Global American Eunuchracy
Lessons from the Orient in Eunuchratic States and Siege Economies
Dear Reader, I hope I am not offending your tolerances by producing yet another 10,000 word essay. It won’t fit in an email, so I do hope you open it up in read it at full length! Do let me know in the comments what you think.
There exists a Chinese phrase which deserves some writing about. Not that you, dear reader, have never heard of it - you almost certainly have. The phrase is 宦官制度 (Huànguān zhìdù), and as you may have guessed from the title, this phrase is usually translated as “Eunuch System”. While there are alternatives to both the Chinese and English, the purpose of this article is more-so to investigate a specific English translation of that phrase I recently stumbled upon.
John Keay, a rather well-respected British “non-academic” historian on matters of the Orient, offers a different translation. Just to eschew any doubts to his abilities, it’s worth noting he’s known for - and has won awards from - his many articles at The Economist, The Gaurdian, The Independent, and an impressive bibliography of oriental topics. So at the very least, his having offered an alternative translation ought be considered and not cast away without thought. It was his peculiar translation of the phrase 宦官制度 that caught my attention and led to this post, after all.
That translation is: Eunuchracy.
This word, when I first saw it, struck me as a rather clever invention. I say invention, because this word seems incredibly rare - somuchso that I suspect Mr Keay may have coined it himself, or acquired it from a neighboring wordsmith at one of his many employments. I also found myself rather jealous that neither I, nor my writing friends, had independently coined it. This is rather surprising for what ought to be a word we Americans could have invented entirely on our own - given our contemporary culture war riffraff. That it is virtually unknown is why I want to spend some time cranking out a proper definition for you, dear reader - but to do so will be a length journey. Nonetheless, I do hope at the end you will help in popularizing the term when describing certain privileged classes of Americas’s Manageoisie.
This article is thus a review of eunuchratic literature - about that term, its origins and consequences, and possible strategies to contest what I want to call the contemporary eunuchrat. I hope you find it a worthy addition to your diction.
Notes on Eunuchs
Many of you reading this will be well-aware of China’s four-thousand-year history of employing - and making - eunuchs to run their massive continental holdings. In China, they were not only castrated, but had the full shaft removed too. They were manufactured pseudomen - a term I’ve also occasionally seen used. Often, the gentiles were pickled and given to the young eunuch. He would hold onto them for life, and then be buried with them when he passed. It was said that a eunuch who was buried with his picked pickle, regained the full rights of manhood and full honors of being born a man in the afterlife. Presumably, to lose the jar was a great dishonor - possibly barring one from manhood in eternity with their ancestors. Quite a weight to bare, guarding his pickle.
At its height, the Ming Court hosted some 70,000 eunuchs to run its bloated administration, and these were hardly constrained to the courts. The eunuchs were mobile in nature, traveling city to city as the long arm of the Emperor’s will. The benefit of using eunuchs should be obvious: men who cannot form a legacy cannot form a competing dynasty. Thus, men who cannot give an inheritance can be more focused on serving their lords. For a well-oiled managerial caste in good-standing moral character, such an army of eunuchs kept the Imperial Bureaucracy running smoothly. They could keep an empire in lock-step with the Imperial Court, with local divergences in ethics or loyalties pushed to a bare minimum. Such was the norm in a healthy dynastic cycle with a strong Heavenly Mandate. The norm, however, doesn’t always sustain. The norm eventually declines, and the Heavenly Mandate is eventually lost.
In the aforementioned John Keay’s China: A History, the reader can find a letter by a Jesuit Missionary, Matteo Ricci, detailing what becomes of the unrestrained eunuch in the twilight years of a failing dynasty. The description may sound somewhat familiar to certain urban dwellers:
The tax collectors found gold mines, not in the mountains, but in the rich cities. If they were told that a rich man lived here or there, they said he had a silver mine in his house, and immediately decided to ransack and undermine his home … Sometimes, in order to secure an exemption from being robbed, the cities and even the provinces bartered with the eunuchs, and paid them a large sum of silver, which they said was taken from the mines for the royal treasury. The result of this unusual spoliation was an increase in the price of all commodities, with a corresponding growth in the general spread of poverty.
This is the double-edged sword of any eunuch system. Without any hope of heirs or dynasties, they can serve an emperor most loyally in the good times - but the second those good times end, that same knowledge that they are a dead end can transform them into roaming hordes of thieving lords living for today, for tomorrow they die, with no one to carry their image.
Note here also, that in such late-stage dynastic decline, the eunuch begins to tear off from the rest of the Imperial Bureaucracy. Lords and scholars who by themselves constitute a local bureaucracy with potent men become victims of an unrestrained eunuch seeking to catabolize local wealth for his own comforts. This change of form from a loyal eunuch system to a roving band of looting lords deserves its own word. It is this late-stage catabolism/cannibalism which I wish to define as an eunuchracy.
The choice to both manufacture and employ a professional class of Eunuchs is not unique to China, it should be noted - nor is the nature of this double-edged sword. Such Castré Professionnel existed in the Ottoman Empire as well. Likewise, when the going got hard, the emerging eunuchratic mess oft tore members off the Sultan’s domains, most famously the Mamluks forming an independent Egypt. You may also be familiar with biblical examples in Babylon and Persia. While Daniel is never outright said to be a eunuch, he neither marries nor is stated as having children. It was normal for Babylon and Persia to make eunuchs of foreign elite and place them in seats of authority, of which Daniel’s recorded life seems to match rather perfectly. In fact, one may consider 2 Kings 20:18 to be a direct reference of Daniel, but to be clear it’s not known for sure. Daniel did not live in an era of decline (other than Israel’s), so he spent his years serving his Emperor faithfully, and likely bequeathed the Magi with the prophecy of Christ’s birth - hence their presence in the New Testament. Daniel would not fit the description of a eunuchrat.
It is my hope that this rather clearly differentiates between a functioning Eunuch System and a dysfunctional Eunuchracy. But, with that established, let us also consider the broader structure beyond the individual eunuch - what supporting infastructure enables his ascent and feeds his catabolism.
For that, we have to go back to the 1970s…
Notes on Eunuchrats
If you google the phrase eunuchracy, you will only get about Fifty results - by far, most of them repeats. There is, of course, John Keay’s text somewhere at the top. Along with that, one noteworthy American hit shows up: an article by the British Lord, Conrad Black - look up his controversies in your own time. He used this word to describe Jeffrey Session’s administration - in fact, his use of the word in describing political impotency somewhat reveals where he may have learned the word, which I’ll get into in a bit. Shift over to Google Books, and you will only find two hits: The aforementioned John Keay text, and a Malaysian text of some kind. Dig a little deeper through Archive.org, you will only find a single use of the term for the whole of archived written English history prior to the internet: An article from The New Statesman, from 1970 - although, only an index. The article itself cannot be found online - more on that soon.
Given that all three of these main hits are old British men with links to similar newspapers, it would be difficult to deny some link between them. Most likely, it was an in-office meme that got tossed around by all three at various times. Let’s go a bit deeper, though, to see how they use this word. First, let’s poke at Lord Black’s perspective.
