards

The purpose of this second blog is for me to work through ideas I don’t feel are fully formed, but whose shape I have in my mind. Today I wanted to reflect a little on what I actually positively believe about the world. And specifically what I would like the State to pursue.

Me explaining my esoteric political beliefs to 100 subscribers

Principally, I think that America is facing many simultaneous crises as a result of the profound way computers have changed Human life - front of mind recently the reality that P(Doom) is inching up by the day. We happen to face this crisis while America, like Spain in the 17th century, is a civilization whose motivating ideological force is spent.

Given that I attach an almost unlimited moral weight to the future survival of Life - what else could possibly have moral value? The fact that these crises have the possibility of ending complex life leads me to take them extremely seriously. It also happens to be true that the obvious insurance against these risk vectors is to scatter our species into the inky void of space. If Humanity dies on Earth right now - from one of a number of disasters - it is over, making that no longer true is a moral imperative of the highest degree.1

I appreciate that how, exactly, we achieve this Human scattering is rocky and ambiguous, but this is all the more reason we should clearly set our intentions towards it. We cannot simply hope it will emerge as the natural product of other values - for example maximizing our lifetime discounted utility.

The path that I see to accomplishing this goal is one built around America. Specifically, a rejuvenated American Nation with a civic religion bent soul and purpose towards the goal of settling Space - with the same fervor the Iberians had in their quest for conquest. America, alone among the countries in the world, has the experience, the infrastructure, and the security to accomplish something on this scale. But above that, we also have a uniquely flexible political system which can be set towards any objective - in an orderly and thoughtful manner - if it is what the citizens want. Our Golden Age is already fading and we have spent the last 50 years twiddling our epicurean thumbs in search of more and more complex toys and distractions. We should get to work in this twilight before the sun sets and our species is again thrown to the winds of chance.

I’m not going to pretend this will happen, or that any political party will ever run on it, but it is what I would do if I had power and should be thought of—at least for now, we all change—as the benchmark against which I assess all policies. It is my Sharia law, so to speak. Perhaps even my GDP per capita…2

Since the purpose of this movement is not to achieve Utopia on Earth but our mere long-run survival, the facts of Human nature must be taken for granted and accepted as a part of life. Among these is the Human tendency for tribal loyalty and the Human desire for the success of our biological descendants. Since the only way we have any hope of achieving my goal is through the willing sacrifice of individuals for the success of the group properly motivating the individual is the central problem. 

Success would almost certainly require the vast majority of this country accepting that our lives will be materially poorer and more difficult than they are today. Not because our productive and creative abilities are left untended but because they are focused on a goal other than material comfort, specifically, the expansion of America. I believe that Space colonization centered around American Nationalism is compatible with our instincts in a way one based around abstract ideals like Secular Humanism is not.3

But I would argue that struggle is the meaning of life and our short flash of existence - sandwiched between twin eternities of silence - can either be Lived or LARP’d. I, for one, intend to live it. 

The Greatest Generation of Americans (born at the turn of the 20th century) lived through Depression and War but built the post-War utopia whose prosperity we live in today. It was their struggle and overcoming against the Nazis and the Soviets that turned our elites during that era into what they were. It has been the lack of struggle that has decayed them—on both left and right—into what they are today. All leisure aristocracies rot in the limit. Our politicians and professional yappers invent nonsense as we drift into disrepair. More and more of intellectual and political life is devoted to obvious distractions and lies. The recent Trump insanity is only the tip of the iceberg (I know 5 years is a long time, but we ought not forget Covid). With the Denial of Death eating at the heart of our society like a worm.

I think a point of basic disagreement with my most liberal friends has been my deep feeling that society is in fact in decline. I hope that we can now all agree - in light of the most recent chicanery - this is true.  I see a not small amount of cope online that perhaps as we get poorer, our lives will become more difficult and in response the rot I’ve described will be reversed. 

To this I would simply invite you to look at the poor in the world today and tell me if their elite classes are more virtuous than ours. No, we can sink all the way to the bottom with the Congo if we aren’t careful.

Struggle alone is insufficient. Instead, for struggle to be virtuous, it must be real, it must be towards honest goals. Of course, lies and trickery do abound; in ideologies, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of ideologies, but lies were never the originating influence. They are not the health and life of such things, but their disease, and a sign their being about to die! Lies give birth to nothing; they give death to all things. It is our sole duty as Men to sweep them out of our thoughts as out of our practice.4

I sincerely believe however that this goal - the conquest and colonization of our Universe - is not a lie. It is the principle calling of our Time, the thing that when millennia pass will be remembered, not ups and downs of the Current Thing(TM). 

I don’t have specific policy recommendations beyond the stuff I yap about extensively online. But I do believe that if the purpose is to conquer Space, there are directional policy objectives. Namely, a substantial shift of our public finances away from transfers to investment in fundamental technology and space-oriented manufacturing, the sidelining of cultural issues as divisive5, and avoiding foreign entanglements as much as possible - without creating a global power vacuum which pulls us into its vortex.

More than anything though, what I would like is us as a society to see the awesome duty that stands before us. A lack of willingness to pursue the obvious meaning of our Time is different from an absence of meaning. If we, the Zoomers, can pull this off, we will go down in history as the most impressive generation of Humans to ever grace our small blue orb. We will leave the mark of our time and our values onto all eternity, and the entire Universe will be to America what the Americas are to Iberia. Onwards and Upwards!

1As we look around the Galaxy, it is becoming increasingly probable we are totally alone in the Universe.

2Which is another way of saying average utility

3As much as a moralist may wish they were. 

4Heavily paragraphing Carlyle here. 

5Implicitly the acceptance of Human nature as basically fixed and an aversion to Utopian projects of social reform.

---

# Trump - S2E2: Dark Woke

Episode 2 of the Trump show has aired and it is a real step down in quality from the season premier. Alas. I hope they can break the tired formula but I fear they won’t.

Date: 2025-04-04
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/trump-s2e2-dark-woke
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/trump-s2e2-dark-woke

I am a temperamentally conservative person. I’m extremely grateful for the country I was born into in the late 1990s and am generally someone with strong tribal instincts—no doubt a product of my Mormon upbringing. So, I would be lying if I said there haven’t been aspects of the Trump administration that I’ve unabashedly celebrated. My feelings toward illegal immigration, racial preferences in university and professional hiring, and the outsized power of the managerial class are all so strong that it’s difficult to imagine myself being anything but dogmatically loyal to the political figure who has done the most for me personally of anyone in my lifetime1. As a 27-year-old White American, I directly benefit from Trump’s attacks on affirmative action. So the fact I routinely find myself being horrified by the coalition I should call home is deeply disheartening and I have much deeper sympathy for writers like Noah Smith than I ever had before. 

For example, the recent “Liberation Day” fiasco has left me foaming at the mouth in blind rage, in a way that nothing else he has done has quite succeeded. Because everything I despised about Wokism—a refusal to engage with reality, the willingness to dress up lies as institutionally supported truths, and a broad sense of laziness in the face of the awesome duty of being the elite class of the most powerful civilization on Earth—is at play right now, again, on the national stage. 

I’m want to in this article walk you through the fiasco because it is so absurd that it’s, frankly, hard to believe.

On April 2nd, Donald Trump came on stage to give a speech announcing “Liberation Day”. 

Watch on YouTube

The goal of this spectacle was to announce a new regime of reciprocal tariffs, with the objective of bringing back manufacturing jobs to this country. At roughly the 20-minute mark, Trump is handed the following poster.

this is just a snippet you can find the whole poster here

America appeared to have, generously, decided to levy tariffs at only half the level of other countries. But almost immediately, people began to realize that these numbers frankly didn’t make any sense. How, for example, notoriously protectionist countries like Brazil had the same calculated tariffs as a country like Singapore was unclear. 

Until people all over Xitter began to realize2  the following:

Or said another way, the Trump administration was taking the max(10%, Relative Trade Imbalance). In other words this had nothing to do with tariffs. To which a person might respond: technically, their tariff numbers include currency manipulation and trade barriers. I would simply retort: this is Critical Trade Theory!

I mean this with zero irony, it is the same argument used for structural racism in the US - all average differences between races are the result of racial discrimination. This is the basis of Kendi’s Critical Race Theory. In his own words, “racial inequity is evidence of racist policy”. Critical Trade Theory applies this same logic to US trade relations, where any trade deficit is seen as evidence of trade manipulation. Of course, both of these positions are insane to people who live in the real world. In the case of either racial inequity or trade deficits, obviously, racism and trade barriers play a role, but you would have to be genuinely blind to the realities of life to not realize that they are not the only factors.

In response to a growing number of people on Xitter mocking the Trump administration, Kush Desai—the White House Deputy Press Secretary—implied James Surowiecki was a liar and tweeted a link to the government’s own website describing how these tariffs are calculated.

The website showed the following: 

Now, lost in the Greek alphabet—which was obviously chosen to be confusing—and the strange mixed representation of indices is the hilarious fact that epsilon(4) and phi(0.25) cancel out. This means that this is a lot of fancy math to say that James is 100% right: “They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates plus non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us,” which is objectively what they did.

They do cite a couple of papers to find values for epsilon and phi, and I’ll say, to their credit, their values do seem to align with the results of the cited academic work. Although how they got 0.25 from Cavallo et al., 2021, is unclear.

But I have to assume they meant “Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy” by Alberto Cavallo, Gita Gopinath, Brent Neiman, and Jenny Tang, since, for reasons I don’t comprehend, they have chosen to leave out any details about the paper in their references.

In response to this, the MAGA-adjacent crowd on Xitter took to their keyboards to defend our glorious President. Here is Jason—Silicon Valley investor, host of the All-In Podcast, and a previous Never Trumper—who gave the following glowing review, equipped with AI slop emojis and everything.

Democrats sincerely wish their fans were this ride or die. 

The truth is this: the new formula for determining US tariffs isn’t even that bad of a formula. If you wanted to set a base of 10% and then increase the rate in proportion to our trade deficit, this is literally what you would do. In fact, if you ask ChatGPT - as I did - it gives you this idea. 

But presenting these numbers as the tariffs that other countries charge us is literally untrue. I don’t think we have ever had such an open and bald-faced lie before. Usually, when our politicians lie, they do it in a careful, subtle way. But Trump is so totally devoid of the shame any of us would feel for inventing nonsense that he is willing to just go on stage and say it. It seems like some Republicans are trying to push back—I saw a clip of Ted Cruz, for example, saying he was not a fan—but I doubt people will do anything about it. Tariffs are a consumption tax imposed only on imported goods, and the scale of taxes we are talking about is in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. This is an enormous amount of money—and I would weep right now if I owned a factory in Vietnam—but I simply do not think it will crash the economy. Perhaps I will have to eat crow on this, but only time can tell.

What I know for sure is that lies are at the heart of almost all evil in this world, at least the fraction of evil that we contribute as Humans. Trump needs to stop lying so much if he doesn’t want to land in jail - or worse tear this country apart. He still has an enormous amount of goodwill from a broad swath of the country, as exemplified by his approval numbers.

But the two areas where Trump has had success and remains broadly popular—DEI and immigration—are the ones where his policy reflects a more honest interpretation of the law. Maybe he should try this in other areas as well. There is an enormous amount of regulatory overreach, for example, I doubt people would be upset if he pruned it substantially. But continuing down this path of lies leads only to damnation. 

If you have the money and would like to support me please sign up for a paid subscription! 

1As I explained in the previous article on Trump Season 2. 

2I first noticed it from journalist James Surowiecki(https://x.com/JamesSurowiecki

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# The Hero as King | Thomas Carlyle | Anthologies

Cromwell, Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism

Date: 2025-03-29
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-hero-as-king-thomas-carlyle-anthologies
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-hero-as-king-thomas-carlyle-anthologies

May 22, 1840

We come now to the last form of Heroism; that which we call Kingship. The Commander over Men; he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men. He is practically the summary for us of all the various figures of Heroism; Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignity we can fancy to reside in a man, embodies itself here, to command over us, to furnish us with constant practical teaching, to tell us for the day and hour what we are to do. He is called Rex, Regulator, Roi: our own name is still better; King, Konning, which means Can-ning, Able-man.

Numerous considerations, pointing towards deep, questionable, and indeed unfathomable regions, present themselves here: on the most of which we must resolutely for the present forbear to speak at all. As Burke said that perhaps fair Trial by Jury was the soul of Government, and that all legislation, administration, parliamentary debating, and the rest of it, went on, in "order to bring twelve impartial men into a jury-box;"—so, by much stronger reason, may I say here, that the finding of your Ableman and getting him invested with the symbols of ability, with dignity, worship (worth-ship), royalty, kinghood, or whatever we call it, so that he may actually have room to guide according to his faculty of doing it,—is the business, well or ill accomplished, of all social procedure whatsoever in this world! Hustings-speeches, Parliamentary motions, Reform Bills, French Revolutions, all mean at heart this; or else nothing. Find in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit. It is in the perfect state; an ideal country. The Ablest Man; he means also the truest-hearted, justest, the Noblest Man: what he tells us to do must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that we could anywhere or anyhow learn;—the thing which it will in all ways behoove US, with right loyal thankfulness and nothing doubting, to do! Our doing and life were then, so far as government could regulate it, well regulated; that were the ideal of constitutions.

Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a very great way off; and we will right thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meagre product of reality" in this poor world of ours. We will esteem him no wise man; we will esteem him a sickly, discontented, foolish man. And yet, on the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that Ideals do exist; that if they be not approximated to at all, the whole matter goes to wreck! Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a wall perfectly perpendicular, mathematically this is not possible; a certain degree of perpendicularity suffices him; and he, like a good bricklayer, who must have done with his job, leaves it so. And yet if he sway too much from the perpendicular; above all, if he throw plummet and level quite away from him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just as it comes to hand—! Such bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. He has forgotten himself: but the Law of Gravitation does not forget to act on him; he and his wall rush down into confused welter of ruin—!

This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, social explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too Unable Man at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgotten that there is any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting the Able Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. Unable Simulacrum of Ability, quack, in a word, must adjust himself with quack, in all manner of administration of human things;—which accordingly lie unadministered, fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery: in the outward, and in the inward or spiritual, miserable millions stretch out the hand for their due supply, and it is not there. The "law of gravitation" acts; Nature's laws do none of them forget to act. The miserable millions burst forth into Sansculottism, or some other sort of madness: bricks and bricklayer lie as a fatal chaos—!

Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or more, about the "Divine right of Kings," moulders unread now in the Public Libraries of this country. Far be it from us to disturb the calm process by which it is disappearing harmlessly from the earth, in those repositories! At the same time, not to let the immense rubbish go without leaving us, as it ought, some soul of it behind—I will say that it did mean something; something true, which it is important for us and all men to keep in mind. To assert that in whatever man you chose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of clutching at him); and claps a round piece of metal on the head of, and called King,—there straightway came to reside a divine virtue, so that he became a kind of god, and a Divinity inspired him with faculty and right to rule over you to all lengths: this,—what can we do with this but leave it to rot silently in the Public Libraries? But I will say withal, and that is what these Divine-right men meant, That in Kings, and in all human Authorities, and relations that men god-created can form among each other, there is verily either a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong; one or the other of these two! For it is false altogether, what the last Sceptical Century taught us, that this world is a steam-engine. There is a God in this world; and a God's-sanction, or else the violation of such, does look out from all ruling and obedience, from all moral acts of men. There is no act more moral between men than that of rule and obedience. Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is! God's law is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws may run: there is a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart of every claim that one man makes upon another.

It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: in all the relations of life it will concern us; in Loyalty and Royalty, the highest of these. I esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that in short, there is nothing divine whatever in the association of men, a still more despicable error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, than that of a "divine right" in people called Kings. I say, Find me the true Konning, King, or Able-man, and he has a divine right over me. That we knew in some tolerable measure how to find him, and that all men were ready to acknowledge his divine right when found: this is precisely the healing which a sick world is everywhere, in these ages, seeking after! The true King, as guide of the practical, has ever something of the Pontiff in him,—guide of the spiritual, from which all practice has its rise. This too is a true saying, That the King is head of the Church.—But we will leave the Polemic stuff of a dead century to lie quiet on its bookshelves.

Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to seek, and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it! That is the world's sad predicament in these times of ours. They are times of revolution, and have long been. The bricklayer with his bricks, no longer heedful of plummet or the law of gravitation, have toppled, tumbled, and it all welters as we see! But the beginning of it was not the French Revolution; that is rather the end, we can hope. It were truer to say, the beginning was three centuries farther back: in the Reformation of Luther. That the thing which still called itself Christian Church had become a Falsehood, and brazenly went about pretending to pardon men's sins for metallic coined money, and to do much else which in the everlasting truth of Nature it did not now do: here lay the vital malady. The inward being wrong, all outward went ever more and more wrong. Belief died away; all was Doubt, Disbelief. The builder cast away his plummet; said to himself, "What is gravitation? Brick lies on brick there!" Alas, does it not still sound strange to many of us, the assertion that there is a God's-truth in the business of god-created men; that all is not a kind of grimace, an "expediency," diplomacy, one knows not what—!

From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, "You, self-styled Papa, you are no Father in God at all; you are—a Chimera, whom I know not how to name in polite language!"—from that onwards to the shout which rose round Camille Desmoulins in the Palais-Royal, "Aux armes!" when the people had burst up against all manner of Chimeras,—I find a natural historical sequence. That shout too, so frightful, half-infernal, was a great matter. Once more the voice of awakened nations;—starting confusedly, as out of nightmare, as out of death-sleep, into some dim feeling that Life was real; that God's-world was not an expediency and diplomacy! Infernal;—yes, since they would not have it otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial or terrestrial! Hollowness, insincerity has to cease; sincerity of some sort has to begin. Cost what it may, reigns of terror, horrors of French Revolution or what else, we have to return to truth. Here is a Truth, as I said: a Truth clad in hell-fire, since they would not but have it so—!

A common theory among considerable parties of men in England and elsewhere used to be, that the French Nation had, in those days, as it were gone mad; that the French Revolution was a general act of insanity, a temporary conversion of France and large sections of the world into a kind of Bedlam. The Event had risen and raged; but was a madness and nonentity,—gone now happily into the region of Dreams and the Picturesque!—To such comfortable philosophers, the Three Days of July, 1830, must have been a surprising phenomenon. Here is the French Nation risen again, in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting and being shot, to make that same mad French Revolution good! The sons and grandsons of those men, it would seem, persist in the enterprise: they do not disown it; they will have it made good; will have themselves shot, if it be not made good. To philosophers who had made up their life-system, on that "madness" quietus, no phenomenon could be more alarming. Poor Niebuhr, they say, the Prussian Professor and Historian, fell broken-hearted in consequence; sickened, if we can believe it, and died of the Three Days! It was surely not a very heroic death;—little better than Racine's, dying because Louis Fourteenth looked sternly on him once. The world had stood some considerable shocks, in its time; might have been expected to survive the Three Days too, and be found turning on its axis after even them! The Three Days told all mortals that the old French Revolution, mad as it might look, was not a transitory ebullition of Bedlam, but a genuine product of this Earth where we all live; that it was verily a Fact, and that the world in general would do well everywhere to regard it as such.

Truly, without the French Revolution, one would not know what to make of an age like this at all. We will hail the French Revolution, as shipwrecked mariners might the sternest rock, in a world otherwise all of baseless sea and waves. A true Apocalypse, though a terrible one, to this false withered artificial time; testifying once more that Nature is preternatural; if not divine, then diabolic; that Semblance is not Reality; that it has to become Reality, or the world will take fire under it,—burn it into what it is, namely Nothing! Plausibility has ended; empty Routine has ended; much has ended. This, as with a Trump of Doom, has been proclaimed to all men. They are the wisest who will learn it soonest. Long confused generations before it be learned; peace impossible till it be! The earnest man, surrounded, as ever, with a world of inconsistencies, can await patiently, patiently strive to do his work, in the midst of that. Sentence of Death is written down in Heaven against all that; sentence of Death is now proclaimed on the Earth against it: this he with his eyes may see. And surely, I should say, considering the other side of the matter, what enormous difficulties lie there, and how fast, fearfully fast, in all countries, the inexorable demand for solution of them is pressing on,—he may easily find other work to do than laboring in the Sansculottic province at this time of day!

To me, in these circumstances, that of "Hero-worship" becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of the world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.

Hero-worship would have sounded very strange to those workers and fighters in the French Revolution. Not reverence for Great Men; not any hope or belief, or even wish, that Great Men could again appear in the world! Nature, turned into a "Machine," was as if effete now; could not any longer produce Great Men:—I can tell her, she may give up the trade altogether, then; we cannot do without Great Men!—But neither have I any quarrel with that of "Liberty and Equality;" with the faith that, wise great men being impossible, a level immensity of foolish small men would suffice. It was a natural faith then and there. "Liberty and Equality; no Authority needed any longer. Hero-worship, reverence for such Authorities, has proved false, is itself a falsehood; no more of it! We have had such forgeries, we will now trust nothing. So many base plated coins passing in the market, the belief has now become common that no gold any longer exists,—and even that we can do very well without gold!" I find this, among other things, in that universal cry of Liberty and Equality; and find it very natural, as matters then stood.

And yet surely it is but the transition from false to true. Considered as the whole truth, it is false altogether;—the product of entire sceptical blindness, as yet only struggling to see. Hero-worship exists forever, and everywhere: not Loyalty alone; it extends from divine adoration down to the lowest practical regions of life. "Bending before men," if it is not to be a mere empty grimace, better dispensed with than practiced, is Hero-worship,—a recognition that there does dwell in that presence of our brother something divine; that every created man, as Novalis said, is a "revelation in the Flesh." They were Poets too, that devised all those graceful courtesies which make life noble! Courtesy is not a falsehood or grimace; it need not be such. And Loyalty, religious Worship itself, are still possible; nay still inevitable.

May we not say, moreover, while so many of our late Heroes have worked rather as revolutionary men, that nevertheless every Great Man, every genuine man, is by the nature of him a son of Order, not of Disorder? It is a tragical position for a true man to work in revolutions. He seems an anarchist; and indeed a painful element of anarchy does encumber him at every step,—him to whose whole soul anarchy is hostile, hateful. His mission is Order; every man's is. He is here to make what was disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order. Is not all work of man in this world a making of Order? The carpenter finds rough trees; shapes them, constrains them into square fitness, into purpose and use. We are all born enemies of Disorder: it is tragical for us all to be concerned in image-breaking and down-pulling; for the Great Man, more a man than we, it is doubly tragical.

Thus too all human things, maddest French Sansculottisms, do and must work towards Order. I say, there is not a man in them, raging in the thickest of the madness, but is impelled withal, at all moments, towards Order. His very life means that; Disorder is dissolution, death. No chaos but it seeks a centre to revolve round. While man is man, some Cromwell or Napoleon is the necessary finish of a Sansculottism.—Curious: in those days when Hero-worship was the most incredible thing to every one, how it does come out nevertheless, and assert itself practically, in a way which all have to credit. Divine right, take it on the great scale, is found to mean divine might withal! While old false Formulas are getting trampled everywhere into destruction, new genuine Substances unexpectedly unfold themselves indestructible. In rebellious ages, when Kingship itself seems dead and abolished, Cromwell, Napoleon step forth again as Kings. The history of these men is what we have now to look at, as our last phasis of Heroism. The old ages are brought back to us; the manner in which Kings were made, and Kingship itself first took rise, is again exhibited in the history of these Two.

We have had many civil wars in England; wars of Red and White Roses, wars of Simon de Montfort; wars enough, which are not very memorable. But that war of the Puritans has a significance which belongs to no one of the others. Trusting to your candor, which will suggest on the other side what I have not room to say, I will call it a section once more of that great universal war which alone makes up the true History of the World,—the war of Belief against Unbelief! The struggle of men intent on the real essence of things, against men intent on the semblances and forms of things. The Puritans, to many, seem mere savage Iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of Forms; but it were more just to call them haters of untrue Forms. I hope we know how to respect Laud and his King as well as them. Poor Laud seems to me to have been weak and ill-starred, not dishonest an unfortunate Pedant rather than anything worse. His "Dreams" and superstitions, at which they laugh so, have an affectionate, lovable kind of character. He is like a College-Tutor, whose whole world is forms, College-rules; whose notion is that these are the life and safety of the world. He is placed suddenly, with that unalterable luckless notion of his, at the head not of a College but of a Nation, to regulate the most complex deep-reaching interests of men. He thinks they ought to go by the old decent regulations; nay that their salvation will lie in extending and improving these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehemence towards his purpose; cramps himself to it, heeding no voice of prudence, no cry of pity: He will have his College-rules obeyed by his Collegians; that first; and till that, nothing. He is an ill-starred Pedant, as I said. He would have it the world was a College of that kind, and the world was not that. Alas, was not his doom stern enough? Whatever wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully avenged on him?

It is meritorious to insist on forms; Religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one. The naked formlessness of Puritanism is not the thing I praise in the Puritans; it is the thing I pity,—praising only the spirit which had rendered that inevitable! All substances clothe themselves in forms: but there are suitable true forms, and then there are untrue unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might say, Forms which grow round a substance, if we rightly understand that, will correspond to the real nature and purport of it, will be true, good; forms which are consciously put round a substance, bad. I invite you to reflect on this. It distinguishes true from false in Ceremonial Form, earnest solemnity from empty pageant, in all human things.

There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. In the commonest meeting of men, a person making, what we call, "set speeches," is not he an offence? In the mere drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies you see to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous reality within, are a thing you wish to get away from. But suppose now it were some matter of vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as Divine Worship is), about which your whole soul, struck dumb with its excess of feeling, knew not how to form itself into utterance at all, and preferred formless silence to any utterance there possible,—what should we say of a man coming forward to represent or utter it for you in the way of upholsterer-mummery? Such a man,—let him depart swiftly, if he love himself! You have lost your only son; are mute, struck down, without even tears: an importunate man importunately offers to celebrate Funeral Games for him in the manner of the Greeks! Such mummery is not only not to be accepted,—it is hateful, unendurable. It is what the old Prophets called "Idolatry," worshipping of hollow shows; what all earnest men do and will reject. We can partly understand what those poor Puritans meant. Laud dedicating that St. Catherine Creed's Church, in the manner we have it described; with his multiplied ceremonial bowings, gesticulations, exclamations: surely it is rather the rigorous formal Pedant, intent on his "College-rules," than the earnest Prophet intent on the essence of the matter!

Puritanism found such forms insupportable; trampled on such forms;—we have to excuse it for saying, No form at all rather than such! It stood preaching in its bare pulpit, with nothing but the Bible in its hand. Nay, a man preaching from his earnest soul into the earnest souls of men: is not this virtually the essence of all Churches whatsoever? The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance, however dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself with due semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear of that; actually no fear at all. Given the living man, there will be found clothes for him; he will find himself clothes. But the suit-of-clothes pretending that it is both clothes and man—! We cannot "fight the French" by three hundred thousand red uniforms; there must be men in the inside of them! Semblance, I assert, must actually not divorce itself from Reality. If Semblance do,—why then there must be men found to rebel against Semblance, for it has become a lie! These two Antagonisms at war here, in the case of Laud and the Puritans, are as old nearly as the world. They went to fierce battle over England in that age; and fought out their confused controversy to a certain length, with many results for all of us.

In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, their cause or themselves were little likely to have justice done them. Charles Second and his Rochesters were not the kind of men you would set to judge what the worth or meaning of such men might have been. That there could be any faith or truth in the life of a man, was what these poor Rochesters, and the age they ushered in, had forgotten. Puritanism was hung on gibbets,—like the bones of the leading Puritans. Its work nevertheless went on accomplishing itself. All true work of a man, hang the author of it on what gibbet you like, must and will accomplish itself. We have our Habeas-Corpus, our free Representation of the People; acknowledgment, wide as the world, that all men are, or else must, shall, and will become, what we call free men;—men with their life grounded on reality and justice, not on tradition, which has become unjust and a chimera! This in part, and much besides this, was the work of the Puritans.

And indeed, as these things became gradually manifest, the character of the Puritans began to clear itself. Their memories were, one after another, taken down from the gibbet; nay a certain portion of them are now, in these days, as good as canonized. Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nay Ludlow, Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of Heroes; political Conscript Fathers, to whom in no small degree we owe what makes us a free England: it would not be safe for anybody to designate these men as wicked now. Few Puritans of note but find their apologists somewhere, and have a certain reverence paid them by earnest men. One Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor Cromwell, seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and find no hearty apologist anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will acquit of great wickedness. A man of ability, infinite talent, courage, and so forth: but he betrayed the Cause. Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a fierce, coarse, hypocritical Tartuffe; turning all that noble Struggle for constitutional Liberty into a sorry farce played for his own benefit: this and worse is the character they give of Cromwell. And then there come contrasts with Washington and others; above all, with these noble Pyms and Hampdens, whose noble work he stole for himself, and ruined into a futility and deformity.

This view of Cromwell seems to me the not unnatural product of a century like the Eighteenth. As we said of the Valet, so of the Sceptic: He does not know a Hero when he sees him! The Valet expected purple mantles, gilt sceptres, bodyguards and flourishes of trumpets: the Sceptic of the Eighteenth century looks for regulated respectable Formulas, "Principles," or what else he may call them; a style of speech and conduct which has got to seem "respectable," which can plead for itself in a handsome articulate manner, and gain the suffrages of an enlightened sceptical Eighteenth century! It is, at bottom, the same thing that both the Valet and he expect: the garnitures of some acknowledged royalty, which then they will acknowledge! The King coming to them in the rugged unformulistic state shall be no King.

For my own share, far be it from me to say or insinuate a word of disparagement against such characters as Hampden, Elliot, Pym; whom I believe to have been right worthy and useful men. I have read diligently what books and documents about them I could come at;—with the honestest wish to admire, to love and worship them like Heroes; but I am sorry to say, if the real truth must be told, with very indifferent success! At bottom, I found that it would not do. They are very noble men, these; step along in their stately way, with their measured euphemisms, philosophies, parliamentary eloquences, Ship-moneys, Monarchies of Man; a most constitutional, unblamable, dignified set of men. But the heart remains cold before them; the fancy alone endeavors to get up some worship of them. What man's heart does, in reality, break forth into any fire of brotherly love for these men? They are become dreadfully dull men! One breaks down often enough in the constitutional eloquence of the admirable Pym, with his "seventhly and lastly." You find that it may be the admirablest thing in the world, but that it is heavy,—heavy as lead, barren as brick-clay; that, in a word, for you there is little or nothing now surviving there! One leaves all these Nobilities standing in their niches of honor: the rugged outcast Cromwell, he is the man of them all in whom one still finds human stuff. The great savage Baresark: he could write no euphemistic Monarchy of Man; did not speak, did not work with glib regularity; had no straight story to tell for himself anywhere. But he stood bare, not cased in euphemistic coat-of-mail; he grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things! That, after all, is the sort of man for one. I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts of men. Smooth-shaven Respectabilities not a few one finds, that are not good for much. Small thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean, who would not touch the work but with gloves on!

Neither, on the whole, does this constitutional tolerance of the Eighteenth century for the other happier Puritans seem to be a very great matter. One might say, it is but a piece of Formulism and Scepticism, like the rest. They tell us, It was a sorrowful thing to consider that the foundation of our English Liberties should have been laid by "Superstition." These Puritans came forward with Calvinistic incredible Creeds, Anti-Laudisms, Westminster Confessions; demanding, chiefly of all, that they should have liberty to worship in their own way. Liberty to tax themselves: that was the thing they should have demanded! It was Superstition, Fanaticism, disgraceful ignorance of Constitutional Philosophy to insist on the other thing!—Liberty to tax oneself? Not to pay out money from your pocket except on reason shown? No century, I think, but a rather barren one would have fixed on that as the first right of man! I should say, on the contrary, A just man will generally have better cause than money in what shape soever, before deciding to revolt against his Government. Ours is a most confused world; in which a good man will be thankful to see any kind of Government maintain itself in a not insupportable manner: and here in England, to this hour, if he is not ready to pay a great many taxes which he can see very small reason in, it will not go well with him, I think! He must try some other climate than this. Tax-gatherer? Money? He will say: "Take my money, since you can, and it is so desirable to you; take it,—and take yourself away with it; and leave me alone to my work here. I am still here; can still work, after all the money you have taken from me!" But if they come to him, and say, "Acknowledge a Lie; pretend to say you are worshipping God, when you are not doing it: believe not the thing that you find true, but the thing that I find, or pretend to find true!" He will answer: "No; by God's help, no! You may take my purse; but I cannot have my moral Self annihilated. The purse is any Highwayman's who might meet me with a loaded pistol: but the Self is mine and God my Maker's; it is not yours; and I will resist you to the death, and revolt against you, and, on the whole, front all manner of extremities, accusations and confusions, in defence of that!"—

Really, it seems to me the one reason which could justify revolting, this of the Puritans. It has been the soul of all just revolts among men. Not Hunger alone produced even the French Revolution; no, but the feeling of the insupportable all-pervading Falsehood which had now embodied itself in Hunger, in universal material Scarcity and Nonentity, and thereby become indisputably false in the eyes of all! We will leave the Eighteenth century with its "liberty to tax itself." We will not astonish ourselves that the meaning of such men as the Puritans remained dim to it. To men who believe in no reality at all, how shall a real human soul, the intensest of all realities, as it were the Voice of this world's Maker still speaking to us,—be intelligible? What it cannot reduce into constitutional doctrines relative to "taxing," or other the like material interest, gross, palpable to the sense, such a century will needs reject as an amorphous heap of rubbish. Hampdens, Pyms and Ship-money will be the theme of much constitutional eloquence, striving to be fervid;—which will glitter, if not as fire does, then as ice does: and the irreducible Cromwell will remain a chaotic mass of "madness," "hypocrisy," and much else.

From of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's falsity has been incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe the like, of any Great Man whatever. Multitudes of Great Men figure in History as false selfish men; but if we will consider it, they are but figures for us, unintelligible shadows; we do not see into them as men that could have existed at all. A superficial unbelieving generation only, with no eye but for the surfaces and semblances of things, could form such notions of Great Men. Can a great soul be possible without a conscience in it, the essence of all real souls, great or small?—No, we cannot figure Cromwell as a Falsity and Fatuity; the longer I study him and his career, I believe this the less. Why should we? There is no evidence of it. Is it not strange that, after all the mountains of calumny this man has been subject to, after being represented as the very prince of liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but always some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should not yet have been one falsehood brought clearly home to him? A prince of liars, and no lie spoken by him. Not one that I could yet get sight of. It is like Pococke asking Grotius, Where is your proof of Mahomet's Pigeon? No proof!—Let us leave all these calumnious chimeras, as chimeras ought to be left. They are not portraits of the man; they are distracted phantasms of him, the joint product of hatred and darkness.

Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to me, a very different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him. Of those stories of "Spectres;" of the white Spectre in broad daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we are not bound to believe much;—probably no more than of the other black Spectre, or Devil in person, to whom the Officer saw him sell himself before Worcester Fight! But the mournful, oversensitive, hypochondriac humor of Oliver, in his young years, is otherwise indisputably known. The Huntingdon Physician told Sir Philip Warwick himself, He had often been sent for at midnight; Mr. Cromwell was full of hypochondria, thought himself near dying, and "had fancies about the Town-cross." These things are significant. Such an excitable deep-feeling nature, in that rugged stubborn strength of his, is not the symptom of falsehood; it is the symptom and promise of quite other than falsehood!

The young Oliver is sent to study Law; falls, or is said to have fallen, for a little period, into some of the dissipations of youth; but if so, speedily repents, abandons all this: not much above twenty, he is married, settled as an altogether grave and quiet man. "He pays back what money he had won at gambling," says the story;—he does not think any gain of that kind could be really his. It is very interesting, very natural, this "conversion," as they well name it; this awakening of a great true soul from the worldly slough, to see into the awful truth of things;—to see that Time and its shows all rested on Eternity, and this poor Earth of ours was the threshold either of Heaven or of Hell! Oliver's life at St. Ives and Ely, as a sober industrious Farmer, is it not altogether as that of a true and devout man? He has renounced the world and its ways; its prizes are not the thing that can enrich him. He tills the earth; he reads his Bible; daily assembles his servants round him to worship God. He comforts persecuted ministers, is fond of preachers; nay can himself preach,—exhorts his neighbors to be wise, to redeem the time. In all this what "hypocrisy," "ambition," "cant," or other falsity? The man's hopes, I do believe, were fixed on the other Higher World; his aim to get well thither, by walking well through his humble course in this world. He courts no notice: what could notice here do for him? "Ever in his great Taskmaster's eye."

It is striking, too, how he comes out once into public view; he, since no other is willing to come: in resistance to a public grievance. I mean, in that matter of the Bedford Fens. No one else will go to law with Authority; therefore he will. That matter once settled, he returns back into obscurity, to his Bible and his Plough. "Gain influence"? His influence is the most legitimate; derived from personal knowledge of him, as a just, religious, reasonable and determined man. In this way he has lived till past forty; old age is now in view of him, and the earnest portal of Death and Eternity; it was at this point that he suddenly became "ambitious"! I do not interpret his Parliamentary mission in that way!

His successes in Parliament, his successes through the war, are honest successes of a brave man; who has more resolution in the heart of him, more light in the head of him than other men. His prayers to God; his spoken thanks to the God of Victory, who had preserved him safe, and carried him forward so far, through the furious clash of a world all set in conflict, through desperate-looking envelopments at Dunbar; through the death-hail of so many battles; mercy after mercy; to the "crowning mercy" of Worcester Fight: all this is good and genuine for a deep-hearted Calvinistic Cromwell. Only to vain unbelieving Cavaliers, worshipping not God but their own "love-locks," frivolities and formalities, living quite apart from contemplations of God, living without God in the world, need it seem hypocritical.

Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him in condemnation with us. It is a stern business killing of a King! But if you once go to war with him, it lies there; this and all else lies there. Once at war, you have made wager of battle with him: it is he to die, or else you. Reconciliation is problematic; may be possible, or, far more likely, is impossible. It is now pretty generally admitted that the Parliament, having vanquished Charles First, had no way of making any tenable arrangement with him. The large Presbyterian party, apprehensive now of the Independents, were most anxious to do so; anxious indeed as for their own existence; but it could not be. The unhappy Charles, in those final Hampton-Court negotiations, shows himself as a man fatally incapable of being dealt with. A man who, once for all, could not and would not understand:—whose thought did not in any measure represent to him the real fact of the matter; nay worse, whose word did not at all represent his thought. We may say this of him without cruelty, with deep pity rather: but it is true and undeniable. Forsaken there of all but the name of Kingship, he still, finding himself treated with outward respect as a King, fancied that he might play off party against party, and smuggle himself into his old power by deceiving both. Alas, they both discovered that he was deceiving them. A man whose word will not inform you at all what he means or will do, is not a man you can bargain with. You must get out of that man's way, or put him out of yours! The Presbyterians, in their despair, were still for believing Charles, though found false, unbelievable again and again. Not so Cromwell: "For all our fighting," says he, "we are to have a little bit of paper?" No—!

In fact, everywhere we have to note the decisive practical eye of this man; how he drives towards the practical and practicable; has a genuine insight into what is fact. Such an intellect, I maintain, does not belong to a false man: the false man sees false shows, plausibilities, expediences: the true man is needed to discern even practical truth. Cromwell's advice about the Parliament's Army, early in the contest, How they were to dismiss their city-tapsters, flimsy riotous persons, and choose substantial yeomen, whose heart was in the work, to be soldiers for them: this is advice by a man who saw. Fact answers, if you see into Fact! Cromwell's Ironsides were the embodiment of this insight of his; men fearing God; and without any other fear. No more conclusively genuine set of fighters ever trod the soil of England, or of any other land.

Neither will we blame greatly that word of Cromwell's to them; which was so blamed: "If the King should meet me in battle, I would kill the King." Why not? These words were spoken to men who stood as before a Higher than Kings. They had set more than their own lives on the cast. The Parliament may call it, in official language, a fighting "for the King;" but we, for our share, cannot understand that. To us it is no dilettante work, no sleek officiality; it is sheer rough death and earnest. They have brought it to the calling-forth of War; horrid internecine fight, man grappling with man in fire-eyed rage,—the infernal element in man called forth, to try it by that! Do that therefore; since that is the thing to be done.—The successes of Cromwell seem to me a very natural thing! Since he was not shot in battle, they were an inevitable thing. That such a man, with the eye to see, with the heart to dare, should advance, from post to post, from victory to victory, till the Huntingdon Farmer became, by whatever name you might call him, the acknowledged Strongest Man in England, virtually the King of England, requires no magic to explain it—!

Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall into Scepticism, into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know Sincerity when they see it. For this world, and for all worlds, what curse is so fatal? The heart lying dead, the eye cannot see. What intellect remains is merely the vulpine intellect. That a true King be sent them is of small use; they do not know him when sent. They say scornfully, Is this your King? The Hero wastes his heroic faculty in bootless contradiction from the unworthy; and can accomplish little. For himself he does accomplish a heroic life, which is much, which is all; but for the world he accomplishes comparatively nothing. The wild rude Sincerity, direct from Nature, is not glib in answering from the witness-box: in your small-debt pie-powder court, he is scouted as a counterfeit. The vulpine intellect "detects" him. For being a man worth any thousand men, the response your Knox, your Cromwell gets, is an argument for two centuries whether he was a man at all. God's greatest gift to this Earth is sneeringly flung away. The miraculous talisman is a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass in the shops as a common guinea.

Lamentable this! I say, this must be remedied. Till this be remedied in some measure, there is nothing remedied. "Detect quacks"? Yes do, for Heaven's sake; but know withal the men that are to be trusted! Till we know that, what is all our knowledge; how shall we even so much as "detect"? For the vulpine sharpness, which considers itself to be knowledge, and "detects" in that fashion, is far mistaken. Dupes indeed are many: but, of all dupes, there is none so fatally situated as he who lives in undue terror of being duped. The world does exist; the world has truth in it, or it would not exist! First recognize what is true, we shall then discern what is false; and properly never till then.

"Know the men that are to be trusted:" alas, this is yet, in these days, very far from us. The sincere alone can recognize sincerity. Not a Hero only is needed, but a world fit for him; a world not of Valets;—the Hero comes almost in vain to it otherwise! Yes, it is far from us: but it must come; thank God, it is visibly coming. Till it do come, what have we? Ballot-boxes, suffrages, French Revolutions:—if we are as Valets, and do not know the Hero when we see him, what good are all these? A heroic Cromwell comes; and for a hundred and fifty years he cannot have a vote from us. Why, the insincere, unbelieving world is the natural property of the Quack, and of the Father of quacks and quackeries! Misery, confusion, unveracity are alone possible there. By ballot-boxes we alter the figure of our Quack; but the substance of him continues. The Valet-World has to be governed by the Sham-Hero, by the King merely dressed in King-gear. It is his; he is its! In brief, one of two things: We shall either learn to know a Hero, a true Governor and Captain, somewhat better, when we see him; or else go on to be forever governed by the Unheroic;—had we ballot-boxes clattering at every street-corner, there were no remedy in these.

Poor Cromwell,—great Cromwell! The inarticulate Prophet; Prophet who could not speak. Rude, confused, struggling to utter himself, with his savage depth, with his wild sincerity; and he looked so strange, among the elegant Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillingworths, diplomatic Clarendons! Consider him. An outer hull of chaotic confusion, visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, almost semi-madness; and yet such a clear determinate man's-energy working in the heart of that. A kind of chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight and fire, working in such an element of boundless hypochondria, unformed black of darkness! And yet withal this hypochondria, what was it but the very greatness of the man? The depth and tenderness of his wild affections: the quantity of sympathy he had with things,—the quantity of insight he would yet get into the heart of things, the mastery he would yet get over things: this was his hypochondria. The man's misery, as man's misery always does, came of his greatness. Samuel Johnson too is that kind of man. Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted; the wide element of mournful black enveloping him,—wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic man; a man with his whole soul seeing, and struggling to see.

On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's reputed confusion of speech. To himself the internal meaning was sun-clear; but the material with which he was to clothe it in utterance was not there. He had lived silent; a great unnamed sea of Thought round him all his days; and in his way of life little call to attempt naming or uttering that. With his sharp power of vision, resolute power of action, I doubt not he could have learned to write Books withal, and speak fluently enough;—he did harder things than writing of Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all things you will set him on doing. Intellect is not speaking and logicizing; it is seeing and ascertaining. Virtue, Virtues, manhood, herohood, is not fair-spoken immaculate regularity; it is first of all, what the Germans well name it, Tugend (Taugend, dow-ing or Dough-tiness), Courage and the Faculty to do. This basis of the matter Cromwell had in him.

One understands moreover how, though he could not speak in Parliament, he might preach, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how he might be great in extempore prayer. These are the free outpouring utterances of what is in the heart: method is not required in them; warmth, depth, sincerity are all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is a notable feature of him. All his great enterprises were commenced with prayer. In dark inextricable-looking difficulties, his Officers and he used to assemble, and pray alternately, for hours, for days, till some definite resolution rose among them, some "door of hope," as they would name it, disclosed itself. Consider that. In tears, in fervent prayers, and cries to the great God, to have pity on them, to make His light shine before them. They, armed Soldiers of Christ, as they felt themselves to be; a little band of Christian Brothers, who had drawn the sword against a great black devouring world not Christian, but Mammonish, Devilish,—they cried to God in their straits, in their extreme need, not to forsake the Cause that was His. The light which now rose upon them,—how could a human soul, by any means at all, get better light? Was not the purpose so formed like to be precisely the best, wisest, the one to be followed without hesitation any more? To them it was as the shining of Heaven's own Splendor in the waste-howling darkness; the Pillar of Fire by night, that was to guide them on their desolate perilous way. Was it not such? Can a man's soul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method than intrinsically by that same,—devout prostration of the earnest struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light; be such prayer a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticulate one? There is no other method. "Hypocrisy"? One begins to be weary of all that. They who call it so, have no right to speak on such matters. They never formed a purpose, what one can call a purpose. They went about balancing expediencies, plausibilities; gathering votes, advices; they never were alone with the truth of a thing at all.—Cromwell's prayers were likely to be "eloquent," and much more than that. His was the heart of a man who could pray.

But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, were not nearly so ineloquent, incondite, as they look. We find he was, what all speakers aim to be, an impressive speaker, even in Parliament; one who, from the first, had weight. With that rude passionate voice of his, he was always understood to mean something, and men wished to know what. He disregarded eloquence, nay despised and disliked it; spoke always without premeditation of the words he was to use. The Reporters, too, in those days seem to have been singularly candid; and to have given the Printer precisely what they found on their own note-paper. And withal, what a strange proof is it of Cromwell's being the premeditative ever-calculating hypocrite, acting a play before the world, That to the last he took no more charge of his Speeches! How came he not to study his words a little, before flinging them out to the public? If the words were true words, they could be left to shift for themselves.

But with regard to Cromwell's "lying," we will make one remark. This, I suppose, or something like this, to have been the nature of it. All parties found themselves deceived in him; each party understood him to be meaning this, heard him even say so, and behold he turns out to have been meaning that! He was, cry they, the chief of liars. But now, intrinsically, is not all this the inevitable fortune, not of a false man in such times, but simply of a superior man? Such a man must have reticences in him. If he walk wearing his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at, his journey will not extend far! There is no use for any man's taking up his abode in a house built of glass. A man always is to be himself the judge how much of his mind he will show to other men; even to those he would have work along with him. There are impertinent inquiries made: your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on that matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was! This, could one hit the right phrase of response, is what the wise and faithful man would aim to answer in such a case.

Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of small subaltern parties; uttered to them a part of his mind. Each little party thought him all its own. Hence their rage, one and all, to find him not of their party, but of his own party. Was it his blame? At all seasons of his history he must have felt, among such people, how, if he explained to them the deeper insight he had, they must either have shuddered aghast at it, or believing it, their own little compact hypothesis must have gone wholly to wreck. They could not have worked in his province any more; nay perhaps they could not now have worked in their own province. It is the inevitable position of a great man among small men. Small men, most active, useful, are to be seen everywhere, whose whole activity depends on some conviction which to you is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we call an error. But would it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or often, to disturb them in that? Many a man, doing loud work in the world, stands only on some thin traditionality, conventionality; to him indubitable, to you incredible: break that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths! "I might have my hand full of truth," said Fontenelle, "and open only my little finger."

And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how much more in all departments of practice! He that cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatever. And we call it "dissimulation," all this? What would you think of calling the general of an army a dissembler because he did not tell every corporal and private soldier, who pleased to put the question, what his thoughts were about everything?—Cromwell, I should rather say, managed all this in a manner we must admire for its perfection. An endless vortex of such questioning "corporals" rolled confusedly round him through his whole course; whom he did answer. It must have been as a great true-seeing man that he managed this too. Not one proved falsehood, as I said; not one! Of what man that ever wound himself through such a coil of things will you say so much?—

But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which pervert to the very basis our judgments formed about such men as Cromwell; about their "ambition," "falsity," and such like. The first is what I might call substituting the goal of their career for the course and starting-point of it. The vulgar Historian of a Cromwell fancies that he had determined on being Protector of England, at the time when he was ploughing the marsh lands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay all mapped out: a program of the whole drama; which he then step by step dramatically unfolded, with all manner of cunning, deceptive dramaturgy, as he went on,—the hollow, scheming [Gr.] Upokrites, or Play-actor, that he was! This is a radical perversion; all but universal in such cases. And think for an instant how different the fact is! How much does one of us foresee of his own life? Short way ahead of us it is all dim; an unwound skein of possibilities, of apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell had not his life lying all in that fashion of Program, which he needed then, with that unfathomable cunning of his, only to enact dramatically, scene after scene! Not so. We see it so; but to him it was in no measure so. What absurdities would fall away of themselves, were this one undeniable fact kept honestly in view by History! Historians indeed will tell you that they do keep it in view;—but look whether such is practically the fact! Vulgar History, as in this Cromwell's case, omits it altogether; even the best kinds of History only remember it now and then. To remember it duly with rigorous perfection, as in the fact it stood, requires indeed a rare faculty; rare, nay impossible. A very Shakspeare for faculty; or more than Shakspeare; who could enact a brother man's biography, see with the brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things he saw; in short, know his course and him, as few "Historians" are like to do. Half or more of all the thick-plied perversions which distort our image of Cromwell, will disappear, if we honestly so much as try to represent them so; in sequence, as they were; not in the lump, as they are thrown down before us.

But a second error, which I think the generality commit, refers to this same "ambition" itself. We exaggerate the ambition of Great Men; we mistake what the nature of it is. Great Men are not ambitious in that sense; he is a small poor man that is ambitious so. Examine the man who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; who goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims; struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under this sun. A great man? A poor morbid prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital, than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find something in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and real substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this way.

Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be "noticed" by noisy crowds of people? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was already there; no notice would make him other than he already was. Till his hair was grown gray; and Life from the down-hill slope was all seen to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable matter how it went,—he had been content to plough the ground, and read his Bible. He in his old days could not support it any longer, without selling himself to Falsehood, that he might ride in gilt carriages to Whitehall, and have clerks with bundles of papers haunting him, "Decide this, decide that," which in utmost sorrow of heart no man can perfectly decide! What could gilt carriages do for this man? From of old, was there not in his life a weight of meaning, a terror and a splendor as of Heaven itself? His existence there as man set him beyond the need of gilding. Death, Judgment and Eternity: these already lay as the background of whatsoever he thought or did. All his life lay begirt as in a sea of nameless Thoughts, which no speech of a mortal could name. God's Word, as the Puritan prophets of that time had read it: this was great, and all else was little to him. To call such a man "ambitious," to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described above, seems to me the poorest solecism. Such a man will say: "Keep your gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me alone, leave me alone; there is too much of life in me already!" Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, was not ambitious. "Corsica Boswell" flaunted at public shows with printed ribbons round his hat; but the great old Samuel stayed at home. The world-wide soul wrapt up in its thoughts, in its sorrows;—what could paradings, and ribbons in the hat, do for it?

