Victory and Vengeance

Eventually, One Must Choose

---

Please note: This is a long post with many footnotes. It may get cut short by your email service (especially if you’re on gmail). If you have this problem, you may read the full article in your Substack client, or at http://jdanielsawyer.substack.com

---

John Carter, provocateur extraordinaire who often manages to write think-pieces that are as original and fascinating as they are trollish and maddening, has joined a growing chorus of voices in the culture war who have recognized a growing thirst for revenge among those pushed out and pushed down over the last decade by the cultural movement usually known as “wokeness.”¹

You can find his essay here.

Justice and credibility, he and his ilk argue, demand that those opposed to the reigning clique of cultural and political bozos become what they’ve beheld and start aggressively employing a tit-for-tat ethic—if not a scorched-Earth ethic—when it comes to “cancellation.”

For our supposes, I define “cancellation” as a sort of public humiliation ritual whereby the mob is set on a person for untoward utterances or behavior. The purpose of the ritual is to invade a person’s personal sphere (career, family, relationships, etc.) in such a threatening way that they are either ruined in public life (however small their role) or they “step back in line” with the values of those doing the cancelling.

Carter, if I read him correctly, is calling for the legitimization of these tactics as a kind of message violence: If you publicly humiliate the old lady with the objectionable political views that works at Home Depot, and find a way to get her fired, you’re sending a message to the people that would do the same to you. The fact that the old lady’s behavior is unprofessional and rude helps your cause. The fact that the views about which she was unprofessional and rude are pretty damn common makes the prospect of meting out message violence upon her seem that much more delicious to those who have decided they’ve “had enough of this shit.”

Carter is an unapologetic, and quite articulate, right- winger who slots somewhere in the neo-fascist reactionary spectrum while still seeming to hold pretty tightly to American ideals of non-totalitarianism, social solidarity, and individual liberty. If I read his essay correctly, he believes a severe backlash—all the way into fascist near-totalitarian territory—is required to correct the ship of State enough for normal intra-cultural squabbling to resume. Even though I do not agree with him on this, if you grant the implicit Hegelian priors for the sake of argument, I don’t have an a priori problem with his logic.²

While the freethinking contingent³ on Substack has responded, and will be responding, with a range of columns which tackle the subject from a variety of angles—everything from the practical workings of violence to the moral validity of premeditated sadism—there’s another issue that, as a history buff and a novelist, really sticks out to me about the whole situation.

Morality and Revenge

As explained by Carter and echoed by a number of those who have approvingly amplified his article, the central issue at stake is revenge. Years of watching those you identify with being ground under the boot heel (or of being subject to it yourself), is enough to stoke anyone’s desire for revenge.

I buy that. And, frankly, I don’t have a problem with it. We have evolved the instinct for revenge for very good reasons: the most basic form of peace is the peace of the jungle—the implicit understanding between powerful parties that if you raid my village, I will raid yours (but I’ll do it worse).

It is the fear of vengeance that is the first line of defense against violence, and we—all of us—use it all the time to manage our interpersonal relations. Because of the culture we live in, we’re usually not cutting people up, beating them, trading gunshots, or even trading punches, but we do hurl disapproval and displays of irritation, and we all use personal leverage all the time.

If you think you don’t, ask your loved ones in a context where you’re sure they won’t be afraid to lie to you. The reason they love you is because you bring value to their lives—any time value is present, the fear of its loss or perversion is also present. Social interaction is policed, always and everywhere, at a low level, with the threat of revenge.

And, sometimes (in our world, the need is thankfully rare), direct revenge is appropriate—but there’s a relational⁴ catch:

The cycle of revenge must not escalate.

There are only two ways to accomplish this (and they are not always successful):

First, you can mete out scrupulously proportional revenge and make sure your enemy understands exactly what is happening and why—and that it will stop, permanently, the moment the scales are balanced.

Second, you can escalate so egregiously that your enemy either winds up dead or winds up so terrified of you that he’ll never are cross you again.⁵

Anything else, and you’re better of forgoing revenge entirely.

