My Own Personal Favorites

I appreciate Lovecraft because I understand his cosmic-nihilism, the terror of a universe that owes us nothing, which no Christian offering easy consolation will ever fully understand. I appreciate Tolkien for his Heart and faithfulness: his belief that loyalty, mercy and carrying the burden still matter when victory is impossible. I appreciate Jack London for his grounded emotional sapience, his hunger, labour, instinct, struggle slowly becoming power. I appreciate James Clavell because he understood civilizations as contests between cultures, institutions, commerce, hierarchy and human ambition; morality never floats safely above power. I appreciate Douglas Adams because, when the cosmos supplies no satisfactory answer, absurd laughter becomes an honest form of survival. I appreciate Wilkie Collins because he saw respectable society as a maze of secrets, property, manipulation and confinement, while retaining compassion for the people trapped inside it. I appreciate Cormac McCarthy because he depicts men stripped of every illusion who love even when they know reality will punish it.

1. Fantasy Authors As Seen by the Contemporary Cultural Left

• H. P. Lovecraft — Mostly hated for his racial and reactionary views, although his cosmic horror remains too influential to discard completely.

• J. K. Rowling — Once celebrated for an inclusive underdog narrative, she is now heavily condemned for her position on sex and gender.

• J. R. R. Tolkien — Respected as a supreme mythmaker but criticized for traditionalism, Eurocentrism and relatively conventional social roles.

• Ursula K. Le Guin — Loved for anarchism, feminism, anti-colonialism and her willingness to imagine radically different societies and genders.

• China Miéville — Loved for combining Marxist politics, anti-imperialism and formal experimentation with grotesquely inventive fantasy.

• N. K. Jemisin — Most strongly celebrated for placing oppression, identity, diversity and structural injustice at the centre of epic fantasy.

2. Fantasy Authors As Seen by the Contemporary Centre-Right

• China Miéville — Disliked for revolutionary Marxism, although his intelligence and imaginative power receive reluctant respect.

• N. K. Jemisin — Disliked for progressive activism and identity politics, while still acknowledged as an accomplished world-builder.

• Philip Pullman — Admired for individual liberty and opposition to authority but distrusted for militant anti-Christianism.

• J. K. Rowling — Increasingly liked as a liberal who resisted progressive orthodoxy without becoming conventionally conservative.

• C. S. Lewis — Loved for Christian moral order, intelligible good and evil, and an accessible defence of Western tradition.

• J. R. R. Tolkien — Revered for inherited order, rooted communities, moral courage and resistance to industrialized modernity.

3. Fantasy Authors As Seen by the Contemporary Far Right

• Steven Brust — Hated as an avowed socialist whose cosmopolitan, irreverent fantasy represents the political enemy.

• Ursula K. Le Guin — Disliked for anarchism, feminism, sexual experimentation and egalitarian social imagination, despite her undeniable stature.

• Frank Herbert — Admired for treating hierarchy, breeding, religion and elite power as permanent realities rather than liberal abnormalities.

• J. R. R. Tolkien — Selectively loved for ancestry, rooted peoples and heroic anti-modernism, though his Catholic universalism complicates the embrace.

• John Norman — Liked for unapologetic natural hierarchy, masculine dominance and rejection of feminist equality.

• Vox Day — Most strongly embraced for explicit anti-progressivism, hierarchy and culture-war opposition to the contemporary literary establishment.

4. Fantasy Authors As Seen by the Neo-Charismatic Evangelicals

• Philip Pullman — Hated as an overt literary opponent of Christianity whose fantasy culminates in rebellion against divine authority.

• J. K. Rowling — Viewed ambivalently because her moral struggle and sacrificial themes appeal, while normalized witchcraft alarms some believers.

• J. R. R. Tolkien — Admired for Christian myth and providence, though his Catholicism and subtle sacramentalism are not loved by the charismatic.

• Ted Dekker — Loved for conversion, spiritual danger and supernatural warfare presented through emotionally intense thrillers.

• C. S. Lewis — Revered for making Christian doctrine, temptation and redemption intelligible through imaginative narrative.

• Frank Peretti — Most closely aligned because his fiction depicts angels, demons and spiritual warfare as immediate forces operating around ordinary believers.

5. Fantasy Authors As Seen by the Traditionalist Catholics

• Philip Pullman — Hated for turning anti-clericalism and revolt against God into the central liberation narrative of his fantasy.

• C. S. Lewis — Warmly respected as a Christian apologist and defender of natural law, but limited by his Protestantism.

• Tim Powers — Loved for treating Catholic belief, sin and supernatural evil as objective realities within adventurous fantasy.

• Gene Wolfe — Deeply revered for sacramental symbolism, theological complexity and Catholic metaphysics hidden inside difficult speculative fiction.

• Flannery O’Connor — Loved for revealing grace through violence, grotesquerie, pride and the spiritual desolation of the modern South.

• J. R. R. Tolkien — The supreme literary figure because his entire mythology embodies providence, fall, sacrifice, stewardship and Catholic subcreation.

6. Fantasy Authors As Seen by the Eastern Orthodox

• J. K. Rowling — In this deliberately severe panel, she is most distrusted because globally normalized magical education and liberal cultural symbolism appear more socially influential than Pullman’s explicit polemic.

• H. P. Lovecraft — Rejected for atheistic cosmic nihilism, although his sense of metaphysical dread can resemble a world emptied of divine light.

• C. S. Lewis — Widely appreciated for spiritual realism, moral psychology and his considerable influence upon Orthodox converts.

• J. R. R. Tolkien — Loved for humility, providence, premodern community and a creation filled with meaning beyond human will.

• Eugene Vodolazkin — Revered for presenting medieval Rus’, holiness, repentance and sacred time through sophisticated literary fiction.

• Nicholas Kotar — Most directly embraced as an Orthodox writer who consciously integrates Slavic folklore, spiritual struggle and Orthodox cosmology.

7. Fantasy Authors As Seen by the Latter-day Saints

• George R. R. Martin — Disliked for sexual brutality, moral ambiguity and an apparently providence-free world, although his plotting and dynastic imagination are respected.

• J. K. Rowling — Moderately liked for courage, friendship and resistance to evil, with lingering reservations about magical culture.

• Stephenie Meyer — Embraced as a prominent Latter-day Saint author whose supernatural romance emphasizes chastity, marriage, family and eternal attachment.

• Tracy Hickman — Loved as an LDS fantasy pioneer whose adventures emphasize moral choice, fellowship and the consequences of power.

• Orson Scott Card — Highly valued for agency, sacrifice, family, moral responsibility and explicitly LDS-inflected speculative thought.

• Brandon Sanderson — The contemporary ideal: an active Latter-day Saint producing enormously successful, morally structured fantasy with disciplined world-building.

8. Fantasy Authors As Seen by the Western Esotericists

• H. P. Lovecraft — Both rejected as a materialist and fascinated over as an inadvertent visionary who created an apparently functional modern mythology.

• Arthur Machen — Loved for sacred terror, hidden realities and the suggestion that modern rational life conceals ancient spiritual forces.

• Algernon Blackwood — Loved for portraying nature as alive with sublime, overwhelming and sometimes terrifying consciousness.

• Charles Williams — Revered for combining occult societies, ceremonial magic and supernatural adventure with esoteric Christianity.

• Dion Fortune — Treated as an authoritative insider because her novels directly communicate the Western Mystery Tradition and psychic cosmology.

• Alan Moore — The modern high magician of the panel, loved for treating language, art, symbols and imagination as operative magical forces.

9. Fantasy Authors As Seen by the Western Atheist

• H. P. Lovecraft — Admired for uncompromising materialism and cosmic indifference, though his racial politics prevent uncomplicated veneration.

• James Morrow — Loved for turning theology into philosophical satire and treating the death of God as a literal speculative premise.

• Isaac Asimov — Revered for scientific rationalism, secular humanism and confidence in intelligence as humanity’s principal instrument.

• Terry Pratchett — Loved for compassionate humanism, institutional skepticism and exposing religious or political absurdity without losing sympathy.

• Kurt Vonnegut — Loved for combining atheistic absurdism with moral outrage, grief and stubborn concern for suffering human beings.

• Douglas Adams — The culminating figure because he makes a purposeless universe hilarious, liberating and strangely consoling.

10. Fantasy Authors As Seen by the Right-Wing Atheist

• John Norman — Uneasily admired for confronting biological and sexual hierarchy, but kept low because his domination themes appear crude and obsessive.

• Terry Goodkind — Liked for Objectivist individualism, heroic reason, capitalism and militant hostility toward collectivism.

• Jack Vance — Loved for aristocratic irony, radically different cultures, unequal societies and the absence of compulsory egalitarian moralizing.

• Frank Herbert — Revered for understanding religion as political technology and for exploring breeding, institutions, charismatic power and elite formation.

• Robert E. Howard — Loved for heroic vitalism, masculine independence and the recurring victory of barbarian strength over decadent civilization.

• H. P. Lovecraft — Placed at the head for combining godless materialism, cosmic indifference, civilizational pessimism and an unsoftened sense of hierarchy.

I saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind’s ear the blasphemous domdaniel of cacophony which companioned it. It was the shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which that corpse-city had ever stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I screamed and screamed and screamed as my nerves gave way and the walls quivered about me.

“The full moon—damn ye—ye . . . ye yelping dog—ye called ’em, and they’ve come for me! Moccasined feet—dead men—Gad sink ye, ye red devils, but I poisoned no rum o’ yours—han’t I kept your pox-rotted magic safe?—ye swilled yourselves sick, curse ye, and ye must needs blame the squire—let go, you! Unhand that latch—I’ve naught for ye here—”

~ “HE” by H.P. Lovecraft

“He” is a brief, standalone Gothic short story, published in Weird Tales in September 1926. The unnamed narrator, a likely stand in, for Lovecraft himself, is a sensitive New England antiquarian who has moved to New York expecting mystery, beauty, and poetic inspiration. Instead, he finds the city oppressive, spiritually dead, and alien in every way. He begins wandering Greenwich Village at night, searching for surviving fragments of the old New English New York he wanted to see. The great thing about this story, is that it is in fact a Time Travel story, without the mechanism clearly shown. It is a story without romanticizing the past, as the traditionalist might, or romanticising a future, that forever gets better, as a progressive would.

One night, in a sequence of hidden courtyards seemingly absent from modern maps, he meets a thin pale man wearing an old-fashioned cloak. The stranger recognizes the narrator’s obsession with the past and offers to show him parts of New York that few living people know. He leads him through an increasingly impossible maze. Ordinary streets give way to forgotten alleys; modern street lamps become oil lamps, then candles, and finally they reach a steep colonial lane and an eighteenth-century country estate that should no longer exist. In a way, both the stranger and the unnamed antiquarian narrator are very much made to feel like doubles for Lovecraft himself.

Inside the decaying mansion, the stranger reveals himself in full Georgian dress. He claims that one of his ancestors, a squire, possessed the estate in 1768. He learned magical rites from those he called “Red Indians,” meaning American Indians. These rites allowed a sufficiently powerful human will to manipulate matter, space, and time. After acquiring their secret, he gave the American Indian practitioners lethally bad rum. The stranger evasively insists that their deaths were accidental, but the strong implication is that the squire murdered them to become the sole possessor of their knowledge.

Standing at the library window, the stranger produces three temporal visions: First, Precolonial Manhattan: The city disappears, replaced by thick vegetation, the Hudson, salt marshes, and fireflies. Second, Colonial New York: Greenwich becomes a rural village of green lanes and scattered houses, with the churches of old New York visible in the distance And finally, Future New York: A gigantic black city of terraces and pyramids fills the landscape. Strange flying creatures cover the sky, while a strange terrifying Asiatic or mixed-race population, in orange and red clothes, dance to drums and disturbing music. In other words, New York, had become in time even more horrible than the narrator originally felt it.

The final vision overwhelms the narrator, who begins screaming. The stranger becomes terrified because it is the full moon, and the screams have apparently alerted the murdered American Indians, or their supernatural remnants. Bringing them back for revenge upon him. The stranger drops his pretense and reveals that he is the original 1768 squire, preserved for more than 150 years by the stolen magic. Moonlight strikes him, causing his body to shrivel and blacken. The door is broken open, apparently by a tomahawk, and a shapeless black mass filled with glowing eyes enters. It envelops the sorcerer and carries him away.

There are two things I love about this short story. It has a cold vision of the future, which also indicts the past. Lovecraft, despite accusations of “racism” is hardly pretending that the lying New England sorcerer, is somehow blameless. The stranger was lying the whole time, about much of his narrative and only persisted into the future due to his own wicked acts. This is hardly a case of Lovecraft romanticizing New England, and simply hating on multiracial New York, as the usual stereotype would portray him. Needless to say there is a contradiction in the “Red Indians” having certain powers and not using them, and the even more hellish multiracial New York, being something at the mercy of this sorcerer, but these lose ends only add to the horror.

He begins with the belief that the old world was more beautiful, dignified, and spiritually alive. But the authentic past turns out to contain, occult exploitation, betrayal and murder, stolen Indigenous knowledge, unnatural longevity and guilt concealed beneath aristocratic refinement. A progressive might well read this and see their entire worldview on everything being presenting in Lovecraft’s own alter ego. He searches for the beautiful past and discovers the crime underneath it all. That irony makes the story more interesting than a simple complaint about modernity. It is a story, that says, in effect, that the only thing that can connect the time traveller, by magic, to the wicked future of New York, is precisely the wicked past of New York.

Of course, modern “multicultural” New York is portrayed as a hellish monstrosity, a grotesque non-European civilization occupying the corpse of the old city. Why would we expect anything less from a Lovecraft story? He was portraying his own sensitive experience, though not completely uncritically, as those who might jeer at him would have it. In much of Lovecraft, cosmic forces are indifferent and wrongdoing is not morally punished. Here the conclusion is strangely “traditional.” The ghosts of the American Indians come for the sorcerer; the future condemns the past and the past condemns the future. This is very far from the kind of mere criticism of others which progressives like to indulge in. Lovecraft can see evil in both spheres of time. It is a story where the “moral” seems to be, “It can always get worse.”

One of the first ways I first learned geography, was merely from parables and the Brothers Grimm stories. From them, I learned that there was a land called Greece, a land called Germany, a land called Lappland, a land called “Ancient Rome,” etc. One thing I could never figure out, was why, Bremen on the map, appeared to be two cities, Bremen and Bremerhaven.

The reason is historical and practical. Medieval Bremen became a major trading city because ships could sail up the Weser to it. But over the centuries the lower Weser silted up, making it increasingly difficult for large oceangoing ships to reach Bremen. Bremen therefore purchased land near the mouth of the Weser from the Kingdom of Hanover in 1827. That settlement became Bremerhaven.

The Institutional Parable of the Musicians of Bremen

A donkey has spent years carrying sacks for a miller. As he grows old and weak, he realizes his master intends to get rid of him. So he escapes and decides that he will go to Bremen and become a town musician.

On the road he successively encounters a Dog, a Cat and a Rooster. Each has the same problem. The dog is too old to hunt and his master intends to kill him; the cat is no longer useful at catching mice and is threatened with death; the rooster is destined for the cooking pot. The donkey recruits all three: come with me to Bremen; we’ll make music and earn our living. They don’t make it there before nightfall. Instead they enter a forest and see a light coming from a house occupied by robbers.

The animals peer through the window and see the robbers eating. They devise the wonderfully ridiculous plan for which the story is famous: Rooster on top of Cat
on top of Dog on top of Donkey. Then they all scream, bray, bark, meow and crow simultaneously and crash through the window. The terrified robbers think some kind of monstrous supernatural creature has attacked them and flee.

While the moral of the story for children is something like, never give up, there is still a use for you, even if all your old masters or family have abandoned you. There is another deeper institutional meaning hidden in here I did not realize. An even stranger detail. When a robber returns, he cannot understand what attacked him. The cat becomes a witch, the dog's bite becomes a man stabbing him with a knife, the donkey becomes a monster wielding a club, and the rooster's crow becomes a judge ordering that the criminal be brought before him. That's almost a miniature theory of institutional power: when separate capacities act together, outsiders perceive not four weak animals but an entire social order, witch, armed man, enforcer, judge.

Bremen itself eventually adopted fictional characters who never visited Bremen as perhaps its most famous civic symbols. The famous Gerhard Marcks bronze wasn't installed until 1953. In 2019, on the story's bicentenary, Bremen's Kunsthalle explicitly presented the animals as symbols of courage and solidarity.

Every Ideology Has Its Saints and Devils

Naturally creating a political iconostasis without being a direct part of the ideology that might produce them, comes with some limitations. While fanatics might readily agree, were it produced by themselves, there are always genuinely nuanced groups. Leaders in Marxist groups, for example, will be significantly more nuanced, flexible and understanding of differences, than most of their followers. This can lead to several versions of even a basic liberal or conservative iconostasis being wildly inaccurate for getting a simple read on “who is in” and “who is out.” These are of course, only my approximations.

