#LOTR #RWNJ #BadNerds
"The right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings. But they don’t understand it.
The bizarre conservative misunderstanding of The Lord of the Rings, explained.
Among the many humiliations of being American in the current moment is this: Members of the tech right and the conservative ruling class continually fetishize objects of nerd culture while also displaying a willful inability to grasp the very basic messages those objects are sending. While there are certainly worse problems (e.g. white nationalism in the White House), the blazing lack of reading comprehension from people who are allegedly smart does give one pause. Put simply, these people are bad nerds.
Probably the text they are most consistently prone to misreading is The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved fantasy trilogy deals with the corrupting influence of power and the necessity of death. Yet, the right keeps using it as a parable for why powerful people should be given more power and human beings should be immortal.
Among the many humiliations of being American in the current moment is this: Members of the tech right and the conservative ruling class continually fetishize objects of nerd culture while also displaying a willful inability to grasp the very basic messages those objects are sending. While there are certainly worse problems (e.g. white nationalism in the White House), the blazing lack of reading comprehension from people who are allegedly smart does give one pause. Put simply, these people are bad nerds.
Probably the text they are most consistently prone to misreading is The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved fantasy trilogy deals with the corrupting influence of power and the necessity of death. Yet, the right keeps using it as a parable for why powerful people should be given more power and human beings should be immortal.
In Tolkien’s books, it is not the men of Gondor who turn back the forces of evil and save the Shire; it’s those gentle, peaceful hobbits who pull the whole thing off. They’re the only species able to carry the One Ring of Power, because they are, by their nature, unambitious. All they want is to live their peaceful bourgeois lives of tea and toast and jam, so they are able to withstand the temptations of the ring and its promises of power, ultimately carrying it far enough to destroy it. The best the men of Gondor can do to help is refuse to ever touch the ring, because they know that if they pick it up, they will not be able to resist temptation.
To translate this into the metaphor: If you’re taking Tolkien as your guide, and you believe your homeland to be under invasion by the forces of evil, the solution is not to try to consolidate your power, harden your nature, and glory in needless cruelty. The solution is to refuse power whenever it is offered to you and to fight from a place of humility."
https://www.vox.com/culture/466858/lord-of-the-rings-conservatives-right-republicans-elon-musk-jd-vance-peter-thiel
