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 regularly fetishize objects of nerd tradition whereas additionally displaying a willful incapacity to understand the very fundamental 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 sensible does give one pause. Put merely, these individuals are dangerous nerds.
Most likely the textual content they’re most constantly liable 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 loss of life. But, the correct retains utilizing it as a parable for why highly effective folks must be given extra energy and human beings must be immortal.
Most just lately, Elon Musk posted to his platform X that Tolkien’s peaceable hobbits have been in a position to dwell idyllic lives on the Shire solely as a result of “they have been protected by the laborious males of Gondor,” referring to the human kingdom entrenched in battle towards Mordor. England, Musk declared, should additionally ally with laborious males — on this case, the far proper anti-Islamic activist Tommy Robinson — to revive its personal peace and tranquility. Robinson is at the moment 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 signify 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 nations. The one method to forestall it, the metaphor implies, is for the hobbits to ally with the “laborious males of Gondor” — Islamaphobic agitators for Musk and masked militias who assault unarmed civilians for the DHS — earlier than their lifestyle is gone utterly.
Nonetheless, you don’t 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 in a position to carry the One Ring of Energy, as a result of they’re, by their nature, unambitious. All they need is to dwell their peaceable bourgeois lives of tea and toast and jam, so they’re able to face up to the temptations of the ring and its guarantees of energy, finally carrying it far sufficient to destroy it. One of the best 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 choose it up, they will be unable to withstand temptation.
To translate this into the metaphor: When you’re taking Tolkien as your information, and also you consider your homeland to be beneath 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 provided to you and to struggle 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 Right this moment, 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 certainly one of Tolkien’s magic rings. Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel named his personal enterprise capital agency Mithril, after certainly one of Tolkien’s magic metals. One other certainly one of Thiel’s firms — an AI platform Trump is utilizing to surveil and monitor People — is known as after Palantir, a magical artifact that the Lord of the Rings villain Sauron makes use of to watch and deceive the folks 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 not less than 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 reality tales about human beings who attempt to be immortal just like the elves and are corrupted by that try, their lives ruined. They develop into undead or insane; they cling onto grotesque caricatures of life. Dying in these books is named The Reward of Males. It’s what offers human lives their form and which means. Elves are naturally immortal, however people who attempt to be immortal are corrupted as absolutely 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 college usually pull them out of those books with out problem. But, for some purpose, a bunch of extremely highly effective males who delight themselves on their very own intelligence and who additionally think about Tolkien’s philosophy to be elementary to their worldview appear to be having a whole lot of bother.
The Lord of the Rings really has a reasonably respectable metaphor for what occurs when highly effective folks resolve to willfully ignore the knowledge of individuals they declare to respect and conclude that the one approach 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 lads of Gondor don’t cease him in any respect.
