Eunuch Caste Theory
or, The Perpetual End of History
Human Domestication
With the dawn of domesticated agriculture came as well the dawn of domesticated labor. Artificial selection of varying species for the purposes of human consumption, be that consumption as food or as toil, brought with it the first real economic surplusses in human history. These surplusses, along with the refinery of domestication, led to the first ruling classes, classes which then applied the same techniques of domestication to human populations. The toiling classes, the warring classes, the priestly classes, and the ruling classes all began to be selected for based on specific traits and specific uses, their internal mechanisms, politics, and cultures developed to these ends.
These specialization mechanisms developed independently everywhere that advanced agriculture-based civilizations did. From Egypt to Greece to Rome, from India to China to Japan, to the Inca, the Maya, the Aztecs, the preservation of a ruling class capable of organizing labor and sub-classes responsible for executing policy so as to maintain a permanent surplus was an absolute necessity for survival in the disconnected post-neolithic world. The feudal monarchies of Europe and China raised their dynastic heirs specifically to rule, their education in history, foreign tongues, diplomacy, and the physical sciences tailored to the needs of managing the dynastic line, to maintain the wealth of the state so that the state did not collapse. Raised up to navigate contradicting — at times silently warring — factions needed to uphold the state as it existed, lest the whole of society break up into civil war and famine.
Back during these days, famine was an ever-present threat. A cold snap at the wrong time would devastate entire nations, whole family lines wiped out by an early September freeze or dry seasons lasting two weeks too long. Rulers capable of handling these harsh material conditions, capable of holding down the fort when surpluses diminished, capable of doling out just the right balance of reward and punishment and empty promise were as necessary as the serfs tied to the land, toiling and praying that they had enough to pay their tithes and feed themselves.
Thus, the interbreeding of the ruling classes became a common practice everywhere agriculture flourished. It became an ever more common practice as trade proliferated, feudal systems centralized, and the whole of Europe found itself subject to one large agricultural system with internal factions and competing dynasties, rather than entirely siloed, disparate feudal/agricultural systems. This led to incest, which led to genetic fray, which led to handicap, which led (usually) to the dysgenic corruption or even outright end of a given dynastic line through infertility, incompetence, or insanity (or all three at once with hemophilia as a bonus).
But of course, monarchies are so rarely what their namesake (mono = single, archus = ruler) makes them out to be. The creation of the aristocratic court was meant to facilitate the handover of power from one monarch to another, to prepare heirs and spares for their assumed duties as the highest nobles in the land. The court, of course, required extravagant surpluses directed to itself, and their unique authority over and relationship with the office of the monarch was the means by which they protected those surpluses. Especially when the king happened to be a young child, not yet of an age capable of ruling over an entire kingdom or empire, the court secured miracle-working duties for itself; duties which made them indispensable even when the young prince came of age to actually rule. The king’s adult family would not necessarily intervene in these cases, usually because they were themselves covetous and more than slightly disloyal to family when it came to these games of power.
Enter the Eunuch
Eunuchs made for very useful court appointees. Their relative physical frailty, infertility, and absence of uniquely masculine aggression made them less likely candidates for staging palace coups. They were far more likely to align themselves with whichever faction would be the most powerful and best suited to rule for stability; they are not risk-takers, but extremely risk-averse. They could not possibly retain happy, long lives without the luxury and safety that being a court member guaranteed, thus they had to hang onto power by any means. Despite their lack of T-fueled aggression, they still retained a masculine competitive instinct, fully aware that to ascend to the court one needed not only to cut one’s penis and testicles off (yes, often both had to go), but to prove that they had the raw knowledge, sage wisdom, and brutal realpolitik necessary to keep the kingdom afloat.
