Henry Dampier

Many men tend to erroneously conflate authority, influence, and power.

Authority is the right to use power, symbolized by the trappings of power — its symbols. The scepter, the orb, and the crown are all such symbols. The eagle is another such symbol. The CEO has formal authority over the company that he’s charged with. The President is commander-in-chief of the military. Authority is not itself power, but the right to use it. It’s the formal expression of who can use it legitimately.

Influence is the capacity to affect the thoughts and behavior of others. Influence can’t compel, but if it can compel reliably enough, it can lead to the gradual accumulation of power and authority.

Attempting to make a run at authority without accumulating sufficient influence before doing so is usually fatal or otherwise damaging, because people who have it are rarely eager to give it up. Influence without authority is temporarily toothless, but authority without influence is pathetic. Trying to grab authority without preparing the scene is either suicidal, revolutionary, or both — which tends to appeal to the left, but not so much to the pro-civilizational types.

Establishing authority is a consolidation and formalization of existing influence. For example, when two men start a company together, formalize their titles, and assign share ownership, they’re just formalizing in law their preexisting relationship with each other, and setting that down contractually to facilitate the venture.

Power is the capacity to act without interference — and can also mean violence or the capacity to use it for certain ends. The mugger uses power against his victim, but it’s illegitimate, and the reigning authority reserves the right to rectify the wrong using its own retaliatory force in order to preserve law and order. In the nonviolent realm, we would say that the boss with the authority to make purchases, sales, hire and fire people, has some form of local power over his environment. If I can terminate your employment contract, I have authority over you.

When people ambitious for influence and power go wrong, they tend to misunderstand how far their influence is likely to go, or whether or not their actual influence maps to their stated authorities. A manager in a corporation will lose prestige if he issues orders which his subordinates flout publicly. If his authority says that he’s in command over the department, but the reality is that it’s actually something else, that manager will become next to useless or worse.

Therefore, if you want to consolidate influence into authority, it’s best not to issue commands. The sergeant can command the private, but men together who have no formal rank don’t know who’s the superior to whom.

The authority to use power within the law confers a special influence all on its own, in the same way that a gun barrel pressing into a man’s back encourages his compliance. So, the lack of authority confers a special disadvantage in the competition of influence, but less so if you can provoke that authority to act in ways that oversteps its own real support.

There’s a particular progression to these developments which can’t be skipped. Putting on a crown and declaring yourself emperor makes yourself like Norton. Norton had no legitimacy, so he was a joke. Going through the antecedent steps makes you more like Napoleon, for better or worse. Napoleon had near universal support of the citizenry upon his coronation, at least so far as could be verified by referendum.

In America, authority matches fairly well with raw power, but it matches poorly to influence. Those with power have little influence, which makes it so that those with influence have a fairly easy time subverting the formal authority — including foreign powers and international capital. This creates an erratic, tyrannical, and unstable politics, especially as most of the serious European competitors have been successfully repressed.

One of the key aspects of any slave caste is that they tend to be forbidden to carry arms, or their rights to weaponry tend to be highly restricted. Certain warrior castes can carry weapons, but priests and artisans tend to have their rights to the use of force restricted in many situations.

When going through the paintings of the Dutch masters, it’s not uncommon to see free men carrying swords and pistols, sometimes as ceremonial symbols of status, but also as a demonstration of their superior rights. Trade was not separate from war, and even before the advent of mass conscription, the levée writ small if not en masse was something that hung over the heads of many men from many social classes. The men in this painting are officers, but their lack of uniformity shows that it dates from before the democratic era (click for big):

Especially since the end of World War II and the step back from mass conscription, even in republics like the United States, baptized in the blood of citizen militias, we have instead regressed (or pro-gressed, depending on your viewpoint) to professional warrior castes holding arms in the urban areas, with a more mixed state of affairs outside the cities.

This creates a cultural and political tension between the American cities and the outside. Within the cities, the people are soft, disarmed, and androgynous. They’re lead by something like a slave caste of bureaucrats and artisans, lead by a small number of oligarchical corporate capitalists who own most of the property and the access to legal and financial leverage points over the system of trade.

