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Notes -
The Two Towers
It is trivial, with the current "very online right" and with the benefit of a (relatively recent) era that didn’t require "diversity", to impose a reactionary reading on the movie trilogy the Lord of the Rings. Having just finished watching the (otherwise pedestrian, at least in relation to the sublime Fellowship of the Ring) Two Towers, the analogies are almost too on the nose. We have a technocratic leader ("a mind of metal and wheels") who leads a rabid horde of third-worlders in a takeover of a 100% white, peaceful, free nation. In the books, the technocratic leader’s "new" cloak is literally rainbow hued. The free nation just wants to be left alone, but is eventually forced into battle. The leaders pine for a simpler, easier time; where valor, honor, and renown were attainable.
Of course, so do all who live to see such times. The folk in the old tales had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. One of Tolkien’s motifs is how easy evil is to defeat: all good has to do is stand up to it. The Ents think that they go to their doom, before utterly decimating Isengard. The Hobbits cower initially during the scouring of the Shire, then win an almost trivial victory. One of my favorite lines from the book is when Theoden decides to go into battle himself, at which Aragorn proclaims, "Then even the defeat of Rohan will be glorious in song!". This is echoed in the movie during the "Forth Eorlingas" last charge. Yet the only thing in the Lord of the Rings that risks genuine defeat is passivity. Ultimately, Theoden’s death in Return of the King is one through which he does win lasting glory: the great Witch king is forever destroyed. Not only will he have no shame in the halls of his fathers, he has a prominent position in their company.
My grandfather served in WWII but never fought. If it wasn’t for the dropping of the Atom bombs in Japan, he would have been in the invading ground force. Given the casualty estimates of a ground invasion, there is a solid chance that his 5 children, his 20+ grandchildren, and his 40+ great-grandchildren would never have been born. He felt some pride in his service, but also regret and shame. Others fought and died. He didn’t.
Two generations removed from WWII, the very thought of storming Iwo Jima or Normandy is unthinkable; both at the national level as well as the individual level. Watch Saving Private Ryan and try to imagine yourself in that scene. My grandfather felt shame, but I can’t even muster that emotion. When I imagine myself in those boats approaching the beach, the only emotion I feel is terror. I am a product of my time, where even the "good" guys lack ambition and will. The world’s richest man trolls on X. The world’s most powerful man trolls on Truth Social.
Another great movie, the Dark Knight, features the iconic (and ironic) line "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain". As I stare at the beige walls of my cubicle, were that those were my options! We live in an age where everything is flattened. There is great evil but without an obvious source. There are many who live upright lives, but without valor or victory. Our present evil is the insidious slow drip of poison that seeps into us through our surrounding milieu.
The great project of the "online right" is to identify this evil, to name it, and to then fight it. Yet this evil remains amorphous and elusive. Each "influencer" thinks they have the "correct" answer. These answers are typically mutually contradictory. In the face of this hydra, some have returned to recommending the basics: reproduce, guard your family, stay in shape, weather the storm. This is sound advice. But as long as the evil permeates are society, our children and our spouses risk defecting. The halls of power rot even as their power becomes more entrenched, threatening lives and livelihood. What can men do against such reckless hate? The one option that is certainly not available to us moderns is to ride out and meet it.
I don't think this is remotely true. I'd argue evil is so pervasive, it's a target rich environment. Just because people identify different evils doesn't mean they are all wrong. They can all be right!
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Needs more continental philosophy.
Joseph de Maistre wrote 'La contre-revolucion n'est pas une revolucion contraire, mais sur le contraire de la revolucion'. An important line, but incomplete by itself- de Maistre left his philosophy on reacting to the French revolution incomplete, because the reactionary impulse, by itself, is simply a leg of a Hegelian dialectic which will synthesize into a less extreme version of the revolution. Which is exactly what happened in France.
By itself, opposition to revolution is merely driving the speed limit. What is needed is a paradigm shift to escape the revolutionary paradigm. And central planning does not have a good historical record for constructing a paradigm.
I notice you talking about guarding your family and weathering the storm. What you don't talk about is forming a community with likeminded families. You must network, man is a social animal. Your children will defect if they don't have friends. They will defect if your subculture does not offer a pathway to becoming an adult. You need other families for this. And out of that group a paradigm will arise organically, a very similar paradigm to the pre-revolution, but not exactly the same because it's a different world. And a different paradigm will naturally tend to form independent institutions, which grow slowly, over generations, until you eat the revolution itself.
Finding a like-minded community that is in my same socio-economic class, age, and willingness to be "apart" from the world is difficult, especially since my wife is more liberal than I. I like what https://becomingnoble.substack.com/ and https://blog.exitgroup.us/ are trying to do, but I think those are too "right-wing" coded for my family.