In the midst of his essay, Carter advocates—rather viscerally—for those who have previously used dirty tactics (like cancellation, political imprisonment, etc.) against his team to receive the same and worse in return. He advocates this partly to slake his team’s hunger for vengeance, and partly as a sort of message violence:

To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement. She must be made to taste it, and gag, and swallow nonetheless. She must be made to weep burning tears. She must be traumatized, and made to understand that this is what she did, that these are the rules of engagement that she established, that these are the consequences of loss in this awful game that she has forced all of us to play. She needs to beg for the game to end, for the rules to change.

This is not as out-of-the-blue as it might at first seem. If you read about the parts of history you’re shown in school, you’ll know that in times of revolution and/or the retreat of a conqueror it is de rigeur for those who collaborated with the regime to be subject to such humiliations literally, and to others (such as being stripped naked and slathered in sewage, tarred and feathered over bare skin, have all the hair on one’s body publicly shaved off, and being tied in all these states to a public pillory for passers-by to spit on, throw rotten food at, or smash literal shit into one’s face).

This happens predictably in a window of a few days to a couple weeks following the revolution and/or conqueror’s withdrawal, and the purpose of such activities is twofold:

1. To allow the newly-freed downtrodden some measure of revenge, and

2. To punish collaborators as a form of message violence: “This is what happens to collaborators around here, so don’t you dare think about siding with any regime against your own people.”

For a depiction of these rituals, see the Dutch WW2 espionage thriller Black Book.

So far, so understandable. But “understandable” and “having a justifying historical precedent” is not the same thing as “wise.”

Flies in the Vengeful Ointment

In war, victory often goes to the canny, the wise, and the careful. Only rarely does it go to the impulsive, the undisciplined, or the self-indulgent. This is not just because literal warfare involves complicated logistics, it is because all warfare is much less about the fighting than it is about the ability to predict one’s adversary. As Sun Tzu famously said:

Every battle is won before it is ever fought.
—The Art of War

Therefore, when fighting your enemy it is wise, at a minimum, to subjugate one’s felt desires for revenge and the joy of battle to the strategic needs of one’s war. Self-reflection and self-discipline are paramount, even in a conflict as trivial as a fistfight. Outside of an actual game (be it a boxing match or a hand of poker), “winning” is not a condition that magically materializes when one finally achieves one’s objective.

Conflict is a social game, and that means that, unless you actually literally kill all your enemies and all those who might sympathize with them, you cannot retain your winnings unless you earn the respect (if not the good will, though that helps a lot, too) of the people you defeat.

I have heard it said from time to time⁶ (Carter is not the first) that right-wing violence is scarier than left-wing violence because the qualities that predispose a person to conservatism (conscientiousness, self-discipline, valuing delayed gratification) predispose one to deliberate, strategic, and effective action that is unlikely to slip out of one’s control.

If you’re familiar with the foundational work on authoritarianism in the 20th century, you’ll recognize this clever turn-of-thought as quietly affirming the old saw about how “there are no left-wing authoritarians” because left-wingers are, by definition, freethinking, anti-establishment, disorganized, and couldn’t actually coordinate their own socks, let alone a repressive regime or an effective revolution. And, alongside it, you’ll hear the not-quite-whispered-anymore argument that “right-wing authoritarianism isn’t all that bad, though.”

Well, why wouldn’t it be all that bad?

The “right” is the “right” because they’re “right” about human limitation, human morality, and human flourishing, you see, so of course a right-wing authoritarian regime that prevented toxic ideas from being expressed in public would result in a happier and better and freer world for everybody (at least who was willing to take their cues about their morality from politicians).⁷ The right-wing State would exercise its power and moral authority for the benefit of the nation, not to advance corruption and crack-pot ideologies…right?

As Steve Stewart-Williams and several others have pointed out at soporific length over the past several years, this dogma about how only right-wingers can be effective authoritarians came from psychologists who hailed from Trotskyist and other dissident-left circles, and their biases dramatically colored their research and conclusions. It does Carter and his partisans no credit that they buy the half of the calumny that they consider laudable while pointing out (correctly) that, actually, left-wing authoritarianism is quite a big thing and it almost destroyed the world not-that-long ago.

