Lord of the Rings aficionado and Middle-Earth mixer joins me to discuss the role of the One Ring in the Lord's story, and how it relates to our understanding of the nature of power and the exercise of monarchy.
00:00:51.220You must reject the call of power because ultimately power corrupts and destroys and divides.
00:00:57.500But I think this is a shallow reading of the different book that they are referencing, the Lord of the Rings series.
00:01:04.380Because ultimately, while yes, there is a message about power in there, there's also a message about right authority.
00:01:10.880The last book is, of course, called Return of the King, and this is seen as a good thing.
00:01:15.740So it doesn't look like Tolkien is ultimately rejecting the use of power, but he does have some very important things to say about the nature of power.
00:01:23.940Joining me to discuss that today is Lord of the Rings aficionado and one of the best meme accounts on Twitter, MiddleEarthMixer.
00:01:36.680Well, we're going to get into Lord of the Rings, what Tolkien believed about power, the exercise of power, monarchy, and Lord of the Rings.
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00:02:44.580All right, Mixer, so like I said, we hear this debate all the time, right?
00:02:49.580Especially now when people are kind of looking at the presidency of Donald Trump, and even in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there are some people like myself saying, look, we must exercise a level of power.
00:04:00.180I used to know a legal scholar by the name of Dr. Guy Ferdon, and she wrote a book called A Republic, If You Can Keep It.
00:04:08.020And there was, I don't remember if it was jurisdiction or jurisprudence, and I apologize to her if she oversees this.
00:04:15.460But she identified the definition of what I believe was jurisprudence to be lawful use of lawful authority.
00:04:25.960That is so relevant to the concept of power in Lord of the Rings, right?
00:04:30.800Because there is lawful use of lawful authority, which translates to power, that many characters have and have permissions to do so by the creator god, Iluvatar.
00:04:45.280And then there are characters who commit unlawful use of unlawful authority.
00:04:52.400And Sauron creating the one ring would be a perfect example of that.
00:04:57.500So that's the angle I want to take it today.
00:05:00.620It's not that the use of power is wrong in order to get something important done.
00:05:08.940And does this character in the books, are they remaining within the boundaries that have been set upon them by their creator?
00:05:16.700So one of the things that I think goes somehow past people's heads, even though it's literally in the titles of the book, is as you say, one of the big themes is that the king has a specific duty to exercise power, right?
00:05:34.160A large theme in the book is, in many ways, we're looking at these different aristocratic classes.
00:05:41.500We're looking at these different leaders.
00:05:43.500And in many ways, they all fail because they reject their duty.
00:06:17.200I was just going to say, I can't imagine a better segue into what I was just about to dive into.
00:06:23.380So for this, I thought it would be fruitful, since everybody wants to make arguments about, you know, we shouldn't, we should never grasp at power.
00:06:33.940We should never take any level of authority.
00:06:35.660I'd like to tell a story from start to finish of what happened when a leader in the Lord of the Rings universe did not take up proper authority when they were supposed to,
00:06:48.060and the externalities that it placed on everyone and all of the fallout because of that original issue.
00:06:55.420Can I, will you indulge me for a second?
00:06:58.800So I want to talk about why the political situation in Gondor is broken, right?
00:07:05.080For all my lore heads, you'll enjoy this.
00:07:10.040Isildur, his father, his brother, they come to Middle-earth.
00:07:14.860They flee the destruction of Numenor, and they establish two kingdoms.
00:07:20.880These kingdoms are under the ultimate authority of Elendil, their father, right?
00:07:25.440And then the brothers rule Gondor in the south.
00:07:27.800There is some distance between the two kingdoms, so it requires there to be kind of a tetrarchy with the sons being subservient to the father up in Arnor in the north.
00:07:38.980And after the War of the Last Alliance, after the prologue of the Fellowship of the Ring, if you will,
00:07:48.040Anarion, who isn't in the movies, he's Isildur's brother.
00:07:50.980He is killed in the battles leading up to that moment in the prologue.
00:07:56.400And Elendil, of course, is killed as well.
00:09:44.360So he is of the line of Isildur, and he is told by a prophet that you must either let your kingdom be destroyed or claim both the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom and unite man against this threat coming in from the north.
00:10:04.220And if you aren't able to get that done, I'm paraphrasing, of course, you're going to die and your kingdom is going to die.