Needless, to say, people “on the Right,” are much more intellectually diverse, and therefore might have even more of an objection to me, making an Iconostasis which does not accurately represent their views. Just as a more nuanced Communist might not condemn Trotsky outright, a more nuanced Nazi, might very well take three or four different contradictory views on Hitler, making him impossible to map. Likewise, there can be several different genuine Nazi views on Hitler, from different descending or parallel fascist groups. Since this is done in good fun, these are not meant to be definitive. Some items in some of my lists are admittedly way off. Different iterations may have more than one view on a “left wing” figure or a “right wing” figure.

As always, I think this particular Islamic-Persian Art tradition, deserves more praise. And A.I. can do beautiful versions of them. For this set, I will also include some additions mixing in a more Orthodox Christian version, still with a Persian overlay, for my own political-economic heros and preferences, as a side.

To begin with some of my own developing synthesis.

The Weberist-Burnhamist View

A State Directed Distributist Model

“THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS SEEN BY A WESTERN NATIONAL BOLSHEVIK”

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS SEEN BY FRANCO FREDA’S NAZI-MAOISTS

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS SEEN BY USTRYALOV NATIONAL BOLSHEVIKS

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS SEEN BY THE NIEKISCHIAN NATIONAL BOLSHEVIKS

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS SEEN BY THE LIMONOVITE NATIONAL BOLSHEVIKS

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS SEEN BY THE DUGINIST NEO-EURASIANISTS

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS SEEN BY SAVITRI DEVI

ESOTERIC HITLERISM

OTTO ERNST REMER THE REICH-LOYALIST WORLDVIEW GERMANY AND THE COLD WAR AFTER 1945

The American Neo-Nazi World View ( Approx. Version )

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS SEEN BY THE CHIANGIST REPUBLIC OF CHINA

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS SEEN BY JAPANESE IMPERIAL ULTRANATIONALISTS

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS SEEN BY THE ZIONIST MAXIMALISTS

A Possible “National Anarchist” Worldview Line up

This is my political iconostasis representing different points of view on the 20th century, in my prefered Persian-Islamic style. I have chose 6 figures from the 20th century, a spread of dictators, thought leaders, philosophers, celebrity figures. The contrast between the views will be commonly understood. Then I will introduce some odder views, and explain the distinguishing features; and introduce my own. Some of these contrasts will be readily understood. Others may not. I will start with the ones everyone thinks of and then proceed eventually into Nazi-Maoists and Randian schools.

Since progressives, especially are well-known for looking at politics in terms of Saints and Devils, in the most shrill, fashion, I figure, why not “take that as read” and apply the model from every possible perspective religiously. Some differences between Leftist views would be interesting to see visually; and the less understood Rightist views of this figures, likewise, deserve a little seen media expression. If anyone has any thoughts on figures who should be represented in the Persian-Islamic fashion in contrast, this might be a simple exercise to at least create some perspective for the more “shrill” types.

The Twentieth Century As Seen by the Contemporary Woke Left

The Twentieth Century According to the Liberal Internationalist

The Twentieth Century According to the Centrist Conservative

The Twentieth Century According to the social democrat

The Twentieth Century According to the Soviet Marxist-Stalinist

The Twentieth Century According to the Critical Pro-Soviet Marxist

The Twentieth Century According to Non-Soviet Trotskyist Internationalists

The Modern Middle East As Seen by the Khomeinist Revolutionaries

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY As Seen By The Christian Democrats

The French Revolution As Seen By The Jacobin Republicans

In History

The most important, well-known, and common “Man” on Earth, every Eon going back into recorded history, would be the single individual, or, where individual names disappear, the single representative human type, who best captures humanity at that point in time. The standard I am choosing to represent “Planet Earth” deliberately broad: not the most powerful ruler, greatest thinker, or morally admirable person, but the one or type whose name had the most renown across the planet and whose life, actions, or historical position most strongly represents the age in which he lived. As we move backward beyond recorded names, our principle shifts from the most famous individual to the most common or representative kind of person actually alive. This was inspired by H.G. Wells “A Brief History of the World.” While I want to look at this historically, I also want to examine ancient memory. For that, we will do “pairs” if possible from the earliest recorded or mythological memory, in a more culture specific way, and work backwards, up through history.

• 5000–4000 BC — The Anonymous Yellow River Farmer-Forager

• 4000–3000 BC — Narmer

• 3000–2000 BC — Gilgamesh

• 2000–1000 BC — Ramesses II

• 1000 BC–1 AD — Alexander the Great

• 1–1000 AD — Jesus Christ

• 1000–2000 AD — Adolf Hitler

Starting In Africa

In African Myth, in the prehistoric mythological era, the most common representative of or vision of a “Man” or a “Woman,” the most known, at the earliest conception in tropical Africa. If we go as far back as we reasonably can into the indigenous mythic imagination of tropical Africa, before substantial Eurasian influence, what was the most widespread archetype, the basic human figure that people imagined when they told stories about the primordial or mythological age. This will be our starting baseline for this culture, to represent the Earth; a set of persons, man and or woman, at least two, in this eon, to represent “The Planet of Tears.” For some we could go even further back with less details, but we will do an approximation for the most well-known, at the earliest time.

For Africa:

NYAME-THE SKY FATHER & NYAMBE, THE MOTHER EARTH — c. 5000 BC
Ancestral Niger-Congo / Early Bantu — Creator and Earth-Ancestress

For the Middle-East, the Two Primordial Ones:

THE TWO PRIMORDIAL ONES — roughly 9600-8000 BC
Mesopotamian/Sumerian — Heaven and Earth

For Europe:

POSEIDON & POTNIA — c. 1400–1200 BC
Mycenaean Greece — Lord of the Earth/Sea and “The Mistress”

For East Asia:

FUXI & NÜWA — c. 300 BC–200 AD
Ancient China — Culture Hero/First Ancestor and Creator-Mother

For South Asia:

c. 2600–1900 BC — The Horned Lord & The Mother, Indus Civilization, earliest compelling paired sacred imagery.

For Australia:

BAIAME & BIRRANGULU — Pre-contact Aboriginal Australia
Gamilaraay / Southeastern Australia — Creator-Father and Fertility-Mother

For Melanesia:

KILIBOB & MANUP
North-coastal Papua New Guinea — Primordial Culture-Hero Brothers / Ancestral Civilizers

For South America:

VIRACOCHA & PACHAMAMA — c. 1400–1530 AD
Inca Andes — Supreme Creator and Mother Earth

For Polynesia:

RANGI & PAPA
Polynesian World — Sky Father and Earth Mother / Primordial Parents

For North America:

GITCHI MANITOU & NOKOMIS
Algonquian World — Great Spirit / Creator and Grandmother Earth

For Japan:

ZANAGI & IZANAMI — recorded c. 712–720 AD
Early Japan / Shinto — Primordial Creator Couple / Parents of the Japanese Islands and Kami

For Madagascar:

ZANAHARY & RATOVANTANY — Pre-contact Madagascar
Malagasy World — Sky Creator / Giver of Life and Earth Creator / Shaper of Humanity

In order to correct any cultural or geographic bias that might be present in recording the “Greatest Faces” upon “the Earth,” I have asked the A.I. to represent just those beings, persons, in legend, myth or history, that would have been most known to “American Indians” alone in North America, up until the 1400s A.D. prior to European contact.

Of historical legendary figures just in North America, we have only a few well known historical personalities, and repeat mythological archetypes, like the Thunderbird. Another Monster, Intelligence, Contradiction, who “attacks from above” in the human imagination.

Great Peacemaker — Hiawatha — Jikonsaseh — Tadodaho — Raven — Coyote — Thunderbird

In order to also record for our possible future extra-terrestrial encounters, we might also want to mention, another mute part of “human history.” That of tropical Africa before the Bantu expansion. These names would have been the most known prior to 4000 B.C. in Sub-Saharan Africa.

TORE — KOMBA — JENGI — AREBATI — KHONVOUM — WAITO — BEMBE

5 Forest gods, 1 Fire god and a Creator “god.”

In order to be absolutely complete, I will treat the forgotten Siberian Arctic as yet another chapter of the “human story” upon which history and power is muted, as separate from Europe and Asia, and civilizational memory. Nothing much happens in oral memory until about 1700 A.D.

• Napana — Koryak prince/chief of the Aklan sedentary and reindeer-herding Koryaks.

• Kaigin — leader of the Penzhina reindeer Koryaks.

• Akhema — leader of the Kamennoye fortified settlement.

• Tykhyly — Koryak prince of the Ust-Talovka settlement.

• Kukey — toyon (chief) of the sedentary Koryaks on the Paren River.

• Lotsukhnat — prince of the Apuka Koryaks, including sedentary and reindeer-herding groups.

• Megevya — one of the named leaders of the reindeer-herding Apuka Koryaks.

Prior to European contact in the 1500s, Japan had its own civilizational memory. I will treat it separately.

AMATERASU — HACHIMAN — KŪKAI — PRINCE SHŌTOKU — SUGAWARA NO MICHIZANE — MINAMOTO NO YOSHITSUNE — MINAMOTO NO YORITOMO

And just to absolutely not leave anything out. The Forgotten world of the Amazon is another “muted civilization.”

AMAZONIAN EARTHWORK CIVILIZATIONS — c. AD 1000–1500

THE EARTHWORK RULER — THE ROAD BUILDER — THE FOREST GARDENER — THE CANAL ENGINEER — THE GEOMETRIC PRIEST — THE FISHERY MASTER — THE LOST STORYTELLER

And just to be absolutely thorough, I will conclude with completely lost and legendary civilizations as a final footnote. One, Atlantis, presuming it lay on the mid-Atlantic ridge, descendent from Prehistoric Europe and North Africa, and remained strange, apart and forgotten.

ATLAS — The Central King
GADEIRUS — The Western Sea Prince
AMPHERES — The Navigator
EVAEMON — The Temple Prince
MNESEUS — The Highland Prince
AUTOCHTHON — The Earthborn Prince
ELASIPPUS — The Horse/War Prince

And finally the Paracas civilization, and what little we know of them. 800–200 BC.

THE OCULATE BEING — THE ELONGATED-HEAD ELITE — THE FLYING SHAMAN — THE TROPHY-HEAD BEARER — THE STAFF-BEARER — THE TEXTILE LORD — THE MASKED RITUALIST

Furthermore we must include, as an aside to Prehistoric Europe, the prehistoric fringe of Pre-Indo-European Europe, the prehistoric Mediterranean. Sardinia, Crete and Malta must be represented.

THE TEMPLE PEOPLE WITHOUT NAMES — c. 3000 BC

SLEEP / DEATH — DIVINE BODY — SERPENT / FERTILITY — RITUAL DANGER — MASTERY OF NATURE — HUNT / WAR — HEROIC WARRIOR

And not to end this series by sounding too Jordan Peterson-like, but the Snake or the Land Dragon, seems to be the earliest identifiable “monster” that commanded the “human” attention. An alien different from us, with the appearance of intelligence, with wants like us, but methods different, no legs.

“Man” and Monster, is story of “The Earth.”

The 7 most Ancient Monsters or Fears from dimly remembered pre-history, before 6000 B.C.

DROWNING — ENEMY — CONTRADICTION — DISORDER — DOMINANCE — ATTACK FROM ABOVE

6 external monsters, mostly serpentine, and 1 anomaly monster, contradiction, show up in the “human” memory.

Before 4000 B.C. the most commonly known monsters on Earth were essentially Snakes and Dragons:

Water Serpent (~4000 BC )

Dragon-Serpent (~4000–3000 BC )

Cosmic Coiled Serpent (~2700 BC)

Chaos Serpent (~2000 BC)

Horned Dragon (~2000 BC onward)

Storm Serpent (~1600 BC onward)

The most Ancient Enemy of the “hominid” on Earth: The serpent reptile.

On Earth, the most famous non-humanoid beings in 3000 B.C. were:

Land Dragon — Serpent Dragon — Serpopard/Feline Monster — Griffin — Set/Desert Beast — Lion-Eagle Monster — Fish-Mammal Monster

2 Dragons-serpents, 5 Monsters.

By way of inference, I would pause to suggest two possibilities here, one mundane and accepted by “science” and one extreme. The mundane, is that this was the first era in which symbols became creative storytelling devices; the extreme, some invasion that was monstrous was remembered.

Most well-known non-humanoid beings on Earth prior to 67 A.D:

CERBERUS — APEP — SHESHA/ANANTA — QINGLONG — PEGASUS — HYDRA — LEVIATHAN

An intelligent monster wolf, Snake, Snake, Dragon, Good Monster Horse, Snake, Dragon.

Most well-known 7 non-human beings just in Europe, prior to 67 A.D.

Jupiter/Zeus — Mars/Ares — Lugus — Taranis — Wodan/Odin — Donar/Thor — Apollo

If we go back to 67 A.D. and ask for the most well known non-human beings believed in on The Planet of Tears:

Indra — Shiva — Vishnu — Zeus/Jupiter — Xiwangmu (Queen Mother of the West) — Isis — Ahura Mazda

The 7 most famous non-human beings known by the greatest number of people on Earth before 1400 A.D.

GOD/ALLAH — SATAN/IBLIS — GABRIEL/JIBRIL — VISHNU — SHIVA — GUANYIN/AVALOKITEŚVARA — INDRA

To correct for any historical bias, in the memory of The planet of Tears, the 6 most commonly heard names throughout Oceania, Australia, Polynesia and the Pacific were:

Tangaroa/Tagaloa — Tāne — Hina — Rongo/Lono — Tū — Baiame

A Hero, an Ancestor, an Ancestor, a King, a King, a King, a Law Giver. In written testimony that survives, this world of Oceania, is also a mostly mute world.

Before the Vedic names appear, India does not become empty; history simply becomes mute.

Harappan ruler — merchant — priest/ritual specialist — seal owner — craftsman — sailor — farmer

India prior to 2000 B.C. in the historical record, pre-Aryan. This is a silent chapter in Earth history so far. Due to many untranslated scripts of known existing groups on the scale of the middle-east. I would consider this an unknown colonial extension of the Persian world, with some unknown additions.

Proto-Dravidian, Munda, Austroasiatic, extinct language isolate(s), multiple unknown Harappan languages, remain mute.

In the Indic-Bharat World, the personal names probably most widely known across the early Indic world by about 500 BC:

PARIKSHIT — JANAMEJAYA — YAJNAVALKYA — JANAKA — UDDALAKA ARUNI — BIMBISARA — PRADYOTA

In this case, they are mostly their latest Indo-Aryan-Vedic Kings and Sages.

Correcting for any bias: Just in the Persian World, before 580, the most famous personages would have been: Median kings at home, Babylonian allies, Assyrian enemies, a Lydian rival, and an Iranian religious teacher.

CYAXARES — ASTYAGES — NEBUCHADNEZZAR II — NABOPOLASSAR — ASHURBANIPAL — ALYATTES — ZOROASTER

Correcting for geographic bias, the most famous people just in East Asia, prior to 400 B.C. would have been:

Duke of Zhou — King Wen — King Wu — Confucius — Duke Huan of Qi — Guan Zhong — Yu the Great

Correcting for historical bias in Africa, 7 most famous names in premodern Sub-Saharan Africa, prior to 1500 A.D.

Correcting any history bias, the 7 most famous names in Asia, prior to any large European contact, in 400 B.C. would have been:

Gautama Buddha — Confucius — Cyrus the Great — Laozi — Zoroaster — Darius the Great — Sun Tzu

About 4 from the Persian-Indian expanse, about 3 from East Asia.

Mansa Musa — Sundiata Keita — Taharqa — Amanirenas — Ezana — Sunni Ali — Askia Muhammad

Religiously, they would have had 3 Muslims, 1 Christian, 3 Pagans, all elite figures only included, no mythology.

Correcting for any historical bias, the 7 most known names in the Americas prior to the 1400s and European Contact were:

Pachacuti, Inca, Peru, Emperor

Pakal the Great, Maya, Emperor

Nezahualcoyotl, Acolhua/Nahua, Texcoco/Mexico, Aztec King.

Eight Deer Jaguar Claw, Mixtec, Oaxaca/Mexico, Conqueror.

Moctezuma I, Mexica/Aztec, Emperor.

Topa Inca Yupanqui, Inca, Conqueror.

Lady Six Sky, Maya, Naranjo/Guatemala, Queen.

Prior to 70,000 years ago, the earliest objects we can securely associate with human possession and intentional use are startlingly basic: worked stone, modified wood, engraved shell, pigment, beads, and finally drawing itself.

The earliest archaeological trail suggests that human movement was repeatedly organized around water, following rivers, lakeshores, estuaries and coastlines as natural highways through the landscape. The first map.

I arrived at 7 most famous or infamous people in “human history”: those whose name has penetrated the greatest number of countries, languages, religions, generations, and levels of education? I weighted global name recognition, longevity of fame, historical importance, religious or educational transmission, and internet visibility: Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha as civilizational religious figures; Napoleon and Hitler as nearly universal historical symbols; Shakespeare as a symbol of literature; and Einstein as a symbol of genius itself. I asked the A.I. to scan all knowledge from the internet and give me 7 people to start from in 2026.

