The Will to Battle

Hubris it is, reader, to call one’s self the most anything in history: the most powerful, the most mistreated, the most alone.

As Machiavelli observed, Rome showed, tyrant after tyrant, how those reared in palatine luxury, expecting to be master of the world, basely abused the godlike authority that fell to them unearned, while those promoted through merit—Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius—made judicious use of the Imperium of which they considered themselves, not owners, but custodians. It is not power that corrupts, but the belief that it is yours.

In darker ages Justice stood alone before courthouses, but in Carlyle’s vision her sister Temperance stands to one side holding back her sword, while from the other side Reason lifts away her blindfold, so Justice can finally see the contents of her scales.

Complacency is the enemy, Mycroft, not xenophobia. An old phoenix needs burning

people feel as if the past is the best solution to the present, kings and emperors and coats of arms to stand firm now that the democracies are teetering.

What I have read of war suggests that the most devastating mistakes are often made either in war’s inception, when the front lines take their shapes, or after the surrender. In the latter case, exaltation and vendetta often have clouded victors’ judgments as they laid the architecture of their postwar worlds.

Hobbes tells us that war consists not in Battle only, but in that tract of time wherein the Will to Battle is so manifest that, scenting bloodlust in his fellows and himself, Man can no longer trust civilization’s pledge to keep the peace. If so, we are at war. We have been these four months, since Ockham’s arrest and Sniper’s bullet revealed too much truth for trust to stay. But we do not know how to turn the Will to Battle into Battle. We have enjoyed three hundred years of peace, World Peace, real peace, whatever the detractors say. This generation has never met a man who met a man who marched onto a battlefield. Governments have no armies anymore, no arms. A man may kill another with a gun, a sword, a sharpened stone, but the human race no longer remembers how to turn a child of eighteen into a soldier, organize riot into battle lines, or dehumanize an enemy enough to make the killing bearable.

It can never change that peace is endangered if one man tries to reserve to himself some Right which he will not share with everyone else, or if, in cases of revenge, men dwell on the greatness of the evil past, instead of thinking of the greatness of the good to follow, and so let private vendetta grow into public ruin.

Such mercy!” Hobbes too marvels, “to say that thought without deed is not a crime! In my day almost as many were executed for opinion as for deed, and even to imagine the king’s death constituted treason.

This world is far from perfect, but people have never been happier, healthier, more productive, more free, more equal. We have a lot of improvements still to make, but we’ve come a long way compared to any older era.

Humor, mankind’s survival strategy, brought absurd images before my mind here, mobs in blasted wastelands, raising impossibly honest banners: “Financial stability! Self-determination! Xenophobia!

Color-coded rank hats? Those are worse than wearing a bull’s-eye on your chest! If you want your commanders to survive a week, you want no difference in uniform visible from more than a few meters away. Marking them out like this is madness!

Since ancient days there has been a name for Senatorial recommendations that carry the force, not of law, but of the Will of the Leviathan, but the name is Latin, and we cannot say Senatus Consultum without implying that the Latin-speaking Masons somehow own this, much as we half believe they own all Romanova, built for us by MASONS past. So we instead say 'Senatorial Consult,' which translates to 'Let's pretend we aren't thinking about Masons right now.' Of course we are.

…like some great shaman whose apprentice pledged to join the master’s desert journey of enlightenment, but arrives for embarkation still clinging to a teddy bear.

The fittest survived, but with the conquered within them, as conquered bacteria became the mitochondria which feed the cells that crawl through volvox, trilobite, and coelacanth toward Mars.

If Ockham Saneer told me that my death would save ten thousand lives," Quarrimann interrupted flatly, "I'd let them kill me. Would you?

I closed my eyes. “Tully, while it’s true I’ll never rest in peace until I’ve killed you, you’re low on the list of reasons I will never rest in peace.