00:10:11.180And so Arvadui, he takes the wife of the Gondorian, or he takes a Gondorian wife.
00:10:19.520She is a princess, the daughter of the king.
00:10:21.340The king of Gondor in the south dies with no male heir.
00:10:25.000So he is now married to the daughter of the old king.
00:10:29.080And he says, hey, by rights of the fact that I am an heir of Elendil, and I am married to the last king's daughter, I'm going to take both kingdoms for myself, and we're going to unite and fight this threat that's coming from the north.
00:11:41.980And they put him in the position of kingship, instead of giving the rightful authority to Arvadui, because, again, he didn't have the gall to go claim it for himself.
00:11:54.040And, you know, let's not forget, the Gondorians were too prideful.
00:11:58.220In their pride, they made this mistake.
00:12:55.660So the line is broken, and then the stewards take over, all because they were too prideful to accept this king's claim from the north,
00:13:03.520while the king's claim in the north, him not being strong enough to go seize the throne himself.
00:13:08.580But this shirk of responsibility from everyone involved and his inability to take power created the political disaster that made for why men were so weak by the time you get to the Fellowship of the Ring.
00:13:59.920The stewards are there instead of the kings, but they are simply inferior versions of a king, right?
00:14:05.800You're still going to have the stewards there, but ultimately, you're getting an inferior leadership because you rejected rightful authority.
00:14:16.020And it has nothing to do with you needing to destroy.
00:14:19.220At no point is it, well, we've got to destroy the kingship.
00:14:22.940And if we just throw off the lordship of these kings, then ultimately, we will become free or we'll become strong or we'll have escaped the trap of power.
00:14:37.380There is no running away from responsibility.
00:14:39.600And we do see that over and over again that it's interesting because Denethor is obviously a character that kind of invokes a lot of disgust in people when they kind of watch the movie.
00:14:53.640And ultimately, one of the reasons, at least as I understand it, I'm nowhere near as versed in the book as you are, but ultimately, one of the reasons is that he has spent too much time looking into the Palateer, right?
00:15:04.280He spent too much time viewing the forces that Sauron has amassed.
00:15:16.100And so this is an interesting thing because he is, in a way, more learned on the topic than other rulers, right?
00:15:25.120Like, he has the knowledge, he has seen at these things, and as somebody who analyzes power on a regular basis, who peers into the Palateer from time to time, I can kind of sympathize with this problem, right?
00:15:38.780Because when you analyze power, when you look at the totality of power, it's very easy to be overwhelmed by it, to say there's just no way to escape, right?
00:15:48.840His rational mind told him that ultimately there was no victory over these forces.
00:15:54.540And so even though he's filling the role, and I would say this is a good allegory to many of our conservative leaders, right?
00:16:00.180He's filling the role of leadership because it has to be filled, but he is inadequate to the task because he is trapped by the reality that he sees in the glass, in the power.
00:16:12.280And so he becomes this, you know, you say a doomer, right?
00:16:18.420And so he never feels the call to, like, return his people back to their rightful place.
00:16:26.360He simply falls into depression after the loss of his first child.
00:16:30.760He, you know, basically tries to kill himself and the other child because ever since his wife died, he's, like, trapped in this, you know, in this depression.
00:16:40.460And that, in a lot of ways, feels like what we're getting from the David Frenches, right?
00:16:45.120Like, they're, like, look, we have to go along with power.
00:16:52.780We have to play inside the rules that the power has set up for us.
00:16:56.360And ultimately, I'm kind of willing to burn myself and my movement down as long as ultimately, like, I didn't become this thing that I'm warning people about, right?
00:17:09.000So as long as I don't care if the people around me kind of die to this, that I ultimately kind of sacrifice my, you know, very real son in a very, again, the connections here are really good.
00:17:21.600Like, you know, the older version of conservatives willing to sacrifice their children to avoid, like, you know, becoming this thing, you know, is very much the same thing that we saw from the steward of Gondor.
00:17:32.160And I just thought that was, like, an interesting contrast of what happens when you have an unworthy ruler sitting on the throne.
00:17:41.120He's filling the role, but he's dooming his people in the meantime because he simply refuses to see another way out or to find a true heir that should be able to bring Gondor back to its glory.
00:17:54.740Absolutely. And when you read the books, Denador actually is a much more fleshed out, tragic.