HITLER, STALIN, MAO, GENGHIS KHAN, BIN LADEN, SADDAM HUSSEIN, POL POT

Of the top 7 purely infamous figures in “human history.” 2, would ordinarily be classified as “White.” 4 would be Caucasoid, 3 would be wholly East Asian.

Jesus — Muhammad — Buddha — Julius Caesar — Genghis Khan — Alexander the Great — Confucius

1590, was the last time in history, where our 7 most famous or infamous figures in “human history” was altered by at least a majority of 4.

In A.D. 27, the most famously known names on Earth would have been:

Buddha — Julius Caesar — Alexander the Great — Confucius — Aristotle — Socrates — Augustus

In 1000 B.C., the most famous names on Earth were:

Ramesses II — Hammurabi — Sargon of Akkad — Gilgamesh — Thutmose III — Akhenaten — Ur-Nammu

In 2000 B.C., the most famous names on Earth were:

Khufu — Djoser — Sargon of Akkad — Naram-Sin — Shulgi — Gudea — Enheduanna

For some reason the A.I. had trouble deriving Hitler in a line up, aside from that, it had no problem with a tyrannical genocidal figure prior to Hitler. This show the only bias in history. I think the Holocaust happened, but we have a clear bias, when we cannot discuss someone from Ancient times would wipe out one-third of a country, and modern times.

The first named people in recorded history between 3100–3000 BC: An Accountant, a Slave Owner, a slave, a slave, a Princess, a King, a Queen.

Kushim — Gal-Sal — En-pap X — Sukkalgir — Niseret — Den — Merneith

If we start judging mythological figure as something that starts on a time line before recorded history, the first set of famous mythological names in history would be, confined to the Egyptians and Mesopotamians.

Horus — Inanna — Nanna/Sin — Neith — Enlil — Ninlil — Hathor

An Avenging Son god, A Mother-Whore-Lover goddess, A Moon god grandpa grandma figure, A War goddess, A Patriarch god, A Queenly Mother god, non-sexual, and finally a nurturing Love Mother goddess.

Son, Lover, Grandpa, Warrior symbol, Father, Mother, Wife.

Prior to 3000 BC, we lose recorded historical myth completely. And we are left with repeated Archetypes who precede the myth. These would be the most famous “THOUGHTS” on the Earth of Tears, The Planet of Tears:

MOTHER — LOVER — ELDER — SHAMAN — HUNTER — BEAST-LORD — VIRILE MALE

The Mother, from the European Paleolithic. The Lovers from the Judean desert. The Ancestor Elder from the Middle-East. The Shaman from the European Paleolithic. The Hunter from the Paleolithic of Eurasia. The Beast, from Anatolia, The Bull, from Anatolia.

I would say roughly 50,000 BC, would be our earliest only oral memory:

THE MOTHER — THE FATHER/HUNTER-BEAST — THE ELDER/SHAMAN — THE LOVERS/YOUNG

The Hunter, Beast, Bull represent “The Father” who departs early from the family, is killed or died. The Father is hated, but perhaps respected in his Hunter Archetype, he is a Beast, but he is also a Bull, if ever praised by the Mother. The other four, are all that remain of the famous names to a tribe, The Elder-Shaman become one person, the Mother remains, and the children and lovers remain.

In Cave Art, before 67,000 B.C, the earliest ACTIONS of “Man” were:

Claimer — Storyteller — Hunter — Dancer/Lover — Mother — Swimmer — Gatherer

The Man of the Tribe in two incarnation, claimant and Hunter, the Storyteller, the Dancers, the Mother, the Swimmer, the Gatherer.

The Hunter Claimer is The Leader of the Tribe, The Storyteller is the Mind of the tribe, the lovers are the tribe, the Mother has special status, and everyone else is dependent. 5 Classes or the earliest possible hierarchy. This is what “ True Inherent Primitive Communism” looked like: the earliest hierarchy may have looked less like a pyramid of wealth and more like a division of social necessity:

Warrior/Ruler — Priest/Scribe — Family/Mothers — Commoners/Workers — Dependents

A good way of criticizing Marxism is to begin by explaining Marxism better than most Marxists manage to do, themselves, without inserting my own position or bias into the narrative. So I am going to attempt exactly that. Too often I have found that the Far-Left is simply terrible at explaining their “Big Brain” systematizing in simple terms without emotion and without their usual moralizing. So that is all I am going to present here.

Marxism begins by making class conflict the primary driver of history. It does not necessarily deny that nature, family, religion, nation, property, personality and inherited culture matter. Rather, it argues that these things are profoundly shaped by the material organization of society: who owns productive property, who must work for whom, how the resulting surplus is distributed, and which class controls the institutions that turn its interests into law, morality and common sense. History is therefore interpreted principally through changing modes of production and the struggles between the classes those systems create.

Once class is made primary, however, Marxism necessarily asks people to reify class, to treat it as more fundamental than family, faith, nation, locality, inheritance or personal possession. This creates a problem that every real Marxist movement and state must eventually confront. People do not ordinarily experience themselves merely as interchangeable members of an economic category. They are also parents, believers, patriots, property-holders, members of ethnic and historical communities, and individuals with loyalties that cannot always be reduced to their position within production.

Nevertheless, the primacy of class gives Marxism enormous coalition-building power. It can unite people who otherwise believe very different things. An Enlightenment universalist can join because Marxism promises the rational emancipation of humanity. A Jewish or Christian universalist can translate an older moral concern for justice into secular politics. An economic producerist can join because Marxism promises to place those who make things above rentiers and hereditary owners. A modernizer can join because it promises industrial development and the destruction of feudal backwardness. A trade unionist can see it as the completion of organized labour. An anti-colonial nationalist can use it as a theory of liberation from foreign capital. An intellectual can see himself as the bearer of scientific consciousness. A bureaucratic centralist, technocrat or state-builder can see in it the machinery necessary to reorganize an entire society. Even people who disagree about religion, nationality and morality can temporarily unite under the category of the working class.

Marxism also appeals to individuals for reasons that are almost the inverse of Randian or Stirnerite individualism. The Marxist does not promise that the individual will become free by escaping every collective obligation. He promises that the individual will become materially free because society will collectively abolish the conditions that make him dependent upon employers, landlords, creditors and inherited wealth. This is a kind of collectivized individual emancipation: “I accept universal social obligations because, once everyone does so, I will receive security, education, healthcare, leisure and access to the common inheritance of civilization.” This begs all kinds of questions.

The final promise is therefore much larger than simple redistribution. In the lower stage of communism, productive property is socialized and goods are still distributed partly according to work. In the higher stage, production becomes so abundant and cooperative habits so deeply established that society can operate according to the principle: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Class divisions disappear because no separate group owns the means of production. The coercive political state eventually becomes unnecessary, leaving what Engels called “the administration of things rather than the government of people.”

This is the promise made, explicitly or implicitly, to anarchists, Left Communists and ordinary idealists: eventually, everyone will participate in governing the common enterprise; production will become one enormous cooperative system; unnecessary labour will shrink; leisure will become plentiful; and coercive authority will wither because the material causes of conflict have disappeared. But then comes the turn.

The revolution does not inherit abundance, universal agreement or a population already trained in spontaneous cooperation. It inherits scarcity, administrative breakdown, hostile classes, competing political movements, foreign enemies and millions of people who retain attachments to religion, property, family, locality and nation. The revolutionary government therefore concludes that it cannot immediately abolish authority. It must make the revolutionary state stronger than every external enemy and every internal source of resistance.

At first, force is directed against the old ruling class: aristocrats, capitalists, landlords and counter-revolutionaries. But opposition cannot remain confined to formally defined class enemies. Socialists disagree with other socialists; workers resist labour discipline; peasants defend their land and crops; national minorities demand autonomy; religious believers reject ideological reconstruction; anarchists refuse party authority; and rival Marxists dispute which faction truly represents historical necessity. The category of the enemy consequently expands from the class enemy to the ideological enemy, and then from the ideological enemy to anyone whose behaviour obstructs the state’s economic plan. This begs more questions.

This logic trickles downward through the whole system. To defend the revolution, the party must be disciplined. To discipline the party, its leadership must control appointments and information. To fulfil the economic plan, ministries must command managers. Managers must command workers. Workers must be monitored, rewarded and punished. Police must identify sabotage; censors must prevent counter-revolutionary ideas; statisticians must present politically acceptable results; and local officials must conceal failures from their superiors. Each level becomes more accountable to the level above it than to the people below it.

The promised cooperative of everyone consequently becomes an administrative pyramid. Ownership may have been formally socialized, but effective control is concentrated in the officials who allocate employment, housing, investment, education and political permission. The capitalist’s legal title disappears, yet the managerial function does not. Indeed, it becomes more powerful because economic management, political authority and ideological legitimacy are now concentrated within the same institutional hierarchy.

Marxism therefore does not simply “fail” because wicked people betray an innocent theory. The deeper problem is that its governing institutions are forced to reproduce the very separation between rulers and producers that the theory promised to abolish. Scarcity demands allocation; allocation demands decisions; decisions create offices; offices create managers; managers acquire information and discretion; discretion produces privilege; and privilege becomes self-protecting power.

The final irony is that Marxism begins by saying that legal ownership conceals real relations of power, but Marxist states often defend themselves by making precisely the opposite argument: because factories legally belong to “the people,” the officials who actually control them cannot constitute a ruling class. However, and this is the most important point, if power is defined materially, by who commands production, distributes resources, appoints subordinates and remains insulated from failure, then abolishing private ownership does not abolish class domination. It merely replaces the proprietor with the commissar, and unite economic management with the coercive power of the state.

That is where my criticism of Marxism begins, not by denying its moral attraction or pretending that it has no explanatory power, but by following its own analysis of institutions, hierarchy and material control more consistently than Marxists themselves are usually willing to do.

But Do You Actually Believe This?

Having explained their premise as fairly as possible, I now want to reverse the direction of the argument. ( If you are a Leftist or Far-Leftist, tell me if anything in the above section is at all unfair to you. ) These questions are addressed to Marxists, but also to the neutral onlooker:

Do you actually believe this?

1. Do You Believe Concentrating Power Will Eventually Distribute It?

Do you actually believe that endowing a central caste of administrators with control over employment, investment, housing, education, information, policing and political organization will eventually distribute power throughout society? Or is it more likely that those administrators will use their authority to make themselves permanently indispensable? If the state controls nearly every institution through which an ordinary person can earn a living, organize opposition or acquire public influence, what independent source of power remains capable of holding the state accountable?

2. Do You Believe a Temporary Ruling Caste Will Remain Temporary?

Marxists may call this arrangement the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but who exercises that dictatorship in practice? Millions of workers cannot simultaneously administer every ministry, factory, railway, court and intelligence service. Particular people must interpret the workers’ interests, issue commands and appoint subordinates. Once this administrative caste possesses the power of appointment, why would it abolish itself? What historical mechanism causes an entrenched institution to surrender its authority merely because its original theory described that authority as transitional?

3. Do You Believe the Administrators Will Always Represent the Workers?

Even if the first generation of revolutionaries is sincere, what guarantees the character of the second, third or fourth generation? Do you believe every person promoted through the party will continue advancing toward equality? Or will advancement increasingly favour those who flatter their superiors, defend existing arrangements and avoid reporting inconvenient failures? If administrators appoint the people below them, while those below them provide the information upon which administrators depend, why would the system select for truthfulness rather than obedience?

4. Do You Believe Power Is the Same Thing as Legal Ownership?

If a capitalist can be considered powerful without holding political office, why can an official not be considered powerful without legally owning the factory he controls? If an administrator decides who manages an enterprise, who receives investment, who obtains desirable employment and which failures will be punished, does it really matter that his name does not appear on the property deed? Is power not ultimately held by those who control institutions and appoint the people who operate them? If so, why should state ownership automatically be equated with ownership by “the people”?

5. Do You Believe Abolishing Capitalists Abolishes Class?

If class is defined by material control rather than ceremonial titles, what should we call a permanent group that controls production, allocates resources, monopolizes political information and protects itself from removal? Does a ruling class cease to be a ruling class merely because its privileges are attached to offices rather than inherited shares? If private capital can reproduce hierarchy, why cannot administrative control reproduce hierarchy as well?

6. Do You Believe Political Monopoly Produces Worker Control?

If workers cannot form an independent union, publish an opposition newspaper, organize a rival party, strike against a state enterprise or remove their managers, in what meaningful sense do they control production? Does calling the state a “workers’ state” compensate for workers having fewer independent means of resisting their employer, when their employer is also their landlord, regulator, police force and government? When workers oppose the party that claims to represent them, who gets to decide which side expresses the authentic interests of the working class?

7. Do You Believe the State Can Accurately Know Everything It Must Decide?

If productive decisions are centralized, administrators must determine what should be produced, in what quantity, at what price, by which factory, using which materials and for which consumers. Where does the information required to make all these decisions come from? What happens when local managers know more than central planners, but are rewarded for meeting quotas rather than reporting reality? If reporting shortages, failed harvests or impossible targets threatens an official’s career, will accurate information travel upward, or will reassuring falsehoods?

8. Do You Believe Removing Profit Removes Self-Interest?

Marxists correctly observe that private owners respond to incentives. But why would party officials, planners and managers cease to respond to incentives? If they cannot accumulate private capital, might they not pursue larger offices, privileged housing, access to scarce goods, political protection and authority over other people? Why assume that selfishness disappears when its rewards become bureaucratic rather than commercial?

9. Do You Believe Every Failure Will Be Treated as Information?

When a private enterprise fails, it may lose customers, capital and eventually its existence. What happens when a state ministry fails? Can it be allowed to collapse, or must the state protect it because the ministry performs an essential function and its failure would discredit the plan? Will failure therefore lead to institutional correction, or to falsified statistics, scapegoats, purges and demands for still greater authority? At what point does every failure become evidence that the plan was insufficiently obeyed rather than evidence that the plan itself was defective?

10. Do You Believe Dissent Can Remain Merely Intellectual?

If the party claims to embody the historical interests of the proletariat, what status can it assign to someone who rejects party policy? Can that person simply be mistaken? Or must persistent opposition eventually be interpreted as class hostility, false consciousness, sabotage or counter-revolution? Once disagreement with the government becomes opposition to the working class itself, what principled limit remains upon censorship and repression?

11. Do You Believe Coercion Will Wither Through Repeated Use?

Marxism predicts that the state will eventually wither away after class antagonisms disappear. But the transitional state must suppress counter-revolution, enforce the plan, discipline labour, control information and defend itself against foreign enemies. Do institutions become weaker through continuous use? Do police organizations, intelligence services, planning ministries and party bureaucracies prepare themselves for extinction, or do they continually discover new reasons why their powers remain necessary? Why should an institution constructed to identify enemies ever announce that no enemies remain?

12. Do You Believe “Emergency” Will Ever End?

What happens when the revolution faces invasion, sanctions, economic isolation, internal resistance or technological backwardness? Each danger provides a plausible reason to postpone political freedom, material abundance and the withering of the state. But what society is ever entirely free from external pressure or internal conflict? If communism can arrive only after every emergency has ended, is it an attainable social order, or a future permanently invoked to justify the present government?

13. Do You Believe Class Will Permanently Defeat Every Other Loyalty?

Will people cease to care about family, religion, nation, ethnicity, locality, inheritance and personal possession because theory identifies class as their most fundamental interest? When these loyalties conflict with revolutionary policy, will the state accommodate them, or attempt to reconstruct the population itself? If Marxism must continually suppress non-class loyalties to preserve class unity, does that prove those loyalties are artificial, or that Marxism misunderstood how human beings actually identify themselves?

14. Do You Believe Abundance Automatically Produces Harmony?

Suppose technology eventually creates extraordinary abundance. Does abundance eliminate disagreement over status, authority, family, culture, territory, risk, beauty, morality and the purposes of life? Even if everyone possesses sufficient food and housing, will people no longer compete to determine what society builds, teaches, celebrates and permits? Was material scarcity really the only source of political conflict, or merely one source among many?

15. Do You Believe the Correct People Will Always Control the Machine?

Some Marxists respond that these failures arose because the wrong faction, the wrong leader or the wrong interpretation gained power. But every political system can be made perfect in imagination by assuming that the correct people will always govern it correctly. The relevant question is not whether an ideal Marxist could use concentrated power benevolently. The question is what kinds of people the institutions themselves will select, reward and preserve. Does the system promote those most committed to eventual equality, or those most skilled at acquiring patrons, controlling information, surviving internal struggles and presenting institutional self-interest as historical necessity?

16. What Evidence Would Cause You to Reject the Theory?

If Marxism succeeds, that proves the theory. If it fails, the failure is attributed to capitalist encirclement, material backwardness, betrayal, revisionism, insufficient centralization or the persistence of bourgeois consciousness. What conceivable result would count against it? How many revolutions must concentrate power without later distributing it before concentration is recognized as a feature of the process rather than an unfortunate accident? How many temporary dictatorships must become permanent before the expected transition itself is questioned?

