[See: Carnival Culture Index]

Behold, The Man of Power

The Man of Power, though he be self-sufficient and capable of defending himself against all comers, can never rest easy. For with power comes the certainty that this power will eventually be lost through another turn of the Wheel of Fortune, the ever-moving Tao, the all-powerful Hands of Fate.

Sir James Frazer’s epic exploration of magic and religion, The Golden Bough, hinges upon this very point through his allegory of the priest-king defending the sacred tree:

In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.

The roots of this myth lay in the Law of the Jungle, the Forest Primeval. Kipling’s verse reminds us, “And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper / but the wolf that shall break it must die.” That law is simply that the strong survive. None understands this reality better than the Chevalier, the professional warrior, who pits himself in battle after battle against other men of power. Much like in the wolf pack, those he bests become his subordinates. Gradually, he himself may work his way up the ladder of hierarchy and become a Lord, an Alpha, having underneath him knights and vassals sworn to fealty, squires, pages and men-at-arms.

Pack Dynamics

Wolves, they say, organize into packs in order to maximize their ability to bring down big game. A Man of Power is fully sovereign (irie, “I rule I eternally”), capable of fending for himself on all counts. He is Machiavelli’s Prince. No Prince, however, comes to power on his own. In addition to those who train him directly in the forge of battle, every Prince needs allies. Though a Prince always remains self-sufficient at root, wisdom and experience proves that more can be accomplished with others. Life becomes better, easier, more pleasurable and fulfilling. Thus, each Prince enters into relations with others. Packs are formed, family bands, clans and tribes. Together the pack can hunt better, farm more effectively, guard their territories against rival packs, and reproduce, ensuring mutual genetic survival through time. My offspring become qualitatively the same as yours. We protect each other as brothers, as though our self were a concentric circle widening out from each one of us, a community of sovereign individuals actively working and living together instead of isolated disjointed points, sad sacks of flesh buffeted by the grey winds of death.

In time, successful packs and tribes widen, expanding their reach, range and influence. As such, territorial conflicts arise between groups. They may be decided through brute force of arms, claws and gnashing of teeth, flailings of swords and thrustings of bayonet points. Or they may be decided by diplomacy, which is ultimately the same as trade: the ritual exchange of value, of tribute, between sovereigns leading to the formation of the same types of alliances which formed the pack-unit to begin with.

Warfare, diplomacy and trade all come from the same place: from wolves jockeying for position within the smaller and larger packs. They say that with wolves, most aggressive rank-related behavior never actually erupts into violence. Why? Because violence is wasteful when a simple threatening posture, a low growl or an angry glance will cow a lesser rival into submission.

Noblesse Oblige

As Uncle Ben says to Peter Parker in Spider-Man, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Spider-Man, like all super-heroes, is a Man of Power, a sovereign prince. He possesses abilities far in excess of those of mortal man. In a slightly more historical context, the term “noblesse oblige” refers to the notion that nobles & notables, Spider-Men and other X-Men, by virtue of the gifts given to them are honor-bound {see also: chivalric code} to share those gifts with others.

Any sovereign who has the ability to create abundance for himself has the ability to share the extras with others at no real cost to himself {see: Harvest Culture}. Any Prince who can provide for others quickly draws a pack of loyal followers into his orbit, whether he likes it or not. Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales is a great narrative exploration of this theme. In it, Clint Eastwood’s character is a lone wolf whose family-pack is slaughtered in the Civil War. He enacts revenge against his enemies, and veers off into the frontier to start over again. Along the way, a rag-tag band of allies forms around him, creating a new pack, putting him unwittingly into a leadership role.

In pack dynamics, this leadership role may not be a strictly formal one, so much as it is that the alphas set an example after which other pack members inevitably follow:

The alpha pair have the most social freedom of all the animals in a pack, but they are not “leaders” in the sense humans usually think of the term. They do not give the other wolves orders. The alphas simply have the most freedom to choose where they would like to go and what they would like to do, and the rest of the pack usually follows along.

In wolf packs, it is often only the alphas who are allowed to breed. As depicted in the movie, Braveheart, there may have been a tradition in Medieval Europe (disputed by some historians), of the Droit de seigneur, the right of the Lord of the manor to deflower virgins. The justification for such a tradition - if it really existed - most likely had something to do with the Lord, as ultimate owner of the lands upon which his subjects lived and word, was entitled to its first fruits. This tradition has, of course, thankfully gone the way of the dodo in modern times.