00:18:05.440You don't have the same level of resentment for him because you see this tragedy that has taken place inside this once great man, a man who should be in triumph over his enemies, who carries the majesty of those who came before him.
00:18:23.480But that blackpilling, so to speak, does happen to him.
00:18:29.480And we see Tolkien creates this foil of characters between Denador and Theoden as what is the proper response when everything is on fire, quite literally, how should a man respond?
00:18:46.820And Theoden had every, you look at the similarities, both lost a son, both lost an heir, both have everything crashing and burning around them.
00:18:56.280And where Theoden rises to the occasion and chooses hope with a little help from Gandalf, of course, they had to go in there and take out the trash.
00:19:07.320They had to remove Grima, who I love Grima because he is the quintessential archetype for the sneaky government bureaucrat, right?
00:19:17.920He's such a great character, the mischievous counselor, you know, there's so many of those in our government today that need to be kicked to the curb.
00:19:30.500And Tolkien uses that to show us, hey, even when everything around you seems insurmountable, hopelessness is only for those who can't see the end.
00:19:44.640And in Denador's mind, he thought he saw the end because Sauron really was whispering to him over years and years and years.
00:19:53.100He thought he had an edge over the enemy and really Sauron was using this thing to cause him to really only show him things that he wanted him to see.
00:20:04.240Well, of course, Theoden is another great example, right?
00:20:09.260Because you have, as you say, that influence of the counselor.
00:20:12.940And in many ways, obviously, we know that our government is constantly receiving, as you say, these demoralizing, destructive advice from bureaucrats, you know, people coming in.
00:20:25.840You can't do that. You don't have the authority. You can't make these decisions. You can't take these actions, right?
00:20:30.920In a way, the council is paralyzing. It's meant to be paralyzing.
00:20:35.560It's meant to stop you from taking your rightful authority and taking the honorable action.
00:20:40.600And you have to remove that influence, right? You need that removed.
00:20:45.100But also, really critically, the way that he has ultimately woken up, again, if I remember correctly, it's been a little while, but Gandalf puts the sword in his hand, right?
00:22:11.920But yeah, I just feel like that's a beautiful portrayal of like what stirs the king back to a noble action, right?
00:22:18.820Is he has to feel the weight of the instrument of his office.
00:22:22.880The sword, the rifle sword he has been entrusted with as the civil magistrate has to be felt in his hand before he can once again truly return to who he is and behave honorably.
00:22:35.160Yeah, and it's a great analogy there, you know, if you're looking for it, that the counselor, the sneaky counselor had the means of power and authority.
00:22:46.560If you want to look at a sword that way, certainly to take violent action if you have to as a king.
00:22:51.480And he had that locked away and hidden.
00:25:47.500We know that he's having this inner struggle.
00:25:49.700And that inner struggle is pushing him to do certain things with, obviously, what he thinks are good intentions.
00:25:57.180And it's, I think it's important to make a distinction between, like, all right, if power has to be seized, it can't be power that causes you to sin, right?
00:26:11.640But if it doesn't cause you to sin, and it is needed for the moment, then that authority needs to be filled.
00:26:20.860And the power that Boromir was reaching for in that moment was unlawful use of unlawful authority.
00:26:47.200They knew it was a craft of the enemy.
00:26:48.880But this thing was made by Sauron in order, as a means to concentrate his power that he was illegally using outside the will of Iluvatar.
00:27:04.180So because it has that clear sin aspect to it, whether Boromir is willing to admit that or not, and sometimes you really have to be guided by wisdom and just thinking.
00:27:21.360That's the difference between Faramir and Boromir is Faramir was more humble in his approach.
00:27:27.320He listened to right judgment and understood that this was a thing, and he said it himself, you know, I wouldn't pick this thing up off the road if I found it, not if the entirety of the kingdom of Gondor depended on it.
00:27:49.440So that's the difference there, is Boromir is reaching for something that intuitively he should feel is wrong.
00:27:56.080Now, in real life, we should be guided by the Holy Spirit, you know, to see when things are unclear, those are the triggers within ourselves.
00:28:07.520And in the books, Tolkien uses, he describes something called the secret fire, and a lot of people debate on, like, how much is the secret fire, which is the power of the creator?