The final question is therefore the simplest:

Why should we believe that every institution created during the transition will eventually produce the opposite of its observable tendency?

Why should concentrated power disperse itself, coercion abolish itself, bureaucracy simplify itself, political monopoly create democracy, administrative privilege create equality and a ruling caste voluntarily make itself unnecessary? Marxism asks us to believe that these institutions are travelling toward their theoretical destination even when every practical incentive pulls them in the opposite direction. That is not a minor discrepancy between theory and practice. It is the central problem.

The difference between GOD, as a theological “persona” in the THREE Abrahamic religions is actually quite substantial. It is substantial enough that I really see it as three different conceptions of one monotheistic deity. “The Father,” Elohim, and Allah, are “different Gods.”

The Christians worship, above all, a GOD OF LOVE: a God whose defining act is self-sacrifice, mercy and redemption. Their nearest pagan analogue might be ELEOS, not erotic Aphrodite or Eros, but divine compassion and mercy. This God frequently cannot be justified by law, or held back by it.

The Muslims worship, above all, a GOD OF JUDGMENT: the sovereign lawgiver before whom mankind must submit and by whom every soul will finally be weighed. Their nearest pagan analogue might be THEMIS: divine law, judgment and cosmic order. Mercy is ridiculous to this God.

The Jews worship, above all, a GOD OF VICTORY: the God who chooses a people, preserves them through catastrophe and promises that history will not end with their extinction or defeat. Reduced to its most provocative formulation, this is the “WE SURVIVE, and ALWAYS MUST WE WIN” God. Morals has nothing to do with it. The nearest pagan analogue would be NIKE.

Each tradition places a different attribute at the dramatic centre of God’s personality: ELEOS. THEMIS. NIKE. Mercy. Judgment. Vindication.

I come from a poor Catholic family of fourteen children, but right off the bat, you do not get “diversity moralizing privilege points” for that. In fact, the first girl I ever loved, only saw that side of me; and I was not in a position to use my “diversity privilege moralizing points” to use her “must worship diversity” condition to obtain her, before even more entrenched diversity con-artists could. And yet despite this, when any of the actual managerial controllers, no matter how petty, low, or pink collared, typically 115 IQ tops, have looked at me, they only “see White.” They do not care about anything else. To add insult to injury, people from my demographic are shamed, if we ever complain about anything. The “privileged” and their diverse PETS, are never shamed for complaining about anything.

I did not encounter “social conservatism” as an intellectual posture adopted after reading the correct theorists; it was the world in which I was formed. It was my lived reality of scarcity and inherent limitations. When my peers were boasting of doing weed, and going to prostitutes, I could only remain silent for many years, deflect, ignore, sometimes risk hating on me, if I said a word. That was one of the things that got me into trouble with “The left.” Simply a grimace of “disrespect” to their self-indulgent arrogance can be enough. And of course, the “diversity” are always there, waiting to “climb.” Family, restraint, obligation, sacrifice and inherited moral limits were not decorative preferences. They were part of the machinery by which people survived when there was not enough money, privacy, attention or institutional protection to go around. I therefore have very little patience for comfortable liberal leftist progressive people who enjoy freedoms and possibilities that families like mine could never afford, and then lecture us about our supposed “privilege.” Some of us, find this hypocrisy so excruciating, but it comes from people, who only “point the finger.” They can never see the finger pointing right back. Every failure, on their part must be justified. Every failure of the political conservative, is obvious enough.

This is the fundamental double standard I have encountered throughout the Left. Its members may participate in every capitalist-liberal delight available to them: fashionable consumption, sexual experimentation, prolonged adolescence, professional mobility, urban anonymity, therapy, travel, fashionable politics and the freedom to abandon obligations whenever those obligations become inconvenient. Their material compromises are excused because they are merely “living under capitalism.” But if someone formed under poverty, Catholicism and a family of fourteen retains conservative instincts about family, sexuality, nation, religion or social order, that disagreement is treated as evidence of personal wickedness. Even if, and I may stress this, I have no personal faith at all; I simply come from an actual situation, where I understand that love, obligation, and self-restraint is necessary, at least in the confines of personal appropriate working class survival. Would I be as degenerate as you progressives, if I was the hated billionaire fascist of your dreams? Quite possibly. This is the ironic attraction of Jeffrey Epstein to “the Right.” Despite the fact, that on moral grounds, they should be otherwise hating him.

I no longer care whether these people call themselves social democrats, anarchists, communists, anti-racists or anything else. The doctrinal differences do not matter to me when the same moral hierarchy repeatedly reappears beneath them; it is their ultimate tell. When a Marxist is married or when a Liberal is charitable, I consider these to be contradictions to their group-nature, even if, it might be much more, consistent with their theories. They forgive themselves for enjoying the products, liberties and protections of capitalist liberalism, while condemning those who never possessed equal access to those things. Their indulgence becomes liberation; our restraint becomes repression. Their preferences are treated as universal human emancipation, while the social arrangements upon which poorer people depend are dismissed as backwardness; they make alliances and build a coalition logic, based on the path of least resistance. As opposed to appealing to the most angry and shut out of institutional power; those who once made-up the backbone of their coalition.

If you can enjoy more capitalist-liberal delights than someone raised in a poor Catholic family of fourteen, then in the relevant material sense, you are the privileged one. You possess the money, privacy, mobility, education, social protection or institutional approval required to survive the consequences of your choices. You can experiment because someone or something stands ready to catch you. People without that protection often depend upon family solidarity, reciprocal obligation, stable norms and durable communities. To attack those things without replacing what they provide is not liberation. It is the privileged imposing the risks of their lifestyle upon people denied its safeguards. This is the sense in which “I am not a leftist.” Because I realize, that for too many people, to enjoy or experiment with those liberal delights would destroy them to such a degree, that they would never recover. It is not because I do not like fun, appreciate beautiful women, or because I lack an understanding of conflict, greed and lust. I understand these things perfectly. I am not above them. I simply say, “Not now, if you are serious. If you are serious, and you want me to be a martyr now, I would expect you to be too, if you want me to engage in collective self-sacrifice.” The Left depends on a set of “good traits” that they never cultivated.

When men see a good leader work harder than “his team,” his team will work harder than “the leader.” When the leader snobbily refers to you as “his team,” that is when the leader is abandoned. THIS is why the Left, will never “win men back.” This is why I find so much of the Left unserious. It speaks incessantly about material conditions, but immediately forgets material conditions whenever they might explain why ordinary people remain socially conservative. It claims to judge systems rather than individuals, yet excuses its own economic contradictions as systemic while treating our cultural disagreements as individual moral crimes. A politics that permits bourgeois conduct but cannot tolerate working-class cultural memory is not meaningfully revolutionary. It is capitalist liberalism wearing the language of class struggle, and using that language to discipline the very people it claims to represent. This is why I think “the Right” ironically possesses the coalitions that actually could build a self-sustaining future, which is not forever downgraded. The Left are vampiric, though they have an older more materialist conception. The Right, has terrible advocates, but they have the actual producing mass, which is not merely parasitic. That difference matters.

“And so they call me heiress to this little realm of violence; and in sorry sport sometimes, I am their Princess or their Queen.”

1. Beyond the Waterfall

The first great scene is the one in which the boy John Ridd climbs beside the waterfall and enters the hidden country of the Doones. The climb itself is romantic to me, because it represents the impossibility that exists between unknown love, unrequited love, and even obstructed love. A whole forcefield exists between him and the unknown girl; water, rock and courage stand between the ordinary world and the secret valley. John does not pass through a door, he has to fight a natural barrier, as though entering a kingdom blocked off and hidden. And there he finds Lorna, passed out, trapped, but incapable of ever being “his.” That hurts.

She is a child enclosed within a robber kingdom, surrounded by violent men who have appropriated beauty, rank and even her very inheritance for themselves. I see it as a reversal of The Great Gatsby. Daisy is the rich woman in the tower, while Gatsby attempts to transform himself into the kind of man who can reach her. Meanwhile, John has already crossed the boundary that keeps grown men away; and is in the process of comprehending what kind of rescue will be necessary. Their meeting therefore has the quality of a childhood revelation: he encounters the woman who will define his life before either of them can properly understand what love is.

What makes the scene so romantic is that John will spend the remainder of the story trying to return to what he discovered beyond the waterfall. Lorna is not merely a girl he meets later and decides to marry; she represents stolen potential. That is why it hurts so much. She is the beautiful figure he first glimpses in a forbidden world. The waterfall becomes the boundary between ordinary existence and enchantment, and John’s love begins when he crosses it. She is literally the “Fairy Queen” but one who is powerless, and the human, although enchanted, is the only one, who can reach into her world, and bring her out of it again.

2. John Enters Her House and Asks for Her Hand

“Young and harmless as she was, her name alone made guilt of her.”

My second favorite scene reverses the first. John no longer enters the valley as a lost boy. He returns as a fully grown man and is secretly brought into Sir Ensor Doone’s house to declare his love for Lorna. This is a magnificent confrontation because John possesses almost none of the advantages recognised by the Doones. Sir Ensor has birth, lineage, authority and the accumulated pride of a fallen aristocratic house. John is, in their eyes, merely a farmer. Though it is John who reflects back to them the only superiority that matters. He is willing to enter the stronghold of his enemies, stand before its dying patriarch and ask openly for the woman he loves.

Lorna has inherited the name of her captors and John has inherited the grief caused by that name; everything around them therefore demands that he see her as a Doone and that she accept herself and belongs as a Doones. John does not care and does not accept the publicly accepted definition of her. He does not ask for property, their inheritance or their social elevation; he asks for Lorna, the innocence concealed beneath the guilty name. In doing so, the boy farmer demonstrates a nobility the fallen nobles have lost: he can distinguish love from possession, the person from the title, and inheritance from the moral worth.

Sir Ensor tries to reduce marriage to folly. He invokes the gulf of rank between them and treats love itself as one of the delusions by which human beings make life tolerable. John does not defeat this philosophy with a polished argument. He refuses to retract how he feels. Ensor’s strange judgment, “Fools you are; be fools forever” becomes both a curse and a consent. He cannot bring himself to believe in love, but he recognises their refusal to surrender it; this is perhaps the one paternal signal he utters. A blessing in disguise. His hope that they remain “boy and girl” even when they have grandchildren identifies the deepest promise in the novel: that the revelation beside the waterfall might survive adulthood, violence, rank and time.

3. When the Doones Come to Kill John

“What largest humanity, or what dreams of divinity, could make a man put up with this?”

The third scene brings the romance out of the hidden valley and places it in a state of siege at Plover’s Barrows. Lorna has been brought into John’s household, and the Doones come to recover what they believe belongs to them. Their intention is not merely to reclaim her, though there is that. They come to kill John, terrorise his family and burn the farm. She is property to them first, not the object of love, as she is for John. This is where John’s physical strength acquires its moral meaning. He objects to reducing her into a dollar value value; for him, she is beyond their evaluation. That is romantic.

John is not brave because he enjoys killing. In fact, he is distinctly unlike the Doones because he lacks their cruelty, deception and blood. But when they enter his country and threaten his household, his mother, his sisters and the woman he loves, gentleness becomes immovable resistance. He meets Carver directly, seizes him by the beard, demands to know whether he calls himself a man. That gesture contains the entire social argument of the novel. Carver possesses the name, posture and inherited arrogance of a nobleman, and yet he is predatory. John is dismissed as a common farmer, yet he cultivates land, feeds a household, protects women and accepts danger himself rather than transferring it to the weak.

Most importantly, John wins without becoming a Doone. Other men are killed, but he is relieved that he has taken no life himself. This is why the scene is romantic rather than merely violent: Lorna is not protected by a man who resembles her captors but happens to desire her for himself, but rather by a man unlike her captors who would desire her, quite apart from her inheritance. Throughout the story there are many “hurts” but these are the three that stand out to me as holding the whole romantic architecture of the novel. The fact that love is obstructed by nature, and then later by rank, and then finally by battle; but it overcomes. The author, Blackmore is ready to surrender to the known pattern of the tragic romance. Instead he makes it an anti-tragedy. He reverses Romeo and Juliet. Carver enters the sacred space, shoots Lorna, and to all appearances succeeds in making the lovers pay for the violence surrounding them. But Lorna survives. The story refuses the sacrificial death of the beloved woman. Carver, not Lorna, is swallowed by the landscape. Lorna Doone feels like a Victorian ancestor of The Princess Bride: love passes through captivity, violence and apparent death, but the romance refuses to become a tragedy.

My previous article explained precisely what I mean by the “missing link.” I am not demanding one theatrical creature divided perfectly between ape and man. I am asking for the missing population-level account of how the long, low braincase visible at Jebel Irhoud became the higher, rounder braincase visible in Omo I and later Homo sapiens.

The apparent interval between them is approximately 82,000 years, and possibly less. That is enough “evolutionary time,” but saying that sufficient time existed is not the same as demonstrating what happened inside it. What does the standard model require? What do we actually know? What remains unknown? And was the available time sufficient for the proposed transformation?

1. What Is Required for the Standard Model to Hold?

The standard model proposes that modern human globularity emerged within a structured African sapiens population network. Different regional populations carried different combinations of facial, dental, cranial and developmental characteristics. Periodic migration and interbreeding recombined those traits until the recognizable sapiens package emerged. This model doesn’t require an isolated place or one perfectly linear population replacing another.

If this explanation is correct, the intermediate populations necessarily existed, although their remains may never have fossilized or may have been destroyed. Ideally, we would discover several securely dated fossils from the critical period, preferably representing related or geographically connected populations, showing intermediate degrees of backward elongation, cranial height and parietal rounding. Enough individuals would be needed to establish an inherited population tendency rather than individual variation, pathology or uncertainty introduced through reconstruction.

Genetics should identify sapiens-derived variants affecting brain and cranial development, estimate when those variants arose, and determine whether they spread through selection or population contact. Developmental biology should then explain how those variants altered postnatal growth, the parietal and cerebellar regions, the cranial base or the relationship between the shrinking face and expanding vault. A list of genetic differences is not sufficient unless those differences can be connected to the anatomical result requiring explanation.

The standard model therefore does not owe us an impossibly complete chain. It does owe us clear predictions and an honest distinction between observation and reconstruction. Fossils should, if recovered, fit the proposed trajectory. Genomic evidence should be consistent with change occurring within the sapiens population network. Developmental evidence should demonstrate a plausible mechanism. Together, those independent forms of evidence could establish the transition even if no perfect “midway skull” is ever found.

2. What We Actually Know

Jebel Irhoud in Morocco is approximately 315,000 years old. Its face is relatively flat, small and retracted. Its brain was already approximately within the modern volume range. Its cranial vault, however, remained long, low and extended backward. Irhoud demonstrates that modern brain volume and a substantially modern face appeared before the fully globular braincase. Jebel Irhoud fossil study

Omo I in Ethiopia is securely older than approximately 233,000 years. It possesses a higher, rounder vault, a chin and other unmistakably sapiens characteristics. Yet Omo I is incomplete: significant portions of its complete appearance depend upon reconstruction. Its present age is also a minimum derived from volcanic material above the fossil, not an exact date of death. Revised minimum age of Omo I

Herto, at approximately 160,000 years old, is exceptionally robust but clearly sapiens. Here we are examining an archaic variation of Homo sapiens. Florisbad in South Africa, approximately 259,000 years old, may belong somewhere near the transition, but the skull is too incomplete to settle the decisive question about the complete vault.

We also know that the issue did not end with Omo. Comparisons of fossil endocasts indicate that brain shape continued changing within the sapiens lineage, entering the range of present-day human variation sometime between approximately 100,000 and 35,000 years ago. This leads them to see it in terms of an early major shift followed by a much longer period of refinement. Study of modern-human brain-shape evolution

3. What We Do Not Know

We do not know which population underwent the principal transformation. Irhoud comes from Morocco; Omo comes from Ethiopia; Florisbad comes from South Africa. Chronological ordering does not prove genealogical succession. We cannot simply arrange geographically scattered fossils on a table and assume that the older individual begat the younger population. The fossils may represent interacting branches, parallel experiments, local dead ends or differently mixed members of a continental population network.

We do not know how many populations contributed. The phrase “structured African population network” could conceal dozens or hundreds of local breeding groups joined intermittently through larger regional metapopulations. A demographic model using two or three ancestral sources is necessarily a simplification. We have not identified the actual communities that carried the flatter face, the large brain, the altered cranial base or the developmental pattern producing increased globularity.

We also do not know the responsible genetic mechanism. The transformation might have resulted from new mutations, selection acting upon much older standing variation, recombination of traits from separated African populations, or developmental consequences of facial reduction. It might have involved hundreds of variants of individually small effect or a few regulatory changes with disproportionately large consequences. We do not know whether globularity was itself adaptive or whether it accompanied selection for some other neurological, obstetric or developmental characteristic.

Finally, we cannot yet exclude some contribution from an unidentified lineage. One or more relevant variants might have entered emerging sapiens through introgression from a deeply divergent population absent from the known fossil record. Missing fossils do not prove this “super-ghost”; missing evidence cannot identify the thing that is missing. My own hypothesis becomes competitive only if positive evidence appears, such as unusually deep genomic regions associated with cranial development, a dated admixture signal, or fossils belonging to a morphologically unexpected contributor.