Especially since the 2007 financial crisis and the escalation of the cost of living in these cities, this slave caste (which is often quite wealthy, as slave castes often have been, particularly in the East) has become more squeezed and dependent. It’s not uncommon to hear of particularly ambitious corporate slaves who have achieved ‘success’ only to be able to barely afford to buy a humble, lower middle class home in their favored region near the seat of power. Outside the seat of power, even a truck driver can afford to buy a beautiful home which would cost millions of dollars in the central cities. Inside the seat of power, most of the slaves can only afford to rent from either higher-end slaves or members of the oligarchical class.

This slave class tends to look down on the more numerous classes of dependent helots, concentrated in the same cities, but with a sense of pity, occasionally with contempt. The slave class sees it as their moral obligation to support and even uplift the helots, who are usually darker skinned. The slave class both hates, fears, and ridicules the freer middle classes from the less densely populated regions in the interior, not understanding how and why the freemen tend to value their rights to bear arms and hold their own property so much.

The slave class is entirely dependent on the activities in the modern bureaucratic courts. They’re skimmers, financiers, rule-makers, centralizers, standardizers, administrators, teachers, technologists, and cultural manipulators. They usually turn their noses up at independence, even in matters of business, preferring to raise paper money for grand projects with social missions from their oligarchical superiors. They’ll happily trade autonomy for a recognized position within the court, even if it makes them soft and dependent on the system. Hand such a man a gun, and he will tend to feel frightened of the idea of shooting it.

The reason for this is simpler if we look at our society from a broader historical perspective: to hold a gun and to use it wouldn’t be just illegal in most cities without permits, but it would be a violation of a caste boundary. You’ll hear this often from slave women, who are usually quite happy and comfortable in servitude, no matter what she says in earshot of her masters to show what a spirited, hard-working, self-abnegating little slave she is.

When a slave man she knows brings up guns or buying a gun, she will have an immediate emotional reaction to it, sometimes even babbling about how terrible and dangerous guns are, and why one shouldn’t own it or even know how to use it.

Rather than calling the slave woman addled, we should recognize her reaction for what it is — an entirely sensible enforcement of the social caste boundaries which she has intuited. The armed super-cop praetorian is the one authorized to carry a gun. Members of the helot class who are criminals can also be permitted to carry guns now and again, so long as they don’t leave their neighborhoods to menace the powder-skinned slaves too often. Every once in a while, a helot kills a slave, but slaves will tend to instead blame the inherent sin of their own class rather than the semi-feral aggression of the helot types.

These slaves, especially when they advocate for national gun control laws, are just trying to enhance the relative power of the praetorian class, their oligarchical masters, and their own harem-like social organization, so highly dependent on refined, obscure, and fashionably fluctuating religious doctrines emanating from their high academies, as dramatized in the glowing liturgical pageants emanating from screens.

The recent events in Ferguson, MO tended to be those slave classes cheering on the mass violence from the helots directed against the freemen, white and colored, who owned businesses in the downtown.

The freemen tend to be loyal to the older symbols, doctrines, religions, and philosophies of the American founding stock. The slaves, who typically own no property which isn’t contingent on their servitude, only use those symbols in cynical ways to achieve their political ends.

This is really the shape of the conflict that’s brewing on the North American continent. The higher end slaves and the oligarchs don’t like the freemen, their culture, and their resistance to their oligarchical masters who live in New York, Washington, and elsewhere, even around the globe. The Republican party essentially represents the freemen, but usually only in terms of their brokering the many surrenders to the oligarchs and their golden-chained toads.

In this, the urban slaves know that to import more helots from around the globe is to weaken the relative position of the freemen. This also increases their own burdens, but because they are slaves who’ve had the pride and independence trained out of them, this doesn’t rankle them all that much. Indeed, the elite education process is now more one more appropriate to the conditioning of a slave class (which is what it produces) than a class of free men befitting a noble republic.

This system is not particularly wisely put together, nor is it likely to survive, if only because slaves are such terrible fighters, and helots are also terrible fighters. The slave classes are making very loud noises about how much they distrust the praetorians, and how much they would prefer it if the praetorian caste came to be either replaced by helots, or made into a helot praetorian caste.

Why this is doesn’t seem to be from any sort of rational thought process. It’s more that the slave mentality within them has gone to a runaway, ‘left singularity’ signalling competition, in which the slaves are desperate to show that they are more humble and submissive to the needs of the oligarchs than the slave next to them. It’s a sort of groveling competition. The slaves also like to think that their influence over the helots — and their lauding of them as more holy and important than themselves — will also help them use those helots as proxy armies against their real rivals, the freemen.