00:28:19.260How much is it involved in the regular decision making of people in Middle Earth?
00:28:23.060But I think you have evidence of it throughout the books, is that this idea of Iluvatar's power moving in Middle Earth, it speaks to people, it whispers.
00:28:37.360So that's where Boromir committed his flaw.
00:28:40.580And deep down, he really did know that, you know, he admits that as much to Aragorn.
00:29:02.840I'll make sure to include a notice when we start the actual stream.
00:29:06.240But most of what we discussed so far has been obviously in the book, right?
00:29:11.160Because that's the context most people are making those associations with.
00:29:16.200But I think it is also useful to look at Tolkien's actual beliefs because he was a real person in the real world.
00:29:22.580And that obviously informed what he's writing about.
00:29:25.440So beyond the fact that he's writing about monarchy and the need to have these different authorities and to assume authority as king and not doing so is itself a sinful, is a flaw, is falling short.
00:29:39.100We also know that ultimately someone like Tolkien supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, which shocks a lot of people.
00:29:51.000But it makes a lot of sense when you realize that he was a ardent Catholic.
00:29:54.340And if you know anything about the Spanish Civil War, it was really bad.
00:29:58.880Like they were throwing nuns off of the sides of cliffs after raping them.
00:30:09.760Now, a lot of people don't like Franco because they tend to associate him with fascism.
00:30:14.000I think that's a wrong way to understand Franco.
00:30:16.120But I understand given the connections of the different people he was associated with at that time, there's a reason that sticks.
00:30:23.420But even knowing this, you know, Tolkien says, ultimately, you know, I support Franco because he's stopping the ravaging of the Catholic Church in Spain.
00:30:32.980And that's really important to me as a Catholic.
00:30:34.700In fact, he was so committed to this that this actually became a falling out between him and C.S. Lewis.
00:30:39.660And Lewis ultimately kind of breaks off their friendship in no small part because of this fact.
00:30:47.600So it's very interesting because even if you look at the, you know, we don't have to do just these, you know, extrapolations of what he meant in the book and, you know, try to interpret how he felt about power.
00:30:58.820It's clear that when the chips are down, he believed that ultimately embracing a authority that was protecting Christians in a time of persecution was worth it.
00:31:09.840Even if he ultimately might have had some misgivings about the way that was done or the man in charge or the allocation of the power, he would embrace a dictator like Franco if it meant stopping the communist murder of a large number of Christians.
00:31:24.180Yeah, Tolkien did certainly support Franco, and that is, as you said, something that tends to upset a lot of people.
00:31:31.520And I don't think it's as complicated as everyone really makes it out to be.
00:31:36.760You know, it's not it's not something that you have to write essays over.
00:31:40.440It's it's a simple matter of the fact that the token was a Catholic above all else.
00:31:46.700And the communists had you can call them the Republicans or whatever and do all the coping you want.
00:31:53.760But the communists and the left had full control of the other side of the pendulum in the Spanish Civil War, and they were committing all kinds of atrocities against the church.
00:32:02.760So that was something that Tolkien absolutely could not stomach under any circumstances.
00:32:07.780So I don't believe it was a difficult choice for him.
00:32:13.460Obviously, he would say that I didn't support everything.
00:32:16.760You can't you can't support everything in war.
00:32:18.900You know, Tolkien supported the allies in World War One and Two, but he would often make criticisms of propaganda coming from the allied side.
00:32:30.040He would often he was a huge critic of the atom bomb and was horrified of them.
00:32:35.280So there's there's things that he would acknowledge that were wrong about what what any one side has done.
00:32:43.760But ultimately, he was able to have the cognitive ability to be like, well, I clearly don't I don't want these people to have power.
00:33:33.300I do want to I know you kind of wanted to use some external sources and I do want to talk about that.
00:33:38.560But I want to also just make a brief mention of what does restoration look like in the books?
00:33:46.960Can we can I touch on that real quick?
00:33:48.660Absolutely. So one of the questions I wanted to answer is when it comes to politics in the book.
00:33:55.180And again, when you're reading Lord of the Rings, your your mind shouldn't be what political message should I get out of this?
00:34:00.080That's not where you should be at all.
00:34:01.820But when it comes to politics, what does what does good order look like?
00:34:05.940And good order looks like the restoration of the reunited kingdom of Gondor and Arnor.