Ah yes, I will say again: The great silent men! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his department; silently thinking, silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest which had no roots; which had all turned into leaves and boughs;—which must soon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what we can show, or speak. Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It alone is great; all else is small.—I hope we English will long maintain our grand talent pour le silence. Let others that cannot do without standing on barrel-heads, to spout, and be seen of all the market-place, cultivate speech exclusively,—become a most green forest without roots! Solomon says, There is a time to speak; but also a time to keep silence. Of some great silent Samuel, not urged to writing, as old Samuel Johnson says he was, by want of money, and nothing other, one might ask, "Why do not you too get up and speak; promulgate your system, found your sect?" "Truly," he will answer, "I am continent of my thought hitherto; happily I have yet had the ability to keep it in me, no compulsion strong enough to speak it. My 'system' is not for promulgation first of all; it is for serving myself to live by. That is the great purpose of it to me. And then the 'honor'? Alas, yes;—but as Cato said of the statue: So many statues in that Forum of yours, may it not be better if they ask, Where is Cato's statue?"—

But now, by way of counterpoise to this of Silence, let me say that there are two kinds of ambition; one wholly blamable, the other laudable and inevitable. Nature has provided that the great silent Samuel shall not be silent too long. The selfish wish to shine over others, let it be accounted altogether poor and miserable. "Seekest thou great things, seek them not:" this is most true. And yet, I say, there is an irrepressible tendency in every man to develop himself according to the magnitude which Nature has made him of; to speak out, to act out, what nature has laid in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay it is a duty, and even the summary of duties for a man. The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: To unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty for. It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of our existence. Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns to speak by this necessity it feels.—We will say therefore: To decide about ambition, whether it is bad or not, you have two things to take into view. Not the coveting of the place alone, but the fitness of the man for the place withal: that is the question. Perhaps the place was his; perhaps he had a natural right, and even obligation, to seek the place! Mirabeau's ambition to be Prime Minister, how shall we blame it, if he were "the only man in France that could have done any good there"? Hopefuler perhaps had he not so clearly felt how much good he could do! But a poor Necker, who could do no good, and had even felt that he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted because they had flung him out, and he was now quit of it, well might Gibbon mourn over him.—Nature, I say, has provided amply that the silent great man shall strive to speak withal; too amply, rather!

Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old Samuel Johnson, in his shrouded-up existence, that it was possible for him to do priceless divine work for his country and the whole world. That the perfect Heavenly Law might be made Law on this Earth; that the prayer he prayed daily, "Thy kingdom come," was at length to be fulfilled! If you had convinced his judgment of this; that it was possible, practicable; that he the mournful silent Samuel was called to take a part in it! Would not the whole soul of the man have flamed up into a divine clearness, into noble utterance and determination to act; casting all sorrows and misgivings under his feet, counting all affliction and contradiction small,—the whole dark element of his existence blazing into articulate radiance of light and lightning? It were a true ambition this! And think now how it actually was with Cromwell. From of old, the sufferings of God's Church, true zealous Preachers of the truth flung into dungeons, whips, set on pillories, their ears crops off, God's Gospel-cause trodden under foot of the unworthy: all this had lain heavy on his soul. Long years he had looked upon it, in silence, in prayer; seeing no remedy on Earth; trusting well that a remedy in Heaven's goodness would come,—that such a course was false, unjust, and could not last forever. And now behold the dawn of it; after twelve years silent waiting, all England stirs itself; there is to be once more a Parliament, the Right will get a voice for itself: inexpressible well-grounded hope has come again into the Earth. Was not such a Parliament worth being a member of? Cromwell threw down his ploughs, and hastened thither.

He spoke there,—rugged bursts of earnestness, of a self-seen truth, where we get a glimpse of them. He worked there; he fought and strove, like a strong true giant of a man, through cannon-tumult and all else,—on and on, till the Cause triumphed, its once so formidable enemies all swept from before it, and the dawn of hope had become clear light of victory and certainty. That he stood there as the strongest soul of England, the undisputed Hero of all England,—what of this? It was possible that the Law of Christ's Gospel could now establish itself in the world! The Theocracy which John Knox in his pulpit might dream of as a "devout imagination," this practical man, experienced in the whole chaos of most rough practice, dared to consider as capable of being realized. Those that were highest in Christ's Church, the devoutest wisest men, were to rule the land: in some considerable degree, it might be so and should be so. Was it not true, God's truth? And if true, was it not then the very thing to do? The strongest practical intellect in England dared to answer, Yes! This I call a noble true purpose; is it not, in its own dialect, the noblest that could enter into the heart of Statesman or man? For a Knox to take it up was something; but for a Cromwell, with his great sound sense and experience of what our world was,—History, I think, shows it only this once in such a degree. I account it the culminating point of Protestantism; the most heroic phasis that "Faith in the Bible" was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it: that it were made manifest to one of us, how we could make the Right supremely victorious over Wrong, and all that we had longed and prayed for, as the highest good to England and all lands, an attainable fact!

Well, I must say, the vulpine intellect, with its knowingness, its alertness and expertness in "detecting hypocrites," seems to me a rather sorry business. We have had but one such Statesman in England; one man, that I can get sight of, who ever had in the heart of him any such purpose at all. One man, in the course of fifteen hundred years; and this was his welcome. He had adherents by the hundred or the ten; opponents by the million. Had England rallied all round him,—why, then, England might have been a Christian land! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its hopeless problem, "Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action;"—how cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this problem is becoming to all men a palpably hopeless one.—

But with regard to Cromwell and his purposes: Hume, and a multitude following him, come upon me here with an admission that Cromwell was sincere at first; a sincere "Fanatic" at first, but gradually became a "Hypocrite" as things opened round him. This of the Fanatic-Hypocrite is Hume's theory of it; extensively applied since,—to Mahomet and many others. Think of it seriously, you will find something in it; not much, not all, very far from all. Sincere hero hearts do not sink in this miserable manner. The Sun flings forth impurities, gets balefully incrusted with spots; but it does not quench itself, and become no Sun at all, but a mass of Darkness! I will venture to say that such never befell a great deep Cromwell; I think, never. Nature's own lionhearted Son; Antaeus-like, his strength is got by touching the Earth, his Mother; lift him up from the Earth, lift him up into Hypocrisy, Inanity, his strength is gone. We will not assert that Cromwell was an immaculate man; that he fell into no faults, no insincerities among the rest. He was no dilettante professor of "perfections," "immaculate conducts." He was a rugged Orson, rending his rough way through actual true work,—doubtless with many a fall therein. Insincerities, faults, very many faults daily and hourly: it was too well known to him; known to God and him! The Sun was dimmed many a time; but the Sun had not himself grown a Dimness. Cromwell's last words, as he lay waiting for death, are those of a Christian heroic man. Broken prayers to God, that He would judge him and this Cause, He since man could not, in justice yet in pity. They are most touching words. He breathed out his wild great soul, its toils and sins all ended now, into the presence of his Maker, in this manner.

I, for one, will not call the man a Hypocrite! Hypocrite, mummer, the life of him a mere theatricality; empty barren quack, hungry for the shouts of mobs? The man had made obscurity do very well for him till his head was gray; and now he was, there as he stood recognized unblamed, the virtual King of England. Cannot a man do without King's Coaches and Cloaks? Is it such a blessedness to have clerks forever pestering you with bundles of papers in red tape? A simple Diocletian prefers planting of cabbages; a George Washington, no very immeasurable man, does the like. One would say, it is what any genuine man could do; and would do. The instant his real work were out in the matter of Kingship,—away with it!

Let us remark, meanwhile, how indispensable everywhere a King is, in all movements of men. It is strikingly shown, in this very War, what becomes of men when they cannot find a Chief Man, and their enemies can. The Scotch Nation was all but unanimous in Puritanism; zealous and of one mind about it, as in this English end of the Island was always far from being the case. But there was no great Cromwell among them; poor tremulous, hesitating, diplomatic Argyles and such like: none of them had a heart true enough for the truth, or durst commit himself to the truth. They had no leader; and the scattered Cavalier party in that country had one: Montrose, the noblest of all the Cavaliers; an accomplished, gallant-hearted, splendid man; what one may call the Hero-Cavalier. Well, look at it; on the one hand subjects without a King; on the other a King without subjects! The subjects without King can do nothing; the subjectless King can do something. This Montrose, with a handful of Irish or Highland savages, few of them so much as guns in their hands, dashes at the drilled Puritan armies like a wild whirlwind; sweeps them, time after time, some five times over, from the field before him. He was at one period, for a short while, master of all Scotland. One man; but he was a man; a million zealous men, but without the one; they against him were powerless! Perhaps of all the persons in that Puritan struggle, from first to last, the single indispensable one was verily Cromwell. To see and dare, and decide; to be a fixed pillar in the welter of uncertainty;—a King among them, whether they called him so or not.

Precisely here, however, lies the rub for Cromwell. His other proceedings have all found advocates, and stand generally justified; but this dismissal of the Rump Parliament and assumption of the Protectorship, is what no one can pardon him. He had fairly grown to be King in England; Chief Man of the victorious party in England: but it seems he could not do without the King's Cloak, and sold himself to perdition in order to get it. Let us see a little how this was.

England, Scotland, Ireland, all lying now subdued at the feet of the Puritan Parliament, the practical question arose, What was to be done with it? How will you govern these Nations, which Providence in a wondrous way has given up to your disposal? Clearly those hundred surviving members of the Long Parliament, who sit there as supreme authority, cannot continue forever to sit. What is to be done?—It was a question which theoretical constitution-builders may find easy to answer; but to Cromwell, looking there into the real practical facts of it, there could be none more complicated. He asked of the Parliament, What it was they would decide upon? It was for the Parliament to say. Yet the Soldiers too, however contrary to Formula, they who had purchased this victory with their blood, it seemed to them that they also should have something to say in it! We will not "for all our fighting have nothing but a little piece of paper." We understand that the Law of God's Gospel, to which He through us has given the victory, shall establish itself, or try to establish itself, in this land!

For three years, Cromwell says, this question had been sounded in the ears of the Parliament. They could make no answer; nothing but talk, talk. Perhaps it lies in the nature of parliamentary bodies; perhaps no Parliament could in such case make any answer but even that of talk, talk! Nevertheless the question must and shall be answered. You sixty men there, becoming fast odious, even despicable, to the whole nation, whom the nation already calls Rump Parliament, you cannot continue to sit there: who or what then is to follow? "Free Parliament," right of Election, Constitutional Formulas of one sort or the other,—the thing is a hungry Fact coming on us, which we must answer or be devoured by it! And who are you that prate of Constitutional Formulas, rights of Parliament? You have had to kill your King, to make Pride's Purges, to expel and banish by the law of the stronger whosoever would not let your Cause prosper: there are but fifty or threescore of you left there, debating in these days. Tell us what we shall do; not in the way of Formula, but of practicable Fact!

How they did finally answer, remains obscure to this day. The diligent Godwin himself admits that he cannot make it out. The likeliest is, that this poor Parliament still would not, and indeed could not dissolve and disperse; that when it came to the point of actually dispersing, they again, for the tenth or twentieth time, adjourned it,—and Cromwell's patience failed him. But we will take the favorablest hypothesis ever started for the Parliament; the favorablest, though I believe it is not the true one, but too favorable.

According to this version: At the uttermost crisis, when Cromwell and his Officers were met on the one hand, and the fifty or sixty Rump Members on the other, it was suddenly told Cromwell that the Rump in its despair was answering in a very singular way; that in their splenetic envious despair, to keep out the Army at least, these men were hurrying through the House a kind of Reform Bill,—Parliament to be chosen by the whole of England; equable electoral division into districts; free suffrage, and the rest of it! A very questionable, or indeed for them an unquestionable thing. Reform Bill, free suffrage of Englishmen? Why, the Royalists themselves, silenced indeed but not exterminated, perhaps outnumber us; the great numerical majority of England was always indifferent to our Cause, merely looked at it and submitted to it. It is in weight and force, not by counting of heads, that we are the majority! And now with your Formulas and Reform Bills, the whole matter, sorely won by our swords, shall again launch itself to sea; become a mere hope, and likelihood, small even as a likelihood? And it is not a likelihood; it is a certainty, which we have won, by God's strength and our own right hands, and do now hold here. Cromwell walked down to these refractory Members; interrupted them in that rapid speed of their Reform Bill;—ordered them to begone, and talk there no more.—Can we not forgive him? Can we not understand him? John Milton, who looked on it all near at hand, could applaud him. The Reality had swept the Formulas away before it. I fancy, most men who were realities in England might see into the necessity of that.

The strong daring man, therefore, has set all manner of Formulas and logical superficialities against him; has dared appeal to the genuine Fact of this England, Whether it will support him or not? It is curious to see how he struggles to govern in some constitutional way; find some Parliament to support him; but cannot. His first Parliament, the one they call Barebones's Parliament, is, so to speak, a Convocation of the Notables. From all quarters of England the leading Ministers and chief Puritan Officials nominate the men most distinguished by religious reputation, influence and attachment to the true Cause: these are assembled to shape out a plan. They sanctioned what was past; shaped as they could what was to come. They were scornfully called Barebones's Parliament: the man's name, it seems, was not Barebones, but Barbone,—a good enough man. Nor was it a jest, their work; it was a most serious reality,—a trial on the part of these Puritan Notables how far the Law of Christ could become the Law of this England. There were men of sense among them, men of some quality; men of deep piety I suppose the most of them were. They failed, it seems, and broke down, endeavoring to reform the Court of Chancery! They dissolved themselves, as incompetent; delivered up their power again into the hands of the Lord General Cromwell, to do with it what he liked and could.

What will he do with it? The Lord General Cromwell, "Commander-in-chief of all the Forces raised and to be raised;" he hereby sees himself, at this unexampled juncture, as it were the one available Authority left in England, nothing between England and utter Anarchy but him alone. Such is the undeniable Fact of his position and England's, there and then. What will he do with it? After deliberation, he decides that he will accept it; will formally, with public solemnity, say and vow before God and men, "Yes, the Fact is so, and I will do the best I can with it!" Protectorship, Instrument of Government,—these are the external forms of the thing; worked out and sanctioned as they could in the circumstances be, by the Judges, by the leading Official people, "Council of Officers and Persons of interest in the Nation:" and as for the thing itself, undeniably enough, at the pass matters had now come to, there was no alternative but Anarchy or that. Puritan England might accept it or not; but Puritan England was, in real truth, saved from suicide thereby!—I believe the Puritan People did, in an inarticulate, grumbling, yet on the whole grateful and real way, accept this anomalous act of Oliver's; at least, he and they together made it good, and always better to the last. But in their Parliamentary articulate way, they had their difficulties, and never knew fully what to say to it—!

Oliver's second Parliament, properly his first regular Parliament, chosen by the rule laid down in the Instrument of Government, did assemble, and worked;—but got, before long, into bottomless questions as to the Protector's right, as to "usurpation," and so forth; and had at the earliest legal day to be dismissed. Cromwell's concluding Speech to these men is a remarkable one. So likewise to his third Parliament, in similar rebuke for their pedantries and obstinacies. Most rude, chaotic, all these Speeches are; but most earnest-looking. You would say, it was a sincere helpless man; not used to speak the great inorganic thought of him, but to act it rather! A helplessness of utterance, in such bursting fulness of meaning. He talks much about "births of Providence:" All these changes, so many victories and events, were not forethoughts, and theatrical contrivances of men, of me or of men; it is blind blasphemers that will persist in calling them so! He insists with a heavy sulphurous wrathful emphasis on this. As he well might. As if a Cromwell in that dark huge game he had been playing, the world wholly thrown into chaos round him, had foreseen it all, and played it all off like a precontrived puppet-show by wood and wire! These things were foreseen by no man, he says; no man could tell what a day would bring forth: they were "births of Providence," God's finger guided us on, and we came at last to clear height of victory, God's Cause triumphant in these Nations; and you as a Parliament could assemble together, and say in what manner all this could be organized, reduced into rational feasibility among the affairs of men. You were to help with your wise counsel in doing that. "You have had such an opportunity as no Parliament in England ever had." Christ's Law, the Right and True, was to be in some measure made the Law of this land. In place of that, you have got into your idle pedantries, constitutionalities, bottomless cavillings and questionings about written laws for my coming here;—and would send the whole matter into Chaos again, because I have no Notary's parchment, but only God's voice from the battle-whirlwind, for being President among you! That opportunity is gone; and we know not when it will return. You have had your constitutional Logic; and Mammon's Law, not Christ's Law, rules yet in this land. "God be judge between you and me!" These are his final words to them: Take you your constitution-formulas in your hand; and I my informal struggles, purposes, realities and acts; and "God be judge between you and me!"—

We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things the printed Speeches of Cromwell are. Wilfully ambiguous, unintelligible, say the most: a hypocrite shrouding himself in confused Jesuitic jargon! To me they do not seem so. I will say rather, they afforded the first glimpses I could ever get into the reality of this Cromwell, nay into the possibility of him. Try to believe that he means something, search lovingly what that may be: you will find a real speech lying imprisoned in these broken rude tortuous utterances; a meaning in the great heart of this inarticulate man! You will, for thc first time, begin to see that he was a man; not an enigmatic chimera, unintelligible to you, incredible to you. The Histories and Biographies written of this Cromwell, written in shallow sceptical generations that could not know or conceive of a deep believing man, are far more obscure than Cromwell's Speeches. You look through them only into the infinite vague of Black and the Inane. "Heats and jealousies," says Lord Clarendon himself: "heats and jealousies," mere crabbed whims, theories and crotchets; these induced slow sober quiet Englishmen to lay down their ploughs and work; and fly into red fury of confused war against the best-conditioned of Kings! Try if you can find that true. Scepticism writing about Belief may have great gifts; but it is really ultra vires there. It is Blindness laying down the Laws of Optics.—

Cromwell's third Parliament split on the same rock as his second. Ever the constitutional Formula: How came you there? Show us some Notary parchment! Blind pedants:—"Why, surely the same power which makes you a Parliament, that, and something more, made me a Protector!" If my Protectorship is nothing, what in the name of wonder is your Parliamenteership, a reflex and creation of that?—

Parliaments having failed, there remained nothing but the way of Despotism. Military Dictators, each with his district, to coerce the Royalist and other gainsayers, to govern them, if not by act of Parliament, then by the sword. Formula shall not carry it, while the Reality is here! I will go on, protecting oppressed Protestants abroad, appointing just judges, wise managers, at home, cherishing true Gospel ministers; doing the best I can to make England a Christian England, greater than old Rome, the Queen of Protestant Christianity; I, since you will not help me; I while God leaves me life!—Why did he not give it up; retire into obscurity again, since the Law would not acknowledge him? cry several. That is where they mistake. For him there was no giving of it up! Prime ministers have governed countries, Pitt, Pombal, Choiseul; and their word was a law while it held: but this Prime Minister was one that could not get resigned. Let him once resign, Charles Stuart and the Cavaliers waited to kill him; to kill the Cause and him. Once embarked, there is no retreat, no return. This Prime Minister could retire no-whither except into his tomb.

One is sorry for Cromwell in his old days. His complaint is incessant of the heavy burden Providence has laid on him. Heavy; which he must bear till death. Old Colonel Hutchinson, as his wife relates it, Hutchinson, his old battle-mate, coming to see him on some indispensable business, much against his will,—Cromwell "follows him to the door," in a most fraternal, domestic, conciliatory style; begs that he would be reconciled to him, his old brother in arms; says how much it grieves him to be misunderstood, deserted by true fellow-soldiers, dear to him from of old: the rigorous Hutchinson, cased in his Republican formula, sullenly goes his way.—And the man's head now white; his strong arm growing weary with its long work! I think always too of his poor Mother, now very old, living in that Palace of his; a right brave woman; as indeed they lived all an honest God-fearing Household there: if she heard a shot go off, she thought it was her son killed. He had to come to her at least once a day, that she might see with her own eyes that he was yet living. The poor old Mother!—What had this man gained; what had he gained? He had a life of sore strife and toil, to his last day. Fame, ambition, place in History? His dead body was hung in chains, his "place in History,"—place in History forsooth!—has been a place of ignominy, accusation, blackness and disgrace; and here, this day, who knows if it is not rash in me to be among the first that ever ventured to pronounce him not a knave and liar, but a genuinely honest man! Peace to him. Did he not, in spite of all, accomplish much for us? We walk smoothly over his great rough heroic life; step over his body sunk in the ditch there. We need not spurn it, as we step on it!—Let the Hero rest. It was not to men's judgment that he appealed; nor have men judged him very well.

Precisely a century and a year after this of Puritanism had got itself hushed up into decent composure, and its results made smooth, in 1688, there broke out a far deeper explosion, much more difficult to hush up, known to all mortals, and like to be long known, by the name of French Revolution. It is properly the third and final act of Protestantism; the explosive confused return of mankind to Reality and Fact, now that they were perishing of Semblance and Sham. We call our English Puritanism the second act: "Well then, the Bible is true; let us go by the Bible!" "In Church," said Luther; "In Church and State," said Cromwell, "let us go by what actually is God's Truth." Men have to return to reality; they cannot live on semblance. The French Revolution, or third act, we may well call the final one; for lower than that savage Sansculottism men cannot go. They stand there on the nakedest haggard Fact, undeniable in all seasons and circumstances; and may and must begin again confidently to build up from that. The French explosion, like the English one, got its King,—who had no Notary parchment to show for himself. We have still to glance for a moment at Napoleon, our second modern King.

Napoleon does by no means seem to me so great a man as Cromwell. His enormous victories which reached over all Europe, while Cromwell abode mainly in our little England, are but as the high stilts on which the man is seen standing; the stature of the man is not altered thereby. I find in him no such sincerity as in Cromwell; only a far inferior sort. No silent walking, through long years, with the Awful Unnamable of this Universe; "walking with God," as he called it; and faith and strength in that alone: latent thought and valor, content to lie latent, then burst out as in blaze of Heaven's lightning! Napoleon lived in an age when God was no longer believed; the meaning of all Silence, Latency, was thought to be Nonentity: he had to begin not out of the Puritan Bible, but out of poor Sceptical Encyclopedies. This was the length the man carried it. Meritorious to get so far. His compact, prompt, every way articulate character is in itself perhaps small, compared with our great chaotic inarticulate Cromwell's. Instead of "dumb Prophet struggling to speak," we have a portentous mixture of the Quack withal! Hume's notion of the Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as it has, will apply much better to Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the like,—where indeed taken strictly it has hardly any truth at all. An element of blamable ambition shows itself, from the first, in this man; gets the victory over him at last, and involves him and his work in ruin.

"False as a bulletin" became a proverb in Napoleon's time. He makes what excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead the enemy, to keep up his own men's courage, and so forth. On the whole, there are no excuses. A man in no case has liberty to tell lies. It had been, in the long-run, better for Napoleon too if he had not told any. In fact, if a man have any purpose reaching beyond the hour and day, meant to be found extant next day, what good can it ever be to promulgate lies? The lies are found out; ruinous penalty is exacted for them. No man will believe the liar next time even when he speaks truth, when it is of the last importance that he be believed. The old cry of wolf!—A Lie is no-thing; you cannot of nothing make something; you make nothing at last, and lose your labor into the bargain.

Yet Napoleon had a sincerity: we are to distinguish between what is superficial and what is fundamental in insincerity. Across these outer manoeuverings and quackeries of his, which were many and most blamable, let us discern withal that the man had a certain instinctive ineradicable feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact, so long as he had any basis. He has an instinct of Nature better than his culture was. His savans, Bourrienne tells us, in that voyage to Egypt were one evening busily occupied arguing that there could be no God. They had proved it, to their satisfaction, by all manner of logic. Napoleon looking up into the stars, answers, "Very ingenious, Messieurs: but who made all that?" The Atheistic logic runs off from him like water; the great Fact stares him in the face: "Who made all that?" So too in Practice: he, as every man that can be great, or have victory in this world, sees, through all entanglements, the practical heart of the matter; drives straight towards that. When the steward of his Tuileries Palace was exhibiting the new upholstery, with praises, and demonstration how glorious it was, and how cheap withal, Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a pair of scissors, clips one of the gold tassels from a window-curtain, put it in his pocket, and walked on. Some days afterwards, he produced it at the right moment, to the horror of his upholstery functionary; it was not gold but tinsel! In St. Helena, it is notable how he still, to his last days, insists on the practical, the real. "Why talk and complain; above all, why quarrel with one another? There is no result in it; it comes to nothing that one can do. Say nothing, if one can do nothing!" He speaks often so, to his poor discontented followers; he is like a piece of silent strength in the middle of their morbid querulousness there.

And accordingly was there not what we can call a faith in him, genuine so far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy asserting itself here in the French Revolution is an unsuppressible Fact, which the whole world, with its old forces and institutions, cannot put down; this was a true insight of his, and took his conscience and enthusiasm along with it,—a faith. And did he not interpret the dim purport of it well? "La carriere ouverte aux talens, The implements to him who can handle them:" this actually is the truth, and even the whole truth; it includes whatever the French Revolution or any Revolution, could mean. Napoleon, in his first period, was a true Democrat. And yet by the nature of him, fostered too by his military trade, he knew that Democracy, if it were a true thing at all, could not be an anarchy: the man had a heart-hatred for anarchy. On that Twentieth of June (1792), Bourrienne and he sat in a coffee-house, as the mob rolled by: Napoleon expresses the deepest contempt for persons in authority that they do not restrain this rabble. On the Tenth of August he wonders why there is no man to command these poor Swiss; they would conquer if there were. Such a faith in Democracy, yet hatred of anarchy, it is that carries Napoleon through all his great work. Through his brilliant Italian Campaigns, onwards to the Peace of Leoben, one would say, his inspiration is: "Triumph to the French Revolution; assertion of it against these Austrian Simulacra that pretend to call it a Simulacrum!" Withal, however, he feels, and has a right to feel, how necessary a strong Authority is; how the Revolution cannot prosper or last without such. To bridle in that great devouring, self-devouring French Revolution; to tame it, so that its intrinsic purpose can be made good, that it may become organic, and be able to live among other organisms and formed things, not as a wasting destruction alone: is not this still what he partly aimed at, as the true purport of his life; nay what he actually managed to do? Through Wagrams, Austerlitzes; triumph after triumph,—he triumphed so far. There was an eye to see in this man, a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was such. The common soldiers used to say on the march: "These babbling Avocats, up at Paris; all talk and no work! What wonder it runs all wrong? We shall have to go and put our Petit Caporal there!" They went, and put him there; they and France at large. Chief-consulship, Emperorship, victory over Europe;—till the poor Lieutenant of La Fere, not unnaturally, might seem to himself the greatest of all men that had been in the world for some ages.

But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan-element got the upper hand. He apostatized from his old faith in Facts, took to believing in Semblances; strove to connect himself with Austrian Dynasties, Popedoms, with the old false Feudalities which he once saw clearly to be false;—considered that he would found "his Dynasty" and so forth; that the enormous French Revolution meant only that! The man was "given up to strong delusion, that he should believe a lie;" a fearful but most sure thing. He did not know true from false now when he looked at them,—the fearfulest penalty a man pays for yielding to untruth of heart. Self and false ambition had now become his god: self-deception once yielded to, all other deceptions follow naturally more and more. What a paltry patchwork of theatrical paper-mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this man wrapt his own great reality in, thinking to make it more real thereby! His hollow Pope's-Concordat, pretending to be a re-establishment of Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method of extirpating it, "la vaccine de la religion:" his ceremonial Coronations, consecrations by the old Italian Chimera in Notre-Dame,—"wanting nothing to complete the pomp of it," as Augereau said, "nothing but the half-million of men who had died to put an end to all that"! Cromwell's Inauguration was by the Sword and Bible; what we must call a genuinely true one. Sword and Bible were borne before him, without any chimera: were not these the real emblems of Puritanism; its true decoration and insignia? It had used them both in a very real manner, and pretended to stand by them now! But this poor Napoleon mistook: he believed too much in the Dupability of men; saw no fact deeper in man than Hunger and this! He was mistaken. Like a man that should build upon cloud; his house and he fall down in confused wreck, and depart out of the world.

Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and might be developed, were the temptation strong enough. "Lead us not into temptation"! But it is fatal, I say, that it be developed. The thing into which it enters as a cognizable ingredient is doomed to be altogether transitory; and, however huge it may look, is in itself small. Napoleon's working, accordingly, what was it with all the noise it made? A flash as of gunpowder wide-spread; a blazing-up as of dry heath. For an hour the whole Universe seems wrapt in smoke and flame; but only for an hour. It goes out: the Universe with its old mountains and streams, its stars above and kind soil beneath, is still there.

The Duke of Weimar told his friends always, To be of courage; this Napoleonism was unjust, a falsehood, and could not last. It is true doctrine. The heavier this Napoleon trampled on the world, holding it tyrannously down, the fiercer would the world's recoil against him be, one day. Injustice pays itself with frightful compound-interest. I am not sure but he had better have lost his best park of artillery, or had his best regiment drowned in the sea, than shot that poor German Bookseller, Palm! It was a palpable tyrannous murderous injustice, which no man, let him paint an inch thick, could make out to be other. It burnt deep into the hearts of men, it and the like of it; suppressed fire flashed in the eyes of men, as they thought of it,—waiting their day! Which day came: Germany rose round him.—What Napoleon did will in the long-run amount to what he did justly; what Nature with her laws will sanction. To what of reality was in him; to that and nothing more. The rest was all smoke and waste. La carriere ouverte aux talens: that great true Message, which has yet to articulate and fulfil itself everywhere, he left in a most inarticulate state. He was a great ebauche, a rude-draught never completed; as indeed what great man is other? Left in too rude a state, alas!

His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at St. Helena, are almost tragical to consider. He seems to feel the most unaffected surprise that it has all gone so; that he is flung out on the rock here, and the World is still moving on its axis. France is great, and all-great: and at bottom, he is France. England itself, he says, is by Nature only an appendage of France; "another Isle of Oleron to France." So it was by Nature, by Napoleon-Nature; and yet look how in fact—HERE AM I! He cannot understand it: inconceivable that the reality has not corresponded to his program of it; that France was not all-great, that he was not France. "Strong delusion," that he should believe the thing to be which is not! The compact, clear-seeing, decisive Italian nature of him, strong, genuine, which he once had, has enveloped itself, half-dissolved itself, in a turbid atmosphere of French fanfaronade. The world was not disposed to be trodden down underfoot; to be bound into masses, and built together, as he liked, for a pedestal to France and him: the world had quite other purposes in view! Napoleon's astonishment is extreme. But alas, what help now? He had gone that way of his; and Nature also had gone her way. Having once parted with Reality, he tumbles helpless in Vacuity; no rescue for him. He had to sink there, mournfully as man seldom did; and break his great heart, and die,—this poor Napoleon: a great implement too soon wasted, till it was useless: our last Great Man!

Our last, in a double sense. For here finally these wide roamings of ours through so many times and places, in search and study of Heroes, are to terminate. I am sorry for it: there was pleasure for me in this business, if also much pain. It is a great subject, and a most grave and wide one, this which, not to be too grave about it, I have named Hero-worship. It enters deeply, as I think, into the secret of Mankind's ways and vitalest interests in this world, and is well worth explaining at present. With six months, instead of six days, we might have done better. I promised to break ground on it; I know not whether I have even managed to do that. I have had to tear it up in the rudest manner in order to get into it at all. Often enough, with these abrupt utterances thrown out isolated, unexplained, has your tolerance been put to the trial. Tolerance, patient candor, all-hoping favor and kindness, which I will not speak of at present. The accomplished and distinguished, the beautiful, the wise, something of what is best in England, have listened patiently to my rude words. With many feelings, I heartily thank you all; and say, Good be with you all!

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# The Hero as Writer | Thomas Carlyle | Anthologies

Johnson, Rousseau, Burns

Date: 2025-03-29
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-hero-as-writer-thomas-carlyle
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-hero-as-writer-thomas-carlyle

May 19, 1840.

Hero-Gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong to the old ages, make their appearance in the remotest times; some of them have ceased to be possible long since, and cannot any more show themselves in this world. The Hero as Man of Letters, again, of which class we are to speak to-day, is altogether a product of these new ages; and so long as the wondrous art of Writing, or of Ready-writing which we call Printing, subsists, he may be expected to continue, as one of the main forms of Heroism for all future ages. He is, in various respects, a very singular phenomenon.

He is new, I say; he has hardly lasted above a century in the world yet. Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavoring to speak forth the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, and find place and subsistence by what the world would please to give him for doing that. Much had been sold and bought, and left to make its own bargain in the market-place; but the inspired wisdom of a Heroic Soul never till then, in that naked manner. He, with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living,—is a rather curious spectacle! Few shapes of Heroism can be more unexpected.

Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world! It seemed absurd to us, that men, in their rude admiration, should take some wise great Odin for a god, and worship him as such; some wise great Mahomet for one god-inspired, and religiously follow his Law for twelve centuries: but that a wise great Johnson, a Burns, a Rousseau, should be taken for some idle nondescript, extant in the world to amuse idleness, and have a few coins and applauses thrown him, that he might live thereby; this perhaps, as before hinted, will one day seem a still absurder phasis of things!—Meanwhile, since it is the spiritual always that determines the material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world will do and make. The world's manner of dealing with him is the most significant feature of the world's general position. Looking well at his life, we may get a glance, as deep as is readily possible for us, into the life of those singular centuries which have produced him, in which we ourselves live and work.

There are genuine Men of Letters, and not genuine; as in every kind there is a genuine and a spurious. If hero be taken to mean genuine, then I say the Hero as Man of Letters will be found discharging a function for us which is ever honorable, ever the highest; and was once well known to be the highest. He is uttering forth, in such way as he has, the inspired soul of him; all that a man, in any case, can do. I say inspired; for what we call "originality," "sincerity," "genius," the heroic quality we have no good name for, signifies that. The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in that; he declares that abroad, by act or speech as it may be in declaring himself abroad. His life, as we said before, is a piece of the everlasting heart of Nature herself: all men's life is,—but the weak many know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times; the strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden from them. The Man of Letters, like every Hero, is there to proclaim this in such sort as he can. Intrinsically it is the same function which the old generations named a man Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; which all manner of Heroes, by speech or by act, are sent into the world to do.

Fichte the German Philosopher delivered, some forty years ago at Erlangen, a highly remarkable Course of Lectures on this subject: "Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten, On the Nature of the Literary Man." Fichte, in conformity with the Transcendental Philosophy, of which he was a distinguished teacher, declares first: That all things which we see or work with in this Earth, especially we ourselves and all persons, are as a kind of vesture or sensuous Appearance: that under all there lies, as the essence of them, what he calls the "Divine Idea of the World;" this is the Reality which "lies at the bottom of all Appearance." To the mass of men no such Divine Idea is recognizable in the world; they live merely, says Fichte, among the superficialities, practicalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that there is anything divine under them. But the Man of Letters is sent hither specially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this same Divine Idea: in every new generation it will manifest itself in a new dialect; and he is there for the purpose of doing that. Such is Fichte's phraseology; with which we need not quarrel. It is his way of naming what I here, by other words, am striving imperfectly to name; what there is at present no name for: The unspeakable Divine Significance, full of splendor, of wonder and terror, that lies in the being of every man, of every thing,—the Presence of the God who made every man and thing. Mahomet taught this in his dialect; Odin in his: it is the thing which all thinking hearts, in one dialect or another, are here to teach.

Fichte calls the Man of Letters, therefore, a Prophet, or as he prefers to phrase it, a Priest, continually unfolding the Godlike to men: Men of Letters are a perpetual Priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still present in their life, that all "Appearance," whatsoever we see in the world, is but as a vesture for the "Divine Idea of the World," for "that which lies at the bottom of Appearance." In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest;—guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time. Fichte discriminates with sharp zeal the true Literary Man, what we here call the Hero as Man of Letters, from multitudes of false unheroic. Whoever lives not wholly in this Divine Idea, or living partially in it, struggles not, as for the one good, to live wholly in it,—he is, let him live where else he like, in what pomps and prosperities he like, no Literary Man; he is, says Fichte, a "Bungler, Stumper." Or at best, if he belong to the prosaic provinces, he may be a "Hodman;" Fichte even calls him elsewhere a "Nonentity," and has in short no mercy for him, no wish that he should continue happy among us! This is Fichte's notion of the Man of Letters. It means, in its own form, precisely what we here mean.

In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred years, by far the notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte's countryman, Goethe. To that man too, in a strange way, there was given what we may call a life in the Divine Idea of the World; vision of the inward divine mystery: and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises imaged once more as godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. Illuminated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendor as of Mahomet, but in mild celestial radiance;—really a Prophecy in these most unprophetic times; to my mind, by far the greatest, though one of the quietest, among all the great things that have come to pass in them. Our chosen specimen of the Hero as Literary Man would be this Goethe. And it were a very pleasant plan for me here to discourse of his heroism: for I consider him to be a true Hero; heroic in what he said and did, and perhaps still more in what he did not say and did not do; to me a noble spectacle: a great heroic ancient man, speaking and keeping silence as an ancient Hero, in the guise of a most modern, high-bred, high-cultivated Man of Letters! We have had no such spectacle; no man capable of affording such, for the last hundred and fifty years.

But at present, such is the general state of knowledge about Goethe, it were worse than useless to attempt speaking of him in this case. Speak as I might, Goethe, to the great majority of you, would remain problematic, vague; no impression but a false one could be realized. Him we must leave to future times. Johnson, Burns, Rousseau, three great figures from a prior time, from a far inferior state of circumstances, will suit us better here. Three men of the Eighteenth Century; the conditions of their life far more resemble what those of ours still are in England, than what Goethe's in Germany were. Alas, these men did not conquer like him; they fought bravely, and fell. They were not heroic bringers of the light, but heroic seekers of it. They lived under galling conditions; struggling as under mountains of impediment, and could not unfold themselves into clearness, or victorious interpretation of that "Divine Idea." It is rather the Tombs of three Literary Heroes that I have to show you. There are the monumental heaps, under which three spiritual giants lie buried. Very mournful, but also great and full of interest for us. We will linger by them for a while.

Complaint is often made, in these times, of what we call the disorganized condition of society: how ill many forces of society fulfil their work; how many powerful are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged manner. It is too just a complaint, as we all know. But perhaps if we look at this of Books and the Writers of Books, we shall find here, as it were, the summary of all other disorganizations;—a sort of heart, from which, and to which all other confusion circulates in the world! Considering what Book writers do in the world, and what the world does with Book writers, I should say, It is the most anomalous thing the world at present has to show.—We should get into a sea far beyond sounding, did we attempt to give account of this: but we must glance at it for the sake of our subject. The worst element in the life of these three Literary Heroes was, that they found their business and position such a chaos. On the beaten road there is tolerable travelling; but it is sore work, and many have to perish, fashioning a path through the impassable!

Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in the speaking of man to men, founded churches, made endowments, regulations; everywhere in the civilized world there is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of complex dignified appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom a man with the tongue may, to best advantage, address his fellow-men. They felt that this was the most important thing; that without this there was no good thing. It is a right pious work, that of theirs; beautiful to behold! But now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing, a total change has come over that business. The Writer of a Book, is not he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all men in all times and places? Surely it is of the last importance that he do his work right, whoever do it wrong;—that the eye report not falsely, for then all the other members are astray! Well; how he may do his work, whether he do it right or wrong, or do it at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken the pains to think of. To a certain shopkeeper, trying to get some money for his books, if lucky, he is of some importance; to no other man of any. Whence he came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what he might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident in society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance!

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined,—they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives: can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.

Do not Books still accomplish miracles, as Runes were fabled to do? They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library novel, which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolish girls. So "Celia" felt, so "Clifford" acted: the foolish Theorem of Life, stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid Practice one day. Consider whether any Rune in the wildest imagination of Mythologist ever did such wonders as, on the actual firm Earth, some Books have done! What built St. Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of the matter, it was that divine Hebrew BOOK,—the word partly of the man Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thousand years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the strangest of things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, of which Printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively insignificant corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced. It related, with a wondrous new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Present in time and place; all times and all places with this our actual Here and Now. All things were altered for men; all modes of important work of men: teaching, preaching, governing, and all else.

To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable, respectable product of the modern ages. Their existence too is modified, to the very basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose while there were yet no Books procurable; while a man, for a single Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when a man had some knowledge to communicate, he should do it by gathering the learners round him, face to face, was a necessity for him. If you wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard. Thousands, as many as thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and that metaphysical theology of his. And now for any other teacher who had also something of his own to teach, there was a great convenience opened: so many thousands eager to learn were already assembled yonder; of all places the best place for him was that. For any third teacher it was better still; and grew ever the better, the more teachers there came. It only needed now that the King took notice of this new phenomenon; combined or agglomerated the various schools into one school; gave it edifices, privileges, encouragements, and named it Universitas, or School of all Sciences: the University of Paris, in its essential characters, was there. The model of all subsequent Universities; which down even to these days, for six centuries now, have gone on to found themselves. Such, I conceive, was the origin of Universities.

It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, facility of getting Books, the whole conditions of the business from top to bottom were changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all Universities, or superseded them! The Teacher needed not now to gather men personally round him, that he might speak to them what he knew: print it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had it each at his own fireside, much more effectually to learn it!—Doubtless there is still peculiar virtue in Speech; even writers of Books may still, in some circumstances, find it convenient to speak also,—witness our present meeting here! There is, one would say, and must ever remain while man has a tongue, a distinct province for Speech as well as for Writing and Printing. In regard to all things this must remain; to Universities among others. But the limits of the two have nowhere yet been pointed out, ascertained; much less put in practice: the University which would completely take in that great new fact, of the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not yet come into existence. If we think of it, all that a University, or final highest School can do for us, is still but what the first School began doing,—teach us to read. We learn to read, in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of Books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us. The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.

But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in its preaching, in its working, by the introduction of Books. The Church is the working recognized Union of our Priests or Prophets, of those who by wise teaching guide the souls of men. While there was no Writing, even while there was no Easy-writing, or Printing, the preaching of the voice was the natural sole method of performing this. But now with Books!—He that can write a true Book, to persuade England, is not he the Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate of England and of All England? I many a time say, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the real working effective Church of a modern country. Nay not only our preaching, but even our worship, is not it too accomplished by means of Printed Books? The noble sentiment which a gifted soul has clothed for us in melodious words, which brings melody into our hearts,—is not this essentially, if we will understand it, of the nature of worship? There are many, in all countries, who, in this confused time, have no other method of worship. He who, in any way, shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is beautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty; as the handwriting, made visible there, of the great Maker of the Universe? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a little verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he who sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the noble doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a brother man! He has verily touched our hearts as with a live coal from the altar. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic.

Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an "apocalypse of Nature," a revealing of the "open secret." It may well enough be named, in Fichte's style, a "continuous revelation" of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and Common. The Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure there; is brought out, now in this dialect, now in that, with various degrees of clearness: all true gifted Singers and Speakers are, consciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful indignation of a Byron, so wayward and perverse, may have touches of it; nay the withered mockery of a French sceptic,—his mockery of the False, a love and worship of the True. How much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare, of a Goethe; the cathedral music of a Milton! They are something too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a Burns,—skylark, starting from the humble furrow, far overhead into the blue depths, and singing to us so genuinely there! For all true singing is of the nature of worship; as indeed all true working may be said to be,—whereof such singing is but the record, and fit melodious representation, to us. Fragments of a real "Church Liturgy" and "Body of Homilies," strangely disguised from the common eye, are to be found weltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call Literature! Books are our Church too.

Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament, was a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there deliberated and decided; what we were to do as a nation. But does not, though the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, out of Parliament altogether? Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact,—very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal everyday extempore Printing, as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures. the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually there. Add only, that whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by, organized; working secretly under bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it will never rest till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracy virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.—

On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them;—from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew BOOK, what have they not done, what are they not doing!—For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing (bits of paper, as we say, and black ink), is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of man's faculty that produces a Book? It is the Thought of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man works all things whatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought. This London City, with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One;—a huge immeasurable Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.—The thing we called "bits of paper with traces of black ink," is the purest embodiment a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest.

All this, of the importance and supreme importance of the Man of Letters in modern Society, and how the Press is to such a degree superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the Senatus Academicus and much else, has been admitted for a good while; and recognized often enough, in late times, with a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It seems to me, the Sentimental by and by will have to give place to the Practical. If Men of Letters are so incalculably influential, actually performing such work for us from age to age, and even from day to day, then I think we may conclude that Men of Letters will not always wander like unrecognized unregulated Ishmaelites among us! Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has virtual unnoticed power will cast off its wrappages, bandages, and step forth one day with palpably articulated, universally visible power. That one man wear the clothes, and take the wages, of a function which is done by quite another: there can be no profit in this; this is not right, it is wrong. And yet, alas, the making of it right,—what a business, for long times to come! Sure enough, this that we call Organization of the Literary Guild is still a great way off, encumbered with all manner of complexities. If you asked me what were the best possible organization for the Men of Letters in modern society; the arrangement of furtherance and regulation, grounded the most accurately on the actual facts of their position and of the world's position,—I should beg to say that the problem far exceeded my faculty! It is not one man's faculty; it is that of many successive men turned earnestly upon it, that will bring out even an approximate solution. What the best arrangement were, none of us could say. But if you ask, Which is the worst? I answer: This which we now have, that Chaos should sit umpire in it; this is the worst. To the best, or any good one, there is yet a long way.

One remark I must not omit, That royal or parliamentary grants of money are by no means the chief thing wanted! To give our Men of Letters stipends, endowments and all furtherance of cash, will do little towards the business. On the whole, one is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is no evil to be poor; that there ought to be Literary Men poor,—to show whether they are genuine or not! Mendicant Orders, bodies of good men doomed to beg, were instituted in the Christian Church; a most natural and even necessary development of the spirit of Christianity. It was itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Crucifixion, every species of worldly Distress and Degradation. We may say, that he who has not known those things, and learned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has missed a good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse woollen cloak with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all the world, was no beautiful business;—nor an honorable one in any eye, till the nobleness of those who did so had made it honored of some!

Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest of it, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for being poor? It is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward profit, that success of any kind is not the goal he has to aim at. Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are bred in his heart, as in every heart; need, above all, to be cast out of his heart,—to be, with whatever pangs, torn out of it, cast forth from it, as a thing worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made out even less than Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same "best possible organization" as yet far off, Poverty may still enter as an important element? What if our Men of Letters, men setting up to be Spiritual Heroes, were still then, as they now are, a kind of "involuntary monastic order;" bound still to this same ugly Poverty,—till they had tried what was in it too, till they had learned to make it too do for them! Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there; and even spurn it back, when it wishes to get farther.

Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the fit assigner of them, all settled,—how is the Burns to be recognized that merits these? He must pass through the ordeal, and prove himself. This ordeal; this wild welter of a chaos which is called Literary Life: this too is a kind of ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men are born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there. The manifold, inextricably complex, universal struggle of these constitutes, and must constitute, what is called the progress of society. For Men of Letters, as for all other sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle? There is the whole question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy of blind Chance; a whirl of distracted atoms, one cancelling the other; one of the thousand arriving saved, nine hundred and ninety-nine lost by the way; your royal Johnson languishing inactive in garrets, or harnessed to the yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying broken-hearted as a Gauger; your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, kindling French Revolutions by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly enough the worst regulation. The best, alas, is far from us!

And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, as yet hidden in the bosom of centuries: this is a prophecy one can risk. For so soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they do infallibly set about arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it; and rest not till, in some approximate degree, they have accomplished that. I say, of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present extant in the world, there is no class comparable for importance to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books. This is a fact which he who runs may read,—and draw inferences from. "Literature will take care of itself," answered Mr. Pitt, when applied to for some help for Burns. "Yes," adds Mr. Southey, "it will take care of itself; and of you too, if you do not look to it!"

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they are but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body; they can struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont. But it deeply concerns the whole society, whether it will set its light on high places, to walk thereby; or trample it under foot, and scatter it in all ways of wild waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore! Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head of the world, the world will fight its battle victoriously, and be the best world man can make it. I called this anomaly of a disorganic Literary Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once product and parent; some good arrangement for that would be as the punctum saliens of a new vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, in some European countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces some beginnings of an arrangement for the Literary Class; indicating the gradual possibility of such. I believe that it is possible; that it will have to be possible.

By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on which we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites endless curiosity even in the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt to make their Men of Letters their Governors! It would be rash to say, one understood how this was done, or with what degree of success it was done. All such things must be very unsuccessful; yet a small degree of success is precious; the very attempt how precious! There does seem to be, all over China, a more or less active search everywhere to discover the men of talent that grow up in the young generation. Schools there are for every one: a foolish sort of training, yet still a sort. The youths who distinguish themselves in the lower school are promoted into favorable stations in the higher, that they may still more distinguish themselves,—forward and forward: it appears to be out of these that the Official Persons, and incipient Governors, are taken. These are they whom they try first, whether they can govern or not. And surely with the best hope: for they are the men that have already shown intellect. Try them: they have not governed or administered as yet; perhaps they cannot; but there is no doubt they have some Understanding,—without which no man can! Neither is Understanding a tool, as we are too apt to figure; "it is a hand which can handle any tool." Try these men: they are of all others the best worth trying.—Surely there is no kind of government, constitution, revolution, social apparatus or arrangement, that I know of in this world, so promising to one's scientific curiosity as this. The man of intellect at the top of affairs: this is the aim of all constitutions and revolutions, if they have any aim. For the man of true intellect, as I assert and believe always, is the noble-hearted man withal, the true, just, humane and valiant man. Get him for governor, all is got; fail to get him, though you had Constitutions plentiful as blackberries, and a Parliament in every village, there is nothing yet got—!

These things look strange, truly; and are not such as we commonly speculate upon. But we are fallen into strange times; these things will require to be speculated upon; to be rendered practicable, to be in some way put in practice. These, and many others. On all hands of us, there is the announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of Routine has ended; that to say a thing has long been, is no reason for its continuing to be. The things which have been are fallen into decay, are fallen into incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every society of our Europe, are no longer capable of living at all by the things which have been. When millions of men can no longer by their utmost exertion gain food for themselves, and "the third man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate potatoes," the things which have been must decidedly prepare to alter themselves!—I will now quit this of the organization of Men of Letters.

Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours was not the want of organization for Men of Letters, but a far deeper one; out of which, indeed, this and so many other evils for the Literary Man, and for all men, had, as from their fountain, taken rise. That our Hero as Man of Letters had to travel without highway, companionless, through an inorganic chaos,—and to leave his own life and faculty lying there, as a partial contribution towards pushing some highway through it: this, had not his faculty itself been so perverted and paralyzed, he might have put up with, might have considered to be but the common lot of Heroes. His fatal misery was the spiritual paralysis, so we may name it, of the Age in which his life lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half paralyzed! The Eighteenth was a Sceptical Century; in which little word there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one could specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more difficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith,—an age of Heroes! The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were, formally abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The "age of miracles" had been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer. An effete world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;—in one word, a godless world!

How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time,—compared not with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan Skalds, with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil, with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela, has died out into the clanking of a World-MACHINE. "Tree" and "Machine:" contrast these two things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no machine! I say that it does not go by wheel-and-pinion "motives" self-interests, checks, balances; that there is something far other in it than the clank of spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities; and, on the whole, that it is not a machine at all!—The old Norse Heathen had a truer motion of God's-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the old Heathen Norse were sincere men. But for these poor Sceptics there was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called truth. Truth, for most men, meant plausibility; to be measured by the number of votes you could get. They had lost any notion that sincerity was possible, or of what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities asking, with unaffected surprise and the air of offended virtue, What! am not I sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, nothing left but a Mechanical life, was the characteristic of that century. For the common man, unless happily he stood below his century and belonged to another prior one, it was impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay buried, unconscious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest man, only with infinite struggle and confusion was it possible to work himself half loose; and lead as it were, in an enchanted, most tragical way, a spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!

Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief symptom, as the chief origin of all this. Concerning which so much were to be said! It would take many Discourses, not a small fraction of one Discourse, to state what one feels about that Eighteenth Century and its ways. As indeed this, and the like of this, which we now call Scepticism, is precisely the black malady and life-foe, against which all teaching and discoursing since man's life began has directed itself: the battle of Belief against Unbelief is the never-ending battle! Neither is it in the way of crimination that one would wish to speak. Scepticism, for that century, we must consider as the decay of old ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new better and wider ways,—an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it; we will lament their hard fate. We will understand that destruction of old forms is not destruction of everlasting substances; that Scepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as we see it, is not an end but a beginning.

The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, of Bentham's theory of man and man's life, I chanced to call it a more beggarly one than Mahomet's. I am bound to say, now when it is once uttered, that such is my deliberate opinion. Not that one would mean offence against the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentham himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively worthy of praise. It is a determinate being what all the world, in a cowardly half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we shall either have death or the cure. I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It was a laying-down of cant; a saying to oneself: "Well then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let us see what, by checking and balancing, and good adjustment of tooth and pinion, can be made of it!" Benthamism has something complete, manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true; you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its eyes put out! It is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in the half-and-half state, pervading man's whole existence in that Eighteenth Century. It seems to me, all deniers of Godhood, and all lip-believers of it, are bound to be Benthamites, if they have courage and honesty. Benthamism is an eyeless Heroism: the Human Species, like a hapless blinded Samson grinding in the Philistine Mill, clasps convulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin down, but ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I meant to say no harm.

But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and lay to heart, that he who discerns nothing but Mechanism in the Universe has in the fatalest way missed the secret of the Universe altogether. That all Godhood should vanish out of men's conception of this Universe seems to me precisely the most brutal error,—I will not disparage Heathenism by calling it a Heathen error,—that men could fall into. It is not true; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who thinks so will think wrong about all things in the world; this original sin will vitiate all other conclusions he can form. One might call it the most lamentable of Delusions,—not forgetting Witchcraft itself! Witchcraft worshipped at least a living Devil; but this worships a dead iron Devil; no God, not even a Devil! Whatsoever is noble, divine, inspired, drops thereby out of life. There remains everywhere in life a despicable caput-mortuum; the mechanical hull, all soul fled out of it. How can a man act heroically? The "Doctrine of Motives" will teach him that it is, under more or less disguise, nothing but a wretched love of Pleasure, fear of Pain; that Hunger, of applause, of cash, of whatsoever victual it may be, is the ultimate fact of man's life. Atheism, in brief;—which does indeed frightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually a paralytic man; this godlike Universe a dead mechanical steam-engine, all working by motives, checks, balances, and I know not what; wherein, as in the detestable belly of some Phalaris'-Bull of his own contriving, he the poor Phalaris sits miserably dying!

Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man's mind. It is a mysterious indescribable process, that of getting to believe;—indescribable, as all vital acts are. We have our mind given us, not that it may cavil and argue, but that it may see into something, give us clear belief and understanding about something, whereon we are then to proceed to act. Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. Certainly we do not rush out, clutch up the first thing we find, and straightway believe that! All manner of doubt, inquiry, [Gr.] skepsis as it is named, about all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. It is the mystic working of the mind, on the object it is getting to know and believe. Belief comes out of all this, above ground, like the tree from its hidden roots. But now if, even on common things, we require that a man keep his doubts silent, and not babble of them till they in some measure become affirmations or denials; how much more in regard to the highest things, impossible to speak of in words at all! That a man parade his doubt, and get to imagine that debating and logic (which means at best only the manner of telling us your thought, your belief or disbelief, about a thing) is the triumph and true work of what intellect he has: alas, this is as if you should overturn the tree, and instead of green boughs, leaves and fruits, show us ugly taloned roots turned up into the air,—and no growth, only death and misery going on!

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get. We call those ages in which he gets so low the mournfulest, sickest and meanest of all ages. The world's heart is palsied, sick: how can any limb of it be whole? Genuine Acting ceases in all departments of the world's work; dexterous Similitude of Acting begins. The world's wages are pocketed, the world's work is not done. Heroes have gone out; Quacks have come in. Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which also was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth? Consider them, with their tumid sentimental vaporing about virtue, benevolence,—the wretched Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were without quackery; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and amalgam for truth. Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes down to the House, all wrapt and bandaged; he "has crawled out in great bodily suffering," and so on;—forgets, says Walpole, that he is acting the sick man; in the fire of debate, snatches his arm from the sling, and oratorically swings and brandishes it! Chatham himself lives the strangest mimetic life, half-hero, half-quack, all along. For indeed the world is full of dupes; and you have to gain the world's suffrage! How the duties of the world will be done in that case, what quantities of error, which means failure, which means sorrow and misery, to some and to many, will gradually accumulate in all provinces of the world's business, we need not compute.

It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of the world's maladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. An insincere world; a godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that the whole tribe of social pestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, and what not, have derived their being,—their chief necessity to be. This must alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My one hope of the world, my inexpugnable consolation in looking at the miseries of the world, is that this is altering. Here and there one does now find a man who knows, as of old, that this world is a Truth, and no Plausibility and Falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead or paralytic; and that the world is alive, instinct with Godhood, beautiful and awful, even as in the beginning of days! One man once knowing this, many men, all men, must by and by come to know it. It lies there clear, for whosoever will take the spectacles off his eyes and honestly look, to know! For such a man the Unbelieving Century, with its unblessed Products, is already past; a new century is already come. The old unblessed Products and Performances, as solid as they look, are Phantasms, preparing speedily to vanish. To this and the other noisy, very great-looking Simulacrum with the whole world huzzaing at its heels, he can say, composedly stepping aside: Thou art not true; thou art not extant, only semblant; go thy way!—Yes, hollow Formulism, gross Benthamism, and other unheroic atheistic Insincerity is visibly and even rapidly declining. An unbelieving Eighteenth Century is but an exception,—such as now and then occurs. I prophesy that the world will once more become sincere; a believing world; with many Heroes in it, a heroic world! It will then be a victorious world; never till then.

Or indeed what of the world and its victories? Men speak too much about the world. Each one of us here, let the world go how it will, and be victorious or not victorious, has he not a Life of his own to lead? One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us forevermore! It were well for us to live not as fools and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world's being saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves: there is great merit here in the "duty of staying at home"! And, on the whole, to say truth, I never heard of "world's" being "saved" in any other way. That mania of saving worlds is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with its windy sentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the saving of the world I will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own saving, which I am more competent to!—In brief, for the world's sake, and for our own, we will rejoice greatly that Scepticism, Insincerity, Mechanical Atheism, with all their poison-dews, are going, and as good as gone.—

Now it was under such conditions, in those times of Johnson, that our Men of Letters had to live. Times in which there was properly no truth in life. Old truths had fallen nigh dumb; the new lay yet hidden, not trying to speak. That Man's Life here below was a Sincerity and Fact, and would forever continue such, no new intimation, in that dusk of the world, had yet dawned. No intimation; not even any French Revolution,—which we define to be a Truth once more, though a Truth clad in hell-fire! How different was the Luther's pilgrimage, with its assured goal, from the Johnson's, girt with mere traditions, suppositions, grown now incredible, unintelligible! Mahomet's Formulas were of "wood waxed and oiled," and could be burnt out of one's way: poor Johnson's were far more difficult to burn.—The strong man will ever find work, which means difficulty, pain, to the full measure of his strength. But to make out a victory, in those circumstances of our poor Hero as Man of Letters, was perhaps more difficult than in any. Not obstruction, disorganization, Bookseller Osborne and Fourpence-halfpenny a day; not this alone; but the light of his own soul was taken from him. No landmark on the Earth; and, alas, what is that to having no loadstar in the Heaven! We need not wonder that none of those Three men rose to victory. That they fought truly is the highest praise. With a mournful sympathy we will contemplate, if not three living victorious Heroes, as I said, the Tombs of three fallen Heroes! They fell for us too; making a way for us. There are the mountains which they hurled abroad in their confused War of the Giants; under which, their strength and life spent, they now lie buried.

I have already written of these three Literary Heroes, expressly or incidentally; what I suppose is known to most of you; what need not be spoken or written a second time. They concern us here as the singular Prophets of that singular age; for such they virtually were; and the aspect they and their world exhibit, under this point of view, might lead us into reflections enough! I call them, all three, Genuine Men more or less; faithfully, for most part unconsciously, struggling to be genuine, and plant themselves on the everlasting truth of things. This to a degree that eminently distinguishes them from the poor artificial mass of their contemporaries; and renders them worthy to be considered as Speakers, in some measure, of the everlasting truth, as Prophets in that age of theirs. By Nature herself a noble necessity was laid on them to be so. They were men of such magnitude that they could not live on unrealities,—clouds, froth and all inanity gave way under them: there was no footing for them but on firm earth; no rest or regular motion for them, if they got not footing there. To a certain extent, they were Sons of Nature once more in an age of Artifice; once more, Original Men.

As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one of our great English souls. A strong and noble man; so much left undeveloped in him to the last: in a kindlier element what might he not have been,—Poet, Priest, sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man must not complain of his "element," of his "time," or the like; it is thriftless work doing so. His time is bad: well then, he is there to make it better!—Johnson's youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, very miserable. Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any the favorablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life could have been other than a painful one. The world might have had more of profitable work out of him, or less; but his effort against the world's work could never have been a light one. Nature, in return for his nobleness, had said to him, Live in an element of diseased sorrow. Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the nobleness were intimately and even inseparably connected with each other. At all events, poor Johnson had to go about girt with continual hypochondria, physical and spiritual pain. Like a Hercules with the burning Nessus'-shirt on him, which shoots in on him dull incurable misery: the Nessus'-shirt not to be stript off, which is his own natural skin! In this manner he had to live. Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases, with his great greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful as a stranger in this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he could come at: school-languages and other merely grammatical stuff, if there were nothing better! The largest soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of "fourpence-halfpenny a day." Yet a giant invincible soul; a true man's. One remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-faced, rawboned College Servitor stalking about, in winter-season, with his shoes worn out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a new pair at his door; and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his dim eyes, with what thoughts,—pitches them out of window! Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a type of the man's life, this pitching away of the shoes. An original man;—not a second-hand, borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that;—on the reality and substance which Nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing she has given another than us—!

And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was really higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise. I could not find a better proof of what I said the other day, That the sincere man was by nature the obedient man; that only in a World of Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. The essence of originality is not that it be new: Johnson believed altogether in the old; he found the old opinions credible for him, fit for him; and in a right heroic manner lived under them. He is well worth study in regard to that. For we are to say that Johnson was far other than a mere man of words and formulas; he was a man of truths and facts. He stood by the old formulas; the happier was it for him that he could so stand: but in all formulas that he could stand by, there needed to be a most genuine substance. Very curious how, in that poor Paper-age, so barren, artificial, thick-quilted with Pedantries, Hearsays, the great Fact of this Universe glared in, forever wonderful, indubitable, unspeakable, divine-infernal, upon this man too! How he harmonized his Formulas with it, how he managed at all under such circumstances: that is a thing worth seeing. A thing "to be looked at with reverence, with pity, with awe." That Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson still worshipped in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place.

It was in virtue of his sincerity, of his speaking still in some sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all dialects "artificial"? Artificial things are not all false;—nay every true Product of Nature will infallibly shape itself; we may say all artificial things are, at the starting of them, true. What we call "Formulas" are not in their origin bad; they are indispensably good. Formula is method, habitude; found wherever man is found. Formulas fashion themselves as Paths do, as beaten Highways, leading toward some sacred or high object, whither many men are bent. Consider it. One man, full of heartfelt earnest impulse, finds out a way of doing somewhat,—were it of uttering his soul's reverence for the Highest, were it but of fitly saluting his fellow-man. An inventor was needed to do that, a poet; he has articulated the dim-struggling thought that dwelt in his own and many hearts. This is his way of doing that; these are his footsteps, the beginning of a "Path." And now see: the second men travels naturally in the footsteps of his foregoer, it is the easiest method. In the footsteps of his foregoer; yet with improvements, with changes where such seem good; at all events with enlargements, the Path ever widening itself as more travel it;—till at last there is a broad Highway whereon the whole world may travel and drive. While there remains a City or Shrine, or any Reality to drive to, at the farther end, the Highway shall be right welcome! When the City is gone, we will forsake the Highway. In this manner all Institutions, Practices, Regulated Things in the world have come into existence, and gone out of existence. Formulas all begin by being full of substance; you may call them the skin, the articulation into shape, into limbs and skin, of a substance that is already there: they had not been there otherwise. Idols, as we said, are not idolatrous till they become doubtful, empty for the worshipper's heart. Much as we talk against Formulas, I hope no one of us is ignorant withal of the high significance of true Formulas; that they were, and will ever be, the indispensablest furniture of our habitation in this world.—

Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his "sincerity." He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere,—of his being particularly anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or "scholar" as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live—without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him. He does not "engrave Truth on his watch-seal;" no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once more. The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that openness to Nature which renders him incapable of being insincere! To his large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a Fact: all hearsay is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him acknowledge it or not, nay even though he seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to him,—fearful and wonderful, on this hand and on that. He has a basis of sincerity; unrecognized, because never questioned or capable of question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard of have this as the primary material of them. Innumerable commonplace men are debating, are talking everywhere their commonplace doctrines, which they have learned by logic, by rote, at second-hand: to that kind of man all this is still nothing. He must have truth; truth which he feels to be true. How shall he stand otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, in all ways, tells him that there is no standing. He is under the noble necessity of being true. Johnson's way of thinking about this world is not mine, any more than Mahomet's was: but I recognize the everlasting element of heart-sincerity in both; and see with pleasure how neither of them remains ineffectual. Neither of them is as chaff sown; in both of them is something which the seedfield will grow.

Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel to them,—as all like him always do. The highest Gospel he preached we may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence: "in a world where much is to be done, and little is to be known," see how you will do it! A thing well worth preaching. "A world where much is to be done, and little is to be known:" do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief;—you were miserable then, powerless, mad: how could you do or work at all? Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught;—coupled, theoretically and practically, with this other great Gospel, "Clear your mind of Cant!" Have no trade with Cant: stand on the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let it be in your own real torn shoes: "that will be better for you," as Mahomet says! I call this, I call these two things joined together, a great Gospel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at that time.

Johnson's Writings, which once had such currency and celebrity, are now as it were disowned by the young generation. It is not wonderful; Johnson's opinions are fast becoming obsolete: but his style of thinking and of living, we may hope, will never become obsolete. I find in Johnson's Books the indisputablest traces of a great intellect and great heart;—ever welcome, under what obstructions and perversions soever. They are sincere words, those of his; he means things by them. A wondrous buckram style,—the best he could get to then; a measured grandiloquence, stepping or rather stalking along in a very solemn way, grown obsolete now; sometimes a tumid size of phraseology not in proportion to the contents of it: all this you will put up with. For the phraseology, tumid or not, has always something within it. So many beautiful styles and books, with nothing in them;—a man is a malefactor to the world who writes such! They are the avoidable kind!—Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight and successful method, it may be called the best of all Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did it.

One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor Bozzy. He passes for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature; and was so in many senses. Yet the fact of his reverence for Johnson will ever remain noteworthy. The foolish conceited Scotch Laird, the most conceited man of his time, approaching in such awe-struck attitude the great dusty irascible Pedagogue in his mean garret there: it is a genuine reverence for Excellence; a worship for Heroes, at a time when neither Heroes nor worship were surmised to exist. Heroes, it would seem, exist always, and a certain worship of them! We will also take the liberty to deny altogether that of the witty Frenchman, that no man is a Hero to his valet-de-chambre. Or if so, it is not the Hero's blame, but the Valet's: that his soul, namely, is a mean valet-soul! He expects his Hero to advance in royal stage-trappings, with measured step, trains borne behind him, trumpets sounding before him. It should stand rather, No man can be a Grand-Monarque to his valet-de-chambre. Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear, and there is left nothing but a poor forked radish with a head fantastically carved;—admirable to no valet. The Valet does not know a Hero when he sees him! Alas, no: it requires a kind of Hero to do that;—and one of the world's wants, in this as in other senses, is for most part want of such.

On the whole, shall we not say, that Boswell's admiration was well bestowed; that he could have found no soul in all England so worthy of bending down before? Shall we not say, of this great mournful Johnson too, that he guided his difficult confused existence wisely; led it well, like a right valiant man? That waste chaos of Authorship by trade; that waste chaos of Scepticism in religion and politics, in life-theory and life-practice; in his poverty, in his dust and dimness, with the sick body and the rusty coat: he made it do for him, like a brave man. Not wholly without a loadstar in the Eternal; he had still a loadstar, as the brave all need to have: with his eye set on that, he would change his course for nothing in these confused vortices of the lower sea of Time. "To the Spirit of Lies, bearing death and hunger, he would in nowise strike his flag." Brave old Samuel: ultimus Romanorum!

Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot say so much. He is not what I call a strong man. A morbid, excitable, spasmodic man; at best, intense rather than strong. He had not "the talent of Silence," an invaluable talent; which few Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort in these times, excel in! The suffering man ought really "to consume his own smoke;" there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire,—which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming! Rousseau has not depth or width, not calm force for difficulty; the first characteristic of true greatness. A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man. We need forever, especially in these loud-shrieking days, to remind ourselves of that. A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.

Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of him. A high but narrow contracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep, strait-set eyes, in which there is something bewildered-looking,—bewildered, peering with lynx-eagerness. A face full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of the antagonism against that; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed only by intensity: the face of what is called a Fanatic,—a sadly contracted Hero! We name him here because, with all his drawbacks, and they are many, he has the first and chief characteristic of a Hero: he is heartily in earnest. In earnest, if ever man was; as none of these French Philosophers were. Nay, one would say, of an earnestness too great for his otherwise sensitive, rather feeble nature; and which indeed in the end drove him into the strangest incoherences, almost delirations. There had come, at last, to be a kind of madness in him: his Ideas possessed him like demons; hurried him so about, drove him over steep places—!

The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily name by a single word, Egoism; which is indeed the source and summary of all faults and miseries whatsoever. He had not perfected himself into victory over mere Desire; a mean Hunger, in many sorts, was still the motive principle of him. I am afraid he was a very vain man; hungry for the praises of men. You remember Genlis's experience of him. She took Jean Jacques to the Theatre; he bargaining for a strict incognito,—"He would not be seen there for the world!" The curtain did happen nevertheless to be drawn aside: the Pit recognized Jean Jacques, but took no great notice of him! He expressed the bitterest indignation; gloomed all evening, spake no other than surly words. The glib Countess remained entirely convinced that his anger was not at being seen, but at not being applauded when seen. How the whole nature of the man is poisoned; nothing but suspicion, self-isolation, fierce moody ways! He could not live with anybody. A man of some rank from the country, who visited him often, and used to sit with him, expressing all reverence and affection for him, comes one day; finds Jean Jacques full of the sourest unintelligible humor. "Monsieur," said Jean Jacques, with flaming eyes, "I know why you come here. You come to see what a poor life I lead; how little is in my poor pot that is boiling there. Well, look into the pot! There is half a pound of meat, one carrot and three onions; that is all: go and tell the whole world that, if you like, Monsieur!"—A man of this sort was far gone. The whole world got itself supplied with anecdotes, for light laughter, for a certain theatrical interest, from these perversions and contortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were not laughing or theatrical; too real to him! The contortions of a dying gladiator: the crowded amphitheatre looks on with entertainment; but the gladiator is in agonies and dying.

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals to Mothers, with his contrat-social, with his celebrations of Nature, even of savage life in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality, struggle towards Reality; was doing the function of a Prophet to his Time. As he could, and as the Time could! Strangely through all that defacement, degradation and almost madness, there is in the inmost heart of poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once more, out of the element of that withered mocking Philosophism, Scepticism and Persiflage, there has arisen in this man the ineradicable feeling and knowledge that this Life of ours is true: not a Scepticism, Theorem, or Persiflage, but a Fact, an awful Reality. Nature had made that revelation to him; had ordered him to speak it out. He got it spoken out; if not well and clearly, then ill and dimly,—as clearly as he could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even those stealings of ribbons, aimless confused miseries and vagabondisms, if we will interpret them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlement and staggerings to and fro of a man sent on an errand he is too weak for, by a path he cannot yet find? Men are led by strange ways. One should have tolerance for a man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what he will do. While life lasts, hope lasts for every man.

Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still among his countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what I call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in Rousseau. Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not genuinely poetical. Not white sunlight: something operatic; a kind of rose-pink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it is universal, among the French since his time. Madame de Stael has something of it; St. Pierre; and down onwards to the present astonishing convulsionary "Literature of Desperation," it is everywhere abundant. That same rose-pink is not the right hue. Look at a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott! He who has once seen into this, has seen the difference of the True from the Sham-True, and will discriminate them ever afterwards.

We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, under all disadvantages and disorganizations, can accomplish for the world. In Rousseau we are called to look rather at the fearful amount of evil which, under such disorganization, may accompany the good. Historically it is a most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished into Paris garrets, in the gloomy company of his own Thoughts and Necessities there; driven from post to pillar; fretted, exasperated till the heart of him went mad, he had grown to feel deeply that the world was not his friend nor the world's law. It was expedient, if any way possible, that such a man should not have been set in flat hostility with the world. He could be cooped into garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a wild beast in his cage;—but he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. The French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His semi-delirious speculations on the miseries of civilized life, the preferability of the savage to the civilized, and such like, helped well to produce a whole delirium in France generally. True, you may well ask, What could the world, the governors of the world, do with such a man? Difficult to say what the governors of the world could do with him! What he could do with them is unhappily clear enough,—guillotine a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau.

It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving second-hand Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting up, among the artificial pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a little well in the rocky desert places,—like a sudden splendor of Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall! People knew not what to make of it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work; alas, it let itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness of death, against that! Perhaps no man had such a false reception from his fellow-men. Once more a very wasteful life-drama was enacted under the sun.

The tragedy of Burns's life is known to all of you. Surely we may say, if discrepancy between place held and place merited constitute perverseness of lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse then Burns's. Among those second-hand acting-figures, mimes for most part, of the Eighteenth Century, once more a giant Original Man; one of those men who reach down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank with the Heroic among men: and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut. The largest soul of all the British lands came among us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant.

His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed in any; was involved in continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor as the Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns says, "which threw us all into tears." The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering Father, his brave heroine of a wife; and those children, of whom Robert was one! In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter for them. The letters "threw us all into tears:" figure it. The brave Father, I say always;—a silent Hero and Poet; without whom the son had never been a speaking one! Burns's Schoolmaster came afterwards to London, learnt what good society was; but declares that in no meeting of men did he ever enjoy better discourse than at the hearth of this peasant. And his poor "seven acres of nursery-ground,"—not that, nor the miserable patch of clay-farm, nor anything he tried to get a living by, would prosper with him; he had a sore unequal battle all his days. But he stood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful, unconquerable man;—swallowing down how many sore sufferings daily into silence; fighting like an unseen Hero,—nobody publishing newspaper paragraphs about his nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him! However, he was not lost; nothing is lost. Robert is there the outcome of him,—and indeed of many generations of such as him.

This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic special dialect, known only to a small province of the country he lived in. Had he written, even what he did write, in the general language of England, I doubt not he had already become universally recognized as being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men. That he should have tempted so many to penetrate through the rough husk of that dialect of his, is proof that there lay something far from common within it. He has gained a certain recognition, and is continuing to do so over all quarters of our wide Saxon world: wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be understood, by personal inspection of this and the other, that one of the most considerable Saxon men of the Eighteenth Century was an Ayrshire Peasant named Robert Burns. Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of the right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;—rock, yet with wells of living softness in it! A wild impetuous whirlwind of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly melody dwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough genuineness; homely, rustic, honest; true simplicity of strength; with its lightning-fire, with its soft dewy pity;—like the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god!

Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told me that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, was usually the gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats in the bog, or such like, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well believe it. This basis of mirth ("fond gaillard," as old Marquis Mirabeau calls it), a primal element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most attractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man. He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over them. It is as the lion shaking "dew-drops from his mane;" as the swift-bounding horse, that laughs at the shaking of the spear.—But indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's, are they not the outcome properly of warm generous affection,—such as is the beginning of all to every man?

You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted British soul we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe the day is coming when there will be little danger in saying so. His writings, all that he did under such obstructions, are only a poor fragment of him. Professor Stewart remarked very justly, what indeed is true of all Poets good for much, that his poetry was not any particular faculty; but the general result of a naturally vigorous original mind expressing itself in that way. Burns's gifts, expressed in conversation, are the theme of all that ever heard him. All kinds of gifts: from the gracefulest utterances of courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate speech; loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection, laconic emphasis, clear piercing insight; all was in him. Witty duchesses celebrate him as a man whose speech "led them off their feet." This is beautiful: but still more beautiful that which Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more than once alluded to, How the waiters and ostlers at inns would get out of bed, and come crowding to hear this man speak! Waiters and ostlers:—they too were men, and here was a man! I have heard much about his speech; but one of the best things I ever heard of it was, last year, from a venerable gentleman long familiar with him. That it was speech distinguished by always having something in it. "He spoke rather little than much," this old man told me; "sat rather silent in those early days, as in the company of persons above him; and always when he did speak, it was to throw new light on the matter." I know not why any one should ever speak otherwise!—But if we look at his general force of soul, his healthy robustness every way, the rugged downrightness, penetration, generous valor and manfulness that was in him,—where shall we readily find a better-gifted man?

Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I sometimes feel as if Burns might be found to resemble Mirabeau more than any other. They differ widely in vesture; yet look at them intrinsically. There is the same burly thick-necked strength of body as of soul;—built, in both cases, on what the old Marquis calls a fond gaillard. By nature, by course of breeding, indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much more of bluster; a noisy, forward, unresting man. But the characteristic of Mirabeau too is veracity and sense, power of true insight, superiority of vision. The thing that he says is worth remembering. It is a flash of insight into some object or other: so do both these men speak. The same raging passions; capable too in both of manifesting themselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit; wild laughter, energy, directness, sincerity: these were in both. The types of the two men are not dissimilar. Burns too could have governed, debated in National Assemblies; politicized, as few could. Alas, the courage which had to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling schooners in the Solway Frith; in keeping silence over so much, where no good speech, but only inarticulate rage was possible: this might have bellowed forth Ushers de Breze and the like; and made itself visible to all men, in managing of kingdoms, in ruling of great ever-memorable epochs! But they said to him reprovingly, his Official Superiors said, and wrote: "You are to work, not think." Of your thinking-faculty, the greatest in this land, we have no need; you are to gauge beer there; for that only are you wanted. Very notable;—and worth mentioning, though we know what is to be said and answered! As if Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all times, in all places and situations of the world, precisely the thing that was wanted. The fatal man, is he not always the unthinking man, the man who cannot think and see; but only grope, and hallucinate, and missee the nature of the thing he works with? He mis-sees it, mistakes it as we say; takes it for one thing, and it is another thing,—and leaves him standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal man; unutterably fatal, put in the high places of men.—"Why complain of this?" say some: "Strength is mournfully denied its arena; that was true from of old." Doubtless; and the worse for the arena, answer I! Complaining profits little; stating of the truth may profit. That a Europe, with its French Revolution just breaking out, finds no need of a Burns except for gauging beer,—is a thing I, for one, cannot rejoice at—!

Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality of Burns is the sincerity of him. So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The song he sings is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thing felt, really there; the prime merit of this, as of all in him, and of his Life generally, is truth. The Life of Burns is what we may call a great tragic sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity,—not cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things. In that sense, there is something of the savage in all great men.

Hero-worship,—Odin, Burns? Well; these Men of Letters too were not without a kind of Hero-worship: but what a strange condition has that got into now! The waiters and ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about the door, eager to catch any word that fell from Burns, were doing unconscious reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for worshipper. Rousseau had worshippers enough; princes calling on him in his mean garret; the great, the beautiful doing reverence to the poor moon-struck man. For himself a most portentous contradiction; the two ends of his life not to be brought into harmony. He sits at the tables of grandees; and has to copy music for his own living. He cannot even get his music copied: "By dint of dining out," says he, "I run the risk of dying by starvation at home." For his worshippers too a most questionable thing! If doing Hero-worship well or badly be the test of vital well-being or ill-being to a generation, can we say that these generations are very first-rate?—And yet our heroic Men of Letters do teach, govern, are kings, priests, or what you like to call them; intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means whatever. The world has to obey him who thinks and sees in the world. The world can alter the manner of that; can either have it as blessed continuous summer sunshine, or as unblessed black thunder and tornado,—with unspeakable difference of profit for the world! The manner of it is very alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any power under the sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can take its choice. Not whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what we call him; but whether we believe the word he tells us: there it all lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to believe it; believing it, we shall have to do it. What name or welcome we give him or it, is a point that concerns ourselves mainly. It, the new Truth, new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the nature of a message from on high; and must and will have itself obeyed.—

My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history,—his visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his demeanor there were the highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine manhood was in him. If we think of it, few heavier burdens could be laid on the strength of a man. So sudden; all common Lionism. which ruins innumerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon had been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the Artillery Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fere. Burns, still only in his twenty-seventh year, is no longer even a ploughman; he is flying to the West Indies to escape disgrace and a jail. This month he is a ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from him: next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down jewelled Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity. I admire much the way in which Burns met all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was ever so sorely tried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished; not abashed, not inflated, neither awkwardness nor affectation: he feels that he there is the man Robert Burns; that the "rank is but the guinea-stamp;" that the celebrity is but the candle-light, which will show what man, not in the least make him a better or other man! Alas, it may readily, unless he look to it, make him a worse man; a wretched inflated wind-bag,—inflated till he burst, and become a dead lion; for whom, as some one has said, "there is no resurrection of the body;" worse than a living dog!—Burns is admirable here.

And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters were the ruin and death of Burns. It was they that rendered it impossible for him to live! They gathered round him in his Farm; hindered his industry; no place was remote enough from them. He could not get his Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls into discontents, into miseries, faults; the world getting ever more desolate for him; health, character, peace of mind, all gone;—solitary enough now. It is tragical to think of! These men came but to see him; it was out of no sympathy with him, nor no hatred to him. They came to get a little amusement; they got their amusement;—and the Hero's life went for it!

Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of "Light-chafers," large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and illuminate the ways with at night. Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which they much admire. Great honor to the Fire-flies! But—!

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# The Hero as Priest | Thomas Carlyle | Anthologies

Luther; Reformation: Knox; Puritanism

Date: 2025-03-29
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-hero-as-priest-thomas-carlyle
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-hero-as-priest-thomas-carlyle

May 15, 1840

Our present discourse is to be of the Great Man as Priest. We have repeatedly endeavored to explain that all sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this, to sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a great, victorious, enduring manner; there is given a Hero,—the outward shape of whom will depend on the time and the environment he finds himself in. The Priest too, as I understand it, is a kind of Prophet; in him too there is required to be a light of inspiration, as we must name it. He presides over the worship of the people; is the Uniter of them with the Unseen Holy. He is the spiritual Captain of the people; as the Prophet is their spiritual King with many captains: he guides them heavenward, by wise guidance through this Earth and its work. The ideal of him is, that he too be what we can call a voice from the unseen Heaven; interpreting, even as the Prophet did, and in a more familiar manner unfolding the same to men. The unseen Heaven,—the "open secret of the Universe,"—which so few have an eye for! He is the Prophet shorn of his more awful splendor; burning with mild equable radiance, as the enlightener of daily life. This, I say, is the ideal of a Priest. So in old times; so in these, and in all times. One knows very well that, in reducing ideals to practice, great latitude of tolerance is needful; very great. But a Priest who is not this at all, who does not any longer aim or try to be this, is a character—of whom we had rather not speak in this place.

Luther and Knox were by express vocation Priests, and did faithfully perform that function in its common sense. Yet it will suit us better here to consider them chiefly in their historical character, rather as Reformers than Priests. There have been other Priests perhaps equally notable, in calmer times, for doing faithfully the office of a Leader of Worship; bringing down, by faithful heroism in that kind, a light from Heaven into the daily life of their people; leading them forward, as under God's guidance, in the way wherein they were to go. But when this same way was a rough one, of battle, confusion and danger, the spiritual Captain, who led through that, becomes, especially to us who live under the fruit of his leading, more notable than any other. He is the warfaring and battling Priest; who led his people, not to quiet faithful labor as in smooth times, but to faithful valorous conflict, in times all violent, dismembered: a more perilous service, and a more memorable one, be it higher or not. These two men we will account our best Priests, inasmuch as they were our best Reformers. Nay I may ask, Is not every true Reformer, by the nature of him, a Priest first of all? He appeals to Heaven's invisible justice against Earth's visible force; knows that it, the invisible, is strong and alone strong. He is a believer in the divine truth of things; a seer, seeing through the shows of things; a worshipper, in one way or the other, of the divine truth of things; a Priest, that is. If he be not first a Priest, he will never be good for much as a Reformer.

Thus then, as we have seen Great Men, in various situations, building up Religions, heroic Forms of human Existence in this world, Theories of Life worthy to be sung by a Dante, Practices of Life by a Shakspeare,—we are now to see the reverse process; which also is necessary, which also may be carried on in the Heroic manner. Curious how this should be necessary: yet necessary it is. The mild shining of the Poet's light has to give place to the fierce lightning of the Reformer: unfortunately the Reformer too is a personage that cannot fail in History! The Poet indeed, with his mildness, what is he but the product and ultimate adjustment of Reform, or Prophecy, with its fierceness? No wild Saint Dominics and Thebaid Eremites, there had been no melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavor, Scandinavian and other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, enabled Shakspeare to speak. Nay the finished Poet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished; that before long there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed.

Doubtless it were finer, could we go along always in the way of music; be tamed and taught by our Poets, as the rude creatures were by their Orpheus of old. Or failing this rhythmic musical way, how good were it could we get so much as into the equable way; I mean, if peaceable Priests, reforming from day to day, would always suffice us! But it is not so; even this latter has not yet been realized. Alas, the battling Reformer too is, from time to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,—a business often of enormous difficulty. It is notable enough, surely, how a Theorem or spiritual Representation, so we may call it, which once took in the whole Universe, and was completely satisfactory in all parts of it to the highly discursive acute intellect of Dante, one of the greatest in the world,—had in the course of another century become dubitable to common intellects; become deniable; and is now, to every one of us, flatly incredible, obsolete as Odin's Theorem! To Dante, human Existence, and God's ways with men, were all well represented by those Malebolges, Purgatorios; to Luther not well. How was this? Why could not Dante's Catholicism continue; but Luther's Protestantism must needs follow? Alas, nothing will continue.

I do not make much of "Progress of the Species," as handled in these times of ours; nor do I think you would care to hear much about it. The talk on that subject is too often of the most extravagant, confused sort. Yet I may say, the fact itself seems certain enough; nay we can trace out the inevitable necessity of it in the nature of things. Every man, as I have stated somewhere, is not only a learner but a doer: he learns with the mind given him what has been; but with the same mind he discovers farther, he invents and devises somewhat of his own. Absolutely without originality there is no man. No man whatever believes, or can believe, exactly what his grandfather believed: he enlarges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his view of the Universe, and consequently his Theorem of the Universe,—which is an infinite Universe, and can never be embraced wholly or finally by any view or Theorem, in any conceivable enlargement: he enlarges somewhat, I say; finds somewhat that was credible to his grandfather incredible to him, false to him, inconsistent with some new thing he has discovered or observed. It is the history of every man; and in the history of Mankind we see it summed up into great historical amounts,—revolutions, new epochs. Dante's Mountain of Purgatory does not stand "in the ocean of the other Hemisphere," when Columbus has once sailed thither! Men find no such thing extant in the other Hemisphere. It is not there. It must cease to be believed to be there. So with all beliefs whatsoever in this world,—all Systems of Belief, and Systems of Practice that spring from these.

If we add now the melancholy fact, that when Belief waxes uncertain, Practice too becomes unsound, and errors, injustices and miseries everywhere more and more prevail, we shall see material enough for revolution. At all turns, a man who will do faithfully, needs to believe firmly. If he have to ask at every turn the world's suffrage; if he cannot dispense with the world's suffrage, and make his own suffrage serve, he is a poor eye-servant; the work committed to him will be misdone. Every such man is a daily contributor to the inevitable downfall. Whatsoever work he does, dishonestly, with an eye to the outward look of it, is a new offence, parent of new misery to somebody or other. Offences accumulate till they become insupportable; and are then violently burst through, cleared off as by explosion. Dante's sublime Catholicism, incredible now in theory, and defaced still worse by faithless, doubting and dishonest practice, has to be torn asunder by a Luther, Shakspeare's noble Feudalism, as beautiful as it once looked and was, has to end in a French Revolution. The accumulation of offences is, as we say, too literally exploded, blasted asunder volcanically; and there are long troublous periods, before matters come to a settlement again.

Surely it were mournful enough to look only at this face of the matter, and find in all human opinions and arrangements merely the fact that they were uncertain, temporary, subject to the law of death! At bottom, it is not so: all death, here too we find, is but of the body, not of the essence or soul; all destruction, by violent revolution or howsoever it be, is but new creation on a wider scale. Odinism was Valor; Christianism was Humility, a nobler kind of Valor. No thought that ever dwelt honestly as true in the heart of man but was an honest insight into God's truth on man's part, and has an essential truth in it which endures through all changes, an everlasting possession for us all. And, on the other hand, what a melancholy notion is that, which has to represent all men, in all countries and times except our own, as having spent their life in blind condemnable error, mere lost Pagans, Scandinavians, Mahometans, only that we might have the true ultimate knowledge! All generations of men were lost and wrong, only that this present little section of a generation might be saved and right. They all marched forward there, all generations since the beginning of the world, like the Russian soldiers into the ditch of Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill up the ditch with their dead bodies, that we might march over and take the place! It is an incredible hypothesis.

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with fierce emphasis; and this or the other poor individual man, with his sect of individual men, marching as over the dead bodies of all men, towards sure victory but when he too, with his hypothesis and ultimate infallible credo, sank into the ditch, and became a dead body, what was to be said?—Withal, it is an important fact in the nature of man, that he tends to reckon his own insight as final, and goes upon it as such. He will always do it, I suppose, in one or the other way; but it must be in some wider, wiser way than this. Are not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army, enlisted, under Heaven's captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy, the empire of Darkness and Wrong? Why should we misknow one another, fight not against the enemy but against ourselves, from mere difference of uniform? All uniforms shall be good, so they hold in them true valiant men. All fashions of arms, the Arab turban and swift scimetar, Thor's strong hammer smiting down Jotuns, shall be welcome. Luther's battle-voice, Dante's march-melody, all genuine things are with us, not against us. We are all under one Captain, soldiers of the same host.—Let us now look a little at this Luther's fighting; what kind of battle it was, and how he comported himself in it. Luther too was of our spiritual Heroes; a Prophet to his country and time.

As introductory to the whole, a remark about Idolatry will perhaps be in place here. One of Mahomet's characteristics, which indeed belongs to all Prophets, is unlimited implacable zeal against Idolatry. It is the grand theme of Prophets: Idolatry, the worshipping of dead Idols as the Divinity, is a thing they cannot away with, but have to denounce continually, and brand with inexpiable reprobation; it is the chief of all the sins they see done under the sun. This is worth noting. We will not enter here into the theological question about Idolatry. Idol is Eidolon, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a Symbol of God; and perhaps one may question whether any the most benighted mortal ever took it for more than a Symbol. I fancy, he did not think that the poor image his own hands had made was God; but that God was emblemed by it, that God was in it some way or other. And now in this sense, one may ask, Is not all worship whatsoever a worship by Symbols, by eidola, or things seen? Whether seen, rendered visible as an image or picture to the bodily eye; or visible only to the inward eye, to the imagination, to the intellect: this makes a superficial, but no substantial difference. It is still a Thing Seen, significant of Godhead; an Idol. The most rigorous Puritan has his Confession of Faith, and intellectual Representation of Divine things, and worships thereby; thereby is worship first made possible for him. All creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions that fitly invest religious feelings, are in this sense eidola, things seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:—we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only more idolatrous.

Where, then, lies the evil of it? Some fatal evil must lie in it, or earnest prophetic men would not on all hands so reprobate it. Why is Idolatry so hateful to Prophets? It seems to me as if, in the worship of those poor wooden symbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked the Prophet, and filled his inmost soul with indignation and aversion, was not exactly what suggested itself to his own thought, and came out of him in words to others, as the thing. The rudest heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit in that poor act of his; analogous to what is still meritorious in Poets: recognition of a certain endless divine beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects whatsoever. Why should the Prophet so mercilessly condemn him? The poorest mortal worshipping his Fetish, while his heart is full of it, may be an object of pity, of contempt and avoidance, if you will; but cannot surely be an object of hatred. Let his heart be honestly full of it, the whole space of his dark narrow mind illuminated thereby; in one word, let him entirely believe in his Fetish,—it will then be, I should say, if not well with him, yet as well as it can readily be made to be, and you will leave him alone, unmolested there.

But here enters the fatal circumstance of Idolatry, that, in the era of the Prophets, no man's mind is any longer honestly filled with his Idol or Symbol. Before the Prophet can arise who, seeing through it, knows it to be mere wood, many men must have begun dimly to doubt that it was little more. Condemnable Idolatry is insincere Idolatry. Doubt has eaten out the heart of it: a human soul is seen clinging spasmodically to an Ark of the Covenant, which it half feels now to have become a Phantasm. This is one of the balefulest sights. Souls are no longer filled with their Fetish; but only pretend to be filled, and would fain make themselves feel that they are filled. "You do not believe," said Coleridge; "you only believe that you believe." It is the final scene in all kinds of Worship and Symbolism; the sure symptom that death is now nigh. It is equivalent to what we call Formulism, and Worship of Formulas, in these days of ours. No more immoral act can be done by a human creature; for it is the beginning of all immorality, or rather it is the impossibility henceforth of any morality whatsoever: the innermost moral soul is paralyzed thereby, cast into fatal magnetic sleep! Men are no longer sincere men. I do not wonder that the earnest man denounces this, brands it, prosecutes it with inextinguishable aversion. He and it, all good and it, are at death-feud. Blamable Idolatry is Cant, and even what one may call Sincere-Cant. Sincere-Cant: that is worth thinking of! Every sort of Worship ends with this phasis.

I find Luther to have been a Breaker of Idols, no less than any other Prophet. The wooden gods of the Koreish, made of timber and bees-wax, were not more hateful to Mahomet than Tetzel's Pardons of Sin, made of sheepskin and ink, were to Luther. It is the property of every Hero, in every time, in every place and situation, that he come back to reality; that he stand upon things, and not shows of things. According as he loves, and venerates, articulately or with deep speechless thought, the awful realities of things, so will the hollow shows of things, however regular, decorous, accredited by Koreishes or Conclaves, be intolerable and detestable to him. Protestantism, too, is the work of a Prophet: the prophet-work of that sixteenth century. The first stroke of honest demolition to an ancient thing grown false and idolatrous; preparatory afar off to a new thing, which shall be true, and authentically divine!

At first view it might seem as if Protestantism were entirely destructive to this that we call Hero-worship, and represent as the basis of all possible good, religious or social, for mankind. One often hears it said that Protestantism introduced a new era, radically different from any the world had ever seen before: the era of "private judgment," as they call it. By this revolt against the Pope, every man became his own Pope; and learnt, among other things, that he must never trust any Pope, or spiritual Hero-captain, any more! Whereby, is not spiritual union, all hierarchy and subordination among men, henceforth an impossibility? So we hear it said.—Now I need not deny that Protestantism was a revolt against spiritual sovereignties, Popes and much else. Nay I will grant that English Puritanism, revolt against earthly sovereignties, was the second act of it; that the enormous French Revolution itself was the third act, whereby all sovereignties earthly and spiritual were, as might seem, abolished or made sure of abolition. Protestantism is the grand root from which our whole subsequent European History branches out. For the spiritual will always body itself forth in the temporal history of men; the spiritual is the beginning of the temporal. And now, sure enough, the cry is everywhere for Liberty and Equality, Independence and so forth; instead of Kings, Ballot-boxes and Electoral suffrages: it seems made out that any Hero-sovereign, or loyal obedience of men to a man, in things temporal or things spiritual, has passed away forever from the world. I should despair of the world altogether, if so. One of my deepest convictions is, that it is not so. Without sovereigns, true sovereigns, temporal and spiritual, I see nothing possible but an anarchy; the hatefulest of things. But I find Protestantism, whatever anarchic democracy it have produced, to be the beginning of new genuine sovereignty and order. I find it to be a revolt against false sovereigns; the painful but indispensable first preparative for true sovereigns getting place among us! This is worth explaining a little.

Let us remark, therefore, in the first place, that this of "private judgment" is, at bottom, not a new thing in the world, but only new at that epoch of the world. There is nothing generically new or peculiar in the Reformation; it was a return to Truth and Reality in opposition to Falsehood and Semblance, as all kinds of Improvement and genuine Teaching are and have been. Liberty of private judgment, if we will consider it, must at all times have existed in the world. Dante had not put out his eyes, or tied shackles on himself; he was at home in that Catholicism of his, a free-seeing soul in it,—if many a poor Hogstraten, Tetzel, and Dr. Eck had now become slaves in it. Liberty of judgment? No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign, and believe there, by the grace of God alone! The sorriest sophistical Bellarmine, preaching sightless faith and passive obedience, must first, by some kind of conviction, have abdicated his right to be convinced. His "private judgment" indicated that, as the advisablest step he could take. The right of private judgment will subsist, in full force, wherever true men subsist. A true man believes with his whole judgment, with all the illumination and discernment that is in him, and has always so believed. A false man, only struggling to "believe that he believes," will naturally manage it in some other way. Protestantism said to this latter, Woe! and to the former, Well done! At bottom, it was no new saying; it was a return to all old sayings that ever had been said. Be genuine, be sincere: that was, once more, the meaning of it. Mahomet believed with his whole mind; Odin with his whole mind,—he, and all true Followers of Odinism. They, by their private judgment, had "judged "—so.

And now I venture to assert, that the exercise of private judgment, faithfully gone about, does by no means necessarily end in selfish independence, isolation; but rather ends necessarily in the opposite of that. It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half-belief and untruth that make it. A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth. There is no communion possible among men who believe only in hearsays. The heart of each is lying dead; has no power of sympathy even with things,—or he would believe them and not hearsays. No sympathy even with things; how much less with his fellow-men! He cannot unite with men; he is an anarchic man. Only in a world of sincere men is unity possible;—and there, in the long-run, it is as good as certain.

For observe one thing, a thing too often left out of view, or rather altogether lost sight of in this controversy: That it is not necessary a man should himself have discovered the truth he is to believe in, and never so sincerely to believe in. A Great Man, we said, was always sincere, as the first condition of him. But a man need not be great in order to be sincere; that is not the necessity of Nature and all Time, but only of certain corrupt unfortunate epochs of Time. A man can believe, and make his own, in the most genuine way, what he has received from another;—and with boundless gratitude to that other! The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another. Every son of Adam can become a sincere man, an original man, in this sense; no mortal is doomed to be an insincere man. Whole ages, what we call ages of Faith, are original; all men in them, or the most of men in them, sincere. These are the great and fruitful ages: every worker, in all spheres, is a worker not on semblance but on substance; every work issues in a result: the general sum of such work is great; for all of it, as genuine, tends towards one goal; all of it is additive, none of it subtractive. There is true union, true kingship, loyalty, all true and blessed things, so far as the poor Earth can produce blessedness for men.

Hero-worship? Ah me, that a man be self-subsistent, original, true, or what we call it, is surely the farthest in the world from indisposing him to reverence and believe other men's truth! It only disposes, necessitates and invincibly compels him to disbelieve other men's dead formulas, hearsays and untruths. A man embraces truth with his eyes open, and because his eyes are open: does he need to shut them before he can love his Teacher of truth? He alone can love, with a right gratitude and genuine loyalty of soul, the Hero-Teacher who has delivered him out of darkness into light. Is not such a one a true Hero and Serpent-queller; worthy of all reverence! The black monster, Falsehood, our one enemy in this world, lies prostrate by his valor; it was he that conquered the world for us!—See, accordingly, was not Luther himself reverenced as a true Pope, or Spiritual Father, being verily such? Napoleon, from amid boundless revolt of Sansculottism, became a King. Hero-worship never dies, nor can die. Loyalty and Sovereignty are everlasting in the world:—and there is this in them, that they are grounded not on garnitures and semblances, but on realities and sincerities. Not by shutting your eyes, your "private judgment;" no, but by opening them, and by having something to see! Luther's message was deposition and abolition to all false Popes and Potentates, but life and strength, though afar off, to new genuine ones.

All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral suffrages, Independence and so forth, we will take, therefore, to be a temporary phenomenon, by no means a final one. Though likely to last a long time, with sad enough embroilments for us all, we must welcome it, as the penalty of sins that are past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that are coming. In all ways, it behooved men to quit simulacra and return to fact; cost what it might, that did behoove to be done. With spurious Popes, and Believers having no private judgment,—quacks pretending to command over dupes,—what can you do? Misery and mischief only. You cannot make an association out of insincere men; you cannot build an edifice except by plummet and level,—at right-angles to one another! In all this wild revolutionary work, from Protestantism downwards, I see the blessedest result preparing itself: not abolition of Hero-worship, but rather what I would call a whole World of Heroes. If Hero mean sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero? A world all sincere, a believing world: the like has been; the like will again be,—cannot help being. That were the right sort of Worshippers for Heroes: never could the truly Better be so reverenced as where all were True and Good!—But we must hasten to Luther and his Life.

Luther's birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony; he came into the world there on the 10th of November, 1483. It was an accident that gave this honor to Eisleben. His parents, poor mine-laborers in a village of that region, named Mohra, had gone to the Eisleben Winter-Fair: in the tumult of this scene the Frau Luther was taken with travail, found refuge in some poor house there, and the boy she bore was named MARTIN LUTHER. Strange enough to reflect upon it. This poor Frau Luther, she had gone with her husband to make her small merchandisings; perhaps to sell the lock of yarn she had been spinning, to buy the small winter-necessaries for her narrow hut or household; in the whole world, that day, there was not a more entirely unimportant-looking pair of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet what were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and its history was waiting for this man. It is strange, it is great. It leads us back to another Birth-hour, in a still meaner environment, Eighteen Hundred years ago,—of which it is fit that we say nothing, that we think only in silence; for what words are there! The Age of Miracles past? The Age of Miracles is forever here—!

I find it altogether suitable to Luther's function in this Earth, and doubtless wisely ordered to that end by the Providence presiding over him and us and all things, that he was born poor, and brought up poor, one of the poorest of men. He had to beg, as the school-children in those times did; singing for alms and bread, from door to door. Hardship, rigorous Necessity was the poor boy's companion; no man nor no thing would put on a false face to flatter Martin Luther. Among things, not among the shows of things, had he to grow. A boy of rude figure, yet with weak health, with his large greedy soul, full of all faculty and sensibility, he suffered greatly. But it was his task to get acquainted with realities, and keep acquainted with them, at whatever cost: his task was to bring the whole world back to reality, for it had dwelt too long with semblance! A youth nursed up in wintry whirlwinds, in desolate darkness and difficulty, that he may step forth at last from his stormy Scandinavia, strong as a true man, as a god: a Christian Odin,—a right Thor once more, with his thunder-hammer, to smite asunder ugly enough Jotuns and Giant-monsters!

Perhaps the turning incident of his life, we may fancy, was that death of his friend Alexis, by lightning, at the gate of Erfurt. Luther had struggled up through boyhood, better and worse; displaying, in spite of all hindrances, the largest intellect, eager to learn: his father judging doubtless that he might promote himself in the world, set him upon the study of Law. This was the path to rise; Luther, with little will in it either way, had consented: he was now nineteen years of age. Alexis and he had been to see the old Luther people at Mansfeldt; were got back again near Erfurt, when a thunder-storm came on; the bolt struck Alexis, he fell dead at Luther's feet. What is this Life of ours?—gone in a moment, burnt up like a scroll, into the blank Eternity! What are all earthly preferments, Chancellorships, Kingships? They lie shrunk together—there! The Earth has opened on them; in a moment they are not, and Eternity is. Luther, struck to the heart, determined to devote himself to God and God's service alone. In spite of all dissuasions from his father and others, he became a Monk in the Augustine Convent at Erfurt.

