Tyranny and the Modern State Cult

On the Remarkable Continuity of a Concept Over Time

This is a reworked article originally posted on The American Sun in 2020.

If I were asked what I consider the most important discovery which has been made during the nineteenth century, with respect to the ancient history of mankind, I should answer by the following short line:

Sanskrit Dyaus Pitr = Greek Zeus Pater = Latin Jupiter = Old Norse Tyr.

-          Max Müller

The 19^th century was the high point of Western civilization, and the list of important discoveries is staggering—natural selection, thermodynamics, electrodynamics, telegraphy, the internal combustion engine, the periodic table, germ theory of disease, the list goes on. But Müller’s “most important discovery” may end up outshining them all. The birth of comparative linguistics has given us a window into our most ancient modes of life, which both consciously and unconsciously are being reborn. And we owe it all to something dismally boring: etymology.

I sang the praises of etymology in a previous article. There is basically no such thing as the ‘etymological fallacy’—words are concepts, concepts shape our reality, and etymology is the real history of our concepts. When you tease out the archaic and originary meaning of a term, you almost always end up understanding it in a deeper way. Very often, by some theurgic operation, it becomes totally transformed. Even if it has barely changed at all for thousands of years, the original apprehension of the term almost always throws far more light on it.

The Latin term for “ought” is debeo, cognate with our “debt”, and synonymous in the Latin with “to owe”. Why ought you do anything? Because you are obligated by a debt—here, the radically social, embedded, and corporate character of morality starts to come into focus. This becomes still clearer on the Germanic side of the ledger, where “guilt” grows out of Old English gieldan (cognate with “gild” and “yield”), meaning “to pay for”. Indebtedness is not just a metaphor for normativity, it’s identical with it.

You may note that a word has been utterly transformed through time, which tells you even more—it gives you a window into ancient structural conflict, that the word was a hotly contested battleground, as words are today.¹ And where a term has been totally inverted, you often find that the original meaning persists in some important way, and without that original meaning you have at best only a half-understanding.

The Greeks have bequeathed to us many of our categories, but among the most important is tyranny. Liberalism is allergic to tyranny the way Rome was allergic to a king, the way the left is allergic to hierarchy. Of the many ways to characterize liberalism, you won’t go too far wrong thinking of it as just a recipe to prevent tyranny. Tyranny’s etymology is obscure, going back to the myth of Gyges of Lydia, a usurper who gained the throne by artifice and trickery. But the term doesn’t enter the lexicon in any sustained way until the time of the popular tyrants, late in the history of the Greek city-states, and not long before the Greeks became vassals of Rome.² The tyrants come only shortly after the historical lights go on and we have records, but they come late in the life of the Greek peoples, after structural conflict had hollowed out these once cohesive societies. This conflict will seem eerily familiar by the time we’re done.