00:34:12.100And that is a vast dominion under Aragorn.
00:34:16.520So for anyone to say that all power is bad, I want you to go on Google right now and look at a map of the restored kingdom of Arnor and Gondor, because it's I mean, it covers the entire thing top down and stretches all the way out east.
00:34:44.520But it's important to note that for Tolkien, what that good looked like was a monarchy and a monarchy that acts as a conductor, not as not a total state.
00:35:00.660Tolkien talked a lot about, you know, a lot about the total state.
00:35:03.120I think you wrote a nice, nice book on that.
00:35:07.360Tolkien was an enemy of the total state.
00:35:10.160And what that monarchy looked like in the restored kingdom was you could use the Shire as a great example.
00:35:16.780So when it's restored and the northern kingdom is rebuilt, Aragorn has a political situation with the Shire where there's a mayor and there's a Thane.
00:35:27.200And they loosely report to him, but they are mostly left to govern their own affairs.
00:35:38.220Like I said, he acts as a conductor of an orchestra, but they are left to live peacefully to themselves.
00:35:45.200And that kind of sacred, if you want to call it medieval anarchy or sacred medieval anarchy where authority looks more like a patchwork, you know, as opposed to this huge state full of bureaucracy and people who are...
00:36:09.100The bureaucracy is what the Shire looked like when it was scoured, right?
00:36:14.460During the scouring of the Shire, there's rules posted everywhere.
00:36:18.660Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, they return, they come over the bridge, and the first thing they see is a bunch of hobbits locked in this disgusting house where there's a list of rules on the wall.
00:36:29.980You know, you read that and you go, oh, this is a lot of times what liberal democracy looks like.
00:36:35.400You know, this, if you want to call it the HRification of government.
00:36:45.040He talked about throwing people in prison who used the term, who used the word state in any other definition besides just referring loosely to what has historically been the nation of England.
00:36:56.720So that's what a restored monarchy looks like, is this, is Aragorn being a noble protectorate under the authority of the creator, which that essentially comes through like Gandalf.
00:37:12.460Gandalf is the mastermind, if you want to say that, behind him returning to the throne.
00:37:18.420Gandalf is pushing the events of Middle-earth in that direction, himself acting as the priest for the king.
00:37:27.180So that's, that's what right power looked like to him.
00:37:31.540I'm really glad you brought that up because I was, my next point was going to be him, you know, the quote that people like to throw around is him talking about being an anarchist, right?
00:37:40.500Like, and, and they don't understand because they're not familiar.
00:37:43.440They never finished that quote, though.
00:37:47.000So he says, I could be described as an anarchist and, and I'm, this isn't verbatim.
00:37:54.400I'm, uh, doing it off the top of my head, but I could be described as an anarchist, which is to say that I don't believe in whiskered men with weapons, uh, pointed at everyone.
00:38:07.160Or he says, or everyone stops at anarchist.
00:38:10.140He says, or an unconstitutional monarchist.
00:38:16.100So it's like, uh, those are very different and you have to square those two.
00:38:21.100And, and what does he really mean by that?
00:38:23.380And what he really means is, is sacred monarchy, one that acts as an orchestra conductor that does not interfere with the family church or, or individual property owners.
00:38:36.560That's, that's more, or the, the community, the village, if you will.
00:38:40.360Uh, that's, that's more what he means by that.
00:38:42.940The, the, the, the, the power and the ability to solve a problem should be as close to the problem as possible.
00:38:55.920And when he used the word machine, he's not talking about any, he's not talking about a car or a plane.
00:39:02.520He's talking about the machine and the abstract, the machinification of every aspect of our lives.
00:39:09.540It's the machinification of, of government because now, now government is figuring out how to surgically control you to surgically have a stake in every aspect of your life.
00:39:23.360That is what Tolkien repudiated and hated more than anything else.
00:39:27.240And this is really what shows you that a lot of people have a cartoonish understanding of what a monarchy looked like, right?
00:39:35.540When you say the words feudal anarchy, like that just, for most people, like their brain just shuts down immediately when those two words are mentioned next to each other.
00:39:43.700Cause they're like, well, no, uh, kings get to do whatever they want and they have total authority.
00:39:49.380Anarchy, anarchy is the absence of authority.
00:39:51.580And therefore you can't have feudal Kings and anarchy, but this is a terrible definition.
