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Something like “muscular” Christianity, reimbued with the old virtues of chivalry, will be required.

Unfortunately, the Catholic church has spent the last 60 years studiously purging itself of its “muscular” old art, music, and traditions and has replaced them with vapid Novus Ordo nonsense. People simply aren’t being provided with the spiritual nutrients they need to thrive. The Orthodox churches seem to be in better shape, but there’s not enough of them in the West.

Combining this with the full scale war being waged against masculinity and testosterone paints a gloomy picture. I would argue that they way we crawl out of it is through hard physical training. We have to start slowly, and the body is much easier to discipline than the mind. Humans are first and foremost physical creatures, so sorting out our biological problems will inevitably lead to progress in other areas. Achilles and Hector weren't soy boys.

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I agree with you. There is a full-scale war on masculinity at hand.

The collapse in testosterone levels is, I think, far more impactful than people realize. As a personal anecdote, after I was cancelled I became very depressed and low-energy and lost my will to fight. I had my testosterone tested and my levels had plummeted to nearly nil. I took a treatment called Clomid* to restore my T-levels and my entire vigor returned, as if by magic. Clomid is a drug that makes your own testes produce more testosterone, so it's a natural boost to T rather than a replacement/injection. It made far more difference for me than any other drug ever has.

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I've never heard of clomid. Interesting. I do injections myself.

I'm convinced that low T levels are partially responsible for the wide spread acceptance of masking. I expected young men to rebel against that back in April 2020. It's been a disappointing few years.

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Dec 15, 2022Liked by Tree of Woe

What do you think of expanding this concept, slightly, so that it's not just Christianity?

I've been thinking that liberalism is _really_ something like, a "minimum viable religion", but it was never treated as such.

Do you think it's doable to build a cross-religious colation based entirely around worship of, and submission to, Truth itself? Every religion, as far as I understand it, would not see this considers its own cannon to be truth. I can imagine people of different religions now have much more in common with each other than we do with people who are convinced up is down, weakness is strength, etc.

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I, personally, like the idea of a minimum viable religion. That is essentially where I have gotten, what I might call natural theism. But most of the devout Christians I know would not be satisfied with that. The sentiment seems to be that giving one inch led to giving it all. I can't say I blame them.

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Do you think it's doable to build a cross-religious colation based entirely around worship of, and submission to, Truth itself?

Wasn't this the idea behind the Enlightenment? It's a great idea in theory, but I don't think there's any instances of it actually working. Humans are just too tribal.

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It's not the soy. There are estrogen mimics in fragrances, plastics, personal care products, and more. See the book "Estrogeneration"

https://www.ajconsultingcompany.com/store/c1/Featured_Products.html

Particularly creepy is the fact that the artificial estrogen in birth control pills does not break down in nature. And it's not removed by conventional sewer and water treatment plants. If your municipal water supply uses river water, you might want to use a charcoal filter.

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Yeah, I saw a podcast with Dr. Jay. This pollution is *still* not being talked about my mainstream endocrinologists.

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Dec 15, 2022Liked by Tree of Woe

Tangentia,l but, how about this prospiracy theory:

Cincinnatus never actually resigned the dictatorship. This was the public story. Fit for the masses. What nobler virtue than to resign ultimate power, to tend to one's farm?

The perfect cover story.

Instead, Cincinnatus went underground. He convinced a group of elite senators that this way better. There has been, for centuries now, a tiny, tiny conspiracy to move the world forward in ways that are good. This tiny conspiracy has controlled and used ~other~ conspiracies who have long remained unaware of its existence. It sets them up to do evil, so that the good men of the world see the need for them to seek greatness.

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That's epic and I want to read your Dan Brownesque novel about this.

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That's Far too Romantic an explanation (at least for myself).

More likely it's simply a matter of the Western World-proper being designated as the "Homo Sacer" this time around, Ripe for Destruction and Conquest. It's the Sacrifice/Scapegoat to "uplift" everyone else to the heights of the Virtus Heroica.

