Dark Enlightenment, II

 I have been debating when to write here, and when to write at my (very obscure) Patreon, and I've decided that the Patreon site will be more focused and specialized. I'm writing for a target audience of, well... my vision of America. It's not well suited for stream of consciousness rambling, since I'm actually trying to make it readable for a stranger. Not like these posts that are more like notes to myself.

Anyways, learning about that whole Dark Enlightenment movement has been bothering me. Like wiggling a loose tooth, it just sort of eats away at me, and I wanted to dig into why.

When we are born, we generally accept the world we are born in as 'normal'. And the average person (who doesn't have a lot of wealth and power) mainly focuses on the basics - make a living, raise a family. Many hoping to find love and happiness, and maybe trying to be 'good' like their faith or principles tell them to.

That gives society a lot of inertia. And change... well, change is inevitable, but it's often uncomfortable. Plus change often means that some people win and some people lose.

In other words, change comes... and some people resent and resist it, and some people want it and encourage it, and in some ways the daily politics are an interplay between the two forces.

Too much change, too fast, and resistance builds up. Not enough change, too much stagnation and blockage, and issues also start cropping up.

But... if the status quo has too many problems, if more and more people decide change is important... it doesn't mean everyone agrees on the direction of change. 

If problems have become too big to ignore, people can still disagree on what to do in order to fix those problems.

A truly talented leader and statesman is one who can help bring people together and direct that change in a certain direction. They're able to overcome the competing visions, as well as the inertia of the status quo.

It's very challenging. I don't think I've ever formally thought of it this way, but managing that has been a large part of what drives my interests. 

How do you genuinely fix things, in ways that lead to something better.

Which involves all sorts of value judgements and touches on a lot of underlying concepts. 

Or perhaps to put it another way - as a young ROTC cadet, the Army taught me that leaders provide purpose and direction.

What is our purpose, and what direction should we move in order to get there?

I haven't really answered that question before, other than perhaps some vague platitudes, partly because it's such a large and complicated thing to answer, but a lot of it comes from the values I learned growing up. Both from political science and a deep love for our Constitution, as well as my family - which valued science and faith. Both. My family has always been rather STEM oriented. My father taught science, my brother teaches math, two or three of my uncles are engineers...

And my parents were also devout Catholics. Actually, my sister was asking about the People of Hope because back when my father was an officer in the Air Force and we were living in Nebraska, we took a long road trip to Notre Dame in South Bend, IN for a charismatic event of some sort, and she thought that was the group they were involved in at the time.

Every place we moved to, every new city or town, my parents would become part of a church... and were always very involved. They'd bring communion to the home bound, volunteer to do readings or distribute communion, were regulars at church, etc.

He doesn't ostracize us or make visits difficult or anything, but I know he's disappointed so few of us followed that path.

Anyways.

What I'm trying to get at is that all of those play rather well with Enlightenment values. 

Purpose and direction?

The Declaration of Independence put it best... "all men are created equal" and have certain unalienable rights. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But that's a very big idea that doesn't really tell you what it would look like. Doesn't really give us the how.

And I could go into some very long posts discussing that in great detail, but what bothers me about this Dark Enlightenment is that it's not arguing over the how. 

It's questioning those very values in the first place. It questions egalitarianism, questions the very idea that all of us are created equal.

It also ignores science and reason (though some of them pretend that they don't). It doesn't think that representative government is a good thing, and is throwing out the hard-learned lessons of hundreds of years of shared experience.

There are cracks in our current status quo, issues that have been festering for a long time... and I think many of us are open to the idea of change. 

Believe that we need change.

But the change these people are pushing for is malicious. It will cause suffering... an unnecessary, wasteful, stupid suffering.

And so I keep circling back to it, like wiggling a loose tooth. Asking myself why.

Why are they throwing all these resources, spending so much money... in pursuit of such a horrible, ugly, pointless goal.

This is not just about the Dark Enlightenment movement either. It's about every single news article or report that shows people working towards a darker and uglier future. It's the white supremacists, the christian nationalists, the MAGA supporters who still overlook Trump's attacks on the Constitution, the wealthy and powerful who enable all of that, and more.

I don't claim to have answers, though I have my suspicions.

I don't have the answers because I'm not in the social circles I think I would need to be, in order to know for sure. 

