Might Is Right Read online

  There is no obligation upon any man to passive obedience, when his life, his liberty and his property are threatened by footpad, assassin or statesman.

  One of Columbus’s lieutenants in the West Indies captured a Carib chief by means of a subtle stratagem. The chief was invited to a feast and when there, persuaded with honeyed words to don (on horseback) a set of brightly polished steel manacles; it being cunningly represented to him, that the irons were the regalia of sovereignty. He foolishly believed his astute flatterer, and when the chains were firmly clasped around his limbs, he was led away, to die of vermin, turning a mill in a Spanish dungeon. What those glittering manacles were to the Indian chieftain, constitutions, laws, moral codes, and Hebrew dominated civilizations, are to the nations of the earth. Indeed, under the name of Progress and Social Evolution, mankind has been lured into foæted dungeons, where it labors unceasingly and for naught, in darkness, despair and shame. Like that Spanish lieutenant the masters of the earth first flatter their dupes, in order to more easily enchain them. Who talks nowadays of the “sovereign people,” without a laugh of derision? And yet it was once thought to be a term full of significance. Their ‘sovereignty’ is now acknowledged sham, and their freedom a dream. The sovereign people be — damned.

  It is clear, therefore, that the man or nation that would retain liberty, or be really safe, must accept no formula as final — must trust in nothing written or unwritten, living or dead — must believe neither in special Jehovahs, nor weeping Saviors — neither in raging devils, nor in devilish philosophies — neither in ghosts, nor in idols, nor in laws — nor in woman, nor in man.

  “O threats of hell, and hopes of paradise,

  One thing at least is certain — this life flies;

  One thing is certain and all the rest is — lies,

  The flower that once has bloomed forever dies.”

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  He who saith unto himself, “I must believe, I must not question” is not a man but a mere pusillanimous mental gelding. He who believes “because it has been handed down” is a menial in his heart; and he who believes “because it has been written” is a fool in his folly. Sagacious spirits doubt all things, and hold fast only to that which is demonstrably true.

  The rules of life are not to be found in Korans, Bibles, Decalogues and Constitutions, but rather the rules of decadence and death. The “law of laws” is not written in Hebrew consonants or upon tables of brass and stone, but in every man’s own heart. He who obeys any standard of right and wrong, but the one set up by his own conscience, betrays himself into the hands of his enemies, who are ever laying in wait to bind him to their millstones. And generally a man’s most dangerous enemies are his neighbors.

  Masterful men laugh with contempt at spiritual thunders, and have no occasion to dread the decisions of any human tribunal. They are above and beyond all that. Laws and regulations are only for conquered vassals. The free man does not require them. He may manufacture and post up Decalogue regulations, to bind and control dependents with, but he does not himself bow down before those inventions of his own hands, — except as a lure.

  Statute books and golden rules, were made to fetter slaves and fools. Very useful are they, for controlling the herds of sentenced convicts, who fill the factories and cultivate the fields. All moral principles therefore are the servitors, not the masters of the strong. Power made moral codes, and Power abrogates them.

  A man is under no obligation to obey anything or anybody. It is only serving-men that must obey, because they are caitiffs by birth, breeding, and condition. Morals are only required in an immoral community, that is to say a community held in a state of conquest.

  Fear God, bridle the spirit, and obey the law, is advice most excellent, as from a philosopher to a yokel, but when directed in all earnestness at a man of inherent might, he smiles to himself in silent scorn. Full well he knows that in actual life the path to victory and renown, does not lie through Gethsemanies, but over fallen enemies, the ruins of rival combines, through Aceldamas. “Meekness of spirit” is regarded by him as a convenient superstition, very useful for regulating the lives of his servants, his women and his children, but otherwise inoperative.