But, contra this attitude, right-wing authoritarianism is nothing to sneeze at, as the barest glance in the direction of, for example, 1920s-1940s Imperial Japan will show you in frightening relief.

Cruelty and Sadism

In our current vernacular, we frequently equate cruelty and sadism—they seem equally morally anathema, and they seem like semantic equivalents. It may shock you, then, to learn that cruelty was prized by political theorists from the ancient world onwards as an important virtue in a ruler, while sadism⁸ was seen as evidence of low character.

And, if you squint closely enough at what each term describes, you might be able to see why.

Both terms relate to brutality—the raw, unsympathetic use of power against another creature. But each of them have a different relationship to brutality.

We call someone “cruel” when they tell us truths we don’t want to hear, when they make decisions and/or take actions that result in harm, trauma, or death, and they do so without a great deal of self-torture. A “cruel” person isn’t exactly “callous”—this latter term implies a sort of reckless and total disregard for the consequences of one’s actions—but he is resolute in his brutality, and willing to do the uncongenial thing he deems necessary because it is necessary. Whether engaging in “tough love” by intervening with an alcoholic friend, or in lopping off the head of a treasoner, the brutality employed is exactly that which is necessary and called for by the situation at hand. The ancients also characterized forces of nature as “cruel” for the same reason—they were “unassailable by pity.”⁹

Sadism, on the other hand, does not do the hard or harsh thing because it is necessary, for a sadist cares nothing whatsoever for necessity. A sadist engages in the infliction of pain, anguish, humiliation, etc. because it is fun.

To one degree or another, we’ve all got a little sadism in us—there’s a little corner in every mind (and that corner is bigger in some minds than in others) that delights in the thought of seeing our enemies (or any creature) burned alive, skinned alive, and otherwise tortured. It is no coincidence that torture has, for at least as long as humans have had writing, been a great public entertainment and spectacle, nor that things like executions and torture only retreated behind official curtains once we could get our fill of these things at the movie theater and on the TV screen. Our capacity for sadism is part of our hunting drive—it is also something that gives us consolation when we are powerless.

Invariably, the person for whom sadism is a prominent character feature or defining preoccupation is one for whom life is such an overwhelming misery¹⁰ that the greatest imaginable solace comes in fantasies of tying a cat to a tree, dousing the cat with gasoline, and setting it alight (or anything analogous).

Many of the great leaders of the past who were known for their cruelty are also those who were known for their nobility and magnanimity and mercy. For example: Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Victoria, Benjamin Disraeli, etc.

Leaders of the past who were known for their sadism are also usually known for their failures as leaders—Adolph Hitler, Nero, Caligula, Tiberius (at least according to Suetonius), Tamerlane, Robespierre, Pol Pot, etc.

It is so rare to find a leader who is both a thoroughgoing sadist and competent that I can only come up with three off the top of my head: Joseph Stalin, Mao, and Genghis Khan.

Fit to Rule

I have long maintained (on this Substack and elsewhere) that “culture wars” are essentially a branch of the entertainment business, used to distract the public from politics (or to camouflage politics when distraction is impossible).

As I pointed out in my article The Last American Illusion, the nature of politics is violent, because politics is the discipline of apportioning, exercising, and restraining power.

The most basic of all political questions is “Who’s in charge here?”

Close on its heels is the one that the United States is currently fighting a very slow-rolling, fairly un-violent (so far) civil war over:

Who is fit to rule?

