Nietzsche & the Dynastic Cycle: Dionysus, Apollo, & the Charlatan’s Box | The Masters’ Game 4
a Short Essay for the Modern Existentialist
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1 | Conceptions of Time and the Trajectory of History
Since time immemorial, human beings have observed on this earth a perpetual cycle of growth and decay. Seasons pass—spring comes and goes, then comes again. War and peace—life and death. It appeared obvious and apparent that, since long before the days of man, all things had traced and traveled the edge of an infinite circle.
To ancient Sinitic cultures, this primordial force of cyclical time was embodied within their socio-political history by what we know today as the Dynastic Cycle. Often mystified in the West as the “Mandate of Heaven”, the Dynastic Cycle is a famous, classical political theory which describes the “uniquely” circular nature of the course of Chinese civilization. And, upon first observation, it should appear immediately clear that the trajectory of Chinese history actually does follow a roughly stable curve of prosperity, fragmentation, scarcity, consolidation, and reunification.
In reality, however, this cyclical trajectory isn’t actually particularly unique, and can’t really be considered to be some kind of inherent, metaphysical property of Chinese history. Instead, this curvature can be easily explained by simply examining the shape of the board upon which the Masters’ Game is played.
It’s a topic which deserves a bit more elaboration, but for now it should suffice to say that the geography of China encourages the centralization of Resources and power, and that this centralizing physical force facilitates the establishment of socio-political order and ethno-religious unity. What this means is that, every time a Chinese dynasty does experience collapse, the geography of the land makes it relatively easy for a new, unitary force to re-organize, re-centralize, and to raise a new empire from the ashes of the old.
…
Politics is driven by social incentive.
Society is driven by economic incentive.
Thus, it can be said that the movements of the social and political spheres both march in lockstep with the Economy of Agency.
Today, when we reference the concept of cyclical growth-and-decay, we think no longer of the old cycles: of seasons or dynasties, of war and peace—of death and life. Instead, we think now of macroeconomics—the Business Cycle: a fluctuating system of economic output, the oscillation of which drives the movement of the socio-political sphere, and the divination of which appears to illuminate the path of future economic change.
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And so, it should appear really quite obvious to those well-versed in history, economics, and geopolitical theory—those who live with one foot in the past and the other in the now—that the Dynastic Cycle and the Business Cycle are two theories which both describe the same phenomenon; that is, a broad-based, politico-economic cycle of growth and decay.
We can empirically observe, after all, that to survive within our physical reality, a human being requires these things:
Food: to eat
Water: to drink
Shelter: to fend off the elements
To plant and to harvest, to build and create—to transport and purify life-giving water. To collect and to aggregate a pool of Resources—of Value—is an attempt to generate greater supply in order to satisfy existing demand. To trade and exchange Resources—exchange Value—is to establish an Economy of Agency. And, when war, or famine, or some other great force of history disrupts or destroys this supply, what remains is only just a wave of demand; a tide of hungry, desperate men. Thus, a new era of Chaos sweeps forth—and once its devastation has been wrought, new Order shall sprout from beneath the carnage; the advent of a brand new age of socio-political regrowth and change.
2 | The Priest’s Gambit & the Charlatan’s Box
The Master is the architect of Order—the Priest, a harbinger of Chaos.
The Master is an effective leader: a capable administrator who inspires confidence through the demonstration of a superior competence. The Master is thus the one who is responsible for the construction of the human world—who:
raises a wall to reduce uncertainty and to achieve control—to expel the Chaos of the outside world and create a safe place; an Ordered space which adheres to his rule of law, in which he’ll be better able to protect the things which he loves.
In this way, the Master initiates an era of growth and prosperity. By creating and enforcing a Social Order, the Master sets the rules of conduct throughout his realm. A line is thus drawn—both literal and figurative—establishing a boundary between what should be considered Tame or Feral; safe, or yet still dangerous. In this way, the Master raises a fortress—a home—elevating his world of Social Order over the base and lawless wilderness: the world of primeval Chaos.
The Priest, meanwhile, is an ineffective leader: a less-than-competent administrator who fails to inspire confidence, and so chooses to employ cunning tactics instead to destroy those whom he’s failed to inspire. He who can seize the crown only through the use of cunning tactics, however… is liable to only be able to keep hold of that crown through the continued use of those tactics.
The Priest—the Charlatan—is an artist at heart. An actor, and a propagandist. Because he cannot do—cannot perform the Master’s tasks to a masterful degree of competency—he is thus forced to employ his alternative methodology. And so, he chooses to play the Priest’s Gambit, composing a dangerous new fiction—a beautiful new lie. By means of Ressentiment, the Priest convinces the Slave that the Social Order which the Master has created isn’t absolute… and must, therefore, be fake. That it’s instead the Priest’s Order—the absolute, inherent, Metaphysical form of Order—which is true… and which, therefore, must obviously supersede any Social Order made by Man or mankind.
