Why this philosophy of life is being promoted right now, why it doesn’t genuinely explain the natural world, and why a civilization based on that principles isn’t truly a civilization at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5TvBdNaAWo
Like many New Yorkers, I’m still kind of buzzing from our recent victory. No, I don’t mean the socialist democrat candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani who won their primaries—though that was interesting, and I’d argue much less about Mamdani’s charisma or endorsement than a genuine groundswell of people who see the potential for a civics that supports human flourishing. Government can be about even more than beating up people in the street, preventing them from getting healthcare, or poisoning their groundwater for the benefit of tech billionaires.
But no, I’m not talking about that. I mean the New York Knicks winning the NBA finals, after 52 years of heartache. This town went crazy. With everything going on around us—the war, the atrocities, ICE, extreme weather, voter suppression, trillionaires feeding our water to AIs, artificially enforced divisiveness—it felt so good to have something in common. For a whole city to be on the same team.
During the whole run up to the finals, I’d get in conversations with strangers on the street: black white young old rich poor male female and other. We all had permission to talk with each other. The Knicks served as “social currency”—that’s a term I coined in the early 90s, for topics that give us an excuse to interact. It can be some authority or skill you have, like telling jokes or knowing facts, that make you interesting at a party. But it can also just be touch points that allow for social contact.
After one game, I got in a conversation in the street with two twenty-something guys about the magic rituals we’d do to ensure wins. I explained how when things get really dire I switch from TV to radio, and it sometimes makes the difference. Then they call over some other strangers, “This old guy listens to the Knicks on the radio for luck!” “Old guy” notwithstanding, I felt part of my local community in a way I hadn’t experienced in a while, particularly in today’s polarized landscape where people seem afraid to talk at a bar or a barbecue lest they find out their on opposite sides like Hatfields and McCoys.
The night we won the championship, everyone went outside into the streets as if on cue. NYC does carnival. Traffic halted. Everything halted, as everyone celebrated the opportunity to celebrate together. It was madness. It was love.
The very next night, on the south lawn of the White House, a different sort of sporting event took place. The UFC, owned by Trump ally Dana White (and my former literary agency, William Morris Endeavor), and broadcast exclusively by Trump ally Larry Ellison’s Paramount TV—of which Trump is a shareholder, and for which his administration cleared a $111-billion takeover of Warner Brothers along with CNN, just a week or so prior. The fighters, meanwhile, receive their winning bonuses in cryptocurrency issued through Trump family’s World Liberty Financial.
But I’m less interested in the conflict of interests here, than the interest in conflict.
Douglas Rushkoff || This was a throwback to the gladiatorial contests of Ancient Rome. In case you missed it, a giant arena was erected on the south lawn, dwarfing the White House itself. They called it The Claw, for the giant steel superstructure over it. Neon and lasers, Joe Rogan announcing, Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires attending, fighters fighting ,and the winners running over to President Trump in the first row, bowing to him, and receiving his approval. “Good fight.” Yes, it was his 80th birthday celebration, but this was more like the attention a two-year-old gets at his birthday party. Or, more to the point, a Roman Emperor.
In those times, like in ours, the games were intended as a form of propaganda. They usually held games in times of war, when the public was getting impatient with the slow returns on expensive campaigns. If Anthony was losing battles in Africa, the taxpayers funding it all would still get a reward in the form of a day of matches. The Emperor’s thumbs up or down after a match decided the fate of the vanquished fighter, and reinforced the Emperor’s god-like power over life and death.
They knew what they were doing. We know this because regional leaders were not allowed to hold death matches within a few months of an election (see my 1999 book Coercion for more on that). It gave them too much authority, and too much of an advantage.
But even more than a chance to aggrandize the emperor, beyond satisfying the sadistic, malignant narcissism of an emperor or would-be emperor like Trump, gladiatorial contests are meant to affirm the underlying ethos of an authoritarian society: might makes right. Military force, wealth, or violence dictate the law, overriding abstract morality. The “abstract morality” is all that law, all that trickery devised by intellectuals and Jews to protect immigrants, minorities, and other inferiors. The kinds of ideas now getting officially listed terrorism and leading to long prison sentences.
The fights celebrate a world where the strongest guy, the best fighter, gets the glory, the girls, and the gold. Ideally, the biggest winner at the end of the day, the last man standing, is a Roman or white dude or whoever represents the national bloodline. The original games made this explicit. They’d start with a round of animals against animals, then female slaves against animals, black men against females, and so on, all the way “up” in their schema, to white against white. The games offered an opportunity to see those racial hierarchies play out in their bloody fullness.
