Does might make right?
What is right? What is wrong? Who decides? We've been asking this question for what appears time immemorial, did the question come first, or the violence inherent to it? Look anywhere, it doesn't matter, and people grip with this perennial question, yet has anything changed? Are we any closer to answering such a fundamental question? Or was there never an answer in the first place?
Forgive me, but I'd like to look at two songs, separated by centuries, and perhaps we will find they give us some insight into this very same question wrapped in very different coat of paints. Robert Burn's "Ye Jacobites by Name1" and LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out2". On the surface, the exoteric, it may appear that the former appears quite anti-war, and the latter pro-violence, but below these surface readings lies an identical revelation about the machinery of legitimacy.
In 1791, Robert Burns took the pro-government anti-Jacobite song and transformed it into something completely new, something that has allowed his version to last throughout time, and something which is perhaps much more unsettling than a simple sociopolitical ballad of love and war. The original simply attacked the Stuart loyalists, Burns created a perennial humanist anti-war piece that exposed the skeleton behind all political righteousness, observer:
"What is Right, and what is Wrang, by the law, by the law?
What is Right and what is Wrang by the law?
What is Right, and what is Wrang?
A short sword, and a lang,
A weak arm and a strang3, for to draw."
Notice that burns does not pick a side? The game was rigged from the start. "The Law" is nothing more than a mirage, an inventory check even. Who has the longer blade? Who has the stronger arm?4 Behold, this is your righteousness, behold this is your justice. The answer to the question "What is right?" resolves to a physical answer, not a philosophical one. And what else can history show us?5
Burn was writing amidst the French Revolution, when King's and noble's heads rolled in the name of equality, liberty, and fraternity. His original manuscript for the rendition originally called out the "Blacknebs", the revolutionaries of his day6, before he (intelligently) chickened out and coded his message in the safer, more distant language of the Jacobites. He asks: "What makes heroic strife, famed afar?" His answer: "it's what "whets th' assassin's knife, / Or hunts a Parent's life, wi' bluidy war." Understand? The song doesn't celebrate anyone, there are no good guys, no bad guys, it mourns rather the fact that every moral question eventually comes down to who can hit harder while we pretend like this is righteousness.
Fast forward to the 90s, LL Cool J, famed gangster rapper, faced his own crisis of legitimacy. The opps said he went soft, gangster rap was on the rise, his last album underperformed7, his career was over they said. Despondent in his grandmother's basement, lost, questioning, not knowing if he could survive in this new landscape of hip-hop, he was given a similar violent revelation as the one that Burn too had received some two hundred years prior: "Oh baby, just knock them out!" The anthem produced from this revelation opens with supreme confidence, Don't call it a comeback / I been here for years". Listen deeper, past the ghetto swag, and you hear the same samsaric mechanism that Burns diagnosed. When LL declares "I'm gonna knock you out", he's not speaking metaphorically about lyrical superiority alone, but rather he is acknowledging that in the arena of legitimacy, whether it be the streets of Queens or Paris, in any arena, hip-hop, politics, life, whoever demonstrates the most convincing strength, wins the argument.
The imagery is pure violence, shotguns, pistols, bombs, skulls getting bashed, bodies being beaten. LL becomes Muhammad Ali, becoming a divine warrior, becoming someone who will "tie you up and let you understand / That I'm not your average man". The message here could not be more clear, in the words of Mao Tse Tung8, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" (枪杆子里面出政权). Authority comes from the capacity to dominate.
Yet do you see? Burns and LL see this exact same truth, yet their prescriptions become opposite. Burn says "leave your schemes alone, in the state", walk away from the stupid game. LL says: if this is a game, then let me become the greatest god damn player who has ever lived! Both invoke higher powers to justify themselves. Burns keeps repeating "by the law", the institutional blessing that allows us to see certain violence as legitimate. LL invokes... "mama", but whose 'mama'? The ancestral authority that sanctifies his aggression and craven lust for power. It could be his real mother, it could be the mother of all things9. In both songs we see the same function, a different costume. Burns sees this and mourns, LL sees this and asks for an AK47.
Is this right? That the strong determine10 what's right and wrong?
Burns meekly whispers: "No, and we should resist this logic"
LL shouts: "Mama said knock you out!"
