On Being a Ring-Giver

bēah-gifa and the cycle of elites

Of Scyld's great son in the lands of the Danemen.

So the carle that is young, by kindnesses rendered

The friends of his father, with fees in abundance

Must be able to earn that when age approacheth

Eager companions aid him requitingly,

When war assaults him serve him as liegemen:

By praise-worthy actions must honor be got

'Mong all of the races.

What is an elite? What makes one superior? One of the defining characteristics of rightist political philosophy is the notion of hierarchy and the premise that a rightly-ordered society is one where the right people sit at the top. Recent events have brought this question into sharp focus, as the American presidential election has proven not merely to be a change of leader, but a change in leadership. To wit, a new order is set to come into being, and the character it will adopt will set the course of American society- among other places- for decades to come.

There are two ways to understand ‘elite’ as a concept- objective and comparative. One is objectively elite to the degree one brings one very self into spiritual alignment with the good and beautiful. Such is spiritual eliteness, which exists irrespective of the situation in which said elite finds himself. Christ, the very essence of this, was the Son of God even as He was mocked and beaten and spat upon by the scum of the earth. A monk in the desert, or even a waitress going about her duties with eyes toward Heaven and love for her fellow men can achieve this, a light burden on a narrow path for which many are called, but few are chosen.

A comparative elite is elite relative to others. He is high because others are low, and his status is contingent upon being followed, obeyed, admired, and above all served. This latter form is generally what is meant by ‘elite’ in political discourse. The elites of any given society are whomever happen to be dictating terms to others at some given moment, regardless of their spiritual qualities.

But how do such elites form in the first place, and, more pertinently, how is one elite replaced by another? The Nietzschean right would have it that the will to power is key, that forceful men of action rise to the top through charismatic and physical dominance of others, such that the masses fall into line behind their agendas. In this scheme, one is meant to recall Bronze-Age warriors slaughtering their peers on the battlefield, looting and pillaging, and through their prowess and presence both inspiring and intimidating others into betahood. But the Homeric corpus actually gives some more prosaic and actionable lessons on leadership, lessons that much pre-modern literature and social experience serves to validate. People follow elites because elites give them stuff.

This ‘stuff’ is not merely material, though passing over that aspect too quickly gives an impoverished understanding of the actual benefits people expect from an elite. People also desire psychic rewards, public honors, conspicuous placements, and distinctions between those more loyal and those less, which reflect well on all parties. Elites who give things out are respected, no matter the particular claim to legitimacy that they make. Elites who become extractive, who use their titles and offices to loot those who would otherwise be inclined to follow them, will inevitably be displaced by those who promise to make those so plundered whole.

Bonding over board games is important as well.

Consider that the central plotline of the Iliad, for example, concerns the poor form of Agamemnon in confiscating a girl from Achilles whom the latter had previously been awarded for his valor. Achilles not only likes Briseis (and she seems to like him, not that anyone asked), but she serves as a public endorsement of his courage and personal worth on the part of the overlord of the expedition to Troy. The main point of Achilles’ complaint to Agamemnon is not merely to personally insult him, but to point out what a cheap and ungrateful POS he is:

Achilles scowled at him and answered, "You are steeped in insolence and lust of gain. With what heart can any of the Achaeans do your bidding, either on foray or in open fighting? I came not warring here for any ill the Trojans had done me. I have no quarrel with them. They have not raided my cattle nor my horses, nor cut down my harvests on the rich plains of Phthia; for between me and them there is a great space, both mountain and sounding sea. We have followed you, Sir Insolence! for your pleasure, not ours- to gain satisfaction from the Trojans for your shameless self and for Menelaus. You forget this, and threaten to rob me of the prize for which I have toiled, and which the sons of the Achaeans have given me. Never when the Achaeans sack any rich city of the Trojans do I receive so good a prize as you do, though it is my hands that do the better part of the fighting. When the sharing comes, your share is far the largest, and I, forsooth, must go back to my ships, take what I can get and be thankful, when my labour of fighting is done. Now, therefore, I shall go back to Phthia; it will be much better for me to return home with my ships, for I will not stay here dishonoured to gather gold and substance for you."