The article details much of the impotency of Trump’s picks for various offices. Of course, the power held by Trump’s higher-ups like Sessions, or any of Biden’s today, is not a sphere of influence which happens overnight. It is a product of an authority holding jurisdiction rewarding its loyal base. The problems detailed by Lord Black generally come about by picking bad allies at the start of a bid for power, not during an exercise of acquired power. As mentioned before, let us differentiate between the eunuchrats, and the ordinary bureaucrats. We can imagine a bureaucrat as someone with political ambitions and potency, who represents a potentially competing dynasty. The eunuchrat is a dead end - he simply lacks the ability to muster a competing dynasty and is instead interested in catabolizing what he has been given by an authority figure. It is often the case that a man of authority will first achieve a great conquest thanks to the services of his potent inner circle. However, that potency quickly becomes a threat in peacetime. Immediately some of his secondaries will start to grow jealous of the vast domains of their lord, and demand shares as reward for having helped the authority figure achieve their great victory. At which point, history can diverge in several directions.
A good lord will give out shares of the inheritance to his underlings (Keys to power, if you are familiar with the CPG Grey video on the topic). A bad lord will horde it all for himself, inevitably leading to rebellion and division. Such was the case of the likes of many Republican lords that helped get Trump elected. When they found little share of the conquest, they quickly turned on him.
That Lord Black grouped Jeffrey Sessions in with the eunuchrats of old begs some questioning. Did Sessions, in his time, form a roving band of catabolizing decline? Sessions, briefly considered for VP over Pence, is not known for much other than his private meetings with Russian ambassadors - part of the fizzled Russia Collusion narrative. His children certainly have aspirations as well. Long after Mr Sessions departs this life, his children and personal network will continue to pry at power, lending hands to future Republican Candidates. So Lord Black may be incorrect to use this terminology to describe Mr. Sessions in this way. Nonetheless, as a description of an impotent leader at the time, it may work. Perhaps Lord Black meant that Sessions is something of a eunuchrat in the sense that his era of politics, that of the neocon, appears to be castrated at this time. Other than a few passive claps to the Biden camp when they support the Ukrainian war effort, the necons represent something of a political dead end. Functionally, eunuchrats. Nothing of Jeffrey Sessions’ necon heritage will be a campaign issue for decades to come, and it is unlikely his dynastic house would make a bid at power, or lend their network’s resources, off the same political slogans Sessions himself did in his time. He can offer only his assets, without much expectation they represent a competing power for the throne - for now.
To be clear, I think most Neocons know this, and that is why they are so desperate to make Ukraine their comeback tour. For now, they remain an impotent perspective that’s lost the interest of most. Perhaps they will slowly be grafted on to a Democrat limb.
It should be noted here, the lack of such betrayals in Biden’s ranks may hint at a few curiosities. We could simply say Biden has been more faithful to his base, rewarding rich deals for service in his campaign. Or, perhaps, could it be the case that Biden is rewarding a growing class of professional eunuchrats? Do you feel the people Biden places in power are catabolizing regions of the United States?
Let me be simple here, dear reader. It may not be the case that Biden, or his nobles, actually support any of this sexual and racial identitarianism that’s been growing off the backs of his and Obama’s administration. It may be the case he simply needed to have a faithful caste of eunuchrats to ward off the many competing dynsatic houses from gaining power with him - in Biden’s case, some quite literally eunuchs.
Does “woke” really offer a competing power for the throne? Or does it represent a blocking move against competing powers? It may merely be evidence of infighting, as loyal eunuchrats hold seats that otherwise would have gone to other dynasties. Here today, forgotten tomorrow.
Such is the case for the third option for some authorities: Rather than distribute shares to their nobles, or deny them, it is often better to setup an alternative peace-time bureaucracy that gradually evicts the warriors and nobles that helped an authority take the throne - and hope they don’t notice, of course. The authority need not give up his possessions when heir-less eunuchs manage matters. When they pass, the authority holds final say as to whom they will bequeath them unto next. However, understand that the normal pathway of such things is to setup the eunuchs after you conquer, as eunuchs do not make great warriors. For the case of Biden, it seems as though he brought in the eunuchs before he conquered. This is quite a curious course, but it does skip over much of the infighting an emperor must do in gradually replacing his nobles and warriors with eunuchs, after a conquest. However, Biden did this in a rather poor season - the kind of times when eunuchs get the sense they aren’t going to live out their days in comfort. They’ve started looting the nobles as economic and political stability faces growing strains. We can return here to John Keay’s text, where he specifically notes how this divide between the degenerate eunuchrats and ordinary noble bureaucrats inevitably causes a dynastic crisis:
Regular officials protested, even resisted, but to no avail; they were either dismissed or imprisoned. The eunuchcrats had the emperor’s full backing and grew ever ‘more insolent in their attitude and more daring in their depredations’. In the eyes of the inarticulate masses the entire government apparatus was at risk of being discredited…
Consider these words as we dive into that aforementioned New Statesman article next.
The New Eunuchracy, 1970
Finding The New Statesman article proved quite challenging, but one of the benefits of having an Ivy League credential and living in Manhattan is unrestrained access to the archives they don’t allow Google to touch (if for no other reason - and to be clear, I have no other reason - this is the real value of such a degree if you were thinking of pursuing one). Hidden away in those archives was not the article I was looking for, but a response to the article - ironic that the article’s public response was archived first. The article itself, as it turned out, was not so properly archived and took a bit more effort to find, but after many hours of surveying the archives of the New York Public Library, I found it!
I was very lucky to have stumbled upon an article titled The New Eunuchracy, in the September 1970 edition of The New Statesman penned by a Colin McGlashan. I found the article by finding an index of subscriber responses to articles over at Archive.org. Neither the letter, nor the article it was responding to, can be found on the internet by conventional means. Yes, dear reader, even in the year of our Lord, Two Thousand Twenty Three, some things have yet to be added to the matrix. I had to brush up the old academic in me and travel to the New York Public Library to get a hold of it, which I will reproduce here - pun intended:
Colin brings in quite a lot of 1970s lore, so you’ll have to be patient trying to understand the context. That said, I must confess a bit of a giggle over his feminist affirmation cigarettes - I claim patent rights to make those today, dagnabbit!. I got flashbacks of Yarvin’s self-licking napalm as well.
Colin describes the eunuchrat as one disconnected from the needs of the people. Like the eunuchrats of China long ago, all they do is go city to city to enforce and debate meaningless bylaws and worthless morals they cook up in their debate clubs, gradually degenerating into a traveling band of robbers as they sense their own irrelevency. No one actually cares about the eunuchrat’s values when inflation is going to the moon and the kids don’t have Christmas gifts. Most people are rather more concerned about their national legacy, and eventually the catabolism of the eunuch is understood as natural consequence of their impotent officials - an eunuchracy is born.
While any eunuchracy will eventually catabolize itself into a warring states era, Colin describes the on-the-way experience “as notable for an absence of disasters as for a lack of success”. Things become so bland, Colins points out, that the moment a fuckable candidate starts shaking things up, he wins - he becomes so dangerous that “the machine promptly shows itself ready to deal” - now what dealing involves, either destruction or integrating, depends.
(Dear reader, as a side note, can we please popularize the term “Fuckable Candidates”? It feels apropos with Prude’s recent meme of ‘The Fuck Rate Must Increase!”)
What Colin reveals is that Americans have a proclivity for patricians - fuckable candidates that bequeath spoils to their loyal footsoldiers. Americans like candidates that do things and get things done, and then show a willingness to share the spoils. A nation of pirates and rebels that shows itself far more engaged than British voters. There’s that rather amusing quote later in the article when McGlashan interviewed a mayor: “I was more a dictator than a democrat” - and yet, one wonders if those same fuckable candidates haven’t slipped into a bit of an eunuchracy themselves since those riotous years of the 60s and 70s?