4. What Could, or Could Not, Happen Within the Time Available?

Using the central dates, the apparent interval between Jebel Irhoud at approximately 315,000 years and the minimum age established for Omo I at approximately 233,000 years is about 82,000 years. Because Omo is older than its overlying volcanic layer, the actual separation may have been considerably shorter. Nevertheless, even 82,000 years represents approximately 3,000–3,400 human generations, assuming an average generation of 24–27 years.

Three thousand generations are not evolutionarily trivial. Every individual carries dozens of new mutations, while large populations collectively generate enormous quantities of variation. Selection acting on an advantageous existing variant can alter its frequency over hundreds or thousands of generations. Recombination and contact among structured populations can assemble combinations much faster than a model requiring multiple entirely new mutations to arise and fix sequentially.

The time would become problematic only if modern globularity required numerous precisely coordinated new mutations, if none existed previously as standing variation, if each had to fix before the next became useful, and if the changes supplied little selective advantage. That would be a much slower and less plausible sequence. But the mainstream model does not presently claim that this is what happened. Regulatory change, polygenic selection and recombination among populations could produce large developmental effects within the available generations.

The honest conclusion is therefore not that 82,000 years was too short and a super-ghost must be invoked. The honest conclusion is that the interval was genetically sufficient but historically underspecified. “Science” has enough time for its model. What it has not yet supplied is the complete account of which populations, variants and developmental processes used that time to produce the visible transformation. The super-ghost remains possible, but it becomes more plausible only if future evidence fits introgression better than ordinary change within the sapiens network. The question is no longer whether evolution had enough time. The question is: what, exactly, happened during those three thousand generations?

When people ask for a “missing link,” they are often treated as though they expect one magical creature, half ape, half human, to step obligingly out of the ground.

That is not what I mean. I understand precisely what mainstream science is arguing. I am not the intellectually inferior religious simpleton they have assumed me to be. I understand how complex their standard model is.

I accept that evolution operates through populations, that different anatomical traits can change at different times, and that no individual announces the birth of a new species. My objection is much more precise:

We do not possess a sufficiently complete fossil population showing the principal transformation from the long, low archaic braincase to the high, rounded and eventually globular braincase of modern Homo sapiens.

We possess evidence on either side of the change. What we lack is an adequate record of the change itself.

The Skull Before

Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, approximately 315,000 years old, is one of the earliest fossils assigned to the sapiens lineage.

Its face is surprisingly modern. It is relatively small, flat and retracted. Its teeth and jaws possess important sapiens characteristics. Its brain volume was already approximately within the modern range.

But its cranial vault was still long, low and extended backward. It did not possess our high, rounded and globular braincase. Irhoud therefore demonstrates something extraordinarily important:

Modern brain volume appeared before modern brain shape.

It gives us a large-brained early sapiens population before the decisive cranial reorganization was complete.

The Skull After

Omo I, discovered in Ethiopia, is securely older than approximately 233,000 years. It possesses a substantially higher and rounder cranial vault, as well as a chin and other unmistakably sapiens characteristics.

Herto, approximately 160,000 years old, is extremely robust but clearly human. By this stage we are no longer looking at something that appears halfway between an archaic hominin and ourselves. We are looking at archaic variations of Homo sapiens. Ultimately, I think those are just homo sapiens.

Omo is also incomplete, meaning that portions of its reconstructed skull cannot supply the continuous anatomical evidence that a well-preserved fossil population would provide.

The First Time Window

Using the central dates, the apparent interval between Jebel Irhoud and the minimum age of Omo I is 82,000. But this is not a securely established 82,000-year evolutionary sequence.

Omo I is older than approximately 233,000 years. The volcanic layer provides a minimum age, not its exact birthday. Omo could be substantially older. Jebel Irhoud’s date also carries uncertainty, and the two fossils come from opposite ends of Africa rather than one demonstrably continuous population.

Therefore, if Irhoud represents the condition before the major shift and Omo represents the condition after it, then the principal transformation may have occurred within no more than approximately 82,000 years, and possibly much less.

That is the narrow window that interests me.

Somewhere around this interval, a large brain contained inside a long, low vault began assuming a higher and rounder configuration. Yet we do not possess a densely sampled population demonstrating the intermediate geometry.

Where is the skull that is unmistakably midway? This is the question many “skeptics of evolution” are actually trying to ask, but popularizers of science always condescend to them for asking it. My intention is not to treat people as inferior rubes, but to explain what scientists are actually saying. This is how I wish they had spoken to me: admitting clearly what they know, what they do not know, what they infer, and how their theory is derived from the available evidence.

I am not asking for the impossible. I do not expect a fossil from every generation or one theatrical specimen divided perfectly between “archaic” and “modern.” To satisfy a reasonable skeptic, however, I would only ask for at least, several securely dated fossils from the critical period, preferably representing related or geographically connected populations, showing intermediate degrees of backward elongation, cranial height and globularity. Enough individuals would be required to demonstrate an inherited population tendency rather than individual variation or speculative reconstruction. If such fossils cannot be recovered, then developmental and genetic evidence should independently demonstrate how the transformation occurred within the sapiens population. That would not give us an impossibly complete chain, but it would give us a testable, evidence-based account of the missing transition.

Where is the vault that has stopped extending so far backward but has not yet risen into the Omo condition? Where are several members of the same population showing that this was an inherited developmental transformation rather than individual variation or an uncertain reconstruction?

The Second, Longer Time Window

The first major change did not immediately produce the average brain shape of what we now call “human.”

Research comparing fossil endocasts suggests that globularization continued within the sapiens lineage, with fossil brain shapes entering present-day human variation somewhere between approximately 100,000 and 35,000 years ago.

This gives us two distinct time frames:

1. The narrow early window: between Irhoud and Omo, during which the major shift toward a higher, rounder vault appears to have become visible, no more than about 82,000 years and possibly much less.

2. The longer completion window: extending from early sapiens toward approximately 100,000–35,000 years ago, during which the braincase continued developing toward the fully globular range characteristic of living humans.

The process was therefore neither completely instantaneous nor completely uniform. A major early reorganization appears to have been followed by a much longer period of refinement.

What Must Have Happened Inside That Window?

The mainstream explanation is that globularity evolved within a structured African sapiens population network.

Different populations possessed different combinations of traits. Faces became smaller and more retracted. Teeth and jaws changed. Brain volume entered the modern range. Changes in postnatal development then altered the parietal, occipital and cerebellar regions. Periodic contact among African populations distributed and recombined these characteristics.

That explanation may be correct. It is presently the most economical explanation.

But if it is correct, then the decisive developmental transformation must have occurred somewhere within the sapiens stem or population network represented only very incompletely by Irhoud, Florisbad, Omo and related fossils.

The missing fossils have to exist somewhere, or have existed before geology destroyed them.

The alternative is more extreme:

One or more important developmental variants may have entered emerging sapiens through introgression from a presently unknown, deeply divergent lineage.

That lineage might have been another terrestrial hominin population absent from the known fossil record or, in the most extreme version of the hypothesis, something genuinely alien. It might have contributed only a small amount of ancestry, most of which subsequently disappeared through backcrossing while selected developmental variants survived.

I am not claiming that the absence of an intermediate skull proves this “super-ghost.” It does not. Missing evidence cannot identify the thing that is missing.

But the present fossil arrangement leaves a real question with two broad possibilities:

• the decisive change developed within the structured sapiens population network, as mainstream models propose; or

• some part of it entered that network from a population we have not yet identified.

The first explanation predicts that future fossils, developmental evidence or genetic signatures may demonstrate the change occurring within the sapiens stem. The second predicts unusually deep genetic regions associated with cranial development, or fossils belonging to an unexpected contributor.

This is where I introduce my more extreme hypothesis, and why, however much one might laugh, I remain willing to lend an ear to people operating outside the scientific consensus. It is not because I cannot “follow the science,” but because status-chasing popularizers and institutional gatekeepers have repeatedly blurred the distinction between evidence, inference and authority, causing me to distrust academic certainty across a multitude of subjects. I distrust them not because I cannot understand their model, but because I understand enough to recognize when a model is being presented as an observation and uncertainty is being concealed behind status.

That Is the Missing Link

The missing link is not one theatrical half-man. It is the missing population-level sequence inside the critical early window.

We have Irhoud: approximately modern face and brain volume, but a long, low vault. We have Omo: substantially higher, rounder and already recognizably sapiens, to my eyes. We have Herto: robust, but clearly sapiens.

What we do not have is the population that allows us to watch one condition becoming the other.

The mainstream explanation may be entirely correct. But if it is, the principal transformation happened within a surprisingly narrow and poorly represented interval. If future fossils or genomes fail to locate that transformation within the known sapiens network, then more extreme possibilities—including deep-lineage introgression—deserve examination.

Something happened inside that window. What population did it happen to—and who else, if anyone, was there?

This is not a discovery, and I am not claiming proof. It is an original, deliberately “out there” hypothesis. I am riffing a construction around a real absence in the fossil record. My question is simple:

What if a presently unknown, deeply divergent “super-ghost” lineage contributed a small but anatomically decisive portion of the modern sapiens package?

We possess several large-brained archaic hominids, but their skulls repeatedly follow a long, low and backward-projecting architecture. Neanderthals had enormous brains. Jebel Irhoud already possessed approximately modern brain volume. Yet these were not contained inside the tall, rounded and globular vault characteristic of modern Homo sapiens.

The conventional explanation is mosaic evolution among structured African populations. The face became smaller and more retracted first. Brain volume entered the modern range. The parietal and cerebellar regions then developed differently, producing the characteristically globular sapiens vault. That is entirely possible. But arranging the surviving fossils into a plausible order does not establish that we have identified every population that contributed to the transformation.

We Already Accept Ghosts

Human evolution is no longer understood as a clean tree. It resembles a web of diverging populations that repeatedly encountered one another and exchanged genes.

Neanderthals introgressed into sapiens. Denisovans introgressed into sapiens. Sapiens appears to have introgressed into Neanderthals. Denisovans themselves may have inherited DNA from a much more deeply diverged “archaic” population. Researchers have also reported genetic signals consistent with archaic introgression into West African populations.

One influential study produced model-dependent estimates extending as high as approximately 19% archaic ancestry in some West African populations; something most people would conventionally perceive as “less evolved,” being introgressed with the “more evolved” incoming homo sapiens. That estimate is not a measurement of an identified fossil species, and competing models can explain portions of the signal through long-standing African population structure. Nevertheless, the important point remains: serious geneticists already entertain substantial contributions from populations whose bones and genomes have never been identified. African ghost-introgression study

The ghost is inferred from what it left behind. Why, then, must every important contributor to the sapiens anatomical package already be represented in our fossil cabinet?

The Super-Ghost

My proposed “super-ghost” would not merely be another regional population of familiar African Middle Pleistocene Homo. It would be a more deeply divergent and morphologically unusual lineage: perhaps descended from an earlier branch of the hominin radiation, perhaps evolving for many hundreds of thousands of years in geographical isolation; perhaps, even a million years prior to our lesser hominids.

I am imagining a population with a naturally high and vertically developed cranial vault, something much more extreme than modern sapiens, and radically unlike the repeated long, low configuration found among known large-brained archaic hominids. The resulting modern human skull would not be a miniature copy of this hypothetical donor. It could be a composite developmental result:

• the large brain volume and broad cranial architecture of existing African Homo;

• the reduced face and teeth appearing among early sapiens populations;

• a small collection of introgressed variants affecting vertical brain growth, parietal expansion, cranial-base development or postnatal globularization.

In a primitive visual blending model, an extremely tall donor might need to contribute something like one-third of the ancestry of the original hybrid population to move a long, low skull toward the modern intermediate form. While I realize that genetics does not operate like mixing paint, this is essentially the idea. An initial hybrid population might have carried 10% or as much as 30% donor ancestry, while repeated backcrossing eliminated nearly all of it. Natural selection could preserve only a few regulatory regions with disproportionately large developmental effects. The result today might be less than 1% in us today.

Thus my hypothesis does not require modern humans to be one-third “ alien other.” It requires only that an original mixture introduced a few consequential variants that survived while almost everything surrounding them disappeared. Call it one percent divine, if you like.

Introgression Downward Through Time

We normally describe introgression horizontally: Neanderthals meet sapiens, Denisovans meet sapiens, one neighbouring population contributes to another. By “introgression downward through time,” I do not mean that anything literally travelled through time. I mean introgression from a deeply surviving branch: an ancient lineage persisted alongside later hominids long enough to encounter them, contributed a small portion of its DNA, and then disappeared while fragments of its biology continued within the resulting population.

Its complete form then in almost Lovecraftian fashion “disappears,” but selected fragments of its biology continue within descendants who look nothing like the original donor. This is not as conceptually strange as it initially sounds. If Denisovans contained genetic material from a “super-archaic” population, then something resembling this already occurred. An ancient lineage persisted, encountered a later lineage, contributed DNA and vanished as an independently recognizable population.

My speculation is simply that one such contribution might have affected the developmental system producing sapiens globularity. There is presently no genetic evidence connecting a ghost lineage specifically to our rounded braincase. That is why this remains a hypothesis rather than a conclusion. But neither do we possess ancient African DNA from the period and populations required to exclude it decisively.

The Tall-Skulled Image

The exceptionally tall skulls associated with Paracas naturally provoke this thought in my imagination. The known Paracas remains are recent Homo sapiens, and their extreme forms are generally attributed to intentional modification during infancy. They therefore cannot themselves be the ancient donor proposed here. My thought experiment is different:

Suppose an ancient population existed whose natural, inherited anatomy resembled the vertically exaggerated Paracas form.

The recent skulls would not prove that population existed. They merely provide a useful visual model of the morphology I am imagining: not the Neanderthal braincase extended backward, but a vault directed dramatically upward.

My hypothetical donor might have possessed a naturally tall but narrow vault. Hybridization with broader, large-brained African populations could then have produced something neither parent population possessed independently: the moderated, rounded and globular sapiens condition. Again, I am merely proposing “an undiscovered species,” an undiscovered phenotype, not an identified species.

Gilgamesh and the Fractional Human

This next association is mythopoetic rather than scientific and contributes no evidence to the “genetic hypothesis.” Here my hypothesis acquires a mythological echo. The Epic of Gilgamesh describes Gilgamesh as two-thirds divine and one-third human. This is not genetics. It does not correspond neatly to one divine parent and one mortal parent, which would produce halves rather than thirds. Nor can an ancient poem serve as biological evidence.

The mythological formulation is intriguing to me; the way everyone was claiming to be “part god” in the ancient world, sometimes even with a precise number to go along with the claim. Gilgamesh was not merely blessed by the gods or descended from them. He was imagined as possessing a quantitatively mixed constitution: one order of being combined with another.

Could such myths preserve an extremely distorted cultural memory of encounters between visibly different populations? Possibly. Could “two-thirds divine” simply express royal power, exceptional strength and proximity to the gods? I am leaving the first possibility open without pretending that mythology proves it.

Aliens Are Not Required

One need not invoke Zecharia Sitchin, or Lloyd Pye, or the Anunnaki, or a complete extraterrestrial engineering programme to ask this question. My hypothesis does not require them.

The unknown donor could have been entirely terrestrial: a relic population from an ancient hominin radiation, isolated somewhere in the Levant, Central Asia or another poorly sampled region. It might have been no more “alien” than Denisovans appeared before their DNA was recovered from a fragment of finger bone. An extraterrestrial origin belongs at the extreme outer edge of logical possibility. My hypothesis works without it.

A deeply divergent and presently unidentified terrestrial lineage may have contributed a small amount of developmentally important ancestry to emerging Homo sapiens. Most of that ancestry may subsequently have disappeared, leaving perhaps 1%, or much less, concentrated in selected regions affecting cranial and neurological development.

What Would Prove or Disprove It?

The hypothesis would require evidence. We would need to identify unusually deep genetic segments associated with cranial development; demonstrate that they entered sapiens through admixture rather than ordinary ancestral variation; estimate when and where that admixture occurred; and, ideally, discover fossils or ancient DNA belonging to the donor population.

Of course, I understand this “Super-Ghost” is just my own speculation. But speculation is not the opposite of science when it clearly identifies itself and proposes evidence that might decide the question. It is the beginning of a question.

We already know that the history of humanity contains populations we discovered first as statistical shadows. We know that lineages could disappear while fragments of their genomes survived inside other people. We know that brain volume became approximately modern before brain shape did. What we do not know is whether the decisive change came entirely from within the populations we have already named.

What if it did not? What if there was someone else? What if there was someone, we do not know anything about?

I am not repeating the Ancient Aliens conclusion; I am extracting its underlying hybrid-origin intuition, removing the spaceships, monuments and presumed engineering, and restating the remaining possibility as a testable hypothesis of deep-lineage introgression. As a literary analogy, my speculation resembles a Lovecraftian “great lost race” theory: an ancient, radically unfamiliar lineage disappears, while some minute biological inheritance survives inside the species that follows it. I invoke Lovecraft not as evidence, but because his fiction supplies an unusually vivid imaginative form for the hypothesis.

