Exile commented on ‘Within a Harvester of Souls’ May-6-2020 2:53 PM UTC
James, the dilemma of preaching tribalism to half-individuals is something I've stumbled over in writing about identity and tribalism but never had distilled the way you do here.
It's something a lot of political outlaws struggle with in preparing for Whatever Comes Next.
The "mannerbund" concept, the band-of-brothers, is a necessary step. More "self-actualized" men need to help bring the others along.
We're truly starting from scratch - reforming the masculine hunter-bands before we can make a proper tribe with women & children in tow.
Guys worried about tribal issues like how we tackle the Woman Question or "who's allowed in our tribe" should worry about forming the tribe first.
I'm a believer in folkish society but the folk-forming process is just getting underway and individual men have to learn to stop crawling before they walk together.
In our post-parental public school hellscape, one-on-one friendships are how that gets done and the better man has to be willing to give a lesser brother a hand up.
James responded on May-6-2020 at 6:20 PM:
Very well put, Exile.
If you would note that in Bandit, I found that the term band has ancient Arуan roots that mean to bind a physical garment, a man by oath and a slave by force or condemnation and that the band of Germanic brothers of feudal Europe would be hijacked and enslaved and turned into a band of bound convicts digging ditches, or slave soldiers marched around and shot in bright uniforms for the pleasure of kings.
As cited in A Babylonian Woe, nations of ethnic type have been hijacked by international money interests to farm people for profit since antiquity. It goes without saying that a nation with no explicit racial identity [and there is none in the founding documents of the U.S. as proven in The Greatest Lie Ever Told] is going to be that much easier to corrupt for international interests.
The way that traditional warrior societies in crisis have in the past, combated the evil merchant matrix, was through "societies." A society was an alliance network of like-honored men willing to cross ethnic, religious and political lines in service to higher purposes. The two best examples are the crusading orders that attempted to redeem Christendom against traitor potentates working as agents for bankers, and societies of Amerindian warriors willing to work across tribal lines to battle the ever-encroaching nothingness of the slave matrix, even as drunken chiefs and Christianized women sold out to the enemy.
Do you see the corruption here, that the word for an honorable association, being society, has been bloated and corrupted to include all humans in a certain economic zone.
These efforts failed, specifically, with every such society of men—like Tolkien's rangers, who don't get snuffed because its fantasy but repose as a society harboring a true king—doomed to be betrayed to the enemy by their traitor kings. However, these doomed warrior associations do help usher in the next age with some gaps, cryptic niches if you will, where criminals might operate, and who in their turn keep alive the network of shadows that might once again be navigated by moral men.
This is earth, the world, so evil will always win.
But as long as men can struggle in the shadows cast by the soul eating beast of Civilization there remains a chance that humanity might avoid its assigned fate, of being domesticated into 100% moral chattel.
What is necessary is to be able to navigate the evil laws of Civilization, such as RICO statutes and social distancing edicts, which persecute free association. We cannot bring any of the trappings of civilization into masculine society lest we be caught up in them like a weir. If anything more than a handshake or a bond of word and deed between men is needed than that will be the net that culls another segment of the tiny number of earthlings who remain human. I'm estimating that at this point, 90% of women and 80% of men are not human beings and have no soul and no chance of developing one, that they are just fresh-meat zombies who exist to permit us to be hunted down by the puppeteers who dangle them from their glaringly visible strings.
I agree that a society of informal law & custom, oral over written tradition, discretionary judgment over black-letter process, is a key revival/replacement we need to make the step from individualism to a functional folkish society - the sort of "council of elders" that Slavic, Teutonic and Celtic tribes had in the pre-Christian era. Also the way most ad-hoc bands of brothers get things done - even where one man has one vote, leaders tend to carry the day.
Frank Herbert, the writer of the Dune books, stated it like this:
"Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time."
Some evolutionary psych guys theorize that reason evolved as a means to persuade others and foster group action more than "finding truth." When the tribe found itself under bad/oppressive leadership, "beta males" would band together to overthrow Og the Feckless, Cruel or Stupid using their reasoning/rhetorical faculties.
In the natural order, the bad leader gets tossed into the Tiber and a new king and his war-band step take the throne.
The modern, formalized check-and-balance, process-oriented, black-letter legalized society is an unnatural perpetuation of this "state of emergency." It perpetuates the rule of greasy-tongued priests rather than warriors, scholars and merchants rather than providers & craftsmen.
Thanks so much for this and the original prompt.