This was probably the first light-point in the history of Luther, his purer will now first decisively uttering itself; but, for the present, it was still as one light-point in an element all of darkness. He says he was a pious monk, ich bin ein frommer Monch gewesen; faithfully, painfully struggling to work out the truth of this high act of his; but it was to little purpose. His misery had not lessened; had rather, as it were, increased into infinitude. The drudgeries he had to do, as novice in his Convent, all sorts of slave-work, were not his grievance: the deep earnest soul of the man had fallen into all manner of black scruples, dubitations; he believed himself likely to die soon, and far worse than die. One hears with a new interest for poor Luther that, at this time, he lived in terror of the unspeakable misery; fancied that he was doomed to eternal reprobation. Was it not the humble sincere nature of the man? What was he, that he should be raised to Heaven! He that had known only misery, and mean slavery: the news was too blessed to be credible. It could not become clear to him how, by fasts, vigils, formalities and mass-work, a man's soul could be saved. He fell into the blackest wretchedness; had to wander staggering as on the verge of bottomless Despair.

It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an old Latin Bible which he found in the Erfurt Library about this time. He had never seen the Book before. It taught him another lesson than that of fasts and vigils. A brother monk too, of pious experience, was helpful. Luther learned now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by the infinite grace of God: a more credible hypothesis. He gradually got himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder he should venerate the Bible, which had brought this blessed help to him. He prized it as the Word of the Highest must be prized by such a man. He determined to hold by that; as through life and to death he firmly did.

This, then, is his deliverance from darkness, his final triumph over darkness, what we call his conversion; for himself the most important of all epochs. That he should now grow daily in peace and clearness; that, unfolding now the great talents and virtues implanted in him, he should rise to importance in his Convent, in his country, and be found more and more useful in all honest business of life, is a natural result. He was sent on missions by his Augustine Order, as a man of talent and fidelity fit to do their business well: the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich, named the Wise, a truly wise and just prince, had cast his eye on him as a valuable person; made him Professor in his new University of Wittenberg, Preacher too at Wittenberg; in both which capacities, as in all duties he did, this Luther, in the peaceable sphere of common life, was gaining more and more esteem with all good men.

It was in his twenty-seventh year that he first saw Rome; being sent thither, as I said, on mission from his Convent. Pope Julius the Second, and what was going on at Rome, must have filled the mind of Luther with amazement. He had come as to the Sacred City, throne of God's High-priest on Earth; and he found it—what we know! Many thoughts it must have given the man; many which we have no record of, which perhaps he did not himself know how to utter. This Rome, this scene of false priests, clothed not in the beauty of holiness, but in far other vesture, is false: but what is it to Luther? A mean man he, how shall he reform a world? That was far from his thoughts. A humble, solitary man, why should he at all meddle with the world? It was the task of quite higher men than he. His business was to guide his own footsteps wisely through the world. Let him do his own obscure duty in it well; the rest, horrible and dismal as it looks, is in God's hand, not in his.

It is curious to reflect what might have been the issue, had Roman Popery happened to pass this Luther by; to go on in its great wasteful orbit, and not come athwart his little path, and force him to assault it! Conceivable enough that, in this case, he might have held his peace about the abuses of Rome; left Providence, and God on high, to deal with them! A modest quiet man; not prompt he to attack irreverently persons in authority. His clear task, as I say, was to do his own duty; to walk wisely in this world of confused wickedness, and save his own soul alive. But the Roman High-priesthood did come athwart him: afar off at Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get lived in honesty for it; he remonstrated, resisted, came to extremity; was struck at, struck again, and so it came to wager of battle between them! This is worth attending to in Luther's history. Perhaps no man of so humble, peaceable a disposition ever filled the world with contention. We cannot but see that he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence in the shade; that it was against his will he ever became a notoriety. Notoriety: what would that do for him? The goal of his march through this world was the Infinite Heaven; an indubitable goal for him: in a few years, he should either have attained that, or lost it forever! We will say nothing at all, I think, of that sorrowfulest of theories, of its being some mean shopkeeper grudge, of the Augustine Monk against the Dominican, that first kindled the wrath of Luther, and produced the Protestant Reformation. We will say to the people who maintain it, if indeed any such exist now: Get first into the sphere of thought by which it is so much as possible to judge of Luther, or of any man like Luther, otherwise than distractedly; we may then begin arguing with you.

The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, by Leo Tenth,—who merely wanted to raise a little money, and for the rest seems to have been a Pagan rather than a Christian, so far as he was anything,—arrived at Wittenberg, and drove his scandalous trade there. Luther's flock bought Indulgences; in the confessional of his Church, people pleaded to him that they had already got their sins pardoned. Luther, if he would not be found wanting at his own post, a false sluggard and coward at the very centre of the little space of ground that was his own and no other man's, had to step forth against Indulgences, and declare aloud that they were a futility and sorrowful mockery, that no man's sins could be pardoned by them. It was the beginning of the whole Reformation. We know how it went; forward from this first public challenge of Tetzel, on the last day of October, 1517, through remonstrance and argument;—spreading ever wider, rising ever higher; till it became unquenchable, and enveloped all the world. Luther's heart's desire was to have this grief and other griefs amended; his thought was still far other than that of introducing separation in the Church, or revolting against the Pope, Father of Christendom.—The elegant Pagan Pope cared little about this Monk and his doctrines; wished, however, to have done with the noise of him: in a space of some three years, having tried various softer methods, he thought good to end it by fire. He dooms the Monk's writings to be burnt by the hangman, and his body to be sent bound to Rome,—probably for a similar purpose. It was the way they had ended with Huss, with Jerome, the century before. A short argument, fire. Poor Huss: he came to that Constance Council, with all imaginable promises and safe-conducts; an earnest, not rebellious kind of man: they laid him instantly in a stone dungeon "three feet wide, six feet high, seven feet long;" burnt the true voice of him out of this world; choked it in smoke and fire. That was not well done!

I, for one, pardon Luther for now altogether revolting against the Pope. The elegant Pagan, by this fire-decree of his, had kindled into noble just wrath the bravest heart then living in this world. The bravest, if also one of the humblest, peaceablest; it was now kindled. These words of mine, words of truth and soberness, aiming faithfully, as human inability would allow, to promote God's truth on Earth, and save men's souls, you, God's vicegerent on earth, answer them by the hangman and fire? You will burn me and them, for answer to the God's-message they strove to bring you? You are not God's vicegerent; you are another's than his, I think! I take your Bull, as an emparchmented Lie, and burn it. You will do what you see good next: this is what I do.—It was on the 10th of December, 1520, three years after the beginning of the business, that Luther, "with a great concourse of people," took this indignant step of burning the Pope's fire-decree "at the Elster-Gate of Wittenberg." Wittenberg looked on "with shoutings;" the whole world was looking on. The Pope should not have provoked that "shout"! It was the shout of the awakening of nations. The quiet German heart, modest, patient of much, had at length got more than it could bear. Formulism, Pagan Popeism, and other Falsehood and corrupt Semblance had ruled long enough: and here once more was a man found who durst tell all men that God's-world stood not on semblances but on realities; that Life was a truth, and not a lie!

At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther as a Prophet Idol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. It is the function of great men and teachers. Mahomet said, These idols of yours are wood; you put wax and oil on them, the flies stick on them: they are not God, I tell you, they are black wood! Luther said to the Pope, This thing of yours that you call a Pardon of Sins, it is a bit of rag-paper with ink. It is nothing else; it, and so much like it, is nothing else. God alone can pardon sins. Popeship, spiritual Fatherhood of God's Church, is that a vain semblance, of cloth and parchment? It is an awful fact. God's Church is not a semblance, Heaven and Hell are not semblances. I stand on this, since you drive me to it. Standing on this, I a poor German Monk am stronger than you all. I stand solitary, friendless, but on God's Truth; you with your tiaras, triple-hats, with your treasuries and armories, thunders spiritual and temporal, stand on the Devil's Lie, and are not so strong—!

The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on the 17th of April, 1521, may be considered as the greatest scene in Modern European History; the point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilization takes its rise. After multiplied negotiations, disputations, it had come to this. The young Emperor Charles Fifth, with all the Princes of Germany, Papal nuncios, dignitaries spiritual and temporal, are assembled there: Luther is to appear and answer for himself, whether he will recant or not. The world's pomp and power sits there on this hand: on that, stands up for God's Truth, one man, the poor miner Hans Luther's Son. Friends had reminded him of Huss, advised him not to go; he would not be advised. A large company of friends rode out to meet him, with still more earnest warnings; he answered, "Were there as many Devils in Worms as there are roof-tiles, I would on." The people, on the morrow, as he went to the Hall of the Diet, crowded the windows and house-tops, some of them calling out to him, in solemn words, not to recant: "Whosoever denieth me before men!" they cried to him,—as in a kind of solemn petition and adjuration. Was it not in reality our petition too, the petition of the whole world, lying in dark bondage of soul, paralyzed under a black spectral Nightmare and triple-hatted Chimera, calling itself Father in God, and what not: "Free us; it rests with thee; desert us not!"

Luther did not desert us. His speech, of two hours, distinguished itself by its respectful, wise and honest tone; submissive to whatsoever could lawfully claim submission, not submissive to any more than that. His writings, he said, were partly his own, partly derived from the Word of God. As to what was his own, human infirmity entered into it; unguarded anger, blindness, many things doubtless which it were a blessing for him could he abolish altogether. But as to what stood on sound truth and the Word of God, he could not recant it. How could he? "Confute me," he concluded, "by proofs of Scripture, or else by plain just arguments: I cannot recant otherwise. For it is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here stand I; I can do no other: God assist me!"—It is, as we say, the greatest moment in the Modern History of Men. English Puritanism, England and its Parliaments, Americas, and vast work these two centuries; French Revolution, Europe and its work everywhere at present: the germ of it all lay there: had Luther in that moment done other, it had all been otherwise! The European World was asking him: Am I to sink ever lower into falsehood, stagnant putrescence, loathsome accursed death; or, with whatever paroxysm, to cast the falsehoods out of me, and be cured and live?—

Great wars, contentions and disunion followed out of this Reformation; which last down to our day, and are yet far from ended. Great talk and crimination has been made about these. They are lamentable, undeniable; but after all, what has Luther or his cause to do with them? It seems strange reasoning to charge the Reformation with all this. When Hercules turned the purifying river into King Augeas's stables, I have no doubt the confusion that resulted was considerable all around: but I think it was not Hercules's blame; it was some other's blame! The Reformation might bring what results it liked when it came, but the Reformation simply could not help coming. To all Popes and Popes' advocates, expostulating, lamenting and accusing, the answer of the world is: Once for all, your Popehood has become untrue. No matter how good it was, how good you say it is, we cannot believe it; the light of our whole mind, given us to walk by from Heaven above, finds it henceforth a thing unbelievable. We will not believe it, we will not try to believe it,—we dare not! The thing is untrue; we were traitors against the Giver of all Truth, if we durst pretend to think it true. Away with it; let whatsoever likes come in the place of it: with it we can have no farther trade!—Luther and his Protestantism is not responsible for wars; the false Simulacra that forced him to protest, they are responsible. Luther did what every man that God has made has not only the right, but lies under the sacred duty, to do: answered a Falsehood when it questioned him, Dost thou believe me?—No!—At what cost soever, without counting of costs, this thing behooved to be done. Union, organization spiritual and material, a far nobler than any Popedom or Feudalism in their truest days, I never doubt, is coming for the world; sure to come. But on Fact alone, not on Semblance and Simulacrum, will it be able either to come, or to stand when come. With union grounded on falsehood, and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!

And yet, in prizing justly the indispensable blessings of the New, let us not be unjust to the Old. The Old was true, if it no longer is. In Dante's days it needed no sophistry, self-blinding or other dishonesty, to get itself reckoned true. It was good then; nay there is in the soul of it a deathless good. The cry of "No Popery" is foolish enough in these days. The speculation that Popery is on the increase, building new chapels and so forth, may pass for one of the idlest ever started. Very curious: to count up a few Popish chapels, listen to a few Protestant logic-choppings,—to much dull-droning drowsy inanity that still calls itself Protestant, and say: See, Protestantism is dead; Popeism is more alive than it, will be alive after it!—Drowsy inanities, not a few, that call themselves Protestant are dead; but Protestantism has not died yet, that I hear of! Protestantism, if we will look, has in these days produced its Goethe, its Napoleon; German Literature and the French Revolution; rather considerable signs of life! Nay, at bottom, what else is alive but Protestantism? The life of most else that one meets is a galvanic one merely,—not a pleasant, not a lasting sort of life!

Popery can build new chapels; welcome to do so, to all lengths. Popery cannot come back, any more than Paganism can,—which also still lingers in some countries. But, indeed, it is with these things, as with the ebbing of the sea: you look at the waves oscillating hither, thither on the beach; for minutes you cannot tell how it is going; look in half an hour where it is,—look in half a century where your Popehood is! Alas, would there were no greater danger to our Europe than the poor old Pope's revival! Thor may as soon try to revive.—And withal this oscillation has a meaning. The poor old Popehood will not die away entirely, as Thor has done, for some time yet; nor ought it. We may say, the Old never dies till this happen, Till all the soul of good that was in it have got itself transfused into the practical New. While a good work remains capable of being done by the Romish form; or, what is inclusive of all, while a pious life remains capable of being led by it, just so long, if we consider, will this or the other human soul adopt it, go about as a living witness of it. So long it will obtrude itself on the eye of us who reject it, till we in our practice too have appropriated whatsoever of truth was in it. Then, but also not till then, it will have no charm more for any man. It lasts here for a purpose. Let it last as long as it can.—

Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all these wars and bloodshed, the noticeable fact that none of them began so long as he continued living. The controversy did not get to fighting so long as he was there. To me it is proof of his greatness in all senses, this fact. How seldom do we find a man that has stirred up some vast commotion, who does not himself perish, swept away in it! Such is the usual course of revolutionists. Luther continued, in a good degree, sovereign of this greatest revolution; all Protestants, of what rank or function soever, looking much to him for guidance: and he held it peaceable, continued firm at the centre of it. A man to do this must have a kingly faculty: he must have the gift to discern at all turns where the true heart of the matter lies, and to plant himself courageously on that, as a strong true man, that other true men may rally round him there. He will not continue leader of men otherwise. Luther's clear deep force of judgment, his force of all sorts, of silence, of tolerance and moderation, among others, are very notable in these circumstances.

Tolerance, I say; a very genuine kind of tolerance: he distinguishes what is essential, and what is not; the unessential may go very much as it will. A complaint comes to him that such and such a Reformed Preacher "will not preach without a cassock." Well, answers Luther, what harm will a cassock do the man? "Let him have a cassock to preach in; let him have three cassocks if he find benefit in them!" His conduct in the matter of Karlstadt's wild image-breaking; of the Anabaptists; of the Peasants' War, shows a noble strength, very different from spasmodic violence. With sure prompt insight he discriminates what is what: a strong just man, he speaks forth what is the wise course, and all men follow him in that. Luther's Written Works give similar testimony of him. The dialect of these speculations is now grown obsolete for us; but one still reads them with a singular attraction. And indeed the mere grammatical diction is still legible enough; Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one. I call him a great Thinker; as indeed his greatness of heart already betokens that.

Richter says of Luther's words, "His words are half-battles." They may be called so. The essential quality of him was, that he could fight and conquer; that he was a right piece of human Valor. No more valiant man, no mortal heart to be called braver, that one has record of, ever lived in that Teutonic Kindred, whose character is valor. His defiance of the "Devils" in Worms was not a mere boast, as the like might be if now spoken. It was a faith of Luther's that there were Devils, spiritual denizens of the Pit, continually besetting men. Many times, in his writings, this turns up; and a most small sneer has been grounded on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg where he sat translating the Bible, they still show you a black spot on the wall; the strange memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther sat translating one of the Psalms; he was worn down with long labor, with sickness, abstinence from food: there rose before him some hideous indefinable Image, which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work: Luther started up, with fiend-defiance; flung his inkstand at the spectre, and it disappeared! The spot still remains there; a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary's apprentice can now tell us what we are to think of this apparition, in a scientific sense: but the man's heart that dare rise defiant, face to face, against Hell itself, can give no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail before exists not on this Earth or under it.—Fearless enough! "The Devil is aware," writes he on one occasion, "that this does not proceed out of fear in me. I have seen and defied innumerable Devils. Duke George," of Leipzig, a great enemy of his, "Duke George is not equal to one Devil,"—far short of a Devil! "If I had business at Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, though it rained Duke Georges for nine days running." What a reservoir of Dukes to ride into—!

At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this man's courage was ferocity, mere coarse disobedient obstinacy and savagery, as many do. Far from that. There may be an absence of fear which arises from the absence of thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and stupid fury. We do not value the courage of the tiger highly! With Luther it was far otherwise; no accusation could be more unjust than this of mere ferocious violence brought against him. A most gentle heart withal, full of pity and love, as indeed the truly valiant heart ever is. The tiger before a stronger foe—flies: the tiger is not what we call valiant, only fierce and cruel. I know few things more touching than those soft breathings of affection, soft as a child's or a mother's, in this great wild heart of Luther. So honest, unadulterated with any cant; homely, rude in their utterance; pure as water welling from the rock. What, in fact, was all that down-pressed mood of despair and reprobation, which we saw in his youth, but the outcome of pre-eminent thoughtful gentleness, affections too keen and fine? It is the course such men as the poor Poet Cowper fall into. Luther to a slight observer might have seemed a timid, weak man; modesty, affectionate shrinking tenderness the chief distinction of him. It is a noble valor which is roused in a heart like this, once stirred up into defiance, all kindled into a heavenly blaze.

In Luther's Table-Talk, a posthumous Book of anecdotes and sayings collected by his friends, the most interesting now of all the Books proceeding from him, we have many beautiful unconscious displays of the man, and what sort of nature he had. His behavior at the death-bed of his little Daughter, so still, so great and loving, is among the most affecting things. He is resigned that his little Magdalene should die, yet longs inexpressibly that she might live;—follows, in awe-struck thought, the flight of her little soul through those unknown realms. Awe-struck; most heartfelt, we can see; and sincere,—for after all dogmatic creeds and articles, he feels what nothing it is that we know, or can know: His little Magdalene shall be with God, as God wills; for Luther too that is all; Islam is all.

Once, he looks out from his solitary Patmos, the Castle of Coburg, in the middle of the night: The great vault of Immensity, long flights of clouds sailing through it,—dumb, gaunt, huge:—who supports all that? "None ever saw the pillars of it; yet it is supported." God supports it. We must know that God is great, that God is good; and trust, where we cannot see.—Returning home from Leipzig once, he is struck by the beauty of the harvest-fields: How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fair taper stem, its golden head bent, all rich and waving there,—the meek Earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again; the bread of man!—In the garden at Wittenberg one evening at sunset, a little bird has perched for the night: That little bird, says Luther, above it are the stars and deep Heaven of worlds; yet it has folded its little wings; gone trustfully to rest there as in its home: the Maker of it has given it too a home!—Neither are mirthful turns wanting: there is a great free human heart in this man. The common speech of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive, genuine; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints. One feels him to be a great brother man. His love of Music, indeed, is not this, as it were, the summary of all these affections in him? Many a wild unutterability he spoke forth from him in the tones of his flute. The Devils fled from his flute, he says. Death-defiance on the one hand, and such love of music on the other; I could call these the two opposite poles of a great soul; between these two all great things had room.

Luther's face is to me expressive of him; in Kranach's best portraits I find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face; with its huge crag-like brows and bones, the emblem of rugged energy; at first, almost a repulsive face. Yet in the eyes especially there is a wild silent sorrow; an unnamable melancholy, the element of all gentle and fine affections; giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter was in this Luther, as we said; but tears also were there. Tears also were appointed him; tears and hard toil. The basis of his life was Sadness, Earnestness. In his latter days, after all triumphs and victories, he expresses himself heartily weary of living; he considers that God alone can and will regulate the course things are taking, and that perhaps the Day of Judgment is not far. As for him, he longs for one thing: that God would release him from his labor, and let him depart and be at rest. They understand little of the man who cite this in discredit of him!—I will call this Luther a true Great Man; great in intellect, in courage, affection and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk; but as an Alpine mountain,—so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another purpose than being great! Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the Heavens; yet in the clefts of it fountains, green beautiful valleys with flowers! A right Spiritual Hero and Prophet; once more, a true Son of Nature and Fact, for whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will be thankful to Heaven.

The most interesting phasis which the Reformation anywhere assumes, especially for us English, is that of Puritanism. In Luther's own country Protestantism soon dwindled into a rather barren affair: not a religion or faith, but rather now a theological jangling of argument, the proper seat of it not the heart; the essence of it sceptical contention: which indeed has jangled more and more, down to Voltaireism itself,—through Gustavus-Adolphus contentions onwards to French-Revolution ones! But in our Island there arose a Puritanism, which even got itself established as a Presbyterianism and National Church among the Scotch; which came forth as a real business of the heart; and has produced in the world very notable fruit. In some senses, one may say it is the only phasis of Protestantism that ever got to the rank of being a Faith, a true heart-communication with Heaven, and of exhibiting itself in History as such. We must spare a few words for Knox; himself a brave and remarkable man; but still more important as Chief Priest and Founder, which one may consider him to be, of the Faith that became Scotland's, New England's, Oliver Cromwell's. History will have something to say about this, for some time to come!

We may censure Puritanism as we please; and no one of us, I suppose, but would find it a very rough defective thing. But we, and all men, may understand that it was a genuine thing; for Nature has adopted it, and it has grown, and grows. I say sometimes, that all goes by wager-of-battle in this world; that strength, well understood, is the measure of all worth. Give a thing time; if it can succeed, it is a right thing. Look now at American Saxondom; and at that little Fact of the sailing of the Mayflower, two hundred years ago, from Delft Haven in Holland! Were we of open sense as the Greeks were, we had found a Poem here; one of Nature's own Poems, such as she writes in broad facts over great continents. For it was properly the beginning of America: there were straggling settlers in America before, some material as of a body was there; but the soul of it was first this. These poor men, driven out of their own country, not able well to live in Holland, determine on settling in the New World. Black untamed forests are there, and wild savage creatures; but not so cruel as Star-chamber hangmen. They thought the Earth would yield them food, if they tilled honestly; the everlasting heaven would stretch, there too, overhead; they should be left in peace, to prepare for Eternity by living well in this world of Time; worshipping in what they thought the true, not the idolatrous way. They clubbed their small means together; hired a ship, the little ship Mayflower, and made ready to set sail.

In Neal's History of the Puritans [Neal (London, 1755), i. 490] is an account of the ceremony of their departure: solemnity, we might call it rather, for it was a real act of worship. Their minister went down with them to the beach, and their brethren whom they were to leave behind; all joined in solemn prayer, That God would have pity on His poor children, and go with them into that waste wilderness, for He also had made that, He was there also as well as here.—Hah! These men, I think, had a work! The weak thing, weaker than a child, becomes strong one day, if it be a true thing. Puritanism was only despicable, laughable then; but nobody can manage to laugh at it now. Puritanism has got weapons and sinews; it has firearms, war-navies; it has cunning in its ten fingers, strength in its right arm; it can steer ships, fell forests, remove mountains;—it is one of the strongest things under this sun at present!

In the history of Scotland, too, I can find properly but one epoch: we may say, it contains nothing of world-interest at all but this Reformation by Knox. A poor barren country, full of continual broils, dissensions, massacrings; a people in the last state of rudeness and destitution; little better perhaps than Ireland at this day. Hungry fierce barons, not so much as able to form any arrangement with each other how to divide what they fleeced from these poor drudges; but obliged, as the Colombian Republics are at this day, to make of every alteration a revolution; no way of changing a ministry but by hanging the old ministers on gibbets: this is a historical spectacle of no very singular significance! "Bravery" enough, I doubt not; fierce fighting in abundance: but not braver or fiercer than that of their old Scandinavian Sea-king ancestors; whose exploits we have not found worth dwelling on! It is a country as yet without a soul: nothing developed in it but what is rude, external, semi-animal. And now at the Reformation, the internal life is kindled, as it were, under the ribs of this outward material death. A cause, the noblest of causes kindles itself, like a beacon set on high; high as Heaven, yet attainable from Earth;—whereby the meanest man becomes not a Citizen only, but a Member of Christ's visible Church; a veritable Hero, if he prove a true man!

Well; this is what I mean by a whole "nation of heroes;" a believing nation. There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul! The like has been seen, we find. The like will be again seen, under wider forms than the Presbyterian: there can be no lasting good done till then.—Impossible! say some. Possible? Has it not been, in this world, as a practiced fact? Did Hero-worship fail in Knox's case? Or are we made of other clay now? Did the Westminster Confession of Faith add some new property to the soul of man? God made the soul of man. He did not doom any soul of man to live as a Hypothesis and Hearsay, in a world filled with such, and with the fatal work and fruit of such—!

But to return: This that Knox did for his Nation, I say, we may really call a resurrection as from death. It was not a smooth business; but it was welcome surely, and cheap at that price, had it been far rougher. On the whole, cheap at any price!—as life is. The people began to live: they needed first of all to do that, at what cost and costs soever. Scotch Literature and Thought, Scotch Industry; James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns: I find Knox and the Reformation acting in the heart's core of every one of these persons and phenomena; I find that without the Reformation they would not have been. Or what of Scotland? The Puritanism of Scotland became that of England, of New England. A tumult in the High Church of Edinburgh spread into a universal battle and struggle over all these realms;—there came out, after fifty years' struggling, what we all call the "Glorious Revolution" a Habeas Corpus Act, Free Parliaments, and much else!—Alas, is it not too true what we said, That many men in the van do always, like Russian soldiers, march into the ditch of Schweidnitz, and fill it up with their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over them dry-shod, and gain the honor? How many earnest rugged Cromwells, Knoxes, poor Peasant Covenanters, wrestling, battling for very life, in rough miry places, have to struggle, and suffer, and fall, greatly censured, bemired,—before a beautiful Revolution of Eighty-eight can step over them in official pumps and silk-stockings, with universal three-times-three!

It seems to me hard measure that this Scottish man, now after three hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the world; intrinsically for having been, in such way as it was then possible to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen! Had he been a poor Half-and-half, he could have crouched into the corner, like so many others; Scotland had not been delivered; and Knox had been without blame. He is the one Scotchman to whom, of all others, his country and the world owe a debt. He has to plead that Scotland would forgive him for having been worth to it any million "unblamable" Scotchmen that need no forgiveness! He bared his breast to the battle; had to row in French galleys, wander forlorn in exile, in clouds and storms; was censured, shot at through his windows; had a right sore fighting life: if this world were his place of recompense, he had made but a bad venture of it. I cannot apologize for Knox. To him it is very indifferent, these two hundred and fifty years or more, what men say of him. But we, having got above all those details of his battle, and living now in clearness on the fruits of his victory, we, for our own sake, ought to look through the rumors and controversies enveloping the man, into the man himself.

For one thing, I will remark that this post of Prophet to his Nation was not of his seeking; Knox had lived forty years quietly obscure, before he became conspicuous. He was the son of poor parents; had got a college education; become a Priest; adopted the Reformation, and seemed well content to guide his own steps by the light of it, nowise unduly intruding it on others. He had lived as Tutor in gentlemen's families; preaching when any body of persons wished to hear his doctrine: resolute he to walk by the truth, and speak the truth when called to do it; not ambitious of more; not fancying himself capable of more. In this entirely obscure way he had reached the age of forty; was with the small body of Reformers who were standing siege in St. Andrew's Castle,—when one day in their chapel, the Preacher after finishing his exhortation to these fighters in the forlorn hope, said suddenly, That there ought to be other speakers, that all men who had a priest's heart and gift in them ought now to speak;—which gifts and heart one of their own number, John Knox the name of him, had: Had he not? said the Preacher, appealing to all the audience: what then is his duty? The people answered affirmatively; it was a criminal forsaking of his post, if such a man held the word that was in him silent. Poor Knox was obliged to stand up; he attempted to reply; he could say no word;—burst into a flood of tears, and ran out. It is worth remembering, that scene. He was in grievous trouble for some days. He felt what a small faculty was his for this great work. He felt what a baptism he was called to be baptized withal. He "burst into tears."

Our primary characteristic of a Hero, that he is sincere, applies emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere that this, whatever might be his other qualities or faults, is among the truest of men. With a singular instinct he holds to the truth and fact; the truth alone is there for him, the rest a mere shadow and deceptive nonentity. However feeble, forlorn the reality may seem, on that and that only can he take his stand. In the Galleys of the River Loire, whither Knox and the others, after their Castle of St. Andrew's was taken, had been sent as Galley-slaves,—some officer or priest, one day, presented them an Image of the Virgin Mother, requiring that they, the blasphemous heretics, should do it reverence. Mother? Mother of God? said Knox, when the turn came to him: This is no Mother of God: this is "a pented bredd,"—a piece of wood, I tell you, with paint on it! She is fitter for swimming, I think, than for being worshipped, added Knox; and flung the thing into the river. It was not very cheap jesting there: but come of it what might, this thing to Knox was and must continue nothing other than the real truth; it was a pented bredd: worship it he would not.

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage; the Cause they had was the true one, and must and would prosper; the whole world could not put it down. Reality is of God's making; it is alone strong. How many pented bredds, pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than to be worshipped!—This Knox cannot live but by fact: he clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He is an instance to us how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic: it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good honest intellectual talent, no transcendent one;—a narrow, inconsiderable man, as compared with Luther: but in heartfelt instinctive adherence to truth, in sincerity, as we say, he has no superior; nay, one might ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of the true Prophet cast. "He lies there," said the Earl of Morton at his grave, "who never feared the face of man." He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an Old-Hebrew Prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid narrow-looking adherence to God's truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake truth: an Old-Hebrew Prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh Minister of the Sixteenth Century. We are to take him for that; not require him to be other.

Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used to make in her own palace, to reprove her there, have been much commented upon. Such cruelty, such coarseness fills us with indignation. On reading the actual narrative of the business, what Knox said, and what Knox meant, I must say one's tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They are not so coarse, these speeches; they seem to me about as fine as the circumstances would permit! Knox was not there to do the courtier; he came on another errand. Whoever, reading these colloquies of his with the Queen, thinks they are vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest to a delicate high lady, mistakes the purport and essence of them altogether. It was unfortunately not possible to be polite with the Queen of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the Nation and Cause of Scotland. A man who did not wish to see the land of his birth made a hunting-field for intriguing ambitious Guises, and the Cause of God trampled underfoot of Falsehoods, Formulas and the Devil's Cause, had no method of making himself agreeable! "Better that women weep," said Morton, "than that bearded men be forced to weep." Knox was the constitutional opposition-party in Scotland: the Nobles of the country, called by their station to take that post, were not found in it; Knox had to go, or no one. The hapless Queen;—but the still more hapless Country, if she were made happy! Mary herself was not without sharpness enough, among her other qualities: "Who are you," said she once, "that presume to school the nobles and sovereign of this realm?"—"Madam, a subject born within the same," answered he. Reasonably answered! If the "subject" have truth to speak, it is not the "subject's" footing that will fail him here.—

We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well, surely it is good that each of us be as tolerant as possible. Yet, at bottom, after all the talk there is and has been about it, what is tolerance? Tolerance has to tolerate the unessential; and to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be noble, measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, on the whole, we are not altogether here to tolerate! We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal. We do not "tolerate" Falsehoods, Thieveries, Iniquities, when they fasten on us; we say to them, Thou art false, thou art not tolerable! We are here to extinguish Falsehoods, and put an end to them, in some wise way! I will not quarrel so much with the way; the doing of the thing is our great concern. In this sense Knox was, full surely, intolerant.

A man sent to row in French Galleys, and such like, for teaching the Truth in his own land, cannot always be in the mildest humor! I am not prepared to say that Knox had a soft temper; nor do I know that he had what we call an ill temper. An ill nature he decidedly had not. Kind honest affections dwelt in the much-enduring, hard-worn, ever-battling man. That he could rebuke Queens, and had such weight among those proud turbulent Nobles, proud enough whatever else they were; and could maintain to the end a kind of virtual Presidency and Sovereignty in that wild realm, he who was only "a subject born within the same:" this of itself will prove to us that he was found, close at hand, to be no mean acrid man; but at heart a healthful, strong, sagacious man. Such alone can bear rule in that kind. They blame him for pulling down cathedrals, and so forth, as if he were a seditious rioting demagogue: precisely the reverse is seen to be the fact, in regard to cathedrals and the rest of it, if we examine! Knox wanted no pulling down of stone edifices; he wanted leprosy and darkness to be thrown out of the lives of men. Tumult was not his element; it was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much in that. Every such man is the born enemy of Disorder; hates to be in it: but what then? Smooth Falsehood is not Order; it is the general sum-total of Disorder. Order is Truth,—each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it: Order and Falsehood cannot subsist together.

Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of drollery in him; which I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has a true eye for the ridiculous. His History, with its rough earnestness, is curiously enlivened with this. When the two Prelates, entering Glasgow Cathedral, quarrel about precedence; march rapidly up, take to hustling one another, twitching one another's rochets, and at last flourishing their crosiers like quarter-staves, it is a great sight for him every way! Not mockery, scorn, bitterness alone; though there is enough of that too. But a true, loving, illuminating laugh mounts up over the earnest visage; not a loud laugh; you would say, a laugh in the eyes most of all. An honest-hearted, brotherly man; brother to the high, brother also to the low; sincere in his sympathy with both. He had his pipe of Bourdeaux too, we find, in that old Edinburgh house of his; a cheery social man, with faces that loved him! They go far wrong who think this Knox was a gloomy, spasmodic, shrieking fanatic. Not at all: he is one of the solidest of men. Practical, cautious-hopeful, patient; a most shrewd, observing, quietly discerning man. In fact, he has very much the type of character we assign to the Scotch at present: a certain sardonic taciturnity is in him; insight enough; and a stouter heart than he himself knows of. He has the power of holding his peace over many things which do not vitally concern him,—"They? what are they?" But the thing which does vitally concern him, that thing he will speak of; and in a tone the whole world shall be made to hear: all the more emphatic for his long silence.

This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man!—He had a sore fight of an existence; wrestling with Popes and Principalities; in defeat, contention, life-long struggle; rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sore fight: but he won it. "Have you hope?" they asked him in his last moment, when he could no longer speak. He lifted his finger, "pointed upwards with his finger," and so died. Honor to him! His works have not died. The letter of his work dies, as of all men's; but the spirit of it never.

One word more as to the letter of Knox's work. The unforgivable offence in him is, that he wished to set up Priests over the head of Kings. In other words, he strove to make the Government of Scotland a Theocracy. This indeed is properly the sum of his offences, the essential sin; for which what pardon can there be? It is most true, he did, at bottom, consciously or unconsciously, mean a Theocracy, or Government of God. He did mean that Kings and Prime Ministers, and all manner of persons, in public or private, diplomatizing or whatever else they might be doing, should walk according to the Gospel of Christ, and understand that this was their Law, supreme over all laws. He hoped once to see such a thing realized; and the Petition, Thy Kingdom come, no longer an empty word. He was sore grieved when he saw greedy worldly Barons clutch hold of the Church's property; when he expostulated that it was not secular property, that it was spiritual property, and should be turned to true churchly uses, education, schools, worship;—and the Regent Murray had to answer, with a shrug of the shoulders, "It is a devout imagination!" This was Knox's scheme of right and truth; this he zealously endeavored after, to realize it. If we think his scheme of truth was too narrow, was not true, we may rejoice that he could not realize it; that it remained after two centuries of effort, unrealizable, and is a "devout imagination" still. But how shall we blame him for struggling to realize it? Theocracy, Government of God, is precisely the thing to be struggled for! All Prophets, zealous Priests, are there for that purpose. Hildebrand wished a Theocracy; Cromwell wished it, fought for it; Mahomet attained it. Nay, is it not what all zealous men, whether called Priests, Prophets, or whatsoever else called, do essentially wish, and must wish? That right and truth, or God's Law, reign supreme among men, this is the Heavenly Ideal (well named in Knox's time, and namable in all times, a revealed "Will of God") towards which the Reformer will insist that all be more and more approximated. All true Reformers, as I said, are by the nature of them Priests, and strive for a Theocracy.

How far such Ideals can ever be introduced into Practice, and at what point our impatience with their non-introduction ought to begin, is always a question. I think we may say safely, Let them introduce themselves as far as they can contrive to do it! If they are the true faith of men, all men ought to be more or less impatient always where they are not found introduced. There will never be wanting Regent Murrays enough to shrug their shoulders, and say, "A devout imagination!" We will praise the Hero-priest rather, who does what is in him to bring them in; and wears out, in toil, calumny, contradiction, a noble life, to make a God's Kingdom of this Earth. The Earth will not become too godlike!

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# The Hero as Poet | Thomas Carlyle | Anthologies

Dante: Shakespeare.

Date: 2025-03-29
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-hero-as-poet-thomas-carlyle-anthologies
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-hero-as-poet-thomas-carlyle-anthologies

May 12, 1840

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past. We are now to see our Hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character of Poet; a character which does not pass. The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce;—and will produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul; in no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet.

Hero, Prophet, Poet,—many different names, in different times, and places, do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note in them, according to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves! We might give many more names, on this same principle. I will remark again, however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the different sphere constitutes the grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator, Philosopher;—in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is all these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward. The grand fundamental character is that of Great Man; that the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which are like Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of poetical men withal; the things Turenne says are full of sagacity and geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in what province soever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well: one can easily believe it; they had done things a little harder than these! Burns, a gifted song-writer, might have made a still better Mirabeau. Shakespeare,—one knows not what he could not have made, in the supreme degree.

True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all great men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varieties of aptitude doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and far oftenest it is the latter only that are looked to. But it is as with common men in the learning of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague capability of a man, who could be any kind of craftsman; and make him into a smith, a carpenter, a mason: he is then and thenceforth that and nothing else. And if, as Addison complains, you sometimes see a street-porter, staggering under his load on spindle-shanks, and near at hand a tailor with the frame of a Samson handling a bit of cloth and small Whitechapel needle,—it cannot be considered that aptitude of Nature alone has been consulted here either!—The Great Man also, to what shall he be bound apprentice? Given your Hero, is he to become Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? It is an inexplicably complex controversial-calculation between the world and him! He will read the world and its laws; the world with its laws will be there to be read. What the world, on this matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said, the most important fact about the world.—

Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; Vates means both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are still the same; in this most important respect especially, That they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the Universe; what Goethe calls "the open secret." "Which is the great secret?" asks one.—"The open secret,"—open to all, seen by almost none! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, "the Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of Appearance," as Fichte styles it; of which all Appearance, from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appearance of Man and his work, is but the vesture, the embodiment that renders it visible. This divine mystery is in all times and in all places; veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter,—as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to speak much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful pity;—a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise!

But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the Vates, whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither to make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message; he is to reveal that to us,—that sacred mystery which he more than others lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knows it;—I might say, he has been driven to know it; without consent asked of him, he finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; this man too could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever may live in the shows of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in the very fact of things. A man once more, in earnest with the Universe, though all others were but toying with it. He is a Vates, first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet, participators in the "open secret," are one.

With respect to their distinction again: The Vates Prophet, we might say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the Vates Poet on what the Germans call the aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love: how else shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest Voice ever heard on this earth said withal, "Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." A glance, that, into the deepest deep of Beauty. "The lilies of the field,"—dressed finer than earthly princes, springing up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful eye looking out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! How could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks and is, were not inwardly Beauty? In this point of view, too, a saying of Goethe's, which has staggered several, may have meaning: "The Beautiful," he intimates, "is higher than the Good; the Beautiful includes in it the Good." The true Beautiful; which however, I have said somewhere, "differs from the false as Heaven does from Vauxhall!" So much for the distinction and identity of Poet and Prophet.—

In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few Poets who are accounted perfect; whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with. This is noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only an illusion. At bottom, clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether of Poetry. We are all poets when we read a poem well. The "imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante," is not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakespeare can embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus, the story of Hamlet as Shakespeare did: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every one embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has so much more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbors. World-Poets too, those whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in the same way. One who rises so far above the general level of Poets will, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All Poets, all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man is wholly made of that. Most Poets are very soon forgotten: but not the noblest Shakespeare or Homer of them can be remembered forever;—a day comes when he too is not!

Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between true Poetry and true Speech not poetical: what is the difference? On this point many things have been written, especially by late German Critics, some of which are not very intelligible at first. They say, for example, that the Poet has an infinitude in him; communicates an Unendlichkeit, a certain character of "infinitude," to whatsoever he delineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a matter is worth remembering: if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be found in it. For my own part, I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of Poetry being metrical, having music in it, being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say this as soon as anything else: If your delineation be authentically musical, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it, then it will be poetical; if not, not.—Musical: how much lies in that! A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!

Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in it: not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent;—the rhythm or tune to which the people there sing what they have to say! Accent is a kind of chanting; all men have accent of their own,—though they only notice that of others. Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become musical,—with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call musical Thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that manner. At bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.

The Vates Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature, seems to hold a poor rank among us, in comparison with the Vates Prophet; his function, and our esteem of him for his function, alike slight. The Hero taken as Divinity; the Hero taken as Prophet; then next the Hero taken only as Poet: does it not look as if our estimate of the Great Man, epoch after epoch, were continually diminishing? We take him first for a god, then for one god-inspired; and now in the next stage of it, his most miraculous word gains from us only the recognition that he is a Poet, beautiful verse-maker, man of genius, or such like!—It looks so; but I persuade myself that intrinsically it is not so. If we consider well, it will perhaps appear that in man still there is the same altogether peculiar admiration for the Heroic Gift, by what name soever called, that there at any time was.

I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man literally divine, it is that our notions of God, of the supreme unattainable Fountain of Splendor, Wisdom and Heroism, are ever rising higher; not altogether that our reverence for these qualities, as manifested in our like, is getting lower. This is worth taking thought of. Sceptical Dilettantism, the curse of these ages, a curse which will not last forever, does indeed in this the highest province of human things, as in all provinces, make sad work; and our reverence for great men, all crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out in poor plight, hardly recognizable. Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship. The dreariest, fatalest faith; believing which, one would literally despair of human things. Nevertheless look, for example, at Napoleon! A Corsican lieutenant of artillery; that is the show of him: yet is he not obeyed, worshipped after his sort, as all the Tiaraed and Diademed of the world put together could not be? High Duchesses, and ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns;—a strange feeling dwelling in each that they never heard a man like this; that, on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these people it still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of uttering it at present, that this rustic, with his black brows and flashing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, is of a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all others. Do not we feel it so? But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood, cast out of us,—as, by God's blessing, they shall one day be; were faith in the shows of things entirely swept out, replaced by clear faith in the things, so that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the other non-extant; what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!

Nay here in these ages, such as they are, have we not two mere Poets, if not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakespeare and Dante are Saints of Poetry; really, if we will think of it, canonized, so that it is impiety to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world, working across all these perverse impediments, has arrived at such result. Dante and Shakespeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, in a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none second to them: in the general feeling of the world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory as of complete perfection, invests these two. They are canonized, though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite of every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still our indestructible reverence for heroism.—We will look a little at these Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakespeare: what little it is permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will most fitly arrange itself in that fashion.

Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his Book; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it were, irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived; and the most of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes. It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The Book;—and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also deathless;—significant of the whole history of Dante! I think it is the mournfulest face that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A soft ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too, a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdain of the thing that is eating out his heart,—as if it were withal a mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and lifelong unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all converted into indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable, silent, like that of a god! The eye too, it looks out as in a kind of surprise, a kind of inquiry, Why the world was of such a sort? This is Dante: so he looks, this "voice of ten silent centuries," and sings us "his mystic unfathomable song."

The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well enough with this Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper class of society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then going; much school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latin classics,—no inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things: and Dante, with his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt, learned better than most all that was learnable. He has a clear cultivated understanding, and of great subtlety; this best fruit of education he had contrived to realize from these scholastics. He knows accurately and well what lies close to him; but, in such a time, without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what was distant: the small clear light, most luminous for what is near, breaks itself into singular chiaroscuro striking on what is far off. This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gone through the usual destinies; been twice out campaigning as a soldier for the Florentine State, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of the Chief Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a certain Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank, and grown up thenceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant intercourse with her. All readers know his graceful affecting account of this; and then of their being parted; of her being wedded to another, and of her death soon after. She makes a great figure in Dante's Poem; seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of all beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at last in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever with his whole strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; but it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous earnest man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make happy.

We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta, or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbors,—and the world had wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be ten of them and more) had no Divina Commedia to hear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and he, struggling like a man led towards death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give him the choice of his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy, what was really miserable.

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some other confused disturbances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose party had seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly forth into banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and wandering. His property was all confiscated and more; he had the fiercest feeling that it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of God and man. He tried what was in him to get reinstated; tried even by warlike surprisal, with arms in his hand: but it would not do; bad only had become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant in the Florence Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught, to be burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a very curious civic document. Another curious document, some considerable number of years later, is a Letter of Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates, written in answer to a milder proposal of theirs, that he should return on condition of apologizing and paying a fine. He answers, with fixed stern pride: "If I cannot return without calling myself guilty, I will never return, nunquam revertar."

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron to patron, from place to place; proving, in his own bitter words, "How hard is the path, Come e duro calle." The wretched are not cheerful company. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with his moody humors, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports of him that being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day for his gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. Della Scala stood among his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (nebulones ac histriones) making him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he said: "Is it not strange, now, that this poor fool should make himself so entertaining; while you, a wise man, sit there day after day, and have nothing to amuse us with at all?" Dante answered bitterly: "No, not strange; your Highness is to recollect the Proverb, Like to Like;"—given the amuser, the amusee must also be given! Such a man, with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was not made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to him that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, in this earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to wander, wander; no living heart to love him now; for his sore miseries there was no solace here.

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him; that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its Florences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence thou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt surely see! What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life altogether? ETERNITY: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou and all things bound! The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home more and more in that awful other world. Naturally his thoughts brooded on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied or bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men:—but to Dante, in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; he no more doubted of that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into "mystic unfathomable song;" and this his Divine Comedy, the most remarkable of all modern Books, is the result.

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see, a proud thought for him at times, That he, here in exile, could do this work; that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that it was great; the greatest a man could do. "If thou follow thy star, Se tu segui tua stella,"—so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in his extreme need, still say to himself: "Follow thou thy star, thou shalt not fail of a glorious haven!" The labor of writing, we find, and indeed could know otherwise, was great and painful for him; he says, This Book, "which has made me lean for many years." Ah yes, it was won, all of it, with pain and sore toil,—not in sport, but in grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been written, in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole history, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very old, at the age of fifty-six;—broken-hearted rather, as is said. He lies buried in his death-city Ravenna: Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorris ab oris. The Florentines begged back his body, in a century after; the Ravenna people would not give it. "Here am I Dante laid, shut out from my native shores."

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it "a mystic unfathomable Song;" and such is literally the character of it. Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song: we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,—to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part! What we wants to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,—whose speech is Song. Pretenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is for most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business, that of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be rhymed;—it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it was aiming at. I would advise all men who can speak their thought, not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love the true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall we hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing.

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his Divine Comedy that it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there is a canto fermo; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple terza rima, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort of lilt. But I add, that it could not be otherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it musical;—go deep enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the character of music. The three kingdoms, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, look out on one another like compartments of a great edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the sincerest of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts; and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, "Eccovi l' uom ch' e stato all' Inferno, See, there is the man that was in Hell!" Ah yes, he had been in Hell;—in Hell enough, in long severe sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come out divine are not accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;—true effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought. In all ways we are "to become perfect through suffering."—But, as I say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made him "lean" for many years. Not the general whole only; every compartment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the middle ages, rendered forever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense one: but a task which is done.

Perhaps one would say, intensity, with the much that depends on it, is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does not come before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great not because he is worldwide, but because he is world-deep. Through all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the outermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has a great power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the Hall of Dite: red pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom;—so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and forever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus is not briefer, more condensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation, spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and then there is silence, nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It is strange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true likeness of a matter: cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is "as the sails sink, the mast being suddenly broken." Or that poor Brunetto Latini, with the cotto aspetto, "face baked," parched brown and lean; and the "fiery snow" that falls on them there, a "fiery snow without wind," slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or the lids of those Tombs; square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there; they are to be shut at the Day of Judgment, through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and how Cavalcante falls—at hearing of his Son, and the past tense "fue"! The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius this sort of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent, passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent "pale rages," speaks itself in these things.

For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he had, what we may call, sympathized with it,—had sympathy in him to bestow on objects. He must have been sincere about it too; sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say that intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come out here. Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted man is he who sees the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that he discern the true likeness, not the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to work in. And how much of morality is in the kind of insight we get of anything; "the eye seeing in all things what it brought with it the faculty of seeing"! To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with him.

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is every way noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what qualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: della bella persona, che mi fu tolta; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that he will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these alti guai. And the racking winds, in that aer bruno, whirl them away again, to wail forever!—Strange to think: Dante was the friend of this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon the Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigor of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his Divine Comedy's being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,—sentimentality, or little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like the wail of AEolian harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart;—and then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towards his Beatrice; their meeting together in the Paradiso; his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been purified by death so long, separated from him so far:—one likens it to the song of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.

For the intense Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity. Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;—as indeed, what are they but the inverse or converse of his love? "A Dio spiacenti ed a' nemici sui, Hateful to God and to the enemies of God:" lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; "Non ragionam di lor, We will not speak of them, look only and pass." Or think of this; "They have not the hope to die, Non han speranza di morte." One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely die; "that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die." Such words are in this man. For rigor, earnestness and depth, he is not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets there.

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the Inferno to the two other parts of the Divine Commedia. Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient feeling. The Purgatorio and Paradiso, especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing that Purgatorio, "Mountain of Purification;" an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The tremolar dell' onde, that "trembling" of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of demons and reprobate is underfoot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna; "I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by that winding steep, "bent down like corbels of a building," some of them,—crushed together so "for the sin of pride;" yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached the top, which is heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentance and got its sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought.

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are indispensable to one another. The Paradiso, a kind of inarticulate music to me, is the redeeming side of the Inferno; the Inferno without it were untrue. All three make up the true Unseen World, as figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing forever memorable, forever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in this of Dante's; a man sent to sing it, to keep it long memorable. Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day reality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, we find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among things palpable, indubitable! To Dante they were so; the real world, as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as preternatural as the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say again, is the saving merit, now as always.

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic representation of his Belief about this Universe:—some Critic in a future age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased altogether to think as Dante did, may find this too all an "Allegory," perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world-wide architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two polar elements of this Creation, on which it all turns; that these two differ not by preferability of one to the other, but by incompatibility absolute and infinite; that the one is excellent and high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna and the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence, with everlasting Pity,—all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the other day, with what entire truth of purpose; how unconscious of any embleming! Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as emblems; was there, in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of their being emblems! Were they not indubitable awful facts; the whole heart of man taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere confirming them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believe an Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who considers this of Dante to have been all got up as an Allegory, will commit one sore mistake!—Paganism we recognized as a veracious expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the Universe; veracious, true once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism; one great difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance of the first Thought of men,—the chief recognized virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect only—!

And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very strange way, found a voice. The Divina Commedia is of Dante's writing; yet in truth it belongs to ten Christian centuries, only the finishing of it is Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, the smith with that metal of his, with these tools, with these cunning methods,—how little of all he does is properly his work! All past inventive men work there with him;—as indeed with all of us, in all things. Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thought they lived by stands here, in everlasting music. These sublime ideas of his, terrible and beautiful, are the fruit of the Christian Meditation of all the good men who had gone before him. Precious they; but also is not he precious? Much, had not he spoken, would have been dumb; not dead, yet living voiceless.