To get a bit into the weeds of Colin’s article, you may be wondering about this referenced pamphlet, The New Politics - this being Tony Benn’s major re-evaluation of the Labour Party’s vitality following the botched election of 1970. Dear Reader, in order to refine our understanding of eunuchracy, we are going to have to dive into this text. It’s a bit long from here on out, so I apologize if things get convoluted.
The New Politics would help Labout revitalize, winning the 1974 election and remaining in power until 1979, going on to inspire future Labour leaders such as Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. But, there remains something of a problem with what happened to Labour both in the late 70s and with later attempts at the throne by Corbyn: The assumption that the eunuchrat can organize any revitalizing force.
It does not appear Mr. Benn used the term eunuchrat in the text, but the usage of the word by Colin certainly rings in symphony with Benn’s criticisms of the then-stalled Labour Party. Colin’s primary criticism is not a denial of the stale politics of 1970’s Britian, but rather that a eunuchrat is incapable of becoming the fuckable candidate Benn longed for in his pamphlet. Indeed, after Labour came back for a few years, the government did not stop being impotent. Its stale and faux energy degenerated into the same eunuchratic looters of ancient China, and it all came tumbling down when the very fuckable Thatcher showed up and crushed them. Likewise, again, the very fuckable Boris showed up to crush Corbyn years later when Bennism’s heir made a bit for the throne. Colin’s predictions held true: eunchrats are not fuckable. They are incapable of fucking.
(Ok Ok, we Americans may not find that mutant creature very fuckable, but let’s not judge our British friends for their peculiar tastes…)
I should repeat here that I only found this article because someone had archived an index including responses to it. In the October edition of The New Statesman, one can find the following amusing response.
Millions must, etc. It is a rather amusing response, and one which reminds the reader that nerdy prudes were still crawled around in the neovictorian afterglow of post-empire Britain. Incidentally, I think I’ve identified who Mr. Holford-Stevens is, as he appears to be the same age and location as a Leofranc Holford-Strevens(sic), who was apparently banned from his university dinning hall for “medieval eating habits”. He’s still alive, and apparently wrote some great books. I’ll have to investigate…
I must deter here to speak more on Colin McGlashan, dear reader. This man seems to be all-together memory holed. By that I mean, he doesn’t seem to exist. Despite having a number of academic papers quoting his articles, a number of interviews and journeys to strange places in the Soviet world, his articles appear to be the entire evidence of his ever having lived at all. There is no Wikipedia page on a Colin McGlashan. I cannot find any record of his peerage, knighthood, or professorships - if he had any - nor much of anything about him, other than his articles at The New Statesman and The Observer. The man appears to have been famous in his time, or at least that is what I sense from his extensive interviews and contacts. Yet, he seems an academic ghost. Discovering this ghost stalking the archives of the New York Public Library was quite the joy of my week. If for no other reason than to resurrect his curious wisdom, I shall write more on him in the future.
While I have not much evidence, I suspect Lord Black took some tutorage from the writing of Colin, given they both were involved in the British Newspaper business. Suffice to say, the two men almost certainly spoke to each other on occasion, and they both share the same understanding of just what a eunuchrat is.
But, who is an Eunuchrat? Tony Benn, although never having used the word, can be understood as criticizing the stuffy old parliamentarians. Lord Black and McGlashan may be understood as calling Benn one of the very same class of impotent leaders as Benn criticized. We have here a whole mess of words and terms, some interchangeable in part, others in hole.
In order to better understand the thoughts of all three, it likely requires we dive into Benn’s The New Politics and discover just what this so-called Eunuchracy is.
The New Politics
It may seem rather mad to explore Tony Benn’s pamphlet, 50 years hence. Hard to say its politics are still “new”. Still, being a product of Fabian philosophy is curious, albeit please don’t confuse that with the Faustian philosophy. Benn also doesn’t use the term eunuchrat at all it seems, so for the purposes of the text we may say manager is a synonym of eunuchrat. As is the case with all Marxist texts, you should pay attention to the problems they identify, but question the offered solutions. Every Marxist is an excellent doctor, but a lethal surgeon.
In like manner, The New Politics is worth reading to learn the symptoms of a Eunuchratic State, but be cautious of the offered remedy. As Tony Benn himself proved something of a Eunuchrat in his time, perhaps it’s best to view this along the lines of an eunuchratic autobiographic reflection of the problems from within, as opposed to some roadmap to deal with it from outside. In either case, this places the text at odds with the late Cold War era neo-lib / neo-con managerial state whose decrepit members still hold the throngs of power Fifty years hence, making Benn’s pamphlet, oddly, still rather relevant. Benn himself had already been in Parliament for Twenty years, and would go on to remain in Parliament for another Thiry One. In comparison, Joe Biden would win his first election only two years after this text’s publication, and is still in politics, Fifty One years hence. To be frank, dear reader, you may come to realize that the stale politics of 1970’s Labour and Tory parties mirrors that of today’s parties across the pond, hinting we not only do live in quite the late-stage eunuchracy, but worse it is still the very same eunuchracy of Benn’s day. It hasn’t gone anywhere at all. But never doubt that things can get worse!
Tony Benn himself is something of a contradiction. He took his faith seriously and promoted a powerful anti-war and labor protection stance. He was originally elected to the House of Commons, but when he inherited his father’s peerage - a privilege which barred one from Commons - he fought for the right to give it up to continue being a Parliamentarian. Yet, past all this, he was still a product of the1970s - favoring all the progressive take overs of the church you can imagine. Though, here, it is also worth noting that while quite a number of problems in the eunuchratic state are labeled by Benn as problems needing socialist solutions, the reality past the propaganda is that in the Fifty years since its publication, the Labour Party has failed to repair any of the problems Benn identified - and that’s not to say the Tories offered much better. These facts point to a rather obvious collapse in the left-right dichotomy of the Cold War era, and the need for a New Politics - truly new. Let’s dive in:
Tony Benn’s thesis to the pamphet, found in its opening lines, is worth presenting nakedly without commentary. It is a rather curiously relevent critique of “line go up” geopolitics:
What Tony Benn says here, is that “line go up” is the focus of the eunuchrat. He has no other interest or purpose than to deliver this temporary result, no matter the cost or consequence. In times gone by, this was likely what his emperor wanted. In a democratic era, the eunuchrat is attempting to deliver to the electorate the results that would only interest a now-extinct central crown. The Eunuchrat has assumed the public is as autistic on this matter as he is, and so the Eunuchrat will ruin the nation and burn the cities, so long he can show the electorate - instead of the emperor - that the coffers are not empty, and the line has gone up once again.
For a Fifty year old text, this is rather prophetic to the political stalemate of the United States today.
Contrary to these eunuchratic special interests, Tony Benn describes an emerging “New Citizen” that requires his own “New Politics” that has not yet been grasped by the eunuchrat. This was partly because the voting age had been lowered from 21 to 18 the year prior - vastly increasingly the young vote - and partly because younger people in general were the first adapters of new technology and culture - matters that the eunuchrat is not able to do more than extract wealth from. He describes it as such:
A quick reminder, dear reader, that at the time this was written the internet was little more than a private phone line between libraries and defense contractors. The first Bulletin Board Systems wouldn’t arrive for a few more years. It’s rather fascinating to see Tony Benn more or less predict not only the internet, but that it would allow for skill trading and new industry, as well as open the doors to marauding hordes of organized cancel-culture. Despite being Fifty years old, the New Citizens of Mr. Benn’s New Politics are still a relevant today!
Getting into the text, one of the chief lessons one can learn in this opening section is that there exists a gap, thanks to technology, between the speed of public reaction and the snail’s pace deliberation process in our Temples of Democracy. In simple terms, reaction spreads faster than propaganda. This gap was already stressing the capacity of the British Government in the 1960s and 1970s. Today it has vastly surpassed it.
