Reaction 101: Priests and warriors

We are always ruled by priests or warriors.

Priests are in the business of controlling what people think, warriors in the business of controlling people by hurting them and breaking their toys.

So who else matters?

Merchants can control people by offering them value, hence get targeted due to envy and covetousness, but merchants have no substantial incentive to cohere into guilds, whereas priests naturally cohere into priesthoods (see the Climategate files for this process in operation) because if you hear the same story from several different people it sounds a lot more convincing, and warriors naturally cohere into armies, because otherwise, likely to die.

And the rest should do as they are told, and if we make sure they get a wife, children, and a home by doing what they are told, they will surely do it.

If merchants group into a cartel, that would profit them collectively, but any one merchant has large incentive to defect on the cartel, and there is not much the cartel can do to stop him, whereas the priest does not profit by defecting on the priesthood. The warrior sometimes has large incentive to defect on the army, but there is a lot the army can do to stop him.

By “priest” we don’t mean someone overtly in the business of making supernatural claims. We mean a member of a priesthood, and by a priesthood, we mean what the Chinese call a “knowledge faction” – a bunch of intellectuals who conspire together to give everyone the same story and use the same shibboleths, so that it sounds more convincing.

In practice, even when a priesthood vehemently denies making supernatural claims, as for example the communists vehemently claiming to be strict materialists, they frequently wind up sounding remarkably similar to those that do make overtly supernatural claims. Thus “occupy” meetings sound like prayer meetings. The Occupy Priest chants an incantation, and the congregation chants a response. Similarly the Chinese communist party is always talking about faith and values. Everywhere in communist China there are official party books about “How to be a good party member who has faith”, “Chinese people have faith in the party”, “Have faith in the …” In China, you are forbidden to call Communism a religion, but it is perfectly OK to call Communism a religion in every way short of actually calling it a religion and the Communist Party itself does this all the time.

The claim that all men are created equal is transparently supernatural. The Marxist theory of history is the God of nineteenth century Judaism renamed “History”, a thinly disguised supernatural claim. Holocaustianity is the tenth commandment inverted, a somewhat better disguised supernatural claim.

But what makes a priesthood a priesthood is not supernatural claims. Long lived religions usually restrict their supernatural claims to unfalsifiable issues, like transubstantiation and so forth. In the long run, falsifiable claims, claims about this world, claims that conflict with science, lead to problems, as for example the progressive claim that men and women are indistinguishable, a claim that every music video must endorse, which restriction makes music videos and comedians boring. What makes a priesthood a priesthood is that they get together to get their story straight, so that all of them are on message – which is what makes them a knowledge faction. Lots of people are knowledge workers, but the essential element that makes a priesthood a faction is that they coordinate to get their story straight in order to make it sound more convincing, and what makes them a priesthood, a knowledge faction, is that they seek power by controlling what people think.

To be effective, a priest needs to be part of a group of priests who back each other up by telling the same story, and a warrior needs to be part of a group of warriors that back each other up by physical violence, thus warriors naturally cohere into armies capable of ruling, and priests naturally cohere into priesthoods capable of ruling, while capitalists naturally compete for workers and customers, workers for jobs, entrepreneurs for capital and workers, so do not cohere into groups capable of ruling. If you see a capitalist who appears to rule, for example George Soros, he is a hireling of those who do rule.

When we are in power the state religion will make overtly supernatural claims, but these claims, unlike the supernatural claims made by the current state religion, such as that all men are created equal, will be entirely unfalsifiable, and will never draw faith into conflict with science, for in such conflicts, science always loses totally and devastatingly, as for example in Global Warming debate, and the ensuing destruction of science is bad for your society, your technology, your economy, and your military capability. The reason that our nukes do not work any more is because men and women are supposedly equal. Nukes don’t work for the same reason that music videos and comedians are no longer entertaining. The state religion has to stay out of the way of science and technology, because science and technology are so terribly weak and fragile. Religions that make falsifiable earthly claims usually self destruct eventually, not because science defeats them, but because they blow themselves up, as for example the Jewish Zealots. The holiness spiral leads them to make earthly claims that require faith to be demonstrated by ever more disastrous earthly actions, as for example the Zealots destroying their own food supplies while besieged by the Romans, and transgenderism requiring one to castrate one’s own children and sit them on the laps of gays.

This account of priests and warriors make them sound like entirely bad things, that warriors are bandits, priests conspiratorial conmen. That is the libertarian and anarcho capitalist position: bandits and conmen.

The reactionary position, on the contrary, is that warriors performing the right role of warriors is the most honorable profession, and in a good society warriors shoud be honored, and that priests performing the right role of priest is an honorable profession, and priests should be honored second only to warriors.

Obviously we need warriors to prevent bandits. The defense of property and freedom is costly, the price is terribly high, and the honor due to warriors is part of the fair price we must pay for the security of our persons and our property.

What about priests?

Priesthood is rather more complicated. The state cannot really enforce law. Your computer is not registered with the government. You have to enforce your property rights in it. The government will back you up, but this only works because there is widespread agreement on property rights and right conduct, shared beliefs about good conduct with other members of the ingroup. That the state is all powerful is bluff and illusion. We are never out of anarchy. The state is a ramshackle ship on a storm tossed sea. It cannot really enforce law, only back up private enforcement. And private enforcement will only work if beliefs about what should privately be enforced are widely shared.

