Lucifer

Power resides where men believe it resides.
It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall.
– Varys

Civilizations begin to die when they mistake maps for the terrain of power. Rights, laws, markets, governments — illusions agreed upon. They endure only while young men choose to enforce them.

Today’s elites mistake the institutions they control for power, as if they were self-sustaining. The result is a predictable crisis.

The Reckoning#

Rome
The optimates ruled the Senate: men of inherited “quality”. They grew rich on slave labor while the plebs starved. Caesar saw it differently. He courted the legions, feeding them coin, land, spectacle. He knew their loyalty outweighed pedigree. When he crossed the Rubicon, the Senate discovered that marble words could not command hungry men. Cicero’s hands were nailed to the Rostra. The Republic was dead. The Empire had begun.

France
For a century and a half, ‘L’État, c’est moi’ was not a boast but rule itself. The monarchy wrapped itself in divine right; the court mistook ritual for mandate. When grain ran short, the Bastille answered. Young men — the sans-culottes — surged. Public executions settled the question of legitimacy.

Germany
The old guard — Junkers, generals, Hindenburg — thought they could contain the rabble. Communists against fascists, street brawls as safety valves. Bread and coal for order. But in the beer halls a wounded corporal rose with nothing but his voice. Armed with trench rage and belief. Within a decade, the aristocracy that thought it could control him was serving under him.

History teaches that elite hubris always ends at the guillotine. A lesson never learned. They forget that all power flows from a singular force.

The Singular Force#

Markets, governments, civic trust: these are not forces of nature. They are fragile patterns of compliance, parasitic on an order sustained by a singular force: the threat of violence. That threat rests on young men. Violence is the bedrock of order. When they withdraw, abstractions collapse. Order ultimately cashes out in force. Constitutions and rights are not self-sustaining. They exist only in the young man who obeys or pulls the trigger.

The Evolutionary Hijack#

The eternal challenge of civilization was never to erase this force, but to enslave it to order. Young men exercise not raw violence but coordinated risk. Evolution shaped them for small groups where survival depended on loyalty, discipline, and shared purpose. That instinct for belonging, for surrendering the self to the group, is why men have always been the backbone of systems.

For centuries, societies channeled this instinct and gave it structure: the army, the guild, the flag, the church. They took the small band and made it legion. Patriotism, duty, and honor were the narratives laid over the wiring.

Ignorance breaks the spell. Yet the circuitry remains. The need for belonging and sacrifice does not disappear. It seeks new objects.

Contempt#

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
– W.B. Yeats

Past rulers understood the force that sustains order. They appeased it, honored it, gave it narrative and structure. Today’s elites sneer. Loyalty, belief, identity: reduced to pathology. Energies that once bound civilizations are managed into sedation. When young men are told their instincts toward loyalty and belonging are sickness, they are left not pacified but unmoored. No flag, no altar, no standard: just abundance and sedation, where even masculinity itself is prescribed away. Contempt leaves a vacuum, and vacuums do not stay empty. Into that void step voices promising meaning. Among them, none has been courted more by power than Jordan Peterson.

Compliance#

He tells young men that meaning is found in burden. “The purpose of life,” Peterson says, “is finding the largest burden you can bear, and bearing it.”

Peterson

But he is not the first to use that metaphor. The Greeks knew it too. They called him Sisyphus. He rolled his stone in Hades. What Peterson calls meaning, they called hell. He hands young men their chains and calls them virtues, peddling hell for heaven. Peterson was elevated not for pronouns, but because he channels rebellion into obedience.

Nick Fuentes, by contrast, is cast out. Not because his words are uniquely dangerous, but because his audience is. Peterson and Fuentes are two sides of the same coin; the coin is young men. One side marked with obedience, the other with rebellion.

Defiance#

They froze my money. They banned my accounts. They put me on a no-fly list. And I realized: none of it matters. They can take it all tomorrow, and I’ll still go live the next day. I’m not doing it for money or praise.

I’m doing it for the pleasure: to be the wrench in their system.

– Nick Fuentes (paraphrased from live monologue)

If Peterson channels fire into obedience, Fuentes spits it back as defiance. His blasphemies are performance: rebellion for its own sake. That is why he is hounded, debanked, and cast into digital exile. Not because his words are lethal, but because control is fragile. His crime is proof that control can be broken; suppression only breeds defiance.

Pressure#

Peterson and Fuentes are not the eruption. Smoke at the crater, nothing more. Beneath the mountain a larger fire builds. Here are some seismic readings:

  • Wages: real wages down ~30% since 1980
  • Work: >95% postwar to ~68% today
  • Education (25–34): women BA ~47%, men ~37% .
  • Living (25–34): ~20% of men in parents’ homes
  • Divorce: ~two-thirds initiated by women
  • Suicide: men ~80% of deaths; rate 3–4× women
  • Sex (<30): ~25% of men report none in past year

Eruption#

You may drug it, mock it, exile it. You may call it toxic, repress it with pills, distract it with screens. But a volcano is a force of nature. It cannot be controlled. When it erupts, the damage is enormous, and cities in its shadow turn to ash.

Civilizations are not accidents. They are monuments to men who bound their will to order. Betray them, and the volcano erupts.