What happens in this gap is debatable. You may recall from Colin’s eunuchracy article that more often than not, this gap produces a mellowed burned-out feeling - a sense that nothing can be don. Benn, on the other hand, views this as a potential flashpoint for violent revolution - something that Fabians are not in favor of:
This chasm between people and states led Benn to identify 12 objectives for a New Politics - objectives focused on the formation of what he describes as an inter-dependent mutually-regulating relationship between the State and its Citizens - castrating the eunuchrats from the state aparatus, and using these 12 objectives as 12 stitches to heal the wound. They are as follows:
human dignity through development and diversity
towards a new view of world affairs
an intensive study of organizational problems
towards worker control
direct action against bureaucracy
a frontal assault on secrecy in decision making
the democratization of the mass media
new priorities in education
beyond parliamentary democracy
redefining the role of national government
a new role for political leaders
rethinking the role of the Labour Party
There’s some side humor here, you may notice if you have keen eyes. The only capitalized words are the Labour Party, for instance. A bit of a tongue-in-cheek move by Benn. Some of these titles may peak your interests, as well, but do realize these are each niche issues to the problems of the day in 1970s Albion. Nonetheless, if I might offer my own commentary, what Benn sounds like he is describing is a confederate model akin to the old Holy Roman Empire - a model close to my own heart. While Britons today may weep at the state and defunctionality of devolved governments as a tool to subvert national unity, we Americans are very biased to want these things - indeed we know how to use them to our own designs.
Even from these titles, you may feel surprised to find so many issues touched upon that are relevant to today. From the unelected NGOs and HR departments crushing your soul, to the media-state decision making apparatuses that seem wholly detached from public thought. I will use snippets from the text to emphasize how relevant they are when dealing with our own eunuchracy in the United States today, in the hopes that you may find a peculiar kinship with this deceased ex-Lord.
However, for these same reasons, I think there may be a better way to discuss these Twelve Objectives than stifling through a 1970’s Socialist with a highlighter. Let’s do a test - one I often do to Marxist literature in order to siphon out the bullshit from the bullet-points: let’s interpret Benn’s prognosis of the eunuchracy - again, he calls it managerial - through the lens of today’s dissident interests. You’ve likely heard the phrase “Cthulhu only swims left” and “conservatives are progressives driving the speed limit”. Here’s another one to mull over: “A Fabian reacts in a based liquid”. I find this fascinating, dear reader - that one can take any 50-year-old far-left manifesto and find within it the seeds of a reactionary argument. The Fabians of the 1970s are no different. To those ends, lets rebrand Benn’s Twelve Objectives and see if they still hold up:
Dignity through Deatomization
A Global Forum
Determining a Managorial diet
An Elected Manageoisie
Direct Action Against Eunuchracy
Open Door Decision Making
Democratization of Mass Media
Devolution of Education
Beyond Representation
Reimagined Federal Government
Restructured Political Leadership
Rethinking the Role of the Party
With that in mind, let us review these 12 objectives:
1 - Dignity through Deatomization
Original Title: human dignity through development and diversity
Snippets for review:
This “Confidence Trick” at the start of the section is an interesting term to think about, and how very common it is that containment media will hire someone you feel is “on your side” and then chain them to a contract and have them dance around for entertainment for a decade. If you’ve been following developments, you may recall this was the whole Daily Wire v Steven Crowder schism. This is, however, the means by which a eunuch system operates. Stripped of his ability to create anything truly new, the atomized person settles in for the closest thing he can get to real meat in the Matrix. Many of us, myself included, have often found ourselves being played into the confidence trick. Witnessing the cancelations and doxes of the past decade, I simply “notice and move on”; Smile and wave at the people who hate me and let my potency be ripped away for a comfortable life. It has only recently been the case that I have decided I no longer care, albeit perhaps I, like the eunuchs of old, sense some looming end to it all and want to get what little reserve of wealth or value I can before it’s over. Who knows…
It is also quite amusing to find this early call for “diversity" - a buzzword today, and briefly in the 90’s - all the way back in the 1970’s. But don’t get too distracted. While today this word more-or-less means removing white people, diversity in the 1970’s Britain was much more appropriate, meaning to respect every people - an idea obviously more adapted to the “diversity” of Britain’s Welsh, English, Irish, and Scottish populations. Now, while the imported American term “Black is Beautiful” may induce sighs and cringe alongside the socialist mumbo-jumbo, one finds a curious word here: detribalize. This word, seemingly akin to dissident terminologies such as atomization and deracination, may be one worth adopting for its specific cultural and ethnic protectionism - as opposed to purely racial ones. Benn, curiously, is calling against modernity’s multiracial melting pot and favoring a more confederate model. Or, perhaps, we may say that the British offer something in their United Kingdom model that which we Americans should explore importing inasmuch as they have imported so much of our nonsense. Trade parity and all that jazz.
From a dissident perspective, this provides some understanding as to how a eunuch system makes more eunuchs - more-so in the spiritual sense rather than the literal. The containment trick produces what we today would all “allyship” of various sexual and ethnic minorities, for instance. Some main population is detribalized into a standardized form - a brick, if you will, in a new Tower of Babel. They can be molded into any design. Of course, this only works if the controller has the resources and power to forge them. Once that fails, the eunuch system quickly degenerates into a eunuchracy.
The primary takeaway here, then, is in countering our own eunuchracy today. We should focus attention on where we can acquire dignity. When everyone feels like they are stripped of their potency and cogs in a machine, the way to weaken the eunuch’s rule is essentially to create spaces the eunuch cannot thrive in. These spaces become ungovernable, and they can be as simple as a night out with friends to go bowling.
We can actually take a page out of McGlashan here. In one of his articles, he compares the fantastical ideas in the Nation of Islam - such as Yakub inventing white people - as being the mythology of a doomed people in a dark age, attempting to revitalize themselves:
Today, many Right Wingers have their own Yakub. Qanon nonsense, the delusion that Trump would cross the Rubicon and make some kind of Based Empire, and other myths that amount to white ghost dancing. We mustn’t fall to such nonsense - and yet, as McGlashan shows, there is value in myth-making. The Restoration Bureau is something like that - attempting to make myths without falling into nonsensical delusions. I hope it helps you envision some desired future you can take small steps towards.
2 - A Global Forum
Original Title: towards a new view of world affairs
Dear reader, does this one hit especially close to home for you? It did for me. If not, let me try to frame this section. May I ask, in some sense, is social media the foreign office of the state when dealing with its own “New Citizens”? By that I mean, does the eunuchracy treat pop culture as a foreign nation? I’d say so. The eunuchrat simply cannot keep up with all the pop culture that people democratically generate en mass. As a solution, our eunuchratic overlords actually thought they could force all digital conversation down a narrow band of allowable talking points and repeatable phrases, and tag anyone out of line as a potential destabilizing agent. They were that nuts.
Benn, however, seems to be something of a hypocrite here. He speaks of the madness of states doing this, and yet advocates for an embryonic set of rules that we often here from today’s eunuchrats: “accuracy” and “truth”. According to who?
Indeed, this “World Bonfire” is the only way he can actually achieve this, by removing all information contrary to his values - and thus, we once again have the situation of narrow bands of communication crammed through a predetermined list of approved narratives. Benn fails to recognize the key question of “What if I want to keep my history?” This chatter of bonfires flies in direct contradiction with his previous thoughts on diversity. Benn’s World Bonfire would erase that diversity and bring about his feared multicultural melting pot. He doesn’t realize he’d end up with the exact eunuchracy he is criticizing.