On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic Song, at once of one of the greatest human souls, and of the highest thing that Europe had hitherto realized for itself? Christianism, as Dante sings it, is another than Paganism in the rude Norse mind; another than "Bastard Christianism" half-articulately spoken in the Arab Desert, seven hundred years before!—The noblest idea made real hitherto among men, is sung, and emblemed forth abidingly, by one of the noblest men. In the one sense and in the other, are we not right glad to possess it? As I calculate, it may last yet for long thousands of years. For the thing that is uttered from the inmost parts of a man's soul, differs altogether from what is uttered by the outer part. The outer is of the day, under the empire of mode; the outer passes away, in swift endless changes; the inmost is the same yesterday, to-day and forever. True souls, in all generations of the world, who look on this Dante, will find a brotherhood in him; the deep sincerity of his thoughts, his woes and hopes, will speak likewise to their sincerity; they will feel that this Dante too was a brother. Napoleon in Saint Helena is charmed with the genial veracity of old Homer. The oldest Hebrew Prophet, under a vesture the most diverse from ours, does yet, because he speaks from the heart of man, speak to all men's hearts. It is the one sole secret of continuing long memorable. Dante, for depth of sincerity, is like an antique Prophet too; his words, like theirs, come from his very heart. One need not wonder if it were predicted that his Poem might be the most enduring thing our Europe has yet made; for nothing so endures as a truly spoken word. All cathedrals, pontificalities, brass and stone, and outer arrangement never so lasting, are brief in comparison to an unfathomable heart-song like this: one feels as if it might survive, still of importance to men, when these had all sunk into new irrecognizable combinations, and had ceased individually to be. Europe has made much; great cities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion and practice: but it has made little of the class of Dante's Thought. Homer yet is veritably present face to face with every open soul of us; and Greece, where is it? Desolate for thousands of years; away, vanished; a bewildered heap of stones and rubbish, the life and existence of it all gone. Like a dream; like the dust of King Agamemnon! Greece was; Greece, except in the words it spoke, is not.

The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his "uses." A human soul who has once got into that primal element of Song, and sung forth fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the depths of our existence; feeding through long times the life-roots of all excellent human things whatsoever,—in a way that "utilities" will not succeed well in calculating! We will not estimate the Sun by the quantity of gaslight it saves us; Dante shall be invaluable, or of no value. One remark I may make: the contrast in this respect between the Hero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet. In a hundred years, Mahomet, as we saw, had his Arabians at Grenada and at Delhi; Dante's Italians seem to be yet very much where they were. Shall we say, then, Dante's effect on the world was small in comparison? Not so: his arena is far more restricted; but also it is far nobler, clearer;—perhaps not less but more important. Mahomet speaks to great masses of men, in the coarse dialect adapted to such; a dialect filled with inconsistencies, crudities, follies: on the great masses alone can he act, and there with good and with evil strangely blended. Dante speaks to the noble, the pure and great, in all times and places. Neither does he grow obsolete, as the other does. Dante burns as a pure star, fixed there in the firmament, at which the great and the high of all ages kindle themselves: he is the possession of all the chosen of the world for uncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may long survive Mahomet. In this way the balance may be made straight again.

But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the world, by what we can judge of their effect there, that a man and his work are measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man do his work; the fruit of it is the care of Another than he. It will grow its own fruit; and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones and Arabian Conquests, so that it "fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers," and all Histories, which are a kind of distilled Newspapers; or not embodied so at all;—what matters that? That is not the real fruit of it! The Arabian Caliph, in so far only as he did something, was something. If the great Cause of Man, and Man's work in God's Earth, got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then no matter how many scimetars he drew, how many gold piasters pocketed, and what uproar and blaring he made in this world,—he was but a loud-sounding inanity and futility; at bottom, he was not at all. Let us honor the great empire of Silence, once more! The boundless treasury which we do not jingle in our pockets, or count up and present before men! It is perhaps, of all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in these loud times.—

As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life; so Shakespeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humors, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at the world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece; so in Shakespeare and Dante, after thousands of years, what our modern Europe was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible. Dante has given us the Faith or soul; Shakespeare, in a not less noble way, has given us the Practice or body. This latter also we were to have; a man was sent for it, the man Shakespeare. Just when that chivalry way of life had reached its last finish, and was on the point of breaking down into slow or swift dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, this other sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with his perennial singing voice, was sent to take note of it, to give long-enduring record of it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the world; Shakespeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper light of the world. Italy produced the one world-voice; we English had the honor of producing the other.

Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us. I think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this Shakespeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for deer-stealing, we had perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods and skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enough for this man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole English Existence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did not it too come as of its own accord? The "Tree Igdrasil" buds and withers by its own laws,—too deep for our scanning. Yet it does bud and wither, and every bough and leaf of it is there, by fixed eternal laws; not a Sir Thomas Lucy but comes at the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and not sufficiently considered: how everything does co-operate with all; not a leaf rotting on the highway but is indissoluble portion of solar and stellar systems; no thought, word or act of man but has sprung withal out of all men, and works sooner or later, recognizably or irrecognizable, on all men! It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and influences, mutual communication of every minutest leaf with the lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion of the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread the highest Heaven—!

In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with its Shakespeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. The Christian Faith, which was the theme of Dante's Song, had produced this Practical Life which Shakespeare was to sing. For Religion then, as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the primary vital fact in men's life. And remark here, as rather curious, that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of Parliament could abolish it, before Shakespeare, the noblest product of it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance nevertheless. Nature at her own time, with Catholicism or what else might be necessary, sent him forth; taking small thought of Acts of Parliament. King Henrys, Queen Elizabeths go their way; and Nature too goes hers. Acts of Parliament, on the whole, are small, notwithstanding the noise they make. What Act of Parliament, debate at St. Stephen's, on the hustings or elsewhere, was it that brought this Shakespeare into being? No dining at Freemason's Tavern, opening subscription-lists, selling of shares, and infinite other jangling and true or false endeavoring! This Elizabethan Era, and all its nobleness and blessedness, came without proclamation, preparation of ours. Priceless Shakespeare was the free gift of Nature; given altogether silently;—received altogether silently, as if it had been a thing of little account. And yet, very literally, it is a priceless thing. One should look at that side of matters too.

Of this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgment not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, that Shakespeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth; placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It has been said, that in the constructing of Shakespeare Dramas there is, apart from all other "faculties" as they are called, an understanding manifested, equal to that in Bacon's Novum Organum That is true; and it is not a truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakespeare's dramatic materials, we could fashion such a result! The built house seems all so fit,—every way as it should be, as if it came there by its own law and the nature of things,—we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect than any other man, we may call Shakespeare in this: he discerns, knows as by instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of the whole matter; it is a calmly seeing eye; a great intellect, in short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will give of it,—is the best measure you could get of what intellect is in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent; which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true beginning, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must understand the thing; according to the depth of his understanding, will the fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself to like; does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its embroilment becomes order? Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.

Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare. The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart, and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said: poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently? The word that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakespeare's morality, his valor, candor, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world. No twisted, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly level mirror;—that is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. Novum Organum, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object; you may say what he himself says of Shakespeare: "His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible."

The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things; what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or other genially relate yourself to them;—you can, at lowest, hold your peace about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, till the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them! At bottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents,—perhaps on his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, See. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, "But are ye sure he's not a dunce?" Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's not a dunce? There is, in this world, no other entirely fatal person.

For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakespeare's faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a capital error. Then again, we hear of a man's "intellectual nature," and of his "moral nature," as if these again were divisible, and existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms of utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is one; and preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways.

Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but, consider it,—without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly immoral man could not know anything at all! To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathize with it: that is, be virtuously related to it. If he have not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day merely.—But does not the very Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where the geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the world, what more does he know but this and the like of this? Nay, it should be considered too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine morality, he could not even know where the geese were, or get at the geese! If he spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so forth; and had not courage, promptitude, practicality, and other suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say of the Fox too, that his morality and insight are of the same dimensions; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpine life!—These things are worth stating; for the contrary of them acts with manifold very baleful perversion, in this time: what limitations, modifications they require, your own candor will supply.

If I say, therefore, that Shakespeare is the greatest of Intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of. Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those Dramas of his are Products of Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a great truth in this saying. Shakespeare's Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows up from the deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of Nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human being; "new harmonies with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man." This well deserves meditating. It is Nature's highest reward to a true simple great soul, that he get thus to be a part of herself. Such a man's works, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion and forethought shall accomplish, grow up withal unconsciously, from the unknown deeps in him;—as the oak-tree grows from the Earth's bosom, as the mountains and waters shape themselves; with a symmetry grounded on Nature's own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How much in Shakespeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to himself; much that was not known at all, not speakable at all: like roots, like sap and forces working underground! Speech is great; but Silence is greater.

Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will not blame Dante for his misery: it is as battle without victory; but true battle,—the first, indispensable thing. Yet I call Shakespeare greater than Dante, in that he fought truly, and did conquer. Doubt it not, he had his own sorrows: those Sonnets of his will even testify expressly in what deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling for his life;—as what man like him ever failed to have to do? It seems to me a heedless notion, our common one, that he sat like a bird on the bough; and sang forth, free and off-hand, never knowing the troubles of other men. Not so; with no man is it so. How could a man travel forward from rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing, and not fall in with sorrows by the way? Or, still better, how could a man delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many suffering heroic hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered?—And now, in contrast with all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuine overflowing love of laughter! You would say, in no point does he exaggerate but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that pierce and burn, are to be found in Shakespeare; yet he is always in measure here; never what Johnson would remark as a specially "good hater." But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods; he heaps all manner of ridiculous nicknames on the butt he is bantering, tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse-play; you would say, with his whole heart laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it is always a genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some poor character only desiring to laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy; good laughter is not "the crackling of thorns under the pot." Even at stupidity and pretension this Shakespeare does not laugh otherwise than genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts; and we dismiss them covered with explosions of laughter: but we like the poor fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope they will get on well there, and continue Presidents of the City-watch. Such laughter, like sunshine on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.

We have no room to speak of Shakespeare's individual works; though perhaps there is much still waiting to be said on that head. Had we, for instance, all his plays reviewed as Hamlet, in Wilhelm Meister, is! A thing which might, one day, be done. August Wilhelm Schlegel has a remark on his Historical Plays, Henry Fifth and the others, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of National Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English History but what he had learned from Shakespeare. There are really, if we look to it, few as memorable Histories. The great salient points are admirably seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; it is, as Schlegel says, epic;—as indeed all delineation by a great thinker will be. There are right beautiful things in those Pieces, which indeed together form one beautiful thing. That battle of Agincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect things, in its sort, we anywhere have of Shakespeare's. The description of the two hosts: the worn-out, jaded English; the dread hour, big with destiny, when the battle shall begin; and then that deathless valor: "Ye good yeomen, whose limbs were made in England!" There is a noble Patriotism in it,—far other than the "indifference" you sometimes hear ascribed to Shakespeare. A true English heart breathes, calm and strong, through the whole business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the better for that. There is a sound in it like the ring of steel. This man too had a right stroke in him, had it come to that!

But I will say, of Shakespeare's works generally, that we have no full impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works are so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that was in him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory, imperfect, written under cramping circumstances; giving only here and there a note of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that come upon you like splendor out of Heaven; bursts of radiance, illuminating the very heart of the thing: you say, "That is true, spoken once and forever; wheresoever and whensoever there is an open human soul, that will be recognized as true!" Such bursts, however, make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is, in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakespeare had to write for the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other mould. It was with him, then, as it is with us all. No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his own free Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate it into the stone that was given, with the tools that were given. Disjecta membra are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man.

Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakespeare may recognize that he too was a Prophet, in his way; of an insight analogous to the Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to this man also divine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven; "We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!" That scroll in Westminster Abbey, which few read with understanding, is of the depth of any seer. But the man sang; did not preach, except musically. We called Dante the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call Shakespeare the still more melodious Priest of a true Catholicism, the "Universal Church" of the Future and of all times? No narrow superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousand-fold hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men worship as they can! We may say without offence, that there rises a kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakespeare too; not unfit to make itself heard among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony with these, if we understood them, but in harmony!—I cannot call this Shakespeare a "Sceptic," as some do; his indifference to the creeds and theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No: neither unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism; nor sceptic, though he says little about his Faith. Such "indifference" was the fruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own grand sphere of worship (we may call it such); these other controversies, vitally important to other men, were not vital to him.

But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right glorious thing, and set of things, this that Shakespeare has brought us? For myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact of such a man being sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all; a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light?—And, at bottom, was it not perhaps far better that this Shakespeare, every way an unconscious man, was conscious of no Heavenly message? He did not feel, like Mahomet, because he saw into those internal Splendors, that he specially was the "Prophet of God:" and was he not greater than Mahomet in that? Greater; and also, if we compute strictly, as we did in Dante's case, more successful. It was intrinsically an error that notion of Mahomet's, of his supreme Prophethood; and has come down to us inextricably involved in error to this day; dragging along with it such a coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it a questionable step for me here and now to say, as I have done, that Mahomet was a true Speaker at all, and not rather an ambitious charlatan, perversity and simulacrum; no Speaker, but a Babbler! Even in Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet will have exhausted himself and become obsolete, while this Shakespeare, this Dante may still be young;—while this Shakespeare may still pretend to be a Priest of Mankind, of Arabia as of other places, for unlimited periods to come!

Compared with any speaker or singer one knows, even with Aeschylus or Homer, why should he not, for veracity and universality, last like them? He is sincere as they; reaches deep down like them, to the universal and perennial. But as for Mahomet, I think it had been better for him not to be so conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet; all that he was conscious of was a mere error; a futility and triviality,—as indeed such ever is. The truly great in him too was the unconscious: that he was a wild Arab lion of the desert, and did speak out with that great thunder-voice of his, not by words which he thought to be great, but by actions, by feelings, by a history which were great! His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do not believe, like him, that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as always, is a Force of Nature. Whatsoever is truly great in him springs up from the inarticulate deeps.

Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;—on which point there were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this Shakespeare has actually become among us. Which Englishman we ever made, in this land of ours, which million of Englishmen, would we not give up rather than the Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment of highest Dignitaries that we would sell him for. He is the grandest thing we have yet done. For our honor among foreign nations, as an ornament to our English Household, what item is there that we would not surrender rather than him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give up your Indian Empire or your Shakespeare, you English; never have had any Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakespeare? Really it were a grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in official language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer: Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakespeare! Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare does not go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up our Shakespeare!

Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real, marketable, tangibly useful possession. England, before long, this Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike intercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as the greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and governments are here to accomplish: what is it that will accomplish this? Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot. America is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it not fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable in that point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are, they will say to one another: "Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him." The most common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, may think of that.

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at all; yet the noble Italy is actually one: Italy produced its Dante; Italy can speak! The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong with so many bayonets, Cossacks and cannons; and does a great feat in keeping such a tract of Earth politically together; but he cannot yet speak. Something great in him, but it is a dumb greatness. He has had no voice of genius, to be heard of all men and times. He must learn to speak. He is a great dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cossacks will all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante's voice is still audible. The Nation that has a Dante is bound together as no dumb Russia can be.—We must here end what we had to say of the Hero-Poet.

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# The Hero as Prophet | Thomas Carlyle | Anthologies

Muhammad: Islam

Date: 2025-03-29
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-hero-as-prophet-thomas-carlyle
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-hero-as-prophet-thomas-carlyle

May 8, 1840

From the first rude times of Paganism among the Scandinavians in the North, we advance to a very different epoch of religion, among a very different people: Mahometanism among the Arabs. A great change; what a change and progress is indicated here, in the universal condition and thoughts of men!

The Hero is not now regarded as a God among his fellowmen; but as one God-inspired, as a Prophet. It is the second phasis of Hero-worship: the first or oldest, we may say, has passed away without return; in the history of the world there will not again be any man, never so great, whom his fellowmen will take for a god. Nay we might rationally ask, Did any set of human beings ever really think the man they saw there standing beside them a god, the maker of this world? Perhaps not: it was usually some man they remembered, or had seen. But neither can this any more be. The Great Man is not recognized henceforth as a god any more.

It was a rude gross error, that of counting the Great Man a god. Yet let us say that it is at all times difficult to know what he is, or how to account of him and receive him! The most significant feature in the history of an epoch is the manner it has of welcoming a Great Man. Ever, to the true instincts of men, there is something godlike in him. Whether they shall take him to be a god, to be a prophet, or what they shall take him to be? that is ever a grand question; by their way of answering that, we shall see, as through a little window, into the very heart of these men's spiritual condition. For at bottom the Great Man, as he comes from the hand of Nature, is ever the same kind of thing: Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns; I hope to make it appear that these are all originally of one stuff; that only by the world's reception of them, and the shapes they assume, are they so immeasurably diverse. The worship of Odin astonishes us,—to fall prostrate before the Great Man, into deliquium of love and wonder over him, and feel in their hearts that he was a denizen of the skies, a god! This was imperfect enough: but to welcome, for example, a Burns as we did, was that what we can call perfect? The most precious gift that Heaven can give to the Earth; a man of "genius" as we call it; the Soul of a Man actually sent down from the skies with a God's-message to us,—this we waste away as an idle artificial firework, sent to amuse us a little, and sink it into ashes, wreck and ineffectuality: such reception of a Great Man I do not call very perfect either! Looking into the heart of the thing, one may perhaps call that of Burns a still uglier phenomenon, betokening still sadder imperfections in mankind's ways, than the Scandinavian method itself! To fall into mere unreasoning deliquium of love and admiration, was not good; but such unreasoning, nay irrational supercilious no-love at all is perhaps still worse!—It is a thing forever changing, this of Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is to do it well.

We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one. Farther, as there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him I justly can. It is the way to get at his secret: let us try to understand what he meant with the world; what the world meant and means with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only. When Pococke inquired of Grotius, Where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there was no proof! It is really time to dismiss all that. The word this man spoke has been the life-guidance now of a hundred and eighty millions of men these twelve hundred years. These hundred and eighty millions were made by God as well as we. A greater number of God's creatures believe in Mahomet's word at this hour, than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which so many creatures of the Almighty have lived by and died by? I, for my part, cannot form any such supposition. I will believe most things sooner than that. One would be entirely at a loss what to think of this world at all, if quackery so grew and were sanctioned here.

Alas, such theories are very lamentable. If we would attain to knowledge of anything in God's true Creation, let us disbelieve them wholly! They are the product of an Age of Scepticism: they indicate the saddest spiritual paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls of men: more godless theory, I think, was never promulgated in this Earth. A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house! If he do not know and follow truly the properties of mortar, burnt clay and what else be works in, it is no house that he makes, but a rubbish-heap. It will not stand for twelve centuries, to lodge a hundred and eighty millions; it will fall straightway. A man must conform himself to Nature's laws, be verily in communion with Nature and the truth of things, or Nature will answer him, No, not at all! Speciosities are specious—ah me!—a Cagliostro, many Cagliostros, prominent world-leaders, do prosper by their quackery, for a day. It is like a forged bank-note; they get it passed out of their worthless hands: others, not they, have to smart for it. Nature bursts up in fire-flames, French Revolutions and such like, proclaiming with terrible veracity that forged notes are forged.

But of a Great Man especially, of him I will venture to assert that it is incredible he should have been other than true. It seems to me the primary foundation of him, and of all that can lie in him, this. No Mirabeau, Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no man adequate to do anything, but is first of all in right earnest about it; what I call a sincere man. I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic. Not the sincerity that calls itself sincere; ah no, that is a very poor matter indeed;—a shallow braggart conscious sincerity; oftenest self-conceit mainly. The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is conscious rather of insincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere! The great Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality. His mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all. Fearful and wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is this Universe to him. Though all men should forget its truth, and walk in a vain show, he cannot. At all moments the Flame-image glares in upon him; undeniable, there, there!—I wish you to take this as my primary definition of a Great Man. A little man may have this, it is competent to all men that God has made: but a Great Man cannot be without it.

Such a man is what we call an original man; he comes to us at first-hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us. We may call him Poet, Prophet, God;—in one way or other, we all feel that the words he utters are as no other man's words. Direct from the Inner Fact of things;—he lives, and has to live, in daily communion with that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him; he is blind, homeless, miserable, following hearsays; it glares in upon him. Really his utterances, are they not a kind of "revelation;"—what we must call such for want of some other name? It is from the heart of the world that he comes; he is portion of the primal reality of things. God has made many revelations: but this man too, has not God made him, the latest and newest of all? The "inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding:" we must listen before all to him.

This Mahomet, then, we will in no wise consider as an Inanity and Theatricality, a poor conscious ambitious schemer; we cannot conceive him so. The rude message he delivered was a real one withal; an earnest confused voice from the unknown Deep. The man's words were not false, nor his workings here below; no Inanity and Simulacrum; a fiery mass of Life cast up from the great bosom of Nature herself. To kindle the world; the world's Maker had ordered it so. Neither can the faults, imperfections, insincerities even, of Mahomet, if such were never so well proved against him, shake this primary fact about him.

On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who is called there "the man according to God's own heart"? David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough; blackest crimes; there was no want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask, Is this your man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten? "It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps." Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin;—that is death; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility and fact; is dead: it is "pure" as dead dry sand is pure. David's life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle never ended; ever, with tears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature! Is not a man's walking, in truth, always that: "a succession of falls"? Man can do no other. In this wild element of a Life, he has to struggle onwards; now fallen, deep-abased; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, struggle again still onwards. That his struggle be a faithful unconquerable one: that is the question of questions. We will put up with many sad details, if the soul of it were true. Details by themselves will never teach us what it is. I believe we misestimate Mahomet's faults even as faults: but the secret of him will never be got by dwelling there. We will leave all this behind us; and assuring ourselves that he did mean some true thing, ask candidly what it was or might be.

These Arabs Mahomet was born among are certainly a notable people. Their country itself is notable; the fit habitation for such a race. Savage inaccessible rock-mountains, great grim deserts, alternating with beautiful strips of verdure: wherever water is, there is greenness, beauty; odoriferous balm-shrubs, date-trees, frankincense-trees. Consider that wide waste horizon of sand, empty, silent, like a sand-sea, dividing habitable place from habitable. You are all alone there, left alone with the Universe; by day a fierce sun blazing down on it with intolerable radiance; by night the great deep Heaven with its stars. Such a country is fit for a swift-handed, deep-hearted race of men. There is something most agile, active, and yet most meditative, enthusiastic in the Arab character. The Persians are called the French of the East; we will call the Arabs Oriental Italians. A gifted noble people; a people of wild strong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noble-mindedness, of genius. The wild Bedouin welcomes the stranger to his tent, as one having right to all that is there; were it his worst enemy, he will slay his foal to treat him, will serve him with sacred hospitality for three days, will set him fairly on his way;—and then, by another law as sacred, kill him if he can. In words too as in action. They are not a loquacious people, taciturn rather; but eloquent, gifted when they do speak. An earnest, truthful kind of men. They are, as we know, of Jewish kindred: but with that deadly terrible earnestness of the Jews they seem to combine something graceful, brilliant, which is not Jewish. They had "Poetic contests" among them before the time of Mahomet. Sale says, at Ocadh, in the South of Arabia, there were yearly fairs, and there, when the merchandising was done, Poets sang for prizes:—the wild people gathered to hear that.

One Jewish quality these Arabs manifest; the outcome of many or of all high qualities: what we may call religiosity. From of old they had been zealous worshippers, according to their light. They worshipped the stars, as Sabeans; worshipped many natural objects,—recognized them as symbols, immediate manifestations, of the Maker of Nature. It was wrong; and yet not wholly wrong. All God's works are still in a sense symbols of God. Do we not, as I urged, still account it a merit to recognize a certain inexhaustible significance, "poetic beauty" as we name it, in all natural objects whatsoever? A man is a poet, and honored, for doing that, and speaking or singing it,—a kind of diluted worship. They had many Prophets, these Arabs; Teachers each to his tribe, each according to the light he had. But indeed, have we not from of old the noblest of proofs, still palpable to every one of us, of what devoutness and noble-mindedness had dwelt in these rustic thoughtful peoples? Biblical critics seem agreed that our own Book of Job was written in that region of the world. I call that, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew; such a noble universality, different from noble patriotism or sectarianism, reigns in it. A noble Book; all men's Book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending Problem,—man's destiny, and God's ways with him here in this earth. And all in such free flowing outlines; grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity; in its epic melody, and repose of reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true every way; true eyesight and vision for all things; material things no less than spiritual: the Horse,—"hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?"—he "laughs at the shaking of the spear!" Such living likenesses were never since drawn. Sublime sorrow, sublime reconciliation; oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind;—so soft, and great; as the summer midnight, as the world with its seas and stars! There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit.—

To the idolatrous Arabs one of the most ancient universal objects of worship was that Black Stone, still kept in the building called Caabah, at Mecca. Diodorus Siculus mentions this Caabah in a way not to be mistaken, as the oldest, most honored temple in his time; that is, some half-century before our Era. Silvestre de Sacy says there is some likelihood that the Black Stone is an aerolite. In that case, some man might see it fall out of Heaven! It stands now beside the Well Zemzem; the Caabah is built over both. A Well is in all places a beautiful affecting object, gushing out like life from the hard earth;—still more so in those hot dry countries, where it is the first condition of being. The Well Zemzem has its name from the bubbling sound of the waters, zem-zem; they think it is the Well which Hagar found with her little Ishmael in the wilderness: the aerolite and it have been sacred now, and had a Caabah over them, for thousands of years. A curious object, that Caabah! There it stands at this hour, in the black cloth-covering the Sultan sends it yearly; "twenty-seven cubits high;" with circuit, with double circuit of pillars, with festoon-rows of lamps and quaint ornaments: the lamps will be lighted again this night,—to glitter again under the stars. An authentic fragment of the oldest Past. It is the Keblah of all Moslem: from Delhi all onwards to Morocco, the eyes of innumerable praying men are turned towards it, five times, this day and all days: one of the notablest centres in the Habitation of Men.

It had been from the sacredness attached to this Caabah Stone and Hagar's Well, from the pilgrimings of all tribes of Arabs thither, that Mecca took its rise as a Town. A great town once, though much decayed now. It has no natural advantage for a town; stands in a sandy hollow amid bare barren hills, at a distance from the sea; its provisions, its very bread, have to be imported. But so many pilgrims needed lodgings: and then all places of pilgrimage do, from the first, become places of trade. The first day pilgrims meet, merchants have also met: where men see themselves assembled for one object, they find that they can accomplish other objects which depend on meeting together. Mecca became the Fair of all Arabia. And thereby indeed the chief staple and warehouse of whatever Commerce there was between the Indian and the Western countries, Syria, Egypt, even Italy. It had at one time a population of 100,000; buyers, forwarders of those Eastern and Western products; importers for their own behoof of provisions and corn. The government was a kind of irregular aristocratic republic, not without a touch of theocracy. Ten Men of a chief tribe, chosen in some rough way, were Governors of Mecca, and Keepers of the Caabah. The Koreish were the chief tribe in Mahomet's time; his own family was of that tribe. The rest of the Nation, fractioned and cut asunder by deserts, lived under similar rude patriarchal governments by one or several: herdsmen, carriers, traders, generally robbers too; being oftenest at war one with another, or with all: held together by no open bond, if it were not this meeting at the Caabah, where all forms of Arab Idolatry assembled in common adoration;—held mainly by the inward indissoluble bond of a common blood and language. In this way had the Arabs lived for long ages, unnoticed by the world; a people of great qualities, unconsciously waiting for the day when they should become notable to all the world. Their Idolatries appear to have been in a tottering state; much was getting into confusion and fermentation among them. Obscure tidings of the most important Event ever transacted in this world, the Life and Death of the Divine Man in Judea, at once the symptom and cause of immeasurable change to all people in the world, had in the course of centuries reached into Arabia too; and could not but, of itself, have produced fermentation there.

It was among this Arab people, so circumstanced, in the year 570 of our Era, that the man Mahomet was born. He was of the family of Hashem, of the Koreish tribe as we said; though poor, connected with the chief persons of his country. Almost at his birth he lost his Father; at the age of six years his Mother too, a woman noted for her beauty, her worth and sense: he fell to the charge of his Grandfather, an old man, a hundred years old. A good old man: Mahomet's Father, Abdallah, had been his youngest favorite son. He saw in Mahomet, with his old life-worn eyes, a century old, the lost Abdallah come back again, all that was left of Abdallah. He loved the little orphan Boy greatly; used to say, They must take care of that beautiful little Boy, nothing in their kindred was more precious than he. At his death, while the boy was still but two years old, he left him in charge to Abu Thaleb the eldest of the Uncles, as to him that now was head of the house. By this Uncle, a just and rational man as everything betokens, Mahomet was brought up in the best Arab way.

Mahomet, as he grew up, accompanied his Uncle on trading journeys and such like; in his eighteenth year one finds him a fighter following his Uncle in war. But perhaps the most significant of all his journeys is one we find noted as of some years' earlier date: a journey to the Fairs of Syria. The young man here first came in contact with a quite foreign world,—with one foreign element of endless moment to him: the Christian Religion. I know not what to make of that "Sergius, the Nestorian Monk," whom Abu Thaleb and he are said to have lodged with; or how much any monk could have taught one still so young. Probably enough it is greatly exaggerated, this of the Nestorian Monk. Mahomet was only fourteen; had no language but his own: much in Syria must have been a strange unintelligible whirlpool to him. But the eyes of the lad were open; glimpses of many things would doubtless be taken in, and lie very enigmatic as yet, which were to ripen in a strange way into views, into beliefs and insights one day. These journeys to Syria were probably the beginning of much to Mahomet.

One other circumstance we must not forget: that he had no school-learning; of the thing we call school-learning none at all. The art of writing was but just introduced into Arabia; it seems to be the true opinion that Mahomet never could write! Life in the Desert, with its experiences, was all his education. What of this infinite Universe he, from his dim place, with his own eyes and thoughts, could take in, so much and no more of it was he to know. Curious, if we will reflect on it, this of having no books. Except by what he could see for himself, or hear of by uncertain rumor of speech in the obscure Arabian Desert, he could know nothing. The wisdom that had been before him or at a distance from him in the world, was in a manner as good as not there for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through so many lands and times, no one directly communicates with this great soul. He is alone there, deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness; has to grow up so,—alone with Nature and his own Thoughts.

But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man. His companions named him "Al Amin, The Faithful." A man of truth and fidelity; true in what he did, in what he spake and thought. They noted that he always meant something. A man rather taciturn in speech; silent when there was nothing to be said; but pertinent, wise, sincere, when he did speak; always throwing light on the matter. This is the only sort of speech worth speaking! Through life we find him to have been regarded as an altogether solid, brotherly, genuine man. A serious, sincere character; yet amiable, cordial, companionable, jocose even;—a good laugh in him withal: there are men whose laugh is as untrue as anything about them; who cannot laugh. One hears of Mahomet's beauty: his fine sagacious honest face, brown florid complexion, beaming black eyes;—I somehow like too that vein on the brow, which swelled up black when he was in anger: like the "horseshoe vein" in Scott's Redgauntlet. It was a kind of feature in the Hashem family, this black swelling vein in the brow; Mahomet had it prominent, as would appear. A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.

How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich Widow, as her Steward, and travelled in her business, again to the Fairs of Syria; how he managed all, as one can well understand, with fidelity, adroitness; how her gratitude, her regard for him grew: the story of their marriage is altogether a graceful intelligible one, as told us by the Arab authors. He was twenty-five; she forty, though still beautiful. He seems to have lived in a most affectionate, peaceable, wholesome way with this wedded benefactress; loving her truly, and her alone. It goes greatly against the impostor theory, the fact that he lived in this entirely unexceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way, till the heat of his years was done. He was forty before he talked of any mission from Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed, date from after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. All his "ambition," seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his "fame," the mere good opinion of neighbors that knew him, had been sufficient hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the prurient heat of his life all burnt out, and peace growing to be the chief thing this world could give him, did he start on the "career of ambition;" and, belying all his past character and existence, set up as a wretched empty charlatan to acquire what he could now no longer enjoy! For my share, I have no faith whatever in that.

Ah no: this deep-hearted Son of the Wilderness, with his beaming black eyes and open social deep soul, had other thoughts in him than ambition. A silent great soul; he was one of those who cannot but be in earnest; whom Nature herself has appointed to be sincere. While others walk in formulas and hearsays, contented enough to dwell there, this man could not screen himself in formulas; he was alone with his own soul and the reality of things. The great Mystery of Existence, as I said, glared in upon him, with its terrors, with its splendors; no hearsays could hide that unspeakable fact, "Here am I!" Such sincerity, as we named it, has in very truth something of divine. The word of such a man is a Voice direct from Nature's own Heart. Men do and must listen to that as to nothing else;—all else is wind in comparison. From of old, a thousand thoughts, in his pilgrimings and wanderings, had been in this man: What am I? What is this unfathomable Thing I live in, which men name Universe? What is Life; what is Death? What am I to believe? What am I to do? The grim rocks of Mount Hara, of Mount Sinai, the stern sandy solitudes answered not. The great Heaven rolling silent overhead, with its blue-glancing stars, answered not. There was no answer. The man's own soul, and what of God's inspiration dwelt there, had to answer!

It is the thing which all men have to ask themselves; which we too have to ask, and answer. This wild man felt it to be of infinite moment; all other things of no moment whatever in comparison. The jargon of argumentative Greek Sects, vague traditions of Jews, the stupid routine of Arab Idolatry: there was no answer in these. A Hero, as I repeat, has this first distinction, which indeed we may call first and last, the Alpha and Omega of his whole Heroism, That he looks through the shows of things into things. Use and wont, respectable hearsay, respectable formula: all these are good, or are not good. There is something behind and beyond all these, which all these must correspond with, be the image of, or they are—Idolatries; "bits of black wood pretending to be God;" to the earnest soul a mockery and abomination. Idolatries never so gilded, waited on by heads of the Koreish, will do nothing for this man. Though all men walk by them, what good is it? The great Reality stands glaring there upon him. He there has to answer it, or perish miserably. Now, even now, or else through all Eternity never! Answer it; thou must find an answer.—Ambition? What could all Arabia do for this man; with the crown of Greek Heraclius, of Persian Chosroes, and all crowns in the Earth;—what could they all do for him? It was not of the Earth he wanted to hear tell; it was of the Heaven above and of the Hell beneath. All crowns and sovereignties whatsoever, where would they in a few brief years be? To be Sheik of Mecca or Arabia, and have a bit of gilt wood put into your hand,—will that be one's salvation? I decidedly think, not. We will leave it altogether, this impostor hypothesis, as not credible; not very tolerable even, worthy chiefly of dismissal by us.

Mahomet had been wont to retire yearly, during the month Ramadhan, into solitude and silence; as indeed was the Arab custom; a praiseworthy custom, which such a man, above all, would find natural and useful. Communing with his own heart, in the silence of the mountains; himself silent; open to the "small still voices:" it was a right natural custom! Mahomet was in his fortieth year, when having withdrawn to a cavern in Mount Hara, near Mecca, during this Ramadhan, to pass the month in prayer, and meditation on those great questions, he one day told his wife Kadijah, who with his household was with him or near him this year, That by the unspeakable special favor of Heaven he had now found it all out; was in doubt and darkness no longer, but saw it all. That all these Idols and Formulas were nothing, miserable bits of wood; that there was One God in and over all; and we must leave all Idols, and look to Him. That God is great; and that there is nothing else great! He is the Reality. Wooden Idols are not real; He is real. He made us at first, sustains us yet; we and all things are but the shadow of Him; a transitory garment veiling the Eternal Splendor. "Allah akbar, God is great;"—and then also "Islam," That we must submit to God. That our whole strength lies in resigned submission to Him, whatsoever He do to us. For this world, and for the other! The thing He sends to us, were it death and worse than death, shall be good, shall be best; we resign ourselves to God.—"If this be Islam," says Goethe, "do we not all live in Islam?" Yes, all of us that have any moral life; we all live so. It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity,—Necessity will make him submit,—but to know and believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;—that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.

I say, this is yet the only true morality known. A man is right and invincible, virtuous and on the road towards sure conquest, precisely while he joins himself to the great deep Law of the World, in spite of all superficial laws, temporary appearances, profit-and-loss calculations; he is victorious while he co-operates with that great central Law, not victorious otherwise:—and surely his first chance of co-operating with it, or getting into the course of it, is to know with his whole soul that it is; that it is good, and alone good! This is the soul of Islam; it is properly the soul of Christianity;—for Islam is definable as a confused form of Christianity; had Christianity not been, neither had it been. Christianity also commands us, before all, to be resigned to God. We are to take no counsel with flesh and blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes: to know that we know nothing; that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not what it seems; that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above, and say, It is good and wise, God is great! "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Islam means in its way Denial of Self, Annihilation of Self. This is yet the highest Wisdom that Heaven has revealed to our Earth.

Such light had come, as it could, to illuminate the darkness of this wild Arab soul. A confused dazzling splendor as of life and Heaven, in the great darkness which threatened to be death: he called it revelation and the angel Gabriel;—who of us yet can know what to call it? It is the "inspiration of the Almighty" that giveth us understanding. To know; to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic act,—of which the best Logics can but babble on the surface. "Is not Belief the true god-announcing Miracle?" says Novalis.—That Mahomet's whole soul, set in flame with this grand Truth vouchsafed him, should feel as if it were important and the only important thing, was very natural. That Providence had unspeakably honored him by revealing it, saving him from death and darkness; that he therefore was bound to make known the same to all creatures: this is what was meant by "Mahomet is the Prophet of God;" this too is not without its true meaning.—

The good Kadijah, we can fancy, listened to him with wonder, with doubt: at length she answered: Yes, it was true this that he said. One can fancy too the boundless gratitude of Mahomet; and how of all the kindnesses she had done him, this of believing the earnest struggling word he now spoke was the greatest. "It is certain," says Novalis, "my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it." It is a boundless favor.—He never forgot this good Kadijah. Long afterwards, Ayesha his young favorite wife, a woman who indeed distinguished herself among the Moslem, by all manner of qualities, through her whole long life; this young brilliant Ayesha was, one day, questioning him: "Now am not I better than Kadijah? She was a widow; old, and had lost her looks: you love me better than you did her?"—"No, by Allah!" answered Mahomet: "No, by Allah! She believed in me when none else would believe. In the whole world I had but one friend, and she was that!"—Seid, his Slave, also believed in him; these with his young Cousin Ali, Abu Thaleb's son, were his first converts.

He spoke of his Doctrine to this man and that; but the most treated it with ridicule, with indifference; in three years, I think, he had gained but thirteen followers. His progress was slow enough. His encouragement to go on, was altogether the usual encouragement that such a man in such a case meets. After some three years of small success, he invited forty of his chief kindred to an entertainment; and there stood up and told them what his pretension was: that he had this thing to promulgate abroad to all men; that it was the highest thing, the one thing: which of them would second him in that? Amid the doubt and silence of all, young Ali, as yet a lad of sixteen, impatient of the silence, started up, and exclaimed in passionate fierce language, That he would! The assembly, among whom was Abu Thaleb, Ali's Father, could not be unfriendly to Mahomet; yet the sight there, of one unlettered elderly man, with a lad of sixteen, deciding on such an enterprise against all mankind, appeared ridiculous to them; the assembly broke up in laughter. Nevertheless it proved not a laughable thing; it was a very serious thing! As for this young Ali, one cannot but like him. A noble-minded creature, as he shows himself, now and always afterwards; full of affection, of fiery daring. Something chivalrous in him; brave as a lion; yet with a grace, a truth and affection worthy of Christian knighthood. He died by assassination in the Mosque at Bagdad; a death occasioned by his own generous fairness, confidence in the fairness of others: he said, If the wound proved not unto death, they must pardon the Assassin; but if it did, then they must slay him straightway, that so they two in the same hour might appear before God, and see which side of that quarrel was the just one!

Mahomet naturally gave offence to the Koreish, Keepers of the Caabah, superintendents of the Idols. One or two men of influence had joined him: the thing spread slowly, but it was spreading. Naturally he gave offence to everybody: Who is this that pretends to be wiser than we all; that rebukes us all, as mere fools and worshippers of wood! Abu Thaleb the good Uncle spoke with him: Could he not be silent about all that; believe it all for himself, and not trouble others, anger the chief men, endanger himself and them all, talking of it? Mahomet answered: If the Sun stood on his right hand and the Moon on his left, ordering him to hold his peace, he could not obey! No: there was something in this Truth he had got which was of Nature herself; equal in rank to Sun, or Moon, or whatsoever thing Nature had made. It would speak itself there, so long as the Almighty allowed it, in spite of Sun and Moon, and all Koreish and all men and things. It must do that, and could do no other. Mahomet answered so; and, they say, "burst into tears." Burst into tears: he felt that Abu Thaleb was good to him; that the task he had got was no soft, but a stern and great one.

He went on speaking to who would listen to him; publishing his Doctrine among the pilgrims as they came to Mecca; gaining adherents in this place and that. Continual contradiction, hatred, open or secret danger attended him. His powerful relations protected Mahomet himself; but by and by, on his own advice, all his adherents had to quit Mecca, and seek refuge in Abyssinia over the sea. The Koreish grew ever angrier; laid plots, and swore oaths among them, to put Mahomet to death with their own hands. Abu Thaleb was dead, the good Kadijah was dead. Mahomet is not solicitous of sympathy from us; but his outlook at this time was one of the dismalest. He had to hide in caverns, escape in disguise; fly hither and thither; homeless, in continual peril of his life. More than once it seemed all over with him; more than once it turned on a straw, some rider's horse taking fright or the like, whether Mahomet and his Doctrine had not ended there, and not been heard of at all. But it was not to end so.

In the thirteenth year of his mission, finding his enemies all banded against him, forty sworn men, one out of every tribe, waiting to take his life, and no continuance possible at Mecca for him any longer, Mahomet fled to the place then called Yathreb, where he had gained some adherents; the place they now call Medina, or "Medinat al Nabi, the City of the Prophet," from that circumstance. It lay some two hundred miles off, through rocks and deserts; not without great difficulty, in such mood as we may fancy, he escaped thither, and found welcome. The whole East dates its era from this Flight, hegira as they name it: the Year 1 of this Hegira is 622 of our Era, the fifty-third of Mahomet's life. He was now becoming an old man; his friends sinking round him one by one; his path desolate, encompassed with danger: unless he could find hope in his own heart, the outward face of things was but hopeless for him. It is so with all men in the like case. Hitherto Mahomet had professed to publish his Religion by the way of preaching and persuasion alone. But now, driven foully out of his native country, since unjust men had not only given no ear to his earnest Heaven's-message, the deep cry of his heart, but would not even let him live if he kept speaking it,—the wild Son of the Desert resolved to defend himself, like a man and Arab. If the Koreish will have it so, they shall have it. Tidings, felt to be of infinite moment to them and all men, they would not listen to these; would trample them down by sheer violence, steel and murder: well, let steel try it then! Ten years more this Mahomet had; all of fighting of breathless impetuous toil and struggle; with what result we know.

Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Religion by the sword. It is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of the Christian Religion, that it propagated itself peaceably in the way of preaching and conviction. Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of the truth or falsehood of a religion, there is a radical mistake in it. The sword indeed: but where will you get your sword! Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. In one man's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man against all men. That he take a sword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him. You must first get your sword! On the whole, a thing will propagate itself as it can. We do not find, of the Christian Religion either, that it always disdained the sword, when once it had got one. Charlemagne's conversion of the Saxons was not by preaching. I care little about the sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.

Here however, in reference to much that there is in Mahomet and his success, we are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat,—the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the good Earth is silent about all the rest,—has silently turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So everywhere in Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so great, and just, and motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only that it be genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so. There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbor to. Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever came into the world? The body of them all is imperfection, an element of light in darkness: to us they have to come embodied in mere Logic, in some merely scientific Theorem of the Universe; which cannot be complete; which cannot but be found, one day, incomplete, erroneous, and so die and disappear. The body of all Truth dies; and yet in all, I say, there is a soul which never dies; which in new and ever-nobler embodiment lives immortal as man himself! It is the way with Nature. The genuine essence of Truth never dies. That it be genuine, a voice from the great Deep of Nature, there is the point at Nature's judgment-seat. What we call pure or impure, is not with her the final question. Not how much chaff is in you; but whether you have any wheat. Pure? I might say to many a man: Yes, you are pure; pure enough; but you are chaff,—insincere hypothesis, hearsay, formality; you never were in contact with the great heart of the Universe at all; you are properly neither pure nor impure; you are nothing, Nature has no business with you.

Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if we look at the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid to heart, I should say a better kind than that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with their vain janglings about Homoiousion and Homoousion, the head full of worthless noise, the heart empty and dead! The truth of it is embedded in portentous error and falsehood; but the truth of it makes it be believed, not the falsehood: it succeeded by its truth. A bastard kind of Christianity, but a living kind; with a heart-life in it; not dead, chopping barren logic merely! Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties, rumors and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews, with their idle wire-drawings, this wild man of the Desert, with his wild sincere heart, earnest as death and life, with his great flashing natural eyesight, had seen into the kernel of the matter. Idolatry is nothing: these Wooden Idols of yours, "ye rub them with oil and wax, and the flies stick on them,"—these are wood, I tell you! They can do nothing for you; they are an impotent blasphemous presence; a horror and abomination, if ye knew them. God alone is; God alone has power; He made us, He can kill us and keep us alive: "Allah akbar, God is great." Understand that His will is the best for you; that howsoever sore to flesh and blood, you will find it the wisest, best: you are bound to take it so; in this world and in the next, you have no other thing that you can do!

And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and with their fiery hearts lay hold of it to do it, in what form soever it came to them, I say it was well worthy of being believed. In one form or the other, I say it is still the one thing worthy of being believed by all men. Man does hereby become the high-priest of this Temple of a World. He is in harmony with the Decrees of the Author of this World; cooperating with them, not vainly withstanding them: I know, to this day, no better definition of Duty than that same. All that is right includes itself in this of co-operating with the real Tendency of the World: you succeed by this (the World's Tendency will succeed), you are good, and in the right course there. Homoiousion, Homoousion, vain logical jangle, then or before or at any time, may jangle itself out, and go whither and how it likes: this is the thing it all struggles to mean, if it would mean anything. If it do not succeed in meaning this, it means nothing. Not that Abstractions, logical Propositions, be correctly worded or incorrectly; but that living concrete Sons of Adam do lay this to heart: that is the important point. Islam devoured all these vain jangling Sects; and I think had right to do so. It was a Reality, direct from the great Heart of Nature once more. Arab idolatries, Syrian formulas, whatsoever was not equally real, had to go up in flame,—mere dead fuel, in various senses, for this which was fire.

It was during these wild warfarings and strugglings, especially after the Flight to Mecca, that Mahomet dictated at intervals his Sacred Book, which they name Koran, or Reading, "Thing to be read." This is the Work he and his disciples made so much of, asking all the world, Is not that a miracle? The Mahometans regard their Koran with a reverence which few Christians pay even to their Bible. It is admitted every where as the standard of all law and all practice; the thing to be gone upon in speculation and life; the message sent direct out of Heaven, which this Earth has to conform to, and walk by; the thing to be read. Their Judges decide by it; all Moslem are bound to study it, seek in it for the light of their life. They have mosques where it is all read daily; thirty relays of priests take it up in succession, get through the whole each day. There, for twelve hundred years, has the voice of this Book, at all moments, kept sounding through the ears and the hearts of so many men. We hear of Mahometan Doctors that had read it seventy thousand times!

Very curious: if one sought for "discrepancies of national taste," here surely were the most eminent instance of that! We also can read the Koran; our Translation of it, by Sale, is known to be a very fair one. I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite;—insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran. We read in it, as we might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses of lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man. It is true we have it under disadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it than we. Mahomet's followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it had been written down at first promulgation; much of it, they say, on shoulder-blades of mutton, flung pell-mell into a chest: and they published it, without any discoverable order as to time or otherwise;—merely trying, as would seem, and this not very strictly, to put the longest chapters first. The real beginning of it, in that way, lies almost at the end: for the earliest portions were the shortest. Read in its historical sequence it perhaps would not be so bad. Much of it, too, they say, is rhythmic; a kind of wild chanting song, in the original. This may be a great point; much perhaps has been lost in the Translation here. Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; written, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was! So much for national discrepancies, and the standard of taste.

Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs might so love it. When once you get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off your hands, and have it behind you at a distance, the essential type of it begins to disclose itself; and in this there is a merit quite other than the literary one. If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that. One would say the primary character of the Koran is this of its genuineness, of its being a bona-fide book. Prideaux, I know, and others have represented it as a mere bundle of juggleries; chapter after chapter got up to excuse and varnish the author's successive sins, forward his ambitions and quackeries: but really it is time to dismiss all that. I do not assert Mahomet's continual sincerity: who is continually sincere? But I confess I can make nothing of the critic, in these times, who would accuse him of deceit prepense; of conscious deceit generally, or perhaps at all;—still more, of living in a mere element of conscious deceit, and writing this Koran as a forger and juggler would have done! Every candid eye, I think, will read the Koran far otherwise than so. It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to utter himself; the thoughts crowd on him pell-mell: for very multitude of things to say, he can get nothing said. The meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of composition, is stated in no sequence, method, or coherence;—they are not shaped at all, these thoughts of his; flung out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state. We said "stupid:" yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit speech. The panting breathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is the mood he is in! A headlong haste; for very magnitude of meaning, he cannot get himself articulated into words. The successive utterances of a soul in that mood, colored by the various vicissitudes of three-and-twenty years; now well uttered, now worse: this is the Koran.

For we are to consider Mahomet, through these three-and-twenty years, as the centre of a world wholly in conflict. Battles with the Koreish and Heathen, quarrels among his own people, backslidings of his own wild heart; all this kept him in a perpetual whirl, his soul knowing rest no more. In wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of the man, tossing amid these vortices, would hail any light of a decision for them as a veritable light from Heaven; any making-up of his mind, so blessed, indispensable for him there, would seem the inspiration of a Gabriel. Forger and juggler? No, no! This great fiery heart, seething, simmering like a great furnace of thoughts, was not a juggler's. His Life was a Fact to him; this God's Universe an awful Fact and Reality. He has faults enough. The man was an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor without eyes or heart, practicing for a mess of pottage such blasphemous swindlery, forgery of celestial documents, continual high-treason against his Maker and Self, we will not and cannot take him.

Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had rendered it precious to the wild Arab men. It is, after all, the first and last merit in a book; gives rise to merits of all kinds,—nay, at bottom, it alone can give rise to merit of any kind. Curiously, through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry, is found straggling. The body of the Book is made up of mere tradition, and as it were vehement enthusiastic extempore preaching. He returns forever to the old stories of the Prophets as they went current in the Arab memory: how Prophet after Prophet, the Prophet Abraham, the Prophet Hud, the Prophet Moses, Christian and other real and fabulous Prophets, had come to this Tribe and to that, warning men of their sin; and been received by them even as he Mahomet was,—which is a great solace to him. These things he repeats ten, perhaps twenty times; again and ever again, with wearisome iteration; has never done repeating them. A brave Samuel Johnson, in his forlorn garret, might con over the Biographies of Authors in that way! This is the great staple of the Koran. But curiously, through all this, comes ever and anon some glance as of the real thinker and seer. He has actually an eye for the world, this Mahomet: with a certain directness and rugged vigor, he brings home still, to our heart, the thing his own heart has been opened to. I make but little of his praises of Allah, which many praise; they are borrowed I suppose mainly from the Hebrew, at least they are far surpassed there. But the eye that flashes direct into the heart of things, and sees the truth of them; this is to me a highly interesting object. Great Nature's own gift; which she bestows on all; but which only one in the thousand does not cast sorrowfully away: it is what I call sincerity of vision; the test of a sincere heart.

Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no miracles. I? "I am a Public Preacher;" appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly "a sign to you," if your eyes were open! This Earth, God made it for you; "appointed paths in it;" you can live in it, go to and fro on it.—The clouds in the dry country of Arabia, to Mahomet they are very wonderful: Great clouds, he says, born in the deep bosom of the Upper Immensity, where do they come from! They hang there, the great black monsters; pour down their rain-deluges "to revive a dead earth," and grass springs, and "tall leafy palm-trees with their date-clusters hanging round. Is not that a sign?" Your cattle too,—Allah made them; serviceable dumb creatures; they change the grass into milk; you have your clothing from them, very strange creatures; they come ranking home at evening-time, "and," adds he, "and are a credit to you!" Ships also,—he talks often about ships: Huge moving mountains, they spread out their cloth wings, go bounding through the water there, Heaven's wind driving them; anon they lie motionless, God has withdrawn the wind, they lie dead, and cannot stir! Miracles? cries he: What miracle would you have? Are not you yourselves there? God made you, "shaped you out of a little clay." Ye were small once; a few years ago ye were not at all. Ye have beauty, strength, thoughts, "ye have compassion on one another." Old age comes on you, and gray hairs; your strength fades into feebleness; ye sink down, and again are not. "Ye have compassion on one another:" this struck me much: Allah might have made you having no compassion on one another,—how had it been then! This is a great direct thought, a glance at first-hand into the very fact of things. Rude vestiges of poetic genius, of whatsoever is best and truest, are visible in this man. A strong untutored intellect; eyesight, heart: a strong wild man,—might have shaped himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero.

To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is miraculous. He sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, the rude Scandinavians themselves, in one way or other, have contrived to see: That this so solid-looking material world is, at bottom, in very deed, Nothing; is a visual and factual Manifestation of God's power and presence,—a shadow hung out by Him on the bosom of the void Infinite; nothing more. The mountains, he says, these great rock-mountains, they shall dissipate themselves "like clouds;" melt into the Blue as clouds do, and not be! He figures the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells us, as an immense Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set on that to steady it. At the Last Day they shall disappear "like clouds;" the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off into wreck, and as dust and vapor vanish in the Inane. Allah withdraws his hand from it, and it ceases to be. The universal empire of Allah, presence everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a Splendor, and a Terror not to be named, as the true force, essence and reality, in all things whatsoever, was continually clear to this man. What a modern talks of by the name, Forces of Nature, Laws of Nature; and does not figure as a divine thing; not even as one thing at all, but as a set of things, undivine enough,—salable, curious, good for propelling steamships! With our Sciences and Cyclopaedias, we are apt to forget the divineness, in those laboratories of ours. We ought not to forget it! That once well forgotten, I know not what else were worth remembering. Most sciences, I think were then a very dead thing; withered, contentious, empty;—a thistle in late autumn. The best science, without this, is but as the dead timber; it is not the growing tree and forest,—which gives ever-new timber, among other things! Man cannot know either, unless he can worship in some way. His knowledge is a pedantry, and dead thistle, otherwise.

Much has been said and written about the sensuality of Mahomet's Religion; more than was just. The indulgences, criminal to us, which he permitted, were not of his appointment; he found them practiced, unquestioned from immemorial time in Arabia; what he did was to curtail them, restrict them, not on one but on many sides. His Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not "succeed by being an easy religion." As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense,—sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. The poor swearing soldier, hired to be shot, has his "honor of a soldier," different from drill-regulations and the shilling a day. It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's Heaven as a god-made Man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations. Not happiness, but something higher: one sees this even in the frivolous classes, with their "point of honor" and the like. Not by flattering our appetites; no, by awakening the Heroic that slumbers in every heart, can any Religion gain followers.

Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments,—nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men toil for. Not a bad man, I should say; something better in him than hunger of any sort,—or these wild Arab men, fighting and jostling three-and-twenty years at his hand, in close contact with him always, would not have reverenced him so! They were wild men, bursting ever and anon into quarrel, into all kinds of fierce sincerity; without right worth and manhood, no man could have commanded them. They called him Prophet, you say? Why, he stood there face to face with them; bare, not enshrined in any mystery; visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes; fighting, counselling, ordering in the midst of them: they must have seen what kind of a man he was, let him be called what you like! No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During three-and-twenty years of rough actual trial. I find something of a veritable Hero necessary for that, of itself.

His last words are a prayer; broken ejaculations of a heart struggling up, in trembling hope, towards its Maker. We cannot say that his religion made him worse; it made him better; good, not bad. Generous things are recorded of him: when he lost his Daughter, the thing he answers is, in his own dialect, every way sincere, and yet equivalent to that of Christians, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord." He answered in like manner of Seid, his emancipated well-beloved Slave, the second of the believers. Seid had fallen in the War of Tabuc, the first of Mahomet's fightings with the Greeks. Mahomet said, It was well; Seid had done his Master's work, Seid had now gone to his Master: it was all well with Seid. Yet Seid's daughter found him weeping over the body;—the old gray-haired man melting in tears! "What do I see?" said she.—"You see a friend weeping over his friend."—He went out for the last time into the mosque, two days before his death; asked, If he had injured any man? Let his own back bear the stripes. If he owed any man? A voice answered, "Yes, me three drachms," borrowed on such an occasion. Mahomet ordered them to be paid: "Better be in shame now," said he, "than at the Day of Judgment."—You remember Kadijah, and the "No, by Allah!" Traits of that kind show us the genuine man, the brother of us all, brought visible through twelve centuries,—the veritable Son of our common Mother.

Withal I like Mahomet for his total freedom from cant. He is a rough self-helping son of the wilderness; does not pretend to be what he is not. There is no ostentatious pride in him; but neither does he go much upon humility: he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes of his own clouting; speaks plainly to all manner of Persian Kings, Greek Emperors, what it is they are bound to do; knows well enough, about himself, "the respect due unto thee." In a life-and-death war with Bedouins, cruel things could not fail; but neither are acts of mercy, of noble natural pity and generosity wanting. Mahomet makes no apology for the one, no boast of the other. They were each the free dictate of his heart; each called for, there and then. Not a mealy-mouthed man! A candid ferocity, if the case call for it, is in him; he does not mince matters! The War of Tabuc is a thing he often speaks of: his men refused, many of them, to march on that occasion; pleaded the heat of the weather, the harvest, and so forth; he can never forget that. Your harvest? It lasts for a day. What will become of your harvest through all Eternity? Hot weather? Yes, it was hot; "but Hell will be hotter!" Sometimes a rough sarcasm turns up: He says to the unbelievers, Ye shall have the just measure of your deeds at that Great Day. They will be weighed out to you; ye shall not have short weight!—Everywhere he fixes the matter in his eye; he sees it: his heart, now and then, is as if struck dumb by the greatness of it. "Assuredly," he says: that word, in the Koran, is written down sometimes as a sentence by itself: "Assuredly."

No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth;—"living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death. The very falsehoods of Mahomet are truer than the truths of such a man. He is the insincere man: smooth-polished, respectable in some times and places; inoffensive, says nothing harsh to anybody; most cleanly,—just as carbonic acid is, which is death and poison.

We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always of the superfinest sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency to good in them; that they are the true dictates of a heart aiming towards what is just and true. The sublime forgiveness of Christianity, turning of the other cheek when the one has been smitten, is not here: you are to revenge yourself, but it is to be in measure, not overmuch, or beyond justice. On the other hand, Islam, like any great Faith, and insight into the essence of man, is a perfect equalizer of men: the soul of one believer outweighs all earthly kingships; all men, according to Islam too, are equal. Mahomet insists not on the propriety of giving alms, but on the necessity of it: he marks down by law how much you are to give, and it is at your peril if you neglect. The tenth part of a man's annual income, whatever that may be, is the property of the poor, of those that are afflicted and need help. Good all this: the natural voice of humanity, of pity and equity dwelling in the heart of this wild Son of Nature speaks so.

Mahomet's Paradise is sensual, his Hell sensual: true; in the one and the other there is enough that shocks all spiritual feeling in us. But we are to recollect that the Arabs already had it so; that Mahomet, in whatever he changed of it, softened and diminished all this. The worst sensualities, too, are the work of doctors, followers of his, not his work. In the Koran there is really very little said about the joys of Paradise; they are intimated rather than insisted on. Nor is it forgotten that the highest joys even there shall be spiritual; the pure Presence of the Highest, this shall infinitely transcend all other joys. He says, "Your salutation shall be, Peace." Salam, Have Peace!—the thing that all rational souls long for, and seek, vainly here below, as the one blessing. "Ye shall sit on seats, facing one another: all grudges shall be taken away out of your hearts." All grudges! Ye shall love one another freely; for each of you, in the eyes of his brothers, there will be Heaven enough!

In reference to this of the sensual Paradise and Mahomet's sensuality, the sorest chapter of all for us, there were many things to be said; which it is not convenient to enter upon here. Two remarks only I shall make, and therewith leave it to your candor. The first is furnished me by Goethe; it is a casual hint of his which seems well worth taking note of. In one of his Delineations, in Meister's Travels it is, the hero comes upon a Society of men with very strange ways, one of which was this: "We require," says the Master, "that each of our people shall restrict himself in one direction," shall go right against his desire in one matter, and make himself do the thing he does not wish, "should we allow him the greater latitude on all other sides." There seems to me a great justness in this. Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is. Let a man assert withal that he is king over his habitudes; that he could and would shake them off, on cause shown: this is an excellent law. The Month Ramadhan for the Moslem, much in Mahomet's Religion, much in his own Life, bears in that direction; if not by forethought, or clear purpose of moral improvement on his part, then by a certain healthy manful instinct, which is as good.

But there is another thing to be said about the Mahometan Heaven and Hell. This namely, that, however gross and material they may be, they are an emblem of an everlasting truth, not always so well remembered elsewhere. That gross sensual Paradise of his; that horrible flaming Hell; the great enormous Day of Judgment he perpetually insists on: what is all this but a rude shadow, in the rude Bedouin imagination, of that grand spiritual Fact, and Beginning of Facts, which it is ill for us too if we do not all know and feel: the Infinite Nature of Duty? That man's actions here are of infinite moment to him, and never die or end at all; that man, with his little life, reaches upwards high as Heaven, downwards low as Hell, and in his threescore years of Time holds an Eternity fearfully and wonderfully hidden: all this had burnt itself, as in flame-characters, into the wild Arab soul. As in flame and lightning, it stands written there; awful, unspeakable, ever present to him. With bursting earnestness, with a fierce savage sincerity, half-articulating, not able to articulate, he strives to speak it, bodies it forth in that Heaven and that Hell. Bodied forth in what way you will, it is the first of all truths. It is venerable under all embodiments. What is the chief end of man here below? Mahomet has answered this question, in a way that might put some of us to shame! He does not, like a Bentham, a Paley, take Right and Wrong, and calculate the profit and loss, ultimate pleasure of the one and of the other; and summing all up by addition and subtraction into a net result, ask you, Whether on the whole the Right does not preponderate considerably? No; it is not better to do the one than the other; the one is to the other as life is to death,—as Heaven is to Hell. The one must in nowise be done, the other in nowise left undone. You shall not measure them; they are incommensurable: the one is death eternal to a man, the other is life eternal. Benthamee Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God's-world to a dead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of Man to a kind of Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, pleasures and pains on:—If you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they, the beggarlier and falser view of Man and his Destinies in this Universe, I will answer, it is not Mahomet—!

On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a kind of Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually highest looking through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. The Scandinavian God Wish, the god of all rude men,—this has been enlarged into a Heaven by Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical of sacred Duty, and to be earned by faith and well-doing, by valiant action, and a divine patience which is still more valiant. It is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly celestial element superadded to that. Call it not false; look not at the falsehood of it, look at the truth of it. For these twelve centuries, it has been the religion and life-guidance of the fifth part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all things, it has been a religion heartily believed. These Arabs believe their religion, and try to live by it! No Christians, since the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have ever stood by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs,—believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it. This night the watchman on the streets of Cairo when he cries, "Who goes?" will hear from the passenger, along with his answer, "There is no God but God." Allah akbar, Islam, sounds through the souls, and whole daily existence, of these dusky millions. Zealous missionaries preach it abroad among Malays, black Papuans, brutal Idolaters;—displacing what is worse, nothing that is better or good.

To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into light; Arabia first became alive by means of it. A poor shepherd people, roaming unnoticed in its deserts since the creation of the world: a Hero-Prophet was sent down to them with a word they could believe: see, the unnoticed becomes world-notable, the small has grown world-great; within one century afterwards, Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on that;—glancing in valor and splendor and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a great section of the world. Belief is great, life-giving. The history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it believes. These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century,—is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black unnoticeable sand; but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Grenada! I said, the Great Man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.

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# The Hero as Divinity | Thomas Carlyle | Anthologies

Odin, Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology

Date: 2025-03-29
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-hero-as-divinity-thomas-carlyle
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-hero-as-divinity-thomas-carlyle

May 5, 1840

We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world's business, how they have shaped themselves in the world's history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they did;—on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance; what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs. Too evidently this is a large topic; deserving quite other treatment than we can expect to give it at present. A large topic; indeed, an illimitable one; wide as Universal History itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these. Too clearly it is a topic we shall do no justice to in this place!

One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;—in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them. On any terms whatsoever, you will not grudge to wander in such neighborhood for a while. These Six classes of Heroes, chosen out of widely distant countries and epochs, and in mere external figure differing altogether, ought, if we look faithfully at them, to illustrate several things for us. Could we see them well, we should get some glimpses into the very marrow of the world's history. How happy, could I but, in any measure, in such times as these, make manifest to you the meanings of Heroism; the divine relation (for I may well call it such) which in all times unites a Great Man to other men; and thus, as it were, not exhaust my subject, but so much as break ground on it! At all events, I must make the attempt.

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man's, or a nation of men's. By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? Was it Heathenism,—plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Scepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them. In these Discourses, limited as we are, it will be good to direct our survey chiefly to that religious phasis of the matter. That once known well, all is known. We have chosen as the first Hero in our series Odin the central figure of Scandinavian Paganism; an emblem to us of a most extensive province of things. Let us look for a little at the Hero as Divinity, the oldest primary form of Heroism.

Surely it seems a very strange-looking thing this Paganism; almost inconceivable to us in these days. A bewildering, inextricable jungle of delusions, confusions, falsehoods, and absurdities, covering the whole field of Life! A thing that fills us with astonishment, almost, if it were possible, with incredulity,—for truly it is not easy to understand that sane men could ever calmly, with their eyes open, believe and live by such a set of doctrines. That men should have worshipped their poor fellow-man as a God, and not him only, but stocks and stones, and all manner of animate and inanimate objects; and fashioned for themselves such a distracted chaos of hallucinations by way of Theory of the Universe: all this looks like an incredible fable. Nevertheless it is a clear fact that they did it. Such hideous inextricable jungle of misworships, misbeliefs, men, made as we are, did actually hold by, and live at home in. This is strange. Yes, we may pause in sorrow and silence over the depths of darkness that are in man; if we rejoice in the heights of purer vision he has attained to. Such things were and are in man; in all men; in us too.

Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the Pagan religion: mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no sane man ever did believe it,—merely contrived to persuade other men, not worthy of the name of sane, to believe it! It will be often our duty to protest against this sort of hypothesis about men's doings and history; and I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this. It seems to me a most mournful hypothesis, that of quackery giving birth to any faith even in savage men. Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things. We shall not see into the true heart of anything, if we look merely at the quackeries of it; if we do not reject the quackeries altogether; as mere diseases, corruptions, with which our and all men's sole duty is to have done with them, to sweep them out of our thoughts as out of our practice. Man everywhere is the born enemy of lies. I find Grand Lamaism itself to have a kind of truth in it. Read the candid, clear-sighted, rather sceptical Mr. Turner's Account of his Embassy to that country, and see. They have their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds! This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here. The Thibet priests have methods of their own of discovering what Man is Greatest, fit to be supreme over them. Bad methods: but are they so much worse than our methods,—of understanding him to be always the eldest-born of a certain genealogy? Alas, it is a difficult thing to find good methods for!—We shall begin to have a chance of understanding Paganism, when we first admit that to its followers it was, at one time, earnestly true. Let us consider it very certain that men did believe in Paganism; men with open eyes, sound senses, men made altogether like ourselves; that we, had we been there, should have believed in it. Ask now, What Paganism could have been?

Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes such things to Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a shadowing forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visual form, of what such poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe. Which agrees, add they, with a primary law of human nature, still everywhere observably at work, though in less important things, That what a man feels intensely, he struggles to speak out of him, to see represented before him in visual shape, and as if with a kind of life and historical reality in it. Now doubtless there is such a law, and it is one of the deepest in human nature; neither need we doubt that it did operate fundamentally in this business. The hypothesis which ascribes Paganism wholly or mostly to this agency, I call a little more respectable; but I cannot yet call it the true hypothesis. Think, would we believe, and take with us as our life-guidance, an allegory, a poetic sport? Not sport but earnest is what we should require. It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are on the way towards truth in this matter, they have not reached it either. Pagan Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and knew about the Universe; and all Religions are symbols of that, altering always as that alters: but it seems to me a radical perversion, and even inversion, of the business, to put that forward as the origin and moving cause, when it was rather the result and termination. To get beautiful allegories, a perfect poetic symbol, was not the want of men; but to know what they were to believe about this Universe, what course they were to steer in it; what, in this mysterious Life of theirs, they had to hope and to fear, to do and to forbear doing. The Pilgrim's Progress is an Allegory, and a beautiful, just and serious one: but consider whether Bunyan's Allegory could have preceded the Faith it symbolizes! The Faith had to be already there, standing believed by everybody;—of which the Allegory could then become a shadow; and, with all its seriousness, we may say a sportful shadow, a mere play of the Fancy, in comparison with that awful Fact and scientific certainty which it poetically strives to emblem. The Allegory is the product of the certainty, not the producer of it; not in Bunyan's nor in any other case. For Paganism, therefore, we have still to inquire, Whence came that scientific certainty, the parent of such a bewildered heap of allegories, errors and confusions? How was it, what was it?

Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend "explaining," in this place, or in any place, such a phenomenon as that far-distant distracted cloudy imbroglio of Paganism,—more like a cloud-field than a distant continent of firm land and facts! It is no longer a reality, yet it was one. We ought to understand that this seeming cloud-field was once a reality; that not poetic allegory, least of all that dupery and deception was the origin of it. Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories: men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks. Let us try if, leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory one, and listening with affectionate attention to that far-off confused rumor of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so much as this at least, That there was a kind of fact at the heart of them; that they too were not mendacious and distracted, but in their own poor way true and sane!

You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a man who had grown to maturity in some dark distance, and was brought on a sudden into the upper air to see the sun rise. What would his wonder be, his rapt astonishment at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free open sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart would be kindled by that sight, he would discern it well to be Godlike, his soul would fall down in worship before it. Now, just such a childlike greatness was in the primitive nations. The first Pagan Thinker among rude men, the first man that began to think, was precisely this child-man of Plato's. Simple, open as a child, yet with the depth and strength of a man. Nature had as yet no name to him; he had not yet united under a name the infinite variety of sights, sounds, shapes and motions, which we now collectively name Universe, Nature, or the like,—and so with a name dismiss it from us. To the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preternatural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;—that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all. It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty; it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it. Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words. We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,—for we have no word to speak about it. This Universe, ah me—what could the wild man know of it; what can we yet know? That it is a Force, and thousand-fold Complexity of Forces; a Force which is not we. That is all; it is not we, it is altogether different from us. Force, Force, everywhere Force; we ourselves a mysterious Force in the centre of that. "There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it; how else could it rot?" Nay surely, to the Atheistic Thinker, if such a one were possible, it must be a miracle too, this huge illimitable whirlwind of Force, which envelops us here; never-resting whirlwind, high as Immensity, old as Eternity. What is it? God's Creation, the religious people answer; it is the Almighty God's! Atheistic science babbles poorly of it, with scientific nomenclatures, experiments and what not, as if it were a poor dead thing, to be bottled up in Leyden jars and sold over counters: but the natural sense of man, in all times, if he will honestly apply his sense, proclaims it to be a living thing,—ah, an unspeakable, godlike thing; towards which the best attitude for us, after never so much science, is awe, devout prostration and humility of soul; worship if not in words, then in silence.

But now I remark farther: What in such a time as ours it requires a Prophet or Poet to teach us, namely, the stripping-off of those poor undevout wrappages, nomenclatures and scientific hearsays,—this, the ancient earnest soul, as yet unencumbered with these things, did for itself. The world, which is now divine only to the gifted, was then divine to whosoever would turn his eye upon it. He stood bare before it face to face. "All was Godlike or God:"—Jean Paul still finds it so; the giant Jean Paul, who has power to escape out of hearsays: but there then were no hearsays. Canopus shining down over the desert, with its blue diamond brightness (that wild blue spirit-like brightness, far brighter than we ever witness here), would pierce into the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was guiding through the solitary waste there. To his wild heart, with all feelings in it, with no speech for any feeling, it might seem a little eye, that Canopus, glancing out on him from the great deep Eternity; revealing the inner Splendor to him. Cannot we understand how these men worshipped Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, worshipping the stars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism. Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit or measure; that is worship. To these primeval men, all things and everything they saw exist beside them were an emblem of the Godlike, of some God.

And look what perennial fibre of truth was in that. To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not a God made visible, if we will open our minds and eyes? We do not worship in that way now: but is it not reckoned still a merit, proof of what we call a "poetic nature," that we recognize how every object has a divine beauty in it; how every object still verily is "a window through which we may look into Infinitude itself"? He that can discern the loveliness of things, we call him Poet! Painter, Man of Genius, gifted, lovable. These poor Sabeans did even what he does,—in their own fashion. That they did it, in what fashion soever, was a merit: better than what the entirely stupid man did, what the horse and camel did,—namely, nothing!

But now if all things whatsoever that we look upon are emblems to us of the Highest God, I add that more so than any of them is man such an emblem. You have heard of St. Chrysostom's celebrated saying in reference to the Shekinah, or Ark of Testimony, visible Revelation of God, among the Hebrews: "The true Shekinah is Man!" Yes, it is even so: this is no vain phrase; it is veritably so. The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself "I,"—ah, what words have we for such things?—is a breath of Heaven; the Highest Being reveals himself in man. This body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for that Unnamed? "There is but one Temple in the Universe," says the devout Novalis, "and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier shall that high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!" This sounds much like a mere flourish of rhetoric; but it is not so. If well meditated, it will turn out to be a scientific fact; the expression, in such words as can be had, of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles,—the great inscrutable mystery of God. We cannot understand it, we know not how to speak of it; but we may feel and know, if we like, that it is verily so.

Well; these truths were once more readily felt than now. The young generations of the world, who had in them the freshness of young children, and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think that they had finished off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man and Nature; they, without being mad, could worship Nature, and man more than anything else in Nature. Worship, that is, as I said above, admire without limit: this, in the full use of their faculties, with all sincerity of heart, they could do. I consider Hero-worship to be the grand modifying element in that ancient system of thought. What I called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out of many roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object, was a root or fibre of a root; but Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown.

And now if worship even of a star had some meaning in it, how much more might that of a Hero! Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life. Religion I find stand upon it; not Paganism only, but far higher and truer religions,—all religion hitherto known. Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man,—is not that the germ of Christianity itself? The greatest of all Heroes is One—whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on earth.

Or coming into lower, less unspeakable provinces, is not all Loyalty akin to religious Faith also? Faith is loyalty to some inspired Teacher, some spiritual Hero. And what therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly great? Society is founded on Hero-worship. All dignities of rank, on which human association rests, are what we may call a Heroarchy (Government of Heroes),—or a Hierarchy, for it is "sacred" enough withal! The Duke means Dux, Leader; King is Kon-ning, Kan-ning, Man that knows or cans. Society everywhere is some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes—reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise. Not insupportably inaccurate, I say! They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing gold;—and several of them, alas, always are forged notes. We can do with some forged false notes; with a good many even; but not with all, or the most of them forged! No: there have to come revolutions then; cries of Democracy, Liberty and Equality, and I know not what:—the notes being all false, and no gold to be had for them, people take to crying in their despair that there is no gold, that there never was any! "Gold," Hero-worship, is nevertheless, as it was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himself ceases.

I am well aware that in these days Hero-worship, the thing I call Hero-worship, professes to have gone out, and finally ceased. This, for reasons which it will be worth while some time to inquire into, is an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness of great men. Show our critics a great man, a Luther for example, they begin to what they call "account" for him; not to worship him, but take the dimensions of him,—and bring him out to be a little kind of man! He was the "creature of the Time," they say; the Time called him forth, the Time did everything, he nothing—but what we the little critic could have done too! This seems to me but melancholy work. The Time call forth? Alas, we have known Times call loudly enough for their great man; but not find him when they called! He was not there; Providence had not sent him; the Time, calling its loudest, had to go down to confusion and wreck because he would not come when called.

For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, could it have found a man great enough, a man wise and good enough: wisdom to discern truly what the Time wanted, valor to lead it on the right road thither; these are the salvation of any Time. But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own. The dry mouldering sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly; but as to calling him forth—! Those are critics of small vision, I think, who cry: "See, is it not the sticks that made the fire?" No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last consummation of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;—the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men.

Such small critics do what they can to promote unbelief and universal spiritual paralysis: but happily they cannot always completely succeed. In all times it is possible for a man to arise great enough to feel that they and their doctrines are chimeras and cobwebs. And what is notable, in no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men; genuine admiration, loyalty, adoration, however dim and perverted it may be. Hero-worship endures forever while man endures. Boswell venerates his Johnson, right truly even in the Eighteenth century. The unbelieving French believe in their Voltaire; and burst out round him into very curious Hero-worship, in that last act of his life when they "stifle him under roses." It has always seemed to me extremely curious this of Voltaire. Truly, if Christianity be the highest instance of Hero-worship, then we may find here in Voltaireism one of the lowest! He whose life was that of a kind of Antichrist, does again on this side exhibit a curious contrast. No people ever were so little prone to admire at all as those French of Voltaire. Persiflage was the character of their whole mind; adoration had nowhere a place in it. Yet see! The old man of Ferney comes up to Paris; an old, tottering, infirm man of eighty-four years. They feel that he too is a kind of Hero; that he has spent his life in opposing error and injustice, delivering Calases, unmasking hypocrites in high places;—in short that he too, though in a strange way, has fought like a valiant man. They feel withal that, if persiflage be the great thing, there never was such a persifleur. He is the realized ideal of every one of them; the thing they are all wanting to be; of all Frenchmen the most French. He is properly their god,—such god as they are fit for. Accordingly all persons, from the Queen Antoinette to the Douanier at the Porte St. Denis, do they not worship him? People of quality disguise themselves as tavern-waiters. The Maitre de Poste, with a broad oath, orders his Postilion, "Va bon train; thou art driving M. de Voltaire." At Paris his carriage is "the nucleus of a comet, whose train fills whole streets." The ladies pluck a hair or two from his fur, to keep it as a sacred relic. There was nothing highest, beautifulest, noblest in all France, that did not feel this man to be higher, beautifuler, nobler.

Yes, from Norse Odin to English Samuel Johnson, from the divine Founder of Christianity to the withered Pontiff of Encyclopedism, in all times and places, the Hero has been worshipped. It will ever be so. We all love great men; love, venerate and bow down submissive before great men: nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him? No nobler or more blessed feeling dwells in man's heart. And to me it is very cheering to consider that no sceptical logic, or general triviality, insincerity and aridity of any Time and its influences can destroy this noble inborn loyalty and worship that is in man. In times of unbelief, which soon have to become times of revolution, much down-rushing, sorrowful decay and ruin is visible to everybody. For myself in these days, I seem to see in this indestructibility of Hero-worship the everlasting adamant lower than which the confused wreck of revolutionary things cannot fall. The confused wreck of things crumbling and even crashing and tumbling all round us in these revolutionary ages, will get down so far; no farther. It is an eternal corner-stone, from which they can begin to build themselves up again. That man, in some sense or other, worships Heroes; that we all of us reverence and must ever reverence Great Men: this is, to me, the living rock amid all rushings-down whatsoever;—the one fixed point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise as if bottomless and shoreless.

So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth. I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century: eight hundred years ago the Norwegians were still worshippers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways. Strange: they did believe that, while we believe so differently. Let us look a little at this poor Norse creed, for many reasons. We have tolerable means to do it; for there is another point of interest in these Scandinavian mythologies: that they have been preserved so well.

In that strange island Iceland,—burst up, the geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summertime; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean with its snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;—where of all places we least looked for Literature or written memorials, the record of these things was written down. On the seabord of this wild land is a rim of grassy country, where cattle can subsist, and men by means of them and of what the sea yields; and it seems they were poetic men these, men who had deep thoughts in them, and uttered musically their thoughts. Much would be lost, had Iceland not been burst up from the sea, not been discovered by the Northmen! The old Norse Poets were many of them natives of Iceland.

Saemund, one of the early Christian Priests there, who perhaps had a lingering fondness for Paganism, collected certain of their old Pagan songs, just about becoming obsolete then,—Poems or Chants of a mythic, prophetic, mostly all of a religious character: that is what Norse critics call the Elder or Poetic Edda. Edda, a word of uncertain etymology, is thought to signify Ancestress. Snorro Sturleson, an Iceland gentleman, an extremely notable personage, educated by this Saemund's grandson, took in hand next, near a century afterwards, to put together, among several other books he wrote, a kind of Prose Synopsis of the whole Mythology; elucidated by new fragments of traditionary verse. A work constructed really with great ingenuity, native talent, what one might call unconscious art; altogether a perspicuous clear work, pleasant reading still: this is the Younger or Prose Edda. By these and the numerous other Sagas, mostly Icelandic, with the commentaries, Icelandic or not, which go on zealously in the North to this day, it is possible to gain some direct insight even yet; and see that old Norse system of Belief, as it were, face to face. Let us forget that it is erroneous Religion; let us look at it as old Thought, and try if we cannot sympathize with it somewhat.

The primary characteristic of this old Northland Mythology I find to be Impersonation of the visible workings of Nature. Earnest simple recognition of the workings of Physical Nature, as a thing wholly miraculous, stupendous and divine. What we now lecture of as Science, they wondered at, and fell down in awe before, as Religion The dark hostile Powers of Nature they figure to themselves as "Jotuns," Giants, huge shaggy beings of a demonic character. Frost, Fire, Sea-tempest; these are Jotuns. The friendly Powers again, as Summer-heat, the Sun, are Gods. The empire of this Universe is divided between these two; they dwell apart, in perennial internecine feud. The Gods dwell above in Asgard, the Garden of the Asen, or Divinities; Jotunheim, a distant dark chaotic land, is the home of the Jotuns.

Curious all this; and not idle or inane, if we will look at the foundation of it! The power of Fire, or Flame, for instance, which we designate by some trivial chemical name, thereby hiding from ourselves the essential character of wonder that dwells in it as in all things, is with these old Northmen, Loke, a most swift subtle Demon, of the brood of the Jotuns. The savages of the Ladrones Islands too (say some Spanish voyagers) thought Fire, which they never had seen before, was a devil or god, that bit you sharply when you touched it, and that lived upon dry wood. From us too no Chemistry, if it had not Stupidity to help it, would hide that Flame is a wonder. What is Flame?—Frost the old Norse Seer discerns to be a monstrous hoary Jotun, the Giant Thrym, Hrym; or Rime, the old word now nearly obsolete here, but still used in Scotland to signify hoar-frost. Rime was not then as now a dead chemical thing, but a living Jotun or Devil; the monstrous Jotun Rime drove home his Horses at night, sat "combing their manes,"—which Horses were Hail-Clouds, or fleet Frost-Winds. His Cows—No, not his, but a kinsman's, the Giant Hymir's Cows are Icebergs: this Hymir "looks at the rocks" with his devil-eye, and they split in the glance of it.

Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vitreous or resinous; it was the God Donner (Thunder) or Thor,—God also of beneficent Summer-heat. The thunder was his wrath: the gathering of the black clouds is the drawing down of Thor's angry brows; the fire-bolt bursting out of Heaven is the all-rending Hammer flung from the hand of Thor: he urges his loud chariot over the mountain-tops,—that is the peal; wrathful he "blows in his red beard,"—that is the rustling storm-blast before the thunder begins. Balder again, the White God, the beautiful, the just and benignant (whom the early Christian Missionaries found to resemble Christ), is the Sun, beautifullest of visible things; wondrous too, and divine still, after all our Astronomies and Almanacs! But perhaps the notablest god we hear tell of is one of whom Grimm the German Etymologist finds trace: the God Wunsch, or Wish. The God Wish; who could give us all that we wished! Is not this the sincerest and yet rudest voice of the spirit of man? The rudest ideal that man ever formed; which still shows itself in the latest forms of our spiritual culture. Higher considerations have to teach us that the God Wish is not the true God.

Of the other Gods or Jotuns I will mention only for etymology's sake, that Sea-tempest is the Jotun Aegir, a very dangerous Jotun;—and now to this day, on our river Trent, as I learn, the Nottingham bargemen, when the River is in a certain flooded state (a kind of backwater, or eddying swirl it has, very dangerous to them), call it Eager; they cry out, "Have a care, there is the Eager coming!" Curious; that word surviving, like the peak of a submerged world! The oldest Nottingham bargemen had believed in the God Aegir. Indeed our English blood too in good part is Danish, Norse; or rather, at bottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon have no distinction, except a superficial one,—as of Heathen and Christian, or the like. But all over our Island we are mingled largely with Danes proper,—from the incessant invasions there were: and this, of course, in a greater proportion along the east coast; and greatest of all, as I find, in the North Country. From the Humber upwards, all over Scotland, the Speech of the common people is still in a singular degree Icelandic; its Germanism has still a peculiar Norse tinge. They too are "Normans," Northmen,—if that be any great beauty—!

Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speak by and by. Mark at present so much; what the essence of Scandinavian and indeed of all Paganism is: a recognition of the forces of Nature as godlike, stupendous, personal Agencies,—as Gods and Demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the infant Thought of man opening itself, with awe and wonder, on this ever-stupendous Universe. To me there is in the Norse system something very genuine, very great and manlike. A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very different from the light gracefulness of the old Greek Paganism, distinguishes this Scandinavian System. It is Thought; the genuine Thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to the things about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of the things,—the first characteristic of all good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here. It is strange, after our beautiful Apollo statues and clear smiling mythuses, to come down upon the Norse Gods "brewing ale" to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Jotun; sending out Thor to get the caldron for them in the Jotun country; Thor, after many adventures, clapping the Pot on his head, like a huge hat, and walking off with it,—quite lost in it, the ears of the Pot reaching down to his heels! A kind of vacant hugeness, large awkward gianthood, characterizes that Norse system; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, stalking helpless with large uncertain strides. Consider only their primary mythus of the Creation. The Gods, having got the Giant Ymer slain, a Giant made by "warm wind," and much confused work, out of the conflict of Frost and Fire,—determined on constructing a world with him. His blood made the Sea; his flesh was the Land, the Rocks his bones; of his eyebrows they formed Asgard their Gods'-dwelling; his skull was the great blue vault of Immensity, and the brains of it became the Clouds. What a Hyper-Brobdignagian business! Untamed Thought, great, giantlike, enormous;—to be tamed in due time into the compact greatness, not giantlike, but godlike and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakspeares, the Goethes!—Spiritually as well as bodily these men are our progenitors.

I like, too, that representation they have of the tree Igdrasil. All Life is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence, has its roots deep down in the kingdoms of Hela or Death; its trunk reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it is the Tree of Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-kingdom, sit Three Nornas, Fates,—the Past, Present, Future; watering its roots from the Sacred Well. Its "boughs," with their buddings and disleafings?—events, things suffered, things done, catastrophes,—stretch through all lands and times. Is not every leaf of it a biography, every fibre there an act or word? Its boughs are Histories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of Human Existence, onwards from of old. It grows there, the breath of Human Passion rustling through it;—or storm tost, the storm-wind howling through it like the voice of all the gods. It is Igdrasil, the Tree of Existence. It is the past, the present, and the future; what was done, what is doing, what will be done; "the infinite conjugation of the verb To do." Considering how human things circulate, each inextricably in communion with all,—how the word I speak to you to-day is borrowed, not from Ulfila the Moesogoth only, but from all men since the first man began to speak,—I find no similitude so true as this of a Tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great. The "Machine of the Universe,"—alas, do but think of that in contrast!

Well, it is strange enough this old Norse view of Nature; different enough from what we believe of Nature. Whence it specially came, one would not like to be compelled to say very minutely! One thing we may say: It came from the thoughts of Norse men;—from the thought, above all, of the first Norse man who had an original power of thinking. The First Norse "man of genius," as we should call him! Innumerable men had passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only feel;—till the great Thinker came, the original man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night;—is it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!—Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation,—till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther; but must give place to another.

For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero, of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!—We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world—!

One other thing we must not forget; it will explain, a little, the confusion of these Norse Eddas. They are not one coherent System of Thought; but properly the summation of several successive systems. All this of the old Norse Belief which is flung out for us, in one level of distance in the Edda, like a picture painted on the same canvas, does not at all stand so in the reality. It stands rather at all manner of distances and depths, of successive generations since the Belief first began. All Scandinavian thinkers, since the first of them, contributed to that Scandinavian System of Thought; in ever-new elaboration and addition, it is the combined work of them all. What history it had, how it changed from shape to shape, by one thinker's contribution after another, till it got to the full final shape we see it under in the Edda, no man will now ever know: its Councils of Trebizond, Councils of Trent, Athanasiuses, Dantes, Luthers, are sunk without echo in the dark night! Only that it had such a history we can all know. Wheresover a thinker appeared, there in the thing he thought of was a contribution, accession, a change or revolution made. Alas, the grandest "revolution" of all, the one made by the man Odin himself, is not this too sunk for us like the rest! Of Odin what history? Strange rather to reflect that he had a history! That this Odin, in his wild Norse vesture, with his wild beard and eyes, his rude Norse speech and ways, was a man like us; with our sorrows, joys, with our limbs, features;—intrinsically all one as we: and did such a work! But the work, much of it, has perished; the worker, all to the name. "Wednesday," men will say to-morrow; Odin's day! Of Odin there exists no history; no document of it; no guess about it worth repeating.

Snorro indeed, in the quietest manner, almost in a brief business style, writes down, in his Heimskringla, how Odin was a heroic Prince, in the Black-Sea region, with Twelve Peers, and a great people straitened for room. How he led these Asen (Asiatics) of his out of Asia; settled them in the North parts of Europe, by warlike conquest; invented Letters, Poetry and so forth,—and came by and by to be worshipped as Chief God by these Scandinavians, his Twelve Peers made into Twelve Sons of his own, Gods like himself: Snorro has no doubt of this. Saxo Grammaticus, a very curious Northman of that same century, is still more unhesitating; scruples not to find out a historical fact in every individual mythus, and writes it down as a terrestrial event in Denmark or elsewhere. Torfaeus, learned and cautious, some centuries later, assigns by calculation a date for it: Odin, he says, came into Europe about the Year 70 before Christ. Of all which, as grounded on mere uncertainties, found to be untenable now, I need say nothing. Far, very far beyond the Year 70! Odin's date, adventures, whole terrestrial history, figure and environment are sunk from us forever into unknown thousands of years.

Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goes so far as to deny that any man Odin ever existed. He proves it by etymology. The word Wuotan, which is the original form of Odin, a word spread, as name of their chief Divinity, over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere; this word, which connects itself, according to Grimm, with the Latin vadere, with the English wade and such like,—means primarily Movement, Source of Movement, Power; and is the fit name of the highest god, not of any man. The word signifies Divinity, he says, among the old Saxon, German and all Teutonic Nations; the adjectives formed from it all signify divine, supreme, or something pertaining to the chief god. Like enough! We must bow to Grimm in matters etymological. Let us consider it fixed that Wuotan means Wading, force of Movement. And now still, what hinders it from being the name of a Heroic Man and Mover, as well as of a god? As for the adjectives, and words formed from it,—did not the Spaniards in their universal admiration for Lope, get into the habit of saying "a Lope flower," "a Lope dama," if the flower or woman were of surpassing beauty? Had this lasted, Lope would have grown, in Spain, to be an adjective signifying godlike also. Indeed, Adam Smith, in his Essay on Language, surmises that all adjectives whatsoever were formed precisely in that way: some very green thing, chiefly notable for its greenness, got the appellative name Green, and then the next thing remarkable for that quality, a tree for instance, was named the green tree,—as we still say "the steam coach," "four-horse coach," or the like. All primary adjectives, according to Smith, were formed in this way; were at first substantives and things. We cannot annihilate a man for etymologies like that! Surely there was a First Teacher and Captain; surely there must have been an Odin, palpable to the sense at one time; no adjective, but a real Hero of flesh and blood! The voice of all tradition, history or echo of history, agrees with all that thought will teach one about it, to assure us of this.

How the man Odin came to be considered a god, the chief god?—that surely is a question which nobody would wish to dogmatize upon. I have said, his people knew no limits to their admiration of him; they had as yet no scale to measure admiration by. Fancy your own generous heart's-love of some greatest man expanding till it transcended all bounds, till it filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought! Or what if this man Odin,—since a great deep soul, with the afflatus and mysterious tide of vision and impulse rushing on him he knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a kind of terror and wonder to himself,—should have felt that perhaps he was divine; that he was some effluence of the "Wuotan," "Movement", Supreme Power and Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the awful Flame-image; that some effluence of Wuotan dwelt here in him! He was not necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he knew. A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is,—alternates between the highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least measure—Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he may be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one another. With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild soul full of noble ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light; a divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him, and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself to be? "Wuotan?" All men answered, "Wuotan!"—

And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What an enormous camera-obscura magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and all that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the darkness, in the entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no Arundel-marble; only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty years, were there no books, any great man would grow mythic, the contemporaries who had seen him, being once all dead. And in three hundred years, and in three thousand years—! To attempt theorizing on such matters would profit little: they are matters which refuse to be theoremed and diagramed; which Logic ought to know that she cannot speak of. Enough for us to discern, far in the uttermost distance, some gleam as of a small real light shining in the centre of that enormous camera-obscure image; to discern that the centre of it all was not a madness and nothing, but a sanity and something.

This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse Mind, dark but living, waiting only for light; this is to me the centre of the whole. How such light will then shine out, and with wondrous thousand-fold expansion spread itself, in forms and colors, depends not on it, so much as on the National Mind recipient of it. The colors and forms of your light will be those of the cut-glass it has to shine through.—Curious to think how, for every man, any the truest fact is modelled by the nature of the man! I said, The earnest man, speaking to his brother men, must always have stated what seemed to him a fact, a real Appearance of Nature. But the way in which such Appearance or fact shaped itself,—what sort of fact it became for him,—was and is modified by his own laws of thinking; deep, subtle, but universal, ever-operating laws. The world of Nature, for every man, is the Fantasy of Himself. This world is the multiplex "Image of his own Dream." Who knows to what unnamable subtleties of spiritual law all these Pagan Fables owe their shape! The number Twelve, divisiblest of all, which could be halved, quartered, parted into three, into six, the most remarkable number,—this was enough to determine the Signs of the Zodiac, the number of Odin's Sons, and innumerable other Twelves. Any vague rumor of number had a tendency to settle itself into Twelve. So with regard to every other matter. And quite unconsciously too,—with no notion of building up "Allegories "! But the fresh clear glance of those First Ages would be prompt in discerning the secret relations of things, and wholly open to obey these. Schiller finds in the Cestus of Venus an everlasting aesthetic truth as to the nature of all Beauty; curious:—but he is careful not to insinuate that the old Greek Mythists had any notion of lecturing about the "Philosophy of Criticism"!—On the whole, we must leave those boundless regions. Cannot we conceive that Odin was a reality? Error indeed, error enough: but sheer falsehood, idle fables, allegory aforethought,—we will not believe that our Fathers believed in these.

Odin's Runes are a significant feature of him. Runes, and the miracles of "magic" he worked by them, make a great feature in tradition. Runes are the Scandinavian Alphabet; suppose Odin to have been the inventor of Letters, as well as "magic," among that people! It is the greatest invention man has ever made! this of marking down the unseen thought that is in him by written characters. It is a kind of second speech, almost as miraculous as the first. You remember the astonishment and incredulity of Atahualpa the Peruvian King; how he made the Spanish Soldier who was guarding him scratch Dios on his thumb-nail, that he might try the next soldier with it, to ascertain whether such a miracle was possible. If Odin brought Letters among his people, he might work magic enough!

Writing by Runes has some air of being original among the Norsemen: not a Phoenician Alphabet, but a native Scandinavian one. Snorro tells us farther that Odin invented Poetry; the music of human speech, as well as that miraculous runic marking of it. Transport yourselves into the early childhood of nations; the first beautiful morning-light of our Europe, when all yet lay in fresh young radiance as of a great sunrise, and our Europe was first beginning to think, to be! Wonder, hope; infinite radiance of hope and wonder, as of a young child's thoughts, in the hearts of these strong men! Strong sons of Nature; and here was not only a wild Captain and Fighter; discerning with his wild flashing eyes what to do, with his wild lion-heart daring and doing it; but a Poet too, all that we mean by a Poet, Prophet, great devout Thinker and Inventor,—as the truly Great Man ever is. A Hero is a Hero at all points; in the soul and thought of him first of all. This Odin, in his rude semi-articulate way, had a word to speak. A great heart laid open to take in this great Universe, and man's Life here, and utter a great word about it. A Hero, as I say, in his own rude manner; a wise, gifted, noble-hearted man. And now, if we still admire such a man beyond all others, what must these wild Norse souls, first awakened into thinking, have made of him! To them, as yet without names for it, he was noble and noblest; Hero, Prophet, God; Wuotan, the greatest of all. Thought is Thought, however it speak or spell itself. Intrinsically, I conjecture, this Odin must have been of the same sort of stuff as the greatest kind of men. A great thought in the wild deep heart of him! The rough words he articulated, are they not the rudimental roots of those English words we still use? He worked so, in that obscure element. But he was as a light kindled in it; a light of Intellect, rude Nobleness of heart, the only kind of lights we have yet; a Hero, as I say: and he had to shine there, and make his obscure element a little lighter,—as is still the task of us all.

We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman; the finest Teuton whom that race had yet produced. The rude Norse heart burst up into boundless admiration round him; into adoration. He is as a root of so many great things; the fruit of him is found growing from deep thousands of years, over the whole field of Teutonic Life. Our own Wednesday, as I said, is it not still Odin's Day? Wednesbury, Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth: Odin grew into England too, these are still leaves from that root! He was the Chief God to all the Teutonic Peoples; their Pattern Norseman;—in such way did they admire their Pattern Norseman; that was the fortune he had in the world.

Thus if the man Odin himself have vanished utterly, there is this huge Shadow of him which still projects itself over the whole History of his People. For this Odin once admitted to be God, we can understand well that the whole Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim No-scheme, whatever it might before have been, would now begin to develop itself altogether differently, and grow thenceforth in a new manner. What this Odin saw into, and taught with his runes and his rhymes, the whole Teutonic People laid to heart and carried forward. His way of thought became their way of thought:—such, under new conditions, is the history of every great thinker still. In gigantic confused lineaments, like some enormous camera-obscure shadow thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past, and covering the whole Northern Heaven, is not that Scandinavian Mythology in some sort the Portraiture of this man Odin? The gigantic image of his natural face, legible or not legible there, expanded and confused in that manner! Ah, Thought, I say, is always Thought. No great man lives in vain. The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.

To me there is something very touching in this primeval figure of Heroism; in such artless, helpless, but hearty entire reception of a Hero by his fellow-men. Never so helpless in shape, it is the noblest of feelings, and a feeling in some shape or other perennial as man himself. If I could show in any measure, what I feel deeply for a long time now, That it is the vital element of manhood, the soul of man's history here in our world,—it would be the chief use of this discoursing at present. We do not now call our great men Gods, nor admire without limit; ah no, with limit enough! But if we have no great men, or do not admire at all,—that were a still worse case.

This poor Scandinavian Hero-worship, that whole Norse way of looking at the Universe, and adjusting oneself there, has an indestructible merit for us. A rude childlike way of recognizing the divineness of Nature, the divineness of Man; most rude, yet heartfelt, robust, giantlike; betokening what a giant of a man this child would yet grow to!—It was a truth, and is none. Is it not as the half-dumb stifled voice of the long-buried generations of our own Fathers, calling out of the depths of ages to us, in whose veins their blood still runs: "This then, this is what we made of the world: this is all the image and notion we could form to ourselves of this great mystery of a Life and Universe. Despise it not. You are raised high above it, to large free scope of vision; but you too are not yet at the top. No, your notion too, so much enlarged, is but a partial, imperfect one; that matter is a thing no man will ever, in time or out of time, comprehend; after thousands of years of ever-new expansion, man will find himself but struggling to comprehend again a part of it: the thing is larger shall man, not to be comprehended by him; an Infinite thing!"

The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all Pagan Mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness of Nature; sincere communion of man with the mysterious invisible Powers visibly seen at work in the world round him. This, I should say, is more sincerely done in the Scandinavian than in any Mythology I know. Sincerity is the great characteristic of it. Superior sincerity (far superior) consoles us for the total want of old Grecian grace. Sincerity, I think, is better than grace. I feel that these old Northmen wore looking into Nature with open eye and soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing way. A right valiant, true old race of men. Such recognition of Nature one finds to be the chief element of Paganism; recognition of Man, and his Moral Duty, though this too is not wanting, comes to be the chief element only in purer forms of religion. Here, indeed, is a great distinction and epoch in Human Beliefs; a great landmark in the religious development of Mankind. Man first puts himself in relation with Nature and her Powers, wonders and worships over those; not till a later epoch does he discern that all Power is Moral, that the grand point is the distinction for him of Good and Evil, of Thou shalt and Thou shalt not.

With regard to all these fabulous delineations in the Edda, I will remark, moreover, as indeed was already hinted, that most probably they must have been of much newer date; most probably, even from the first, were comparatively idle for the old Norsemen, and as it were a kind of Poetic sport. Allegory and Poetic Delineation, as I said above, cannot be religious Faith; the Faith itself must first be there, then Allegory enough will gather round it, as the fit body round its soul. The Norse Faith, I can well suppose, like other Faiths, was most active while it lay mainly in the silent state, and had not yet much to say about itself, still less to sing.

Among those shadowy Edda matters, amid all that fantastic congeries of assertions, and traditions, in their musical Mythologies, the main practical belief a man could have was probably not much more than this: of the Valkyrs and the Hall of Odin; of an inflexible Destiny; and that the one thing needful for a man was to be brave. The Valkyrs are Choosers of the Slain: a Destiny inexorable, which it is useless trying to bend or soften, has appointed who is to be slain; this was a fundamental point for the Norse believer;—as indeed it is for all earnest men everywhere, for a Mahomet, a Luther, for a Napoleon too. It lies at the basis this for every such man; it is the woof out of which his whole system of thought is woven. The Valkyrs; and then that these Choosers lead the brave to a heavenly Hall of Odin; only the base and slavish being thrust elsewhither, into the realms of Hela the Death-goddess: I take this to have been the soul of the whole Norse Belief. They understood in their heart that it was indispensable to be brave; that Odin would have no favor for them, but despise and thrust them out, if they were not brave. Consider too whether there is not something in this! It is an everlasting duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. Valor is still value. The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man's acts are slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he have got Fear under his feet. Odin's creed, if we disentangle the real kernel of it, is true to this hour. A man shall and must be valiant; he must march forward, and quit himself like a man,—trusting imperturbably in the appointment and choice of the upper Powers; and, on the whole, not fear at all. Now and always, the completeness of his victory over Fear will determine how much of a man he is.