Strip away the epic context and anyone with a boss has probably had a similar experience, with a similar outcome. The leader maintains no personal loyalty; people serve out of necessity, always looking for a way out, and failing that, find ways to undermine and sabotage the leader and his goals. No one cares what a terrifying warrior Agamemnon is, or how rich he is, or how charismatic. No one is really even inspired that he sacrificed his own daughter to be there. They all want stuff from him, and absent that, they will leave. Indeed, Agamemnon ultimately has to concede the point and give Achilles more stuff than before to get him back, when he could have avoided all that from the beginning. Of course, it didn’t help Agamemnon in the end, as he discovered at his homecoming that another man in his absence had been doling out the prizes, and his loss of status as an elite was underscored by his murder in his bathtub.

A scene from my favorite play

If this practical example of the Bronze Age Mindset in action is not sufficient, consider the example of the early Christian Church. Influenced by a Jewish legal culture that mandated care for one’s co-ethnics, and Greco-Roman ideas of the responsibilities of the polis/civis to offer material support to poorer citizens, the Church followed a hybrid mandate of seeing to the welfare of its members on an international scale, and from there observing as a commandment to love even those who persecuted them. The Church was already almost a state within a state by the time it fell under the patronage of Constantine the Great, with great bishops dispensing both bread and justice in ways the Roman system scorned to do. What Julian the Apostate hoped to offer with his artificial creed was something organic to the faith he’d abandoned, and those who threw their sickly babies on trash heaps were culturally replaced by those who took them in. Man does not live by bread alone; he does need the bread, and men will naturally gravitate to those who dispense it.

Again though, it would be wrong in both of these contexts to think of this in purely mercenary terms. Both the pagan and Christian of former days considered the material rewards of service in some way indicative of their inner worth. In the days before managerial schemes of quantification and mass production valuable goods were the products of no small amount of human effort and receiving one was a public testament that you as an individual were worthy of the resources invested in you. To eat at the king’s table, to sit at his side and be counted worthy of his praise- this was to be drawn closer in orbit to the center of a moral universe that was in turn bound up with a higher spiritual reality. Reconstructing a better political system means taking these realities into account.

Recent political developments have uncontrovertibly revealed a system characterized by a base and venal version of this, wherein the running dogs of Globohomo have been shown to have long been on the receiving end of enormous sums of payola via USAID and what are no doubt numerous other vents of Swamp gas. The administrative state, brought into being by the Managerial Revolution as an efficient instantiation of neoliberal order, has become a tangled web of sinecures and graft, so bloated as to be unable to fight off challengers, like a dragon grown fat from eating too many village maidens. The Trump administration has launched a multifront campaign against this system, which due to his quick, surgical removal of dark money and its own phlegmatic clumsiness, is in full retreat. As Hollywood so wisely taught us, a blob is killed through freezing.

This Austin-based Asian restaurant neatly sums up the zeitgeist.

This has led to a healthy debate among those on the right regarding whether to destroy this system or make use of it. Is this the One Ring with no other master but The Dark Lord Soros, or the inevitable state of government in an advanced economy? Part of the problem is that any use made of the treasury to reward friends and punish enemies will naturally alienate those on the taking but not receiving side of things, not to mention that any legitimate leader has the responsibility to use the money of others with the common good in mind. There are also practical concerns. The managerial state is in the condition it is in- bloated and dysfunctional- because of the very embarrassment of riches the Trump Ascendency now semi-controls and threatens. Peace has cost them their strength, as it were; they were defeated by victory. How to square the circle of using power and wealth to reward loyalty while avoiding the encumbrances and moral pitfalls of excessive material abundance, and appetites that grow in the feeding. The right, nor the country as a whole, would no more benefit from a class of useless rentiers than the left did.

