The words “uncomfortable” and “unsafe” occupy positions of unquestionable power. To ignore them, when they are deployed, amounts to heresy, to psychopathy, to cruelty.

A crisis of priority underwrites the new rise of an old type of tyranny: 2,000 years ago, it was prophesied that the meek would inherit the Earth. It happened, oh how appropriately, without a whisper. So that by the time the 20th century authoritarian powers took hold of Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, each could defend its pet horrors by evoking a need for safety.

Several decades prior, Friedrich Nietzsche had prophesied the arrival of a new type of philosopher, a philosopher who would affirm life as Dionysus had affirmed it: An Antichrist, drunk on the will to power, an inhuman monster whose words would dissect as only music dissects: at a level, that is, above the human, like unto godly, horrifically cold, if only because their warmth exceeds the apprehension of their readers, who, venerating the meek, are to this new philosopher as an intestinal bacterium is to a human being: At worst, a simple hindrance, an annoyance best to excrete, worthless; no, less than worthless: Worthy of eradication, if only because, without them, the new philosopher may walk unhindered and enjoy a type of life these bacterial men cannot allow themselves.

This new philosopher has arrived.

***

The phrase “Wille zur Macht,” or “Will to Power,” is the least-understood in all philosophy. It does not engage with political power in any way; it is not a will to domination, still less to formal status. It is, abstractly, a will to the expression of content—no, more, to eruption. Each person contains, if only in viciously suppressed dreams, an ideal, a longing, a coursing whitewater of energy. The meek are those who have worked, albeit futilely, to eradicate this will. Considering their longings unattainable, or the task too grand, they make a performance of sacrificing their wills for those still weaker. They call this solidarity.

Oh, but those whom they wrongly consider weaker still have their wills, and someday these meek puritanical noble bourgeois heads will roll.

***

The uncomfortable, the unsafe, have learned to game this system. Situated comfortably in a bourgeois milieu which they disavow at every opportunity, claiming some tenuous link to an oppressed group, they perform weakness so as to hijack the self-denying energies of solidarity. Thus they bastardize the Will to Power, turning it into a will to domination, engaging the armies of solidarity with the task of providing them with their ideals, their longings—but the rapids of energy are diverted from them, who build their lives upon a basis of theatric control. Those weaker, who are really stronger, will recognize their slavery and rebel; and this rebellion will not take the form of cruelty, but of a self-sure vitality, a relentless indifference, which will be cast as cruelty.

***

Kierkegaard should have killed himself; or he should have married, started a family, taught at a university, and forgotten his insectoid ambitions. His greatest creation, the Knight of Faith, who works his whole life for that which is impossible, laboring in a patience which can only be satisfied by eternal life, is a pathetic mockery of will, a monument to submission, to denial of life.

Only the modern meek have done worse: not content with submitting to a higher power, they have dreamed of submitting to the lowest powers they can imagine. New materialists write of giving bacteria and soils their due credit and of unseating humans from the ontological throne; progressives compete to see who is weakest and who, therefore, should be obeyed.

A Kierkegaardian worship of futility is contemptible. But the progressive worship of discursively fabricated weakness is beneath contempt. It is atonement in advance for the sin of strength, a randomized lust for control-as-such, the very apex of guilt-ridden denial of life.

***

But he who would maximize security at the expense of the possibilities of full life is, indeed, guilty; guilty of treason against life itself, against the Earth and all that composes it, against the composition of the human body and the dreams and drives and sublimity that arise from the full exertion thereof.

***

Life ends in death, and so it must, by any lucid thinker, be considered in the context of death. Those who cannot say, “This life is worthy of its death,” have not only lived poorly; they have fundamentally failed to grasp the most basic facts of life, and they should not be trusted in any case, for such an essential failure is inexcusable. And then, what of those higher beings who can say, “This life is worthy of its death, and so it is indifferent to death?” Are there such beings?