This isn’t to say that they weren’t shifty in their own right. Every member of every political class around the world, if this class is to be successful, requires a vulgar materialism that readily discards any major moral considerations. Eunuchs served the king and could never truly become king even if they conquered the throne by force, but this didn’t mean that they didn’t support usurpers and other traitors to power. However, in order for the eunuch to retain the glory and wealth that serving the monarchy came with, he needed to play ball and to play it safely. He was given a freer rein than other male members of the court — near-unfettered access to the ladies of the court and heiresses to the throne, precisely because he posed little to no risk of impregnating them or even of molesting them — but only because he knew instinctively that he had to keep reins on him lest he be crushed swiftly and brutally, expelled from the height of society and straight into the gutter.
Military men facing sanction or even assassination had the option of at least fighting back, wielding entire regiments or just one single sword against their attackers, but not the eunuch. What he lacks in physical strength he makes up for in cunning. A eunuch may very well have made a name for himself within the aristocracy but could never truly become an aristocrat himself. His family line nonexistent, his ascension to permanent power impossible, his properties held only at the behest of the monarch(s) he raised and advised. He is a perpetual servant to power even as he wields it (indeed because he wields it) and can only ever amount to this. It is his only hope at securing an immortal legacy beyond his mortal life.
The 20th Century State: A Violent Birth
What burst forth from the heaving ribs of the 19th century was a mutant chimera which had already ingested and absorbed what remained of its mother’s innards. The rise of corporatist bureaucracies (intermediary economic agencies intended to control market activity, craft and execute policy with limited parliamentary input, and create favorable/unfavorable economic conditions where desired) in every political economy around the world was a momentous process, the most important development since the total collapse of feudalism and the rapid adoption of liberal democracy. This is when the bourgeoisie became truly ascendant and worthy of their present power, securing their gains at the end of monarchy as it once existed with an aristocratic court intended to replace that of the old ruling class. If the 19th century was spent, across most of the Western world, replacing feudal lords with a new landed gentry of businessmen, the 20th century was spent gutting old forms of statecraft and replacing them with new ones, absorbing the advances of the now-dead fascist and communist revolutions (as a sidenote, the Chinese case is a different example, but their communist revolution is dying as well, if it is not considered reasonably dead already; however, this is a topic outside the scope of this essay which I one day hope to revisit).
As capitalist nations across the world consolidated their markets into just a few major enterprises, enterprises which then diversified themselves, creating markets within their own direct control, they needed a new apparatus for managing the vast quantities of wealth being extracted from colonial holdings. The Jeffersonian vision of liberal democracy, that of the humble yeoman farmer, was long dead and buried along with Jefferson at this point. New statesmen — Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, their competitors — progressive statesmen, statesmen who were tasked with this fundamental reshaping of liberal democracy at the close of the Western frontier, these statesmen drew up the new foundations upon which we now rest our decadent feet.
The Constitution meant to unite 13 disparate countries into one powerful military and economic powerhouse managed to unite it into one country altogether, its regionalisms eroded, its empire run out of land. Across the Atlantic, other problems: Groaning empires locked in heated arms races, eager to burn it all down just to rebuild again as a show of might against centuries-old enemies. The Ottoman Empire of this time is often referred to as the Sick Man of Europe, but truth be told it was every last European empire which was sick and dying, every last bloated bureaucracy merging old aristocratic orders with new bourgeois surpluses. The Ottomans, the Austrians, the German Empire, these were the first to be dismantled because they were the sore losers of the bunch. The Russian Empire fell to radical liberals and socialists, those liberals soon falling to socialists and communists, those socialists eventually falling to communists, a process which was decades in the making.
In the United States again, ever greater advances in bureaucratic superstructure were devised in the wake of the Depression. There was serious risk of ideological drift away from the Constitutional foundations; the labor disputes of the previous decades had resulted in powerful new interest groups tackling powerful new corporate bodies, institutions which had no real predecessors within liberalism. The widespread economic collapse, recessions within recessions, rampant deflation, robust crop failure and more demanded answers not because the market was incapable of producing solutions of its own, but because those solutions would have shifted the scales too far in a direction unamenable to wealthy monopolist interests. Thus, a conpromise had to be crafted, and an American corporatism was invented: The New Deal. A corporatism fully in line with the evolution of liberalism as it really existed, not as it was theorized in the heads of philosophers who had yet to touch it with their own hands back in the 18th century.