Of course, it couldn’t even last a full presidential term in our era. A rich guy like Musk came in and purchased Twitter, leaking the deets on how the US government interfaced with twitter seemingly akin to a diplomatic mission to a foreign country. Such information domination appears wholly impossible for any state or private entity to accomplish perpetually. People will expand their views past the borders given them, because they are human. This tower of Babel model of control has never, and will never, work.
Fifty years after his publication of the reconnaissance, the Global Forum is here in the form of the internet, and there will never be a World Bonfire to remove the “mistakes” of nationalism and patriotism. Far from his utopic visions, these global communication networks have had quite the opposite effect: People want their nations, and when they travel they want to meet the patriots of other nationalities. People don’t want to visit copy-pasted 15 minute cities that all look the same. They want an identity, and they want to see and experience other identities to compare themselves with. They want to be someone, and interact with other someones. They do not want a Tabula Rasa, nor its Rasa Man. They want someone with a full Rassa. Both an inheritance of ethnic legacy, and the ability to express it and contribute through it.
3 - Determining a Managerial diet
Original Title: an intensive study of organizational problems
Let us begin here by identifying three archetypes that may help clear up some previous word choices, and specify future word choices. The Socialist, the Manager, and the Progressive. (No blame if you generally imagine these as one archetype with three names.)
The Socialist - Specifically, a follower of Bennism ( and, later, Corbynism) in this context. He is concerned with three matters: perfecting a democratic society, an economy that serves the many and not the few, and the struggle for global justice. He could be an elected official, a professor, an activist, or any number of other career roles. The point is that he seeks these things out.
The Manager - One who deals primarily with margins. Line must go up! For this text, one can treat it as a synonym of the aforementioned eunuchrat, and perhaps understand that he is not an elected official. He is an employed specialist.
The Progressive - One interested in “improving” humanity towards an individualist transhumanist god. An Atomic God, who has been fully atomized and deracinated into a being of pure selfish will. The Übermensch. The Progressive is often an elected official, and for the purpose of this text we ought to just role with that assumption, though he can fill many of the same roles as the Socialist.
For the purposes of this text, we aren’t concerned with the border between elected official, paid employee, and private entrepreneur. Some of each exists as any of these archetypes. We’re more concerned with the network of elites these terms label.
Using these definitions, we can observe a number of overlapping interests, but also stark incompatibilities. For instance, the collectivist classless society of the Socialist can quickly become incompatible with the godhood goals of Progressivism once the vast sum of resources to grant godhood to all runs out. Often is the case that hierarchy emerges with want, and gods always want more. The Manager’s obsession with driving the line up also often runs in direct conflict with the Socialist’s concern that all benefit from that ascent, or if the Progressive’s atomic god requires too great a sacrifice. If that god threatens the Manager’s graph, he will crucify it without question. If the needs of the mob threaten his spreadsheets, he will trim the fat no matter the death toll. Some of the greatest holocausts of history were in the name of the almighty line graph or holy spreadsheet. Remember these distinctions going forward, as they have been hard learned since the days of Tony Benn’s publications.
Overall, this section focuses on a frank admission: Managers delay progress. The irony of this statement should not fall on deaf ears, dear reader. Nested in that idea is the alliance between the Socialist and the Manager that defined the post-war social contract. It stems from the fear that technological progress may escape socialist containment and birth a monster neither the Manager nor Socialist can contend with. This fear is ever-present, and a reminder that while both the Socialist and Manager will ride some of the ascent towards progressivism’s godhood, they will always try to abort that god in the womb, because crucifying it at maturity may prove impossible.
Benn seems to admit that technology will inevitably lead to the elimination of poverty - so his argument can be summed up as “you’d best get Socialism as the brand name of that accomplishment”. What Tony seems to think is that Managers can slow progress sufficiently that Socialism can both guide it, and take credit for it, before the cornucopia years arrive and cut off the poor and victimized peoples that constitute the Marxist’s foot soldiers. He seems to say that there will likely never be another opportunity to establish a Socialist society if that progress breaks containment. So containment is top priority.
But this is a Faustian gamble. The Socialist assumes that allying with the Manager will slow down progress enough to allow his ideals to keep up pace and distribute the goods to all. Even in Benn’s time, this resulted in, firstly, the loss of the 1970 election and, secondly, the rise of Thatcher some years later. In both instances the snail’s pace of progress frustrated a young and educated population that could envision that progress faster, and depressed an aging population that had seen their nation go from ruling the world to barely ruling a single Island.
In reality, this Faustian gamble often results in the generally wealthier Progressive cutting in and taking over the managerial state for his own goals. Containment is broken, and the Atomic God of progress finds its managerial body to siphon resources from.
For these reasons, I have often advocated to use the term Managoise (Also spelled Manageoise Manageois, or Manageoisie) to describe this alliance of the Manager and the Progressive, with the Socialist in the submissive position. This word, similar to the Bourgeoisie, specifically describes the inbred and (spiritually or literally) castrated managerial class that constitutes a ruling eunuchracy that inevitably emerges in the pursuit of Atomic Apotheosis. It comes from an archaic version of French spoken in Wallonia (hence its many spelling alternatives), and describes the French managers of the Lowlands during the Napoleonic years. They had a tendency to pit groups against each other, and frame French culture as an ideal for the Dutch to aim for. In the worst years, they had wholly replaced any Dutch elites with French to such an extent that being Dutch was associated with being low-class, and to become high-class one would have to give up their Dutch identity and become French. A familiar story for anyone today told their whiteness is toxic.
A term like Manageois can offer broad left-right coalition in overthrowing this eunucratic tumor, ideally before it sucks private capital into a blackhole of increasingly delusional goals. The Socialist may not be a particularly trustworthy ally in this, but as the one in a submissive position, he is eager to escape.
This hopefully establishes something I wish contemporary thinkers would accept: Progressivism is not a Marxist ideology. Time and time again the Progressive will simply murder socialism and wear it as a skinsuit for his transhumanist jihad, or Marxism will shank the embryonic god and drink its blood. Alongside them both, the ever-present Managers will faithfully carry our their duties. They were just following orders, after all. The Line must go up! While we may be about Fourteen years into a three-way alliance forged in the Obama administration, it is evident that this alliance has been breaking down for some time now. Remember, dear reader, the aforementioned Confidence Trick.
Beyond that, there are other things worth thinking about in this section of the text. The idea of the “Disposable Institution” has a lot of memetic value in an era frustrated by life-sucking institutional bloat. Rather than the current model whereby governments cede power to decades-old institutional experts managing policies that change every 4-8 years, it may be better to have the people vote on a 10, 20, or even 30 year policy, with institutions set up to expire at pre-determined dates. If they succeed, they can be remembered fondly. If they fail, at least their dead weight on the state can be cleared out. No need to drain a swamp that can’t form! Every new NGO, superpac, university, DEI criteria, ESG standard, and HR department is just another blood-sucking managerial tumor in need of an expiration date.
Such a model is a noose around the Manageois whereby they are forced to compete and perform, or be forgot. In a sense, it is shortening the eunuchrat’s viable employment to a length that forces him into thinking about legacy - however short it is - before he is judged and either removed or scooted along to a reshuffling. Such a constant re-arranging of institutions in a Frankensteinian model can also prevent long-term plots of the manageois, forcing the managers back to their spreadsheets and graphs, and denying the Progressive unrestrained power to make himself a god. In essence, it turns the manageois into an asset to bet on, rather than a thing to purchase for life.