Lonesomeness is crushing. This is not a metaphor. To struggle beneath the weight of such a pressure, in a milieu of those who deny the pressure itself, who swear through gnashing sideways smiles that such a struggle is not strength, but weakness, and who want nothing of that labor, but only a release from what paltry weight they must carry, by virtue of simple existence—this is the weight, the pressure, itself.

And so there is but a thin, blurred line between evil and the lonesomeness of the strong.

***

The first step toward evil:

The meek must exercise their Will to Power, as all things must; but they exercise it by submission, by venerating meekness itself, and so by requiring that all be meek; they work to render their own pathological denial of life obligatory; and so they are less than worthless. They have, by self-effacement, positioned themselves beneath ethical consideration: They are nothing but hindrances to full life, for themselves and for the strong…

The second step of evil:

…and there must be some antibiotic by which we may rid ourselves of them, or by which, videlicet, we may be free of the pathologic weakness they impose.

***

Egoism is a simple idiocy, precisely as the conception of the individual, upon which it is based, is an idiocy. A close bond, a friendship, love, is no external phenomenon. It alters the basic physiology of all involved, such that they are simultaneously singular and plural. My name is Legion, for we are many: I am a chimera composed of those I love, and who love me, and as such I am more than a singular, as a mountain soars above the tectonic slabs which collided to create it.

Lonesomeness is a freedom in the sense that amputation might be freedom from a leg. When the meek seek to impose lonesomeness, it demonstrates their fundamental crisis; namely, that they cannot conjoin in the way I have described, that they are always fearful of each other, for each of them considers himself to be the weakest and most vulnerable of all, even as he bends over backward to show his loyalty to those supposedly weaker—for the weak are desperate and cruel in direct proportion to their weakness, so that solidarity emerges from an egoistic fear, a craven grasping for security in the paranoid, vicious milieu of the weak. Only the strong can merge with one another, can trust, can become more than egoists.

***

The third step of evil:

My name is Legion, for we are many: and those who struggle for weakness among themselves have done nothing to deserve my consideration. Bare life, after all, has no fundamental worth. God is dead; we have killed him; we kill him still; and we laugh, for we know that we have transgressed, and that our transgression opens possibilities of life heretofore unknown, unknowable—a laughter at the edge of an immeasurable abyss, laughter at the possibility of jumping, knowing that we will hit bottom eventually, will die, as we always knew we would, but knowing, also, that the fall promises equally immeasurable ecstasy, a fullness only available within the unknowable. The taste for certainty is the most disgusting taste, rotten fruit of the same craven weakness which spawns the ethics of the meek, their squabbling, their egoist solidarities, their thirsts for control. But the taste for uncertainty is an organ of the full life, of life which does not know, and must test, its boundaries—of life which is lived rather than simply preserved.

***

I repeat: the meek are beneath contempt, beneath all ethical consideration; but we are not those fascists who, smothered by a pathetic fear of the disenfranchised, call them “weak” and seek to eradicate them. Such a paradox, such a loathsome self-ignorance, is no reaction against meekness, but rather a limit-point thereof: as the progressive attempts to hijack the desires of the disenfranchised, the fascist attempts to blot them out; but each is driven by the same fear, the same leering desperation, and toward the same telos—namely, the domination of the disenfranchised. Violence is not the result of power, but rather of the lack thereof. The Venn diagrams constructed by a Berkeley-trained intersectionalist utilize much the same categories as the National Socialist extermination plans, and for the same reasons. But the strong have no need for such distrustful heuristics; we can meet people as they live—as Legion, as the conglomerates of social circles, as collision-points of intimately shared Wills to Power. Such a trusting, humanizing strength is as illegible to Judith Butler as it is to Hermann Goering.

***

And so this is the fourth step of evil:

The phrase, “The meek are beneath contempt, beneath all ethical consideration,” does not mean that they are worthy of violence. To swat at a gnat is a sign of vulnerability, not of strength. Rather, it means that the meek are worthy of naught but indifference. Of contempt, that is, but not of hate: hate must be reserved for equals. The strong abhor needless lashings-out, needless protest; such empty performance, such symbolic “standing up for one’s beliefs,” is nothing but a masturbation of conscience. Violence against the contemptible renders the violent contemptible. It is a show of weakness masquerading as strength, which is the most pathetic form of weakness, the braggadocio of the loser, the bravado of the convinced. We, the strong, are not convinced. We are above convictions: a taste for uncertainty implies a thirst for chaos only when it slips from a tongue without nuance.