In the meantime, Italy and Spain fell to civil war and Fascist revolution, owing to the failures of Liberals and old-guard Monarchists to keep their respective houses in order. Germany too, forced to submit to a radical new liberal democratic order by foreign powers eventually fell to a new, homegrown, internal influence which was similar to, but unlike Spanish integralism or Italian fascism: A radical racial doctrine fusing elements of every political school bursting forth from the hollowed womb of the late 19th century, a form of government completely incompatible (at that point in time) with a weak liberal state. Autarchic and expansionary, corporatist and single-minded, the Nazis posed myriad problems for global leadership at the time — moreover, they were sought and were well-positioned to supplant it, unlike the Communists who sought the same but were still recovering from civil war.
Yet by the middle of the century, the dust had settled and two powers remained. The European empires were finished, now relying on the charity of their superpower neighbors. The Americans and Soviets moved into a divided Europe and a permanently neutered Germany and held an impressive geopolitical stalemate until the latter fell inward and shattered, its enormous surplus already safely held in offshore accounts well before the hammer and sickle stopped flying over the Kremlin. The black markets which had emerged in the gaps between official numbers and real productive capacity forced the doors of liberalism wide open across the Second World, and there was nothing any Marxist-Leninist ideologue could do about it.
And so, the Americans stood tall and proud in 1991 as the British once did, gargantuan shadow cast upon an empire where the sun never sets, holding the combined economic efforts of virtually the entire world in the palms of their hands. A rapid and brutal victory in the Gulf War secured the US as the protector of global trade according to its rule, threatening utter destruction to those who stand in its way. The lessons learned and money made throughout the World Wars and the proxies of the Cold War have resulted in the creation of a perfect capitalist machine. An empire with a very short history, almost totally unencumbered by attachments to the past. Having secured this awe-inspiring power, having built itself upon the ashes of civilizations which never quite got their start, it entered the New Millennium with new evolutionary pressures — in particular, the pressure to stay on top.
Creation of the 21st Century Eunuch
The vote has expanded from a tool by which savvy players in the market could use to leverage their position without coming to blows with competitors into a tool which is little more than a form of patronage to government entities allocating and reallocating the immense surplus of the industrial-financial machine of empire. At one time limited to a small minority of the United States’s inhabitants, now guaranteed to everyone over the age of 18 with virtually no restrictions at all — in fact, impressed upon us, pressuring us to “exercise our right” and to “lift every voice.”
In truth, participants in electoral campaigns at a high level (and indeed, on a local level in many cases) are selected for in advance by bourgeois cabals of interested parties, their campaigns designed to attract those specific segments of the population most likely to produce a winning coalition. In order for a candidate to be appealling, he or she must provide some sort of actionable benefit to the consituents, or at least convince them that he or she will. However, a candidate must balance this with the long-term interests of his or her donors, which may well be at odds with the more immediate interests of his or her constituents.
At one time in the recent past, there were many who lacked the same federally guaranteed individual rights of the property-owning White men who originally built this country’s superstructure. Since at least the 1960s, if not further back in most states, there has been little discrimination in this regard. Thus, upon reaching this point, what else is there to offer? What can be afforded to those who seek more for themselves, while also creating/sustaining a superstructure for the basal power that finance capital wields within liberal democracy?
Expanding the Black vote in the South through the passage of the Civil Rights Act led to Blacks abandoning the Republicans in droves, leading that party to pick up the “Southern Strategy,” i.e., appealing to Southern Whites who felt disenfranchised by federal integration efforts in the wake of violent race riots and mutual exchanges of domestic terrorism by both ethnic blocs. Democrats won big among ethnic minorities and women during this time, as they became the party of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion long before DEI as we know it today reared its head. Indeed, this is the foundation of DEI today, the legal infrastructure upon which these public-private reeducation efforts rely on.
