The Hero King

What Kind of Societal Figurehead Fits a Tribal, Masculine and Transcendent Worldview?

Written with the thoughts on a just society, as expressed by Joseph Bellofatto over the course of our friendship.

The modern president or prime minister is a subdued shadow of the classical king, just as the dictator is a feminized caricature of the king, expressive or collectively distorted to the point of celebrity.

The classical king, himself, is nothing more than a pale imitation of the hero king, seduced by material concerns, managed by moneyed puppets as far back as the Magna Carta of 1215. Hence, even the king of the High Middle Ages is a debased commodity, and a manipulated manipulator, an evolved inheritor of Agamemnon, not of Achilles.

A hero king, like the hero he was before assuming kingship—David comes to mind—must, by definition be a hero first, a man who went against the established order. In an infinitely corrupt and degraded way, a modern businessman who went against the political order would satisfy this requirement. In most cases, the hero turned king is ruined by his transformation, but the ruin is his, as a sacrificial figure, rather than the ruin of the nation that befalls the followers of a dictator or a managerial head of state.

For a view of the heroic conflict of interest with the duties of kingship, one should read The Rage of Achilles from the Iliad and the Prologue of Beowulf. As both the conflict between hero and king take their toll on the nation and army respectively, as the King is essentially illegitimate in masculine, meaning primal, terms, with his stature based upon the accumulated wealth passed down by hero kings and passed upward by slave beings, resting upon the actual heroism—actionist sacrifice—of politically disenfranchised henchmen. This latter element reflects the essential instability of any hereditary kingship and the illegitimate proxy nature of any politically selected head-of-state.

Recently, while discussing politics and my apolitical lack of alignment with a war-fighter, he asked me why I could neglect an attempt to influence the selection of the regime leadership that my sons must live under.

I responded that my position was so far to the right that alignment with the New American Political Right made no more sense to me than the alignment of the “Alt-Right” with third wave feminist political candidates would make to writers at such sites as Counter-Currents and VDare, and that the very idea of a president serving as the hood ornament of an ostensible oligarchy, which is in fact the backroom-bought mask of an actual plutocratic state, was a political form so intrinsically corrupt and false-faced that no good could come of it.

He then asked what kind of government I would support.

I put forth the idea of the Hero King:

• The man must have fought;

• The man must have killed;

• The man must give away all his worldly possessions;

• The man must then engage in some physical contest to be named king;

• The man must serve uncompensated, advised by older, not younger, men, who have likewise sworn an oath of poverty;

• The man must participate in any military action he initiates;

• The man must retire into poverty and exile when physical or mental decline render him ineffective.

That is it, rather than a hero becoming degraded by kingship and devolving into the pawn that pushes lesser pawns around the board of death merchant exchange, he should remain the bane of such manipulators, rather than surrender to their embrace as any modern head-of-state must.

(c) 2017 James LaFond