What’s Puzzling You Is the Nature of My Game

These are two human types who do not understand each other – the one preferring security and comfort, suspicious of anyone who desires more, the other seeking risk and demanding honour, unbelieving that anyone could be satisfied with less.

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-Harvey Mansfield

If we agree with Rene Girard that Jesus Christ was the first political atheist, then let us call Zack Polanski, newish leader of the Green Party of England & Wales, the last political satanist. No, I haven’t been at the whisky again (so far today, at any rate). Here, I aim to justify these, on their face, somewhat strange comments.

Let’s begin with one of the great overlooked matters of politics, which is its relational nature. We are very good at talking about institutions, parties, governments, policies, frameworks, structures, laws, norms, regulations, legislatures, courts and agencies – not to mention ideas, principles, values, ideologies, philosophies, positions, tactics, strategies and manifestos. And we do an awful lot of opinion polling, vox pops, interviews, punditry, debating, gesticulating, ranting, street demonstrations, and standing outside Parliament with loudhailers and portable amplifiers blasting out songs by Chumbawumba. We pen a great deal of investigative journalism, weekly columns, op-eds, Substack posts, letters to the Times (especially if we are disgusted in Tunbridge Wells) and satirical articles in the Private Eye. And we listen to a lot of podcasts, watch a lot of YouTube and retweet a lot of Tweets.

But what we don’t tend to talk about is the fact that politics is in the end really about the relationship between two sets of people with fundamentally different priorities: the governed and those who govern. Both of these groups need each other on side for the polity to remain as a going concern. Yet their desires are not the same. In the words of Machiavelli, in Chapter 9 of The Prince:

The people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and oppress the people.

Most people, that is, just want to get on with their lives. But there is another, much smaller group, who want to boss the others around. To the former, the latter (as Richard Condon once put it) might as well be space aliens. To want to be in charge is not normal. And to make the sacrifices and do all of the ugly things necessary to actually be in charge, one has to be positively maniacal. Yet at the same time, in their darkest moments, ordinary people will admit that somebody does have to be in charge – human societies cannot function without at least some decisions being made by a chief executive of some sort.

This makes politics, in its purest form, largely an attempt to allow these two groups to have some sort of a workable relationship. How can a modus vivendi be achieved within which the ordinary people are not brutalised and enslaved by power-mad leaders, and the leaders do not annoy the people so much that the latter rise up and guillotine them all?

In modernity there have been, broadly speaking, two enduring ways of achieving a relatively calm equilibrium within which both governors and governed get something of what they want. And these, to go back again to Machiavelli, roughly correspond to what he called the republic and the principality – the only true division in variants between modern governing styles. In the republic, the governors govern by representing the people (not democratically, but in the sense of representing a particular shared way of life). In the principality, the governors govern through their prowess, virtuosity, or virtù, working through cunning and skill to maintain their status and please the population just enough not to be overthrown. And that, really, is that – all of modern politics flows from that, fundamental, distinction.

The principality is the pure form of government in modernity because it accords with what is, precisely, modern. Machiavelli presents human institutions as new. They have inherited nothing from God and nothing from nature; they justify themselves by temporal necessity. The state, in particular, exists because it must; its duty is not, in the words of Harvey Mansfield, to ‘remind us of the good from which we have fallen, or to which we might aspire’, but to do what is expedient in relation to our worldly needs and desires. And this puts the governor and governed in a particular, transactional dynamic. The governor governs because he is needed. And he does this because he, in turn, needs the governed, at least in the sense that he has to get his power from somewhere and, if he does not please the people, he will be overthrown.

This, then, is what Girard meant, in essence, in his remarks on Jesus and political atheism. To the pre-modern mind, there was a necessary connection between temporal and spiritual government. The sovereign ruled because he reflected some divine or cosmic order in human affairs. Jesus, by declaring that one should ‘render…unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’ introduced the idea that there was no such continuity. There is spiritual and temporal authority and the two are not the same. And, it follows, temporal authority cannot derive from divine right, or primogeniture. It can only be grounded in temporal necessity. The sovereign rules not because he reflects God’s rule over creation, but because his rule is necessary.

This presents the modern sovereign as, precisely, a governor, with a government – to govern is to rule through skill, wisdom, cunning, knowledge, and control. The medieval sovereign made and enforced laws. The modern sovereign does that, and a very great deal more – he does what the population needs. And he does this in light of the observations we made earlier on. How can it be ensured that the sovereign rules in a way that is not oppressive and the people do not revolt? Through a benevolent implementation of what is necessary, with the ruler and people united through both meeting each other’s needs (i.e., for submission and welfare respectively).

So if you meet me, have some courtesy

This, though, poses a problem. It is all very well situating the grounds of authority in necessity, but who gets to decide what is necessary? And is what is necessary in human affairs objective and fixed, or subjective and relative?