00:40:40.560Like he has to convince them if he doesn't have their banners, if he doesn't have their tax money, if he doesn't have their levies, then he cannot go and do what he wants to do.
00:40:49.500And so the King is in a constant negotiation with these nobles about like how to get things done.
00:40:54.860And that means it's very hard to centralize power in a state apparatus because so much, much of it is distributed down into the people.
00:41:02.660If you read something like the ancient city by Cologne, you get the same idea that ultimately the different tribes and the different, uh, you know, uh, aristocrats and their control over their tribe.
00:41:13.820Like the gins really kept the central power from Rome from being able to create this like organized state.
00:41:20.940And he marks the transition from kind of the, uh, Republic inevitably to the empire to the fact that over and over again, the central government destroyed the authority of these regional rulers of these nobles of these heads of the gins, these, uh, these patriarchs, they lost the control of their, uh, of over their people.
00:41:41.060And every time the people thought this was some kind of liberation because, Oh, look, the, this, this Lord is no longer over me, but actually they were just handing that authority to the state.
00:41:50.900And this is kind of the, the argument to make in the total state is that what we've done is we keep handing power over to the bureaucracy in hopes that we can escape the power and authority of our regional rulers, these different spheres of authority.
00:42:01.880But instead what we've done, instead of free us from government authority, we've just created a complete lack of barriers to overall centralization of authority.
00:42:10.740And so when Tolkien's talking about this medieval anarchy, it really is anarchy in the sense that there is no true central state, that it's all just a constant negotiation between these kind of regionalized powers.
00:42:22.500And that's what he was looking at. So when he said King, he didn't think centralized authority. He actually thought the opposite, that the King was a way to keep the authority from being totally centralized.
00:42:34.920So I just think it's interesting because so few people grasp what real monarchy looked like, that they just kind of think about some movie they saw where the King said off with his head and like that's it, right? That's what Kings are.
00:42:46.800Yeah, it's important. Whenever you read any letter from Tolkien, you have to look at it from the perspective of a person who believes in idealism that the West once had that has been lost, right?
00:43:01.660And people are reading his letters and they see modern words in there that mean completely different things to them.
00:43:08.380And then they go, Oh, look, you know, Tolkien, Tolkien would have supported genital mutilation in a, in a, you know, it's, it's like crazy.
00:43:16.300The, the, the conclusions I've seen people come to, but the one point I wanted to make is a lot of people ask like, okay, well, what was, what is the power?
00:43:27.440Like, like, what does Tolkien mean? What does the power level look like of a monarch? And I mentioned the quote about, and he's like, or an unconstitutional monarchy.
00:43:36.880It's not because he doesn't not support in, in an ideal world, a constitution because he doesn't believe that the King's power should be restrained.
00:43:48.100He doesn't support a constitution because, and it's for the same reason that a lot of the anti-federalists didn't want to have a bill of rights, right?
00:43:56.240They don't want to have a document that says, here's as close to the line the King can get before committing evil, right?
00:44:04.620Because then you can figure out ways to get around those.
00:44:07.940So that if I had to take a guess was why, and I, and I believe I'm right, was why Tolkien believed that.
00:44:14.900It wasn't so there would be unchecked power, but that there would actually be in the longterm, more checked power because you wouldn't have a situation where the King knows exactly what he can and can't get away with.
00:44:28.340And more often than not, those, those documents actually tend to deteriorate, right?
00:44:34.200And the governing power tends to get, get away with more and more and more as time goes on.
00:44:38.360And if you talk about the patchwork and the medieval anarchy, you say, you could ask yourself the question, like, who's more powerful, the local Lord or the King?
00:44:48.780Well, it depends on who you ask, right?
00:44:51.160Because a local Lord is going to have more loyalty from the people, if he's a good, if he's a good leader, from the people who live under him and are closest to him.
00:45:01.400So that's where their loyalty is going to lie.
00:45:04.640And that's the kind of society that Tolkien thought was best, right?
00:45:11.520Is local people having the most loyalty to whoever their local leaders are.
00:45:17.000And that creates this, fighting factions oftentimes actually creates a better situation, right?
00:45:36.240And without power confronting itself, without different powers pushing back against each other, someone will rule, right?