A familiar story from olden days: Celtic Rivers of Blood and the "Dying Gaul" (for instance) are the Pole needed to orient Roman Heroism and the likes of Giants such as Cicero et al.

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Oh, that was just spitballing.

I think you're right that really rough times are in store for the west, north america and europe in particular. The way westerners act right now is like characters in a future morailty play about, "this is what happens when a people loses sight of God."

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Dec 14, 2022·edited Dec 14, 2022Liked by Tree of Woe

Great work as always!

It was the German Philosopher + Jurist Carl Schmitt who (at least in Continental Europe) sketched the notion of (if we use the original German) >>Ausnahmezustand<<.

This breaks down as follows (roughly if we turn it into English):

"irregular situation"/"state of emergency"/"state of exception".

It was Agamben in his landmark work >>State of Exception (2005)<< who first elaborated this relation when examining this relation with regard to early Greco-Roman models regarding the nature of Authority + Justice.

Namely, the "Mirror"-image to Superlative Virtue and its Virtuous King: which is the *Homo Sacer*; hailing from those "Ausnahmezustand-Vices" (henceforth "A-Vices") which render the human person to once more becoming "Bare Life". Whilst the latter is the "sub-lative" who has fallen back to Zoe, the former has gone beyond Bios... but in doing so has somehow paradoxically become "related" to said "sub-lative".

"Bare Life" as Agamben notes, is that Life remaining when the "Qualified Life" (i.e. 'Bios') is taken out of the picture (historically, this happened when certain A-Vices were pursued). Amongst the Vikings this meant turning men into Out-Laws; i.e. quite literally "Outside the Law".

In Ancient Greece it likewise meant turning a man into *Homo Sacer*; "Sacred Man"... one who cannot be sacrificed to the gods, and who could be killed by anybody (as said man retained none of his rights to citizenry and the pursuit of the "Good Life").

It is this Homo Sacer, who alongside the Virtus Heroica (or "Sovereign" as Agamben would note), is beyond the Categorization of Auctoritas (The Latin breaks down back to "Auctor", which notionally means author/master/leader) and therefore outside the purview of 'normal society' which men form and exercise their clout/will/authorship over.

And so both the former and the latter become the benchmarks for societal mores and norms. Or to use Agamben's language: The Zoe (i.e. the biological 'brute fact' of life") can only come after the Bios (i.e. the form or manner in which "life is lived and/or ought to be lived") is outlined.

Otherwise, we have this noumenal almost 'non-linguistic' Lacanian-real "brute fact of life" that will always remain beyond Auctoritas and its proper exercise.

And so.... we come back to 'brute facts' regarding Human Nature and Scapegoating:

The inevitable rise of the Virus Heroica will mean likewise the birth of Homo Sacer; or to put it more simply: Each is Supervenient to the Other (this is a bijective relation weaker than Reduction) Relevant: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supervenience/

In slogan form... "There can be no Virtus Heroica-notion without a Homo Sacer-notion"

Much is often written about the former and how one can "get to it" (at the personal and likewise the social level), so that will not be touched upon (i.e. how one gets to the "Virtus Heroica"-Pole).

But How does one "get" the latter? Well, through pursuing "Crimes for which words have yet to be coined" of course!

For it is those "Lacanian-real", super-linguistic (i.e. 'over and beyond the grasp of language') brutish crimes which escape categorization due to the sort of Uncanny Valley they give rise to (with regard to the exercise of Human Emotions) which can be used to 'fix in place' what the limits are with regard to the Auctoritas of a New Order; especially with regard to the "Homo Sacer"-Pole

A quick riffling of the pages of Human History make this almost self-evident: Massacres And Total Slaughters + Conquests are pursued to Scapegoat those peoples who will take on the mantle of "Homo Sacer", to give rise simultaneously to the Virtus Heroica mantle.

