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"Et Lux in Tenebris Lucet"

When Anger is Righteous

Writer's picture: Joshua BianchiJoshua Bianchi

Updated: Feb 3


 

The Beginnings


It was not part of their blood,

It came to them very late,

With long arrears to make good,

When the Saxon began to hate.


They were not easily moved,

They were icy -- willing to wait.

Till every count should be proved,

Ere the Saxon began to hate.


Their voices were even and low.

Their eyes were level and straight.

There was neither sign nor show.

When the Saxon began to hate.


It was not preached to the crowd.

It was not taught by the state.

No man spoke it aloud.

When the Saxon began to hate.


It was not suddenly bred.

It will not swiftly abate.

Through the chilled years ahead,

When Time shall count from the date.

That the Saxon began to hate.


~ Rudyard Kipling

 

Achilles in battle dress, with shield and spear

Rudyard Kipling wrote The Beginnings shortly after learning that his son had died on the western front of the Great War. In the throes of his grief, he found an emotion that we have long forgotten, one which men feel in the depths of their souls, one which modernity seeks to rip from our very hearts: hate.


The narrative of modernity is clear that man has no use for such an emotion and should cower away from its expression in contemporary life. Hate has been relegated to a growing list of vices alongside several other qualities, forming what Plato called Thumos, or spirit.


In The Republic, Plato describes a tripartite partition of the soul: Logos (reason), Epithumia (desire), and Thumos (spirit.). These three faculties are more complex than emotions; they are drives and longings often accompanied by emotional thoughts.


Logos is the faculty of rationality. It is responsible for wisdom, logic, and higher thought. It seeks truth, order, and meaning. It guides decisions with clarity and foresight. Logos aligns the soul with higher principles and moral law when properly cultivated.


Epithumia is the faculty of physical needs: hunger, thirst, pleasure, and instinct. When unrestrained, it leads to immorality, hedonism, and moral decay, but when rightly ordered, it serves the higher faculties by sustaining life and enabling creativity.


Thumos (the focus of this article) is the faculty of spirit or spiritedness. From it emanates honor, righteous indignation, and the will to defend the good. It is the seat of courage, grit, and righteous fury—the drive to uphold what is noble and resist what is base.


Each of these faculties has a healthy and unhealthy expression, which contributes to the overall health of the soul. This is true both on the microscopic and macroscopic levels: a society that cannot control its faculties is destined for failure. Plato conceptualized the Logos as a chariot driven by two horses representing Thumos and Epithumia. The horses must be healthy and properly balanced to drive the chariot well.


Western civilization has managed to exploit two of these faculties. The Enlightenment was motivated by Logos to the extent that reason supplanted God himself. Modern society is hyper-epithumic, pushing mankind to pursue desire and satisfaction above all else.


Interestingly, rather than sublimate the Thumos faculty, the perpetrators of cultural decay have elected to remove it entirely. The Thumos spirit, which drives heroes such as Achilles, Hector, Samson, David, and especially our Christ, is being bred and trained from Western men's souls.


They accomplish this by conflating hate with irrational malice, uncontrolled rage, and mindless aggression, stripping it of its righteous and protective purpose.


In this, they sever Thumos from its purpose as the fire of men's souls, the inescapable urge to defend goodness, reducing its worth to a mere impulse to be feared and eradicated. They teach that all forms of opposition—resistance to corruption, defiance against immorality, or the natural indignation that arises when confronted with unashamed evil—are forms of hate that men must suppress.


This conditioning is reinforced through cultural narratives that celebrate passivity, equate all masculinity with toxicity, and insist that the highest virtues are compliance, docility, and uncritical acceptance. The very spirit that once propelled men to build, defend, and sacrifice is now demonized as a vestige of a violent past—something to be subdued rather than cultivated. Men serve the dystopia better as lapdogs than lions.


A people without Thumos is a people without defense. Without Thumos, love becomes sentimental and ineffectual. We cannot defend what we love against what seeks to defile it. Without Thumos men have no grit. They fall into apathy and placation. Beauty—so reliant on the strength and vitality that upholds it—falls into decay without men who will die for it.


The narrative seeks to eliminate strong men by conflating passion with hate.


American Thumos


Hate has been the theme of this past decade. The Marxist corporate dystopia has cried "hate speech" to the point of absurdity. They sterilized social media, the workplace, and the public arena in hopes of eliminating hate speech. Still, despite the best efforts of Meta, Google, Blackrock, and all the others, Americans still hate.


Americans hate paying more in taxes only for Congress to increase its salary. They hate sending their sons to die in foreign wars. They hate watching the Fed's runaway inflation. Most of all, they hate being told how evil they are for hating these things. They hate so vehemently the compulsion of the nanny state to mommy its people they elected the biggest hater of all (at least according to said nanny state.)


The need to designate something as 'hate speech' evokes 1984 for obvious reasons; that a social media company would censor users beyond the agreed-upon Terms & Conditions is demeaning to its customer base and disrespectful to the First Amendment.


