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Jan. 23, 2026 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
15:50
The Chinese Art of War

Better to conquer without even fighting. Islander #5: https://shop.lotuseaters.com/

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Time Text
Chinese Narrative of Order 00:12:39
Alastair McIntyre's observation that man is a storytelling animal has been a total brainworm for me, I just can't get it out of my head.
What are we without the stories that we tell about ourselves?
Who are you?
Where are you going?
Where do you live?
Where do you come from?
Without the story of your life, you are completely adrift, lacking meaning, context and purpose.
These stories are how we differentiate ourselves from one another.
Why am I different to you if not for the tales we tell about each other to mark out the differences?
Without the capacity to make the structures of our stories meaningfully different, the content of them becomes irrelevant.
You can choose whichever funko pop you like, but it will only ever be an aesthetic difference between you and the others if you are just sitting in the next cubicle in a vast office of cubicles, all doing the same irrelevant job.
The concept of a story also applies to nations too.
Our national stories differentiate ourselves from other nations and explains why we are what we are, how we are different to them, our place in history, and the future we expect to bring about.
The unique story that each civilization tells about itself grounds it in its own context and informs the direction in which it is moving.
It is the reason we do what we do.
We know the West's self-narrative very well.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe went through a period we falsely call the Dark Ages, out from which we emerge into the Middle Ages, then to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, which runs parallel to the Age of Sale, in which we discovered, conquered, and colonised the world.
European nations grew in wealth and in might until Britain won the game of empires in the 19th century, out of which the modern nation-state developed.
The worst aspects of this new political settlement were experienced in the horrific mechanized conflict of World War I and then finally defeated in World War II.
After that, we endured a long cold war with the Communist East, locked in the contest of which civilization would out-produce and outlast the other, and with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we concluded that Western liberalism was victorious, and we could finally, meaninglessly frolic forever in the end of history, liberated from the burden of responsibility, poverty and politics.
I started thinking about this after reading Konstantin von Hofmeister's article in Island of 5 called The Heroic Eurasian Archetype, in which he explains Eurasianism as opposed to Atlanticism.
And this is the core difference in brief.
Eurasianism defines itself through its direct opposition to Atlanticism, for the two represent rival principles of order.
Atlanticism, shaped by the seafaring powers of the modern West, champions a universalist creed of liberal democracy, open markets and cultural uniformity, enforced through transatlantic institutions like NATO and the global finance system.
Its horizon is one of dissolution, where local traditions, religions, and ethnic groups give way to a planetary monoculture ruled by economic calculation and ideological dogma.
This process corrodes even the West itself, eroding its ancestral identities and reducing its peoples to standardized units of production and consumption.
European ethnic groups are threatened because Atlanticism promotes demographic replacement, cultural amnesia, and the subordination of native traditions to globalized norms.
Eurasianism advocates a multi-polar world where each great culture is free to unfold its own destiny in harmony with the others rather than being subordinated to a single hegemon.
The conflict between Atlanticism and Eurasianism is thus both geopolitical and metaphysical, the restless fluidity of the ocean against the rooted solidity of the continent.
Because of its victories, the Western narrative of history is decidedly self-confident and optimistic, and it has an aspiring end state.
Moreover, it is a reflection of the Western individual's own heroic narrative.
The hero goes out into the world, suffers, overcomes, conquers, brings back treasure, and then lives happily ever after.
We think of it as the universal story of history and through the unbending power of materialism, we will eventually bring all of mankind to this place of post-national equality.
Other national narratives differ markedly from our own.
The story the Chinese tell themselves focuses not on an ever upward trajectory of heroic conquest, but is instead one of an unlimited cultural continuity in which a cycle of dynasties attempts to uphold the core moral claim that the national unity of a self-governed China, which is the premier nation under heaven, is the proper and harmonious state of the universe.
Disunity is immoral and caused by the moral failings on the part of the people of the age.
Civil wars are thereby fought to re-establish the moral legitimacy to rule, reclaiming the mandate of heaven, so that stable governance and moral probity can be re-established and China can once more take its proper place as the civilizational centre of the world.
Through order, legitimacy and high custom, China will once more uphold the view of all under heaven, which holds that there is one moral civilizational order which is authorized by the heavens themselves.
In this view, China sits at the core as the sole civilized realm which influences the surrounding states in the inner periphery, those which are culturally similar and tributary to China, and ignores the outer periphery, which is the rest of the world.
And this is comprised of uncivilized and incomprehensible barbarians, who are incapable of moral incorporation and therefore not worth wasting any time on.
This is why China described itself as the middle kingdom.
It is not just the centre of the earth, it is the moral centre of mankind, in their minds.
Middle meant balanced, cultivated, correctly ordered, which is why tribute from the periphery states was important in suggesting recognition of this moral order, their cultural superiority, and became symbolically important.
We can, from this perspective, see why the foreign invasions of China were so psychologically damaging to the Chinese mind.
If the purpose of the universe is for the Chinese people to uphold a certain kind of order, events like the Mongol conquests or the European invasions present catastrophes from which the Chinese people must struggle for centuries to overcome.
They are national traumas which echo across Chinese history and inform the decisions of people in the present.
From the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839 to the emergence of Mao's People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese viewed themselves as having undergone a century of humiliation, in which the natural order of the universe was upended, and this acts as the foundational stone in the modern Chinese political framework.
Indeed, the modern Chinese state legitimizes itself on the grounds that it ended the century of humiliation, which thereby binds it to a world historic moral mission and informs everything else that it does.
