We’re collaborating with some folk at Ave Satanas Podcast (ASP) and Free Society Satanists to bring you a miniseries looking at Might Is Right — ur-text of Satanism and an infamous work of proto-fascism first published in 1896 by Arthur Desmond a.k.a. “Ragnar Redbeard”.

To be clear: Might Is Right sucks, both as a book and ideology. It’s full of doggerel, bigotry, and contradictions. But we’re gonna talk about it, chapter-by-chapter, from the perspective of modern, anarchist Satanists who feel that racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and tyranny are “bad, actually”.

Livestream to air 9 p.m Eastern / 6 p.m. Pacific this Friday Aug. 8 (0100 UTC Aug. 9), with podcasts released the following Friday, and new recordings taking place every two weeks:

RSS feed: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/2383108.rss

(copy and paste the URL into the podcast app of your choice)

Folk who have thoughts on MIR and want to weigh in are welcome to join us on Twitch.

Assuming we can make the technical stuff work, the idea is for us to talk this week about the background of Arthur Desmond and Might Is Right, and why a piece of shit book like that is even worth investigating almost 130 years later.

(Spoiler: Anton LaVey plagiarized it for The Satanic Bible.)

Since we’re springing this on you suddenly, the chapter-by-chapter stuff won’t start until Friday Aug. 22, giving people time to do their reading and weigh-in. The first one will prolly be messy, but also to do some open table-setting about why we are bothering with this project now.

We’re using the mechanically impressive “Authoritative Edition” that Trevor Blake put together and published in 2019, harmonizing and annotating various versions, but nobody else ought to feel obligated to use that one rather than any of the free versions you can find floating around on the Web.

Frankly, if you follow along reading the 1910 edition published by “14 Words Press”, you are in some ways getting the more genuine and relevant version of this rancid fucking text, what it is all about, and it’s cultural significance than Blake’s version which falls all over itself in apologism.

This is not really a fun book to read, and if you haven’t read it before, maybe it’s not worth your while.

However, the fact that is bad actually helps to explain a lot of the stuff you see around you today, and the continuity of shit like incels and “anti-theist” antisemitism is also useful.

* * *

What is “Might Is Right” and why is it important?

• Brief biography of Arthur Desmond’s life and publishing history
  • Encyclopedia article (1982)
  • Steer people toward Mark Derby’s book and “Behind the Bastards” two-parter (1)(2), but give the outlines (we don’t know when or where he was born exactly, or even if his original name was Arthur Desmond, but we now he really first enters history as a would-be politician in New Zealand in the late 19th Century, aligns himself against the rich and on the side of Maori resistance and land rights. Then moves on to Australia and is on the side of labor rights, but in some complicated and not always legal ways, and ultimately moves to the United States in the late 1890s to publish his previous pamphlets as “Survival of the Fittest” then “Might Is Right” 
    • (Jack) It really is wild that a guy that started out life on such a decent path could do the hardest 180° ever. Proving the road to hell truly is paved with good intentions.
  • There were several versions and at least 10 editions over about three decades (1896, 1903, 1910, 1921 [2x], 1927).
  • We’re reading the harmonized version put together by egoist Trevor Blake, which is mechanically impressive in its process and annotations, but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of worldview. We bought it secondhand because the publisher is involved in some reprehensible shit, and we suggest people read any of the free versions that exist online because it’s not that important.
  • If you follow along reading the 1910 edition published by “14 Words Press”, you are in some ways getting the more genuine and relevant version of this rancid fucking text.

Initial impact on the world

David: I don’t think there was much of an impact initially. It was popular enough not to disappear completely, but other than getting slammed by Leo Tolstoy in “What is Art?” and apparently read by some Wobblies, I don’t know what impact it had on the world. The latter might be worth talking about in the sense that I feel like we, too, have gone, “Damn, this book really gets it,” only to watch it slam face-first just short of a good conclusion. An anarchist would agree with Brennan Lee Mulligan that, “Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army.” But Desmond would go on to say, “And that’s great.”

Jack: You had mentioned how one could come to the notion of “This guy gets it!” only to burn out one sentence later. One thing I noticed a few times reading through the first chapter was thinking “yeah, I can see this.” immediately followed by “until you said THAT shit” I got a few examples but we can go over those on the next episode. 

Some other reviews and biographies:

