On Warlords

and why they've been winning

I’m going to tell you about what it means to be a warlord, and why we should seek them out as our leaders. I should caution you to refrain from allowing your understanding of this word—“warlord”—to be tainted by the images that may come to you if you entered it into Google Dot Com, or by the Current Event Articles that use the word to describe someone. I use the word here not as a physical description of someone, but as a description of their role in the lives of those around them. A warlord projects his will with absolute authority, has no equal within his space of influence—and seeks to expand and maintain this space. As such, a warlord does not necessarily tote an AK47 or live in the third world and engage in Acts that the UN has Officially Condemned. But the negative connotation we have for the word is important in understanding it: a warlord’s rise is a bad thing for the current ruler of a place or people that the warlord desires, as it almost always means the destruction of that sedentary regime and its replacement with something rougher, lighter and more combative in all senses.

Earlier today, I spoke with a friend who compared healthcare to religion. He said that the various approaches to healthcare reminded him of the various denominations within the Christian religion—all apparently addressing the same basic matters, but differing in the specifics of their approach. He noted that one’s willingness to dedicate themselves to any particular denomination depended on which sin/sickness felt most severe to them.

We were probably both oversimplifying things, but I find this comparison apt, especially in light of the increasing popularity of "alternative medicine," which the priests/doctorates naturally understand as "heresy"/"misinformation." Perhaps this trending upwards of heretical beliefs is inevitable now that anyone can read the medical literature on-line, just as the centralized understanding of the Bible continually disintegrated after the printing press made the text itself available to everyone (here I’m merely identifying the similar pattern of these correlations, I make no causal claim between Protestantism and the printed word). In this manner of speaking, we may be about to experience the first "Protestant" regime in this country—one ushered in by warlords, not by a rival faction within the existing court.

And that last part is crucial in understanding what I’m talking about here—the difference between the slow evolution of a regime and it’s rapturous defeat at the hands of an external challenger, which can be an invading convoy headed by a man toting an AK47, but can also be an invading set of ideas advanced by a much more trim-looking warlord who doesn’t need a convoy at all, ideas considered incorrect by the current thought-leaders but believed by more and more people until the trim-looking warlord has carved out his space of influence. Today, many such spaces have been conquered by many such warlords—I do not need to give you specific examples, you’re thinking of them right now.

But there's nuance here: I do not think the rise in alternative methods of understanding God or health or anything else necessarily means the original methods were wrong; but I do think such a rise indicates a certain weakness among the reigning priestly/expert class, specifically an inability to refute meaningful criticism from outsiders in a way that impacts the beliefs of the public. This is not a new idea.

The attempts by the current priests/experts to explain their Solution To The Pandemic was a good example of this; despite having near-uniform support among the academic authorities, media orgs, and even the law itself, proponents of the Solution were unable to make the public believe them—most importantly, these types could not stop the public from voting for the ticket associated with the (allegedly) anti-vacks guy, with anti-vacksism in general. Of course, there are more examples than just this that I could mention in this context. But in all of them, I think this disconnect between the commoners and the once-exalted class says more about the proponents of the learned consensus than it does about the voters.

Here, I like thinking of the "expertise" of the doctorates as ceremonial weapons paraded around the way inbred kings used to do: They looked/sounded hegemonic right up until they had to fight someone with real iron in their scabbard, and then it only takes one fight for the people to realize someone else should be in charge—regardless of whether that person would be a better king. We have seen too many of these fights; too many of our Trusted Experts have turned out to be limp-wristed cowards when their names are called out by approaching warriors on the other side of the line. No serious person can fail to observed that, for better or for worse, we have turned away from these types. And, now that the doctorates have lost their position of power, their place will be seized by warlords, as is always the case in every history. Remember that this is not a bad thing.

But we must demand both from our leaders: actually being correct and possessing the ability to prove it in the face of a sophisticated challenge. If you want people to defer to you in a time of crisis, merely being correct is not enough—you must be demonstrably so, in fact you must relish the opportunity to prove how right your policy recommendations are. I think this is why those refusals to engage with challengers—examples here include the vitriolic rejection of “platforming” vacks skeptics by word-dueling them in public, or even the Dee En See clinging to its internal selection processes rather than accepting an open primary—events that so clearly resulted in average people deciding that the incumbents probably shouldn’t be in charge right now, when the moment demands leaders with elite abilities, even though the incumbents possess all the titles and trappings of legitimacy. Wielding a bejeweled golden sword is only impressive during a parade; the people will not look to you when they see smoke on the horizon. As crises happen, warlords rule.

And DO NOT think that what I mean by this is that our leaders should subject themselves to “debate.” The alleged functionality of an open “marketplace of ideas” is as fake as the that libertarian wet dream “free market,” in which some aptly-named invisible hand (because it does not actually exist in any way, and certainly holds no power) supposedly pushes people to act according to rational impulses. This is what I just said it is—a wet dream, a thought that is pleasurable to wish for but has never actually occurred.

That set of rhetorical skills comprising one’s ability to debate is valuable, but only sufficient in particular situations and even then only to a certain extent—a formal debate with a podium and moderators or lawsuit with rules of evidence and other guidelines—and even then only absent an impressionable jury! Outside of these controlled arenas, to “debate me” has very little to do with changing what I or those who might be listening think, and even less to do with what we believe.

What I’m talking about is persuasion—this is the art of the warlord. A much more noble skill that grants its master command over his fellow man: the ability to get them to take positions in a battle formation or to direct their vote in a certain direction or in some other way to make men move—this can be very useful in a crowded room, and don’t things feel so crowded lately? Surely one with mastery over the art of persuasion could wield great power today (surely you’ve already seen this happen!)

What I’m saying is that such mastery should be a requirement for our leaders—a trait that you, reader, should filter for when deciding who to follow. Of course they should be correct too—theoretically, under controlled conditions their ideas should be revealed as good in a debate among sophisticated parties. But this does not actually matter when it comes to deciding who’s in charge. In real life, when it comes to selecting a king to who’s banner the people will flock, there is no reason to expect the masses to encounter competing ideas under such controlled conditions; victory is achieved in the field, among smoke and clanging iron and the cries of the defeated and prevailing alike—achieved in spite of lies and feints and misdirections. Victory here has been the true test of the warlords of old, and shall continue to be so today upon the equally chaotic and smoky battlefields of internal mind-space. To pretend that we can look to any other performance when selecting our leaders and then expect those leaders to effectively wield power is to deny reality—as my Americans have just seen, the approval of the moderator is not the approval of the nation, and it is the nation that will give you an army.

The priests/doctorates whine about heretical teachings and “dangerous malinformation” because they lack completely the ability to win in the field—so they appeal to the orthodox rules of the established court because it is their only viable strategy here. To be sure, it works among certain types! The courtiers themselves and others like them in spirit find these “no no, you can’t win that way” arguments persuasive for obvious reasons. But we have witnessed these last few years a nationwide example of how limited this strategy is when it comes to winning real power. It is only the field that matters, and it is only there that a worthy king can prove himself so.

And again, I hold no opinion on whether or not they are even wrong about what they claim, whether the vacks is safe and effective or hate speech is violence or the other things. But the gradual and then all-of-a-sudden defeat of the priestly class this past year proves that they are weak, and I do not need to explain to you why this should disqualify them from your respect—and of course disqualifies them from power. Hail now to the chiefs.

-MM