“The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.”

- Genesis 6:2

“The angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them.”

- 1 Enoch 6:1

There is presently no accepted pre-sapiens fossil that looks simply like a smaller-brained modern human. Neither Bodo nor Kabwe/rhodesiensis possesses our globular braincase. The modern human brain shape seems to have evolved relatively late. That is my own central objection.

I can clearly see a chain of relationships between Heidelbergensis, on the one hand, and Neanderthals and Denisovans on the other. I am even prepared to accept the theory of introgression and hybridization between those two derived populations and “us.” Small portions of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry remain in living human populations, and so there is at least genetic evidence that these were not completely sealed species.

The problem is that neither of those “Big-Brained” hominid skulls resembles ours. Nor do we possess an earlier, smaller-brained version of a Homo sapiens skull that clearly resembles us. We have plenty of large brains, but no continuous chain of skulls leading neatly toward our peculiar brain shape. We therefore have a mystery before, and during, the break.

This is what most people actually mean, when they use the unfashionable expression “missing link,” and ask for that link. I do not necessarily mean that there must have been one magical individual who was half archaic hominid and half modern human. I understand that, “evolution” does not work by producing one designated intermediary for our convenience. I mean that the actual morphological sequence is missing. We do not possess a sufficiently complete fossil series showing an archaic African skull changing, generation by generation or population by population, into the high, rounded and globular skull of Homo sapiens.

Scientists can propose the populations between which this transformation probably occurred. They can identify individual fossils possessing mixtures of earlier and later traits. But they cannot yet show us a continuous anatomical chain demonstrating exactly how our unusual cranial architecture developed.

I can understand and accept that the modern “human” anatomical package emerged piecemeal between approximately 350,000 and 100,000 years ago. That is the theory. It also parallels very well the idea that “intelligence” is itself a web of traits and tendencies emerging over time from many repeatedly practised skills. It is not something that arrives fully formed, or even something that necessarily requires an extreme evolutionary singularity to achieve. I can completely understand and accept that part of their theory.

The Reasonable Objection

My problem is something much more specific: we cannot point to any one early piece, or, more importantly, any continuous series of pieces, that perfectly resembles a direct precursor to our odd anatomical variations. We possess several large-brained archaic hominids, but their skulls repeatedly follow a long, low, backward-projecting architecture. Then Homo sapiens appears with a conspicuously different, tall and globular cranial architecture. Where is the adequate fossil sequence demonstrating that transformation?

Brain size alone does not resolve the question. Neanderthals sometimes possessed brains as large as, or larger than, ours. Kabwe possessed a reasonably large brain. Jebel Irhoud already had a brain within approximately the modern range. What distinguishes us is not simply the quantity of brain tissue inside the skull. It is also the brain’s shape, organization and developmental pattern, and the corresponding architecture of the cranial vault.

Bodo does not satisfy our “shape test.” It has an enormous face, very thick brow ridges and a low, elongated cranial vault. Its brain was large, but its architecture was not anything we would call “us.” Its architecture is still archaic; still closer in general appearance to what has traditionally been called Heidelbergensis than to ourselves.

The Bodo skull was discovered in Ethiopia and is approximately 600,000 years old. It may represent some part of the broad African population from which later sapiens populations emerged. But it does not look like a smaller-brained modern human. Nor does it give us the rounded skull that requires explanation.

Kabwe satisfies the test even less. It has a reasonably large brain, but its skull is extraordinarily robust, broad and low, with one of the largest brow ridges in the human fossil record. It has traditionally been called Homo rhodesiensis or African Homo heidelbergensis, although neither classification is universally accepted.

I would not regard Kabwe as a convincing physical model of the immediate sapiens ancestor. It may have belonged to an archaic African population related to our ancestors. It may even have contributed something to later populations. But its known anatomy does not explain the origin of our globular skull. Naming Bodo or Kabwe as “ancestral” does not solve the shape problem. It merely places a taxonomic label over the missing transformation.

The Best That They Have

What we actually possess is a widely scattered collection of African fossils. We have robust, long-headed African archaic “humans.” Then we have “mosaic forms” such as Jebel Irhoud and Florisbad. After that, we have Omo I with a substantially more modern vault, followed by Herto and later sapiens populations with increasingly recognizable modern cranial organization. What we do not have is a complete sequence, particularly between approximately 400,000 and 250,000 years ago, showing exactly how the rounded sapiens braincase arose.

Our Face, but Not Our Brain Shape

Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, dated to approximately 315,000 years ago, is perhaps the most interesting evidence supporting their theory. The Irhoud people possessed relatively flat and reduced faces that appear surprisingly sapiens-like. Their teeth and jaws also display important sapiens affinities. Their brains were already approximately within the modern human range in volume. But their cranial vaults remained elongated rather than globular. Their brains had achieved something approaching our size, but apparently not yet our distinctive shape.

Irhoud is therefore important because it catches what researchers think is “our lineage” in a strange intermediate condition: the face and brain size are approximately human, but the brain shape is certainly not yet ours.

It shows that part of the modern package had appeared by 315,000 years ago. It does not tell us precisely which earlier population produced it, or exactly how its descendants acquired the later globular braincase.

The Florisbad skull from South Africa is approximately 259,000 years old. It possessed a very large brain and a mixture of archaic and sapiens-like facial characteristics. Some researchers have classified it as early Homo sapiens; others have used the name Homo helmei or treated it as a transitional African form.

Florisbad may be one of the better candidates for a population standing somewhere near the transition. Unfortunately, the skull is incomplete. The very portions that might allow it to resolve the whole brain-shape question are not sufficiently preserved.

Omo I: The First Strong Answer to the Shape Question

Omo I, found in Ethiopia and now known to be at least approximately 233,000 years old, possesses a much higher and more rounded cranial vault. It is substantially closer to later Homo sapiens than Irhoud is. If we ask, “Where is the earliest fossil that truly begins to satisfy the brain-shape test?” Omo I may be the strongest present answer.

But Omo I is already classified as Homo sapiens. It does not show us the entire transformation. It shows that the transformation was substantially underway by approximately 233,000 years ago. That for me is a problem. I would want to see precisely, some chain of groups, even if it is a hybridization between groups, bringing these “new traits” together in the resulting “humans” that burst forth into our fossil record.

What Their Explanation Actually Is

The current explanation is not that Heidelbergensis mixed with some already globular, smaller-brained human species. No such population is presently known.

The current “going explanation” is that several African populations descended from earlier, broadly erectus-like or heidelbergensis-like humans. No single one of these populations necessarily possessed the complete modern anatomical package. One population might have developed a smaller, flatter face. Another might have carried different dental, developmental or cranial characteristics. Repeated population contact may then have combined these traits into what eventually became recognizably Homo sapiens.

Which Parts Do They Think Changed First?

Their proposed anatomical sequence is approximately this:

The face became smaller, flatter and more retracted.

The enormous projecting face of earlier hominids began to sit more directly beneath the braincase. This change is already visible at Jebel Irhoud.

The teeth and jaws became more sapiens-like.

Tooth size, root form, mandibular structure and the relationship between the face and jaw changed gradually. The fully prominent modern chin probably appeared later and was not initially universal.

Brain volume entered the modern range.

This happened before the brain acquired its completely modern shape. Irhoud is the strongest demonstration that modern size did not automatically mean modern organization.

The cranial vault became higher and more globular.

The parietal regions expanded and the rear of the skull became more rounded. Changes involving the cerebellar region may also have contributed to the characteristic sapiens form.

The brow ridges and general skeletal structure became more gracile.

This continued after the first recognizably sapiens populations had appeared. Early sapiens could still be much more robust than most living people.

The modern skull therefore did not appear as one indivisible mutation. The face seems to have become recognizably sapiens-like before the braincase. Brain size approached the modern range before brain shape did. Later changes produced the more completely globular, gracile skull familiar among living humans.

That is their current precise theory: these traits evolved gradually and unevenly, while the distinctive shape of the brain appears to have changed comparatively late, after large brain volume was already established. The globular braincase was a new, derived feature that evolved within early “sapiens” populations rather than something inherited fully formed from Bodo, Kabwe or a known smaller-brained precursor. This is an explanation of how the fossils may be arranged. It is not yet an explanation of why the decisive transformation occurred:

Why did a brain that was already large become globular? Why did the face retract before the braincase assumed its modern shape? Why did the parietal and cerebellar regions change in precisely the manner they did? Did the change result from altered childhood brain development, childbirth constraints, diet, language, tool use, social organization or some interaction among them? Did the critical changes arise principally in one African population and then spread, or were separate traits assembled through contact among several populations? Why did this particular anatomical configuration persist and expand while other equally large-brained configurations, Neanderthal, Denisovan, Kabwe-like and other archaic forms, eventually disappeared? And, finally: what changed inside the brain when the outside of the skull changed shape?

Facts or Dreams: Saint Tolkien and the Argument from Wanting It to Be True

Tolkien’s poem is less about argument, and more about posture. He moves seamlessly, from a science to dismissal, from posture to wishes, from dreams defeating facts, to a faith statement repeated at least three times, to at least two statements of defiance, too observations about the flattening of the scientific materialist, to ultimately just re-stating his own version of the Apostles Creed/Catholic catechism disguised under his defense of myth itself, and his own aesthetic preference, and his escape through sub-creation. If modern audiences, were capable of understanding him at all, they will of course reject him. My purpose here is not to call him “wrong,” because that is impossible; it is simply to walk people through, what he is doing and why. Nothing in what Tolkien says, has anything in it that is guaranteed to “convince” Lewis “rationally.” Personally, I find the poem to be a mixture between EXTREMELY effective rhetoric, passionate emotional appeals, begging the question, and emotional blackmail or emotional wagering. Guaranteed, to please those who already agree with him; but unlikely to move those who already are not so disposed. Tolkien begins with the scientific material reality and then swiftly rejects its importance.

I am not arguing that Tolkien is stupid, dishonest, or even necessarily wrong. I am arguing something narrower: Mythopoeia is read as though Tolkien were making an argument for the truth of his Christian vision, when much of what he actually does is declare a posture toward reality, make several powerful observations about materialism, affirm the Christian anthropology he already believes, and finally refuse to surrender it. Those are not the same thing as demonstrating that Christianity is true. In effect, what Tolkien has done, and he wants to say the myth moves the heart in a way that reality never can. It especially moves the man who is in prison. He thereby asserts, that if something “moves” the man who is in prison, the man who feels he is in the gutter, if he is given the ability to create a sub-creation in the mind, discovering “elves.” This in itself, proves his “lordship” and his image in the creator. Such a belief does not follow; having meaning when you are in the lowest gutter, doesn’t mean, you have some spark of the divine. Nor will it make your jailer, free you, even if by this, you count yourself already “free.” My deeper objection is that Tolkien also tends to treat disbelief as surrender: as though the man who cannot see the distant King must therefore have bowed before the Iron Crown. I do not think that follows.

Tolkien's poem may magnificently express what the world looks like from inside a Christian moral imagination, but the beauty, coherence and psychological resilience of that imagination cannot by themselves establish the metaphysics that make it possible. Moreover, Tolkien risks confusing three radically different people: the man who loves evil, the man broken by evil, and the man who simply cannot believe. There are men who did find “elves in the mind” as he says, and then there are men, for whom, no fairies speak at all. The thing that really stands out to me above all the other moves Tolkien makes is how independent of reality, his credal declarations really can be. Tolkien, could speak the same words, under another name, in another universe, in another time, on another world, and it would remain, the same words, the same dispositions speaking, without any other detail of reality remaining the same. You could wipe his memory, call him Gandalf, and put him on a flat earth orbiting a double red star in the Porphyrion galaxy, and he could still hold the same view. At the same time, and this is the troubling thing for me, his disposition is context dependent; no one understands perception or love, without an extremely particular history, and such people, even if what they say is the same, “see” very different things as worthy of allegiance. The Tolkien mind, immersed in his own worldview, may not see that.

a star's a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, Inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain.

Tolkien begins by explaining to his audience that he understands the scientific method, and then, much like an unaffected magician, in the same breath, he dismisses it, as unimportant. Tolkien then shifts to instantly assuming telos. Not everyone thinks like that, or even has to consent to thinking like that. In many ways, Tolkien is himself, the living Tom Bombadil, from his very first verse in Mythopoeia, because his “move” is not a rational one, it is simply a refusal to grant the scientific primary importance to himself. While Tolkien has not yet at this point made either an argument or an assertion of belief, he has indicated “his posture.” He sees mathematics and sciences, he even seems to accept that it is the first thing you see, but he regards that reality, as uninteresting. This will be a recurring theme for Tolkien, he starts from posture, moves to a faith declaration, and then he makes an observation. He is less arguing, than positioning.

each alien, except as kin from one
remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.
God made the petreous rocks, the arboreal trees,
tellurian earth, and stellar stars…

Notice how rapidly uncertainty becomes theology. The “Will” is only dimly apprehended, but within a few lines Tolkien confidently identifies the author of rocks, trees, earth, stars and man as God.

At bidding of a Will, to which we bend
(and must), but only dimly apprehend,
great processes march on, as Time unrolls
from dark beginnings to uncertain goals;

For most people, especially those from a non-European non-Christian background, “meaning” has no “purpose” but their own personal survival. Tolkien, projects his own “humanity” onto his audience from the outset. The sexually successful charmer playboy, does not first ask the girl, if she believes in God, as a test for her; he uses God, as a stand in, for himself; the playboy becomes God, and so is attractive to her. The weakness and the meekness is conditioned the minute the playboy, is actually asked to reflect; the minute he does that and admits he is not God, he instantly becomes non-attractive to the millions of women who sleep with him otherwise. Tolkien, on the otherwise, makes a big ask. He thinks he can “be good” and still be winsome and attractive; he thinks his goodness in all places and in all times, will carry with it, the same effect. This makes him, easily believe a “good will” bids something; because he already thinks he is in complete harmony with it.

Tolkien is speaking to his audience, assuming that they are already “inherently good” and aware of being imprisoned by evil. Not everyone is like that. There is another kind of man whom Tolkien’s moral psychology seems unable to imagine: the man for whom vice does not feel like a prison in the first place. Some men do not experience cruelty, dishonesty, domination, or even sadism as humiliating compromises that must secretly be overcome. Their position in life may have taught them precisely the opposite. They have usually been stronger than the people around them, more socially successful, more desired, better protected from consequences, and more capable of imposing their preferences upon others. For such a man, there is no obvious prison from which virtue must liberate him. He already experiences himself as free. Tolkien’s freedom is profoundly interior: the freedom of the will that refuses corruption even when the world is hostile. But a man can also possess something much more tangible, material freedom. He can actually do what he wants. He can lie and suffer no penalty. He can behave badly and remain charming. He can injure someone beneath him and discover that his friends still laugh at his jokes, women still desire him, institutions still protect him, and weaker men still accommodate themselves to his wishes. Power itself can make him appear winsome. Not everyone will be moved by your interiority.

not for itself to be desired, but ill;
or else to strive or to subdue the will
alike were graceless; and of Evil this
alone is dreadly certain: Evil is

That is precisely why I hesitate when Tolkien projects his own moral disposition outward and treats it as though it were latent in mankind generally. Tolkien can imagine the imprisoned man who remains inwardly free. What I am less certain he understands is the man standing comfortably outside the prison, holding the keys, who has never felt imprisoned at all.

Evil it will not see, for evil lies
not in God's picture but in crooked eyes,
not in the source but in malicious choice,
and not in sound but in the tuneless voice.

My chief criticism for men like Tolkien, who while I would not condemn him to prison for his views, is simply therefore, “Have you ever even met a true Orc, who likes being an Orc?” This is what I think, this kind of Unshakeable Unmovable “Catholic” cannot hear. My criticism before he begins, before he even starts alluding to God or to Evil, is to examine and doubt his posture. Yes, I know, this is very difficult to do in a debate format, but from a logical point of view, this confidence he projects, is what I would feel unearned and even risky. I want to say, “Tolkien, have you ever met evil people?” He speaks of goals and telos; something which when it comes to “conscious animals” differs, wildly. Few, people will automatically consent to Tolkien’s framework of “love.” But that is the posture, he is starting from. It is just to that, which I react, with skepticism. I want to say, Have you met evil people, Tolkien? Not frightened people who have mistaken the Good, not fallen men dimly remembering the Light,but people who know perfectly well that another person is suffering and enjoy the fact? What precisely does their imagination disclose about the structure of reality?

thunder and lightning, birds that wheel and cry,
slime crawling up from mud to live and die,
these each are duly registered and print
the brain's contortions with a separate dint.

