Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - What is Aragorn's Tax Policy?

Jan. 15, 2026 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

21:31

What is Aragorn's Tax Policy?

George R.R. Martin has questions. Islander #5: https://shop.lotuseaters.com/
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	What was Aragorn's tax policy?
	This was a question asked by George R. R. Martin in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone magazine when criticising Tolkien, and it exemplifies the difference between the two methods of storytelling.
	We could call Martin's approach realist, which is dark and Machiavellian, and we could call Tolkien's approach idealist, in that his narratives are infused with goodwill and optimism.
	There is a substantive and important difference between them, and this is interesting because both Martin and Tolkien's works are treatments of the same subject.
	How power creates order.
	In the Rolling Stone interview, Martin details how many people who are avid readers of his work are regularly shocked by the sadistic twists and turns the story takes.
	Characters act in such immoral, self-serving, and power-seeking ways that it often offends the imagination to think that the world could be ruled by such people.
	Martin tells us about how his readers reacted.
	The Red Wedding, upon broadcast, became the most infamously shocking scene in TV history.
	It angered a lot of the people who watched it.
	It did so in the books too.
	In 2000, when the book came out, I got tons of letters from people.
	I'm so angry with you.
	I'm never going to read your work again.
	I threw the book into the fire, then a week later I had to know what happens, so I went out and bought another copy.
	Some people were so horrified that they said they will not read any more of my work.
	I understand that.
	Those characters mattered.
	The readers took them seriously, couldn't bear those fates.
	One letter I got was from a woman, a waitress.
	She wrote me, I work hard all day.
	I'm divorced.
	I have a couple of children.
	My life is very hard, and my one pleasure is I come home and I read fantasy, and I escape to other worlds.
	Then I read your book, and God, it was horrifying.
	I don't read for this.
	This is a nightmare.
	Why would you do this to me?
	Not only that, Martin tells us that it had a profound effect on him, too.
	He says, The Red Wedding was tremendously hard to write.
	I skipped over it until I finished the entirety of A Storm of Swords.
	Then I went back and forced myself to write that chapter.
	I loved those characters too much, but I knew it had to be done.
	The TV Red Wedding was even worse than the book, of course, because the creators turned it up to 11 by bringing in Telesa, pregnant with Rob's child, none of which happened in the book.
	So we get a pregnant woman stabbed repeatedly in the belly.
	In Martin's universe, personal horror is the baseline assumption the reader should hold when entering into it.
	His world is cruel, unforgiving, perverse, and doomed.
	He might persuasively argue that it makes his representation of reality more accurate.
	After all, he based Westeros on medieval Europe and its politics on the War of the Roses.
	He would doubtless bring up numerous examples of acts very similar to those he portrays to support his thesis.
	And as there are no heroes, so can there be no villains.
	Instead, each character contains elements of both.
	As he tells us, Our society is full of people who have fallen in one way or another, and what do we do with these people?
	How many good acts make up for a bad act?
	If you're a Nazi war criminal, and then spend the next 40 years doing good deeds and feeding the hungry, does that make up for being a concentration camp guard?
	I don't know the answer, but these are questions worth thinking about.
	This cynical view of humanity underpins his storytelling and his skepticism of a good moral order.
	We see this in the treatment of all of his characters, but it is most exemplified by the execution of Ned Stark, the truly good and moral character of the first season of Game of Thrones.
	Though Robert Baratheon's Rebellion was successful, and we are shown that his rule was generally decent, Martin uses the imperfection of his characters to begin winding his world down into a harrowing and nightmarish maze of events.
	As he tells us in the interview, I was born three years after the end of World War II.
	You want to be the hero.
	You want to stand up, whether you're Spider-Man fighting the Green Goblin or the American saving the world from the Nazis.
	It's sad to say, but I do think there are things worth fighting for.
	Men are still capable of great heroism, but I don't necessarily think there are heroes.
	That's something very much in my books.
	I believe in great characters.
	We're all capable of doing great things and of doing bad things.
	We have angels and demons inside of us, and our lives are a succession of choices.
	Heroism without heroes, that is, without characters we can side with and be loyal to.
	Characters who are truly virtuous do not exist, and any characters who do embody the heroic virtues are outmaneuvered by the Machiavellians of his world through their naive moral choices.