00:45:44.920And so you have the situation where, yes, technically some unelected bureaucrat in, I don't know, the civil rights division of the United States government has more power than most kings could have imagined throughout history, right?
00:45:58.440Like he snaps his finger and tomorrow he can dictate what every business and every institution and every religious organization in the country has to believe and has to carry out in their private dealings, right?
00:46:11.520Like you're basically, like it's, they can make it more or less illegal for you to think certain things or believe certain things, act in certain ways and no one elected them.
00:46:20.220There's no check on the cower, but also no one's going to call them king, right?
00:46:23.180Like there's no, and so it is the, it is the most empty seat of authority moment imaginable, right?
00:46:29.300Because you have this person who is not worthy of leadership, who has no accountability, who has no honor, who has no, you know, no tie to the line of true honorable succession.
00:46:39.940And yet they are the one wielding all of the power and authority in that situation, more power than any legitimate king throughout most of history would have had.
00:46:49.300And so I think that just getting rid of the title of monarchy does not remove power, right?
00:46:55.120Like just saying, oh, we don't have king, you know, we just had the no kings protest, right?
00:47:02.100Yeah, the government of California can steal your child if you don't want to chop their genitals off.
00:47:06.520But there's no king, no monarch, right?
00:47:09.960And that's what, no monarch in history would have thought of subjecting every parent in their entire civilization to this like weird mutilation sacrifice ritual.
00:47:21.760And if they don't do it, they lose their children.
00:47:23.540Like no, no, no king throughout history would have thought that this was ultimately going to be like a good idea.
00:47:28.120And they also wouldn't have even had the ability to do so.
00:47:31.560You think about medieval England, those leaders did not have the ability to control in such a mechanistic way how everybody, as you said, you can snap your fingers and then every business government organization does this thing.
00:47:47.580You know, they wouldn't have been able to do that.
00:47:48.640Exactly. So I think it's just very interesting that the misinterpretation of what monarchy was, the ahistorical understanding of how it worked, and just the way that people throw around Tolkien as this like anti-authority guy.
00:48:04.820When if we look at any of the stuff that he's talking about, it's not a rejection of authority, it's a rejection of unrighteous authority.
00:48:14.340And it's an encouragement over and over again, like we said, one of the big themes of these books is that you must have the right people assuming authority and that there is a cost for not exercising power, for not assuming your proper role, for shunning or for being too arrogant to accept lawful rule, right?
00:48:32.560Like there is ultimately a consequence. So that's kind of just what I think we hit on most stuff. Is there any other aspects that you wanted to touch on before we go?
00:48:40.200No, I think, you know, we were going to go about 45 minutes, right? I think that pretty much, I think we've covered the gauntlet of it. I was going to maybe talk about Numenor, but I think we've reached a good ending place.
00:48:51.340I think to, to summarize it though, is if you, if you take anything away from this podcast, it's the one ring is unlawful use of unlawful authority.
00:49:06.740And there are characters who need to rise to the occasion of lawful use of lawful authority. And that is, that is a theme throughout all of the books, not just Lord of the Rings, but the entire legendarium, you know, go, go read the Silmarillion.
00:49:24.300There's plenty of examples of kings that needed to do the right thing at the right time. And if they don't do those things, then people suffer.
00:49:31.840Absolutely. All right. Well, we'd like said, no, uh, super chats today because we are prerecorded. So sorry, guys. Uh, can't answer any of your questions today before we go. Is there anywhere you want to direct people? I know you got the podcast, uh, the, the, uh, the, uh, Twitter account, anything else people should know about.
00:49:49.780So, uh, yeah, I plan to come out with a bunch of new content in 2026, uh, big plans. I paused the podcast for a while because my nine to five and dad life
00:50:00.940got pretty busy, but, uh, right now you can find me on Twitter at middle earth mixer. And then you can see my old episodes on Spotify and Apple. Um, and I plan to come out with more stuff soon.
00:50:14.420Excellent. We'll make sure you're following them. So, you know, when those new episodes come out. And of course, if it's, if it's your first time on this channel, you need to subscribe on YouTube, click the bell notification. So, you know, when we go live, if you want to get these broadcast as podcasts, you need to subscribe to your Mac entire show on your favorite podcast platform.
00:50:29.180And when you do please leave a rating or review, it really helps with the algorithm magic. Thank you everybody for watching. And as always, I will talk to you next time.