Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Return of the Great Men

Feb. 27, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

19:03

The Return of the Great Men

This video is an IQ test. If you think it's about Putin, you failed. Get Islander #3 here: https://shop.lotuseaters.com/

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	There is currently a panic in Europe as the European politicians find themselves to be surrounded by foreign powers which fundamentally do not agree with them on how the world ought to be governed.
	We have been treated to headlines from elite publications such as Foreign Policy magazine or the Financial Times informing us that the US is now the enemy of the West and yes, America is Europe's enemy now.
	These are headlines I never thought I would see in my lifetime and it's become apparent to me that the dividing line between who is a friend and who is an enemy is no longer being drawn on the traditional demarcations of the post-World War II liberal order.
	In fact, Ursula von der Leyen and the EU sees the rules-based order as being under siege by a kind of politics that they can only describe as far-right because they do not understand it.
	It is in fact so far out of the scope of their comprehension and what they would consider to be acceptable that it thrusts them into a realm of such profound uncertainty that this becomes something akin to a catastrophe to them, even though materially not much has changed and indeed things may well get better.
	In Ideology and Utopia, Hungarian sociologist Carl Mannheim addresses the question of whether there can be a science of politics.
	In his evaluation, he describes how the drive of the bourgeois liberals to create a science of politics would bring into being the rules-based order of the European Union.
	Science requires its answers to be necessary and predictable.
	If I add this chemical to that chemical, I will always see a certain kind of chemical reaction.
	If I heat this metal to this temperature, then I will always be able to bend it with such and such amount of force, and so on.
	This requires a mechanical set of materials to work upon, and whilst it may accurately describe our ability to manipulate the natural world, it does not fully encompass our ability to deal with our fellow man.
	Though he was writing in 1929 and the European Union wouldn't probably begin to be assembled until 1948, the general concept of a united Europe was present in the beginning of the 20th century, and Europe's bourgeois intellectuals had been diligently working towards it.
	Mannheim accurately presaged how the European Union would end up functioning because of the ideology and worldview of the bourgeois liberal and how that informed the necessary methods that they would have to use to accomplish their goal.
	Mannheim noted that their desire was to rationalize European politics, that is, to create logical systems which would ensure predictable results, to create certainty in the face of uncertainty.
	As he put it, every social process may be divided into a rationalized sphere consisting of settled and routinized procedures in dealing with situations that recur in an orderly fashion, and the irrational by which it is surrounded.
	We are therefore distinguishing between the rationalized structure of society and the irrational matrix.
	The chief characteristic of modern culture is the tendency to include as much as possible in the realm of the rational and bring it under administrative control, and, on the other hand, to reduce the irrational element to the vanishing point.
	This ordering of the world is present all around us now, and it has its virtues.
	Some things ought to be bureaucratized to ensure that they function well and do what they are supposed to.
	Mannheim gives us the example of travel as a realm in which bureaucratization is useful.
	As he says, The traveller of 150 years ago was exposed to a thousand accidents.
	Today, everything proceeds according to schedule.
	Fare is exactly calculated, and a whole series of administrative measures have made travel into a rationally controlled enterprise.
	And this is useful.
	You want to know when you're going to get to your destination and how much it's going to cost you.
	And this also allows Mannheim to differentiate between the concepts of behaviour and conduct.
	As he says, The perception of the distinction between the rationalized scheme and the irrational setting in which it operates provides the possibility for a definition of the concept conduct.
	Conduct, in the sense which we use it, does not begin until we reach the area where rationalization has not yet penetrated, where we are forced to make decisions in situations which have as yet not been subjected to regulation.
	What Mannheim means with his reference to conduct is the development of a person's character.
	It is only outside of the preordained system of rules in which people's conduct must be self-regulated in such a way in which their character develops.
	In all other ways, the system has decreed for them externally how they ought to behave in any given situation, and so this decision-making power has been taken out of their hands.
	It is only where the rationalized system stops that character can begin to form.
	The desire to rationalize all of society, all human interaction, to create a set of rules which would govern each person's behaviour, what we would otherwise call a social contract, is the primary desire of the bourgeois liberal, and the European Union is the most explicit form of that project.
	There is a reason that Europe is creaking under the weight of a million unnecessary regulations put upon it by a political body whose entire mandate is based on the increasing regulation of every aspect of life.
	This is also why the bureaucracies that make up the European Union are so fundamentally characterless.