	This is brutally hammered home to the audience, with the execution of Ned Stark or the mass murder in the Red Wedding.
	Both of which symbolically terminate any such narrative that his books and show may have contained, and forces us into Martin's fascination with the dark realm of pure power politics and self-interest.
	By contrast to Martin, Tolkien's work exists primarily in the idealistic moral layer of storytelling.
	Evil exists in Tolkien's world, of course, along with the barbarity and sadism it produces, but The Lord of the Rings is also an epic work that deals with the nature of the moral order of the universe and how we must become men worthy of wielding power.
	We must do the right thing for the right reason to achieve the right result.
	In Middle-earth, this is the essence of kingship.
	In Westeros, men of virtue are beheaded, and men of vice are crowned.
	Martin also describes his rejection of the epic narrative style of Tolkien in this interview.
	He says, Ruling is hard.
	This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with.
	Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy, that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper.
	We look at real history, and it's not that simple.
	Tolkien can say that Aragon became king, and reigned for a hundred years, and that he was wise and good.
	Martin is revealing his hand here.
	If good intentions were enough to make you good, then we could just all be good.
	And Martin is trying to show us that, with his stories, this is just not sufficient to describe how things work, and on one hand, that is a fair point.
	If the purpose of Lord of the Rings was to describe how Aragon ruled, then it would require Tolkien to explain the mechanisms of what good governance would look like under his rule.
	But in Lord of the Rings, all of this is assumed because that isn't what the story is about.
	Lord of the Rings is about something else.
	So far, every issue of Islander has had an installment of Luca Johnson's superb essay series, The Marshals of Middle-earth.
	Issue 1 covered Boromir, Issue 2, Faramir, Issue 3, Eoen, Issue 4, Sauron, and in issue 5, he has finally covered Aragorn.
	I consider these essays to be the definitive examination of Tolkien's characters, because they address not just the events, but the substance of them.
	And in these essays, Luca excellently draws out the moral of the story behind each character, and reveals to us the distinction between Martin and Tolkien.
	In his essay in Islander 4, Luca explains how Sauron was a beautiful Maiar, one of a primordial race of powerful and angelic beings, before being seduced into evil by Morgoth.
	Sauron thus became a corrupting force who sought to pervert and dominate Middle-earth.
	His long plans to accumulate power and enslave the peoples of Middle-earth were for no reason other than his own vanity.
	This is the ever-pervasive darkness that looms across the land, and it must be defeated at all costs for the order it would create is unthinkable.
	As Luca puts it, there is nothing of value in such a world.
	Sauron's power has no purpose beyond its own preservation.
	Its extractive nature would lead the lands of its victimized peoples to become other Mordors.
	If any hope exists, it is found in the fellowship of the ring.
	The world Sauron seeks to create is not morally different to the world of George R. R. Martin.
	It is governed by evil men who exploit people for their own benefit.
	They do not uphold any kind of noble order.
	It is a world where might makes right.
	Power is power.
	The alternative to a world ruled by Sauron is represented by Aragon and the Fellowship.
	Tolkien believed that there could be an order informed by good men, and that there was a process to produce them, for them to endure the slings and arrows of fate and emerge on the other side stronger, experienced, and above all, worthy.
	This is the journey that Aragon takes throughout Lord of the Rings.
	And in his essay on Aragon, Luca draws the parallel very clearly.
	Aragon's ascendancy is guided by his unwavering virtue.
	From the moment Elrond reveals his royal bloodline, he commits to a path of majesty.
	His years in the wilderness were not wayward, but integral to his destiny.
	Forced to witness the world his ancestors left in decline, he did not undertake this quest for personal gain.
	His kingship is founded on service, consent, and love for his people, virtues unvalued by Sauron.
	The Lord of the Rings is often viewed as a cautionary tale about the corruption of power with the One Ring as its chief symbol, yet Tolkian understood that if the good, embodied by Aragon, does not seek to reaffirm power rooted in tradition, legacy and memory, that vacuum will be filled by evil, which holds these in no regard.
	The war against Sauron is not a war on power, but on one who abuses it.