Avoid this scenario

Part of the solution is to accept that in addition to the need to reward service it is also incumbent on those in power to recognize virtue, to hold as official policy that government must work toward a vision of the good. Then, in accordance with that vision, maintain a scaled back and transparent version of the current systems of government patronage for those (ideally few and temporary) things which should be directly subsidized, while privileging dispersed patronage networks in independent hands, the more local the better. ‘Joe Richman’ currently pays, say, $5 million in taxes a year. The government as constituted then takes that money and gives it to a transgender theater group to perform in front of schoolchildren. Suppose instead that he’s free to keep his money so long as he spends it building a private school, erecting a Gothic cathedral, or of course patronizing writers on Substack. It’s true that the current system already allows for tax deductions for charity; what I mean hear is that what constitutes the public good for that purpose should be more specifically defined to mean things that are actually good. People should be far more free to use their own money for noble ends, while those who burden society with social costs should pay them.

I look to a future of H1-B taxes, DEI taxes, offshoring taxes, fines levied on communities where crime is high, and a total end to all non-profit foundations. Men should be free to spend their money toward noble pursuits during their lifetimes, and should be allowed to pass it on to others they deem worthy of their legacy, but creating free-floating entailed funds in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars provides every incentive for unscrupulous actors to attach themselves to the money pile. Universities should be allowed to maintain an endowment equal to perhaps 10x the dollar amount of scholarships they grant; the rest should be taxed. Religious organizations should be carefully scrutinized to ensure they are not mere proxies for political activism. those which are should be stripped of tax-exempt status.

To facilitate the change in regime, particularly in the face of potential violence being mooted in progressive spaces, it may prove prudent or even necessary for particular NGOs, ‘charities,’ and certain activist organizations to be declared public menaces and confiscated. These could then be auctioned off to parties interested in using their material resources toward some better end. The precedent here would be what happened to the Proud Boys, railroaded in court and forced to hand over their very name to a favored client of the old order. This would result in two salutary results- the impoverishment of those working to harm society and the shifting of patronage opportunities into the hands of those better inclined to use them for good.

Good news everyone; Rufio’s Back!

If this sounds harsh or unreasonable it should be remembered that it is merely the inverse of the previous regime’s policy. Progressivism is animated by a moral vision that culminates in nihilism, but not relativism; its worldview starkly distinguishes between the prechosen elect and the damned, in keeping with its Calvinist roots and pagan accretions. Its animating principle is that the world is moving inexorably toward some predetermined end- this is what is meant by ‘progress.’ The chosen will glory in an eventual grey-goo singularity of universal oneness, their opponents cast aside onto the hell of history’s wrong side. It’s what they mean when they say things like ‘the arc of history bends toward justice.’ There is no system that is truly indifferent to value-claims. The ascension of the right is simply the replacing of an evil system with one that at least aims to facilitate virtue.

In short, what I hope comes into being is not the same system merely handing out prizes to the new favorites, but a restructuring that empowers non-state actors to form an elite who can act as patrons for the kind of society we hope to build. There’s a creative middle ground between dismantling the administrative state and simply moving into the intact vacant spaces. The state should be used to the maximum degree possible for the common good, but at the same time, individual and more local elites should be empowered to build resilient networks of support outside the central apparatus. The goal should be to build a system flexible enough to rule but with enough taking place outside of it that should it be taken over once more by hostile forces, the right still has in place the material and moral infrastructure to survive. The example earlier of the Church is illustrative; working with the state when possible, but still able to function without it in time of need.

In the broader context, Trump’s rise, and its attendant protectionism and pullback from military commitments, signals the beginning of a true multipolar world order, and many of the changes that are coming will necessitate stronger communities and local institutions- political, economic, and social. No longer can problems be outsourced or immigranted away; Americans will soon need to draw on themselves as never before. This will in turn make the changes I advocate that much more necessary. Those who will control patronage, those who can reward, the ring-givers, will be the ones in place to preserve order and culture. Who those people are is vitally important, and this is the chance to create that new elite.