Barbarism

Captain William Bainbridge paying
tribute to the Dey (داي) of Algiers

Barbarism |
Monday – October 5, 2026

Barbarism is commonly used as a word to describe something barbaric. Yes, forgive my tautology. But yes, barbarism is often invoked when we feel righteous indignation, when we consider a situation intolerable, and perhaps murder comes to mind? At any rate, the word barbaric does not come from the Berbers (ⵉⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵏⵎⵣⵗⵏ), a population in modern day Morocco, but often the Barbary Corsairs are thought of as quite barbaric, especially when we consider their slave pracises, because it their slave trade with Europeans is often forgotten about, especially during bouts of hysterical historical sentimentalism. I do not disagree with this: I find the Barbary Corsairs to be quite barbaric, but one should separate their Islam from their slave practices, as they mostly relied on Islam as a poor excuse for their actions, but more on this another time. Now, the word "barbaric" does actually derive from ancient Greek βάρβαρος (barbaros) and from Greek it was borrowed into Arabic where the word "Barbar" (بربر) eventually evolved into Berber which is the exonym of many of the indigenous populations of North Africa, perhaps most notably Morocco but also Libya. But again, if you invoke the shores of Tripoli when you think about barbarism, you would not be mistaken per se.

    At any rate, it seems to me that Barbarism is becoming "normalized", as they say, these days, and by that I mean behaviour that is quite cruel and really evil. As some profane scholars would say: inequities and inequality makes people poorer, stupider, and more evil; and yes, I suppose there is a lot of truth to this, but this whole thing would require me to make a political argument, and a political argument I simply wish to not make. Of course, Thomas Hobbes made the argument that the default state of man was quite barbaric, and to some extent this is true, but as an argument in favor of the state, it simply falls short and can actually be said to be grounded in a secular view of the state and power, rather than in a sacredotal view, read "Temporal Power". Of course, if you contend that the natural and default state of humanity is chaos and barbarism, then you can also plant the seed of the so-called enlightenment, even though Thomas Hobbes came before the "enlightenment"; of course, these things are connected and without Thomas Hobbes, some portion of the "enlightenment" would have been missing, read "The Age of Exploration". And so, do we consider ideas to be important in and of themselves, or are ideas simply measurements aimed at holding back the barbaric hordes at the gates of civilization? But allow me to address the seemingly brutish nature of humanity, read "My Views on the Human Condition". Indeed, if we consider the natural state of man to be chaotic and brutish, then we must consider the primordial man to be less advanced and less "developed", really primitive, and this is actually a prerequisite for people who hold a progressive worldview: to them it is given that "early humans" were more barbaric and brutish, but they still maintain the painful contradiction that all good men in their natural and default state must be fundamentally rational, and that only and purely material considerations dictate whether or not a man should be barbaric, and so with better material circumstances, it would be perfectly natural to expect a man to be less barbaric and less brutish, really more rational; this is of course their explanation for almost anything under the sun.

    Now, there is a kind of barbarism involved in modern society, and really a barbarism that is much more barbaric than the barbarism of the past: I am of course referring not only to modern warfare, but also the the expectation of modern warfare: in fact most modern people expect to be personally affected by war in the modern day, and this was not something you could have said about the people under the rule of the Day of Algiers around 1800, not at all. Then there is the brutalism–the barbarism–of propaganda and of modern cinema. A man yelling on the streets of the Kasbah would have been dealt with swiftly and righteously, compared to the pain of totalitarianism that he would be expected to go through today – so called psychiatry & psychology. Is it not barbaric to force a man to change his point of view? Again, using this word, barbaric, is inaccurate anyways, as this is not what it originally referred to, but because of the mutations inherent in the human condition words tend to lose their meaning or their meaning start to change in an adverse way, and an example of this would perhaps be when a word as a matter of fact has started to adopt an entirely opposite meaning, which seems to happen a lot when people are "liberated". I guess this in and of itself is not too bad, provided that people were capable of keeping the memory of the original meaning intact, which they are not, read "The Memory of Abraham", and so we see this with language: we can see that language also represents quite well a kind of dualism between meaning and structure, poetry and prose. Another barbarism, to not wander away from the main issue too much, is the instance where a young man decided to shoot himself in the face with a gun, and the doctors forced him to live with a severely fractured face. Now, the question in this instance must be why a doctor would attempt to revive such a person, a person that is likely to suffer from severe pain? Again, I may not be capable of answering this question, but to me and to many other people this practice is considered quite barbaric. These questions appear to be rather relativistic, and perhaps someone like Friedrich Nietzsche was right in asserting that these values tend to come from some kind of internal conflict, although I would certainly not carry this argument that far, read "Frugality". At any rate, are we not better than this? I do not think so, but this would have me mount an argument against the entire humanist axiom, and this is not something that I intend to do here. Now, in the meantime, I recommend that you think about these issues, for they are real and they affect the world, whether or not we like it. Of course, we cannot compare ourselves with the Day of Algiers in 1800, for he lived in a much different context, but we do know that much of history is lost today; indeed, much of the primordial tradition is lost today.

Reginald Drax (AKA, M. C. Dutt) – October 5, 2026.