	When that corrupt entity is overthrown, Aragon's rule marks the beginning of the fourth age of Middle-earth and the revival of the Numenorian supremacy.
	Born into an age of twilight and shadow, Aragon's heroism heralds a new dawn.
	As Luca points out, a common misconception regarding Lord of the Rings is that the One Ring represents power, and the difficulty in resisting the Ring's allure is that power is not only tempting but corrupting.
	However, any amount of examination of this theory demonstrates it to not be correct.
	After all, we see many people with power in Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, Rings of Power, or whatever other Middle-earth property.
	Theodon is the King of Rohan, Thranduil is the Elven King of Merkwood, Gil Galad is the last high king of the Noldor Elves, Elrond is the Lord of Rivendell, Thorin Oakshield is a dwarven king in exile trying to recover his kingdom, etc., etc.
	Lord of the Rings is replete with powerful lords who reign over kingdoms.
	For the most part, these are actually wise and just rulers, and many of them are instrumental in the defeat of Sauron.
	Indeed, without such power, how could Sauron have been defeated?
	And after the overthrow of Mordor, Aragorn doesn't relinquish the crown, no, he takes his rightful place as the king of Gondor and Arnor, uniting the realms of men under his wise leadership.
	No, the one ring does not represent power, it represents the power of evil, and against it the power of good must triumph.
	Where Martin assumes that might makes right, Tolkien's belief is the direct inverse.
	Right makes might.
	Contra Martin, Tolkien didn't believe that villains would win because they are evil, but that heroes would win because they were good.
	But all of this assumes that there is a good will that can be put to use in the world, exercise authority, and bring about a just result.
	But George R. R. Martin is a cynical liberal boomer who cannot bring himself to believe such a thing.
	Again, from the Rolling Stone interview.
	Look at a figure like Woodrow Wilson, one of the most fascinating presidents in American history.
	He was despicable on racial issues.
	He was a southern segregationist of the worst stripe, praising D.W. Griffith and the birth of a nation.
	He effectively was a Ku Klux Klan supporter, but in terms of foreign affairs and the League of Nations, he had one of the great dreams of our time, the war to end all wars.
	We make fun of it now, but god it was an idealistic dream.
	If he'd been able to achieve it, we'd be building statues of him a hundred feet high and saying, this was the greatest man in human history.
	This was the man who ended war.
	He was a racist who tried to end war.
	Now, does one cancel out the other?
	Well, they don't cancel out the other.
	You can't make him a hero or a villain.
	He was both, and we're all both.
	What Martin is revealing to us here is his personal and profound disappointment.
	Being a liberal, his ideal of the world is John Lennon's Imagine.
	Imagine there was a world with no wars.
	Wouldn't that be a good and just world?
	And Woodrow Wilson wanted to bring it into being.
	As Martin puts it, it's the greatest, most idealistic dream, and he couldn't do it.
	That would have been, to Martin, the overthrow of Sauron.
	But that generation failed and so the Boomer liberal has grown up disenchanted with the world of men.
	So there are no heroes, and no real villains either.
	Everyone is fallen, and everything is merely a self-serving power calculation, and Martin channelled this disappointment into his work, so he could psychically scar his audience, so that they would also be as despondent as him with the way that things are.
	And this is the purpose of the question he asks of Tolkien.
	What was Aragon's tax policy?
	Did he maintain a standing army?
	What did he do in times of flood and famine?
	And what about all these orcs?
	By the end of the war, Sauron is gone, but all of the orcs aren't gone, they're in the mountains.
	Did Aragon pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them?
	Even the little baby orcs in their little orc cradles?
	In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with.
	Just being a good guy was not the answer.
	You had to make hard, hard decisions.
	Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass.
	It was the law of unintended consequences.
	I've tried to get some of these in my book.
	My people who are trying to rule don't have an easy time of it.
	Just having good intentions doesn't make you a wise king.
	The question, what was Aragon's tax policy, marks Martin's attempt to disenchant the world of Lord of the Rings and make it slip from one layer of storytelling to the other, and drag Lord of the Rings down into the realm of debauchery and immorality where a song of ice and fire happily resides.
	Of course the irony of this perspective is that it's not actually at all self-evident that a world without wars would be a good world.