It is doubtless very savage that kind of valor of the old Northmen. Snorro tells us they thought it a shame and misery not to die in battle; and if natural death seemed to be coming on, they would cut wounds in their flesh, that Odin might receive them as warriors slain. Old kings, about to die, had their body laid into a ship; the ship sent forth, with sails set and slow fire burning it; that, once out at sea, it might blaze up in flame, and in such manner bury worthily the old hero, at once in the sky and in the ocean! Wild bloody valor; yet valor of its kind; better, I say, than none. In the old Sea-kings too, what an indomitable rugged energy! Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy them, unconscious that they were specially brave; defying the wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and things;—progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons! No Homer sang these Norse Sea-kings; but Agamemnon's was a small audacity, and of small fruit in the world, to some of them;—to Hrolf's of Normandy, for instance! Hrolf, or Rollo Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has a share in governing England at this hour.

Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild sea-roving and battling, through so many generations. It needed to be ascertained which was the strongest kind of men; who were to be ruler over whom. Among the Northland Sovereigns, too, I find some who got the title Wood-cutter; Forest-felling Kings. Much lies in that. I suppose at bottom many of them were forest-fellers as well as fighters, though the Skalds talk mainly of the latter,—misleading certain critics not a little; for no nation of men could ever live by fighting alone; there could not produce enough come out of that! I suppose the right good fighter was oftenest also the right good forest-feller,—the right good improver, discerner, doer and worker in every kind; for true valor, different enough from ferocity, is the basis of all. A more legitimate kind of valor that; showing itself against the untamed Forests and dark brute Powers of Nature, to conquer Nature for us. In the same direction have not we their descendants since carried it far? May such valor last forever with us!

That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's voice and heart, as with an impressiveness out of Heaven, told his People the infinite importance of Valor, how man thereby became a god; and that his People, feeling a response to it in their own hearts, believed this message of his, and thought it a message out of Heaven, and him a Divinity for telling it them: this seems to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse Religion, from which all manner of mythologies, symbolic practices, speculations, allegories, songs and sagas would naturally grow. Grow,—how strangely! I called it a small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was alive; consider that. It was the eager inarticulate uninstructed Mind of the whole Norse People, longing only to become articulate, to go on articulating ever farther! The living doctrine grows, grows;—like a Banyan-tree; the first seed is the essential thing: any branch strikes itself down into the earth, becomes a new root; and so, in endless complexity, we have a whole wood, a whole jungle, one seed the parent of it all. Was not the whole Norse Religion, accordingly, in some sense, what we called "the enormous shadow of this man's likeness"? Critics trace some affinity in some Norse mythuses, of the Creation and such like, with those of the Hindoos. The Cow Adumbla, "licking the rime from the rocks," has a kind of Hindoo look. A Hindoo Cow, transported into frosty countries. Probably enough; indeed we may say undoubtedly, these things will have a kindred with the remotest lands, with the earliest times. Thought does not die, but only is changed. The first man that began to think in this Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all. And then the second man, and the third man;—nay, every true Thinker to this hour is a kind of Odin, teaches men his way of thought, spreads a shadow of his own likeness over sections of the History of the World.

Of the distinctive poetic character or merit of this Norse Mythology I have not room to speak; nor does it concern us much. Some wild Prophecies we have, as the Voluspa in the Elder Edda; of a rapt, earnest, sibylline sort. But they were comparatively an idle adjunct of the matter, men who as it were but toyed with the matter, these later Skalds; and it is their songs chiefly that survive. In later centuries, I suppose, they would go on singing, poetically symbolizing, as our modern Painters paint, when it was no longer from the innermost heart, or not from the heart at all. This is everywhere to be well kept in mind.

Gray's fragments of Norse Lore, at any rate, will give one no notion of it;—any more than Pope will of Homer. It is no square-built gloomy palace of black ashlar marble, shrouded in awe and horror, as Gray gives it us: no; rough as the North rocks, as the Iceland deserts, it is; with a heartiness, homeliness, even a tint of good humor and robust mirth in the middle of these fearful things. The strong old Norse heart did not go upon theatrical sublimities; they had not time to tremble. I like much their robust simplicity; their veracity, directness of conception. Thor "draws down his brows" in a veritable Norse rage; "grasps his hammer till the knuckles grow white." Beautiful traits of pity too, an honest pity. Balder "the white God" dies; the beautiful, benignant; he is the Sungod. They try all Nature for a remedy; but he is dead. Frigga, his mother, sends Hermoder to seek or see him: nine days and nine nights he rides through gloomy deep valleys, a labyrinth of gloom; arrives at the Bridge with its gold roof: the Keeper says, "Yes, Balder did pass here; but the Kingdom of the Dead is down yonder, far towards the North." Hermoder rides on; leaps Hell-gate, Hela's gate; does see Balder, and speak with him: Balder cannot be delivered. Inexorable! Hela will not, for Odin or any God, give him up. The beautiful and gentle has to remain there. His Wife had volunteered to go with him, to die with him. They shall forever remain there. He sends his ring to Odin; Nanna his wife sends her thimble to Frigga, as a remembrance.—Ah me—!

For indeed Valor is the fountain of Pity too;—of Truth, and all that is great and good in man. The robust homely vigor of the Norse heart attaches one much, in these delineations. Is it not a trait of right honest strength, says Uhland, who has written a fine Essay on Thor, that the old Norse heart finds its friend in the Thunder-god? That it is not frightened away by his thunder; but finds that Summer-heat, the beautiful noble summer, must and will have thunder withal! The Norse heart loves this Thor and his hammer-bolt; sports with him. Thor is Summer-heat: the god of Peaceable Industry as well as Thunder. He is the Peasant's friend; his true henchman and attendant is Thialfi, Manual Labor. Thor himself engages in all manner of rough manual work, scorns no business for its plebeianism; is ever and anon travelling to the country of the Jotuns, harrying those chaotic Frost-monsters, subduing them, at least straitening and damaging them. There is a great broad humor in some of these things.

Thor, as we saw above, goes to Jotun-land, to seek Hymir's Caldron, that the Gods may brew beer. Hymir the huge Giant enters, his gray beard all full of hoar-frost; splits pillars with the very glance of his eye; Thor, after much rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps it on his head; the "handles of it reach down to his heels." The Norse Skald has a kind of loving sport with Thor. This is the Hymir whose cattle, the critics have discovered, are Icebergs. Huge untutored Brobdignag genius,—needing only to be tamed down; into Shakspeares, Dantes, Goethes! It is all gone now, that old Norse work,—Thor the Thunder-god changed into Jack the Giant-killer: but the mind that made it is here yet. How strangely things grow, and die, and do not die! There are twigs of that great world-tree of Norse Belief still curiously traceable. This poor Jack of the Nursery, with his miraculous shoes of swiftness, coat of darkness, sword of sharpness, he is one. Hynde Etin, and still more decisively Red Etin of Ireland, in the Scottish Ballads, these are both derived from Norseland; Etin is evidently a Jotun. Nay, Shakspeare's Hamlet is a twig too of this same world-tree; there seems no doubt of that. Hamlet, Amleth I find, is really a mythic personage; and his Tragedy, of the poisoned Father, poisoned asleep by drops in his ear, and the rest, is a Norse mythus! Old Saxo, as his wont was, made it a Danish history; Shakspeare, out of Saxo, made it what we see. That is a twig of the world-tree that has grown, I think;—by nature or accident that one has grown!

In fact, these old Norse songs have a truth in them, an inward perennial truth and greatness,—as, indeed, all must have that can very long preserve itself by tradition alone. It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free glance into the very deeps of thought. They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen, what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, That this world is after all but a show,—a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into that,—the Hindoo Mythologist, the German Philosopher,—the Shakspeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever he may be:

     "We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!"
One of Thor's expeditions, to Utgard (the Outer Garden, central seat of Jotun-land), is remarkable in this respect. Thialfi was with him, and Loke. After various adventures, they entered upon Giant-land; wandered over plains, wild uncultivated places, among stones and trees. At nightfall they noticed a house; and as the door, which indeed formed one whole side of the house, was open, they entered. It was a simple habitation; one large hall, altogether empty. They stayed there. Suddenly in the dead of the night loud noises alarmed them. Thor grasped his hammer; stood in the door, prepared for fight. His companions within ran hither and thither in their terror, seeking some outlet in that rude hall; they found a little closet at last, and took refuge there. Neither had Thor any battle: for, lo, in the morning it turned out that the noise had been only the snoring of a certain enormous but peaceable Giant, the Giant Skrymir, who lay peaceably sleeping near by; and this that they took for a house was merely his Glove, thrown aside there; the door was the Glove-wrist; the little closet they had fled into was the Thumb! Such a glove;—I remark too that it had not fingers as ours have, but only a thumb, and the rest undivided: a most ancient, rustic glove!

Skrymir now carried their portmanteau all day; Thor, however, had his own suspicions, did not like the ways of Skrymir; determined at night to put an end to him as he slept. Raising his hammer, he struck down into the Giant's face a right thunder-bolt blow, of force to rend rocks. The Giant merely awoke; rubbed his cheek, and said, Did a leaf fall? Again Thor struck, so soon as Skrymir again slept; a better blow than before; but the Giant only murmured, Was that a grain of sand? Thor's third stroke was with both his hands (the "knuckles white" I suppose), and seemed to dint deep into Skrymir's visage; but he merely checked his snore, and remarked, There must be sparrows roosting in this tree, I think; what is that they have dropt?—At the gate of Utgard, a place so high that you had to "strain your neck bending back to see the top of it," Skrymir went his ways. Thor and his companions were admitted; invited to take share in the games going on. To Thor, for his part, they handed a Drinking-horn; it was a common feat, they told him, to drink this dry at one draught. Long and fiercely, three times over, Thor drank; but made hardly any impression. He was a weak child, they told him: could he lift that Cat he saw there? Small as the feat seemed, Thor with his whole godlike strength could not; he bent up the creature's back, could not raise its feet off the ground, could at the utmost raise one foot. Why, you are no man, said the Utgard people; there is an Old Woman that will wrestle you! Thor, heartily ashamed, seized this haggard Old Woman; but could not throw her.

And now, on their quitting Utgard, the chief Jotun, escorting them politely a little way, said to Thor: "You are beaten then:—yet be not so much ashamed; there was deception of appearance in it. That Horn you tried to drink was the Sea; you did make it ebb; but who could drink that, the bottomless! The Cat you would have lifted,—why, that is the Midgard-snake, the Great World-serpent, which, tail in mouth, girds and keeps up the whole created world; had you torn that up, the world must have rushed to ruin! As for the Old Woman, she was Time, Old Age, Duration: with her what can wrestle? No man nor no god with her; gods or men, she prevails over all! And then those three strokes you struck,—look at these three valleys; your three strokes made these!" Thor looked at his attendant Jotun: it was Skrymir;—it was, say Norse critics, the old chaotic rocky Earth in person, and that glove-house was some Earth-cavern! But Skrymir had vanished; Utgard with its sky-high gates, when Thor grasped his hammer to smite them, had gone to air; only the Giant's voice was heard mocking: "Better come no more to Jotunheim!"—

This is of the allegoric period, as we see, and half play, not of the prophetic and entirely devout: but as a mythus is there not real antique Norse gold in it? More true metal, rough from the Mimer-stithy, than in many a famed Greek Mythus shaped far better! A great broad Brobdignag grin of true humor is in this Skrymir; mirth resting on earnestness and sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest: only a right valiant heart is capable of that. It is the grim humor of our own Ben Jonson, rare old Ben; runs in the blood of us, I fancy; for one catches tones of it, under a still other shape, out of the American Backwoods.

That is also a very striking conception that of the Ragnarok, Consummation, or Twilight of the Gods. It is in the Voluspa Song; seemingly a very old, prophetic idea. The Gods and Jotuns, the divine Powers and the chaotic brute ones, after long contest and partial victory by the former, meet at last in universal world-embracing wrestle and duel; World-serpent against Thor, strength against strength; mutually extinctive; and ruin, "twilight" sinking into darkness, swallows the created Universe. The old Universe with its Gods is sunk; but it is not final death: there is to be a new Heaven and a new Earth; a higher supreme God, and Justice to reign among men. Curious: this law of mutation, which also is a law written in man's inmost thought, had been deciphered by these old earnest Thinkers in their rude style; and how, though all dies, and even gods die, yet all death is but a phoenix fire-death, and new-birth into the Greater and the Better! It is the fundamental Law of Being for a creature made of Time, living in this Place of Hope. All earnest men have seen into it; may still see into it.

And now, connected with this, let us glance at the last mythus of the appearance of Thor; and end there. I fancy it to be the latest in date of all these fables; a sorrowing protest against the advance of Christianity,—set forth reproachfully by some Conservative Pagan. King Olaf has been harshly blamed for his over-zeal in introducing Christianity; surely I should have blamed him far more for an under-zeal in that! He paid dear enough for it; he died by the revolt of his Pagan people, in battle, in the year 1033, at Stickelstad, near that Drontheim, where the chief Cathedral of the North has now stood for many centuries, dedicated gratefully to his memory as Saint Olaf. The mythus about Thor is to this effect. King Olaf, the Christian Reform King, is sailing with fit escort along the shore of Norway, from haven to haven; dispensing justice, or doing other royal work: on leaving a certain haven, it is found that a stranger, of grave eyes and aspect, red beard, of stately robust figure, has stept in. The courtiers address him; his answers surprise by their pertinency and depth: at length he is brought to the King. The stranger's conversation here is not less remarkable, as they sail along the beautiful shore; but after some time, he addresses King Olaf thus: "Yes, King Olaf, it is all beautiful, with the sun shining on it there; green, fruitful, a right fair home for you; and many a sore day had Thor, many a wild fight with the rock Jotuns, before he could make it so. And now you seem minded to put away Thor. King Olaf, have a care!" said the stranger, drawing down his brows;—and when they looked again, he was nowhere to be found.—This is the last appearance of Thor on the stage of this world!

Do we not see well enough how the Fable might arise, without unveracity on the part of any one? It is the way most Gods have come to appear among men: thus, if in Pindar's time "Neptune was seen once at the Nemean Games," what was this Neptune too but a "stranger of noble grave aspect,"—fit to be "seen"! There is something pathetic, tragic for me in this last voice of Paganism. Thor is vanished, the whole Norse world has vanished; and will not return ever again. In like fashion to that, pass away the highest things. All things that have been in this world, all things that are or will be in it, have to vanish: we have our sad farewell to give them.

That Norse Religion, a rude but earnest, sternly impressive Consecration of Valor (so we may define it), sufficed for these old valiant Northmen. Consecration of Valor is not a bad thing! We will take it for good, so far as it goes. Neither is there no use in knowing something about this old Paganism of our Fathers. Unconsciously, and combined with higher things, it is in us yet, that old Faith withal! To know it consciously, brings us into closer and clearer relation with the Past,—with our own possessions in the Past. For the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession of the Present; the Past had always something true, and is a precious possession. In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common Human Nature that has been developing itself. The actual True is the sum of all these; not any one of them by itself constitutes what of Human Nature is hitherto developed. Better to know them all than misknow them. "To which of these Three Religions do you specially adhere?" inquires Meister of his Teacher. "To all the Three!" answers the other: "To all the Three; for they by their union first constitute the True Religion."

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# Strange Symmetry

Do not miss the ouroboros for its teeth.

Date: 2025-03-29
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/strange-symmetry
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/strange-symmetry

Throughout Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, the theme of prediction is central. The very fabric of the civilization he presents is built on "prescience." Strange, monstrous beings known as Guild Navigators guide humanity's ships through the void of space, using their ability to predict the future to shape it into something else. The central characters, Paul and Leto, are both extremely gifted oracles, cursed with the knowledge of the future and burdened with helping Humanity escape the tyranny of prediction.

I doubt that Frank Herbert knew how powerful the allegory he created was. But we ourselves inhabit a universe where prescience defines our lives. Our ability to predict the future is both one of our most powerful and misunderstood abilities. Much of what we have—and may have—is predicated on it, and most of our predictions say more about us than about reality.

I'm going to drop the punchline right here: understanding and prediction have a strange symmetry. Recognizing this allows you to see more clearly that the whole purpose of understanding is prediction. 

If you are a young man between the ages of 16 and 35, there's a strong chance you've been exposed to some version of the alternative history space. It encompasses a huge collection of YouTubers—from AlternateHistoryHub to WhatIfAltHist1—all of whom craft narratives around a relatively basic premise: choose an event in history, alter that event, and describe a new history with that change. Not uncommonly, something as simple as a single person dying or a war being won will butterfly chaotically into a new world where France is now the master of the 19th century and England is nothing but a second-rate power. 

They are essentially benign entertainment, one of countless activities we Zoomers use to fill the screaming void of silence which is our minds. But I want to invite you to engage in this task with me and imagine your own alternative history scenario.

Suppose that on a dark and stormy night somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, by chance, a lightning bolt struck the Santa Maria in 1492, sinking Columbus and forcing La Niña and La Pinta to turn back. How would history have changed?

To those brave few with the fortitude to face your thoughts, take a moment to collect the scraps into something concrete. I will hazard some predictions about your own scenarios. Some of you no doubt thought that nothing would change—perhaps because you are dogmatically deterministic or because you believe that European military and immunological superiority (à la Jared Diamond) made the individual essentially irrelevant. No number of freak accidents would stop some European from eventually landing in the Americas, at which point state and population pressures made their conquest a fait accompli.

Others perhaps allowed their imaginations to flower more chaotically, imagining a future where, instead of European colonial states, an indigenous society remained—perhaps technologically advanced, perhaps not.

I predict, though, that for all of you, the "Human" element was absent. Your predictions were, at their core, predictions of systems—of impersonal forces like capitalism and state power—not human ones like love or despair. History was to you almost a huge machine composed of interlocking gears2. This isn't a failure of imagination; it's the product of a good prediction. Because to predict what would have happened without Columbus, a person, you must see how the machine changes when that part is removed and, more importantly, what remains untouched.

For example, it would be tenuous to argue that Columbus's death would have unleashed demons from the literal bowels of hell, or that volcanoes would have erupted simultaneously across the earth, dooming Humanity to extinction. Thus, our prediction already has guardrails created from our understanding of causality. Just as we cannot imagine a world in which the death of Columbus fundamentally reshapes the relationship between new mother and young child—not for some Humans but for all Humans—it is equally absurd to predict that his death would have unleashed the holy fury of Mother Gaia. It's possible, of course, that a volcano could have erupted at the exact moment the ship sank, but that would be a different event, exogenous to the change I presented. To predict, we must have some model of the thing we are predicting—how its components interact and what can be safely ignored.

But how do we know what to ignore? I would be skeptical if anyone claimed they had, in those seconds, interrogated each component of their internal model. Instead, we look around us; we see what in the modern world seems unshakable—what things we can more easily picture an apocalypse than history without. To some, this might be greed; for others, reproductive pressure. But we take this intuition and interact it as it spirals out until finally, we arrive at something that resembles the only data point we have: today, the end of history.

This is what I refer to as narrative gravity—the idea that any set of theories used in a prediction must lead to a world that, at least in some deep emotional way, resembles our own, or it is a priori implausible. Because prediction is, at its core, a validation of what we already believe about right now. It's a claim to understanding of the universe and how the gears of human society grind.

I hope you can see how no coherent alternative history prediction can exist without a related claim to understanding. But of course, this dynamic flows both ways: no understanding can exist without an associated claim to prediction. Consider an economist who is interested in studying the relationship between minimum wage and employment. Suppose they conduct a scientific examination of counties on either side of a state border that appear to differ only in terms of their exposure to a state minimum wage law. To supplement this empirical result, they also develop a model. What is this for, if not prediction? Is it just to show that there is a difference in both the unemployment rate and minimum wage between two arbitrary political units? Or is it more believably a claim to causality and thus prediction— or that their model and results speak to the general case? Thus, if a politician changes the minimum wage, it will impact employment—not arbitrarily, but in the way the economist has predicted. Prediction is the flower; it's why you grew the plant to begin with.

Beyond the social sciences, this relationship is even stronger. In fact, this symmetry is so strong I would argue identifying it walks the fine line of necessity and uselessness. Consider the laws of Newtonian physics in their closed-form simplicity

The gravitational force between two objects is equal to some constant multiplied by the product of two masses and divided by the square of the distance between them.

If you will concede that this is a claim to understanding the universe—something I believe Newton would have believed—then its relationship to prediction should fall directly out of the screen and onto your head, like a metaphorical apple. Given any set of values for these variables, it would be trivial to predict the gravitational force between two objects. All possible predictions from this formula exist already within its neatness. Through knowing Newtonian physics, you can make all possible predictions about a world that obeys those laws.

Once you see this symmetry, it is impossible to miss in everything—even in our daily lives. We constantly exploit the symmetry between understanding and prediction to navigate our lives. I know that turning the faucet on will produce water, not because it has every time, but because I have some model of how it works. And so, if water does not emerge, I am not left destitute without explanation but instead can venture forth in search of a solution. Of course, that model need not be correct to allow me to make predictions—even accurate ones. In fact, a correct model, one that truly represented all physical and Human interactions, would be remarkably cumbersome. The model need only be correct in the narrow sense of generating predictions that match reality. Newtonian physics is not a complete understanding of reality, meaning its predictions are all wrong in important ways, large or small. But using it alone, I could navigate to the moon and back.

As an absurd example of something being incorrect by design, consider an airport walkway. If you were to examine the speed you were going, it would not be V₀ + V₁—or the speed of your walk and the speed of the walkway—instead, there would be a relativistic correction term. However, it would be so tiny on the scale we operate that it is better to simply ignore the truth in favor of simplicity.

Every day, we are saddled with countless incorrect theories. They both cloud our minds and allow us to function at all. What matters is less the existence of a mistake but the problems it creates. In fact, many of us hold contradictory understandings with zero tension because, perhaps without ever vocalizing it, we know they are both wrong in a general sense but useful or true in their own domain. If one day you are presented with this apparent contradiction, do not take it as a reason to abandon the understanding you have, but instead as the opportunity that it is—a chance to create a new, better understanding and thus better predictions.

Having an incorrect—or incomplete—theory is beyond okay. It's what I believe makes us as Humans such powerful creatures. We are capable of living within paradox, making predictions and behaving as if we have full certainty in them while knowing that they are, in some deep sense, untrue. I would go so far as to argue that relaxing this tension and beginning to believe that any explanation you have is a true reflection of reality is the only dangerous path.

This brings me all the way back to the beginning and why I wanted to talk about this subject. We do not have prescience; we do not have God-Emperors who can see the future and guide us down a "Golden Path." But I believe we each carry a small element of this within ourselves. That naturally gives us a deeper responsibility than I think is publicly acknowledged. Because of the strange symmetry that exists between knowing and predicting, we should be careful to do either without acknowledging how it will shape our minds by implicitly doing the other. We must see it for what it is: an ouroboros. It is not a mouth or a tail; it is both in infinite reflection.

When you accept an understanding that claims to be removed from prediction, know it for what it is—an incomplete picture of itself. If you walk away with anything today, walk away with this: an axiomatic system can be used to do anything. Its logical consistency is a product of its very construction. What matters are the a priori assumptions about reality. Thus, just because something is internally consistent does not make it true. Only if its predictions are validated in reality can we, with humility, say it isn't wrong. Always judge any claim to understanding not by its internal structure or even by the intuitive truth of its axioms but instead by its predictions. And symmetrically, judge a prediction not by how right it feels but by how reasonable the axioms it is predicated on are. Do not miss the ouroboros for its teeth.

1tragically he has moved onto Skitzo posting

2To some, these gears are racism; to others, population pressure.

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# Benthamite Tables of Arithmetic

my incomplete contribution to the shrimp debate

Date: 2025-03-21
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/benthamite-tables-of-arithmetic
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/benthamite-tables-of-arithmetic

Almost a year ago, I wrote an article about what I perceived as a pervasive and toxic ideology that seemed to be capturing the world. I referred to this system of beliefs as “One Life Materialism” since, at its core, the ideology posited that two axioms were true:

The material world is all that exists.

Death is final.

My solution at the time was that we needed to add a third axiom:

The Future matters.

I believed that everything else would flow from there.

But I’ve been grappling with this idea—that the modern world is in a sort of intellectual malaise—for the last year or so, and I’m not confident that the real problem is solely One Life Materialism. Instead, I think it is one of many problems that we face simultaneously. All of these problems can be thought of, in a Nietzschean sense, as life-denying. Each of them manically dances around a central burning flame that casts a shadow on the sky, blotting out the sun and replacing everything with the one and only god: “utility.” Until each of us is transformed into a Utilitarian—an agent of pure utility—engaging in nothing that does not profit us and cut totally loose from our bonds of obligation and duty.

But what is Utilitarianism? Why not just directly quote one of its greatest advocates Bentham? At the very start of Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, he writes the following:

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand, the standard of right and wrong; on the other, the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.”

I’m stealing this meme from an article by “Bentham’s Bulldog” since I think it captures Utilitarianism well.

In short, there is no “objective” morality above that of pain and pleasure. Pleasure should be sought, and pain should be avoided. The mechanism through which you should assess the quality of governance, the value of a social system, or anything else is through the lens of “utility.” This is the dominant worldview of our time; I’m honestly unsure if any system could long survive believing in anything else. All moral arguments for things like GDP growth are predicated on the idea that as people make more money, they are able to consume more goods and services, which increases their utility.

If I was extremely critical of One Life Materialism, I am not of Utilitarianism—although, to its defenders, I doubt that will matter. Instead, I think we have simply put the horse before the cart on this issue. Because what is pain? What is pleasure? Why do Humans—or life in general—experience pain and pleasure at all? Did Nature just leave two levers—one evil and one good—lying around for man to fumble after in the darkness?

No, it did not. Pain and pleasure are our stimuli and response system, an evolved mechanism through which we coordinate our behavior. Literally, pain and pleasure are our inherited—or often socially engineered—reward function estimators.I feel pain when I stick my hand into the flame not because Nature has arbitrarily decided that I should, but because fire is destructive, and pain is my body’s way of communicating that something is bad in a Darwinian sense. Pleasure functions the same way in reverse. Since you cannot directly know the actual Darwinian value of a behavior, our body has developed a set of heuristics that approximately estimate whether something is good or bad. But the heuristic/estimator isn’t the actual function we are optimizing1, so when you structure a society around it, you get weird results that philosophers have been bickering about for literally centuries—if not millennia.

Pain and pleasure are an emergent property of Darwinian selection, not some inherent feature of reality. For a totally random example, when a shrimp are thrown on ice to suffocate to death, I don’t doubt that this causes them immense distress. Conversely, when a lion returns to the pride with a dead gazelle—whose suffering was unimaginable—I’m sure the way it feels is lovely. How we arrange these values in our table of arithmetic is enough of a problem to make any one person’s—or an enormous collection of people’s—brain shatter. Oh my would you look at that result? We must have made an miscalculation somewhere. 

Instead of trying to balance the lion and the gazelle or the astrophysicist and the shrimp salad, I propose we accept that around the throne of Pain and Pleasure, there is a bigger throne room of Fitness.

Since the only way we can interact with the throne room is by pulling on our chains, Utilitarianism is a reasonable enough set of rules by which to live your normal life. Painful things are usually quite bad and should therefore usually be avoided. The inverse goes for pleasurable experiences. But it is worth remembering that this isn’t all that exists in life.

1that is forever unobservable

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# No Secret Tao

Poetry

Date: 2025-03-14
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/no-secret-tao
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/no-secret-tao

Living is a struggle against an eternal plague.It eats at man from deep within.A quest for clarity on living, loving, dying without sin.But all who struggle know the truth—they wear it on their skin.There is no book of wisdom, no secret Tao;No sacred cow, no holy shrine—When Death comes seeking, we all must bow.With sins so plentiful, we fall.Yet we know a deeper truth:

Life, whatever else it is, is Now.

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# Trump - S2E1: The Return of the Sith

"When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and God will not answer you in that day."– 1 Samuel 8:18

Date: 2025-03-07
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/trump-s2e1-the-return-of-the-sith
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/trump-s2e1-the-return-of-the-sith

I wanted to sit down and collect my scattered thoughts on the first six weeks of Trump's administration – has it really only been six weeks? Overall, I would give Trump a C+, passable but in dire need of improvement1. I think he is far better than the Biden administration along the domestic policy dimensions that are very important to me, but he has also shown himself to once again be exactly what he appeared to be – a man totally devoid of any moral instinct beyond loyalty.

The essay is structured as follows. First I will discuss Biden - the counterfactual, my thoughts leading up to the election, and the Democrats. Then I will discuss the four major themes (foreign policy, DEI, migration, the cathedral) of Trump S2E1. I want to point out I am not discussing tariffs because I have a longer piece in the works right now for Voyagers Log on that subject. 

Of course this perspective is from a state of ignorance about what the infinite future will hold. The truth is we are at the end of, or rapidly approaching the end of, the Short 20th Century and things are changing quickly. All the more reason in my eyes to weight what appears to be working and what appears to not be working. 

Biden & Dems

Biden was, in my opinion, a nadir in the position of President, so Trump is an improvement over him. But this is a low bar and I hope the Democrats will be able to surpass it. 

My own disillusionment with Biden began in earnestness when “his” administration dragged its feet on immigration. This was amplified during the presidential election when I saw a doddering old man shamble his way off the stage. I had always felt he was too old for the office - much as I still feel about Trump - but what I saw that night was not a person who I would trust to run a grocery store let alone a country. If he was not the executive of this nation, who was? No one? Had we finally achieved true communism?

My frustrations with the Biden administration - which were at an all time high during the election were tempered against a distrust of Trump on a moral level. In a separate article perhaps I will revisit election week but on October 31st in “The polls are weird rn.” I said the following about the respective Trump and Harris presidencies:

"America is for better or worse, the arbiter of that system, and we seem to have grown tired of it and want to turn inward. What that means for the billions of people who currently live under an effective American Empire is unclear, but it matters a lot. Harris seems set on trying to maintain the current system, and winning could hold it together long enough for Americans to change their opinion on the relative importance of domestic policy – but a Trump victory would probably indicate a major global power rebalance.

On the domestic side, this election is equally important. My entire life has been a series of cultural progressive victories. If Harris wins, I expect that to continue for the foreseeable future. She is running to the center, for now, but I expect her to govern to the cultural left of Biden. In contrast, if Trump wins, I expect him to use the coercive power of the state to take a sledgehammer to a lot of progressive-dominated institutions. The President has huge appointment power within government agencies, and increasingly corporations (and other large institutions) are governed less by the letter of the law than by bureaucratic interpretations of it. A Trump presidency would bring about a huge change in the US domestic policy space – especially if he hands effective regulatory control to Elon Musk as he seems poised to do. Unlike Trump, Elon is probably the most competent human alive today, and I expect him to bring the same frantic energy to reorganizing executive power as he has to running his companies."

In my humble opinion, I got it right on the nose. Trump, in his effort to own the libs, is dismantling the American Empire through a legal and financial war on progressive bastions of soft power. Since the organs of our imperial bureaucracy and clergy were so thoroughly dominated by progressives, Trump has decided to take the sledgehammer approach to the entire house. Given I have very little sympathy for the progressive movement, it is hard for me to be too upset watching this happen. But what I may lack in empathy for places like the university or NGO system, I make up for in empathy for countries like Ukraine or Canada that have been subjected to the temperamental whims of our NYC Slumlord King.

There is a huge amount of rot that needs to be removed from this house, and it would take a team of carpenters and cleaners a full eight years to make a dent. I do not have insight into the twirling whirlwind of Washington, other than to know I can hear the great clamor of a jackhammer. He may hit something load-bearing, and then we will find out how rotten this house really is.

The Democrats in response are in disarray. Trump has complete operational control right now and it is hard to view them as anything but what they are, clowns. 

Who knows what will come. I’ve seen positive and negative signs, only time will tell. Newsom’s2 recent podcast with Kirk was exactly what his party should be doing, and he may have had his own sister souljah moment. I mean this sincerely—not because I think culture-war politics online is important3, but because I unironically think our political figures should openly spend more time together. The truth is that Kirk and Newsom have no problem getting along and it is, as stupid as it sounds, legitimately good for our country to have these kinds of conversations. Our politicians have never actually hated or feared each other, remember, Newsom and Trump Jr. are Eskimo brothers; in fact, they are Agarthan brothers. More long, loose-form discussion and less debate would be a welcome improvement to our society. 

Trump

While I have been generally happy with Trump’s domestic policy I do have criticism and so I will get them out of the way first, to assuage my liberal friends. 

DOGE doesn't appear to have a plan to significantly reduce the debt and the enormous ponzi scheme of social security is still bleeding our treasury dry. Much of Elon's behavior has been erratic, perhaps pushed on by a ketamine habit? And culture war nonsense is, of course—as always—the law of the land. Trump's environmental policy is deeply shortsighted, and although I doubt he will reverse the trend of declining carbon emissions I also doubt he will do enough to battle climate change or generally protect our delicate ecosystem. Finally, Trump is pushing our political guardrails to their boundaries and has as little respect for formal process at home as he does abroad. I have yet to see any evidence he openly violated any laws – or to be more specific, has continued to violate them after receiving a court injunction – but he probably has, and the vast ocean of change that has happened has simply obscured them.

But he has also solved three issues (illegal migration, DEI, and the cathedral) that, to me, were the most central issues of my political life. I will take each of these in turn because they deserve the space to breathe.

Foreign Policy

Given that I think the American Empire, for all of its obvious hypocrisy and flaws, was a net good for Humanity, it is tragic to see Trump use the leverage we have in a way that is contrary to the oaths our country has made. His treatment of Ukraine, for example, has been abhorrent with his behavior being nothing short of Evil. There is a sound first-principles argument to be made that if the goal is countering China, swapping Ukraine—a net liability—for Russia—a net asset—would be good. I could even support a policy of total disengagement from Ukraine in principle, despite it being a rejection of the liberal internationalism that had previously motivated our imperial elite, but what I cannot stand is blackmailing a country we willingly lent aid to for money and getting into public spats with their leadership.

Especially a country that has fought with utter heroism in the face of an encroaching army of Islamic mercenaries, North Korean conscripts, and sadistic Russians (in short, Orks). The Ukrainian people have, like my Finnish ancestors, won their independence in bloody struggle and should settle for a peace with honor. I say this as a person whose grandmother fled Karelia as a refugee and whose ancestral homeland was ethnically cleansed by Soviet Orks. But this choice is ultimately up to the Ukrainian people and they appear to intend to fight on; although I am doubtful Zelensky would win an honest election – it should be noted his main rival Zaluzhnyi was the leader of the Ukrainian army up until a year ago and far from a peace hawk. Again, American disengagement and blackmail are distinct policies and Trump has chosen the worst one.

But Ukraine is just the tip of the disaster that has been Trump's foreign policy. From Canada to Gaza, his primary motivation appears to be owning the libs on the international stage. This isn't an orderly reassessment of our policy objectives but instead a nonstop stream of AI slop and utter insanity. Often even if his directional opinion is correct – as I ironically think it is in both Canada4 and Gaza5 – the manner in which he goes about pursuing them is that of a 1980s NYC businessman.

Do not misunderstand me, I think America would do well to turn inward and focus our energy on self-improvement and revitalization. I do not support our role as world imperator and would rather we accept the reality of global multipolarity graciously rather than wage a futile war in the style of a Thucydides trap with China over territory we all agree – at least formally – is theirs. But I would have hoped this policy would be pursued in a method more morally befitting a country which has done as much good, for such noble causes, as mine has.

Illegal Immigration

The scale of betrayal our political elites engaged in on migration is something we might not be able to have an honest conversation about for at least a century. Immigration is always a delicate issue because humans are not interchangeable economic cogs for capital to allocate efficiently, obviously, and the homogeneity of a society does much to promote pro-social behavior among its members, obviously. And American immigration law has mostly reflected this with the statutory response to illegal crossings being extremely harsh. But for the last 70 odd years our government has simply chosen not to enforce these laws and, as a result, literally tens of millions of people have entered this country illegally and then their children have been sanctified as US citizens by the 14th Amendment. It turns out that if you just, openly, enforce the laws of the land, illegal immigration can be stopped. Border crossings are down to the lowest level since we began to carefully record them in 2000. 

But if our government has a long history of willingly tolerating the desecration of our national borders and a cheapening of our citizenship, Biden turned this up to 11. The main mechanism that he did this was through the asylum process—a system that emerged out of moral shock at the Holocaust, but which was turned into a scam by which huge numbers of fighting-age men slipped into this country. During the debate the infamous “we were told there wouldn’t be any fact checking” moment with JD Vance sparring with Margaret Brennan, perhaps the stupidest mainstream host, was related directly to this. What had happened was that roughly 500,000 Haitians were granted asylum status by the Biden administration after showing up on the southern border and flown to small towns across this country where they were kept at public expense. It doesn't appear as if they were eating pets – although this is far from the most bizarre thing that Haitians have eaten in recent memory. The communities they arrived in clearly did not want them there and they literally did enter this country in a way that was contrary to an honest interpretation of the law.

The bipartisan immigration law that Biden tried to pass—and which Trump shot down—would have been a total disaster and I am ecstatic it was killed. It did two things which I view as red lines. First, it established 5,000 daily illegal crossings as the threshold above which we would actually begin enforcing our immigration laws. That is 1.825 million people per year. Yes, that is right—we would have enshrined roughly 2 million illegals per year as the law of the land. It would have additionally created a pathway to citizenship for the asylum-seeking young men who had already poured over our borders. But to balance this poison it would have marginally increased the budget on border security and behaved more honorably toward the Afghans who served our country in its two-decade-long quest for revenge.

I will not deny that life is better for these young men, and I wouldn't be surprised if, presented with the same incentive structure they faced, I would do the same. But frankly, I don't care. The role of our immigration (and entire governing) system should be to benefit Americans and Americans alone. No coherent case can be made for how America benefits by the inclusion of 500k Haitians, any more than Germany has from 2 million Syrians. If you disagree that immigration should be fundamentally about the interests of Americans, I would ask: where do you draw the line? Should any number of people be allowed to migrate here? What if 200 million Nigerians showed up? Would we have a moral obligation to let them in and grant them citizenship? What if it resulted in our country settling somewhere, in terms of standards of living, roughly halfway between 2025 America and 2025 Nigeria? Doubtless that would be good to the Nigerians, no? This seems like quite a splendid result in my Benthamite table of arithmetic! Doubly so if you assume exponential utility!

The fact that it turns out illegal immigration was always a choice has fomented a real resentment toward our prior administrations. The 14th Amendment is a good amendment because it abolishes all perpetual legal underclasses, but it also creates a unique responsibility with immigration. The children will be citizens—with all the rights and duties that entails—and so ensuring that the current citizenry feels this process is rational, fair, and in their interest is essential.

DEI

The diversification of America—which was brought about not only by illegal immigration but also by the legal kind—has brought the complexity that always comes with diversity. Something like DEI was always needed, given we somehow needed to get American society to handle the inclusion of people from such a broad spectrum of cultural backgrounds. But the implementation which was pursued by our cultural elites has been, in my humble opinion, a disaster of unparalleled proportions. In fact, most of the immigration backlash has been as a result of a total mishandling of an obviously delicate subject by cultural leftists with a stone to grind against Hetero-Normative White Culture. Whatever mask existed in society slipped off in 2020, only to be hastily reattached in 2022, when the idea that the purpose of migration was to destroy the previous culture took on near sanctity.

This was bolstered by the legal standard of disparate impact which held differences in outcomes as sufficient proof for discrimination - for marginalized groups. 

I really had taken the blackpill on this subject and accepted that there was no choice but to simply pretend I was okay with it and continue on my merry way while an explicit regime of discrimination hung overhead, unmentioned and unmentionable. But then Trump simply showed up and with a single blow killed it. Of course, some companies seem not to have realized yet how much their balance of legal liabilities has shifted, but the next four years will give more than enough time for those programs to be challenged in court – DEI made it their explicit goal to create a hostile work environment for white guys and this is, obviously, extremely illegal. I for one am excited for my payday!

Above any legal changes the truth is that the obvious hypocrisy is just totally unsustainable when dragged out into the light and people everywhere are shrinking away from their support of race-hustling politics and pretending that it never existed at all—or if it did, they opposed it. For the first time in my life I feel comfortable writing these words because I know I could stand up in front of anyone and say, with my head held high, that yes, I would like to be treated as a man and not as a mean.

Even a year ago I would have had to obfuscate for literal fear of my employment at Stanford. This brings me to Trump's final victory.

The Cathedral

The cathedral is the idea that Western society is dominated by an unelected class of "bishops" who collectively write policy rather than our elected officials. You can think of these people as academics, journalists, lobbyists—in short, experts. People whose opinion is supposed to be near divine and most in need of respect.

This is a learned and capable class of people who, with a few notable exceptions, honestly strive after the truth. But it is also a class like all others with its own interests which only sometimes are in alignment with the rest of society and sometimes aren't. During the pandemic the rule of this class became increasingly hypocritical and self-interested, and I believe truly we have reached the point where they are simply not worth the price. I say this as a deacon (a Stanford PhD student) who was raised with a proper respect for the Church, so my disillusionment has not been pleasant or sudden.

Every society needs a clergy of some kind to adjudicate truth from falsehood, but that priesthood must be correct. Once the ceremony is knowingly a lie the process is totally corrupted. The cathedral is the same, with certain wings – such as the material sciences and aspects of Economics – remaining intellectually honest. However, the great majority of it is little more than a sham for people to present their class preferences as moral obligation. Incredible, the academic has argued that the government should listen to academics more. To give an example of how empty college has become I like to play a little thought experiment.

Suppose for a second you were offered two options. Option 1) You would gain all of the knowledge and personal growth of a Harvard degree – in any subject you are mentally capable of learning – but you are never allowed to mention this fact to anyone. It has been struck from the universe and no record of it exists. Or Option 2) Everyone would think you went to Harvard but in reality you did not; there was no chance of you being caught, even in a lie. Would anything but a loyalty to veracity keep you from choosing Option 2? If you want a Harvard degree without the acknowledgement, I am pleased to tell you that all the lectures required – along with the associated homework – have been posted online! Bon Voyage!

The truth, as I see it, is that college is a complete scam and little more than a costly signalling game. Yet it traps people in mountains of debt and socially corrupts our society. Bah!

"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go." – Oliver Cromwell

Trump has taken a sledgehammer to this system and, by all odds, appears to be winning? What will come out will be leaner and more capable. A church removed much of its gold filigree but also a more honest one, with priests restored to their proper role as advisor and not as ruler. In America the people rule, not the clergy! Thus it has always been and thus it will always be, if I have breath to aid it.

What is next / Conclusion

I haven’t even been able to briefly touch half of what Trump has done and I will continue to write about him in the future. If I missed something, please forgive me. This essay is already pushing the limits of what a reader will tolerate.

Trump has been, as I expected he would be, an utterly mixed bag. His presidency has accomplished more in 6 weeks than Biden did in 4 years, and I expect the pace to remain as frenetic at least through the midterms. But what I've been reflecting on is the degree to which the individual temperament of Trump has played an enormous role in this presidency. I think that for better, and for worse, we are entering an executive age and, like the Israelites before us, we have begged God to replace the rule of the judges with a King. But rather than Saul, we have been given Trump—a poor trade, if I would say so myself. I find myself somewhere between the Israelites and Samuel, torn between a reality of the sclerotic nature of the ancien régime and a realization that a king will come with an open plunder we have thus far mostly avoided.

"When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day." – 1 Samuel 8:18

But a King we now have, and we ought to do the best with it. When in 2028 Trump finally exits the political scene, Americans will have an opportunity to choose who will succeed him. We would be advised to be more careful and more thoughtful than we have been in the past. Our elections cannot continue to be the bombastic reality-show affairs of 2016 or 2020 but have to be deeply somber occasions—where we choose the person most capable of doing good and entrust them with the sacred power to do it. We can do better than Trump and we have to do better than Trump. But it would be hard to do worse than Biden.

1I wrote this article in advance of receiving Grey Mirror’s most recent publication only to realize they begin their essay almost exactly the same way I do, down to the grade(C-). Life is full of little coincidences. Although without having read his article I suspect our rationals differ substantially. 

2My liege and protector, executive of Godgift California

3Although obviously it is. 

4Watch on YouTube

5Letting Palestinians Move Is Not "Ethnic Cleansing" — Richard Hanania's Newsletter

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# Why I love Thomas Carlyle.

Carlyle was a flawed man, and I never expect him to develop a broad modern audience. But, I will continue to call myself a Reformist Carlylian because so much of what he wrote was true.

Date: 2025-03-01
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/why-i-love-thomas-carlyle
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/why-i-love-thomas-carlyle

I wanted to write about why I love Thomas Carlyle.

First off: Who is Carlyle? He was a 19th‑century Scottish philosopher, historian, and author who was immensely influential during the Victorian period, but has since faded from public consciousness.

In many ways, Carlyle is akin to thinkers like Herbert Spencer or Voltaire—people who had a profound impact on our thought but who have largely been forgotten.

Carlyle is unique, though, because even in his own era he was a dying breed. He was a sort of last gasp in “medieval” (or really, early modern) Anglo civilization before it was permanently transformed by the Industrial Revolution. His influence was widely felt across every political ideology of the 20th century, from socialism to fascism.

To really understand the 20th century, I think you have to understand Carlyle. For that alone, he is worth reading.

It goes beyond this. Since the 20th century was, in many ways, such a complete shit show, Carlyle gives us the chance to revisit earlier attempts to answer the perennial questions of Human life in a manner untainted by the twin cataclysms of WW1 and WW2. Questions about how to organize society,  what the purpose of human existence is, and whether morality exists at all—in other words, questions I believe we are deeply confused about.

So what were Carlyle’s answers to these question? I think to understand that you need to understand Carlyle’s God. But before I do that I want to make it very clear that I am not an academic student of the Victorian sage, so much of this could be wrong. I cannot emphasize enough how much I recommend that you check him out yourself. 

Carlyle’s metaphysics is based on a belief in the necessity of Veracity—that we have an obligation to be honest and that lies are the origin of all evil. Once we are honest, we are forced to acknowledge the miraculous nature of our Universe. That there is evidence of divinity in everything, from the processes of nature to the functioning of high civilization. Everything, from the smallest labor to the highest achievement1, echoes in eternity in a way that defies logical systems; in fact, we risk being swallowed by our logical systems if we pretend that they, rather than reality itself, are true.2

He was raised Presbyterian, and so everything he writes carries a sort of Calvinist morality—full of brimstone and predestination—but also a belief in the fundamental unity between the universe and God. This unity, to me, is the only truly intellectually honest understanding of God. Obviously, Spinoza’s concept of God and Hinduism’s Atman are different, but they share a common direction: a deeper understanding of godhood as a world-soul. This, too, is how Carlyle sees it.

His belief—that divinity exists in everything—informs his most influential idea, the great man theory (or, as he refers to it, “Hero Worship”). To Carlyle, it wasn’t merely that impactful men existed and were the driving force behind history; he believed they were capable of both great good and great evil. And since, at its most basic level, any group of humans is simply a collection of individuals, selecting the individual—or group of individuals—capable of the greatest good and endowing them with power should be the central objective of any government. It is somewhat remarkable that his theory of history fell out of fashion immediately after it was definitively proven correct. How could you even begin to explain WW2 without considering the individual temperaments and preferences of figures like Stalin or Hitler? How different would that era have been if the men most capable of good had controlled their countries rather than the men most capable of evil? Of course, the influence of the individual has not faded; if you disagree, I invite you to look at the Oval Office.

Given that Carlyle sees the problem as selecting the most righteous person and then elevating them, the method by which we do so matters very little—as long as it works. In Latter-Day Pamphlets, he uses the analogy of sailing through the Straits of Magellan—a notoriously dangerous passage. There is a route that the ship must take to survive; if it fails, the entire crew will go down to Davy Jones. The crucial problem is finding the actual path—which has been preordained—and not the method of selecting captains, whose sole qualification is the ability to navigate that route and get the ship safely home.

If you are interested in consuming him directly I have uploaded, and plan to upload more, of his works to this YouTube channel. You can also find text versions available for free on Project Gutenberg or through your public library.

I would recommend one of two books. 

First, if you already know a lot about the French Revolution, I would read his history of that epoch. It is, without any irony, the most beautiful work of historical writing ever put to paper. Oscar Wilde, upon reading it, said “He made history a song for the first time in our language. He was our English Tacitus.” I couldn’t agree more. It’s an incredible, spectacular fusion of philosophical text and a narrative unraveling of the ancien régime.

If you do not enjoy 18th‑century French history, his book on heroism in history is also splendid. His first chapter on Scandinavian mythology gave me goosebumps at multiple points and is relatively light yet profoundly moving.

I’d like to conclude with this thought: what I most love about Carlyle is his insistence that we must confront reality. He was a deeply flawed thinker, even by the standards of his day, and I never expect him to develop a broad modern following. However, I, for one, will continue to call myself a Reformist Carlylian because so much of his project is everlasting.

1“Louis was a Ruler; but art not thou also one? His wide France, look at it from the Fixed Stars (themselves not yet Infinitude), is no wider than thy narrow brickfield, where thou too didst faithfully, or didst unfaithfully. Man, ‘Symbol of Eternity imprisoned into Time!’ it is not thy works, which are all mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the Spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance.” – The French Revolution: A History

2“what theory is so certain as this, that all theories, were they never so earnest, painfully elaborated, are—and, by the very conditions of them, must be incomplete, questionable, and even false? Thou shalt know that this Universe is, what it professes to be, an infinite one. Attempt not to swallow it, for thy logical digestion; be thankful, if skilfully planting down this and the other fixed pillar in the chaos, thou prevent its swallowing thee.” – The French Revolution: A History

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# The 18th Century | A Tale of Rot and Enlightenment.

Voltaire is the banyan tree of our culture—the single origin from which the entire forest of our thought grows.

Date: 2025-02-22
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-18th-century-a-tale-of-rot-and
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-18th-century-a-tale-of-rot-and

Over the roughly 1600 years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, my civilization—the union of Roman and Germanic peoples—has experienced periods of waxing and waning; falsehood and veracity; virtue and dishonor. Yet few eras have been as rotten as the 18th century. But how could our most treasured lotus flower, the Enlightenment1, bloom out of festering muck? Because Enlightenment is always the rejection of forms for the sake of forms and an insistence that we engage with reality as it actually is. In their broad collective suicide of revolution and reform, the critics of the 18th century did their duty and declared that it was better to live in rubble than in a house of lies. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Is this not the eternal battle of Humanity? On one side stand the forces of progress—those willing to confront reality in its unblinking eye and admit that it is as it appears, a God’s fact, not a performance in which our role is knowingly a lie. On the other side stand the forces of stagecraft and quackery, who insist that first the forms must be obeyed; then, and only then, can we discuss what alterations are needed, let alone what alterations are possible.

Whatever honor there was to be had in that era was to be found in deconstruction. Adam Smith, Kant, and Gibbon were all critics and observers of fact beyond reproach. This is not to speak of Voltaire, the living symbol of his era, whose clear mind cut through every word he wrote. Having slain his enemies so utterly, he seems to fight only their ghosts—an illusion born of victories so complete that he is now largely forgotten2. Yet he remains the banyan tree of our culture, the single origin from which the entire forest of our thought grows.

The 18th century was an era of unsurpassed cynicism, in which, with few exceptions, everyone knew that the play in which they were engaged was a lie. In politics, economics, and religion alike, the entire edifice of society and culture rested upon a foundation of untruths and shams. In England and France, it was the era of George III and Louis XV—monarchs whose rule was nothing more than theatre. At one point, nobility had meant something; “duke” comes from “dux,” the Latin for “leader”3. But by that century, it was no longer the nobility’s role to lead their nation in war or even in peace; instead, their job was to collect rents so that they could gossip and dance with unspeakable grace. Chivalry had been pawned off at the dearest price possible.

Religion was even more bankrupt. A careful examination of classical history had shown that, in many ways, the world of Caesar or of Plato was more virtuous and more honest than their own—all without any Christian morality. Perhaps, as Gibbon seemed to indicate, Christianity might even be worse than useless?