Put simply, in their view, weakness invited humiliation, and the only remedy to this is strength.
The policy of modern China reflects this completely, and only by understanding how other national narratives differ from our own can we understand why our rivals are doing what they do.
As Konstantin von Hofmeister puts it in his article, Zi projects the ancient vision of the Middle Kingdom outwards, blending Confucian tradition with socialist governance and modern technology into a coherent civilizational program that positions China as the leader of Eurasia.
This leadership is not a mere extension of state policy, but the reactivation of a historical mission, to radiate order from the center of the world island across the steppes, deserts, mountains and seas.
Zi invokes harmony as a guiding principle, yet this harmony is coupled with the clear pursuit of primacy, for harmony without strength dissolves into subordination, while harmony backed by strength becomes the basis of sovereignty.
His China does not dream of seclusion, nor does it resign itself to playing the role of a manufacturing appendage to the Atlanticist system.
Instead, it asserts itself across the heartland, building railways across Central Asia, pipelines through Siberia, ports across the Indian Ocean, and digital highways that cut through Eurasia's interior.
These are the 21st century equivalents of Alexander's cities or Mongol postal stations.
China under Zi is a true powerhouse, a state civilization that binds tradition and science into a model of development that challenges the liberal template of globalization.
Through this archaeo-futurist synthesis, China emerges as the leader, guiding not only its own destiny but the destiny of Eurasia itself.
Xi's vision is that of the heroic archetype adapted to the 21st century.
He commands through infrastructure rather than hordes, through artificial intelligence rather than hooves, yet the purpose remains the same as Alexander's or Genghis Khan's, to unify the vast expanses of the Eurasian world into a coherent order where power, identity and destiny meet.
The heroic archetype has adapted, but it has not disappeared.
China is acting in accordance with its own national mythology, and is slowly but surely cementing itself once more as the Middle Kingdom, the moral center of the world, and the heartland to which barbarian tribute once again flows.
Like the Bush administration's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, we assumed the Chinese would be grateful to us for outsourcing their manufacturing to them and becoming incorporated into the global economic system for its own sake and good so they could join us at the end of history.
But instead for the Chinese, it was a means to an end, and that end is restoring what they believe to be the rightful ordering of the world.
For them, China is the supreme nation, and all other nations are inferior and tributary to it.
And again, I want to stress, we just don't understand our opponents here.
The Western way of resolving conflicts is in great heroic battles, in which the issue is settled straightforwardly through force of arms.
But this is not how the Chinese look at the world or conflict.
Historically, the Chinese have not actually excelled in this, as Western man has, and so the Chinese doctrine is more strategic.
In chapter 3 of the Art of War, Sun Tzu put it quite bluntly.
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact.
To shatter and destroy it is not so good.
So too, is it better to capture an entire army, a regiment, a detachment, or an entire company rather than destroy it.
Hence, to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence.
Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
Therefore, the skillful leader subdues the enemy troops without any fighting.
He captures their cities without laying siege to them.
He overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.
With his forces intact, he will dispute the mastery of the empire and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete.
This is the method of attacking by stratagem.
This is the strategy that the Chinese have adopted to reclaim their primacy in the world, and it seems to be a good one.
Why fight us on our own terms when they can fight us on their own?
China has a mission, and its strategy is to avoid open conflict while consolidating their position over centuries.
Slowly but surely, they are using the rules-based order against us.
What then is our answer to China's self-informed world historic mission?
What do we even offer ourselves that might enable us to compete with such a vision?
Why We Must Change 00:02:49
What are we offering?
Well, it seems that our national story is that we are working to a world that ends national stories and by extension, personal stories.
What we assume when we advance individualism is a person whose story is different to any other.
This is what a heroic narrative is, and this is what our personal narratives are.
We assume these stories are meaningful, unique, and not lived by others.
But is that the world we are actually creating?
Increasingly, we are sliding into a world of air-conditioned office blocks, email jobs, and personal atomization.
We have service economies that create nations of servants, where the only concern we have is ameliorating inequality, and this creates a kind of political chloroform which is slowly rendering our civilizations unconscious.
I am worried that there is a real danger that we have arrived at a point where we see no other alternative than to continue down the path of what Marcuse called the welfare and warfare state, which imposes this narcotic regime not just on ourselves but on others, and insists that eventually the nature of what it is to be a human will be constrained into a singular narrative that forces us all to arrive in the same place.
And this is just the end of the individual, folks.
The individual ends when all humanity is circumscribed into a meaningless mass of consumers who themselves do not have a story that differentiates themselves from one another.
No life story would be meaningfully different to anyone else's.
No national story is meaningfully different.
The future of the world in the Western view is the liberation of people from place and time, from responsibility and hardship, but also success and glory, propriety or morality.
What we are offering the world is the transcending of the need for a story entirely.
Marcuse saw this one-dimensional man clearly and realized he is a man for whom any experience of the transcendent is forever out of reach.
Where he isn't engaged in his meaningless acts of service, he is plugged into Nozick's pleasure machine to have his senses artificially stimulated until the day he passes away unnoticed.
Each story becomes the same as any other, and so there's no point telling any story at all.
Billions of lives which may well not have been lived for a civilization whose levelling trajectory is only concerned about finally achieving immediate sensory gratification without any concept of long-term thinking or transcendent ideals to uphold.
Clear Change Needed 00:00:21
With a mindset like this, how can we possibly win?
And moreover, why would we want to?
It's very clear that we have to change.
Islander Five is now 75% sold, and once it's gone, it is gone.
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