Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Broken on the Wheel of Fate

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March 5, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

11:31

Broken on the Wheel of Fate

We didn't escape our wyrd. Islander #3: https://shop.lotuseaters.com

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	I find myself haunted by the concept of rota fortune, the ancient concept of the wheel of fortune, which was a cliché even in Tacitus' time in like 70 AD, and has been parodied and vulgarized by popular culture in the modern day, completely frivolously, as if there's nothing behind this.
	But during the Middle Ages, it became a widespread, symbolic way of explaining without explaining the complexities of the world.
	Why did evil men prosper whilst worthy men suffered?
	Who can know?
	Fortuna turns her wheel at her whim, blind to the distinctions of virtue and vice, and you can do nothing but resign yourself to your fate.
	Her decisions were arbitrary, fickle and capricious.
	She cared nothing for you, and if you received weal instead of woe, then good for you.
	But such a state of affairs would not be permanent, because the wheel keeps turning, and what goes around, comes around.
	Roto Fortuna was a widespread theme in medieval literature, being originally popularized by late Roman statesman and philosopher Boethius, as he contemplated his life while in prison for treason, for which he was eventually executed by his former patron, the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great.
	During this time he wrote a highly influential work called The Consolation of Philosophy, in which he reflected upon how he had been noble-born, how he had risen to prominence under Theodoric, and then cast down, imprisoned, and he would be eventually executed.
	The influence of the consolation on medieval thought can hardly be overstated.
	Into English alone it was translated for more than a thousand years by such famous figures as Alfred the Great, Chaucer and Elizabeth I, among others, let alone into the other major European languages.
	A 12th century French manuscript was discovered in 1802 and reinterpreted by German composer Karl Orff in his magnum opus Carmina Burana, which is based upon the medieval idea of Roto Fortuna.
	And though you might think you've never heard of it, you'll certainly recognize its most famous piece, O Fortuna.
	The wheel of fortune has four major stages, with four human figures to represent them at the different phases of their life.
	On the left is Regnabo, I shall reign.
	On the top is Regno, I reign.
	On the right is Regnavi, I have reigned.
	And the wretched figure at the bottom is some sine regno.
	I have no kingdom.
	This is the way that the wheel of fortune turns, and for us, it is turning so that we are at the bottom.
	In my essay about the wanderer in issue 3 of Islander, I explore this point at length.
	I commissioned a translation of The Wanderer and beside it wrote a long companion piece exploring the themes and similarities of the Earthstepper's journey through his world to ours, the turning of his fate upon the wheel.
	His position in the poem is slightly in advance of ours.
	Whilst he has lost his home to the pagan hordes, we are in the process of being dispossessed from ours, but the end result will be the same.
	The Earthstepper drifts listlessly through the world, sullenly reflecting on the pain of his fate and the transience of earthly things.
	Fortune's wheel turns, and the world changes.
	I'll let you read my article in your own time though, as it's not the one I actually want to focus on here.
	Islander three also contains an article by Morgoth's Review called Progressives Against Fate, and it is a sublime examination of how the left is in perpetual struggle against the wheel of fortune.
	Liberalism and science were the Enlightenment's attempt to break free of the wheel, and all leftism is the utopian project geared towards arriving at that final end point where prosperity is a redundant word because no man will want for anything.
	The entire purpose is to abolish turns of fortune so that every man may live in the sunlit uplands forever.
	Morgoth picks up this line of thinking by examining the work of an influential leftist writer called Mark Fischer, who committed suicide in 2017.
	Fisher was more perceptive than your average leftist, and Morgoth explains how he found it peculiar that popular culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries had calcified into a series of repeated and empty forms, which leaves the consumer quote as a spectator trudging through the ruins and the relics.
	In this way Fischer, himself an Englishman, echoes back to the Earthstepper, wandering through the rhyme encrusted ruins of ages past and wondering why things have decayed as such.
	As the wanderer tells us, a wise hero must recognise how ghastly it is when all this world's wealth turns to waste, as now everywhere around this world, wind blown, frost-covered walls stand, the buildings are shaking, the mead horse totter, where lords lie dead, deprived of their joy.