  “I rest my hopes on nothing,” proclaimed Goethe, and masterful minds in all ages have never done otherwise. This unspoken thought gives to all truly great men their manifest superiority over the brainless, vociferating herd. The “common people” have always had to be befooled with some written or wooden or golden Idol — some constitution, declaration or gospel. Consequently the majority of them have ever been mental thralls, living and dying in an atmosphere of strong illusion. They are befooled and hypnotized even to this hour, and a large proportion of them must remain so, until time is no more. Indeed the masses of mankind are but the sediment from which all the more valuable elements have been long ago distilled. They are totally incapable of real freedom, and if it was granted to them, they would straightway vote themselves a master, or a thousand masters within twenty-four hours. Mastership is right — Mastership is natural — Mastership is eternal. But only for those who cannot overthrow it, and trample it beneath their hoofs. Is it not a fact that in actual life, the ballot-box votes of ten million subjective personalities are as thistle down in the balance, when weighed against the far seeing thought, and material prowess of, say, ten strong silent men?

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  It is notorious, universally so, that the blackest falsehoods are ever decked out in the most brilliant and gorgeous regalia. Clearly, therefore, it is the brave man’s duty to regard all sacred things, all legal things, all constitutional things, all holy things, with more than usual suspicion. “I deny, and I affirm,” is the countersign of material freedom. “I believe, and I obey” is the shibboleth of serfage. Belief is a flunkey, a feminine — Doubt is a creator, a master. He who denies fundamentals is in triple armor clad. Indeed he is invulnerable. On the other hand, it has been said that every belief, every philosophy, has some truth in it, but so we might add has every insanity.

  Strong men are not deterred from pursuing their aim by anything. They go straight to the goal, and that goal is Beauty, Wealth, and Material Power. The mission of Power is to control and exploit the powerless, for to be powerless is to be criminal. The world would indeed be a house of horrors, if all men were “good” and all women — padlocked.

  As far as human search lights have yet penetrated, into the darkness that enshrouds the origin of nations, we see the subduers and the subdued, the plebeians and the patricians, the chiefs who governed, and the vassals who obeyed. And there is nothing in the most modern social developments (of these deedless days) to warrant any belief that this ancient and natural division of human animals, into castes of superiors and inferiors, sovereigns and serfs, can ever be dispensed with. The slave-owner’s whip cracked from the beginning and it will crack till the day of doom. In every kingdom, republic and empire on earth, we have (in one disguise or another) the master and the slave — the ruler and the ruled. In the course of centuries, names alone have changed, essentials have remained the same. Forms of royalty may alter but kings can never die. There was mastership at the beginning, and there will be mastership to the end. We build, but as our fathers built. Change is not progress, nor numbers advance.

  Every one who would be free must show his power. Unalterable remains the basis of all earthly greatness. He who exalteth himself shall be exalted, and he who humbleth himself shall be righteously trodden beneath the hoofs of the herd. “The humble” are only fit for dogs’ meat. Bravery includes every virtue, humility, every crime. He who is afraid to risk his life must never be permitted to win anything.

  Human rights and wrongs are not determined by Justice, but by Might. Disguise it as you may, the naked sword is still king-maker and king-breaker, as of yore. All other theories are lies and — lures.

  Therefore! If you would conquer wealth and honor, power and fame, you must be practical, grim, cool and merciless. You must ride to success (by
preference) over the necks of your foemen. Their defeat is your strength. Their downfall is your uplifting. Only the powerful can be free, and Power is non-moral. Life is real, life is earnest, and neither heaven nor hell its final goal. And love, and joy, and birth, and death, and fate, and strife, shall be forever.

  This earth is a vast whirl of warring atoms — a veritable revolving cock-pit. Each molecule, each animal, fights for its life. You must fight for yours, or surrender. Look well to it, therefore, that your beaks and spurs, your fangs and claws are as sharp as steel, and as effective as science can make them.

  Though, the survival of the strongest is the logic of events, yet personal cowardice is the great vice of our demoralized age. Cowardice is corroding the brain and blood of our race, but men have learnt to disguise this terrible infirmity, behind the canting whine of “humanity” and “goodness.” Words flow instead of blood, and terrible insults are exchanged, instead of terrible blows.

  How rich this degenerate world is in small, petty-souled, good-for-nothings, who are forever excusing their infantile ineptitude behind some plausible phrase — some conventional make-believe?