	It could be a world trapped under a thousand years of totalitarian enslavement in which there are no wars because there's no one capable of waging a war against the oppressor.
	At best, it could be a world of such abundance, in which people have literally no need of one another, so they have no reason to fight.
	But even then, what we are describing is not a world that can be affirmatively described positively as good, but instead a world that has been drained of moral content altogether, one that is neither good nor bad, one that is amoral.
	Martin, like all liberals, has shown us that he subconsciously desires a world where moral choices no longer have to be made, lest the people making them make a mistake and get them wrong.
	Instead of committing to one course of action or another, Martin would prefer that the decision was removed from us altogether, and instead reduce all considerations to materialistic utilitarian calculations that theoretically could be determined a priori by a robot.
	And what comes from this concealed idealism of George R. R. Martin?
	Well, he is in fact the exact representation of such consequences.
	His story has had no choice but to stew in the moral putrescence of Westeros, thoroughly subsumed in its own perversion and nihilism, where all heroes are killed and all villains are triumphant, and Martin himself can waffle on indefinitely about the possible redemption of attempted incestuous child murderers and other such monsters.
	This puts him in a position where he has nowhere to go but down and delve deeply into his venal characters, stomach churning events and darkening narratives.
	He is going to be forced to either admit that no good can ever come of it and therefore he will have to crown a villain as the winner of the Game of Thrones or resurrect Jon Snow and allow him to become the hero of the story as a new Ned Stark who vanquishes evil, overthrows the corrupt lords and brings about the new dawn Tolkien prophesied.
	Clearly without the stomach to write the bad ending, Martin has given up on finishing A Song of Ice and Fire altogether because he can't bring himself to write the good ending.
	It would force him to concede that there is a moral ideal that is worth upholding and that there can be people capable and worthy of upholding it.
	And I think that that's why he can't finish his books.
	He would prove that Tolkien was right.
	Instead, it's left hanging by implication that Martin believes we are actually in a world where Sauron triumphed because he doesn't have the courage to commit to a world where Aragon might win and be a worthy king.
	His storytelling thereby acts as a narcotic, in which he attempts to demoralise us in the same way that he himself has been demoralised.
	He is trying to make us accept that the rule of Sauron is inevitable, and it is in this frame which his own story is trapped, contained, and strangled.
	The question, what is Aragon's tax policy, is the first step down this road.
	And what then we can ask is the result of accepting the reign of Sauron?
	Will men resign themselves to the boot of the outsider being forever on their neck?
	Will they give up all pretense of morality, of heroic struggle, of self-sacrifice, of attempting to bring a just moral order into existence, even if that moral order is deeply flawed?
	Well, in Morgoth's essay about Warhammer 40,000, he actually answered this question, as he wrote, The answer to George R. R. Martin's question, what would Aragon's tax policy be, is 10,000 psychers sacrificed daily to feed energy into the corpse of a god-emperor holding the line against the forces of hell itself.
	No, men will not give up the struggle.
	And no matter how bad things get, we will, in fact, cling to whatever kind of order we can bring together in the face of evil.
	No matter how insufficient it might seem to a liberal in their comfortable armchair, and no matter what the cost.
	It doesn't matter how late the hour, how dark the night, how dire the situation.
	We will never give ourselves over to the disgusting, weak, liberal nihilism that declares that everyone is as bad as everyone else.
	We will not capitulate to the moral reign of Sauron, the perversion of the world, and the despoiling of the very notion that there can be a worthy good.
	And no sad boomer libtard is going to change that.
	It is not inevitable that Sauron wins.
	It is not inevitable that the world slips into vice.
	And it is not guaranteed that the heroes will fail.
	We will do whatever it takes for however long is necessary because the struggle is the forces of good against the forces of evil, the forces of order against the forces of chaos, the forces of justice against the forces of injustice, and it is the only war worth fighting.
	And so I am afraid, George, that the time is nigh for you to pick aside and finish your book.
	I hope you enjoyed this video, folks.
	As you can see, it wouldn't have been possible for me to have connected all of these dots if it wasn't for the right-wing intellectual vanguard who write for Islander magazine.
	I truly cannot express how proud I am to have had any kind of hand in producing a work of such quality and majesty.
	I'm genuinely honoured to have such worthy peers.

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