Closely tied to noblesse oblige are the concepts of the White Man’s Burden and Manifest Destiny, which were used in more recent history to justify colonialism and the subjugation of entire continents under the boot of powerful sovereigns and their armies.

Pax Romana

In exchange for domination, classically, the sovereign offers peace - or something resembling it.

In English law, the Queen’s peace (or King’s peace, when a male monarch is on the throne) is the protection the monarch offers their subjects. […]

It is part of the duties of the Crown under the Royal Prerogative to maintain the Queen’s peace. This function is now carried out by the Government, although it remains a duty of the Crown. Should the Crown fail in this duty, it can be under a duty to pay compensation to the subjects whom it has failed. This was the justification for the 18th Century Riot Act and subsequent legislation, counterparts of which appeared in countries throughout the British Empire. Where the civil authorities declared that the Queen’s peace had failed (i.e. there was a state of riot) the rules changed: the authorities (either police, or the army or militia providing Military Aid to the Civil Power) could shoot and kill the ringleaders of the riot, and generally take severe action towards those in a state of riot. The counterbalance was that the Crown was responsible for the damage caused by the riot — the Crown having failed in its prerogative duty to preserve the peace.

In the ancient world, something like the Pax Romana might be a useful analog, the period of relative peace within the Roman Empire between 27 BC and 180 AD. Or we could look to more mythological sources, such as the reign of peace initiated by King Arthur’s court of Camelot, with it’s Round Table of knights. On a more historical note, Richard the Lionheart created something quite similar:

In 1195, Richard I (”the Lionheart”) of England commissioned certain knights to preserve the peace in unruly areas. They were responsible to the King for ensuring that the law was upheld, and preserved the “King’s Peace”, and were known as Keepers of the Peace.

An Act of 1327 had referred to “good and lawful men” to be appointed in every county in the land to “guard the peace”; such individuals were first referred to as Conservators of the Peace, or Wardens of the Peace. The title “justices of the peace” derives from 1361, in the reign of King Edward III Plantagenet. The “peace” to be guarded is the “King’s peace” or (currently) Queen’s peace, the maintenance of which is the duty of the Crown under the royal prerogative. Justices of the peace still use the power conferred or re-conferred on them in 1361 to bind over unruly persons “to be of good behaviour.” The bind over is not a punishment, but a preventive measure, intended to ensure that people thought likely to offend will not do so.

The Sun King

The peace offered by the King, of course, is one in which the social order which represents is upheld as not just Law, but in some extreme historical settings as God’s Will. Louis XIV of France famously proclaimed, “L’etat c’est moi!” or “I am the State!” Meaning that all power and importance within his realm emanated from himself.

He is also known as The Sun King (in French Le Roi Soleil) because it was thought that, just as the planets revolve around the Sun, so too should France and the Court revolve around him. As a result, he was associated with Apollo Helios, the Greco-Roman god of the Sun. This is also fitting because, as patron of the Arts, Louis was, like Apollo Musagetes, the “leader of the Muses”.

Despite his grandiosity, he was hardly alone in his practices. Feudal monarchs frequently cited the Divine Right of Kings, a tradition going back through recorded history at least to Gilgamesh, and propped up by the Church of Rome, so long as monarchs bowed to their temporal authority as the arbiters of God’s Will.

The Scriptural basis of the Divine Right of Kings comes partly from Romans 13:1-2, which states: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”

But I Did Not Shoot The Deputy

Modern law enforcement owes its roots to English common law practices, going back to not just Richard the Lionheart, but the manorial system of feudal management as well. The office of sheriff goes back to the “shire reeves” of England, “an official elected annually by the serfs to supervise lands for a lord,” and whose duties included making certain serfs did their work and did not cheat the Lord out of money owed. And just as the King could authorize agents to keep the peace on his behalf, so too can modern sheriffs authorize deputies to assist them in the fulfillment of their duties.

The word “marshal“, as in the American Old West, derives from the Old Germanic marh “horse” and scalc “servant”. In the Old West, marshals…

… were appointed or elected police officers of small communities, with similar powers and duties to that of a police chief, generally with powers ending at the border of the community. By contrast, federal marshals (U.S. marshals) would work in a larger, possibly overlapping area, especially in pioneering country, in a area overlapping with the state or territorial office of county sheriff (who then, as now, policed communities as well as areas between communities).

Similarly, the term “constable” comes from the Latin comes stabuli or “count of the stables.” And a bailiff was originally an officer in charge of an area of land called a bailiwick.