The contemporary philosopher, historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe in his work "Necropolitics" ( https://web.archive.org/web/20151010043651/https://www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/docs/achillembembe.pdf ) sketches the interesting notion that Sovereignty is best defined by the power and capacity to Kill (or to Leave Alive). If so, then a marriage between Agamben and Mbembe gives us the quickest route to the whole matter:

Commit Unspeakable (in the Lacanian-real sense) crimes to render whole peoples nothing more than Zoe/"Bare Life" merely capable of being Sacrifices/Scapegoats (be it as genetic slaves or some other paltry 'nothing' no longer capable of Bios or exercising Auctoritas) such that their Sovereignty is (in the Mbembe-sense) "captured" fully whereby to kill or to leave alive is no longer upto them. This will create a "Homo Sacer"-pole.

... After that (courtesy of the Supervenience relation between the two) the Virtus Heroica-Pole will be created in tandem.

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Great thoughts. I was only peripherally aware of the Homo Sacer concept as you describe it. In a sense, there can be no heroes without beasts for them to slay.

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It's less a "beast to slay" and more an "opposite pole".

Homo Sacer is to the Vitrus Heroica (Agamben would just call this the "Sovereign") what the North Pole is to the South Pole.

One cannot have a concept of one without the other.

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There's an inherrent flaw in looking to the past successful systems to remedy current ills: they clearly failed to perpetuate themselves or we wouldn't have the problems we have.

I'm no Evolian, and the Evolians I know, and I know some very well, seem to prove that his spiritual claims false, as they have continued to decline in material and mental health since pursuing his methods without any superlative virtue or magical ability to show for it.

Nevertheless, I agree with your conclusions generally that there is a major spiritual component, and as a Christian I also agree that modernized christianity has been largely neutered to cater towards living peaceably in a pluralist world. A more robust spirit is needed to fight this war, and I can see it in my own circles being forged in the fires of growing adversity, so there is hope there. But we're still all fat and lazy from glutting on ease, christians and non christians alike, so it will take time to kindle.

However, back to my original point, the Heroically Virtuous Philosopher King of Aristotle, who is later seen in Aquinas as the ideal "Sovereign" that Aquinas bases his civic ethics on, can and certainly has existed in various forms to various degrees, and they prosper in peace or in war, but they somehow fail to find an equal successor.

Either their heirs are petty and divided and unable to subde one another, as Clovis' and Charlemagne's and Phillip's heirs, or they are corrupt and selfish and squander what they inherrit. Others last a few generations of greatness, but it visible dwindles in an accellerated Tolkienesque manner, until eventually the once great monarchy is swallowed by the bureaucracies it built to help manage its transition from Conqueror to King.

Or you have the HRE, which attempted to avoid the heredity issue and elect its monarch to choose the next king based on his Virtue. Sometimes it worked, but usually it was another case of the bureaucracy swallowing the throne.

So while the allure of a Heroic Sovereign is obvious, and I must admit, I am fond of and hoping against hope that one appear soon, the issue of planning for his success remains one that has never been solved. If it had, we wouldn't be where we are now.

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"they clearly failed to perpetuate themselves or we wouldn't have the problems we have."

I fully agree, although this problem is also applicable to those who want to roll back to e.g. the 1980s or 1950s or 1770s. We are where we are. What do we do now? I don't have a *better* guide than history and philosophy, but it's definitely not a perfect one.

I don't have any good answers to the succession problem you describe. It doesn't seem like anyone has ever come up with one. The Chinese more or less admitted that it's a problem and devised the Mandate of Heaven concept to explain why dynasties come and go. They normalized the upheaval. The Ancients universally seemed to believe that things progressed through cycles and there wasn't much that could be done about that - the traditional formulation being that monarchy degenerates to tyranny, is replaced by aristocracy, which degenerates to oligarchy, which is replaced by democracy, which degenerates to mob rule, which is replaced by monarchy.

That's interesting that the Evolans you know have declined in material and mental health. That tracks with reports I have heard from others about potential harmful effects of attempting "initiation". (And Evola more-or-less admits that a lot of people who try will be destroyed.) I myself haven't undertaken any of his methods, or anyone else's for that matter. I just explore a lot of ideas as I contemplate woe.