	They are lifeless, dull, uninspiring, devoid of personality.
	Nobody can love the bureaucracy, even if they are totally dependent upon it and have been shaped and molded by it for their entire lives.
	Their only attachment to it is out of fear of losing the personal security and material benefits that it provides.
	Ursula von der Leyen is very explicit about what she calls this rules-based international order and how this is something that ought to encompass all of mankind through the United Nations.
	And as she explained in a speech in 2022, Russia is betraying that rational agreement.
	This is an attack against the entire UN Charter.
	Putin has even asked in his speech on annexation, and I quote, who did ever agree on a rules-based global order?
	End of quote.
	Well, the Russians did, certainly.
	They did it when they signed the UN Charter, just like all other nations of the world, and when they negotiated the Helsinki final act.
	The rules-based global order belongs to the world.
	It is the best antidote against perpetual instability in all continents.
	And all nations in the world see this.
	To have a seamless and integrated political system means that every challenge becomes a crisis which threatens to undo the entire project.
	If something were to go wrong, then everything that relied upon that faulty link in the chain breaks as well.
	There is no robustness in such a system, because its inorganic nature renders it as something that has to be governed by specialists and technicians and cannot be dealt with on the ground level by the mass of unspecialized laymen.
	This makes it rigid and oppressively stable and completely inflexible.
	In his infamous book The End of History and the Last Man, political theorist Francis Fukuyama describes how he expected these rationalized liberal democracies to be the final form of government as he felt they satisfied all of the needs expressed by Plato in his theory of the tripartite soul.
	Plato believed that the human soul was separated into three parts the epithemeticon, the appetite, which deals with our bodily desires, the logisticon, our reason, which deals with rational thought, and the thymoothes, the spirit, which deals with conflict in the social realm and encompasses our concepts of honour, challenge, and victory.
	Fukuyama anglicizes this as thymos, which I will also use just because it's easy to say.
	It's obvious to see why our reason would prefer a rationalized system.
	The rational system is after all the product of our reason.
	It has been logically constructed by our reason, and the conclusions of it can be deduced from its premises.
	It is the very nature of reason to create such things.
	And moreover, as Hume observed, reason is forever the slave of the passions, and so the rationalised system is put into place to serve the appetites of people for food, shelter, protection, pleasure, etc.
	These two things meld together naturally to create a predictable state of comfort and safety.
	Liberal democracy and the rules-based international order, as exemplified by the European Union, the UN, the World Economic Forum, etc., is viewed by Fukuyama to bring about what he terms the end of history.
	This is not an end of events as such, but an end of great power politics, in which states would clash on the world stage and wars are fought over irrational causes.
	It is a world in which the entire life of man is rationalized and individualized so that he is just himself alone and every system in the world recognizes him in this way.
	However, Fukuyama never satisfactorily dealt with the issue of thymos.
	He assumed that the desire for recognition, status, honour, respect and greatness could all be achieved within the rules-based system of a liberal democracy.
	But it's becoming apparent that this is simply not the case.
	Often a person's status is not just tied to a numerical evaluation of their individual person, but instead their sentimental position in a cohesive tribal group.
	You have to choose now between Davos or Westminster.
	Davos.
	Why?
	Because Westminster is too constrained.
	Westminster is just a tribal shouting place.
	It's also become clear that a sizable portion of the population views the rules-based bureaucratic order as being itself a form of oppression and seek to get out from under its dominion.
	These people just aren't satisfied by liberal democracy in the way that Fukuyama expected them to be, and so we must look elsewhere for explanations.
	Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle proposed what has become known as the Great Man of History theory in his 1841 book On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History.
	Though much derided by liberal historians, Carlyle was probably onto something here, as he famously viewed history as the biography of great men whose unusual virtues and strong characters allowed them to rise to positions of power which they then could use to reshape the world according to their abilities.
	Carlyle's theory is a non-material, non-rational view of how man operates in the world and is fundamentally rooted in the thymotic part of the human soul.
	These men spring from that part which desires respect, recognition, dignity, power, and majesty.
	And we have been witnessing the conflict between rationalistic and thymotic politics for years now.
	Where the rules-based order sought to bring about the end of history and the rationalization of politics, the irrational great men of Carlisle's theory appear to be rising up and conquering to exercise their thymotic wills on the world stage and settle the problems that we have in the way they see fit.
	The term far-right is a description for this kind of thymotic politics, which cares about the dignity and integrity of peoples and groups, which considers itself to feel a certain way and holds sentimental attitudes to the things that it has.