	Though Fisher is concerned with the modern cultural decay of the West haunting us with its relics from the past, we can see that he recognises that for us in our time, the wheel is turning and something has changed, and the future now signifies not the forever upward trajectory imagined by the Whigs, but instead the downswing looms before us, and there seems to be no escape from it.
	To the leftist mind who has stigmatized all of the past as benighted, ignorant and impoverished, this line of thinking is not just impossible to comprehend, but utterly heretical.
	As Morgoth explains, in desperation, they vainly scramble back to the theory for clues and answers, but none are found, and the path continues to descend, leaving the grand vistas of the view from the peak behind and out of sight.
	On the world stage, progressives far less benign than Mark Fisher react with dismay and confusion.
	This cannot be.
	The genuinely colossal resources at their disposal are deployed like armies to reconfigure the trajectory of civilization.
	The last great war is a war upon time and destiny itself.
	Suppose only we could reset things a little, like a great reset that ushered in more control of the population, the natural resources, the landscape.
	The data seems sound.
	With enough conjoling and authoritarianism, we can grab the hands of the clock and wrench them back, if not to summer, then at least to autumn.
	More complexity, more lines on graphs going up for eternity, more AI systems to carry the slack of incompetence, more hedge funds and tech firms commodifying literally every last resource and lifestyle choice, creating what leftist Yanis Varifakis terms techno feudalism.
	In the process, the last vestiges of creativity become like mulched leaves in the mud of a cold winter puddle.
	The utilitarian logic of the machine toys with euthanizing old people to bring costs down, while the afterglow of progressivism kills babies to make women feel liberated.
	Yet it grows ever colder, ever more barren and sterile.
	Not only are the progressives unable to change the course of this process, they seem incapable of grasping that it was their doing that brought us to this point.
	They are the ones who demanded the ever-increasing rationalization of our society which ate away at the space required for the development of character, so that eventually all we have is a rigid, formalized, digitalized, and ultimately hollowed out simulacrum of our own civilization.
	Are we nearly at the point of progress yet?
	If not, when do we expect to be there?
	I don't know if you've noticed, but as the GDP has gone up, things have actually gotten worse.
	Would I rather go back fifty years and sacrifice all of that GDP for a civilization which actually likes itself?
	A civilization that actually cares about itself and its children.
	Particularly in England, our world is in a slow-motion collapse around us, and all we are told in response to this is that we must have more of the same, or else something will go terribly wrong.
	I think actually it might be too late for that.
	I think things have gone terribly wrong by design because we were so arrogant that we thought we had the ability to overcome things that are in fact instrumental in making us be the kind of people of which we would approve.
	Despite being made great on the wheel of fortune, we assumed a constancy to ourselves which turned out not to be true.
	We can't geld and bid the geldings be fruitful.
	We can't abandon the lessons in character we learn from the wheel and expect future generations to be as good or capable as those of the past.
	When the wheel turns and we once again become great, I suspect that the period we are living through now will be regarded as a kind of spiritual dark age in which we failed to understand what we had to do to do our part.
	We will likely be looked at with revulsion by the people of the future, wondering how we could have been so ignorant and short-sighted as to think that the rules which governed mankind since our beginning no longer apply to us.
	They will laugh at how we thought we were so clever as to be able to trick Fortuna and escape the cycles of civilization.
	The leftist faces a future in which they are simply broken on the wheel of fate, forever lost to their utopian delusions as the world grows colder and darker.
	As Morgoth puts it at the end of his essay, it is the fact of the setting sun that the leftist soul must now contend with.
	We, men of a different disposition, plan, mend, and lament what has passed a burden heavy enough, but nothing compared to the weight on the shoulders of those whose spirit and devotion to snubbing the wheel of time draws them deeper, ever more insanely, into the frozen dark wastes, away from the hearthfire and onwards towards despair and oblivion.
	Islander 3 is available to purchase for three more weeks, and once this moment in time has passed, it will not be available again.
	You can purchase a copy at shop.lotices.com.

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