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Way back when I was a freshman, the first lesson taught by my Western Civ prof was to have us read a passage from the Illiad, and the story of Gideon from the Book of Judges. The difference in sense of life was huge.

Before submitting to a king, read 1 Samuel chapter 8.

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Democracy is only as good as the median voter. Half the people need to be morally better than the government. Those who expect democratic government to create moral excellence are fools. And given the sordid history of monarchies, I daresay that the modern monarchists are reckless to put it mildly.

It may be that we could use a period of dictatorship in the classical sense of the word: a man of great *temporary* power. Pinochet in Chile and Fujimori in Peru came close to that model and left improved republics behind.

But the truly Christian approach to the problem is to move the median. To move the median, somebody needs to move the average enough to put real social pressure on those at the median. We need Salt of the Earth. Salt is a small component of a stew that makes a huge difference in taste.

Back at the height of the Moral Majority, many on the Left were doing a better job of being salt of the earth. The Right was mortgaging future generations to give tax cuts for the rich. James Watt was using end time prophecies as an excuse to trash the environment. Wall St. wizards went wild with outsourcing, monopolies, and giving themselves gigantic dividend checks at the cost of burdening once great companies with unsustainable debt.

The Religious Right's darkness shadowed before men, and they saw the bad works, and cursed our Father in heaven.

Meanwhile, it was members of the concerned Left who were willing to pay extra for food in order to reduce animal cruelty. They were willing to pay more for coffee in order to preserve independent farmers in third world countries.

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The tide is changing. The Left is switching from virtue to virtue signalling. The Religious Right has been humbled and become more forgiving, and more jolly.

And I see some real Salt of the Earth action to good effect. Funding pregnancy centers has had an effect on both the number of abortions and the attitude towards legal abortion.

I see some right-Christian farmers and consumers taking action to reduce animal cruelty and preserve the planet for future generations. Look up Joel Salatin. His good works have impressed Berkley left intellectuals.

I''d really like to see churches solving the homeless problem. We need to replace the mental institutions that were closed in the last few decades with something. I believe that the medieval monastery could be a good model. Spartan housing, security, simple but nutritious food, and beer for those willing to make it, would be a huge improvement over living in the streets.

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But yes, we need excellence beyond excellence in charity. It would be really handy to have some Christian multi-millionaires to do the sort of thing Elon Musk is doing. And we need Christian colleges which can function without federal funds. This requires mixing charity with excellence in business.

Fortunately, opportunities for relative excellence are everywhere. The Woke are self-destructing. Meanwhile, Christian homeschools are clobbering the public schools in terms of performance.

Some years back Ron Dart gave a sermon on Matthew 5:48. He claimed that the word translated as "perfect" would be better translated as "excellent."

Being perfect is impossible. Excellence is another matter.

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I will in the future attend to some more directly Christian matters, although I suspect in doing so I will offend or bore everyone, since Christians are hotly divided on virtually every issue of theology and non-Christians find the whole discussion tiresome. But I have thoughts on chivalry, sacred knighthood, two swords, sermon on the mount, etc. that I'll be presenting eventually.

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Offend away! 40 years ago conservative Christians could afford to be the virtue signalling snowflakes. Between such snowflakey behavior and whiney Jesus Jingles, Jesse Ventura had grounds for his insulting remarks about Christians. Some testing by fire was in order.

Conservative Christians have grown a few new layers of skin in the last few years. I noticed it bigly in the very generous reception Gary Johnson received at Liberty University in 2016. (Johnson handled it poorly.) And then there is the Babylon Bee. Christians can handle some controversy now.

And they need to! If you want the Quibbling Class to take Christianity seriously, they need to be allowed to quibble on theological issues. When the Church was the primary employer of professional intellectuals, the Church could get away with stifling debate down to irrelevant Angels on the Head of a Pin issues.