KRS-ONE’s brilliant “Sound of Da Police” connects these themes in a more modern context (also on YouTube):

Take the word overseer, like a sample
Repeat it very quickly in a crew for example
Overseer
Overseer
Overseer
Overseer
Officer, Officer, Officer, Officer!
Yeah, officer from overseer
You need a little clarity?
Check the similarity!
The overseer rode around the plantation
The officer is off patroling all the nation
The overseer could stop you what you’re doing
The officer will pull you over just when he’s pursuing
The overseer had the right to get ill
And if you fought back, the overseer had the right to kill
The officer has the right to arrest
And if you fight back they put a hole in your chest!

Illegal Business

KRS-ONE elsewhere outlined the simple fact that “illegal business control America,” talking about how police re-sell confiscated drugs on the street. Put another way, the King/Prince/Sovereign Man of Power deputizes agents, hierarchical underlings or henchmen, to act as “Conservators of the Peace”. What this means in practical terms is that they enforce the social order as decreed by their sovereign Lord. They protect his business and financial interests, and maintain his base of power - through force of arms and through intimidation tactics, just like in the wolf pack. Law enforcement officers are granted the exclusive legal right to exercise force to protect the social order.

The five-pointed star pictured above is the symbol of the Fraternal Order of Police, a US-based lodge organization which is “committed to improving the working conditions of law enforcement officers and the safety of those they serve through education, legislation, information, community involvement, and employee representation.” In medieval times, Lords and nobles established chivalric fraternal orders, granting them power and authority in exchange for military and other obligations.

What are these knights, police and other peace-keepers protecting the social order from? Simple: competitors!

Just like the Church established the Knights Templar and Hospitallers to protect the trade routes to the Holy Land, so too did the King’s Men in Elizabethan England protect roads from so-called “highwaymen,” or “knights of the road,” men who rejected the automatic, inherited or divine rights of kings and their deputized henchmen, and directly exercised their own sovereignty through force of arms.

In 17th, 18th and early 19th century Ireland acts of robbery were often part of a tradition of popular resistance to British colonial rule and settlement and Protestant domination. From the mid-17th century, Irish bandits who harassed the British were known as ‘tories’ (from Irish tórai, raider). Later in the century they became known as ‘rapparees’. Some of the Irish highwaymen of the 18th and early 19th centuries were regarded as popular heroes: they defied the government and robbed wealthy landlords. This was symbolized in many of the stories and ballads about them. Famous Irish highwaymen included James Freney, Willie Brennan and Jeremiah Grant.

The Old West spawned a host of uniquely American anti-hero outlaws in people like Frank & Jesse James and countless others. {See also: gangsters}

In British common law, an outlaw was a person who had defied the laws of the realm, by such acts as ignoring a summons to court, or fleeing instead of appearing to plead when charged with a crime. In the earlier law of Anglo-Saxon England, outlawry was also declared when a person committed a homicide and could not pay the weregild, the blood-money, due to the victim’s kin. Outlawry also existed in other legal codes of the time, such as the ancient Norse and Icelandic legal code.

To be declared an outlaw was to suffer a form of civil death. The outlaw was debarred from all civilized society. No one was allowed to give him food, shelter, or any other sort of support — to do so was to commit the crime of aiding and abetting, and to be in danger of the ban oneself. An outlaw might be killed with impunity; and it was not only lawful but meritorious to kill a thief flying from justice — to do so was not murder. A man who slew a thief was expected to declare the fact without delay, otherwise the dead man’s kindred might clear his name by their oath and require the slayer to pay weregild as for a true man. Because the outlaw has defied civil society, that society was quit of any obligations to the outlaw —outlaws had no civil rights, could not sue in any court on any cause of action, though they were themselves personally liable.

In a more modern sense, an outlaw or a criminal is essentially an un-licensed businessman, who operates according to what he can get away with, as opposed to what is socially accepted as ethically or morally right. The more powerful a so-called “criminal” group becomes socially and politically, the more inter-twined outlaws and lawmen become - until in many cases the difference becomes merely one of semantics and name-calling between rival groups vying for dominance and government sanction on the use of force to protect mutual business interests.

Cosa Nostra

Just as the Fraternal Order of Police might be thought of as a hold-over from medieval chivalric orders, so too are groups like the Sicilian mafia, the Cosa Nostra. Compare this description of a mob initiation ritual to the dubbing ceremony and vows made by a knight upon receiving his commission from his Lord:

The orientation ritual in most families happens when a man becomes an associate, and then, a soldier. As described by Tommaso Buscetta to judge Giovanni Falcone, the neophyte is brought together with at least three “men of honor” of the family and the oldest member present warns him that “this House” is meant to protect the weak against the abuse of the powerful; he then pricks the finger of the initiate and spills his blood onto a sacred image, usually of a saint. The image is placed in the hand of the initiate and lit on fire. The neophyte must withstand the pain of the burning, passing the image from hand to hand, until the image has been consumed, while swearing to keep faith with the principles of “Cosa Nostra,” solemnly swearing “may my flesh burn like this saint if I fail to keep my oath.”