Make no mistake, the “unmanageability crises” mentioned is here. It comes in the form of regular industrial fires, disastrous train derailments, failed foreign interventions, institutional bloat, and identity crises that daily slaughters the souls of honest people at the altar of that French trinity of Liberté, Egalité, & Fraternité. Overthrow these idols, dear reader, before they overthrow your soul.
4 - An Elected Manageoisie
Original Title: towards worker control
Developing on the previous section, there is something of a nuclear option in dealing with the schemes of the Manageois (again, the alliance between the Progressive and the Manager). Along with the disposable institution to prevent long-term scheming, what if the managing progressive actually had to earn his place by a vote? Dissidents may question if government by consent has actually been as successful as Benn claims in this section, but they may find agreement with Benn that perhaps it would be more practical to realize democratic consensus first at the corporate scale as means of developing an idea of what works and what does not, then apply that to the state or federal level. Indeed, this concept was essentially how the United States was organized by looking at successfully corporate management schemes and adding them to the British Parliamentary model.
I will not comment much here beyond those thoughts, other than to say this is obviously something of a Soviet nature. But, perhaps if Dissidents make that minor alliance with the Socialist in order to rip down the monster the Socialist brought forth, matters of corporate ownership can be worried about later while we deal with breaking up the eunuchracy. Here, we may find the embryonic form of a truly new politics for our own age. Of course, dissidents would have to fight to preserve small private ownership - but then again, such things existed in the USSR too.
5 - Direct Action Against Eunuchracy
Original Title: direct action against bureaucracy
I must confess that I have some vagueness of terms, and the taped-together and synonyms of Bureaucracy, Eunuchracy, and Manageois will need to cranking out in the future. But, they all broadly describe something of the same bloated administrative mess we have in the United States. We may find some lessons in this section - namely, that there are rarely questions or opportunities to dissent from the sweeping declarations out of HR departments and the like. No one votes on what the HR department says is right or wrong, it is simply fed down to us like the commissars of the Soviets decades ago - perhaps we may call them Eunussars or Eunuchars in years to come, looking back. In all the world, the least democratic space is the workers subject to the whims of an HR tumor that has been forcefully placed onto it by some tax evasion scheme or federal grant requirement. The demand for them is artificial, its existence in exchange for funds rendered. The average American worker has not yet questioned, let alone thought about pathways to rid himself of this foreign tumor festering an increasingly toxic working environment.
It is a question worth asking. Why aren’t the Managers voted on by the workers? Why do we allow or tolerate their unregulated power? We have not even begun any form of malignant compliance, or civil disobedience, to their rule. We should start to consider it.
6 - Open Door Decision Making
Original Title: a frontal assault on secrecy in decision making
We have to confess something about the timeline of the past 30 years since the end of the Cold War: Average people were not the first to awaken from the slumber induced by Manageois gout. In fact, educated people weren’t even. The first people that awakened were the most conspiratorial amongst us. It should be clear now that, “where the door is closed, the imagination is opened”.
One year after the aforementioned The New Statesman publications on Eunuchracy, Colin McGlashan published a piece titled Consumer Communism, detailing matters he witnessed in the East German State. Namely, that due to their proximity to the West, East Germans could tune in to Western stations and hear about decisions and policies that their own states refused to even say exist or not. This can create a sense of paranoia for leaders - a fear of being fact-checked. Colin writes:
It's hard to think of another state whose leaders have to live with the knowledge that its citizens can go home each evening, switch on the radio and television, and be regaled with a subtly hostile account from the country next door of any decisions they announce, together with a rotating display of the consumer goods produced by a society organized in a different and unacceptable way.
Dear Reader, I have for a while thought that the behavior of our Western elite is most similar to the East German State. This is the first sentence I have read that clearly describes how. Instead of the Berlin Wall, there is that barrier between controlled media and the wild west of the internet. Instead of Western stations, there are independent websites and leaks. Our leaders daily live the experience and paranoia of the East German State.
This can have some fairly profound psychological effects on both citizen and leader. Imagine, dear reader, if you knew more about what happened in Moscow than what goes down in DC. You might be hard-pressed to start imagining what goes on in Washington to fill in the gaps, and such gaps would be powerful points of leverage for Moscow’s propaganda. Do read more:
Today, the West has become far more censorious than in 1970. Although we can file FOIA requests on some matters, they only get published if the matter in question is concluded. Sometimes that means waiting decades to learn the truth. Ordinarily, if your side is better than their side, propaganda from their side can’t really hold up. People can see rather easily that the other side is worse off. But once things get hard, you might start to notice. Just as the East Germans started hearing and seeing the West and learning more about themselves from there, as opposed to anything the Stasi claimed, this had some nudges in making the East Germans disloyal to their own state. Today, similar things are starting to happen, albeit not nearly as refined as what the East Germans were capable of. Let me say here, Dear Reader, that the East German Panopticon was an impressive feat of Socialist Planning. Before the West had a Facebook, the East Germans had a digital database of every citizen, and every thing they believed. Before the west had Mapquest, the East Germans had digital maps of every city, with every public and secret meetup and club dotted. Before the West had Google, the Stasi could search a national digital repository for anything desired. Architecture and Manufacturing were done digitally, music was digital, writing was increasingly digital. You may not be aware, but East Germany was the most developed and advanced member of the Warsaw Pact, not Russia. What you may be surprised to know, is that the people hated the state all the more. All the advancements of technology, turned into a weapon aimed at the Soviet Citizen.
McGlashan’s rather poignant observation that Censorship is Leaky is something to think about in the years to come. If anything ends up outperforming the West, it may cause similar problems for the West, as it did for the East State. But, there is also some leverage that states can use this for. This might even be called something of a reverse confidence trick. The Manageois weed out anyone that could threaten it by working in such a manner as to scare off those that do not like closed doors. The only people left to replace the existing managers, are those that never questioned it to begin with, and so the Manageois slowly becomes eunuchratic. It loses its potency, ages, and goes senile. While Dissidents may view the loss of popular trust in these institutions as a goal, this is dangerous. Any eunuchrat that feels threatened will become a monster. They know no one is inheriting their lineage. They fear spending their last years in want. You should read into the final years of the Stasi. Once they knew Socialism was doomed, the teeth and claws struck hard.
Worth considering if constantly gaslighting and accelerating the Manageois into a eunuchratic breakdown is worth it. I understand most do that in hopes the average person “wakes up” and joins them, but what if they don’t? Then you simply branded yourself as outsider, and will never have a voice trusted by “normies” ever again.
7 - Democratization of Mass Media
Original Title: the democratization of the mass media
There isn’t much to say here, dear reader. It happened. We’re living in it. There is, perhaps, the amusing bit about ensuring reliability and trustworthiness in a democratized media. These are familiar censorious talking points that were simply not sustainable and are currently being phased out.
8 - Devolution of Education
Original Title: new priorities in education
This section may be the least compatible with the dissident. I personally am an open advocate for home-schooling due to how our education system has become a political gulag. All that needs be said is that a proper education is useful to maintain a pace to match the democratization of media, without which the people inevitably orient around their choice stories and society devolves into a digital archipelago with limited interactions.
9 - Beyond Representation
Original Title: beyond parliamentary democracy
One sees here the birth of Britain’s obsession with referendums, with a rather prophetic prediction that the issue of the European Common Market may not be solvable via referendum, and may cause an unraveling of the social contract. Referendum seem more applicable to Americans like myself, in which they are generally limited to only one state, and other states can choose to wait and see if the results were the right or wrong thing over time. This confederate approach to referendums appears to be a powerful tool to course-correct a nation in small, Fabian steps, so it’s no surprise to find it in a Fabian Tract!