When the Church is not politically powerful, this does not work! Vulcans need to voice their concerns over obvious-to-them contradictions. When Christianity was still Expected, the elite attended Christianity Lite churches which demanded little in the way of doctrinal adherence. Over m y lifetime, the Episcopal Church became "open minded" (aka air headed). Sermons were the equivalent of listening to someone's home movies, but mercifully short. But the churches and music were beautiful, and it was a club for those whose American roots go back to Jamestown.

But the world offers better social clubs now, and Lite Christianity does not satisfy those who take the Bible seriously. Upper Management, Universities, and the Deep State have gone Post Christian because most modern Christian churches have no place for serious intellectuals.

Christianity used to be a very intellectual religion. Go back 1800 years and you will find Egyptians rioting in the streets over how to interpret John's gospel, and just exactly what kind of being Jesus was. The split between Greek Orthodox and Nestorian Christianity was over quibbles that don't even translate properly into English.

The ancient Churches created creeds and doctrines at various important Councils in order to quash the cacophony.

It's time to bring back the cacophony and make Christianity interesting for quibblers. The Bible is noisy, and God buried some Easter eggs in the text to make things interesting. (Example: the Bible does NOT say Jesus was crucified on a Friday. I will prove this definitively in a future post.)

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And yes, there is also some need for Muscular Christianity. If Christians are supposed to always turn the other cheek, then we should turn over the state to non Christians. Likewise, to forgive all sins is to eliminate all criminal punishments. This is rather impractical.

And let us not forget that Christianity started out as a Middle Eastern religion. Nestorian Christianity was once bigger than either Roman Catholicism or Greek Orthodoxy. Now it's nearly gone. No knights to protect it.

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This was a very inspirational post. Huzzah.

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What is the most admired aspect of a warrior? Endurance.

He might be considered interesting in bright, shiny armor. But it is the sword with the notched blade, the dented helmet, and the man covered in mud and blood, yet still standing, who is admired.

What does Jesus on the Cross represent? Endurance and sacrifice (the soldier fallen for his cause).....Betrayed, and sold out by compatriots, denied, and spurned by the very people He came to save, yet He remained true: the ultimate example of a Warrior's endurance.

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You are manifestly wrong.

America was never great. It has always been a monarchy posing as a republic, and leadership is how you got in this shit in the first place. Leadership is unilateralism, the centralising of power, and power corrupts, always. America should have listened to Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln and headed for democracy. That you went in the opposite direction has cost humanity half its population and poisoned our genetics.

Come down to earth.

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Can you explain your position a bit more?

I understand Thomas Paine as an example of someone who opposed monarchy, but Abraham Lincoln was one of the most imperious presidents we ever had, and he left the US far more centralized and dictatorial than he found it. So I'm not following what you mean by "we should have listened to Abraham Lincoln." (I have not read much of Lincoln's writing outside of the basics from Civics, so excuse my ignorance if he has a large corpus of Paine-like stuff.)

With regard to costing humanity half its population and poisoning its genetics, what do you mean?

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I don't think this is going to work.

You believe official history, for a start, so you are never going to recgnise the truth, even under your nose.

The elite who is running the world fairly obviously today, has been doing so for a thousand years, and the Zionist varriant for 215 years. They run the media and the investment banks and they write the histories. Anybody who favoured genuine democracy was silenced or killed. Paine was silenced and Lincoln was killed.

You need to read 'The Rights of Man' before we discuss Paine. And if you can recall Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, in which he created a lyrical definition of democracy that he believed could not be corrupted or misconstrued... "Government of the people, by the people and for the people", which excludes parliaments, voting, candidates, representatives, and majorities. In other words, the people formulate policy and the public service implements thei politcies. Period.

He was wrong. Most people are too stupid to see through propaganda. Look at today. 70% on average submitted to a mRNA experimental jab, on the recommendation of manifestly crooked politicians. 70% trust their doctors, even though they are the third major cause of death, a medical mafia peddling drugs and killer jabs.

The 3th-5th century Finland worked this way, and for 200 years, as documented by the Irish Monks; there was a Chinese democracy in what is today Indonesia., destroyed by the Dutch.

Kung, Inuit, and Yolngu also had pure democracies for tens of thousands of years.