This isn’t to say the Democrats were and remained popular across the country. Far from it. There were many growing pains within America at the time, and the Democrats were the face of many of them, often in ugly ways. Of course, the Republicans did nothing to roll back the left-wing tide. Indeed, all they did was improve upon those gains through the critique of excesses and reification of premises. They still have this role today and will for the foreseeable future. The Democrats, for now, will be the bleeding edge of Left-Liberalism and the Republicans that of Right-Liberalism, both taking cues from the most important and most fanatically Liberal segment of the electorate: The petit bourgeoisie.
Which leads us, finally, to the subject of this section’s heading. The first “eunuch” caste of the American ruling class was not the transsexuals, but the homosexuals. Indeed, support for their cause was as inorganic as the support for trans, though it took longer to take hold. Homosexuals are similar to eunuchs in function because they are functionally sterile; though they may be physically capable of conceiving a child, it basically doesn’t happen. A constellation of large donor-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) which emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries feverishly marketed for gay acceptance beginning in the 1980s, reaching their penultimate success in 2015 with the federal legalization of gay marriage. This achievement, along with every stepping stone leading up to it, firmly cemented homosexuals as a protected caste within the Left coalition of middle management and academia, a caste which now had certain tools of the state at their disposal.
Then came the early 2010s and the bourgeois Left began experimenting with new NGO forms built upon new information infrastructure with the power to affect mass psychology almost instantaneously and the ability to measure the results of these experiments in real-time. Black Lives Matter, Kony 2012, The Human Rights Campaign, the ACLU etc., all employed these new soft power tools to hard power ends. In the middle of this, almost unnoticed except as the butt of many crude, well-deserved jokes, transgender social contagion made the leap from obscure fetish forums onto the microblogging site Tumblr, officially beginning the trans epidemic we know today.
What the 2010s gave us, more than anything else, was a new method and means of political discourse adopted by virtually everybody, including its critics. Persistent victimhood complexes, cluster B disorder social dynamics, and strong identification with parasocial media figures. Some of these things existed in the past, it’s true, but the digital boom over the last decade intensified these trends, and its actors intensified them intentionally. Trans, however, is the biggest winner from this milieu. It is the perfect mixture of every identity-based special interest group today, and it is the most aggressive. It combines everything needed to succeed as a political venture in this environment and is highly attractive to the most personality disordered, the shrewdest narcissists and sociopaths alive, individuals which are absolutely necessary for brute-forcing a winning coalition. It simultaneously proves that observable reality is easily malleable while also calling attention to how easily manipulated “reality” is.
It also, through its body modification rituals, creates functional eunuchs. Not only does it create a caste of administrators, bureaucrats, and activists which are fiercely defensive of their personal interpretation of reality (as fed to them by digital handlers), it also seals the deal by castrating them — and much more invasively than any other form of eunuchization, as this castration is not just external, but courses throughout the whole body.
Most of these eunuchs, just like most of the eunuchs created in epochs prior to this one, are too unstable and insane to actually belong to the ruling class’s court. Many of these poor degenerates are on the frontlines, antifascist blackshirts brutalizing wayward liberals who are too conservative, who cling too strongly to the liberalism of the pre-digital era, who refuse to unflinchingly accept the new order. These pitiful wrecks are often drug addicts, prostitutes, lumpenproletariat criminal scum who are “to the Left” of the Democrats, and who continually push them further.
Others on the lower levels outside the bourgeois high courts may be petit-bourgeois administrators who work closely with the criminal element, those who set the discourses accepted by the blackshirts, who maneuver more in the realm of legal and bureaucratic violence and discipline. These are the HR representatives, university staff, teachers, doctors and often students in middle school and up. They work together with lumpen to destroy pockets of capital that cannot resist the weight of the institutions they serve and they discipline workers to accept the new paradigm of liberalism in the wake of capital’s perpetually self-revolutionizing advances. The petit bourgeois-lumprenprole relationship is a strong one and an old one, and trans intensifies it. The eunuchs at the heights of bourgeois power, the Martine Rothblatts and Jennifer Pritzkers wielding massive corporate/NGO players in the present ruling coalition, are favored and protected precisely because of what their creations are capable of securing for the rest of the coalition. Such is the ruthlessly cynical role of the court eunuch.