	It is the politics of attachments versus the politics of category that we are witnessing playing out before us.
	And this is why our bourgeois elite cannot properly explain what the far right are, who they are meant to reflect, what their political ideals are.
	They don't have a doctrine.
	They don't have a manifesto.
	They don't organise based on ideology because they aren't an ideology.
	They are in fact the opposite of an ideology.
	They are not rational.
	They are sentimental.
	They are the soul of the people looking for a champion to lead them to victory.
	Trump, Elon, Farage, Shinzo, Bikali, Bolsonaro, Millais, Orban, even Putin and Kim Jong-un all represent the thymotic form of politics, rooted in pride, dignity, virtue, respect, and sentimentality.
	They are all figures whose public presence is based around their characters rather than their obedience to rules.
	That is not to say that they are all on the same side, that is to say that they all come from the same paradigm.
	They are not allies, but they do speak a political language which each other understands.
	Obama, Biden, Trudeau, Blair, Starmer, von der Leyen, Verhofstadt, the entire US bureaucracy, the entire EU apparatus, the UN, the World Economic Forum, and much more, all represent the politics of the logisticon, the desire to have reason impose itself on the organic world of human interaction and regulate every irrational element to the vanishing point.
	Their form of politics does create necessary allies, which is why Starma and the EU are currently running around as if their world is collapsing around them, because in some ways, it is.
	This is a map of NATO.
	This is also a map of the rationalized political system which seeks to impose a characterless social contract on the whole of mankind.
	Russia, marked in red, represents the last major thymotic state to them, but we could also add China and Iran to the axis of thymotic states.
	In the face of Trump negotiating above their heads with Putin over Ukraine, the rational bureaucrats rushed to the UN to get a resolution on it.
	And when Trump's United States decided to vote against them in this resolution, suddenly their map changes.
	Instead of the United States being a bureaucratic country in the end of history, under Trump, it has flipped to being a thymotic great power which seeks to put itself rather than the rules-based order first.
	Trump is not playing by their rules.
	He's playing by his own, which is why when he goes over the heads of the EU to speak to Putin man-to-man about a settlement in Ukraine, the entire political class of Europe begins to completely freak out, even though the end result may actually be peace in Europe and an end to the bloodshed.
	Because if Trump is successful in Ukraine, then what it signals is that the rules-based order may actually not be the best way of organizing the world.
	What it suggests, in fact, is that the rules-based order is actually something artificial, which has been imposed upon us against our better interests.
	It might even reveal the rules-based order to be the vanity project of very boring, characterless people who have no right being in charge of anything and have shown no ability to govern well and for the best interests of their own people.
	They realize that it might, in fact, herald the end of the entire international liberal project.
	They are well aware of this, which is why when JD Vance goes to Europe and explains to them that they ought to actually care about freedom in the thymotic sense, in the sense of a person's dignity and right to express themselves how they see fit, and that being respected by the powers that be, it causes Eurocrats to literally cry on stage because they can feel that the end of their bureaucratic order is drawing closer.
	This conference started as a transatlantic conference after the speech of Vice President Vance on Friday.
	We have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore.
	I'm very grateful to all those European politicians that spoke out and reaffirmed the values and principles that they are defending.
	No one did this better than President Selensky.
	Let me conclude, and this becomes difficult.
	In writing this video, it became clear to me that this is why we are producing Islander magazine.
	The entire purpose of the magazine is to help the West rediscover its thymotic soul and understand itself so we can reflect properly on our own sentimental, heroic, and necessary existence and recapture the spirit and pride required to push outwards against the world.
	Issue 3 is currently on sale at shop.lotsees.com and I strongly recommend it as I'm convinced that the essays here will help you find this moral grounding in the way that they have helped me.
	As with the previous issues of Islander, we're only printing this once, so the link is in the description.
	Get your copy before it's gone, because when it's gone, it is gone forever.
	What's going on?
	Are you come back?
	Were you sick at school?
	Were you?
	Yeah.
	I guess dragging around.
	Yeah.
	Are you speaking for the microphone and recording?
	Nah.
	No, you can't change it.
	I'm going to go back to my ride.
	I'm going to bike ride.
	You say, hello.
	I'm going to go bike ride.
	No, we can't go on a bike ride now because you're not feeling well, so you need to relax.
	I'm better.
	Oh, are you?
	We can go back to school then, can't you?
	But I've got to, I'm doing my report.
	No, no, listen, listen.
	We can go on a bike ride later, okay?
	I'm doing my recording now, but we'll go on a bike ride later, okay?
	I'll let you know when we can go on a bike ride, but I can't go now, so I've got to do my work.
	It's alright, you go back in the living room.
	Bye.
	You go back in, and I'll see you in a little bit, okay?
	Good boy.

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