  Courage, I say! Courage, not goodness, is the great desideratum — courage that requires neither tin horns, nor calcium lights, nor brass bands, nor shouting multitudes to call it into effective action.

  But courage that goes its way alone, as undauntedly as when it marches to ‘victory or death’ amid the menacing stride of armed and bannered legions.

  Courage, that delights in danger — Courage, that knows not despair! Courage that proudly, defiantly smiles on death!

  Courage, that regards with equal loathing the multitude’s mad howls of hate, its stupid hee-haws and its stridulating ‘tremendous applause.’

  Courage, that asks no quarter, even with the knife at its throat — courage that is stiff-necked, unyielding, sullen, pitiless!

  Courage, that never falters — never retreats!

  Courage, that looks down with supreme disdain upon all slave regulations, upon all rights and wrongs, upon all good and evil!

  Courage, that has made up its mind to conquer or — perish!

  That is the kind of courage this world lacks. That is the kind of courage that aids by active co-operation the survival of the Fittest — the survival of the Best.

  That is the kind of courage that has never turned a master’s mill.

  That is the kind of courage that never will turn it.

  That is the kind of courage that will die, rather than turn it.

  * * *

  “When Svipdag came to the enclosure, the gate of the burg was shut (for it was customary to ask leave to come in and see, or take part in the war games.) Svipdag did not take that trouble, but broke open the gate and rode into the yard.”

  Queen Yisa said — “This man will be welcome here.”[1]

  CHAPTER II: ICONOCLASTIC

  As far as Sociology is concerned, we must either abandon our reason, or abandon Christ.

  He is pre-eminently, the prophet of unreason — the preacher of rabble-rabies. All that is enervating and destructive of manhood, he glorifies, — all that is self-reliant and heroic, he denounces. Lazarus, the filthy and diseased vagrant, is his hero of heroes; and Dives, the sane, energetic citizen, is his ‘awful’ example of baseness and criminality. He praises “the humble” and he curses the proud. He blesses the failures, and damns the successful. All that is noble, he perverts — all that is atrocious he upholds. He inverts all the natural instincts of mankind, and urges us to live artificial lives. He commands the demonetization of virtues that aggrandize a people, and advises his admirers to submit in quietness to every insult, contumely, indignity; to be slaves, de-facto. Indeed, there is scarce one thought in the whole of his Dicta that is practically true.

  O, Christ! O, Christ! Thou artful fiend! Thou Great Subverter! What an amazing Eblis-glamour, thou hast cast over the world? Thou mean insignificant-minded Jew!

  Why is it that our modern philosophers are so mortally afraid to boldly challenge the ‘inspired’ utopianism of this poor self-deluded Galilean mountaineer, — this preacher of all eunuch-virtues — of self-abasement, of passive suffering?.

  The sickly humanitarian ethics, so eloquently rayed forth by Jesus Christ and his superstitious successors, in ancient Judea, and throughout the moribund Roman empire, are generally accepted in Anglo-Saxondom as the very elixir of immortal wisdom, the purest, wisest, grandest, most incontrovertible of all ‘divine revelations,’ or occult thaumaturgies. And yet when closely examined, they are found to be neither divine, occult, reasonable, nor even honest; but composed, almost exclusively of the stuff that nightmares are made of; together with a strong dash of oriental legerdemain.

  Through a thousand different channels, current politico-economic belief is dominated by the base communistic cabala of the ‘man of many sorrows;’ yet as a practical theorem, it is hardly ever critically examined. Why is it that the suggested social solutions promulgated by Jesus, Peter, Paul, James, and other Asiatic cataleptics, are accepted so meekly by us, upon trust? If these men were anything, they were crude socialist reformers with mis-shapen souls, preachers of ‘a new heaven, and a new earth,’ that is to say, demagogues — politicians-of-the-slums; and out of the slums, nothing that is noble can ever be born.