In Chapter 6 of The Prince, in a passage I have made reference to before, Machiavelli brings up the figure of Moses in a particularly interesting way. Here, we find Machiavelli opining about what he calls ‘New Principalities Which Are Acquired by One’s Own Arms and Ability [emphasis added]’. Note that he is, in essence, framing for us the problem of modern government – i.e., politically atheistic government – in emphasising that his subject is new (not inherited or pre-existing) principalities, and that his interest is in how they are acquired by the ruler’s ‘own arms and ability’ (again, meaning not inherited, or gained from divine right). He is speaking then to the position of a modern ruler.

And he finds inspiration here in, among others, Moses. Moses, he tells us, can be listed with Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus as having made the most of ‘opportunity’ presented to him in his path to success. And this opportunity is nothing less than the fact that his people, the Israelites, were enslaved:

It was necessary, therefore, to Moses that he should find the people of Israel in Egypt enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptians, in order that they should be disposed to follow him so as to be delivered out of bondage….

It is impossible not to notice here what Machiavelli does not say. He does not say that it was necessary to the people of Israel that Moses should have found them enslaved; he says that it was necessary to Moses himself. And he does not say that it was necessary for Moses to have found them enslaved in order that he should deliver them from bondage; he says that it was necessary in order that they should be disposed to follow him.

Necessity, in other words, means different things in different contexts. What is necessary for the people is not identical with what is necessary for the ruler, and the two things can actually drastically diverge. Moreover, it is in the interests of the ruler to present himself, and what he is doing, as necessary, not in order to actually benefit the people (for all that Moses did indeed benefit the Israelites in the long run) but to benefit himself.

The modern ruler, in other words, rules on the basis that he is necessary, but what is ‘necessary’ is not rooted in an objective concept of need. Rather, it is rooted in a subjective ‘effectual truth’ – if the ruler can make something appear necessary, then that is all that is required to make it so in its effects. And its effects are to buttress the ruler’s status and make his control more concrete. The modern ruler governs because he must do so in order to make true his own necessity. Whether he, and what he is doing, is ‘really’ necessary is thus a question to be at all costs avoided.

Modern government, political atheism writ large, has therefore two distinctive characteristics. The first is that it is concerned with the skill and expertise of the ruler – of those who govern. It is their abilities (or, more extremely, their ‘arms’) alone which put them in power and help them to stay there. And the second is that modern government is interested in justifications for authority rooted in what is necessary, with what is necessary being relativistic – it is a concept subject to manipulation by the ruler himself. And these two characteristics combine to produce a distinctive form of government whose focus is on what Machiavelli called fraud. He did not mean this pejoratively, and in fact encouraged it – the ruler is justified in utilising his cunning to give himself and what he is doing the appearance of necessity. Whether he, or what he is doing, actually is necessary for the people’s welfare (it may or may not be) is beside the point.

A man of wealth and taste

Political atheism, then, can be thought of as a form of tragedy. In severing the political and the spiritual Jesus made plain that only he can save, and that only God can redeem. The sphere of politics does not concern such matters. This frees us from dogma in our political affairs. Yet it also means that politics loses its capacity to ‘remind us of the good from which we have fallen, or to which we might aspire’. Its scope is reduced to mere necessity, for all that necessity itself is freed from any connection to objectivity. Its concerns become purely connected to the here and now. As Strauss puts it, ‘in Machiavelli everything appears in a new light’ but this is ‘due, not to an enlargement of the horizon, but to a narrowing of it’. The radical reduction of the sphere of politics to temporal concerns is precisely radical, with radical implications. But it is radically reductive.

The achievement of modern politics is therefore also its curse. And this is how we are to understand what I have previously described as political satanism, meaning politics conducted not merely without reference to the transcendent, the spiritual, the divine, the immortal – but in contempt of it.

And here for a moment it is useful and instructive to return to everybody’s favourite Northampton-born occultist, Alan Moore, and his exegesis of ‘The Devil’ tarot card and the semiotics of the inverted pentagram. As Moore explains to us, the Satanic message is ultimately one of a lowering of horizons to the most prosaic, mundane and unedifying of all – an insistence that the ‘real world’ is all that there is. Since the ‘real world’ is all that there is, there is absolutely no point in trying to aspire to, or dream of, or even act in relation to anything beyond one’s immediate hedonistic concerns. One’s needs and desires are properly one’s only concern. One should aspire to be safe and secure, and at best acquire status and wealth, but that is all that there is to life, and since life is the end of the road in any event, that is tantamount to the sum of all of human achievement.