More importantly, the cultural obsession with eliminating hate would deny the emotion its ontological purpose. They seem to get away with this because the definition of 'hate' has been subject to semantic drift. To illustrate this, think briefly about what it means to hate. If your definition was anything besides "an intense dislike for something," you may be affected by the Zeitgeist. The Department of Justice cannot define a hate crime based on the dictionary definition alone. It relies on its own broader definition:

The term "hate" can be misleading. When used in a hate crime law, the word "hate" does not mean rage, anger, or general dislike. In this context “hate” means bias against people or groups with specific characteristics that are defined by the law.

Hate is a human emotion, and bias is a decision. It shares nothing with hate. Like all emotions, hate is not good or bad; it is a reaction to the soul's experiences. It is folly to think that anyone, even the government, especially the government, has the right to determine which emotions are good and which are bad.


Moreover, hate can be a healthy emotion. It must be so because even God has hated, and God cannot do wrong. In Proverbs 6, Solomon details:

These six things the Lord hates, Yes, seven are an abomination to Him: a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that are swift in running to evil, a false witness who speaks lies, and one who sows discord among brethren.

Hate is not a crime. Crimes motivated by bias are not merely hateful; they are malignant, but hate alone is not sufficient to commit a crime; there must be action.


"I bid you, stand, men of the West!"


Death, glory, beauty, and grit depend on Thumos. What empowers death also sanctifies life; thus, we are moved by acts of bravery in the face of death and by the moments when beauty defies hard circumstances.


Hate, as a righteously motivated reaction, is empowered by love. To love something is to value it deeply, cherish its existence, and see it as worthy of preservation. But such love necessitates hate—not blind malice but righteous anger toward that which threatens the beloved. This interplay of love and hate becomes the foundation of grit, which compels individuals to act, fight, and endure. If you genuinely love something, you hate that which seeks to destroy it. Grit means persevering through death when necessary, in defense of love, sometimes fueled by hate. Only by the grace of God are we allowed to see and know beauty despite our wicked ugliness. Therefore, it is a sacred duty to defend beauty. Beauty drives men to persevere through hardships and stand resolute in the face of death itself: beauty in the family, beauty in romance, and the beauty of a nation that lives in harmony. Beauty also exists in art, but the beauty we see in art is only a reflection of the higher ideals: God, family, love, peace, strength, and so on.


Few stories capture the raw potential of Thumos as Tolkien's works. The Rohirrim in The Lord of the Rings are a tired people, beset on all sides by malice and malintent. Their cities (those that have not been sacked) are simple and tired. Once renowned for being great lords on horseback, they are fatigued from defending their virtue and their beauty from the hands of death.


In their final moments, when it seems that darkness will prevail, the spirit of their young men saves them. After King Theoden is freed from Saruman's torpor, Eomer and his riders are restored to righteousness and overrun the besieging armies.


Rather than sit contentedly after such an unlikely victory, they charge ahead and bring righteous anger into the darkness. They march to the defense of Gondor, and it is then that the Thumos of these men are put on full display. Fighting before the city of Minas Tirith, they begin to lose spirit, but Eomer discovers his sister, a shieldmaiden, fallen beside his uncle, the King:

 

Then suddenly he beheld his sister Éowyn as she lay, and he knew her. He stood a moment as a man who is pierced in the midst of a cry by an arrow through the heart; and then his face went deathly white, and a cold fury rose in him, so that all speech failed him for a while. A fey mood took him.


'Éowyn, Éowyn!' he cried at last. 'Éowyn, how come you here? What madness or devilry is this? Death, death, death! Death take us all!'


Then without taking counsel or waiting for the approach of the men of the City, he spurred headlong back to the front of the great host, and blew a horn, and cried aloud for the onset. Over the field rang his clear voice calling: 'Death! Ride, ride to ruin and the world's ending!'


And with that the host began to move. But the Rohirrim sang no more. Death they cried with one voice loud and terrible, and gathering speed like a great tide their battle swept about their fallen king and passed, roaring away southwards.

 

When the Rohirrim cry "death!" in the face of their enemies, it is their own deaths to which they refer. They have been freed from the desire for self-preservation and declare that they so love the good and the beautiful that they would sooner die than choose to watch the light of the West go out.


The modern world seeks to eliminate this kind of raw soul power from men. In The Iliad, death in combat is glorious, bringing honor for generations. In the Middle Ages, King Charlemagne established a clear code of chivalry: knights "never refuse a challenge from an equal and never turn the back upon a foe."


Men are powerful because of their strength, vigor, and determination. Only death can take these away. Therefore, defying death is the most significant thing a man can do. This means embodying Christ, defending goodness, truth, and beauty, and even choosing death if necessary. It is terrifying to those who run the modern world because if death itself cannot force men to cower, then the wicked shall have no quarter.


When Western man regains his Thumos, when he is not ashamed to hate the evils of the the modern world, then the wicked will flee.


When truth, goodness, and beauty are once again heralded as virtues, the souls of men will need no assurance that death itself is not a significant obstacle to victory: Death has already been defeated.


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Guest
Jan 31

Once again the Jaded Observer strikes out with Vrillinous hate at those who seek to destroy our beautiful people. Veni Vidi Vici

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