The problem here is one of epistemic modesty. We have no idea why reality came to be or how it is or why we see what we see. Tolkien is describing the mysterious relation between an external world and subjective consciousness, but the mystery itself gives him no special right to infer his Christian explanation. “We don't know” is a legitimate stopping point. The unexplained character of consciousness is not positive evidence for anything.

but neither record nor a photograph,
being divination, judgement, and a laugh,
response of those that felt astir within
by deep monition movements that were kin

What Tolkien has plausibly established is that human language is not a photograph. To call something a tree is already to categorize it, abstract from particular instances, and impose a human concept upon experience. Fine. But then he makes a huge leap. He goes from the clinical art of categorizing, which most people do casually, by inference and judgment, anyway, to inserting, “reverence,” into that categorization. Your average “human” does not automatically include a reverence into a perception. Reverence is culture dependent. A South Asian, coming to Europe, Canada or America, has absolutely ZERO reverence, for the Founding Fathers, German Philosophers, Hengist and Horsa, Jesus Christ, or even necessarily, Newton and Einstein. What they have is a utilitarian conception of reality, alone. Tolkien starts with “science,” recognizes it, and then, dismissed it as the least important issue. He calls it “divination.” In other words, even possessing a disposition toward moral reverence requires certain cultural preconditions. A story must mean something to you before it can move you. A sacrifice must belong to an intelligible moral world before you can experience it as noble. A good deed must participate in some inherited or learned conception of the Good before it acquires the kind of symbolic weight Tolkien assumes. People are not born revering the same stories, heroes, symbols, or moral gestures. They have to be initiated into a world in which those things mean something. And my point is that this kind of shared moral and cultural formation increasingly can no longer simply be assumed. Increasingly, many people may recognize the symbol perfectly well while feeling no reverence toward it at all.

free captives undermining shadowy bars,
digging the foreknown from experience
and panning the vein of spirit out of sense.
Great powers they slowly brought out of themselves
and looking backward they beheld the elves
that wrought on cunning forges in the mind…

This is the decisive escalation. From the modest proposition that perception involves interpretation, Tolkien passes to “the foreknown,” “spirit,” inward freedom and finally elves. But none of these conclusions necessarily follows from the fact that language is not photographic.

Tolkien, begins his anthropology, by instantly inserting “love” into everything he sees, into everything his mind touches. That is not what “the humans” can be counted on to do; he starts there. The first “human” to distinguish one thing from another, likely only thinks: “Food. Predator. Hole. Shelter. Weapon. Mine. Yours. Mine. Female. Use. Throw away.” Human cognition is intensely instrumental. We notice things precisely because they are useful, dangerous, edible, sexually attractive, disposable, or obstacles to something else. Naming something does not entail loving it. Tolkien is starting from a posture of love, and is letting that be his argument. This would not impress anyone with a club, and an audience to play to. The “saintly” posture, depends on the good-will of the audience. And I have found all too frequently, that even the most “Christian” audience is composed of orcs; power and strength are always flexed without justification or reason. It is therefore amazing to me, how Tolkien does not budge from his posture. It is like he doesn’t even see “the orc.” Every interaction includes relations that are going to be non-reverential, the majority of the time. True love is fleeting and extremely exclusive.

He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song

Here Tolkien makes his hierarchy too obvious. Myth does not merely add one possible layer of meaning for him; without the jewelled tent and the maternal earth, he says, there is “only a void.” His preferred imaginative perception has become the condition of possessing a world at all; his imagination is coming before the world as it is.

There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth.

Tolkien turns a defensible observation into an extravagant one. Yes, we all have to admit that science cannot tell us “what a thing is,” only, what it does. What a thing does, how we perceive it, and what it is in itself are not identical. Our concepts are not transparent photographs of reality. Fine. That leaves us with uncertainty. But Tolkien then leaps from “our perception is interpretive” to “the truer perception is enchanted, an enchanted commandment, even.” That is a leap, not an argument. Tolkien does not merely defend metaphor here. He ranks metaphors. His own enchanted perception is treated as fuller, deeper, more truthful than the supposedly flattened perception of the scientific mind. But that hierarchy is asserted, not demonstrated.

The astronomer who sees plasma, gravity, fusion, mass, spectra and distance has not failed to see the star. Nor has the exhausted sailor who sees a navigation point, or the farmer who sees the hour, or the frightened man who barely notices it. Tolkien has taken one extraordinarily rich aesthetic response and promoted it into a criterion of genuine perception. Not everyone loves what he looks at. Most eyes are non-empathic. Tolkien, is counting on you the audience, having empathy, to bow to what he has put higher in importance. That works on some people, not on everyone. The intensity of feelings and pathos, is not epistemic priority.

The heart of man is not compound of lies,

but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls him.

Though now long estranged,

man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.

Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,

and keeps the rags of lordship one he owned,

This is the part of the poem, where Tolkien shows all his cards. In his seventh paragraph. He is essentially just quoting the Catholic Catechism at his audience, though in miniature, in just less than ten words even; whether they notice him doing it or not. Tolkien is versifying the Christian anthropology summarized by the Catholic Catechism. This is the point, where the posture of Tolkien changes from hearing a scientific statement, to refusing posture, to his repeated two or three repeated declarations of faith. It is impossible not to miss the point, where he actually comes the closest “turning and attacking” but this is the point, where he does it. Only the most dim-witted and unfamiliar, would not instantly recognize, what he is alluding to with this. Your average low-IQ atheist, will not know enough of the move he is making to understand, why it matters; Tolkien is attacking materialism itself in “Apostolic” terms directly, at this point. His posture, has moved into a “faith declaration.” First, slowly, and now quickly. Nothing in the preceding discussion of language or imagination demonstrates a Fall. Nothing about metaphor establishes original dominion. Nothing about human creativity establishes that we are disgraced heirs of a divine kingship.

This is where I must express to Tolkien my “lack of faith.” Tolkien starts from the posture of absolute “love.” He starts with love. Explicitly. Tolkien creates a “God,” and indeed a universe in his own image. He believes in a “God” that starts from “Love.” God, grants “the rags of lordship.” He lets you keep them. He does not take them away. That is “love.” Clearly and unmistakably. The “estrangement” is not a cold dark for Tolkien as it is for me. The “golden scepter” is clutched and possessed. But why must this be so. I do not see that. Surely, the con-man, the pornographer, the oath-breaker, the traitor, the envious, the murderer, the liar, the expropriator of the vulnerable, wears not the rags. He bears not the scepter. There is nothing in nature to suggest this. Only cold eyes look out from that man. Tolkien has warm eyes, and a warm voice. There is nothing to suggest that God creates and grants the love. I think the “love” is merely emanating from Tolkien himself. He creates a “God” in his own image. I see no “God” to guarantee the “rags of lordship” in the world. That is my “unbelief.” I see the “ring of Barahir,” on you Tolkien. Perhaps you are the unshakeable warrior Saint. I do not see that ring on any other hand. The “love” is coming from you; not from them, not from the outside. That is my “unbelief.” Tolkien encounters his own extraordinary moral disposition, his loyalty, tenderness, hope, reverence and unwillingness to surrender “human” dignity, and interprets that disposition as evidence about what reality itself is like.

his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues…

Tolkien has now completed his doctrine of creation: God creates man, and man creates derivatively because he bears the pattern of his Creator. The Apostles’ Creed supplies the Creator; Genesis and Catholic anthropology supply the divine image; Tolkien combines them into his notion of the “Sub-creator.” Again, he expresses the doctrine magnificently, but it does not derive the doctrine from anything previously demonstrated.

The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.

Here the argument is no longer merely that human beings create. Tolkien tells us why they create: they are refracted divine light, exercising an inherited dominion according to the law in which God made them. That is the doctrine his discussion of language was supposed to establish, but he has simply announced.

Up to this point, Tolkien can claim to be dialoguing with reason, but at his seventh paragraph he stops completely. Suddenly we have an entire Christian anthropology already being imposed on us: man was once in proper relation to God; man fell or became estranged; he lost grace; he once possessed a divinely sanctioned lordship over creation; some remnant of that dignity survives. My question or objection is this: where the hell did any of that come from? The cruelty of material reality, and the endless chain of death from death in the circle of life, cruelty to cruelty, does not require the Catholic principal of a fallen man, who is still secretly loved by God, and is therefore “secretly good.” Tolkien is the ultimate Luke Skywalker, telling his Darth Vader, that “there is good in him.” That is an assertion, an accusation, not an argument, and not evidence.

Yes! ‘wish-fulfilment dreams’ we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream,
or some things fair and others ugly deem?

It is right after this point, where Tolkien, turns to, really his first statement of defiance, and then to his various iterations of his central faith statement. That of “Feelings do not care about your facts.” Tolkien treats the existence of desire as though the desire's mysterious origin somehow protects its object from dismissal. But a wish establishes the existence of the wish, not the existence of what is wished for. Facts, do defeat, Tolkien. Facts defeat my dreams all the time. My ability to dream is easily dismissed. Who knows where my dream came from. I can desperately want good things for myself, but that does not mean, “reality” in any way has to grant those things, just because I wished for them.

All wishes are not idle, nor in vain
fulfilment we devise — for pain is pain,
not for itself to be desired, but ill;
or else to strive or to subdue the will...

Tolkien distinguishes “good” wishes only after already assuming the Good, only after presumming his audience only wishes for the good. Evil people enjoy evil wishes all the time. There is nothing in the ability to wish or to will, that requires a Christian anthropology. Few people will bother to distinguish between good wishes and evil wishes. Evil people avoid pain for themselves too. “Have you met evil people, Tolkien?” Tolkien cannot simply say that our good desires disclose something true while our evil desires are corruptions. The sadist dislikes pain inflicted upon himself. The tyrant wants security. The torturer wants pleasure. Human aversion to one's own suffering does not establish Tolkien's Christian moral cosmology. If desire points beyond itself, what do evil desires point toward? If Tolkien answers, “Those are fallen or corrupted desires,” my response is again: Fine, but you are explaining human psychology through Christianity, not deriving Christianity from human psychology.

Then Tolkien says:

Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate,
that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate...
weave tissues gilded by the far-off day
hoped and believed in under Shadow’s sway.

Faith statement. Tolkien is no longer demonstrating anything. He is blessing a psychological disposition: the person who preserves hope under darkness. The man who maintains hope may be magnificent. His magnificence does not make the hoped-for thing real. Then Tolkien writes:

They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
and yet they would not in despair retreat,
but oft to victory have turned the lyre
and kindled hearts with legendary fire...

A belief in ‘Saints’ is a double myth. Tolkien is saying that good men never lost hope, so he won't. My problem? You don't know that. Tolkien selects the people who endured suffering without surrendering hope and makes them exemplars; to make matters worse, he selects them from dimily remembered history at best, from legend and from myth. But what about everyone suffering broke? Some people retain faith. Some abandon it. Some become cruel. The existence of a saint proves that a human being can preserve a belief magnificently under adversity. It doesn’t prove the belief. Make Tolkien a saint, by all means. He is your primary vocalized demonstration of it. But that is not evidence. We have blurred images for most of reality which we cannot see, and we are usually wrong.

I would with the beleaguered fools be told,
that keep an inner fastness where their gold,
impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring
to mint in image blurred of distant king...

Faith statement. Tolkien more or less admits that is all he is doing. The distant king is unseen. The image is blurred. The gold is impure and scanty. He is giving a magnificent description of persevering faith despite evidentiary uncertainty. Yes. Exactly. That is faith. And therefore it cannot simultaneously be offered as evidence demonstrating its own object. Here is the thing: no one will care. The “distant king” introduces the Christological centre of Tolkien’s creed without naming Christ directly. Like the ascended Christ of the Apostles’ Creed, who sits at the right hand of the Father and will return, the King is absent from ordinary sight but remains the object of allegiance. Tolkien acknowledges that the image is “blurred,” yet treats loyalty to the unseen original as a virtue.

Blessed are the men of Noah’s race that build
their little arks, though frail and poorly filled,
and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith,
a rumour of a harbour guessed by faith.

Tolkien’s own wording nearly concedes my entire point. The harbour is not demonstrated or clearly seen. It is a “wraith,” a “rumour,” and something “guessed by faith.” His subject is therefore not knowledge triumphing over materialism, but faith preserving its direction under radical uncertainty.

I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends...

Tolkien’s target has now become recognizable: not merely the atheist, but the modern organizer of counterfeit happiness, the man who promises economic bliss, mechanized pleasure and escape from tragedy. Here is the thing he has never demonstrated, which the Christian promises; an escape from tragedy. There is no escape. Just because the Utopian is lying, does not mean, that there is any such thing as a heaven. Tragedy, I know, escape, has not been demonstrated in any way. Furthermore, if a man suffering, he might well suffer more, dwelling on his suffering, but the imagination need not prove any higher reality. That it functions as a temporary respite from suffering I do not doubt. But a bottle of port, does that too.

It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).

And notice the wording, “I will not.” Not “You are factually mistaken because…” He has reached the poem’s purest declaration of allegiance. Tolkien increasingly speaks as though metaphysical skepticism were a moral-political camp one chooses to join. And this is the point in such discussions, where I start to feel offended. As if, by not having faith, or in having lost faith, or in having experienced and understood real “Orcs” that I therefore, in not having maintained said winsome posture, innocent posture, in not dismissing the matter of materialism, must therefore, be completely okay with “evil;” or that I have no preferences or tendencies or biases of my own on any question associated with the emotions and elevated ideals of which he prefers. Ultimately, Tolkien is not responding to argument with argument, he is responding with faith statements. Tolkien is just saying, “stop being a downer.”

I will not tread your dusty path and flat...

I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,

nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.

Tolkien presents unbelief rhetorically as bowing, almost an act of submission to the enemy. But someone can have belief beaten out of him by experience without ever consenting to the reality he fears. And this is where it gets intensely personal for me. This is where I feel insulted by Christians the most. You do not know how intensely I may feel my feelings, even while I am silent, even while I may feel forced to maintain absolute silence on those feelings, for all kinds of reasons, which in and of themselves, may be a torture. Tolkien treats or mistakes, or defines, inability to believe, for willingness to surrender. That is simply unfair. How much suffering must a person endure before losing faith ceases to be interpreted as cowardice, capitulation, spiritual poverty or “bowing”? A broken man hasn’t necessarily changed sides. This is possibly my primary objection to his poem. Again, Tolkien has moved completely from argument into Christian explanation from inside Christianity. God’s picture is “on one side,” and seeing God’s picture is already evidence for him, and proof of allegiance to God’s original design. God’s music; not seeing God’s picture, hearing instead the tuneless voice, is “on the other side.” In that he derives the tuneless voice, the crooked eyes.

Be sure they still will make, not being dead,
and poets shall have flames upon their head,
and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:
there each shall choose for ever from the All.

That's just your Faith, Tolkien. That's not an argument. That's just your pure faith. We began with stars, trees, words and stories. We have ended with immortal poets making art in Paradise. Somewhere between the two, Tolkien did not prove the Creed. He rewrote it beautifully and asked us to recognize it. Many academic types will read his poem and do not realize that this is all Tolkien was doing the whole time. Along the way he makes some sharp observations about the sterility of the “progressive apes,” about the flattening instincts of materialism, and about the poverty of a world that can describe everything while loving nothing. But these are observations and preferences, not demonstrations. Again and again he returns to the same moves: a declaration of faith, a renewed declaration of faith, and finally a declaration of defiance. I will not cast down my sceptre of being made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore, a “sub-creator.” Magnificent rhetoric. Still not an argument.

And this brings me back to my deepest objection. I do not think Tolkien really understands the Orc who rejects him. By “Orc,” I do not mean merely the stupid materialist Tolkien can easily caricature: the man who thinks beauty is chemistry, morality is convenience, and a tree is only so many board-feet of lumber. I mean the person who has looked at precisely the things Tolkien asks him to look at, beauty, suffering, longing, cruelty, myth, death, and still cannot make Tolkien’s leap. I mean the person who would like the King to exist, who would prefer the harbour not to be a rumour, who may desperately want the golden sceptre to signify something beyond his own hand, and yet cannot persuade himself that wanting it makes it true. Tolkien does not quote the Apostles’ Creed verbatim. He reconstructs its narrative architecture poetically: the Creator of heaven and earth; humanity made according to divine law but estranged from its source; fidelity to an unseen King; death transformed into victory; and, finally, perfected embodied life everlasting. His “posture” is therefore not from myth to proof, but from ordinary experience into an already Christian interpretation of ordinary experience. Very few people would move from ordinary experience to proving simply by restating the catechism, though that is all Tolkien is really doing. That will satisfy very few people.

Tolkien continually writes as though unbelief were an allegiance. The skeptic has joined the progressive apes, accepted the Iron Crown, and cast away his own inheritance. But my loss of faith is not my acceptance of what I fear may be true. Despair is not consent. Doubt is not worship. A man does not bow before the Iron Crown simply because he can no longer see the distant King. This is the hidden accusation Tolkien is making that I find so upsetting and offensive. And perhaps this is where I think, I understand the Orc better than Tolkien does. The Orc is not someone who has forgotten the Light. Sometimes he remembers it perfectly well and hates it. Sometimes he knows what goodness is and rejects it. Sometimes he sees suffering and enjoys it. Sometimes he is merely suspicious, and resentful of his place in reality and is therefore, incapable of making Tolkien’s act of faith. Human beings are not uniformly secret saints awaiting the right myth to awaken them. Some are cruel. Some are indifferent. Some are broken. Some simply do not believe. Make Tolkien a saint, by all means. He exemplifies the type magnificently. He kept his inner fastness. But the saint proves the durability of faith, not its object. That is what Mythopoeia finally gives us: not a proof that dreams defeat facts, but the portrait of a remarkable man who refused to allow facts, to defeat his dreams.