In playing the Priest’s Gambit—in seeking to restructure the philosophy of his society—the Priest attempts to flatten the Dialectical Cube; to transform it into a box instead.
If he succeeds—if he’s able to beat the Tame-Feral axis flat into line with that of Order and Chaos—then he would be able to diffuse the idea of Social Objectivity into the Metaphysical. By means of confusion and obfuscation, the Priest is thus able to trick his people, creating a false, two-dimensional world—a world of smoke and mirrors and lies in which he reigns supreme.
In this new Priest’s world—in this Charlatan’s Box—there remains only one type of Objectivity; not two. There is the Metaphysical—the real, true, absolute Objectivity, to which any form of unabsolute, Social Objectivity immediately finds itself subordinate… and, therefore, inferior. Thus, the Value of our old myths and songs—the wisdom of our ancestors, and our most ancient histories—falls pale against the blinding glare of the Priest’s claim to an omnipotent Truth.
In the Charlatan’s Box, there is Subjectivity and Objectivity—but then, there can be nothing in-between. With the realm of the Social enslaved to the Metaphysical, it becomes the case that Subject and Object may interact with one another only via Metaphysical means—that all of an individual’s Intersubjective relations have now been subordinated to “the Divine”. Family and friends—peers and strangers—none of these Social relationships can be one’s primary concern any longer. What should matter most to the Subject instead is now his relationship with Divinity; for it is first this Metaphysical Divine which allows for the existence of a “Social” anything.
In this Charlatan’s Box, there are only two axes—and thus, four types of people. There is the Strong & Weak, the Good & Evil—and thus, also the four corners and Archetypes which exist at their extremes.
By playing the Priest’s Gambit, the Priest initiates an era of repression and decline. By deposing Social Order in favor of his own Metaphysics, the Priest attempts to increase his power by raising himself to the state of Divinity, ensuring the Complacency and compliance of his own people. Because he is weak, he fears strength in those whose station he believes should be below his own—and so, he raises petty fools and culls the skilled and the able, thus sowing conflict and division in the midst of his own people. Through the creation of the Charlatan’s Box—by manipulating his people’s philosophy with a lie—the Priest re-draws the line between the Tame and the Feral; the permissible and the forbidden. In so doing, he begins to rip stones from the old Master’s walls, using them to build new walls to divide and control his own people. Thus, through his own unwitting incompetence, the Priest begins the destruction of all Order—for he has himself, in the first place, declared Social Order defunct. He weakens his people and weakens his wall, inadvertently opening the fissures and breaks through which the Chaos of the lawless wilds may begin to slowly seep back in.
3 | Of Real and Ideal; of Earth and Sky
The Master is born in the world of Dionysus—a Pragmatist shaped and molded to completion by a real, physical world: a world of abject and obvious Chaos. Thus, he aspires toward Apollo—toward truth, and logic, and the advent of the ideal. He aspires toward a state of perfection—or at least, as close as is possible to perfection—and to achieve the creation of a world in which all things move and exist by his own immaculate design.
The Priest is born in the world of Apollo—a Charlatan or a Narcissist who feels the constraint of a made, social world: a world of abject and obvious Order. Thus, he aspires toward Dionysus—toward fiction, and Absurdity, and the return to the imperfect; the world beyond Order. The wild, lawless world in which he believes he’ll be able to find and achieve an absolute liberation of his self.
Each aspires toward his own opposite, hoping to break away from his nature—to grasp the freedom which he feels that he has been denied:
The Master, striving to win his liberty from the violent domination of primeval Chaos, and;
The Priest, desiring to reclaim his Agency from the meticulous oppression of the Order of Man.
And so, we can see that—throughout all of human history—this broad-based cycle of growth and decay has been driven by the interchange between Master and Priest; by the attitude which is held by leaders and kings who command the Value and Agency necessary to sway the stability of civilizations. Order and Chaos are thus driven and defined by an aspiration toward the Real or Ideal—toward Dionysus, or toward Apollo… and toward Earth or Sky.
4 | Conclusions
In the pre-modern world, we saw time as a cycle—in the seasons, and the tide, and the migrations of birds. When we invented the cotton gin, we threw our circles away. What cycle, after all, was there to be found on the factory floor but the rotation of gears day-after-day? We came to believe that time was linear—that the world changed and moved on a line we called progress; that we, as humans, had a duty to press forward, and never to move back.
Today, we see the world’s technology progressing at a rapid rate—Resource-extraction and Value-accrual accelerating as the singularity looms. Many still believe human-time to travel a linear path—but some few see and understand that, in reality, time is Agency and is exponential.
Time, to mankind, is neither cyclical nor linear—neither the circle nor the line. Instead, it’s a cycling exponential; a curve which oscillates ever closer to asymptotic singularity.
