If I Hold A Gun

Not ancient wisdom, but...

“If you hold a gun and I hold a gun, we can talk about the law. If you hold a knife and I hold a knife, we can talk about rules. If you come empty-handed, and I come empty-handed, we can talk about reason. But if you hold a gun and I only have a knife, then the truth lies in your hand. If you have a gun and I have nothing, then what you hold in your hands isn’t just a weapon, it’s my life.”

That Caesar
Over the weekend, I listened to the first chapters of The Twelve Caesars by Gaius Suetonius. I have never heard Julius Caesar described so. I was shocked, but now somewhat reassured to find that he is just the kind of Ruler I consider in my Peasant Theory. He was deadly in every way, and warped space, time and Rome around him. I am coming to understand something that Nietzsche said at a deeper level than when I wrote what is now my most well-read essay on Sam Harris. Julius Caesar is thus, the prototypical emperor.

Honor is pagan, Roman, feudal, aristocratic; conscience is Jewish, Christian, bourgeois, democratic.

I note in passing that Americans don’t fear the Chinese Army. We fear the pinpoint accuracy of the Chinese economy. It has the kind of legal certainty and focus we cannot assemble. As we battle for our Judeo-Christian panoptic morality in our democracy, we are increasingly humbled by the lack of deliberation of Xi’s China. I have a sneaking suspicion that we may come to covet that unity of pen and sword for ourselves. Who will be the first American Caesar? What will it take?

A long time ago I recall, as a Republican, the derisive rhetoric against George W. Bush’s “lack of intellectual curiosity”. It is of course, a charge that still carries weight as applied against the current President, and thus by extension to all ‘low-information voters’ meaning the hastily assembled GOP majority. So at that time, I created from that criticism the ultimate steelman. To be precise, this was about Sarah Palin.

So I have just invented a mental experiment to deal with this question in the future so I can explain a basic conservative phenomenon, which is that you don't want your president to be a certain sort of brilliant.

Imagine that we had a global test to find the most brilliant person in the world and the point of this was that we would give this person the power to be the leader of the free world. After an exhaustive survey, we found a man who understood particle physics, spoke 12 languages, could do cube roots in his head, played classical piano, and ran the marathon in 2:15.

Except this man didn’t run for President of America, he was elected to be Pope. So the question is, do the people who complained about the intellectual, cultural, and physical deficits of the current man in power now decide to convert to Catholicism? Of course not. These are the criticisms of the moment aimed at the opposition. They have their own reasons for not being Catholic and those reasons will not change simply because the Catholic Church is now run by somebody objectively brilliant. There is just a certain part of one's life that you feel some authority has no business controlling - which is exactly how conservatives feel about government.

But if we were to come to that moment where we feel our values, or our GDP per capita, our healthcare, our civil rights, our national security or our AI supremacy is threatened more by our own democratic dithering in the face of the unity of China’s hand on the world, would we give that democracy up? Yeah we would. I mean where exactly is the Bill of Rights now? Why do we complain about billionaires now? Who wouldn’t love to shut them all up and force them to salute the flag appropriately?

Think about it. If Kamala Harris had won the last election, how many Social Justice Warriors would be taking a knee for the national anthem? How many of the Trumpists would?

The point here, besides the obviousness behind our complete disrespect for Congress, is that America might very well be ripe for one of the next three generations to roll over for the right charismatic, strident, brilliant, rule-breaking Caesar.

That Quote
That quote is not ancient wisdom, nor is it from The Godfather. It was generated by the interwebz. The whole of the meme runs off the rails quickly, but those first five sentences are as anthemic as any meme is capable of being. You heard it here first. You will hear it again.

I think it speaks directly to the guts of my theory when it comes to the rule of law and the matter of Roman honor. When Americans what honor more than they want the rule of law, then we are gambling with some very deep foundations of what a Western democracy is supposed to be. Some will tell you quickly that we are a republic with only representative democracy and that our representatives are more or less bought and paid for in the national interest. One cannot deny the economy inside the Beltway or the general imperviousness of our several industrial complexes. But boy does it get the personal right. Rulers rule by making rules for others which they break with aplomb. Above and beyond the dosh point that ruins us peasants, they can hack, slash and burn where our better angels and even our most sinister demons fear to tread.

We pretend to be equal, and that is our bourgeois privilege. It is something we ladies and gentlemen can agree upon, suspending disbelief for the benefit of society. That equality will not be sustained for generations raised on Culture War politics. The Karen is just the tip of the iceberg of the darkness of the human soul. We don’t even know how dark. Well, Caligula is a clue.

Time Rolls On
I’ll be talking about duty, and my friend W.F. Tywman has spoken often in our podcast about the value of pietas romana, and I think he’s correct. But things can go awfully wrong. Then they can go right and wrong and right again.

So good and evil Rulers come and go. It’s hard to believe, when you think about it, how the Roman Empire survived for hundreds of years after Caligula and Nero. It took nearly 100 years to get to every Stoic’s favorite after those two. Rome, the rumor goes, burned while Nero fiddled, but it survived the devastation. And don’t forget that Rome was a republic for 500 years before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and caused a civil war that begat the Roman Empire and that happened more than 800 years before the Holy Roman Empire.

Power will come and go. The nature of power itself doesn’t change much. Nor does virtue. We are not ruined.