"God is dead" they say11. This is one of the founding pillars of Post-Modernism, right? Weber's "disenchanted world"12. Right? So what does any of this matter? Yet we are at the precipice of an age, some say the wheel has already turned and spring beckons. The philosophers, the smart ones that have correctly identified the "end of post-modernism", are calling this the "Age of Reenchantment13", but what does this mean, and how does this relate to LL Cool J and the Jacobites? It means we're waking up from the disenchantment of modernism and post-modernism, we were never disenchanted at all. The magic never disappeared, it really didn't, it just started dressing in muted colors and talking about "agency" and "ROI".
Think about what Burns and LL are actually doing, these are not just critiques or treatises on power, but exorcisms in a very real and genuine way. They rip off the veil of our secular rituals to show the blood feeding babylon underneath, as famous Reenchantment thinker Sir Lulzington Esquire once put to pen, "Babylon Wages War on Babylon14". Do you understand?
The court is a temple where we sacrifice the weak to maintain the balance of Babel's tower. Cancellation is trial by combat15 where we determine who has the right to speak. Democracy is a seance where we summon the ghost of legitimacy and ask it to possess our chosen vessel. Burns knew this, his song is a spell of disillusionment that paradoxically reenchants. By showing us that the "law" is just "a weak arm and a strang" he reveals that it was always magic, shitty magic, but magic nonetheless. LL knew this as well, which is why "mama" isn't just his grandmother, but rather the cosmic principle of survival itself, the voice that screams in a world of predators that you have to kill and fight to survive. Who is right here, LL or Burns?
Everyone is wrong. The nihilists and doomers who grapple with these questions are wrong too. The post-modernists as well. You see, understanding that "might makes right" is the beginning of the story, not the end.
Jesus said "the meek shall inherit the Earth16". Do you know why? Not because it is virtuous to be weak, but rather that truth strength doesn't need to prove itself through domination. The strong protects the weak, not out of some bleeding heart liberal nonsense, but simply put, that is what strength actually does, it creates spaces where others do not -have- to be strong, thus breaking the cycle.
Look at burns here, he had the strength to see through the whole damn game and put his hands up and say "leave your schemes alone". Does this not take more power than any sword? I mean seriously, it's easy to throw stones at people who refuse to take sides in the -current thing- nowadays, but what about during the Age of Enlightenment, or the Reformation? Much different story, you all have it easy. Look at LL, he didn't get strong to oppress but simply to survive, to keep making art, and to stay in the game long enough to become an elder who could teach and protect the next generation of artists like him.
Reenchantment isn't about going backwards in causality and returning to the monadic superposition of totality, it is about recognizing that we never left the realm of magic. Every corporation is a coven, every algorithm is a spell. Every TOS and EULA a blood pact. Now people see it, before they didn't. Click click click, agree agree agree, signing yes with wanton thought, this is how people used to get tricked (the proper term is "Spirited away" or "Trappaned") into being servants on plantations in Virginia and Barbados17 you know? Once you understand this you have many choices. You could be like Burns and opt out, you could be like LL and try to master the game. The truth is, and perhaps this is obvious, you can do both. Yet so few do, why?
Observe how "mama said knock you out" and "what is right by the law" are the same incantation, the same admission that force determines truth. Yet we have free will18, do we not? Indeed we do. You may choose what to do with your force, and for why to train it! You do not have to use it to perpetuate Babylon's eternal holy war on Babylon. You can use it to protect those who haven't developed their strength yet, you can use it to create pockets of peace in a world defined by endless conflict.
The wheel turns, and the old world crumbles. Post-modernism told us that nothing meant anything, that everything was relative, that might makes right was just one narrative among many. Yet this is cope. That was the disenchantment talking. The truth is, might has always made right, from the first ape who picked up a bone to the latest person arrested for tax evasion (a very serious crime!). The question thus is not whether "might makes right" is true, it is, duh, the question is that now that you know this truth, what will you do with it? Will you use your strength to feed the snake that devours its own tail, or will you be strong so others may be weak, so that in their weakness they too may learn to be strong? Will you enslave others or liberate them? Will you perpetuate this cycle or break it?
We don't have the liberty to pretend like we don't know how power works anymore, post-modernism as the zeitgeist has passed, we know better. We must decide what kind of body we're molding in this new age.
The meek will inherit the earth not through weakness, but rather that the truly strong will make it safe for them to do so. This is indeed the final revelation,
The mightiest act is to create spaces where might doesn't matter,
Where a weak arm doesn't doom you,
Where you don't need mama's permission to exist.