The art of political revolution is a pretty simple one. It takes nothing but the right bit of demagoguery and some clever and dependable counter-intuitive manipulation moves to whip people up into the kind of white-hot frenzy that make them buy things, or cast a vote, or fight as if their life depends on it. Humans are panicky creatures, and engaging their fear response (which, in addition to anxiety and terror, also encompasses less-obvious defensive emotions such as anger, greed, rage, vengeance, self-righteousness, and moral fervor) is trivially easy. Saul Alinksy showed how to pull it off,¹¹ and he was but one in a long line of salesmen, priests, prophets, and politicians who’ve figured out the same bag of tricks over the course of human history.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a democracy or a monarchy or a fascist dictatorship, if you can whip the right people into a directed fear-frenzy, you can take power. Given how many discontents there are in even the healthiest of political systems, it is worth considering that “fomenting revolution” and “uniting the grievance holders” are rarely the chief obstacles to political change.

Instead, the chief obstacle is that basic question:

Who is fit to rule?

Sure, Grievance Monger Bob has a wave of people behind him—but do you really want to be ruled by a guy whose whole shtick is resentment and revenge?

I doubt it.

A guy like that—and especially the followers from whom he draws his power—are too small-minded to be trusted. An angry, vengeful regime (or person, or movement) will only be able to exercise power when practicing revenge, so its reign will be marked by an ongoing series of revenge-acts as it moves from one convenient target to another in order to keep its legitimacy afloat.

This exact dynamic played out in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia where both regimes, having been led to power by cadres of charismatic, canny, and vengeful people who capitalized on widespread cultural grievances (many of which were valid in nature, if not in form) found themselves at loose ends when it came to actually exercising power.

In both cases, their base only trusted the revolutionary power so long as that power could make with the goods where revenge was concerned. Sure, Hitler and Lenin (and later Stalin) had loads of vengeance-lust on their own personal slates as well, but all found themselves in a position where they couldn’t maintain power unless they kept making human sacrifices out of their subjects in order to appease the broad-based resentment that they unlocked in the populace (which was the source of their continued legitimacy).

Such regimes do not last, because they can’t. Margaret Thatcher once said that the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money. Similarly, the problem with political grievance as a power base is that eventually you run out of other people to kill.¹²

However, if the underlying culture is sufficiently degraded—such as happened in a number of African republics during the colonial era, the result of which reared its ugly head after the withdrawal of the European colonial hand—the expiration of one vengeful tyranny can give rise to an attempt by the follow-on regime to balance the scales through making war on another part of the population (usually those credibly associated with the previous regime’s elites). The game theoretic rules of such a situation quickly become locked in, as after two or three cycles it becomes clear that one can not afford to ever risk losing power; if one loses power one also loses one’s property and one’s life (and, frequently, sacrifices the lives and/or fortunes of one’s spouse, parents, children, friends, and extended family in the bargain).

Such cycles of unlimited revenge fueled the English civil wars. They have also, in non-governmental contexts, played out numerous times on American soil. The clan war between the Hatfields and the McCoys was such a revenge cycle, as were the Gang Wars in Chicago and New York, as were a number of the grudge-match tribal wars among the Native Americans that plagued the American West as the pioneers were moving in.¹³

This is why we have a cultural taboo against punishing one’s political enemies (even if it sometimes means they literally get away with murder). Alas, it is a taboo that has, at this point in our history, been leveraged for tremendous corruption at all levels and on all sides, but if one intends to break it, one would be well-advised to pay attention to why it’s there so that one doesn’t accidentally pull the rip-cord on our civilization.

Indeed, there is only one thing that can prevent that kind of cyclical political hellscape, and it’s not “tit-for-tat” morality, nor is it “Burn it all down and reset the system.”

The antidote to the current culture-war ills is something we haven’t seen in this country in a long time:

Leadership.

Not Above It

Which brings me to the reason why I am not in the slightest bit impressed by cancel culture, either as a threat or as a strategy:

People who are in charge don’t use it. Instead, people use it when they want to punish the powerful but they’re too weak to actually fight them. People who are nominally in power, but not in charge, will use it in order to forestall being deposed. Mao only invented his version of it—the Cultural Revolution—because he couldn’t keep hold of the political power he’d won the first time around.