Retrieving the spirit of the games, if not the actual death matches, retrieves these same sentiments and ideologies. I watched some of the matches at my friend’s place. He couldn’t get the Paramount channel to stream on his TV even though he’d paid for it, so we watched through one of those pirated sports streaming websites. It ended up even more of an anthropological deep dive, because the website had a chat board attached to it.
And, trigger warning, that board was vile. I’ve been living a pretty insulated life lately, I guess. The most popular word in the chat was the N-word, when it wasn’t words for Jews, gays, or women. Several users kept posting 3D swastikas composed entirely of text characters. But most of the conversation had to do with questions such as whether the Jewish fighter would beat the Black fighter, an argument which hinged on the pros and cons of the various racist tropes associated with each….species of sub-human. As in: can a Jew use this or that of his known qualities against these other attributes that any Black fighter would have — or will he lose because of this quality or that. The loudest voices simply complained about having to watch a match between two inferior races.
That is, until the biggest interracial match of the evening was between ostensibly white (actually half-Mexican) American Josh Hokit and black heavyweight (and Trump favorite) Derrick Lewis. After Hokit won with a TKO, he got interviewed by Joe Rogan in the ring. As if trying to win Trump’s favor, he said “Shout-out to Trump for having the balls to put some s— like this on,” then he thanked his Lord and savior Jesus Christ, and then — as if he hadn’t done quite enough to appeal to the emperor, added the complete non sequitur, “Michelle Obama is a man.” Joe Rogan didn’t break his grin.
The chat stream went wild. One of their own had the guts to say the naughtiest, most racist, sexist, Trumpy thing possible. Hokit later told a podcaster he meant it as a compliment because, well, “She knows how to work hard like a man when the times get tough. You know… the tough keep going.” He said he was also celebrating America’s greatness through a demonstration of freedom of speech.
Beyond the racism and transphobia and circa-2008 Alex Jones conspiracy theory, the statement in the ring was a bizarre, adolescent version of might-makes-right. I won this fight, so I get to say something crazy. Like performing a daring act in front a cult leader in order to prove devotion, Hokit upped the ante on depravity. All to get daddy Trump’s approval by modeling his crude verbal impulsivity. To him, and to this culture, it’s a sign of masculinity.
But it’s also a reflection of the core tenet of this whole approach to life, sex, race, and geopolitics: might makes right. The very opposite of what defined human evolution, and what makes a civilization actually work.
I had been explaining this to my friend with the illegal stream (I talk a lot when the TV is on), and he disagreed. “When you think of it,” he responded “it’s always been might makes right.” And this guy was something of an intellectual. He wrote real books, and he’s smart — even if the covid-era restrictions and Democrat hypocrisy had pushed him over to dark enlightenment thinking. His point was that even when we have apparently cooperative agreements between us or our nations, they’re really just the result of someone having overpowered someone else. It’s always might makes right, same as it ever was.
But in practice, that’s just crazy. Trump clearly believes might makes right. He often acts as if he has unlimited power, or at the very least seeks to behave as if he did. In his vocal ramblings lately, he has asked what would Napoleon do? Or Attila the Hun? After his invasion and kinda-coup in Venezuela, he came to think of himself as invincible. His failure in Iran hasn’t convinced him otherwise. Trump’s strategy of force only succeeded in turning Iran into a dominant regional power with a chokehold on the passage of global oil, while also encouraging Israel into a possibly suicidal overreach.
It turns out, treating the rest of the world as enemies who will submit if we show a willingness to unleash our power does not work.
Neither does social Darwinism, a bastardized misinterpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which holds that everything is in competition with everything else. The fittest individual survives the battle, and is better for it. It doesn’t take cooperation into account at all. The most prevalent feature of the most evolved species, like trees, is that they have learned to facilitate the lives of many others—or even benefit from them. Trees are homes to thousands of other species, from lichen to squirrels, many of whom provide services in return. Trees have had time to learn how to shift from simply protecting themselves from others, to collaborating with them.
Humans are quite new as a species compared with trees, and humans of this civilization even newer than our indigenous elder siblings, which is why we’re just learning how to get along with things. The retreat to might-makes-right, whether supported by Ayn Rand’s science fiction stories or the feeble efforts at machismo cosplayed by Mark Zuckerberg, is a step backwards toward middle school. Michelle Obama is a man.
