Crossing the Rubicon
10 January 2021
On the 10th day of the 11th month of the year DCCV A.U.C., Gaius Julius Caesar, ordered by the Roman senate to give up his governorship of Gaul and disband his army, instead crossed the Rubicon River into Italy. Alea iacta est. So began the Roman Civil War between Caesar and Pompey for control of Roman the government. Within a few years time both would be murdered by men who they thought were loyal to them and the Roman Republic destroyed forever. And so crossing the Rubicon was burned into the western lexicon as a decision from which there is no going back.
The question is, why was there no going back? Why couldn't Pompey and Caesar reach a peaceful settlement? They were playing a game as old as humanity itself for dominance of the tribe. But in this case the tribe was not a band of hunter gatherers on the African savannah, but instead an empire spanning the Mediterranean. Men proving their worth by defeating other men at the game of the day, military warface. When Caesar took Egypt, the breadbasket of the empire, from Pompey, he also took its queen, Cleopatra, cementing his virility by mating with the top female in the tribe. If this all sounds a bit silly and belittling toward our great forebearers, one would do well to remember they were people just like us driven by emotions and desires beyond their control despite trying to affix a logical patina around it.
Mediterranean civilization, however, found a way to short circuit this path to inevitable bloodbath in human conflict via a merging of Hellenic and Semtic traditions. Turn the other cheek. Pray for those who persecute you. Blessed are the peacemakers. Pay attention to the board in your own eye before the mote in your brother's. Can worrying add a single day to your life? And for legitimacy they put the monotheistic god behind it and created a philosopher hero in the mold of Socrates to die for those beliefs at the hands of an uncaring state.
Still, however, men made war and the supposed religion of peace became one of war when emperor Constantine painted crosses on his troops' shields and attributed his victory to this new religion. Building on this in Arabia a few centuries later another conqueror would put together a nearly perfect religion of continual war that required conquest of all of humanity, Islam. Christian knights absorbed this belief system of righteous warfare, succeeding for the most part in making it their own. Thus industrialized men were ready and willing to destroy civilization in the name of conquest. The British, the Germans, and the Russians were all aiming for domination of the same world thus must come to blows.
Enter America, the shining city on a hill, who after the wars advocated discussion over violence, who spent its money rebuilding defeated enemies as friends, and who brought the once warring countries of Europe together much as the Romans had done with Greeks in the Aegean a century before Caesar. So will history repeat itself as Santayana doomed us to because we will forget, or is the capitalist liberal democracy the end of history as Fukuyama claims?
This past week the president of these United States told a mob to march on the capitol. In all seriousness I think he intended it metaphorically but was nevertheless happy about what happened. The mob took him at his word and marched down to the US capitol building and took it over. Men like the self proclaimed Q shaman pictured above. And I say men specifically because they mostly appear to be men. That Trump is a symbol of virility to men who feel marginalized is an understatement, but one the media is wont to ignore because the angry white man is ever cast in the role of the oppressor. So they call it a coup attempt rather than what it really was: a cry for help and a desire to feel heard. Human psychology, however, is not designed to incorporate losers into the tribe. They are to be ostracized or murdered. Just look at the apes. Losers, finding eachother, could even band together to form a new tribe. Modern society does not have the escape valve of this frontier - the West one went to whether as a nineteenth century immigrant to the Americas or as a 10th century viking going to Iceland.
Perhaps Elon Musk will give us a frontier again with his martian colony. Perhaps another series of cataclysmic wars will eliminate the surplus of men. Perhaps women will choose to do the opposite of what they have done in China and abort male children en masse before they are born. Barring these unlikely events society is going to have to figure out how to better handle incorporating those who have had some bad luck, made some bad decisions, or been otherwise branded an outcast. If they do not feel they can succeed in the existing order, if they feel instead persecuted and oppressed by it, then these men will do what comes naturally and try to overturn it.