Mythopoeia Full Text

The Mosaic Law does not abolish property or inequality, but it repeatedly restricts interest, permanent indebtedness, land concentration, and the accumulation of unchecked political wealth. The economic legislation of Moses is neither communist nor laissez-faire. Private property, inheritance, wealth, trade, and social distinctions all remain. Despite this the Torah places clear limits upon the mechanisms by which credit, land, and political power can become permanently concentrated.

I. Against Usury

“If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.”
— Exodus 22:25

“Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee.”
— Leviticus 25:36

“Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.”
— Leviticus 25:37

“Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury.”
— Deuteronomy 23:19

“Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.”
— Deuteronomy 23:20

The prohibition is not a universal ban upon every imaginable interest-bearing transaction. It is specifically directed against turning lending into a mechanism of exploitation and dependency.

II. Against the Permanent Concentration of Property and Power

The Jubilee: property cannot simply accumulate upward forever

“In the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his possession.”
— Leviticus 25:13

“The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine.”
— Leviticus 25:23

“And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land.”
— Leviticus 25:24

The principle is that economic misfortune may temporarily separate a family from its productive inheritance, but it is not supposed to create an irreversible process by which a handful of owners eventually acquire everything.

Debt itself must periodically be broken

“At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release.”
— Deuteronomy 15:1

“Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother.”
— Deuteronomy 15:2

Creditors therefore cannot indefinitely compound claims against fellow members of the community.

The King himself is forbidden unlimited accumulation

“But he shall not multiply horses to himself…”
— Deuteronomy 17:16

“Neither shall he multiply wives to himself… neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.”
— Deuteronomy 17:17

Even the sovereign is subject to an explicit restriction against accumulating military resources, dynastic connections, and treasure without limit.

The original distribution of landed inheritance is to be preserved

“So shall not the inheritance of the children of Israel remove from tribe to tribe: for every one… shall keep himself to the inheritance of the tribe of his fathers.”
— Numbers 36:7

Whatever you think of Moses, his God, or the Hebrews, it is clear that they did not believe in either socialism or unrestricted capitalism. Property is legitimate; permanent dispossession is not. Wealth is legitimate; unlimited accumulation of coercive power is treated with suspicion. Lending is legitimate; transforming necessity into permanent debt-subordination is not. The Mosaic answer to inequality was not to abolish ownership, but to place barriers around the processes by which ownership, debt, and political authority could become permanently concentrated in the same hands.

My A.I. prompt for “Moses, before the Back of God” ( His back, fire, at his feet, sapphires. As it famously says in the text. )

“under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone….”
— Exodus 24:10

“I saw as the colour of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it….”
— Ezekiel 1:27

“…thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.”
— Exodus 33:23

“Economic and political control is monopolised by the bureaucracy.”
—Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratisation of the World (1939)

“The exploitation of certain strata of the population by other strata has not disappeared, but has been disguised.”
—Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Chapter 6

“The communist bureaucrat is the most dangerous type of bureaucrat. Why? Because he masks his bureaucracy with the title of Party member.”
— Joseph Stalin, Speech Delivered at the Eighth Congress of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (May 16, 1928)

“The enterprise comes to be thought of as existing for the sake of its managers—not the managers for the enterprise.”
— James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1941)

The Communist sneer of “petite bourgeoisie” has always struck me as one of the greatest pieces of envy-laden, covert narcissistic, class misdirection in the Leftist vocabulary. The sneer converts modest independence into moral corruption and political suspicion. My question for Leftists, is this: Why is the man who earns money by producing something morally categorized as an “exploiter,” while the salaried institutional intermediary who can regulate, prohibit, punish, blacklist, or distribute resources is presumed innocent simply because his authority isn't called “property?”

For a brief opening clarification, yes, I am aware that kulak had a much more specific historical meaning in the Russian context; I will not be claiming that every small proprietor, student, or comparatively fortunate worker would historically have qualified as one. I use the term here in the looser polemical sense in which it is deployed by contemporary far-leftists: as an ideological slur for those deemed insufficiently dispossessed, excessively independent, or simply more “privileged” than the speaker’s preferred proletarian archetype. In other words, I am deliberately using the category as my opponents themselves often stretch it, rather than pretending that this modern usage is historically precise.

The Personally Productive vs. the Big Centre and the Powerless

The small proprietor, small owner, independent tradesman, shopkeeper, or successful peasant is treated as a uniquely contemptible creature: too prosperous to qualify as an authentic worker, too small to command the respect afforded to a great capitalist, and too independent to be safely controlled by the revolutionary machine. His modest success becomes evidence of moral corruption; not intelligence. Strip away the polemical category, which is often stretched far beyond any stable economic definition, and what remains is precisely just another “worker,” who has partially escaped destitution and accumulated some land, tools, equipment, savings, rental income, or productive capital, whether through work, intelligence, inheritance, or luck. ( And pure Bilbo Baggins “luck” was all I ever personally had. ) It is simply not consistent with the Marxist materialist analysis that many far-leftists claim-to-hold, to politicize and moralize, any case of mere luck, admittedly so, when many other cadres make no so weighted admission.

Does the thoughtful communist really believe that, because a man does not display his scars, he has none? Or that because someone claims the status of the oppressed, the claim must therefore be genuine? From a position of political weakness, such assumptions are especially self-defeating. In his closing speech to the Nineteenth Party Congress on October 14, 1952, Stalin argued that the Western bourgeoisie had “flung overboard” the banners of bourgeois-democratic liberty and national independence, and that Communists should pick them up if they wished to win the majority. Whatever one thinks of Stalin, the strategic lesson is difficult to miss: it is absurd to penalize the admittedly fortunate worker merely because he has escaped some hardships, possesses something worth defending, or enjoys enough security even to entertain your theory. If every difference in fortune must instead be transformed into a totalizing moral biography, privilege on one side, oppression on the other, one has to ask whether the doctrine is still explaining social reality, or merely giving ideological form to envy. This is what I think incites the envy of the dependent communist functionary, even if he is objectively more privileged in the eyes of that “privileged worker; it is not analysis, it is a personal gripe, taking the place of analysis.”

Not all “Reactionary” Motives are Alike

The thing that makes the communist analysis on this topic both offensive, to a “worker” and wrong-headed is that it measures privilege or non-privilege almost entirely through either the appearance of an economic station or ideological conformity to the present norm. In other words, it increasingly reads society through signs and symbols, as Baudrillard might have noticed. It does not measure privilege through any serious knowledge of personal situation, nor through any attempt at “weighting” personal advantages against personal disadvantages. For example, I might attempt to argue that someone from a very large family, seven children, twelve children, fourteen even, can be vastly more disadvantaged in certain vital matters of personal economic, social and cultural capital than his outward social category would suggest. Such a person might feel himself, in the actual business of first-world climbing and positional competition, closer in certain respects even to an Afghan, or to someone in the Third World, than to his own First World peers, with whom he nevertheless shares far greater cultural and historical affinity.

If the Marxist analysis were at least consistent, it might make a note of this. It might rightly infer, for example, a more peasant-reactionary social base of thought in such a person: a psychology produced not simply by abstract ideology but by family structure, scarcity, competition, inheritance, obligation, limited social capital and one’s actual position in the climb. That would at least be a social inference. It would be a social typology. Even its criticism, and thereby its social “hatred” would have some analytical content. But it does not do this. A “reactionary is a reactionary.” The social inference disappears. Instead, it has to assume that someone who, to outward appearance, belongs to the historic majority population of a First World country necessarily occupies some comparatively “privileged” or impure class position if he is not sufficiently socially liberal. It does not occur to the modern Marxist analyst that the supposed reactionary may possess fewer practical advantages than many of the people condemning him, or that the Marxist analyst himself may occupy a comfortable middling position and simply be engaged in another kind of positional struggle.

Here Peter Turchin’s concept of elite overproduction becomes useful. The activist, graduate, intellectual, journalist, bureaucrat or ideological functionary need not be speaking downward from some secure revolutionary understanding of “the worker.” He may himself be an elite aspirant competing with other elite aspirants for a relatively fixed number of desirable positions. What appears morally as ideological struggle may therefore also contain an element of ordinary intra-elite competition: more aspirants, fewer chairs, and increasingly ferocious competition over who is permitted to sit in them. The irony is that a supposedly materialist analysis can therefore become remarkably incapable of analysing people’s actual material circumstances. It sees the symbol of privilege, the language of privilege and the ideological signs associated with privilege, while overlooking the concrete distribution of advantages, disadvantages, obligations, social capital, family resources and institutional access in the life of the person standing directly in front of it.

Modern Communism is Backward in Strategy

I am not suggesting that historically every such proprietor was an innocent saint. But neither was he necessarily a miniature Rockefeller terrorizing the countryside. Often, he was simply the man who had managed to build something durable. Communism promises to eliminate the social power represented by this figure. However, and this is the important problem, I want the Left to hear: you cannot eliminate the functions he performs. Someone must still organize production, maintain equipment, distribute supplies, supervise labour, keep accounts, decide priorities, and plan for the next season. The revolution may abolish the proprietor, but it cannot abolish management. It therefore transfers these functions to officials. This is why simply accusing some of immorality the minute he departs from the party line, is not evidence of a non-proletarian class analysis, for me.

In this contrast, I see the Communist argument reversing itself. The “kulak” is condemned because his control over productive resources supposedly permits him to dominate others. However, his replacement, the commissar, collective-farm chairman, party secretary, planning official, or desk-bound middle manager, is given still greater control over resources that he did not create and does not personally own. He may determine who receives machinery, credit, housing, employment, rations, permits, or political protection. He owns less on paper while commanding more in practice. He has control. Which is exactly the Weber-Burnham, observation. These roles do not always coincide: ownership, management, technical competence, and physical labour can be divided among different people. My point is that abolishing the proprietor does not abolish any of these functions; it merely determines who will exercise them and to whom that person will answer.

Two forms of Power

I am not dismissing the Marxist point that property matters, nor do I deny that property itself is a historical development. My objection is that property is only one form of power; control is more fundamental, and existed long before modern property relations. Hitler did not “take power” because he possessed property. He took power because, slowly but surely, he acquired control. His charisma was central to that process, and charisma is itself a far more primordial source of power than legal title or economic ownership. The Marxist error is in treating a comparatively recent, highly formalized, and specifically European juridical-economic expression of power as though it exhausted the category itself. Modern property is codified: it is expressed through deeds, contracts, shares, accounts, titles, and legally enforceable claims. But human beings exercised domination long before power could be represented by a document, entered into a ledger, or calculated on a balance sheet. Chiefs, priests, conquerors, military commanders, patriarchs, bureaucrats, and charismatic leaders have all exercised enormous power.

Hitler did not acquire power because his name appeared on a title, a piece of paper, or beside numbers on a balance sheet. He acquired power because his charisma produced loyalty, loyalty produced organization, and organization produced control. Indigenous peoples of North America, possessed their own systems governing territorial use, exclusion, and political authority without reducing those relationships to modern market valuation or transferable fee-simple title. Control of resources is older than the accounting systems through which modern societies represent ownership. Control, then, is a primordial form of power; property is one of its derivatives and institutionalizations. The central weakness in Leftist analysis is that it attacks one historically contingent mechanism through which control is exercised while remaining strangely silent about the underlying phenomenon itself. Abolish private title, and the question does not disappear.

I therefore see considerably less difference between the Communist bureaucratic middle manager and the “petty-bourgeois” proprietor he replaces than Communist theory wants me to see. Both occupy a position between the ordinary labourer and the highest governing elite. Both organize resources, direct other people’s work, and receive some benefit from their intermediate position. The crucial difference is that the kulak’s authority rests partly upon property, competence, and demonstrated production, while the commissar’s authority rests primarily upon his appointment by the political hierarchy.

Put more brutally: the commissar is just a kulak who does not even have to farm. That does not mean that every kulak was industrious or that every Communist official was lazy. Administration is real work, and some administrators are indispensable. My objection concerns the system of accountability. The independent farmer who repeatedly mismanages his land eventually loses income, property, or standing. The bureaucrat who mismanages agriculture may falsify his reports, conceal shortages, blame “wreckers,” demand additional resources, or punish the people who reveal his failures. One answers, however imperfectly, to production; the other answers primarily to the hierarchy above him.

Communism therefore does not abolish the middle stratum. It changes the basis upon which membership in that stratum is awarded. Economic independence is replaced by political dependence. The small proprietor must satisfy customers, creditors, workers, neighbours, and the material requirements of production. The functionary must principally satisfy his superiors. This makes bureaucratic conformity, ideological reliability, and institutional loyalty more important than ownership, and devastatingly, and dangerously: more important than competence.

Nor does the absence of private legal title abolish class power. If I cannot legally sell the factory, but I decide who manages it, who works there, what it produces, who receives its output, and who is punished when the plan fails, then my lack of a deed does not make me powerless. Ownership is one form of control; administrative command is another. Communism mistakes the abolition of the first for the abolition of the second. Indeed, the bureaucrat’s power may be more extensive precisely because it is disguised as public service. The proprietor admits that the farm or workshop belongs to him. The official claims to possess nothing personally while deciding who receives everything. His privilege is presented not as privilege, but as the necessary exercise of collective authority. It consequently becomes harder to identify, criticize, or remove.

The moral inversion is extraordinary. The peasant who accumulates the fruits of production is denounced as a parasite, while the official who confiscates, counts, distributes, and consumes those fruits is proclaimed the representative of the producer. The person who builds a durable household is accused of betraying his class; the person whose livelihood depends entirely upon the state hierarchy is celebrated as politically advanced. From my own producerist perspective, this is intuitively almost always a nearly backwards; especially in the modern world, where average “workers” have less and less control, and have to watch their mouths on political topics just to avoid being “fired.” We are less free now, than under Monarchy, which could not monitor everything you said and thought. Modern institutions possess capacities for reputational damage and employment control that premodern monarchies could scarcely have imagined. Formal liberties can therefore coexist with a cruel degree of constant surveillance.

My own solution

This is why, I would rather disperse property among workers, families, farmers, and small enterprises than concentrate all practical control in an administrative caste. The answer to excessive private power is not to make ordinary people permanently dependent upon officials. It is to give more people property, bargaining power, productive capacity, and a genuine stake in the institutions upon which their lives depend. The officials should exist only to ensure that the spread of that productive capacity remains spread and does not concentrate. The officials charged with preventing economic concentration must themselves be divided, audited, removable, and denied discretionary control over individual livelihoods. Otherwise, the institution created to disperse private power will merely concentrate public power.

The problem with “Communism” is that it does not finally eliminate the class relations it condemned. It dispossessed one intermediate class and manufactured another. It replaced the independent proprietor with the dependent administrator, the productive middleman with the political middleman, and visible ownership with less visible managerial control. The commissar was therefore not the opposite of the kulak; he is the kulak’s political successor: a middleman with fewer formal property rights, far greater coercive authority, and considerably less direct accountability for whether anything was actually produced. The central problem for me, is that there is nothing in the Leftist repertoire of recommendations, that guarantees an elimination of “inequality.” All it does, is transform the mechanism of “inequality” which is precisely the issue. The central and most important question from the point of view of the “equalist” should be that “ownership and control” are not identical. There is a difference between who formally owns an institution vs. who actually controls it, and who can punish whom. Without, asking this question, “inequalities” are not lessened.

As a final remark, the sophisticated Leftist will point out, that everything that I have said about the professions they tend to occupy, can be applied to corporate executives too. Certainly. None of this means that managerial domination is uniquely Communist. A privately owned corporation can also develop a salaried administrative caste increasingly insulated from its workers, customers, shareholders, and productive purpose; Burnham's point was considerably broader than the Soviet case. My objection to Communism is more specific: by combining political sovereignty with administrative control over production, employment, allocation, and often housing itself, it risks concentrating in one hierarchy powers that a plural economy at least leaves divided among several institutions.

References

Burnham, J. (1941). The managerial revolution: What is happening in the world. John Day Company.

Đilas, M. (1957). The new class: An analysis of the Communist system. Frederick A. Praeger.

Michels, R. (1915). Political parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy (E. Paul & C. Paul, Trans.). Hearst’s International Library. (Original work published 1911)

Mises, L. von. (1944). Bureaucracy. Yale University Press.

Rizzi, B. (1985). The bureaucratization of the world: The USSR—Bureaucratic collectivism (A. Westoby, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1939)

Trotsky, L. (1937). The revolution betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and where is it going? (M. Eastman, Trans.). Doubleday, Doran & Company. (Original work published 1936)

Shatz, Marshall S. (1989). Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Turchin, P. (2023). End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Penguin Press.