Looking back at the Long March Through the Institutions which culminated in the Maoist struggle-sessions, de-platforming, firings, de-banking, and other totalitarian fuckwittery we’ve grown accustomed to over the last decade, it’s worth noticing that all of it has been conducted by those who have no talent, accomplishment, prestige, or what we might trivializingly call “merit,” against those who do. It’s the revenge of the mediocre against the exceptional for the crime of being exceptional (whether due to outsize talent or outsize success or outsize courage or outsize disagreeability).

It’s a bitch move.

And it cannot win.

Think for a moment about those revenge-based regimes I mentioned earlier. Consider, too, the vindictive people in your life, past or present: the petty dictators, the Karens, the nit-picky rule followers, the tattle-tales. Do you think, for a moment, that any one of them is capable of actually handling the responsibility of leadership?

And, if you actually know one who is, is he or she the kind of person that you would trust if you were subject to his or her leadership?

Of course not.

There’s a reason we call the vindictive person small-minded: their focus is on the micro, on their own feelings, on their own needs, often even at the expense of their own interests and goals. They usually bring little value to the world—instead, they merely seek to have their internal psychological demons (their pains, their inadequacies, their traumas) assuaged by hurting it.

I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you.
—Khan Noonian Singh

Life is rough, and it can be unbearably cruel. People who have, for one reason or another, been sent so far down the trail of pain that they feel they must have revenge and must deputize others to help them take it, who have felt so keenly the boot-heel that they want to get someone else on the ground and stomp them in the face while screaming HOW DOES IT FEEL, MOTHERFUCKER?!?, will not be satisfied with revenge…

…because revenge isn’t what they really want.

What they’re aching for is hope. Especially hope from a source they can trust.

And nobody trusts a resentful bitch.

Nobody trusts a resentful movement.

Because almost everybody has dealt with somebody who is ruled by their resentment, and they know from bitter experience that such people are not to be trusted.

I’m not going to blow sunshine up your ass and claim that I think “people should be above those horrible tactics,” because I don’t. Nobody is above it, and I’m frankly uninterested in the morality of it anyway, because morality depends always and exactly on how you construe the “in-group.” Anything can be counted as moral (and legitimately so) if you start from the right priors and draw the right boundaries.

So, while I could make a moral argument here, I won’t. You believe you’re in a war for your culture and your nation? I believe I’m in a war for my civilization and for the generations that come after me. So warrior to warrior, here’s how you win any power game that depends on legitimacy—and not just win “for now,” but win “for keeps”:

Lead.

That’s it.

To turn the tide on cancel culture, to bring freedom of thought, decency and proportionality, honesty in relationships, etc. into public repute again, one must be willing to lead.

Leaders do not have the luxury of indulging in revenge. They must instead reign in their sadism and become magnanimous and cruel—not, as John Carter argues, after they’ve won, but as their primary and ultimate means to victory.

This is not a matter of fighting with “one hand tied behind your back.” Instead, this is bringing a gun to a knife-fight. Knife-fights are bloody, and exhilarating, and great for indulging the blood-lust, but the person who dispatches his enemy efficiently and so doesn’t have to go into the knife fight is the one who wins.

The man who leads well employs a weapon that has, from time to time, outdone the strongest empires on Earth:

Moral authority.

Moral authority:
The quality of so inspiring admiration that one has the advantage in every engagement, even with an enemy who is willing to fight dirty.

The people who ultimately legitimize any ruler at any scale—those NPCs who make up 90+% of the human race because they, quite reasonably, don’t give a shit about anything beyond their ability to live their lives, and so outsource their morality and epistemology to those whom they believe are smarter or wiser—see a person with moral authority as an example to follow, and an exemplar of the things they value…even if they weren’t at first on his side.

Caesar was not acclaimed by the mob because he eviscerated his enemies (either foreign or domestic). He gained superior respect because he treated his enemies as honored heroes whom he was privileged to fight. In giving the devils their due, so to speak, he showed that he was magnanimous and cruel, but not sadistic. He was ruled by his interests, not his emotions. He was disciplined, and honorable, and a good sportsman. This basket of qualities—cruelty, honor, sportsmanship, interest-based decision making, self-discipline, etc.—are what we, in aggregate, call nobility.