If the spread of transgender social contagion through Tumblr was at one time accidental (and I don’t believe that it was), it certainly isn’t anymore. It provides too many benefits to the bourgeoisie who sit atop this arrangement, it secures recent imperial gains against internal and external threat just as older iterations of the eunuch did in empires past. Many Right-wing critics of transgenderism claim that this, along with the general liberalization of sexual mores, is a sign of civilizational decline but I say quite the contrary. It means that the ruling classes have consolidated their power to such an extent that they can accommodate this amount of sheer decadence within their ranks and not be worried about losing it.
The eunuch is a tool for maintaining power, his emergence alone is not a sign of decline. It is unsurprising that after the emergence of eunuch castes, empires begin declining, but only because eunuchs often arrive at the heights of empire. Once that height has been reached, decline is inevitable, but not owing to the eunuch specifically. Rather, it is most often due to repeated contractions in surplus, disturbances in the base causing superstructures to break apart. Capitalism has proven itself markedly resilient to such disturbances, so the arrival of the eunuch in our modern age is less a sign that modernity is coming to an end and more a sign that it has centuries left before it is ready for a transition on par with the transition from feudalism. In the meantime, everyone’s evolutionary/domestication pressures continue to mount in new and novel ways.
Yes, it may seem stupid and it is silly on the face of it, but there is a reason our leaders are atop the world and almost everyone else swims in the currents even the smallest of their motions create. The reason Russia and China still have to show themselves off as hard-nosed realists is because they sorely lack the power that our empire wields so effortlessly. They bare their teeth, and in response we flash them our genitals. This is not limited to other nations. This is primarily a domestic effort, though it certainly secures gains in our imperial reaches as well. Make no mistake though: The US merely mocks its foreign enemies with its shamelessness, but in order to be so secure, it must be capable of ruling its subjects with an iron fist.
Finale
The world is a different place than it once was, and yet it’s the same as it ever was. Civilizations rise and fall, labor is either disciplined or it disciplines itself. People evolve. They live and they die and if they’re lucky they have children in between. Whether liberalism survives the next ten years or lasts for the next thousand, who can say? What is certain is that it will change, and it will change in order that nothing too fundamental changes. We will bear witness to these changes for the rest of our lives. We will like some of them, hate others. We will stake our claims regardless. And then we will die, regardless of whether we defended those claims or not. We will all experience joy, sadness, delight, despair. The arc of history is longer than the imagination allows for. You have a small part in that arc. You will be buried, or scattered to the wind, and your memory will fade. We all have a role to play, needs to fulfill. Waste only what you can afford to waste. Do what must be done.
Interesting topic, intriguing threads here. Worth pursuing.
And also, I didn’t think it had the sureness of aim this author displays in other articles. I kind of feel it’s a bit of work in progress, it could perhaps benefit from a rewrite or some in depth editing.
Particularly the first part, the historic context. I thought it could be leaner, more to the point, the prose not to the usual standard. I found it too prolix and lacking in engagement, like the writer felt he had to touch on it but didn’t relish the idea too much. I confess I skimmed it.
But all in all I enjoyed it, I’d like to read more about this idea, the eunuch caste and power.
Impressive and compelling interpretation of History.
A stimulating read.
However, the stretch is a bit too long between (a) explaining the eunuch in prior epochs, to (b) addressing the contemporary appearance of the eunuch.
That weakens the connection, and there’s still a question of why exactly the eunuch today would fit the same purpose, when elites now are not necessarily protecting their women or daughters from male servants.