Among the many many humiliations of being American within the present second is that this: Members of the tech proper and the conservative ruling class frequently fetishize objects of nerd tradition whereas additionally displaying a willful lack of ability to know the very primary messages these objects are sending. Whereas there are actually worse issues (e.g. white nationalism within the White Home), the blazing lack of studying comprehension from people who find themselves allegedly good does give one pause. Put merely, these persons are unhealthy nerds.
Most likely the textual content they’re most constantly vulnerable to misreading is The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved fantasy trilogy offers with the corrupting affect of energy and the need of demise. But, the proper retains utilizing it as a parable for why highly effective individuals ought to be given extra energy and human beings ought to be immortal.
Most just lately, Elon Musk posted to his platform X that Tolkien’s peaceable hobbits have been capable of reside idyllic lives on the Shire solely as a result of “they have been protected by the arduous males of Gondor,” referring to the human kingdom entrenched in battle towards Mordor. England, Musk declared, should additionally ally with arduous males — on this case, the far proper anti-Islamic activist Tommy Robinson — to revive its personal peace and tranquility. Robinson is at present on trial within the UK, accused of refusing to adjust to counter-terrorism police and says Musk is paying his authorized payments.
Following Musk’s lead, the Division of Homeland Safety posted an ICE recruitment advert utilizing a screengrab of Merry (performed by Dominic Monaghan), one of many hobbits in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings motion pictures. Superimposed over the picture is a line of Merry’s dialogue — “There received’t be a shire, pippin.” — after which, beneath it, the URL be a part of.ice.gov.
The thought right here is that the naive hobbits characterize the civilians of each the US and the UK, and unbeknownst to them, they’re being menaced by the forces of evil: Muslim migrants from the Center East, alleged to be invading each international locations. The one option to forestall it, the metaphor implies, is for the hobbits to ally with the “arduous males of Gondor” — Islamaphobic agitators for Musk and masked militias who assault unarmed civilians for the DHS — earlier than their lifestyle is gone utterly.
Nevertheless, you do not want to be a deep scholar of The Lord of the Rings — and buddies, I’m not one — to know that this metaphor utterly falls aside after a single step again.
In Tolkien’s books, it isn’t the lads of Gondor who flip again the forces of evil and save the Shire; it’s these mild, peaceable hobbits who pull the entire thing off. They’re the one species capable of carry the One Ring of Energy, as a result of they’re, by their nature, unambitious. All they need is to reside their peaceable bourgeois lives of tea and toast and jam, so they can stand up to the temptations of the ring and its guarantees of energy, in the end carrying it far sufficient to destroy it. The perfect the lads of Gondor can do to assist is refuse to ever contact the ring, as a result of they know that in the event that they decide it up, they won’t be able to withstand temptation.
To translate this into the metaphor: Should you’re taking Tolkien as your information, and also you imagine your homeland to be below invasion by the forces of evil, the answer is to not attempt to consolidate your energy, harden your nature, and glory in pointless cruelty. The answer is to refuse energy at any time when it’s supplied to you and to combat from a spot of humility.
The DHS and Musk aren’t the one members of the brand new proper to make use of Tolkien to justify their actions. As David French instructed As we speak, Defined earlier this fall, JD Vance has described The Lord of the Rings as elementary to his journey into conservatism, a lot in order that he named his enterprise capital agency Narya after considered one of Tolkien’s magic rings. Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel named his personal enterprise capital agency Mithril, after considered one of Tolkien’s magic metals. One other considered one of Thiel’s corporations — an AI platform Trump is utilizing to surveil and monitor Individuals — is called after Palantir, a magical artifact that the Lord of the Rings villain Sauron makes use of to observe and deceive the individuals of Center-earth.
The darkness of that parallel is kind of par for the course for Thiel, who constantly appears to empathize most with Tolkien’s villains. In a 2023 interview with the Atlantic, Thiel declared that he had learn the trilogy at the least 10 instances, and that he had come to the conclusion that the one distinction between Tolkien’s elves and his people is that the elves are immortal and don’t die. “Why can’t we be elves?” requested Thiel, who has spoken at size about his curiosity in extending his personal life, maybe to the purpose of immortality.
One of many recurring plots of The Lord of the Rings is in truth tales about human beings who attempt to be immortal just like the elves and are corrupted by that try, their lives ruined. They turn into undead or insane; they cling onto grotesque caricatures of life. Demise in these books is named The Present of Males. It’s what provides human lives their form and that means. Elves are naturally immortal, however people who attempt to be immortal are corrupted as certainly as those that thirst for energy. For Tolkien, mortality is a present, not one thing to be fled in terror.
None of those messages are obscure. They’re floor degree. Kids in center faculty repeatedly pull them out of those books with out issue. But, for some motive, a bunch of extremely highly effective males who satisfaction themselves on their very own intelligence and who additionally think about Tolkien’s philosophy to be elementary to their worldview appear to be having quite a lot of bother.
The Lord of the Rings really has a reasonably respectable metaphor for what occurs when highly effective individuals determine to willfully ignore the knowledge of individuals they declare to respect and conclude that the one means they are often of service to the world is by chasing energy for themselves. That’s what occurs to Saruman the wizard, and he finally ends up invading the Shire himself. The boys of Gondor don’t cease him in any respect.
