Tolkien’s Wisdom and Naïveté:

Tolkien was not a Fascist, but his anti-Fascist politics were nonetheless as playful and escapist as his stories, and I can’t imagine that the irony of his own contradictions had been lost on him. There cannot be an abolition of control, since abolition is control. One cannot be arrested for professing what is in the interest of State, since only States can make arrests. (A “citizen’s arrest” is nonetheless a *legal* possibility.) There is no friendship without loyalty to common goods and expectations; there can be no noble aspirations without class distinctions, and a monarchy without a constitution is a tyranny. If all are born with evil in their Souls, then any has the obligation to control it, both in Self and Others; this especially is true if only some are evil and the others good, for any innocence must be protected. Men cannot defend those worthy of protection if there is no rational consensus in between them about who is worthy.

All of our moral aspirations strive to the fulfillment of the State, since it is out of that pursuit that moral aspiration comes. The World can never be enough as is; it always needs improvement and revision, since the hope for some transcendence in the Future is what motivates us to move on from all the trauma of the Past. Nostalgia derives its glory from the noble-minded fealty of leaders to their Kings, reflected in the piety of those same Kings in service to their King of Kings. Progressive thought is not a modern evil; social progress was what drove the epics, and the Hero’s Journey is a form of teleology.

The modern evil is not progress, but escape from progress, and the modern State is only evil insofar as it’s divorced from common goods. Yet those who pay no thought to common goods, for they associate appeals to common good as mere inventions of the Modern State, are certainly the greatest fools and tyrants, since the State at least instills the hope of progress and of selflessness in those whom it controls, while anarchists have no such hopes and leave us hopeless. There is no distinction between anarchist philosophy and whiskered men with bombs, since human beings that renounce collective benefit feel no remorse, in opposition to the State, in hurting their own fellow citizens. “Humanity” is much too vague as an appeal; only the *denizen* exists in fact.

Morality necessitates a moral objectivity expressed in moral imposition upon those whose views are false because objectively unjust or of no value to Society. The Modern State is but the culmination of amoral attitudes expressed under the guise of common goods. Yet it can only be the common goods that suffer. 

Throwing out the State is  only leaving power to be seized by savages; discarding moral obligation is to toss the baby out with all the water. There is nothing to be gained by such an effort, since a freedom without moral obligation is an evil which can’t be defended, and abuses of the State are such because they are abuses OF the State, since they employ those freedoms which have come with power with no thought to personal responsibility and harm, and so the anarchist and Fascist, though they hold conflicting views, become as one. (Yet we can pardon Tolkien from this charge, since his morality at least provides a common good to strive for.)

**[({R.G.)}]**


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