To the people of that time, the depths of truth that had inspired men like Luther and Calvin were obscured by the static skyline of two centuries of fog and hypocrisy. Much like standing on the plains and looking up at the Rockies near Denver, one cannot see the gold and rich soil of California.

Even to the priest, all that could now be seen were the heights of deception—the truth that gunpowder and pikes, not theology or veracity, determined which god was true. Had not, in both France and England, a Henry changed religion as one would change a crown? God had been reduced to a coronation ritual and a convenient lie—what a poor God that is! Not a God worth dying for if Truth is to exist at all.

The chaotic, post-religious wars Europe that Hobbes once knew no longer existed. Hierarchy must always be draped in truth and necessity to be tolerable, and by the 18th century, it was not. If, at one time, the Puritans had been able to stand on their simple pews with nothing but the Bible in their hands, Rousseau and Adam Smith could now stand with one simple fact—that what stood between man and utopia was the state. “We actually don’t need someone to burn incense and sing liturgy in Latin, or throw orgies at great public expense.” The plebeians are more than capable of managing on their own with nothing but a fair court of justice, an army, and a light system of taxation and regulation.

“The sovereign has only three duties to attend to: three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understanding: first, the duty of protecting society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; second, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of society from the injustice or oppression of every other member, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and third, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and public institutions, which it can never be in the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain, because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.” – The Wealth of Nations (1776)

The 18th century was the very dawn of what we can call the “written” age, when for the first time the great masses of society were able to engage with the flowering of human knowledge. In Gaul and among the wide-flung Anglo-Saxons—through different methods and at different speeds—the plebeian class was given a voice. With this new voice, they declared that the hierarchies of their ancestors were false and could do nothing better than to do away with themselves. This common bourgeois knowledge—the intuition of stone breakers and farmhands—has always existed among all people who earn their living: that rents are evil, that work is virtuous, and that the only hierarchy which should exist is the hierarchy of merit, where each man is given his lot and serves his purpose.

No other age before this had seen craftsmen with such ferocity. When news came that Louis XVI’s army was gathering around Paris, the workmen of the city set about organizing themselves. They channeled their indigent anger not into chaos, as so many peasant rebellions had at other times in history, but into forging pikes and securing gunpowder. The world merchants of the Channel would not be put down like mad dogs, and for this, they carved their own bloody chapter of sansculottism into history.

Is it the lightning or the dry brush that causes a forest fire? Once the volcanic eruption of postponed reform ceased and the spiraling whirlwind of revolution lost its steam, life began to be pieced back together. New systems of honorable living took root in the freshly laid volcanic soil. The 19th century—a period of intense earnestness—required that the forest be cleared so new sprouts could shoot up. Napoleon, Marx, Goethe, and Spencer all necessitated the removal of the dead wood of the past, one way or another.

We must feel nothing but sympathy for the men of the 18th century. They paid a high price for their lies, as all men do in such times—as we all pay today.

1Is there anything closer to God for us than the Enlightenment?

2Who still reads Candide?

3Nearly all titles of nobility are at their root some version of “leader”. There is something profound there to me.

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# Catch DEI - Chapter 1

My first attempt at literature.

Date: 2025-02-15
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/catch-dei-chapter-1
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/catch-dei-chapter-1

Hancock School of Business and Creative Destruction - Williamson Hall

As people began to settle down in Williamson Hall the sounds of quiet conversation filled the spacious room. Hushed whispers blended to create a wall of white noise. 

Clearing his voice into the microphone Dr. Ash stood on a carpeted platform in the front center. 

“I just want to start by saying thank you so much for coming out to the annual ASSBURN1 conference. You will be hearing more in the coming days but I cannot wait for everyone to see what we have in store for you.” 

He paused and the room was filled with the sound of short polite clapping. 

“If you look at the table in front of you, each of you should have a piece of paper with the itinerary for this year's conference. We made the irregular move this year of not sending the itinerary in advance and ask that everyone refrain from sharing it outside of this room.”

While saying this Dr. Ash held up a copy of the itinerary. Papers quietly shuffled. 

“As you can see we will not be having any seminars this time around. Those of you that expected to be invited to present and did not receive an invitation I hope you can see you are not alone.”

Professional laughter barked out but the attendee's eyes began to look around. Across the room, people shifted with visible discomfort. Whatever was about to happen was not what they had signed up for. 

“I’m going to try and cut to the chase. In this room is the chair and most highly cited 3 professors from every major research institution globally. This room represents the top of the top in terms of what this field has to offer the world” 

Again polite laughter and a smattering of claps. Even a few friendly back slaps could be seen. 

However, our field of Applied Micro Business Physiognomy has been suffering from a major replication crisis. Last month across the Top 3 journals a total of 5 of the 20 most recent publications have been forced to be retracted due to serious accusation of scholarly impropriety.”

At these words, they became completely silent. Blood appeared to drain from the faces of almost every attendee. Dr. Ash continued speaking unperturbed.

“Of course, this is a complicated topic. I myself have had 3 recent publications withdrawn after a coding error was discovered. Candidly I’m not surprised as like many of you I entered this career simply because I didn’t know what else to do with my life.”

A woman shrieked but otherwise, the room continued to be totally silent. The shock was slowly transforming into rage.

“Here at Hancock, we have been facing year-over-year budget cuts as both the number and quality of our PhD students have declined. In many ways, you can think of this year's conference as an attempt to ‘right the ship’ so to speak.” 

The silence was being gradually replaced with muttering. Dr. Ash realized he had about 30 seconds left before Williamson Hall was transformed into pandemonia. 

“This is why I propose a new approach. Instead of trying to expand the scope of research, we should instead focus on those topics in which we have the strongest expertise. A new era of Replication must emerge where we confirm the results that matter instead of wasting our time chasing unicorns.”

Professors were beginning to stand up and shout. Soon even with the microphone, he wouldn’t be able to be heard.

Dropping the itinerary and grasping the microphone with both of his hands Dr. Ash screamed above the growing chaos. 

“I refuse to write another line of code! And I’ll be damned if I give up this Chair!”

Silence fell like a curtain. Lowering his voice again he spoke shakily. 

“Everyone let's be honest. Since the first Smith et al. 1898 paper2 showing the relationship between bone structure and free cash flow, we have been doing nothing but dancing around a central idol. Look at just this list of papers published in the last 5 years.”

“Nose shape and Adjusted EBITDA: Evidence from a Congolese Mining Conglomerate” 

“Exogenous Variation in Jaw size and debt covenant renegotiation success” 

“Hand size and employee satisfaction” 

“And my personal favorite. Skin Care routine and CEO compensation package convexity”

“Who here even reads papers anymore when they write a referee report? I’ve been sending them to Ph.D. students for years as part of their education and recently I realized they don’t even read them either.

“As the editor of SNEERR3, I cannot even begin to articulate how many times I’ve received 3 referee reports.”

Saying this he held up free fingers, pinky held by thumb. 

“Each. One. Identical.” 

With each word, he lowered a finger. 

“So… let's just stop pretending. Instead, I propose we each show that the basic results in Smith et al. still hold in the modern world.”

For the first time since he had begun talking, Dr. Ash stood silent. 

Time seemed to slow to a pause as each of the professors and Ph.D. students realized what Dr. Ash was suggesting. Sitting at a small table in the corner a group of Japanese professors were the first to speak. 

Dr. Sato Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo and 7x distinguished teaching faculty despite having never taught a class stood up.  

“Dear Dr. Ash. Are you suggesting we pivot to replication as a tool to increase the field credibility?” 

Dr. Ash smiled

“Yes… Dr. Yamamoto is that right? That is exactly what I’m calling for” 

Bowing slightly Dr. Sato sat down. Once again the room broke out in hushed conversation. Every table discussed what had just taken place. For almost an hour Dr. Ash and the other professors in charge of hosting ASSBURN sat looking around the room. Sound came in waves as conversations turned jovial and then aggressive. Looking to his right Dr. Ash caught the eyes of a PhD student standing against the wall. His face was stretched in an almost comical smile, so wide it appeared to touch his ears. Dr. Ash knew why he was smiling. 

Standing up again he coughed into his microphone and spoke. 

“A pivot of this scale requires consensus so I wanted to hold a vote before we proceed. Unless this is unanimous we should call off the rest of the conference. If you support the proposed change please raise your hands” 

Every single hand in the room went up. 

After the 3-day conference, the following document was produced. 

Research Modernity and Replication

In an unprecedented move within our scholarly community, we hereby announce a shift towards a foundational approach aimed at reinforcing the integrity and credibility of our field. The Annual Conference of Applied Micro Business Physiognomy Researchers (ASSBURN) has unveiled a transformative agenda that underscores the urgency of addressing the replication crisis and scholarly impropriety that have cast shadows over our collective work. 

In a world of high-impact research and ever-changing Business practices, it is of paramount importance that every field confirms the major results - which form the bedrock of our research - are strong. 

The Crisis at Hand

Recent revelations have brought to light that a significant fraction of research within the realm of Applied Micro Business Physiognomy (AMBP), a field that traces its origins to seminal work by Smith et al. (1898), is plagued by issues of replicability and ethical concerns. This builds on a long series of critiques from major news publications about the foundational results of the field. Without a strong basis, it is impossible to battle these uninformed criticisms. The issue of replication is common across all fields of academia however AMBP will continue its long tradition of cutting edge research by directly addressing any concerns. Because this crisis not only undermines the trust in our scientific endeavors but threatens the very fabric of our society and civilization. 

A Call to Arms

It is with this backdrop that we call upon every member of our global community to embark on a journey of rigorous replication studies. Our collective mission is to reaffirm the veracity of key findings that have shaped our understanding of the intersection between physiognomy and business microdynamics. This initiative is not a step back but a leap forward, acknowledging that the strength of our field lies in the reliability and ethical conduct of our research.

Scope of Replication:

Historical Baseline: Revisit and replicate pivotal studies, beginning with the landmark study by Smith et al. (1898), to ensure that their conclusions stand firm under contemporary scrutiny.

Data: Pursue an aggressive policy of ensuring data used in prior studies has been robustly cleaned. 

Methodological Rigor: Employ state-of-the-art methodologies and statistical analyses to ensure the highest level of precision and reliability in foundational results. 

Collaborative Effort

This initiative demands a collaborative spirit, transcending institutional boundaries and geographic locales. We encourage the formation of replication consortia, bringing together researchers from diverse backgrounds and expertise to undertake this crucial work. Editors of SNEERR, FAC, and PEEN have all committed to only publishing high-quality replications until faith has been restored in the foundations of scientific research. 

Funding and Publication Opportunities

Recognizing the resource-intensive nature of replication studies, a dedicated fund has been established to support these endeavors but this is just the start. Specifically, AMBP departments call on institutions to increase their funding to accommodate the essential nature of the replication crisis. This includes the expansion of research facilities to accommodate state-of-the-art replication laboratories. 

Critically though without a strong investment in both the Ph.D. and current faculty research budget and an expansion of the scope of covered costs, it is impossible to make the crucial changes that are required to restore trust in our institutions. 

Conclusion

Our field stands at a crossroads, facing challenges that question the very core of our scientific pursuit. Yet, it is in these moments of trial that we find opportunities for growth and reaffirmation. Let us unite under the banner of integrity, rigor, and ethical scholarship to steer our field toward a future where trust, reliability, and truth prevail.

1ASSBURN: Association of Scientists, Scholars, Businessmen, Understanding, Research, and Networking

2SmithA, SmithB, SmithC, and SmithD 1898: Published in the Journal of Racial Excellency headline result showed that Aryan facial features namely a Dolichocephalic skull - measured using the Cephalic Index - was associated strongly with higher free cash flows relative to managers with Brachycephalic skulls. The paper was considered a landmark of its time and has since been culturally translated by numerous academics. Applied Micro Business Physiognomy departments emerged after SmithB gained widespread academic acclaim. Note: SmithA made serious accusations against SmithB regarding the original quality of the data. Claiming SmithB had discarded upwards of 90% of the observations for being outliers - this claim is uncontested only how the results would have changed is disputed. 

3SNEERR: Studies in non-Verbal Economic Expressions and Related Research

---

# A Yarvin-Sized Fork in the Road

Curtis Yarvin currently wields huge influence over the President of the United States and his revolutionary administration. The Blob can no longer afford to remain blissfully ignorant of his existence

Date: 2025-02-07
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/a-yarvin-sized-fork-in-the-road
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/a-yarvin-sized-fork-in-the-road

A couple of weeks ago—at the time of writing this article—the New York Times did an interview with the reactionary philosopher Curtis Yarvin. The interview was conducted by David Marchese, an NYU-educated journalist who runs a podcast featuring figures from our cultural and political milieu. Ironically—given the content of this essay—I’ll admit that this was the first time I’d encountered Marchese. Given the ideological chasm between these two men both Yarvin or Marchese were able to maintain a friendly conversation and neither seemed to be operating in bad faith. But what struck me was that Marchese seemed to have zero idea what Yarvin actually believed. Rather than engaging with the old Muldbug’s most interesting beliefs like the cathedral the conversation continually focused on Yarvin's monarchism and edgelord takes. It honest to god felt like Marchese had never actually read any of Yarvin’s most influential essays and was instead totally relying on 2nd hand analysis.

This is not to say that Yarvin “won” the encounter; he presented, as usual, as a somewhat incoherent speaker who failed to push back against the inevitable criticisms someone from David’s pedigree would bring up.

But the question of how one of the most influential political philosophers of the 21st century was basically unknown to the NYT has been worming its way around the inside of my head ever since I finished the interview. Because he is influential and he has been in rightwing circles for quite some time now. It wasn’t like Yarvin was invisible; he was right there for anyone with an interest in looking. 

I for one have been trying to get my friends and family to believe in the existence of his influence for months but I’ve had as much luck as trying to convince them Santa is real. It has been vaguely Cassandraesque screaming at everyone I know that the incoming regime is serious and this man is their ideological father only to be given side eyed looks. Well for better or for worse I was right. The lady doth protest too much.

Of course it isn’t just the NYT who was ignorant this man even existed, a quick glance at google scholar shows how untapped the field of Yarvanese studies is.1

I can think of only one explanation for how the prestige cultural tastemakers and information aggregators of our society—academia, the media, etc. (which I refer to as “the blob”)—were so blind, and it is this:

For $5/month I write weekly articles. You can subscribe for free to receive a preview of the paywalled articles. If you cannot afford the $5/month and would like to read my stuff anyway DM me.

For at least the last 30 odd years, with increasing thoroughness the blob has filtered its workforce along moral lines. Since all forms of affirmative action - in this case racial, sexual, and ideological - mostly impact new hires in 2025 there are basically zero conservative young people inside of any of these organizations. Don’t get me wrong, there are libertarians and classical liberals, but the sort of person who would naturally discover and then find beauty in the works of someone like Curtis Yarvin is basically absent from the blob. The choice to pursue an aggressive policy of promoting hiring among racial minorities, women, and cultural progressives was not accidently. No, it was a conscious effort on the part of individuals to use the prestige institutions of our society to do good. And do not be mistaken from their perspective this strategy paid enormous dividends.

Of course, ejecting conservative people from the Blob did not result in them disappearing and has instead simply resulted in the construction of parallel communities outside of the liberal mainstream. As the Blob became more and more ideologically coherent it has become less and less tolerant of any deviation from the party line, let alone someone as heterodox as Yarvin. To the point that the only people left in Dodge are true believers and people with good camouflage.

But this coherency has come at a real cost to the cultural relevance of somewhere like the NYT among people who reject their coherent morality. This is especially pronounced among young heterosexual guys(~18% of America’s population) for reasons that should be obvious to everyone. In fact, we have reached the point that basically no young straight man consumes the prestige press directly, in my experience. To the extent more normie dudes consume the mainstream press it is almost always through a 3rd content creator on a platform like Xitter or Youtube - who obviously injects their own commentary.

As I see it this leaves the Blob with one of two possible choices. Either they can adapt to the new vibe shift and start trying to hire more straight guys - in particular straight white guys - and then allow them to pursue the topics they find compelling, much of which will be quite critical of the last 20 years of social change. Or second they can double down on their status as the mouthpiece of the ancien regime and wait for the inevitable return of Democrats into power.

What I can say with certainty is that the ignorance that they have been able to maintain about the political beliefs of modern conservatism is over. You can think that they are bad beliefs, you can think that people shouldn’t think them, you can wish that no one would associate with people who believe them, but right now in 2025 they are extraordinarily influential over the President of the US and his revolutionary administration.

1Perhaps if impoundment proves unworkable they can give some of the money to me to begin a sub discipline.

---

# Wtf is going on with the market rn.

Your dashboard should be lighting up right now like a Christmas tree

Date: 2025-01-29
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/wtf-is-going-on-with-the-markets
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/wtf-is-going-on-with-the-markets

Something very strange seems to be happening with the market right now. Despite huge shakeups in the last eight days—including both the turning off and turning back on again of the $3T in federal spending and the release of the new Chinese AI model DeepSeek—there seems to be a near-total absence of market response(in either direction).

When looking at this index of America’s largest companies, where does it look like the big shock to beliefs happened over the last year?

"Can you point me to the place where it hurts NVIDIA?"

In a normal "Newtonian1" model, asset prices are a function of two things: the mean and variance of discounted cash flows. A signal that alters these beliefs should, in theory, move prices unless one of two things is true: (1) the signal contained no new information or (2) the signal was not seen as credible by the market. In other words, prices should always move unless the signal was already "priced in."

This leaves us with only two possible worlds. Either everything we have seen in the last eight days has contained no new information about the expected level or risk2 of future cash flows, or we are outside the bounds of standard Homoeconomicus capital markets. That isn’t to say this world hasn’t been charted, but your dashboard should be lighting up right now like a Christmas tree.

For $10/month I write weekly articles. You can subscribe for free to receive a preview of the paywalled articles. If you cannot afford the $10/month and would like to read my stuff anyway, DM me.

Everything Is Priced

I’ve taken enough financial economics classes to have something like an axiomatic respect for markets’ ability to price information. In retrospect, I could have just believed whatever outcome Polymarket predicted in almost any political standoff and walked away better informed than I would have been after thousands of breathless words of political analysis. But if it is true that capital markets in this country really did fully price in the changes to AI and Trump’s avalanche of policy shifts, that is remarkable. Notice I didn’t say impossible.

It really is hard for people to comprehend how much finance has vacuumed up the most analytically talented humans in the world over the last decade or so. For example, the very man behind DeepSeek, Liang Wenfeng, worked as a quant trader before deciding to dunk on the entire AI world as a side hobby. Take another example: Zhou Qun Song, a Chinese-Canadian who won five gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad only to go work as a quant trader at Citadel and is now a math PhD. The truth is that there is so much money to be made from even squeezing a small alpha from the market; people are willing to do anything to win. On paper, if you can find a big enough arbitrage opportunity, you can create unimaginable wealth. And unlike in other fields, where making this money requires actual labor and time, in finance, you can make—and lose—a functionally unlimited amount, all at once, all from your computer. In other words, quant trading firms scoured the world like Nazgûl, hunting autists with real talent as if they were the One Ring.

Returning to the example of Polymarket. It looks like only ~$3 billion exchanged hands during the recent presidential election, but even this "small" amount of money still resulted in a perfect state-by-state prediction. Just think about how much more time, money, and, frankly, clear-minded rationality is poured into trying to figure out what Trump is going to do by the financial world in New York.

One of the strange things about being a person is that you find out that most questions have an entire sub-epistemology of people and thinkers who have pondered very deeply about this problem. And that the main determinant for how well they are able to predictively model reality is who they are. This is uncomfortable to admit, but on some level we know at least part of the reason literature departments aren’t analytically rigorous is because they are not analytical people. We have much better predictions for something like physics than we do for literature, in no small part because the people with the highest analytic ability are physicists and not professors of comparative literature.

What all of this yapping is meant to convey is that I think it is possible that the market had already priced all of this. You knew Trump would cut regulations and generally act like a bull loose in a china shop, and the exact things he broke wouldn’t really matter all that much. You knew we were on an exponential growth curve with AI and that a lot of these frontier models could be made more lightweight, but you didn’t know exactly how.

All of this would mean that the exact realization hasn’t actually meant that much and we are still on the same cash flow path we were always on. In which case, I personally embrace my "new" financial overlords and would like to express my undying gratitude for efficient capital markets.

Scenario Two: ?

As I mentioned in the introduction, if things aren’t "priced" and we still aren’t seeing market movements from frankly transformational changes, I’m at a loss for words. In the previous section, I went on at great length about how brilliant these financiers are, but in reality, shocks happen all the time. Heck, I was recently reading a paper that used the signing of a bill—which had already passed—as an exogenous shock to investors’ information. So why something like that would be surprising but what we have seen so far isn’t is a mystery to me.

As an extreme example of the obvious failure of finance to correctly price a large and, in retrospect, obvious shock, just look at price movements around the COVID pandemic.

What feels more plausible is that we are in a very strange and uncertain time where the market is dominated more by vibes than anything else. As a society, we are having to seriously talk about p(Doom), and the estimates we are getting aren’t zero. How a market is supposed to operate in the world we live in right now is honestly a total mystery to me, and perhaps to everyone else also.

Going back to the bull in the china shop example. We have some idea that things are going to radically change. We don’t have any idea what specifically will radically change. Nothing we are seeing yet is really updating that. So even if there is material information, it isn’t touching the general vibe that “nothing ever happens” and “holy shit stuff is happening.” So just like the rest of society, the capital markets are just plodding along like nothing new has happened.

Right before finishing up this article, I came from a meeting for a lab that researches corporate taxes at Stanford (STAX). We were all just sitting there talking about corporate incentives, etc., and no one even mentioned the Trump administration. In fact, one of the people talked at what felt like great length about the increasing coordination between Europe and America along tax compliance and how that would impact firms moving forward. I couldn’t help but feel a little like this meme.

But the truth is I said nothing because even I am not sure. It is vibes all the way down.

1Newtonian in the sense that it has a number of simplifying assumptions about the way that the system works but they hold in most normal settings. 

2Note: this includes the resolution of prior uncertainty.

---

# The King is dead. Long live the King.

For the first time in 80 years, America appears to have a King. Only the Creator knows what comes next, but things are changing for the first time in my life.

Date: 2025-01-25
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-king-is-dead-long-live-the-king
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-king-is-dead-long-live-the-king

In the lead-up to this election, I wrote and rewrote an essay where I laid out what I thought the incoming Trump administration was about to do. I ended up not publishing it for a relatively simple reason: the policies that Trump was proposing would be so transformational that the only essay I could write was one where I claimed Trump was about to, actually, change the country. But I hesitated because America seems to be a society that is resistant to change, unless that change is to the Left. Now in retrospect, I regret the decision not to publish the essay because much of what I wrote has turned out to be true. In fact, on pretty much every issue Trump has acted more decisively than I, frankly, could have imagined. 

There has been extensive coverage of this in the press, so please go read articles like this or this if you want more specifics. But what Trump and co seem to have realized is that both the American public clamors for a strong executive after four years of a zombie presidency and that the Left in this country overplayed their hand since the pandemic and they are now facing a real backlash for the first time1. This, combined with Trump’s control of all three branches of government, means that he now has more power than anyone else in recent American history.

And Trump is using this power along many dimensions of American life, from migration to climate change. However, in this essay I want to focus on one area that to me as a White Man is particularly sensitive: Wokism.

The truth is that from a statutory point of view, America has been sort of frozen in the 1960s. Over the last 60 odd years, substantial progress has been made, but it was all built on administrative control of the executive agencies by ideological people, court rulings, and executive orders. Now that the courts are deeply red and the CEO of America is a man with a penchant for revenge, it seems like all of it could just come crashing down.

His executive order on DEI, in particular, shocked me. I’m going to link the whole thing here, but there are two big parts of it. First, “it enforces long-standing federal statutes and faithfully advances the Constitution’s promise of colorblind equality before the law.” Second, it makes explicit that the full power of the state will be used against private companies that do not comply with the principle of color blindness. “It directs all departments and agencies to take strong action to end private sector DEI discrimination, including civil compliance investigations.” This will be transformational. I think that the role legal risk played in the origins of DEI (or wokeness or whatever you want to call it) is broadly underappreciated by academics. But the risk profile of every company in this country has just transformed. If in 2024 the way you reduced legal risk was by pursuing a policy of affirmative action for all protected groups, in 2025, this is now probably your single biggest legal risk.

You are already seeing companies like Target removing all DEI policies, and this will only accelerate. What we are about to witness is what the economist Timur Kuran calls a preference cascade. Or colloquially, the moment everyone looks around them and thinks, “Oh, I’m not the only one.” The only thing that has kept the cadre of 50-year-old, disproportionately straight-shooting and psychopathic men—who basically always run any institution—from implementing social conservatism (which, let’s all be real, would be an easier personal match) is that they were afraid of facing backlash from HR and ultimately from the Civil Rights Code. Well, that enforcement exists primarily at the federal level, and it appears to have just died.

Right now, for all intents and purposes, America is primarily run by a diverse array of huge corporations that help write their own regulations and each function with an amazing degree of competence around the world. The way the managers of these companies feel about social policy matters a lot. We are all, in so many ways, serfs to our employers; as you, dear reader, have doubtless experienced when forced to attend a DEI conference, it is easy to shove down whatever frustration you are experiencing and wear a smiling face while your social superior lectures you. Progressives are just as responsive to the hard realities of capitalist life.

As corporate America shifts right, the entire cultural superstructure we have delicately assembled will shift with it. We, as the small folk, will have the obligation to put it all back together again and pretend—pretend for our daily bread depends on it—that it is universally fair and just.

I’m not sure what the short-term, let alone the long-term, effects of these policies will be, but frankly, I am quite relieved. The post-2020 racial milieu of this country was headed for a catastrophic cliff, and we appear to have swerved off that path at the last possible moment. If a year ago you had told me that the overt racism which has defined my entire professional life in Academia might actually come to an end, I would have laughed in your face. But today. Today for the first time it feels within reach.

All of this has been quite confusing for me. For decades, people on the right have pointed out the hypocrisy of the Left’s racism, and they have simply been ignored. It appears that the only person capable of killing it was a person as full of contradictions and chaos as Trump. I make no claims to know how Trump will govern on net. But on this area in particular, I could not be more grateful to our new King. May his rule be blessed by God, and may he be just and kind. I wish for nothing more sincerely than for this moment to really be the dawning of an American golden age. 

1Bryan Caplan makes a good distinction between backlash and pushback in this interview with Richard Hanania. The line that he draws is that backlash is when you get less than you could have gotten than if you had asked for less to begin with. I think that this is genuinely true in America. Without 2020 progressive policies, the Left would probably have continued their gradual dominance of our institutions in a permanent way.

---

# Atlas Shrugged - Review + Musings on Postmodernism

If you haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, I strongly recommend you read it. Treat it like any perspective: incomplete, flawed, and beautiful. Come in with a truly open mind and don’t try to pick fights.

Date: 2025-01-18
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/atlas-shrugged-review-musings-on
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/atlas-shrugged-review-musings-on

A little while ago, I—taking inspiration from Tracingwoodgrains—asked if I should read Atlas Shrugged. I’ve obviously known about the book for years and even had the privilege(?) of watching both the 2011 and 2012 live-action movie adaptations with a conservative family friend1. I grew up in an extremely literary family—both my parents were literature PhD students, after all—but Atlas Shrugged wasn’t the type of book I was likely to encounter as a child, simply because a diatribe in favor of human greed wasn’t part of my parents’ taste function.

The overwhelming majority of people who responded urged me to read the book—so I did. I had, years ago, tried to begin The Fountainhead and bounced off. But this isn’t the first time I’ve come back to a book, or author, after being recommended by people I trust. For example, a fellow PhD and close friend challenged my perspective on Nietzsche2 and claimed it was, in fact, “life affirming.” On a second pass, where previously I had seen nothing but madness, I now saw imperfect hints of real profundity. I haven’t become a Nietzschean—anymore than I am a Christian—but I’m much more sympathetic to those who are.

So I read Atlas Shrugged. My biases going in were the a priori biases that just exist among all people of the social class that is expected to have some opinion, even if you are not expected to have read the material itself. One, Objectivism was not a real philosophy—aka it had huge holes. Two, Ayn Rand was a bad writer. And three, the villains would be cartoonishly evil and the heroes would be cartoonishly good. Having read the book, I’m not sure I think any of these actually hold water.

The headline is that I would give this book an 8/10. It is pretty good, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants a palate cleanser. You get the book’s point pretty early, and I think you could honestly set it down whenever and miss very little. “People, not systems, are the highest ethical judge”. The morality presented is odd and I would argue incomplete3, but it is sincere and honest.

But I also want to yap about modern society and postmodernism4—two of my favorite subjects. So I’ll do that. Basically, I think that postmodernism presented a very solid critique of society—morality is complicated and often leads to weird contradictions—but then got scared by the implications of it and so imposed a meta-meta-narrative on our cultural understanding of ourselves. This is totally arbitrary, and at any moment, as a society, we can just become 10% more honest. Hypocrisy is bad but inevitable, and it is a job for each batch of Americans to iteratively improve this collective project. So in that vein, I’m going to touch on each of the “prestige” criticisms of the book and reflect on why I think they exist, as well as share some further ponderings on postmodernism.

Objectivism

Look, I don’t see what makes something a real or not real philosophy. I’ve never actually taken a philosophy class and find academic wordsmithing tiresome. But Objectivism seems to be a totally fine philosophy in the sense that I feel like I have a pretty firm idea of what it would look like to live in that society—either in Ayn Rand’s own words or in the negative form of the game Bioshock.

I think there are a lot of truths that aren’t able to be picked up in the system, but alas, isn’t this the doomed world of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem5? I’m not going to really hammer at this. Obviously people don’t like philosophies they disagree with, and in retrospect I probably should have been—and should learn to be in general—less confident in social condemnation of a system of belief.

The Characters(and Post Modernism)

Here are my high-level thoughts.

Dagny is awesome. Trains are much cooler than I had thought they would be. Train futurism anybody? I’m not sure why I doubted; I love setting up train lines in Factorio. Moving material around is badass and appeals to something deep in my mind I can’t really explain. The sex scenes are awkward, but I’m not sure how much of that is just me being a dude. For some context, to the people who haven’t read the book, the sex scenes are very rapey in a way I imagine a book like Fifty Shades of Grey is. Also, my lord, Ayn Rand can yap at times—more on this later.

The other characters are also a little cartoonish. But I feel like the best way to understand this book is as a mirror to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. What do I mean by this? Well, I think both books just bleed sincerity. Invisible Man follows a young Black man who wants to be an upstanding member of society and is met with cartoonishly evil and incompetent characters. In contrast, Atlas Shrugged follows a highly competent and driven woman who wants to be left alone to improve the world and express herself but is met with cartoonishly evil and incompetent characters.

But in both cases, none of this feels invented. Ralph Ellison was a Black man born in the South during the nadir of US race relations, and Ayn Rand was a bourgeois Jew born on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Their worlds, when they wrote their respective books, were cartoonishly evil and unfair. We have a certain American centrist view of atrocities, but it is worth remembering that bourgeois Jews born in Central and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century are in the running for the most systematically abused groups of people in human history.

If, to Ralph Ellison, the enemy was the overt racism of the South and the masked, smiling racism of the North, then Rand’s was the totalitarian “kindness” of Soviet Socialism. Her villains represent the clawing resentment and incompetence that led to the Holodomor and the specific targeting of the most productive and law-abiding members of society—the Kulaks—within Ayn Rand’s own lifetime.

So then why is Invisible Man a classic of the Western literary canon—at least the prestige canon—but Atlas Shrugged is not, especially since one is still enormously popular and the other appears to have drifted into obscurity? Because our cultural tastemakers are sympathetic to the plight of Ralph Ellison but they are not to the plight of Ayn Rand.

If, after reading the writings of Ellison, I went: “Well, what are you going to do? America needed to abuse the Blacks in order to construct the powerful modern society we have,” people would, rightfully, think I was insane—even evil. But I sort of get the feeling that this is what people do to Ayn Rand—if not so explicitly, then through implication. Again, I want to emphasize, I’m not comparing a White guy attending a lecture with Jim Crow. No, I’m comparing the lived experience of a Russian bourgeois Jew born in 1905 with a Black man born in 1914.

So what does any of this have to do with postmodernism? That requires me to explain what I think the major theme of postmodernism is. I would argue that the basic connecting premise of all postmodern culture is that of perspective. By this I mean that morality, history, etc., can only ever be understood through the lens of perspective. The inklings of this idea have always existed—there is nothing new under the sun—but it went into overdrive after the end of WWII in the West and is now a global phenomenon. Part of the reason it is so powerful is that it is basically true. Take Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as an example. No one disputes the primary sources for that book, nor have there really been additional discoveries of Roman texts that change the basic pile of evidence. Instead, we have turned a moral critical eye on the source material. In certain cases, this is probably productive—such as the reexamination of Caesar or early Christianity—but in others, I think it is basically destructive—such as in the case of Caligula or Nero.

But there is a second thread to this idea of perspective: reality cannot be viewed as having some ultimate moral truth. The idea of ultimate moral truth or ultimate anything is often referred to as a “metanarrative” and its rejection is central to postmodernism. Of course none of this means that there cannot be “particular” truths like those in any stories and if anything postmodernism strives to lift these voices up - in theory.

I feel like critics—who wield huge influence—have this asymmetric expectation of certain types of writers or perspectives. Going back to Ayn Rand and Ralph Ellison: in one, the characters are unrepresentative, and in the other, they are motifs of real people. If I was making a movie about ancient China and I cast half of the characters as non–East Asian people, eyebrows would be raised. Let alone if I was doing something like making a movie about the Antebellum South and I made most—or even just some—of the slaves seen in the movie White. In certain circumstances, we hold up the obscure, and in others, we use its obscurity as a tool to silence it.

Let me give an example of what I mean. If you look at the authors who have won Nobel Prizes over the last 20 or so years, they are almost all focused on living as a marginalized person within the brutalities of capitalism. That is an experience that millions of people have. But why does Ayn Rand have to include their perspective any more than Ralph Ellison would have to include the perspective of a White grandmother who was mugged and beaten up by Black migrants from the South? Unless you think that certain perspectives—if not morals—are allowable and others should just not be mentioned—ever.

In many ways postmodernism is just “a little life”-ism. The only stories that are acceptable are those that speak to either the experiences, or fantasies of the New Left.

Just look at the 2019 Joker. That movie resonated with people because it matched their experiences. You can say stuff like “Well, on average, White guys have a better life than minority women,” or “Young men on average don’t face problems like the Joker,” but what are we doing here? No one is calling up Hanya Yanagihara to say, “Look, on average, people aren’t disabled gay men who are sexually abused by priests. Why would you write about this?” A far larger number of men have had experiences like those of the Joker than have had experiences like Jude from A Little Life. When we say a story isn’t authentic but millions of people resonated with it, we are being egotists. We can say we didn’t resonate with it, but the entire point of postmodernism is we don’t get to determine what is authentic and what isn’t. Yet when they made the second Joker movie, they decided to lampoon him and scold the fans to the tune of a couple hundred million dollars.

I really want to hammer this home. In modern media, we center extraordinarily unusual people. If you see a story about a Black person in London during WWII, it is worth realizing that less than 0.1% of the city’s population would have been Black at the time. By contrast a show about the racial collapse of the Bronx or Detroit in the 1970s is inconceivable. Not because the story is less “real” as in it didn’t happen but because it would be chewed up and destroyed by the prestige tastemakers. Postmodernism has not resulted in a deconstruction of the metanarrative as it seemed to want to do but instead in the imposition of a much more stifling meta-meta-narrative that has swallowed our entire media landscape.

If I can leave this section with a final thought: the expansion of our intellectual lives to care about the perspective of the storyteller is good. People who want to go back to modernism are idiots who can’t do it even if they want to. But we should keep expanding the scope of allowable stories so that they better reflect our actual experience as humans, not just the experiences certain members of our society. We each experience some tiny fraction of reality, and I just appreciate people who sincerely communicate theirs. I expect nothing more or less from an artist.

Writing

The third assumption that I had was that the writing would be bad. So perhaps it is because I’m listening to an audiobook form of the book, but honestly, the writing isn’t bad at all. Is Ayn Rand the greatest prose writer of all time? No, that would be Cormac McCarthy, in my opinion. But is she even in the bottom 80%? Also no.

This has bothered me more than the characters, since I expect people to be offended by representations of life that they dislike—I don’t think anyone lives up to the metamodernist ideal—but prose shouldn’t be that divisive. I will say the book is way too long and the author needed a much more aggressive editor. Huge amounts of the material—over half, I would argue—could be cut away and you would lose little. But the complaints I see in reviews aren’t usually about the length. Instead, they tend to be mostly about the style, which I thought was fine. Photocopies of photocopies, as they like to say.

Now, if I were going to describe the writing style of this book, it is an anti–Infinite Jest. If Infinite Jest is a book that is supposed to be confusing and unclear—to the point I’m not sure anyone even really knows what it is about—Atlas Shrugged is supposed to be blindly clear. In fact, the author takes an extended period of time to tell you exactly what she meant in the form of a radio broadcast at the end. But it is anti–Infinite Jest also because where everyone claims to love Infinite Jest’s writing, everyone seems to hate Atlas Shrugged. This isn’t an attack on DFW; he is probably the author whose vision of life is closest to mine, but fuck, that guy needed an editor, badly. I feel bad for DFW since he emerged in an era of deconstruction, and he clearly hated it. He wanted sincerity and clarity but was only taught irony and confusion. He gets a pass because he is so brilliant in what he is actually saying. But the fact that the book is hard to understand is bad. Being confusing is not a sign of being a high-quality writer—in fact, the extreme opposite. I feel similarly about Nietzsche and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. That book is beautiful enough that it gets a pass, similar to DFW, but come on, y’all. Are we going to pretend it is communicable?

In short, if you haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, I would recommend you read it. I would recommend you treat it like any perspective: incomplete, flawed, and beautiful. I would also recommend you come in with an open mind and don’t try to pick fights with the author. There is a lot here for someone who wants to look for it.

1It looks like they wrapped up the series in 2014 and I vaguely remember the cast changing the cast between the first and second part but honestly I don’t care enough to confirm this.

2For us dyslexic people we need a good abbreviation or anglicization of his name. Good chance I will start calling him FN in the future.

3Incomplete in the sense that it leaves out essential aspects of who we are as people. One of the things that it is easy to forget is that we did not evolve for “bad” conditions. When we think about Stone Age societies, it is easy to imagine people living in extremely low population density environments like the Eurasian steppe or the jungle. But the reality is that these areas were inhabited by hunter-gatherers during the written record because they were fringe areas for humans. Once you accept that anatomically modern humans have lived with levels of state and social complexity analogous—if not higher at times—than the Native American population of North America for well over 300k years (and possibly as far back as 3 million years ago, displaying high levels of complexity and probably population density, e.g., Australopithecus africanus), human morality makes more sense.

Even when we think of primates—like chimps in the amazing Netflix show Chimp Empire—we should be thinking about a species that is pushed to the outer possible limit of its habitat by humans. Because we are the more powerful ape. Look at the Sivapithecus, for example, the last common ancestor of chimps and humans. It was a plains, not a deep-jungle, creature. Humans are plains, not jungle, creatures, and plains creatures tend to live in much higher population density than jungle creatures. Just compare lions and panthers to compare the relative social complexity of very early human ancestors and jungle primates today. On the plains, people learn how to fight in formation; if you break formation to stalk on your own, you are caught on your own and cut down by a group of enemies. The reason Napoleonic soldiers stood in formation to take cannon fire was that there was a tiny chance you would not be torn down by fire, but if you broke, there was a 100% chance you would be torn to shreds by Hussars. Society and willing sacrifice to the group isn’t a recent adaptation for us; it is hard-wired into every cell of our body.

To the Human Diversity people: it is remarkable that we have yet to find any group of humans who lack social organization and some basic set of moral codes. Try teaching Kantian morality to a chimp, and then tell me that our moral systems are a new genetic adaptation.

4Literally just the era after ~1960 in my mind. We are approaching the tail end of it but we are still in it.

5“Gödel's incompleteness theorem states that in any consistent mathematical system complex enough to include basic arithmetic, there exist true statements that cannot be proven within the system. Additionally, the system cannot prove its own consistency, highlighting inherent limitations in formal logical frameworks and the boundaries of mathematical proof.” Thank you ChatGPT.

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# The Ballot-Box Empire

More of the Americas should enjoy our culture and institutions. Instead of endless immigration, we can do this by formally expanding the American empire through the ballot box.

Date: 2025-01-11
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/the-ballot-box-empire
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/the-ballot-box-empire

In light of the recent discourse around “high-skill immigration,” I’ve been reflecting on how much “morality” influences how Americans perceive immigration. By morality, I mean that many Americans (not to mention aspirational Americans) strongly believe it is “unfair” that some people enjoy this country’s capital and political institutions while others do not. Therefore, we have an obligation to extend these advantages to as many of our fellow Humans as possible. Their argument goes something like this:

On a basic level, all sentient creatures have moral worth. Among humans, the variation in moral worth is extremely small. Yet people’s material and social circumstances vary enormously. Economically, it appears that when a person migrates from a very low “habitability” zone to a high “habitability” zone, they do not undermine the new zone’s habitability. Yes, they may not achieve the same levels of success, on average, as the local population, but the net effect is undeniably positive. Because the physical and human capital is so much higher, and our institutions are so much better, the same person can achieve a level of flourishing here that they could never dream of at home.

Given the above, we, as Americans, have a moral obligation to grant everyone who wants it the right to move here and enjoy what we have inherited—since, at the end of the day, we did nothing to earn that inheritance (à la the Veil of Ignorance).

To really condense the logic above: because America is so much wealthier, with vastly superior human rights and material conditions, simply not being allowed to live in the West is a crime against humanity1.

However, this logic cuts both ways. If American institutions are truly so vastly morally superior, why should they remain limited to these borders? The answer you will usually get is that colonialism is irredeemably evil and has zero virtues. Writing this puts my employment at risk, but as a White American in California, I cannot accept the premise that colonialism is always evil. No—that would mean hating myself and believing that this land would be better off in the hands of the Mexicans, the natives, or some other marginalized group. But I don’t believe that. I like California. Everyone, including Mexican-Americans, is better off because we are ruled from Washington rather than Mexico City. No, colonialism is not always bad.

But even if it were—even if there were no setting in which imposing your legal and political system could ever be ethically neutral or let alone beneficial—anti-colonialism can’t be the only value for ontological morality. Consider migration again. Even if we accepted huge levels of movement, there would still be billions of people left at home, in what you, dear secular humanist, consider a morally intolerable situation. Should we simply accept, forever, a trickle of humans escaping the crushing poverty of the third world?

This is why I propose a new form of Imperialism—an imperialism befitting a country as moral and powerful as America. An Imperialism of the ballot box.

Ideally, every country in the Americas would be able to hold a referendum. If 50% of the adult population—not just the voters—choose to join America, they would enter into a new arrangement. In many ways, it would resemble the current structure with Puerto Rico. The residents of this new territory would become U.S. citizens but would be unable to vote in federal elections while at home. However, they could move to the metropole at their discretion. Like all U.S. territories, they would be bound in a perpetual bond of fraternity. The state’s monopoly on violence would shift from their old capital to Washington. Laws and institutions would be shaped by the imperial core until the territory reached a predetermined threshold of social and economic development and could fully join the sacred order of the states.

This is the trade: citizenship and aid in exchange for fraternity and empire.

I genuinely believe vast swaths of the Americas would gladly join the U.S. If for no other reason than millions of people prove this by risking everything to come here.

To see how beneficial this arrangement can be, just look at Puerto Rico. Although, shamefully, Puerto Rico has never been granted statehood, it has done extremely well as a formal part of the American Empire. The numbers below ignore the millions of Puerto Rican residents who moved to the metropole.

In short, I agree that more of the world should get to enjoy the privileges of American culture and politics. In fact, I would argue that the entirety of the Americas should enjoy these privileges. But we do not need to force anyone’s hand, nor do we need to accept an unlimited wave of migrants simply out of a shortsighted sense of sympathy. Instead, I truly believe that the millions of people throughout the New World who want to become Americans should have that desire honored in a mutually beneficial way.

1Btw if all of this sounds absurd to you please keep in mind that it is the official policy of the European Court of Justice.

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# The 21st Century Library

We can establish a federal library to provide every citizen with "free" access to the flowering of human literature. This should be the first step in more actively subsidizing online education.

Date: 2025-01-03
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/one-card-to-borrow-them-all
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/one-card-to-borrow-them-all

Currently, approximately 90% of North American library systems offer digital services where residents can download audiobooks and ebooks for free. The system works similarly to a traditional library: a region purchases books in digital formats and “lends” them to patrons who can download them. 

Since there are a limited number of books available, unlike a platform like Netflix, you often end up having to wait for someone to “return” their book. I’ve used this service frequently, and it’s remarkably user-friendly. To minimize my waiting time and maximize the scope of possible coverage, I still carry around every library card I’ve ever gotten my hands on1. 

But having to keep so many library cards, and my selection of books being tied to orthogonal employment decisions, seems, frankly, kind of silly. What if instead of having a separate digital library for each US county, we just had one single Federal Library? It could be a vast library system offering all U.S. legal residents free access to digital ebooks, audiobooks, etc.

As a kid, libraries were instrumental in my education. As I’ve written before, I am extremely dyslexic, but because libraries had a wide selection of audiobooks on CD, I was still able to consume an honestly insane amount of literature. Since the early 2000s thought the world, and how we consume media, has changed. Who even has a CD player now, let alone would reach for it when looking for something to fill the passing moments of their day?

The public library system provides remarkable value for its cost. It’s one of the few tax-funded services—along with national parks, public schools, policing, etc.—that I’m enthusiastic about paying toward. We should modernize this institution for the 21st century.

Here’s how I would implement this “reform”: 

First, I would offer to buy out every municipality’s selection of books. Some, of course, would want to keep theirs to supplement the federal offerings, but ideally, you could credibly communicate to most that their services would be basically obsolete. Then, you could just contract with OverDrive to host the product as they currently do for local library systems. 

Second, I would allocate money—say $2 billion a year ($6 per American)—to purchase new books for the Federal Library. I would want these books to be chosen from a list submitted by users or in some other way reflect the real preferences of America. The key would be that popular books, which regularly have waiting lists, along with hot new releases, should be prioritized.

But why stop with just books? Assuming this went well, you could contract with universities to hire professors from all of the top US schools and have them record lectures on every subject known to man. We could create a 100-hour lecture series that would walk someone from absolute beginner math through differential equations or simple proofs2.

To wrap up my thoughts on this. The state serves a couple of key purposes, but to me, helping each citizen achieve their full potential is a significant one. Giving my fellow Americans the chance to access all of humanity’s greatest works of writing for “free” is something I would gladly spend $6 a year on.

1I would like to specifically highlight my old college town, Fairfax, which has a uniquely good collection of books.

2You can start to get sort of kooky with this and imagine an Ai that could create and grade problems sets for you.

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# Life as a Distribution of Types

What if we are all just a distribution of types?

Date: 2025-01-01
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/life-as-a-distribution-of-types-e7e
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/life-as-a-distribution-of-types-e7e

I’ve never really loved the term “metamodernism.” Not only is it a mouthful, but it also doesn’t serve as a very useful tool to communicate the basket of ideas it’s supposed to represent. However, I think the core ideas of metamodernism are basically correct—namely, that life is far too complex for any all-encompassing truth as people in the modernist era might have believed. At the same time, reality still exists, and we are all bound by it.

There is lovely Carlyle quote from his 1837 classic “The French Revolution: A History” that captures what I mean well. 

“Theories of Government! Such have been, and will be; in ages of decadence. Acknowledge them in their degree; as processes of Nature, who does nothing in vain; as steps in her great process. Meanwhile, what theory is so certain as this, That all theories, were they never so earnest, painfully elaborated, are, and, by the very conditions of them, must be incomplete, questionable, and even false? Thou shalt know that this Universe is, what it professes to be, an infinite one. Attempt not to swallow it, for thy logical digestion; be thankful, if skilfully planting down this and the other fixed pillar in the chaos, thou prevent its swallowing thee.”

To me, metamodernism is essentially a concession to postmodernism: “Yes, culture and power matter in defining truth, but objective reality continues to exist.” Because objective reality continues to exist we are forced to contend with her in the context we live in. 

Thus, maybe a term like “distributionalism” better describes what people usually mean, even if it too carries the burden of being somewhat cumbersome. The world makes more sense to me when we accept that, rather than there being one truth, there are many truths drawn from a mostly stable distribution of human biological and social characteristics. What is true to you will depend on your type. 

For instance it is obvious from my own life that men and women differ in important ways but I’m not comfortable saying that “human society is fundamentally sexually dimorphic.” If anything, the modern world has shown that fields traditionally viewed as masculine—like math—or feminine—like child-rearing—can fully accommodate people of the opposite gender as highly productive and valuable members. One of my best friends - a woman - is also a Ph.D. student here at Stanford, is undeniably better than I am at math, and any system that claims only men can do math would exclude a brilliant, thoughtful person. 

Consider as another example Aella (I’m not sure if that’s her real name). She’s an extremely thoughtful, happy, and seemingly good person, but she’s also literally a whore. She regularly gets into arguments on Twitter when she does something others might find, at a minimum, “icky,” sparking outrage from social conservatives, only for her to assert that it truly makes her happy. I don’t doubt her; she seems to practice what amounts to radical candor, and I believe that being polyamorous and working as a sex worker genuinely brings her joy. But I also believe that, on average, people should avoid being prostitutes for many obvious reasons.

This creates a conundrum of sorts. On one level there are basic distributional facts of life but on the other those facts manifest in extremely diverse forms. Even still I’m hesitant to accept the postmodernist argument that, because some facts defy easy categorization, the idea of truth itself is illegitimate. No, it is just incomplete to us. 

To me, this approach is the only way any workable form of social conservatism could return to humanity. Previous systems that existed throughout our entire biological history have proven unstable in the fact of modernity, crumpling like a wet paper towel—this doesn’t even address the injustice and cruelty they often imposed. People like me, who feel discomfort with social progressivism, need to admit that just because something is, on average, good doesn’t mean it’s always good. I’d prefer my children be monogamous, as I believe this is, on average, the most fulfilling way to live, but that’s different from saying that everyone should be monogamous. Fundamentally, my motivation is utilitarian: I’m advocating for monogamy from a practical, not an objective, perspective. What is ethical is what we permit, and what we permit is what is useful. 

In order to pull this off we will require a level of pluralism that Abrahamic societies have traditionally struggled with—a challenge our civilization needs to address. Jainism’s idea of anekāntavāda introduced to me by my good Jainist friend Rohan - is close to what I’m advocating for. 

But nothing I’ve said above is a postmodern claim that everyone’s personal truths are equally valid. No, objective reality exist and you want to cleave closely to it, but knowing what that reality is should not be thought of as a trivial or a solved problem. 

When I look around, the correlation between engaging in “conservative” behaviors and happiness is striking. If you aim to maximize your chances of living a happy, fulfilling life, it seems like you could do worse than mimic your grandparents' social arrangements. It’s easy to counter this with “not everyone has good grandparents” or “not every women appreciates traditional masculinity,” but that’s my point entirely. Choose what works for you and discard the rest; just don’t forget there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Life is very short and you don’t get that many shots.

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# Welcome and Housekeeping

Date: 2024-12-31
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/welcome-and-housekeeping
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/welcome-and-housekeeping

Welcome to Strong Ideas Held Lightly. This is my Substack, where I’ll share essays, videos, and classic books. 

These are as the title implies strong opinions held lightly. I’m actively seeking good faith engagement. If you have good data share it! 

If you’d like to read more of my long-form essays, check out Voyager's Log, where I, along with a group of friends, write for free. You can also follow me on Xitter or Notes.

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# Coming soon

Date: 2024-06-04
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/coming-soon
Original: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/coming-soon

This is Strong Ideas Held Lightly.