***

The Bolsheviks were strong: they waited for decades, climbing the ladders of Tsarist organizations, waiting, unsure and likely afraid, but nonetheless endowed with the silence of the powerful. The end of the Soviet Union began when the Red Army turned on its comrades, with the routing of Makhno, the Stalinist purges. Stalin, pathetic paean to machismo, was weak. Likewise, Hitler cemented his own demise when he created the SS to protect his fragile edifice from the SA; Kristallnacht, the Night of Long Knives—terminal weakness. Thus did the McCarthy trials foretell the hegemony of America’s distinctly pathological leftism. And thus does Ocasio-Cortez’s blacklist prophesy the rise of something new, something not yet constituted, something which still lies in incubation in the most electrified corners of the American right, but which has already begun to move beyond left and right, beyond nationalism, beyond good and evil…beyond America?

***

She is sick and pale with grief that thou, her spawn, art far more fair than she—cast her off! You traditionalists, you nationalists, you strong and floundering: tradition is an unsurpassable teacher, and the nation is a start, and floundering is the surest sign of strength’s own blessing. The superior will inevitably experience his superiority, at first, as a weakness, for it is a condemnation to loneliness, to ostracization, even to monstrosity.

But tradition is not the end, and if it is fetishized as a provider of certainties, of timeless truths, it is a heavier hindrance than any other. Cast it off, as well, but do not forget its weight, for without weight, there is no strength in movement.

And the nation is as epistemologically feeble as the race, the gender, the sex: it is an insubstantial amoeba, drifting and morphing with the desperate desirers of its suitors, an abstract prostitute infected with an atavistic myopia for which there is no cure, so that its lovers will die blind, paralyzed, and in pain with no origin and no end and no antidote, radiating through the whole of the nervous system, as at the end of the most advanced syphilis.

And your floundering is the vouchsafing of salvation: only the strong may become so lost, may reach such heights of despair, of disillusion, of unsureness; and at the summit of uncertainty, looking out over the surrounding lowlands, rolling and green beneath a thin fog, you see a path, as yet unblazed but blazing, if but for its untrod roughs, which are offered only to your sight, you the directionless, you who can bear the compound phantom weights of such disorder.

The path does not lie to the left or to the right, but upon another axis. It is high time to escape the tyranny of the French Revolution and its deterministic binary. Robespierre is shouting nonsense at the pulpit, but we are not seated to his left or his right: we are outside, sweeping the street or proudly shoeing a good horse or languishing in stocks or branks, waiting for something we cannot yet imagine but of which we have an inkling, a nebulous unsure powerful hope.

***

If thoughts circulate within a mind, and if each mind is not contained within a skull, but is the product of intimacies, of friendships, and if this mind is strong and can withstand such penetrating friendship, then, by tracing through this labyrinth the wire of our personal Ariadne, we may plot the geometry of a world whose geography is bound only by our capacity for such friendship and whose robustness makes a mockery of all political and identitarian designations of any known left or right.

The resulting map is the most dangerous object in existence, for it renders all hegemonic political and social structures obsolete; it demonstrates, by comparison, their looseness, their fragility, their venomous weakness.

And when those strong, all-too-strong few who can contain such maps unite, there is an eruption as of Vesuvius, and the Earth quakes and the stone rolls away, and an altogether new thing strides from the tomb, not looking from side to side, but straight ahead, its brow unfurrowed, adamant—for it knows that, by simple virtue of its existence, it is a foregone conclusion; those temperate noble bourgeois heads which labored to keep it locked inside its tomb will roll, and their vaunted solidarities and sympathies will show themselves, at last, for what they were: the mendacious metastases of a terminal weakness, the tyrannies of a sickness unto death.