And the misguided notion that collaboration weakens everyone flies in the face of not just morality but science. When Elon Musk, in his illegally appointed role as commander of DOGE, shut down USAID, he said it “was not just an apple with a few worms inside, it was a festering ball of worms in the shape of an apple.” He claimed it was “a radical-left political psyop.” In other words, it’s not just that USAID was corrupt; it’s that the very mission of sending aid to stop AIDS and Ebola was a corruption of the God-ordained principles of might-makes-right. Sending African children vaccines or, worse, eradicating one of “their” diseases altogether, is cheating. It’s tipping the scales on the might-makes-right competition. It’s disadvantaging those who have already attained their trillion-dollar lead. It’s the kind of charity that Peter Thiel calls Satanism, because it redistributes assets that could be used for an Ubermensch’s ascension to an inferior, sub-human’s unnecessary and redundant survival.
Lancet—the most prestigious medical journal in the world—estimates that defunding USAID will lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030. According to Harvard University, the number of deaths caused by the sudden retraction of aid led to 1.6 million by April. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is threatening to sue representative Ro Khanna for quoting these figures on the house floor.
But it’s not just “them” who suffer and die. Them is us. You don’t want them getting ebola, not when 15 million people in the world travel by plane every day. It’s not just their babies who die of AIDS if we don’t send medicine. It’s our scientists who lose the ability to observe its modes of transmission and end the threat to everyone.
Employing might-makes-right against Greenland and Denmark alienates Europe and makes America weaker. Just like using UFC logic to teach kids to be bullies doesn’t make them safer on the playground. Even if it makes one kid—the strongest kid— safer for a moment, he’s now got to watch his back all the time, like a silverback male awaiting the next challenger.
But that’s the whole point under authoritarianism. These violent foreign policies model our interior culture. They create the atmosphere of constant threat that leads people to seek the protection of the authority. That’s what the endless, meaningless wars of Orwell’s 1984 were about. The enemy without is no less important than the enemy within.
To authoritarians, cooperation and collaboration are themselves the enemy. If people aren’t afraid of each other, they won’t revert to this childish playground behavior. We must be kept competing with each other, in constant danger from outsiders, immigrants, different races, or even just those who question all this violence.
At best might makes right is a temporary stage for societies that have gotten imbalanced. But once you win, the first thing you do is put down your weapons and rebuild a cooperative society. Jamie Wheal just wrote a piece about how America was founded on the ideal that as soon as you win the war, you return to your farm. After you’re president, you go back home and live a normal life. That’s what the Enlightenment taught: humans can make the world less cruel, slowly but surely optimizing for everyone’s pursuit of happiness.
I tend to look at it more geographically. The world may be violent so you need a standing army of some kind, but you have that army on the perimeter so that you can enjoy an entirely less might-makes-right reality within. That’s the very definition of civilization. A way to cooperate and collaborate together in big groups instead of fighting over stuff. This means we can spend less of our energy on battles and more on music and love and science and children. That’s what we can teach our kids; not the fiction that “might makes right” is the natural law. Civilization is how people learn to work together for the benefit of all. It’s more advanced than might-makes-right. Not wimpier, not repressive. It’s the indigenous American tribes who let a council of women choose a male chief — always with the power to veto his choices or select a different one if he got out of hand. And if he wouldn’t step down, the people would just leave.
As for our relationships with the rest of the world? If it’s truly barbaric out there, you marshal some resources to defend the perimeter, and seek out other tribes or nations with whom to forge alliances. The more alliances you have, the fewer enemies you need to worry about, and the less relative power they have. That’s what institutions like League of Nations, the World Court, and the United Nations were for. Can they get bureaucratic and boring and even co-opted by big money? Yes. But at least they are principled on something other than the logic of organized crime families.
So you make alliances, cooperatives, and communities within and without. And if they don’t get too mired in capitalism, they end up smarter, living in greater abundance, and with more resources to spend on defense (and more allies to come to your side) if it becomes necessary. Not people to come help you invade someone else, as Trump thinks it works, but people to help defend if someone is trying to invade you.
When we succumb to the prison yard logic of might-makes-right, we enable and empower the sociopath. We don’t have to suffer sociopaths as the richest and most powerful people in our society. That’s more a function of our choices, our values, our refusal to forge solidarity and mutual aid, than it is their intrinsic power as mighty individuals. They are rotten fruit of a might-makes-right non-civilization.
You know how I’ve been saying lately that this civilization is dying and we have to learn to act as doulas for its passing, as well as doulas for the birth of whatever comes next? Well, let me amend that. It’s not civilization that is dying, but this anti-civilizational logic, and the criminal, anti-human enterprises that have grown in its poisoned soil.
Don’t avert your gaze. Look at it. This is not life. Mixed martial artists deserve better than to serve at the feet of an 80-year-old sadistic child, bastardizing aikido and ju-jitsu as evidence of their very opposites. What would Bruce Lee think? Or Mohammed Ali? Men for whom fighting was not a battle of might makes right, but the transformation of violence into spirit.
Past into future.
Boys, into men.
“Them”, into us.