You need appreciate that the bankers rubbished the reputations of anyone who got in their way. But it was they who said ancinet Greece was a democracy, which is crap. Only 19% had the vote, which were people whose both parents were Athenians.

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So are you a proponent of pure democracy or not? Because it sounds like you are, but it also sounds like you are highly skeptical that it would work in dumbed-down America.

By the way, you are the first person in history to accuse me of having too much trust in official history and the US government. It just goes to show that everybody's a weak-kneed moderate to somebody!

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Honestly, this Tony Ryan almost sounds low a low grade AI. The individual sentences are grammatical, but there's no coherent idea to the whole.

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That's funny, because a top diplomat just requested a paper I wrote. plus a book.. Meanwhile, I don't want to sound stupid but, pray tell, what is a "low a low grade AI"?

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All I had to judge you by was what you said. But, yes, I have researched democracy for some 47 years. In 2003, I discovered that every book on the history of democracies had been removed from public libraries and burned. It transpires that this has happened throughout the West. Evidently, somebody does not want people to be educated in this regard. I suspect the same entity that killed Lincoln, and also several African and south American leaders.

Regarding Americans, you all have been raised to respect beliefs, nobody ever pointing out that BELIEF can be defined as adopting a position or attitude DESPITE THE EVIDENCE, which comes perilously close to a definition of insanity. This has severely damaged US capacity to analyse. It is invalid to mix beliefs with evidence and logic and anticipate a sound conclusion. Yet that is the national formula for policy formulation. Add to this the fact that the US is 39th on the global literacy scale, and that school text books were reduced to little words because few could read the earlier editions, and you have a serious thought process problem. Even more contextual issues arrive when 61% are actively religious, actually believing God is on your side because he is American. That way, invading 60 sovereign nations since WWII and stealing their resources to make America Great, is OK. But the URL oziz4oziz.com/ elaborates on this.

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I notice you do not mention that the default, obvious Traditional choice might have been to stick with your King from the beginning, with crowning Washington a second option.

I too tend on the side of "America was never great", and probably Satan's chosen land from the beginning, but not for Tony's reasons. The US culture has been money-centric, anti-intellectual, poor at producing geniuses and has had to import them often. Its free speech law is not useful in practice, in a country that has been PC for a long time. Try explaining, in the fifties, to the "greatest" generation, that their glorious capitalist leaders shored up the USSR, poisoned them, raped and tortured children.

The founding fathers were shady characters, from liberal Phoenician Jefferson, to wannabe Phoenician Franklin (a generous donor to synagogues, and collector of children bones in his UK house). Lots of European blue blood. Rebelling, in part, because their King dared to limit the number of lashes their servant's backs could enjoy. By "servants" they meant slaves, of course. Cheap, white trash slaves, imported forcefully from London, the Rhine, or wherever. Young boys in particular must have been working hard, day *and* night, considering there were very few women in the early plantations. Blacks were non existent there at first, and then precious luxury goods for a good while.

The very first flag of the rebelling United States is telling. It's a open secret that its choice was influenced by a nameless occultist outsider. Googling the original owner of that flag seems unreasonably difficult.

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Dimitri... so don't use google. Use a search enging that does not censor your reading... duck duckgo, brave, swisscows. whatever, but never google.

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My fren, I believe your internal policeman quickly made you look a the finger instead of what it's pointing to. The point is that Google seemingly censors what should be a trivial historical detail.

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I agree that the difference between pagan and Christian thought is with regard to mercy, but disagree that heroic virtue itself is necessarily pagan thinking! All of the elaboration of heroic virtue after Aristotle was done by devout Christians. Peter Auvergne, Aquinas, and Giles of Rome were all Christian. The traditional Christian view had been that monarchy, not democracy, was the proper way to organize society. Jesus is King of Kings, not President of Presidents, for instance.

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Sure, that makes sense. In a week or so I'll be posting some thoughts on chivalry, which was in many ways the high water mark of Western civilization's masculine culture, and quotes from St Bridget about knights. So stand by.

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