I make what I consider educated guesses, based off various things I've read and my understanding of human nature... but it's all just my personal untested theory.

And since these forces involve a LOT of people, I know that there's no true one-size-fits-all answer. Different reasons motivate different groups of people.

And still, I keep wiggling away at that loose tooth.

So let me make some educated guesses here.

First, I will say that modern society seems to have forgotten what real leadership is.

I think, sometimes, that people don't appreciate the different mindsets people have in different conditions.

Let me explain that a bit more.

In the Army, when we talk about 'good order and discipline' and 'morale', it's not just some fuzzy feel-good corporate-speak.

It can, quite literally, be a matter of life and death.

The stresses in combat are completely different from the stresses in civilian life.

In civilian life, if you have a bad day at work you can go home, open a beer, vent to your spouse or a friend, and then let it go. Maybe go drinking on Friday, and spend the weekend forgetting about it.

And if you can't let it go, then maybe you start looking for a new job. Bad leadership generally just means higher turnover, and it's a very rare subordinate who will try to bring something up to the boss when they know the boss won't take it well.

 You don't have that luxury in a combat zone. You have to be able to trust the people around you - maybe not with your money or girlfriend or boyfriend, but with your life. Trust that they will do their part, just as you do yours. 

The whole Band of Brothers thing is essential, and divisions that tear a unit apart can be deadly.

Since I wasn't infantry or anything like that, you can talk to the soldiers who went on patrol if you want more on that perspective, but the same is true to a lesser degree to anyone in a combat zone.

And you generally don't have the same stress releases that you do outside of combat.

You're away from your family. You see the same people every day at work (for ~12 hours at a time) and your unit has living quarters in the same location, so even if you might get some privacy when you sleep you're pretty much around the same people 24/7.

Alcohol is forbidden (though I've heard of soldiers finding ways around that.)

There's no movie theater, though you might be able to pick up some boot-legged videos from the little stalls the locals sell stuff at.

There's no real fast food places. Well, depending on which FOB or Camp you're at. You might have some little food truck with little options, but there's a reason so many returning soldiers head straight for a McDonald's or go to a nice restaurant to get a good steak.

Tensions that you might be able to ignore in civilian life will build. Especially six months in, with 120+ degree heat, when you're sick and tired of being around these people and have no real way of getting away.

Plus, of course, the occasional mortar fire or smoke from an IED or tracer rounds.

(And just assume it's all much more severe for our front-line fighters. Really, everything I listed out is tame)

Anyways. The point is, the military has a deep understanding of true leadership, built on a long history of leading troops in the most stressful environments imaginable.

And in civilian life? That perspective is... lacking.

You can found a company and become a CEO and make a lot of money building a large organization - and that requires skills I'm not trying to ignore. 

But you can do that without actually learning how to lead. You can be a tyrant, and subordinates will fall all over themselves catering to your every whim - and the ones who don't will leave. You can tell yourself that they just 'couldn't hack it' or come up with some other reason to justify the losses without looking at your own leadership... it's easy. Doesn't stress the ego quite as much.

That's the path that leads to losing in the long run though, because you start surrounding yourself with yes-men and loyalists and cronies, and all your information comes filtered to meet your preconceptions. Nobody will tell you an uncomfortable truth. 

You start valuing 'loyalty' over competence, and start losing the brilliant people who are unwilling to play along with you.

In the civilian world, well... you can live like that and seem like a 'success' and it'll be fine.

If you actually needed people to trust and follow you though? That's a different story. (You might have noticed that this is lacking, which starts driving your desire for 'loyalty'... but the problem isn't that loyalty is rare or that you have to find the precious diamonds in a field of waste. The problem is that loyalty is earned, and you don't know how to earn it.)

Kings and authoritarian rulers ultimately always fail.

Always.

You might get lucky with one or two. Maybe you have a wise ruler who knows how to actually lead. But eventually, you get someone incompetent who is too powerful to be stopped when they make bad decisions (and generally sees any attempts to do so as a threat, thus becoming a tyrant) and it generally doesn't end well.

Hell, the Bible even points this out in 1 Samuel 8:6-18. Sure, God gave in and gave the people the king they clamored for, but it's pretty clear God wasn't happy about it. 

He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

Does that sound like He's actually happy about kings? Sounds more like a warning to me.

But here we are, in 2025, and people are again rejecting the Lord as their king and clamoring for a king.