Recently, a certain quote has infested itself in my algorithms on Instagram and TikTok from an awful man. The first time I heard it, a chill ran down my spine, and I almost fell into its appeal. Mike Mahoney (more famously known under the pen name Mike Ma), the author of a book titled, “Harassment Architecture,” is a far right social media personality and former Breitbart writer. His book has come up more times on my feed than I am willing to admit, not because I have a desire to ingest the fascist nationalist and supremacist filth in the book, but because Mahoney is a gifted propagandist.
“You will never get to see fifty foot statues of warlords and emperors or feel the triumph of conquest,” the quote goes. “You will never see man live as the ancients dreamed he would, all because a couple of rats tunneled their way into positions of power. They said the past is wrong. They said invaders should have your land. They said it’s ok to embrace apathy. You are a victim of the technocracy, of an abuse named ‘civility’. You have been robbed of a fulfilling earnest life.”
Upon analysis, the quote is embarrassingly filled with alt-right imagery and wording. The motifs of a mythologized past and a return to tradition, the rejection of ideas like anti-imperialism and civility, and the framing of this dilemma as a war against traditionalism is all, regrettably, very obvious as I write this article. However, on a TikTok For You Page, paired with carefully selected imagery from historical epics and with booming music beckoning the audience to imagine themselves in glistening armor, you are tempted to forget all of the red flags. After all, the core feeling the quote feeds off of becomes more bi-partisan every day.
As I reckon with my hours of screen time a day often eclipsing the double digits, hours I have almost certainly wasted, and the future of my life feeling inescapably tied to the incredibly unfulfilling modern 9-5 work model, I feel like it will be hard to live a life that hasn’t been dictated by CEOs and politicians to be mediocre and unfulfilling. The future of my life is bound by many things I wish were not, but are utterly outside of my control. I will live with my hands tied behind my back, unlikely to buy a house, unlikely to be financially independent, and even more unlikely to make my dreams come true.
I have heard it argued on multiple occasions that the average medieval peasant had a better chance of living a fulfilling life than an average person does today. Medieval peasants were commonly serfs, a type of servant living under local lords in a feudal societal structure. Despite this lack of freedom, these men lived and worked hard, not only to cultivate crops and livestock for their lord, but also for themselves. They would pull their own food from the ground with their hands, and they would work hard for long hours. They would live in a community, working and living alongside their families and friends. They were given time off on Sundays and on holidays, and during the winters they kept inside and survived with their families. Of course, the child mortality rate in these days was around 50%, and infrastructure was much worse in almost every aspect of life. There was no electricity, no plumbing or hot water, and none of the countless bureaus and administrations making sure working conditions, food, or countless other health risks were being monitored. However, at the end of a week, I can imagine myself relaxing, preparing for another week full of hard work and uncertainty. I have never known the comfort brought to my ass from a cushioned office chair. I have never had to wait my turn for passing cars, or had the luxury of experiencing a bounty of art every day. My hands have ever known the grip of a hoe, and they long for nothing else. I am, nonetheless, happier than many that work today.
More than that, however, exists the endless possibilities that existed to find meaning long ago. Without the scope of the earth under the vice of those in power, the world possessed a palpable amount of mystique and grandeur. I believe this is one of the core reasons why I sympathized with the quote upon hearing it for the first time. The invocation of the “triumph of conquest” is admittedly a warmongering sentiment, but something about it is twistedly romantic. I can imagine the elation of finding a world unknown, placing your feet on foreign beaches without the aid of a travel brochure. Who knew if legends of far off lands and their otherworldly monsters were true? Who knew what magnitudes of beauty existed in the world in every crevice? Now, every nature program hoping to explore the intricacies of the world’s beauty ends up ruining the minute with their very existence. To see the pyramids, or Angkor Wat, or Saint Peter’s Basilica meant so much. Now, every city skyline invades the mind with its temptations. Here, the birds glisten off the windows of this metal colossus, as they do one block down. The Lighthouse of Alexandria is lucky to have been burnt, for if it stood today, it would be dwarfed by the over 7,000 skyscrapers that have placed their reigns upon the world.
When a medieval peasant went to church, and saw a commissioned painting of the Madonna and her child, that was the greatest painting they would ever see. No floor of unearned knowledge, no folly of one billion Google search results would stampede the magnificence of painting. The simple folk song that would play in a cottage in the dead of winter would be the only music that you would ever hear, and in this way, the voluptuous beauty of song as an art form would shine brighter than it ever could through AirPod Pros and Spotify queues. Art was so pure. Now, no one can create anything original, as the cataclysm of clashing reference block out the light of purity from creation every day.
In this way, Mike Mahoney’s message is finally destroyed. The things lost to us are not the feelings of ripping out another man’s throat, or plundering and subjugating the weak. These things in fact still do happen, however now they are bureaucratized. It is actually optimistic to imagine that a group of people have worked their hardest to stop empires and war. This is not true.
Instead, the masses of those in power have tightened their grasp around the world’s beauty and the revolutionary power of love. Only through the power of the love we have for others are we empowered to have any real chance against those who oppress us, and allow ourselves to be upheaved from this modernized version of the same serfdom our ancestors experienced, this time set on making the servant more reliant, less fulfilled. Our weapon will not be swords and arrows, but the compassion we have for those who our systems of power deem to be lesser, unworthy of attention. This is the true way that our fulfillment has been robbed, and it is utterly useless to think any other way.
Now, there is only one direction for this desire for conquest to go. Conquest is not only satisfying because we foolishly believe it would lead us to fulfillment, but because it is the easiest pathway to unabridged power. In a world that has grown so much larger than us, we have become completely out of control with what stimulates us. The very core of our identities have become someone else’s play thing, and, naturally, we now desire power over our lives more than ever. The much more productive way of attaining this power, however, is not through some great crusade of foreign lands, but instead, an internal sort of conquest. The most accessible form of rebellion for a person like you or me is to reject what our system demands of us: our reliance. With every surge of dopamine or adrenaline produced by machines, we become more complacent and agreeable to what we are being fed. Our social media accounts have eclipsed the drive to explore the world for our own meanings. Instead, we are fed thousands of beliefs by different people. No longer are we required to figure the world out for ourselves. In this way, Mahoney’s quote touches on something true: we have embraced apathy.
In this same truth is maybe the funniest contradiction Mahoney’s stupid quote makes. In his call to action to conquer civilizations and learn the joy of absolute power, he criticizes the embrace of apathy, as if conquest is such an empathetic practice. The only way for these ideas to meld together is if the fifty foot statues are not of warlords and emperors, but for revolutionaries who fought for peace and freedom. The search for these virtues, for now, must start internally. Those who create a fertile foundation for this world must be remembered and celebrated, but every soul on Earth must equally discover a meaning for themselves. In a world in which the shrewd painting of the Madonna becomes an oversight when compared to the millions of similar images on any phone screen, the connection we are able to have with art, or nature, or our loved ones is systematically destroyed. Every day, there is a world to see so much brighter than someone could ever make you imagine. No great leader can tell me of the way it felt when the sunlight hit my eyes through my bedroom window on the first day of summer break in 2019, or how it felt to stick my head out of a sunroof in a car going irresponsibly fast at an irresponsibly late time of night a few weeks ago. To conquer the world is gentle and bloodless. You must simply depart with the few tools they foolishly gave you and discover the world, in all of its primal beauty, for yourself.
