The New Barbarism

10Xing the Chaotic Age

“With the recurrence of barbarism in Europe, new languages were born.” – Giambattista Vico

Everything is getting stupider, costlier, cruder, and crueler. We can acknowledge this without being mistaken for redditors so long as we acknowledge there are no more adults to bring into the room. There is no escape.

As I mentioned in my previous piece, the second victory of Trump represents the arrival of a “new barbarism” comprised of

the grindset ‘hustlers’ of the post-pandemic, who love combat sports and building semi-scam companies in the shadow of the rusted husk of post-war social programs, public schools, and the “national community” of cable news, C-SPAN, and talk shows.

This type of character, exemplified by someone like Andy Elliot, began appearing in the 2010s but exploded on the internet in rebellion to the pandemic. They are barbaric because they fulfill all the criteria of the agents of a barbarian age: the deterioration of literate and verbal powers into pure grunting, an increasing regard for The Gigantic (a Heideggerian term, but the naïve hermit didn’t predict this would expand from industrialism to butts and biceps), an increasing obsession with money shorn of the WASPy decorum of “wealth” and replaced with a piratical sense of “loot,” (“the bag,” “10 X”), and the breakdown of the institution of marriage giving way to sexual promiscuity even among the self-professed “conservative” lumpenbourgeoisie.

Trump was supported by an entirely different symbolic army in 2016: rust belt workers and anonymous college-educated white men trolling on the internet. In 2024, his supporters instead conjure images of provincial capitalists who moved their assets to Florida, UFC fighters, mumble rappers, Elon Musk-type technologists (perhaps the least “classed” of all billionaires), and health industry-skeptic podcasters.

Trump is not himself a barbarian. He thinks he is restoring a phase of Democracy reminiscent of Fred Trump’s America. But his new round of supporters will create a country that will solidly belong to the age that always succeeds the Democratic Age: the Chaotic.

The economic ascent of the Miamian harbingers of chaos will not deliver his platform’s promises but rather a highly speculative real estate market of social carnage. It will eviscerate the egalitarianism that had its beginnings with the 1848 revolutions but came into full form with the social liberal welfarism in the wake of the Great Depression. That this democracy coincided with the rise of neocolonial empire is not a coincidence but the natural course of any democratic regime: we have known this since the heyday of the ‘egalitarian’ Athenians, where the collective slathered their statues in gaudy colors while plundering everyone from Persia to Spain. The more people inducted into the “citizenry” or voting class, the larger the pot of war spoils needs to become; the more the appetites of the city increases, and the more the city needs to go out and pillage—violently or commercially or both.

Thus it makes perfect sense that the “establishment” standing in opposition to Trump’s calls to end militaristic interventionism and the free trade empire would refer to themselves as the defenders of democracy. Democracy has always been bloody and bloated with cash. The thing about democracy’s enemies is that they are bloody and bloated too, except they call the bluff on democracy’s attempts to uphold enlightenment, seeking to expand their bloodlust and stufflust into domestic regions too.

Democracy always gives rise to moral Chaos because democrats level the ethical categories of the Aristocratic Age that precedes it. This starts off with economic reforms, innocently enough, their critical ire being directed only toward the inequalities of property law, but the blaze inevitably spreads to engulf all areas of perceived social inequality, finally torching the foundation of the family, the institution of marriage.

This process, in our Christian iteration known as “the sexual revolution,” began in the Pax Britannica of the 19^th century and came to completion in the 1960s. By the time of Reagan, it came to be fully accepted by the mainstream, leading Mark Lilla to remark that by the 90s we had created a fusion of the hippie movement with corporate America: “they see no contradiction in holding down day jobs in the unfettered global marketplace—the Reaganite dream, the left nightmare—and spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties.”

What the transitionary Derridean chaos agents don’t realize is that by deconstructing sexual moral categories they do not create ever more sophisticated Parisian academicians but instead fully emancipate the appetites of masses leading to the rise of steroid injecting maniacs that will wage war on society. And what the BAPists don’t realize is that the barbarism they champion will not be a “based” patriarchy but the longhouse they fear. The “long dick of the Law” doesn’t get laid down by bandits but by primordial patriarchs who enclose commons and establish customs, conducting primitive accumulation. The state of nature is not methodical units of drilled warriors but annoying petty criminals whose culture of perpetual violence overwhelms all the foundations of rank, corroding the very possibility of patriarchy and engendering polycules of simps celebrating fat matriarchs.

Sexual promiscuity lies in complete contradiction to rationality, because rationality itself rests on the peace of mind free of constant envy achieved through institutional monogamy. This all occurs, as Giambattista Vico exhaustively documented in his New Science, at the level of language. From the jungle of slurring anarchy arises choice men who pull away individual women from the horde and claim singular ownership over them in exchange for physical protection and a tranquil life of domesticity. This primeval marital society increasingly drapes itself in glyphs, signs, and rituals to enshrine the values of the nascent family unit. From the illiterate grunting and wailing of the ever-envious ever-warring slop-pit of sexual rivalry comes the first words of a new language. These words, Vico argued, are onomatopoeia referring to the static forces of Nature, like thunder bolts, birds of prey, seasons, and images of the hearth and the farm: “Zeus,” “Iove” and “Thor” are verbalizations of lightning strikes, “Mars” or “Ares” sound off the clashing of shields and spears, and so on. The marrying society creates an environment free from the constant backstabbing of licentiousness, and thus permits the peace needed to rationalize nature and thereby secure the metaphysical foundations of law and order to which judges may appeal.

From the patriarchal gods of mythology comes abstracted symbols that represent the values embedded in those poetic stories. Eventually, the myths are no longer needed, and the principles behind the symbols become sufficient to guide society. This is the rise of rational theology, or Philosophy. Philosophy brings about a society of aristocrats, who do not need to be guided by the divining rods of the priests of the Theocratic Age but instead elect to govern themselves using constitutional republics. It is this atmosphere of self-governance that gives way to the uppity yeomans, their soldier class, who resent the selfishness of the landed elite and demand an end to their exploitation. The slaves then see the freedoms won by the yeomans, and begin rebelling for citizen status of their own, therefore increasing the need for more slaves from faraway places.

Language descends from the rational theology of the aristocrats to the purely abstract rationality of the urban democratic elite. This entirely irreligious rationality, skeptical of anything which inhibits libertine enjoyment, ends up devouring the now-unstable marital auspices, which were only anchored by the myths of the first patriarchs. But without the marital auspices, the mind is flung into an anarchy of passions where all limits are dissolved. Reason bites its own tail, and forms legions of unreasonable men, hungry for more rights, more stuff, even at the cost of total bloodshed. Language goes from myths to abstract categories to pure grunting, as we see with mumble pop, Gen Z “brainrot,” and the mind-numbing autofictionalist rhapsodes of Dimes Square.

But barbarism brings with it the promise that the world will be made anew. From the forest fire of pure grunting, which will burn the inherited philosophical encumbrance of two millennia, the ground will be cleared for a new Homer to supply a new mythological vocabulary … but much later. Now begins the long grunting.