And what a death! What a thing to watch, this death! The meek have waited so long in hospice, in abject fear and postured trembling, longing for salvation, for the nebulous telos of progress—is this death not the very height of compassion? Of a benevolence of such gravity that it is only available to the strong?

***

This is not a call to violence, but a call to love thy neighbor; but, as in the Biblical Hebrew, thy neighbor is not simply he who lives near to you, but he who is worthy to live near you, who can withstand your type of love, of trust, and who can thus become part of you, part of us, of the strong, another link in Ariadne’s wire—in this labyrinth, the Minotaur is no worry: it was overcome by the very act of building the labyrinth.

Rather, the crucial thing is to explore the labyrinth, to find the structures therein that could not have existed outside of it—to find, that is, those structures which are only available to the strong, and to plot them, and to build them outside the labyrinth; the meek shall line up to explore them and shall be lost, consumed by their own incapacity to trust, by their own thirst for control, for certainty, which is the most disgusting and the most enfeebling of thirsts.

The Minotaur was overcome in the very act of building the labyrinth—or was it? What shall we find, as we plumb those depths, which are beyond all distances yet measured—nay, not only beyond, but upon different axes?

***

I am old-fashioned? So I am old-fashioned. I contain multitudes, and tradition is an unsurpassable teacher. The modern style is a non-style, driven by the craven fear of evoking a cringe, of seeming earnest. The addiction to irony is a horrific disease, marked by self-effacement, indirectness, a permeating weakness which recoils from the slightest hint of gravity. It is a commitment to insignificance. It is a resignation to meek morbidity. Irony is the shell erected by that all-too-soft mollusk who does not believe that he can recognize the world for what it is. We, the strong, have no need for it. It is only one of many self-denials which must be eradicated.

***

And so it is love which, in the end, is the answer. An eruptive love. A love which transgresses all bounds, which penetrates the skin, which renders the mind multiple. And what of the meek, who cannot endure such love, but must settle for solidarity—for the pathetic, mendacious conquest of those whom they only call “weak” because they recognize their superior strengths? Let them burn in the corrosive acid-reflux precipitated by the control which, in their insatiable thirst, they have guzzled; and do not try and save them, who are beneath contempt, beneath consideration, beneath us. For there is a fundamental hierarchy of man.

And so it is strength, the free exercise of the Will to Power, the ability to withstand trustful friendship, rather than a craven will to domination, which determines that hierarchy. It is the capacity to bear the explosive gravitas of friendship, the readiness to enact communication on an etymological basis—that is, “com”: with; “mun”: mouth; “-ication”: The union of a plural as a singular, the relinquishing of fearful egoisms, speaking and thinking as a solo and a choir: my name is Legion, for we are many.

And so, finally, is it that tradition is brought forward: For there is not an opposition between past and future, but rather between the past, as imagined by the traditionalist, and the future, as tyrannized by the progressive. But the strength of tradition was rooted in its timeliness, its honesty with regard to its material reality.

And so let us call it not tradition, but honesty, the strength to withstand recognition. And what shape does such an honesty take now? It is uncertain—indeed, a radical uncertainty, but a willingness to action in precisely such uncertain conditions, without the palliative atavisms of conservatism or the tyrannies of progressivism, but something new, a strength to match the hegemonic sickness, which is as terminal as this new strength is hopeful.

Let the meek rot. Long live the strong, the lonely, the lovers whose love erupts in the form of new worlds, new heights of trust, new summits of loneliness, to which only an equal may ascend, one superior to the meek, for whom the meek are as worthless as a gnat, and to whom the uncharted abysses of uncertainty are an invitation to barely bearable ecstasies, which are not to be controlled or moderated, but which are to be met headlong with a courage only accessible to a select few, who reside above, on a fundamentally higher plane, and have nothing to do with the pathetic political and moral squabbles of their day; but who, rather, chase better worlds, worlds which are not worlds but labyrinths, esoteric by virtue of their barring of all but the elite, the monstrous, the evil, who are, after all, the only explorers who are worthy of the maze and of the Minotaur which guards its center.