• The New Time (1897), includes self-promo by Desmond pseudonym “Adolph Mueller”
• What Is Art? (1897), Tolstoy.
  • Expressed in the form of a doctrine, these positions startle us. In reality they are implied in the ideal of art serving beauty. The art of our upper classes has educated people in this ideal of the over-man—which is, in reality, the old ideal of Nero, Stenka Razin, Genghis Khan, Robert Macaire, or Napoleon, and all their accomplices, assistants, and adulators—and it supports this ideal with all its might. It is this supplanting of the ideal of what is right by the ideal of what is beautiful, i.e. of what is pleasant, that is the fourth consequence, and a terrible one, of the perversion of art in our society. It is fearful to think of what would befall humanity were such art to spread among the masses of the people. And it already begins to spread.
• Humane Review (1900)
  • We have been a little puzzled, it must be confessed, to know whether Dr. Redbeard’s work is to be taken quite seriously—whether his name, so terrific in its suggestion of an avenging barbarism, is not, after all, but a nom-de-plume, and his book a reductio ad absurdum—but we are informed by the publisher “Survival of the Fittest” is undeniably “the most remarkable publication that has appeared in Christendom for fifteen centuries,” we feel it is advisable to be on the safe side, and treat it with all due solemnity.
• The Storm! (1976)
  • Although Redbeard claims to scorn moral codes, stating that “all arbitrary codes of right and wrong are insolent invasions of personal liberty” and that greatness lies “in being beyond and above all moral measurements,” he is, nonetheless, a moralist. He makes plain his antagonism to Judeo-Christian morality, but his whole approach is shot through with the perennial moralistic desire to redeem the human race from “evil.” For him, what is “natural” is “right” and the further human beings get away from “Nature,” the further they depart from “right.” Leaving aside the fact that “Nature” is a mental construct, not a fact, and that “Man” is nothing but an aggregate of individuals, the question remains as to how Redbeard would square his belief that “every breathing being” is a differentiated ego with his demand that all these differentiated egos accept the common goal of being “natural”–as he defines it. If I am unique, then what it is in my “nature” to be will not be the same as what it is in the “nature” of other individuals to be. Indeed, what is natural” for me may well be “unnatural” for others, and a collision unavoidable. Redbeard’s interpretation of “social darwinism” clearly allows for this, but his morality of Nature equally clearly negates it.
• Vice (2011)
  • Many have proposed that the book is a work of satire, though enough neo-Nazis have taken it seriously that it has managed to serve the opposite purpose regardless of the intention. It’s a meandering work, lifting liberally from a variety of thinkers and periodically lapsing into Redbeard’s own nonsensical diatribes. The parts he steals from other authors make the most sense, and his own thoughts usually spin into near-sublime absurdity, to the point that in reading I couldn’t shake the feeling that the joke was on me. (Jack) Yeah, I’ve heard that theory too. That Desmond was satirizing the side he claimed in his earlier life to oppose. As much as I hate to give Vice flowers, they hit the nail on the head with that. If enough people put stock into “the joke”, it gets co-opted by “the enemy”.
• TheSpinoff.co.nz (2017)
  • Arthur Desmond is possibly the most widely read and influential political writer New Zealand has ever produced. Unfortunately the book he’s best known for is – in the words of one reviewer on Goodreads.com – “sexist, racist, classist and more violent than any Tarantino movie”. And the people his book is influencing these days are mostly neo-Nazis, white supremacists and misogynists.(Jack) to say that Desmond is the most read or influential author to come out of NZ is a low bar to clear. I actually had to google NZ authors….didnt recognize a single one..That’s not a slight to the literary community of New Zealand, but it isn’t like he was competing against titans or anything!
• Stuff.co.nz (2020)
  • Because Desmond believed there was no such thing as ‘good’, the only people he respected were those who were physically strong and powerful and could make everyone else do what they wanted.  His ideas got confusingly contradictory as he claimed that non-white people were inferior and women should be considered the property of men, but also that it shouldn’t matter what race or gender someone was, as long as they were powerful and strong. 
• Northwest Progressive Institute (2020)
  • It is as boorish as it is pretentious; it is as boring as its structure is difficult to follow. The author hates all art that isn’t Shakespeare, but to call the poetry he writes “doggerel” is to heap undue praise on it. It’s also grotesquely and unapologetically bigoted in virtually every way at every turn. This book’s value comes from its terribleness in craft as well as substance. Despite being written one hundred and twenty-five years ago, Might Is Right makes plain how old and pervasive the roots of fascism are in our own country. In the process, it shows — without meaning to — why ideas like white supremacy, patriarchy, conservativism, and capitalism have such intrinsic harmony even today.

Impact on Satanism

• Anton LaVey loved it, plagiarized it (wiki), and then acknowledged it in effusive terms after that; current CoS head Peter Gilmore writes the introduction in the edition we’re reading
  • Jack: Which is wild to me. LaVey was Jewish (if only culturally) imagine the copium needed to ignore the massive anti-Jewish sentiment of that book to plagiarize the rest. That is just wild!
• TST’s co-owner Doug Misicko a.k.a. “Lucien Greaves” and early collaborator Shane Bugbee were old friends who produced a 2003 edition of the book with illustrations by Misicko (as “Doug Mesner”) for Mike Hunt Publications; a previous edition included forwards and afterwards by LaVey, Katja Lane for “Fourteen Words Press”, Peter Gilmore for this version.
• Misicko and Bugbee considered writing their own sequel to MIR “more evil than the first” and pitched making “Might Is Right” the foundational text of TST before the other owner, Cevin Soling (a.k.a. “Malcolm Jarry”) nixed it. But it’s still referenced in TST’s “Seven Tenets” (Compare: “Let established sophisms be dethroned, rooted out, burnt and destroyed, for they are a standing menace to all true nobility of thought and action.” vs. “Every value is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought.”)
• The Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter in 2019 killed three people and wounded 17 others, telling people to read MIR as he live-streamed it.
• Point of all this being that it is relevant to Satanists now, and not in a good or at all positive way. Anton LaVey did not plagiarize Malatesta, and TST was not interested in being the inheritors of Lucy Parsons. This is the book they keep tying Satanism back into. If you are a Satanist, you need to know enough about it to suss out the aspects of it philosophy persevering in our own circles.