However, if we return to the aforementioned East Germany article by McGlashan, we can find many mentions on how these local referendums and councils quickly break down. They cannot, for instance, make crime go down. Nor can they fix disagreements between local councils and city governments as to whose job it is to cut the grass:
In the midst of these fissures of authority, there becomes room for a motivated entrepreneurs to fill in the gaps. In years to come, Dissidents may come to realize a rather curious trend: that the cure to Faustian man may be Fabian man - a topic I should explore in a future post. Whereas Faustian man achieves divinity with a morally objectionable trade, Fabian man makes small trades to restore his fallen divinity where he can find. While Faustian man may get immediate short-term results after his deal with the Devil, Fabian man wins on a long enough time span as he can gradually reclaim the lost crown of God’s image. There is much that Dissidents could stand to learn from the trials of East Germany, and rediscovering a writer like Colin McGlashan can provide the material to do so. Just as a broad coalition against an oppressive Manageois class may be the embryo of a new politics today, the birth of Fabian Man may be the embryo of a new politics tomorrow.
There is here, perhaps, a meditation to be had on a dialogue from the late antiquity text The Conflict of Adam and Eve. This text isn’t canonical scripture or anything, but it comes from a 5th century Ethiopian translation of an older Arabic work. It should be emphasized it is a pre-Islamic Arabian story. It details the first days and months of Adam and Eve adjusting to living in the fallen world, and all their many tragedies and bewailments along the way. It is a very sad text. In Chapter 57, in the midst of a deep depression between Adam and Eve, Satan comes to gloat and mock both for falling for his Faustian deal. Satan says some incredibly cruel words:
Do you think that when I have promised one something that I would actually deliver it to him or fulfil my word? Of course not! For I myself have never even thought of obtaining what I promised you. I fell, and I made you fall by that which I myself fell; and with you also, whosoever accepts my counsel, falls too. Oh Adam, because you fell you are under my rule, and I am king over you; because you have obeyed me and have transgressed against your God. Neither will there be any deliverance from my hands until the day promised you by your God. But, because we do not know the day agreed on with you by your God, nor the hour in which you shall be delivered - for that reason we will multiply war and murder on you and your descendants after you. This is our will and our good pleasure, that we may not leave one of the sons of men to inherit our orders in heaven. For as to our home, Oh Adam, it is in burning fire; and we will not stop our evil, no, not one day nor one hour.
And I, Oh Adam, shall set you on fire when you come to live there."
In response to these things, Adam, with Eve, can only say one thing: "we will ask God, who created us, to deliver us out of his hands.” Throughout the text, Adam and Eve discover that gradual and small discipline can help break away from Satan’s dominion. God’s promised Redeemer is a constant hope for a future salvation that, while far off, can be a deep well of motivation. All the while, Satan’s tricks are always the same empty promises. Adam and Eve’s small disciplines and endurances begin building them up out of their depression, and over time allowing them to resist Satan. The lesson is: Satan’s tricks never change, but your strength can - towards stronger, or weaker, paths. A Faustian strategy against a Fabian deal.
In similar way, many small referendums and votes may do well to build up a public discipline against the old and repeated tricks of the Manageois - even as elections become industrialized games of vote harvesting the illiterate. You need only do the work. The goal here is to develop something of a memetic immunity to the tricks of the Manageois - a living memory and discipline to deny their Faustian offers.
10 - Reimagined Federal Government
Original Title: redefining the role of national government
There is some amusing realizations here, namely that there will always be a reserved need for Authoritarian policies, even though when and where they ought be used is rather ambiguous. Benn seems to want to both defang and refang the state all at once, and we see the consequences of that today: The cult of the expert. The state finds in the expert something akin to a religious justification for whatever it wants to do, and forgoes the consultation recommendations here and in the previous open-door policy making.
Once upon a time in Benn’s day, across the pond, there was something of a crises - a general fear the military might intervene against the president. Such matters are lost to contemporary common knowledge, but recorded in a noteworthy McGlashan article titled “The Frightened Society” which I will bring up later. This article relies on a long-forgotten text: Justice, by Richard Harris. In addition, there are a few expansions Harris wrote on this in The New York Times for something title The New Justice which we ought to review alongside The New Politics another time. Still, these matters are worth comparing to what went down during Trump’s failed presidency, and all the little backstabs and betrayals that occurred due to his having picked some rather shit lords to govern his empire.
Administrations leave some tether to authoritarianism for this reason.
11 - Restructured Political Leadership
Original Title: a new role for political leaders
This section is rather prophetic as well, as we see something of a prediction of Trump’s rise through social media. Although social media did not exist in Benn’s day, it is a natural and predictable outcome from the rise of communication technology. But, this vision of the New Leader for the New Citizen has manifested itself with its own set of managers. The social media personalities and micro e-celebrities who act as community organizers of the Digital Archipelago.
One can view this manifestation as a testimony that education does not mass-produce enlightened people. It mass-produces pop kitsch consumers. This is a common Liberal (in the French sense, not the American sense) delusion. This idea that the entire generation could be uplifted into enlightened virtues by a standardized set of lessons has failed. Instead it produced a generation of consumers who lack not only the lessons of their classes, but also the lessons their parents could have taught them in stay of that.
One may recall in Biblical visions how the sea represents gentiles, and the animals various prophets see emerging out of the sea, are the formations of identities by great men forging the chaos of the waved into solid beasts. Out of the sea comes the Greek Leopard, the Persian Bear, etc etc. One may also recall the Gothic kings of old in the final days of the Roman Empire, who could stir up great armies with their will and forge new states out of the ashes of Imperium. Such is what has come back into the world in these latter days, and such is the true role of the New Leader. Not to be Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but rather Alaric - come to demand money for his kin.
12 - Rethinking the Role of the Party
Original Title: rethinking the role of the Labour Party
It is nice to end these obejctives with a frank will to power here. The honesty is ppreciated to the reader tired of endless philosophical diatribes. Benn puts it bluntly: The Labour Party wants power, so it should concern itself firstly with the means to acquire that power, then to maintain that power it can start to explore and develop the other objectives in this pamphlet. To some degree, this makes it the most important objective, albeit the last listed.
Readers of Academic Agent’s works will feel some familiarity with his recent anti-ideology rants: “BS, BS, BS, therefore, we rule.”
The castration that the American Right Wing has been inflicted is thus. They spend far too much time theorizing what economic models work or don’t, and what morals are good or bad. While they debate those topics, the Democrats are out going to the homeless, poor, illiterate, and various immigrants and offering them the empire in exchange for signing their name on a pre-filled mail-in ballot. In the weeks it takes Republicans to figure out if it’s good or bad to pay for a child’s hormone treatment, the Democrats have already mailed 20,000 ballots and gone away on vacation.
If you read this Substack, you know I couldn’t care less which party is in power at this time. Both are rather shite to me. But if the youth reading this don’t want the managerial class to continue converting their people into a eunuchracy, they’re going to have to stop debating settled topics and start concerning themselves with the work of acquiring power - namely, in doing work akin to this Democrat tactic. Whether they use that tactic to take over the Democrat Party in the primaries, or restore the Republican Party to power in general elections, I do not care. The work needs doing regardless. The problem with the young “conservative” is that he spends far too much time imagining himself defending a hypothetical castle under attack, and far too little time trying to take back real castles he has lost.