Everything is instrumental, in other words, and everything is instrumental in the service of human desire. There is nothing beyond the here and now and nothing therefore beyond the individual – since all other values (family, nation, God, etc.) are to Satan a ‘fairy tale’. And politics itself is therefore solely individualistic and rational. It is purely concerned with the relationship between individual and State. It sees nothing beyond that horizon, and in eschewing religion can offer at best utilitarianism or – more likely – simple nihilism.

Political atheism of the Machiavellian stripe naturally leads us to this state of affairs, precisely because it posits the relationship between people and rulers as deriving from need. Since there are no transcendent values, there is no objective good, and politics reduces to an interest in pure necessity, defined of course not by what is truly necessary but what is perceived to be so – even if that perception is false or fraudulently induced. Political satanism can thus be thought of as the end state of modernity in the terms in which Machiavelli laid out: it is a logic of pure political hedonism which grounds authority on a purported capacity in the person of the ruler to be able to gratify needs. Nothing exists beyond that logic, and ‘reason of State’ becomes in its light an exercise simply in justifying whatever actions the ruler performs on the basis of that project.

As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer

This should give us pause for thought when considering the contemporary signficance of the concept of equality or ‘wokeness’. As I have previously argued, people are mistaken in downplaying the political significance of these phenomena, variously describing them as the products of a pseudo-Christian heresy or perhaps the ‘feminisation’ of public life. This overlooks the importance of general features of the human predicament which will, I think almost inevitably, emerge in the conceptual conditions which come into being when secularism has run its course.

Here, it is worth returning briefly for a moment to one of the most important thinkers in understanding our predicament, Alexandre Kojève. Kojève, in language and concepts derived from Hegel, described the most elementary of all human desires as being for recognition, which we can, to all intents and purposes, think of as being the desire to be at the centre of the universe. Although Kojève himself would not have stated it in this way, it is the natural perspective of any person for whom there are no transcendent values or any goods higher than the self. To the individuated and atomised human being there is no person more important than the self, and it is the perspective of the self that trumps all others – we become defined by our own personal ‘truths’, preoccupied by our own concerns, and convinced of our own distinctiveness and importance.

We of course become materialistic too, but materialism has to be understood as servicing the more important desire, the most important of all, which is to bend all of reality to our own wills. Within each of us there lurks the need to impose ourselves upon the world and make it conform – to be our own petty god, forcing gravity to mould itself with our own great density, and recognised by all others as simply that little bit more valuable than them. We strive for status and we want to be admired – we long, as Adam Smith put it, to be both loved and lovely. We are all legends in our own lunch hours, heroes in our own stories, player-characters in our own games.

What this means politically is that we are all – to go back to Robert Bly’s metaphor – individually cast as siblings. The thing about siblings is that parents (good parents, at any rate) make an effort to treat them all equally. But the first thing any parent of more than one child will tell you is that the children definitely don’t see it that way. Siblings want to at least be treated equally with one another, but what they really want above all is to be the favourite. To be a sibling is to be defined by a striving to be ‘more equal than the others’. And siblings struggle against each other bitterly to achieve that status.

Another way of putting this is that in a totally secular context the State’s role becomes naturally parental. It presides over a great mass of individuals, all of whom think they are the most important, and all of whom want the State to prioritise their own personal needs and preferences above all others. The State’s role duly becomes Hobbesian: it is to somehow reconcile all of the conflicts that inevitably emerge when presiding over a squabbling herd of indignant and insatiable animals all of whom consider it their destiny to have their preferences writ large across creation. And the result is an institutionalisation of equality as the be-all and end-all of human accomplishment: the total end-goal of all political association. There is one thing that can unite the population sufficiently and make government seem necessary, and this is the insistence that it is important above all that nobody should ever be allowed to get ahead of anybody else.

Wokeness, then, is best understood as the political reason of a man who is put in charge of two dozen seagulls and tasked with maintaining order amongst them. What can such a man do except try to ensure that at any given moment each of them has exactly the same number of mouldy sandwiches to devour? And what is true of sandwiches is vastly more true of status, because to the human heart status is the only game in town once subsistence has been assured.

I’ve been around for a long, long year

It is entirely natural for a class of leaders to have emerged, then, who derive their claim to possess authority from the meeting of needs, and who define needs not in material terms but on the basis of equality (or, the better word, equity, meaning equality of outcome). The modern prince, the prince of 2025, sets out his stall exactly like Moses. He finds the people unequal. And he promises to deliver them from that inequality. This is necessary to him because it binds them to his cause. It may or may not be necessary to them, but – at the risk of repeating myself – this is irrelevant. The truth of the matter is ‘effectual’; it is defined by outcomes.