The reason why the republic temporarily triumphed in Europe was because of physical and moral superiority of the republican army to the degenerating, unreliable monarchical military orders. Some combination of independent free fighters, privateers, mercenaries, and disciplined professional armies came to dominate the globe. Numbers aren’t really nearly as important as superiority in discipline and a sacred mission.

Slaves also lack the audacity and courage of free men, because they gain nothing when they either win or lose, whereas the freemen have everything to gain from conflict and everything to lose from surrender.

Similarly, a slave class intent on degrading the quality of their own praetorian protectors is not one which is likely to survive. It may be a typical example of slaves passive-aggressively retaliating against their own feckless masters, without really understanding what they’re doing on a conscious level.

Because freedom is unthinkable to a slave — the very thought terrifies them — appeals to liberty have no impact on their hearts. They would prefer death, and act according to their true preferences.

Any mystery around Western birth rates dissipates if you think of them as a slave class who prefer sterilization on the female side and adopting the physical and emotional persona of a court eunuch on the part of the males. An odd development in demographics becomes normal, predictable, categorizable in a logical historical context.

Similarly, the oligarchs are merely an advanced class of slave, being educated in the same religious institutions, having the same disdain for the art of war, and are themselves more predisposed to flight than fight.

The private jet is their favored vehicle for a reason. Delicate, fast, expensive, and it puts them above the land and the water, keeps them away from the zombie port rituals of security-purification, and carries no weapons or defenses whatsoever.

In this, the slaves ought to be cheered on, as they walk as in a trance state towards their own mass-suicide.

Drink the Kool-Aid: it’ll taste sweet. That burning sensation in your throat is just that feeling of liberation, as your soul separates from your flesh.

So in North America and to some extent in Europe, the political task is a bit difficult, but not all that dire, necessarily. A good first step is to call the slaves what they are, and to treat them as free men treat slaves of a foreign empire with an alien religion, which is with contempt and pity, rather than with awe, respect, and fear. The absurd slaves of a dying empire, eager to flagellate themselves and their fellows for public entertainment, can do nothing independently worth fearing. They ask to be broken, they ask to leave no traces to history, so work to break them and then erase them.

That’s only what they’re asking for, proudly so, loudly so, dramatically so, so they’re not even likely to complain when it happens to them.

Identitarians may quibble — “these slaves, they are our own people! The urban elves are us!” Which is somewhat true, and a good enough reason to needle some of them to flee the court, if only to deprive the rival system of useful human and material resources.

A few slaves, even of the better class, will often react with shame upon realizing what they really are, and in being called what they are. But most are comfortable with slave life, and should not be told that freedom would be better for them, because it wouldn’t be. But their interests and desires as slaves shouldn’t be of much concern to you, nor should you feel any special responsibility towards maintaining their happiness or the modern bureaucro-court system which they would not be able to survive without.

It’s just a matter of separating the slaves from their protectors, which they themselves seem to be eager to do, so this isn’t even pushing on resistance, but pushing with their own suicidal impulses. Once they are left with nothing but an erratic force of terrible, barbaric helot dregs, they won’t be capable of projecting force to any long term end — certainly not overseas. The primary difficulty faced by freemen is more a lack of territorial integrity, but that’s a solvable problem. The slave mentality of unquestioning obedience is also an obstacle, but a surmountable one, especially as the imperial capitol becomes more erratic, incompetent, and self-destructive.

What must be also articulated and demonstrated is a better type of civilization more appropriate to Western men who have become alienated from their own history. The reason why we dominated the globe — and still do, even in a weakened state — is because, unlike all other peoples, we have this ingrained understanding of the motive power of liberty, as it’s properly understood.

The problem with slave systems, as compared to even relatively free systems like that of feudalism, is that slaves just ain’t all that loyal, nor are they willing to go above and beyond pleasing the master and staying comfortable. When a contest appears, slaves will reliably break instead of fighting. They build up resentments, and those resentments can be used to motivate betrayals. Our modern slave system is so full of traitors that traitors have even become national heroes, as the slaves look up to them, and see the traitor that they could be if they only had the courage.

Seeing it in this light, while the suicidal empire might be dangerous in the same way that a crocodile bleeding to death from a mortal wound may lash out in fury with its remaining energy, the better course of action is to work to contain it, physically, until the animal’s body goes cold.