For a quick example of this, we need only turn back to the opening sections of the text, which I opted to hold my tongue on until after going through Benn’s objectives with a Reactionary lens:
When we look at the world today, we can find that the Global American Eunuchracy appears to be facing consternation by two primary strategies:
The Indirect Stance: Start with years of planning what Benn calls a “Siege Economy” that can weather the Global Eunchrat's wrath. Gather a collection of elites to eventually present a public claim to a throne. Then, when you feel ready, initiate what will likely be a very violent breakaway. Fabian tactics are front-loaded with the hopes that this final break is more even and a cleaner cut.
The Direct Stance: Work towards establishing a public counter-bureaucracy that shadows the eunuchracy in every field, inching ground away little by little for every specialty task that the eunuchrat fails to compete effectively in. Ideally you poach elite from the eunuchracy to serve you over the years. You will always be presenting yourself, but inevitably law will be used against you. Fabian tactics are back-loaded for this later lawfare, but a good way to avoid it is to focus on needed industries and services that would be crippled without you.
We can see the strengths and weaknesses of both today. Russia, with their Siege Economy built through the past decades, was following an indirect path that has produced the violent break going on right now - although to what degree this endures in the long run, who can say? Likewise, the direct stance can be seen in the activities of folks like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, etc. There are lessons in both these stances, and perhaps some combination of them would be the winning formula. In either case, these stances are best understood as pitting Fabian Man against Faustian Man.
As ot which is preferable, I live the decision to you, Dear Reader. You decide which is better: Dying in some Slavic mudflat to maintain a Siege Economy, or going to Mars because your host nation forgot how to go to space?
It is also worth considering the price of failure. If a participant in the indirect stance fails, you lose everything. The best you can hope is that after many decades the eunuchracy may have forgotten about you and you might be able to reform the foundation for another generation to finish. Meanwhile, a participant in the direct path is merely one broken node of an informal network, which is able to adjust itself to continue if one member fails. For instance, if tomorrow the CIA assassinated Peter Thiel, it is not likely this would spell a doom for American Dissidents. But if the CIA assassinated Putin? It is likely the entirety of Russia’s Siege Economy would implode.
The New Politics, conclusion
Tony Benn ends his pamphlet with a rather somber paragraph. I find it difficult to disagree with him. Once again, as with the aforementioned section, the goal has to be first getting power, not on what you will do if you are given it. In the 2020s, the Democrat Party has become a machine calibrated to win, not to offer justifications for winning. They do this remarkably effectively. Before they even have policies figured out, they’ve already gone out and gotten signatures on tens of thousands of pre-filled mail-in ballots. Before a public debate can even work out who is better or worse, at least 15% of local townships have already voted - most having no clue what for. The Democrats seize power. The Republicans beg for it. Until this changes, the Republicans will continue to face the same impotent failure that 1970’s Labour did. You can worry about what you’ll do in power after you get it. I leave Mr. Benn’s conclusion section here in full:
A return to McGlashan
In many ways, the United States’ equivalence to this Socialist re-evaluation was the Nixon presidency concurrent to these developments. The failure of 1970’s Labour gave way to Thatcherism and, later, the neoliberal takeover by Tony Blair. The failure of Nixon, however, did not produce a vital political rebirth. Instead, the United States simply burned, and this later gave way to Reaganomics. The synchroneity of both Benn and Nixon falling and both political structures nearly going extinct in the early 1970s, followed by both re-emerging in the 2010s - Bennism in the form of Corbyn’s failed campaigns to be Prime Minister, and Nixon’s in the form of Trump’s aborted presidency - is something to think deeply upon. It would be easy to brush this off as a kind of natural inversion - a dance between two diametrically opposed dancers that form a relationship in their difference. But there’s more here. As I have hopefully shown in this evaluation of The New Politics, the concerns of the Labour government have large overlaps with the concerns of the American Dissidents today. Both underwent a series of experimentations to find footing, and both ultimately lost out to left-right flavors of a Globalist Manageois Conspiracy - and I do use the word conspiracy with caution, but certainty. The plots of the Progressive Manageois are hardly hidden any more.
In 1970, one month after his declaration that the West was a eunuchracy, Colin McGlashan penned a curious reflection on American politics called The Frightened Society, in which he explored a number of urban collapses that the 1970s are famous for, and deduced that Nixon’s rise to power represented more-so a reaction against state propaganda than any actual political movement with vitality to endure. It is worth a read, with special emphasize to its closing line: “but for most slum-dwellers in New York or Chicago it’s arguable there would be much difference in their lives if the occupant of City Hall was Ghangis Khan”. Do read:
Ultimately, one must not put too much faith in the politics of reaction alone. Once the political test tube neutralizes, there’s little reason to keep the reactionary around. He was hired to do a job, and once the job was done, that was it. Or, in the case of Trump, the fires that led to Nixon getting elected ended up happening after Trump already had been.
While you may have expected me to generalize the term Eunuchracy to mean any number of the transsexual bureaucrats that want to kill you - and that’s not entirely false - expanding the term to mean the general impotency of our rulers to crucifying the Progressive’s Atomic God is apt. Like actual Eunuchs, they cannot be reproduced. They are manufactured off the castration and conversion of a virile local nobleman, like a parasitical entity. Furthermore, recognizing this Progressive Titan has broken the containment that last-century’s Socialist attempted to cage it in is a neat way to break free of the Cold-War era terms we seem stuck in. It recognizes we are truly in an unmanageability crises. This titan is not Marxist, and although the Social Democrat may be the mother of this beast, it takes far more after its Progressive father than its Socialist mother. It is an entirely new beast, and it needs new terms to outline its form, weak spots to target, and strong plates to not waste effort tackling.
For you
With all these thoughts gone-through, I humbly present to you, dear reader, these resurrected terms from the 1970s which seem to have gone extinct, and yet provide rather precise definitions of the problems of today. You ought add them to your diction - I hope they help you structure your political reality a tad bit better than the words forced down your throat by the Manageois:
Manageois - The alliance between Progressives and Managers, often prone to pit tribes of men against each other and invent new castes and classes in order to facilitate its own progress.
Confidence Trick - The temptation to abandon your own identity when you join the elite, and adopt the identity of the existing elite. This often involves othering one’s ancestors. The general method in manufacturing new managers or eunuchrats from occupied peoples.
Detribalization - The erasure of ethnic tradition for the purposes of replacing it with new ones bequeathed from an authority. Part of the Confidence Trick.
Eunuchrat - The impotent manager or bureaucrat in a late stage of empire, generally prone to devour and catabolize infastructure and resources for its own temporary benefit.
Eunuchracy - The late managerial state which is in the process of catabolizing its weakest members to add longevity to its strongest. Prone to phases of Anarcho-Tyranny.
Fuckable Candidate - The rise of competing bureaucrats and managers who are not impotent and offer a reversal from the catabolysis and decline of the eunuchrat.
World Bonfire - The final erasure of the memory of tribe. The true end of history, and the new Year Zero.
Siege Economy - The necessary infrastructure to operate an independent economy apart from global trade and regulators. Often involves a decline in quality of life for the purpose of living within material limitations.
Disposable Institution - Institutions with expiration dates. A constraint which can force eunuchrats into thinking about legacy, as they will live to see it.
Unmanageability Crises - The breaking of containment of some new technological or economic force that takes on a life of its own. This can come in the form of decline, whereupon a snowballing crises escapes containment and becomes an unmanageable crises. This can also come in the form of progress, whereupon some new technological demon cannot be controlled.
Fabian man - The Man who, through small gradual inclinations, overcomes.
Excellent work, and fascinating study.