And lately these beliefs have been radically and rapidly changing – most notably in the direction that women and gays can do no wrong. The old testament position that if one’s wife or betrothed slept with another man, then it was fine to kill them, seems more in accord with human nature.

The American position on hot burglary, when a burglar openly and obnoxiously burgles an occupied dwelling, is that it is that it is totally OK to kill the burglar on sight without warning. The british postion is that it is totally and absolutely to do anything violent to the burglar, no matter how violent the burglar is, especially if you are white and the burglar is nonwhite. Similarly, the American debate about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman – some people took the position that it was totally OK for Zimmerman to kill Trayvon, if Trayvon was on top hammering Zimmerman’s head against the concrete, while other people took the position it was not OK for a “white” man to kill a black man, no matter what the black man was doing. (Zimmerman got white status from both those who supported him and those who condemned him. Those who condemned Zimmerman called him white, because they hate whites, even if they themselves are whites, especially if they themselves are whites. Those who supported him called him white because they wanted to claim a man who can shoot straight while blood runs over his eye as of their own race, called him white for being able to shoot straight while having his head banged on the concrete. One shot directly through the heart.)

The Book of Deuteronomy tells us that adulterers should be killed, but takes no position on whether it should be state, Church, family, or offended husband that kills adulterers. The position of the Rabbis at the time of Roman rule, the time of Jesus, was that it should be church (temple) that kills adulterers. The law as interpreted and applied at the time of King Solomon was that it was the offended husband, which is very much in accord with human nature. Gnon tells men to defend their own.

Adultery means adulteration as in beer – a man sleeping with another man’s wife or betrothed. If a man sleeps with a woman not his wife, but that women is not married or betrothed to another man, this is not adultery in the sense used in the old and new testaments.

If it is right for a man to defend his television set with deadly force (the American position) it is surely right to defend his capacity to reproduce with deadly force. State, family, and church should apply less extreme measures to adulterers, as they do to burglars, while backing the choice of the man who was personally threatened to use more extreme measures to adulterers, as he can to burglars.

The useful and proper function of warriors is to prevent mobile banditry – the stationary bandit prevents the mobile bandit. The useful and proper earthly function of the priesthood is to get the ingroup all on the same page of right conduct – to create a synthetic tribe, to get everyone feeling like part of the ingroup, and to promote shared values of right conduct, to get everyone acting like part of the ingroup.

You want everyone to agree on what constitutes cooperation, what constitutes defection from fair and reasonable expectations, and what constitutes defection so serious that violence on the spot is necessary and justified. And the legitimate earthly job of the priesthood is to form, represent, and communicate this consensus.

A priest should be in the business of teaching values and managing group identity, managing shared mythos and shared values. Thus something very like a priesthood creates something very like a religion, not necessarily in that it is about overtly supernatural claims, but in that it is an adoptive kin group based on shared values.

That the claims of traditional Christianity were either verifiable or unfalsifiable makes it a lot less supernatural than its new age competitors such as global warming or cultural Marxism, whose claims are not only supernatural, but entirely falsifiable, and usually falsified.

You want your warriors to be fighting for God, King and Tribe, as well as for gold, pussy, and land. And if you don’t have a priesthood that is on your side and on the warrior’s side, you don’t have a tribe.

For being a warrior to be an honorable profession, the warrior must fight not only for gold, pussy and land, but for God, King, and Tribe. If a warrior fights only for gold, pussy, and land, not honorable. If only for gold and pussy, he is a mobile bandit, which is the most dishonorable of professions. And without a good priesthood, hard to have a good tribe.

And since the west is detribalizing, since the priesthood is hostile to us and to our warriors, we are going to be overrun by mobile bandits soon. The great asylum seeker migration, which is largely military aged males, prefigures this.

From the time we defeated the Mongol hordes in Hungary in 1241, to our defeat in Afghanistan in 1840, the west was uniformly victorious for six centuries. (The Mongols were victorious in Hungary in that they successfully devastated and terrorized it, but were defeated in that they were never able to control it, that they never were able to draw revenues from it, that they kept on losing large amounts of treasure, men, and horses in it, and that the west gained the secret of gunpowder from them.)

Since then, since 1841 we have been suffering defeats by ever weaker enemies, notably the hilariously humiliating British defeats in Basra, the Persian Gulf, and Helmand province. The writing on the wall is that the west is ripe for conquest, like a wealthy elderly widow in a neighborhood that has turned bad. Not so much conquest by a major power like China, but rather a dark age collapse, when ever changing minor actors engage in mobile banditry – closer to the New Year rape festival in Cologne, or the car burning festivals in Paris, than D Day. There is a lot of loot and pussy for the taking, and neither the will nor capability to defend it. Something is like to go pear shaped sooner or later. The forever war in the middle east is a sign that the west has delusions of power – that its actual military capability is far less than it is used to, far less than everyone tends to take for granted. The west has not fought a war against a substantial enemy for quite a while, and has been losing, or winning inconclusively, against absurdly weak and tiny enemies.

As a warrior is honorable when he fights for God, King and Tribe, as well as for gold, pussy, and land, a priest is honorable when he performs the earthly task, the task in this world, of ensuring that there is a tribe to fight for, and that the tribe has agreement on what constitutes good conduct such that good members of the tribe do not feel like fighting each other, that the interactions are, as far as possible, cooperate/cooperate.

Since our current State religion is headed towards suicide and mass murder, we are going to need a replacement, assuming we survive at all. And that replacement has to grant warriors honor, and enable men and women to form families.