Our culture is desperate for adults who can model these qualities, because our leadership class (in all contexts and at all levels) has been bereft of them for a long time. The next turning of the wheel will is upon us, and this game is easily winnable by the first group that, having a positive vision and a reputation for refraining from sadism, nastiness, and self-dealing, stands up and says: “Let’s build something amazing.”

So if you want to defeat your enemy, whoever he is, in whatever arena, you would do well to bear in mind the wise words below:

Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly.
—Robert A. Heinlein

If you can do that, you may find that, in the end, you are fit to rule.

---

Support My Writing

Drawing on my background as a novelist, filmmaker, audiobook producer, and FX artist, my life-long study of history and psychology, as well as my thirty-years-plus experience in fringe communities, I publish articles a couple times a week on history, art, geopolitics, and maker stuff (blacksmithing, carpentry, etc.) You can find one (or many) of each sort by hitting the links on each of those four terms. This column is a non-trivial part of how I make my living, and my supporters literally saved my life earlier this year.

When not writing articles for Substack, I write novels and how-to books, host a podcast about writing and creativity, and spend the rest of my time blacksmithing, fixing things, and walking in the forest. You can find everything else that I do apart from this Substack at http://www.jdsawyer.net

1. i.e. the semi-coherent elite-wannabe ideology that reflexively champions the outsider over the insider, that seeks always to put one or another cultural fringe in the spotlight, and that demands ideological conformity to their shibboleths-of-the-moment as a prerequisite for respectability.

2. The Hegelian priors which appear to be involved: The pendulum must swing back in order for society to find a balance; the leftward ratchet of cultural opinion is artificially enforced from the top and is preventing the proper unfolding of the cultural dialectic, that “left” and “right” are meaningful conceptions in the fight between Carter and his enemies, and that one wins cultural battles through revolutionary vigilantism directed at the hoi polli.

It will surprise nobody who’s read my other work that I don’t actually agree with these Hegelian priors, but I am a big believer on engaging people on their own turf before I drag them on to mine. I’m stepping onto Carter’s turf here, so accepting his Hegelian priors for the sake of argument is the polite thing to do.

3. i.e. those that are not exactly on the right or the left, but have found themselves pushed into intense dialogue with the fertile ideological field of the New Right as a result of cultural changes that have homogenized the most vocal contingents of the left wing, which is where all the fun weird-thought action used to be, once upon a time.

4. I say “relational” to make it clear that I am divorcing this issue from legality—revenge, especially proportional revenge for serious or extreme injury—is almost never legal in our world and you’re opening up a can of trouble when you indulge it.

5. This is, by the way, what you’re doing when you use the legal system to punish someone who has wronged you.

6. I first ran into it in the writings of leftish science fiction author David Brin, and later heard it repeated endlessly by Tim Pool and other popular pundits. As Goebbels said: repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.

7. Camus handily refuted this argument in his allegorical novel The Plague, which is a must-read for anyone interested in the sociodynamics of authoritarianism.

8. In the years before the Marquis de Sade inspired the world it was called a variety of things, including-but-not-limited-to “degeneracy,” “decadence,” “meanness,” “blood-lust,” and “wanton cruelty.”

9. This turn of phrase has been shamelessly cribbed from J.R.R. Tolkien.

10. I cut from this sentence a long list of reasons this can be the case, all of which bring to my mind two or three obvious examples which led to rampant sadism. Overwhelming misery is the common denominator in all of them.

11. One of his lesser-appreciated lessons: Pick tactics that your followers will enjoy.

12. Or expropriate, or inter, or torture, or exile, or humiliate, etc.

13. Mohandas Ghandi once described this kind of revenge cycle by saying “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” but he was incorrect—Hammurabi, who in instituted exact retributive justice through the presence of this exact phrase in his legal code, aimed at preventing this kind of cycle from emerging in his empire (an endeavor in which he was, so far as we can tell, completely successful).