This I think more than anything else explains the curiosity of modern socialism and its apparent inconsistencies and points of departure from the ‘old left’. The old left was concerned with redistribution in the interests of improving the lot of the poor. And, as I have said before, there is something that is at least sympathetic about the goals of Communism as it was originally conceived. Marx and Engels genuinely thought that Communism would abolish scarcity. That they were hopelessly wrong about its consequences, misunderstood the nature of economics, and were foolish and naive about the manner in which their ideas would play out in practice, at least one can say for them that they wanted everybody to have nice things.

That is not for one moment, however, what modern, ‘woke’ socialists want. What they want is simply for people to be equal. They are at their most comfortable in that arena. They do not want poor people to be wealthy. They want people put in the position of siblings. And this brings us, quite naturally, to Zack Polanski.

The Green Party of England & Wales is a party of princes par excellence: it is a political movement whose essence is, even more than the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats, defined by a claim to be necessary. ‘Vote for us’, the Green Party tells the electorate, ‘And we will make you equal in respect of everything – even in respect of the world itself and its climate.’ And hence it is unabashed about its policy agenda, which is not to help people prosper and certainly not to reward hard work or talent, but to place everybody in the same position in respect of everybody else.

Let me direct your attention to the following interview, which if you are based in Britain you may have already seen. In it, Polanski is being interrogated about the Green Party’s proposals for a ‘wealth tax’, which would be levied at 1% of all assets above £10 million each year and 2% on assets above £1bn.

Leaving aside the practicalities of implementing this, or its unintended consequences (wealthy people leaving the country; ordinary people disincentivised to be ambitious) the interviewer makes the point that this ‘wealth tax’ is unlikely to raise much money even if it could be put into effect. But Polanski is quite clear: this is not the point. The point is not, as he puts it, ‘creating public investment’. That can be done, he says, anyway. This, he says plainly, is about ‘tackling inequality’. Inequality in itself is the problem. There is something wrong with people not being equal. And making them equal is, or ought to be, a political goal.

At this juncture it is difficult to resist posting this old clip of Margaret Thatcher, from her last speech in Parliament after it had become public knowledge that she had already, in effect, been elbowed out. It is partly worth watching simply for the study in contrasts: it is impossible not to be struck by the stature and quality of British Parliamentarians, of whatever party, in the 1990s in comparison to the likes of Polanski. (Note the speed with which Dennis Skinner makes his joke about the European Central Bank and the deftness of Thatcher’s response.) But it is also impossible not to notice the same arguments being made as Polanski’s (in this case, not coincidentally, by a Liberal Democrat, Simon Hughes), deploying the same basic rationale:

For Hughes, as for Polanski, it is inequality in itself that must be remedied, and equality itself that is the purpose of politics. Thatcher skewers him on this, summing up the essence of modern socialism perfectly in her instant soundbite: ‘He’d rather the poor were poorer as long as the rich were less rich.’ But that clever line should not distract us from the main points, which are precisely that equality in this sense – equality as a trump to other concerns – and the necessity of achieving it has become the absolutely central concern of modern politics, particularly on the left, and that the reason for this is entirely logical if we understand modern politics in terms of its predicates.

The moniker of ‘political satanist’ may sound a rather extreme one to pin on Polanski’s back, but it is apt all the same. The drive to make everybody equal is the lowest, crudest, and narrowest of all political agendas – it is the political agenda of the inverted pentagram, with the human spirit placed at the very bottom of the heap of concerns. It is the political agenda of the modern prince, whose reason of State is expressed through appealing to the basest and least interesting of all human motivations, and presenting this fraudulently as a function of necessity. And its understanding of human society is petty and reductive, conceiving of that society as possessing little to distinguish it from a mob of Hobbesian beasts.

It is worth emphasising, though, that it is also a political agenda that lacks a future, which is why I was keen to emphasise that Polanski and his ilk are the last of a dying breed. Secularism is in decay. Whether this will mean that political atheism – the division of religion from politics – will draw to an end is a separate question. But what we can be sure of is that we look towards a re-enchanted and more religious future, and one in which the concerns of the individual will begin to seem petty and uninteresting when set against greater concerns. This cannot be avoided; it is what human beings, ultimately, need. As Alan Moore puts it, Satan is in the end a mere ‘hologram’, and political satanism, understood as the complete denial that anything exists except the physical world, is likewise hologrammatic. The era of thin materialism, and the political consequences of that worldview, draws to a close. Something will replace it: the transcendent, the divine, the familial, the nationalistic, the tribal, the spiritual, the primal. We all sense that this is happening; we all I think sense that chaos will likely ensue. But the horizons which have been narrowed will at the same time, undoubtedly, broaden. Our task is to prepare for that and orient ourselves towards openness in this sense. It is certainly not to retreat into the unambitious and unhopeful blandness of the world which Zack Polanski would create for us.

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This article (What’s puzzling you is the nature of my game) was created and published by David McGrogan and is republished here under “Fair Use”

Featured image: medium.com