Compare also to Masonic initiation rituals, and consider what it is that “orders” and “organizations” such as the Masons stand for: simply that, maintenance of the social order. Building. Architecture. Organization. Tikkun olam in Judaism. The goddess Ma’at in the ancient Egyptian story-system, who regulated the natural order of existence.

Fraternal orders and other organizations of ordinary citizens may also form as a response to the lack of police authority in a given place and time, as did Curtis Sliwa’s Guardian Angels, which formed “safety patrols” in the 1970’s to protect NYC citizens from rampant violence on the subway system. Members wore red berets, performed citizen’s arrests for violent crimes, but were not permitted to carry weapons.

Officially-sanctioned peace keepers tend to get fidgety around groups like these, and for good reason, because they threaten their authority in the eyes of ordinary citizens, encouraging regular people to exercise their sovereignty and to take vigilante justice into their own hands. Plenty of historical examples certainly exist which depict the potential horrors that vigilante groups may take part in - although I would wager that they probably pale in comparison to the multitudinous examples of official police and state-sanctioned brutality which have been recorded in graphic detail throughout the ages. Not surprisingly from what we have seen here, the borders between the two have rarely been clear.

Agents Provocateurs

Wikipedia relates how, “The Commonwealth of Virginia’s adaptation of the ancient common law office of Conservator of the Peace was described by the Virginia Supreme Court in 1923:”

“…in every shire the King himself should place special eyes and watches over the people, that should be both willing and wise to foresee, and should be also enabled with meet authority to repress all intention of uproar and force even in the first seed thereof and before that it should grow up to any offer of danger.”

One of the most well-known and perhaps most relevant examples of this aspect of peace-keepers in action in modern times may be found in the FBI’s program to surveil and disrupt hippy/yippie radicals, anti-war activists, communists, civil rights advocates and other persona non grata:

COINTELPRO began in 1956 and was designed to “increase factionalism, cause disruption and win defections” inside the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA). However, the program was soon enlarged to include disruption of the Socialist Workers Party (1961), the Ku Klux Klan (1964), the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party (1967), and the entire New Left socio-political movement, which included antiwar, community, and religious groups (1968). A later investigation by the Senate’s Church Committee (see below) stated that “COINTELPRO began in 1956, in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings limiting the Government’s power to proceed overtly against dissident groups…” Congress and several court cases later concluded that the COINTELPRO operations against communist and socialist groups exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association.

Supporters of the program argue that the project was rooted in the Bureau’s knowledge that some domestic left-wing and radical organizations were manipulated by hostile foreign intelligence agencies. For example, the FBI had access to the Venona decrypts that showed the Soviet Union and its KGB manipulated and worked under the cover of the CPUSA for espionage purposes and to incite domestic unrest in the United States.

From the report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, commonly referred to as the “Church Committee”

“Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that…the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”

Tactics used by COINTELPRO agents included: undercover infiltration of dissident groups, psychological warfare and false planted media stories, harrassment through the legal system, and extra-legal force and violence. {See also: the murder of Fred Hampton by the Chicago PD, acting in conjunction with the FBI and the Illinois’ State Attorney’s Office (SAO); the Pine Ridge Incidents, etc etc}. Lucky for us, of course, programs like COINTELPRO were disbanded!

Vitally important to this point though, is that agents provocateurs do not just seek to prevent uprisings against the existing social order. Just as often, they seek to encourage them, so that public outcry over violence gives rulers free reign to clamp down even harder. This false flag terror tactic has been used time and again to ignite wars all around the globe and to usher in repressive despotic regimes.

On the night of Feb. 27, 1933 the Reichstag building was set on fire. At the urging of Hitler, Hindenburg responded the next day by issuing an emergency decree “for the Protection of the people and the State,” which stated: “Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”

The French have a saying: “La plus ça change, la plus c’est la même chose.” The trick, it seems, is in deciding what type of order you ultimately stand for, and making smart choices about who your pack-mates and allies are. In the meantime, the Law of the Jungle remains.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

[Dedicated to Ian G., who recently started at the Academy and who I’m sure will do well.]