  As agitators, Jesus and his modern continuators shall be exclusively considered in these pages. However, it must be distinctly understood that the spiritual and temporal in all cosmogonies, are so intricately interwoven, that it is almost impossible to completely divorce them. Like the Siamese twins, Gods and Governments are inextricably bound together; so much so indeed, that if you kill one, the other cannot live. Hence the open or secret alliance, that has always existed between the politician and the priest.

  Whatever their primitive purity (or impurity), all operative creedal philosophies are essentially civil and military codes, police regulations. ‘Religion is a power, a political engine, and if there was no God, I would have to invent one,’ said the great Napoleon. In letter and in spirit, Christianity is above all things a political theory, and a theory that often takes the form of raging hysterics.

  Religions are the matrix in which public institutions are generally molded. This has ever been well understood by the dominant leaders of mankind, from Numa to Brigham Young, from Solon to Loyola, from Constantine to the lowest Levite hireling, who gets paid in dimes and cents for his unctuous mock — dithyrambs.

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  ‘All ye are brethren.’

  Are all men really brethren? — Negro and Indian, Blackfellow, Kalmuck, and Coolie — the well-born, and the base-bred,[2] — beer-soaked loafer, and hero-hearted patriot — belted chieftain and ignoble mechanic-slave, — pot of iron and pot of clay?

  What proof is there that the brotherhood-of-man hypothesis is in accordance with nature? On what trustworthy biologic, historic or other evidence does it rest? If it is natural, then rivalry, competition, and strife are unnatural. (And it is proposed to prove in this book, that strife, competition, rivalry, and the wholesale destruction of feeble types of men, is not only natural, but highly necessary.) Has ‘brotherhood’ ever been tried upon earth? Where, when and with what final result? Is not self-assertion nobler, grander and more truly heroic than self-denial? Is not self-abasement but another term for voluntary vassalage; voluntary burden-bearing?

  Christ might well and truthfully have said unto his followers ‘Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden and I will bind you in unbreakable bonds, and load you down like an ass between two burdens.’

  The ‘poor and ignorant’ were his first followers — the vagrants, the disinherited shiftless classes: and to this very day, the poorer and more ignorant men and women are, the more eager are they to follow his religious ideals, or the political millennialisms that are distilled out of his delusions.

  ‘If we only lived as Christ lived, what a beautiful world this would be,’ saith all thoughtless ones. If we lived as Chris
t lived, there would be none of us left to live. He begat no children; he labored not for his bread; he possessed neither house nor home; he merely talked. Consequently he must have existed on charity, or have stolen bread. ‘If we all lived like Christ,’ would there have been anyone left to labor, to be begged from, to be stolen from? ‘If we all lived like Christ’ is thus a self-evident absurdity.

  No wonder that it is recorded: ‘Not many wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called; but God chose the foolish things of the world, and God chose the weak things of the world, and the things that are despised.’ Nothing else would have anything to do with him. Christ was indeed, the prophet of the credulous rabble during three years of active agitation, and it abandoned him in his hour of need (what always happens under similar circumstances) for the rabble is ever cowardly, ungenerous, suspicious, unfathomably base. It has never yet had a leader of commanding ability (either in peace or in war) that it did not ultimately desert or betray, i.e. if he did not take the precaution to make himself its master.

  After permitting Christ to be butchered, the mob thereupon set him up as their Divinity, and erected altars to his renown. Slaves, women, madmen, lepers, magdalenes, were the earliest Christians, and to this hour, women, children, slaves and lunatics are the raw material of the Christian Church.

  Primitive Christianity cunningly appealed to the imagination of a world of superstitious slaves (eager for some mode of escape that meant not the giving and receiving of battle-strokes.) It organized them for the overthrow of Heroic Principles; and substituted, for a genuine nobility based on battle-selection, a crafty theocracy founded upon priest-craft, hell-craft, alms-giving, politicalisms, and all that is impure and subterranean. It is a doctrine at once disgraceful in its antecedents, its teachers, and in itself. Truly has it been called ‘the fatal dower of Constantine,’ for it has suffocated, or is suffocating the seeds of Heroism.