You will need to conform yourself to a group- what did you think ‘community’ meant, thoughts, presentations, essays? Band together.
Of course, you could also simply be out of luck. An unwillingness to abandon individualism won’t get you anywhere. But civilization defining ideas shared with other families might, because the future belongs to those who show up. You can as part of a group influence the next generation. You cannot do it on your own. Yes this entails making compromises on your preferences. But the alternative is to forfeit the field.
It's damnation both ways. Hold to individualism and forfeit the field to nothing. Discard it and forfeit it to whoever the leaders are. Only actual winning move is to become the leader, and there's precious few slots available.
So? What's wrong with having a leader setting the field?
Nothing, if you're the leader. Otherwise, you're just a tool.
You mean a follower? Again, what's wrong with that?
What's wrong with living, working, and existing for the benefit of someone else's vision? If you don't see it, I'll never be able to show it to you.
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I can speak French, I live in Quebec, I am used to people randomly switching languages in mid-conversation, and even I think using a French quote untranslated while speaking English is pretentious.
As if the rest of that comment isn’t?
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I mean, they also love battle, drove the Dunlendings out of their (the Dunlendings') ancestral lands, and literally hunted Ghan-buri-Ghan's folk "like beasts". The Rohirrim may be white and free, but peaceful?
I could definitely have been more clear on this point :). In the books they are essentially Vikings on horses who have "settled down" in recent decades but still have an ornery pillaging streak. In the movies they are made to seem more passive, though not pacifist.
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In modern parlance this is mostly peaceful
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Perfectly peaceful. Extremely peaceful! Just need to kill their enemies first.
As Tacitus said: "They make a desert and call it peace"
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Mostly peaceful.
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This is fundamentally wrong. The whole point of the LoTR world is that things keep getting worse and, although you may win the day, in the long run everything is cooked, as it were. Evil keeps coming back, it gets defeated every time one way or another, but things are worse off than they used to be despite the ""victory"". Restoration is impossible. We can never make things as good as our fathers had it. The elves wither and go to the uttermost West. The race of hobbits fails. The dwarves die in their mines. The ents disappear. Lorien dies.
Hard disagree. Evil keeps coming back because the Elves give up on Middle Earth. But even as evil comes back it is less potent: Morgoth was the true baddy, Sauron is but a servant. Saruman becomes a lesser version of his former greatness when he turns to evil, and even his voice fails him. He becomes a mean beggar by the end.
Nonsense. The elves had already fought several wars against evil by the time LotR happens.
The elves give up on middle earth because the cost of defeating sauron was the destruction of the rings, which destroyed the elvish realms and power. The choice of the elves was to leave middle earth or fade into wraiths. None of this is a matter of opinion, it's literally what Tolkein wrote.
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I think the vanishing of the elves and all of that was more to express the author's nostalgia for a preindustrialized past or some such. It's not so much that the world becomes darker over time, but more that the magic goes away. This could also be seen as reflective of childhood nostalgia, perhaps, a theme that was popular in Victorian fiction and which Tolkien was probably influenced by. Of course, these ideas interact with the themes about good vs. evil in certain ways, but I would say that the overall idea presented is more nuanced and indefinite than 'the world becomes increasingly evil'. One of the story points is that while good becomes increasingly degraded, evil does as well, with Sauron being much weaker than Morgoth and so forth. It's an arc from fantasy to mundanity, until evil is represented by your bland cubicle boss.
This is probably more true for the fate of the hobbits than that of the elves.
Of course, Arda has literally gotten darker since the days of the two lamps.
It's not just the magic going away - the dwarves and the hobbits are also gone. Numenor is under the seas and middle Earth kind of sucks compared to numenor.
It doesn't become increasingly evil. Nevertheless, it becomes ineffably worse.
I'd say the earlier era seem to have had greater contrasts, so that while Numenor and such have died off, so to have all the evil dragons and whatever that demon in Moria was. Good and evil were more distinct and individually potent, embodied by externalized creatures, whereas, as Middle Earth evolves towards the recognizable world, they collapse more towards a unitary point embodied by individual men (e.g. Boromir and Denethor). That is the main thrust of the matter I perceive, as far as its tendency towards one state or the other.
And if Middle Earth is literally darker, it is because it represents the world as an adult perceives it and not a little boy.
Which makes sense because eyesight literally becomes much weaker with age. Far fewer photons reach the retina. When a middle aged or older person feels the world is getting darker and darker, there's structural basis for that.
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With the march of the ents, "doom" should be interpreted to mean their destiny, not necessarily their destruction.
That is not how it reads:
"Of course, it is likely enough, my friends," he said slowly, "likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts; and that is why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve. Now at least the last march of the Ents may be worth a song."
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