About dogs, power, trust, and decadence
This is an entry from my journal.
The other day I had a visitor from the region. My gate is always open. Anyone can walk to my window and check what I am doing inside. This is what a local community is about. Trust among people combined with transparency. The private space blends into the public space. I know them and they know me, which is exactly why we have things in common that we recognise and safeguard, hence the common good.
The visitor is an old man who is involved in hunting. We have known each other for several years already. He just dropped by to say “hello” and brought with him a fine gift for the dogs: meat. I was just finishing a video call, so I let him treat the dogs himself, which he did. It was safe for him since the dogs know him already.
Normally, my dogs are friends with each other and there are no fights in the house. But because I was no longer there the situation was different. Atlas, the top dog, growled at Oreeon to make him know that he should not touch his allotted portion. Atlas was asserting his dominance through aggression. Then Atlas went close to Oreeon’s meat to guard it, while still eating his piece. This is behaviour I do not tolerate and outright discourage.
Once I was done with the call, I went outside to check on what was happening. Having already noticed the body language, I went to Atlas and picked up the resource he was guarding. I then established eye contact with him and told him “no” in a stern tone with a clear voice. I did not resort to brute force, though I made it clear that he violated the rules. Then I offered the meat to Oreeon. The puppy was now confident in eating, without worrying that the top dog would attack him.
Dogs are domesticated wolves. They do not have the sensitivities we do. This is ordinary behaviour in the wolf world. Though dogs are also intelligent beings who are very similar to humans. With the appropriate guidance they will do the right thing. They are a great example of something I always point out: show me the deeds, as talk is cheap. Dogs will discern the patterns in your behaviour and will act accordingly. You lead by example, not with platitudes.
My dogs are trained to let go of whatever it is they are holding, including their most precious meal. I do not negotiate and am not playing games. I can reach in their mouth and take the bone they are chewing on, for example. My body language speaks of decisiveness. They know I am not fooling around. This is the most important trait of canine citizenship every dog handler must cultivate. Otherwise, dogs can be extremely dangerous. More so for the larger ones, like my own, though the same is true for those tiny breeds who are evidently aggressive while their reckless handlers pass it off as “my baby is upset right now”. No, my friend, your baby has not been trained properly and we are lucky you are handling a small dog.
There is formal training and then there is conditioning. Training is about spending a few minutes to focus on a specific routine, such as to teach the dog how to sit. Whereas conditioning is your overall relationship with the animal. This is where you ordinarily teach the dog what is accepted behaviour in the human world, always within the confines of the dog’s abilities.
I condition my dogs on a continuous basis through how I interact with them. It is about working with incentives and disincentives. I create associations between signals and consequences. I am consistent in my messaging, so they are confident in my words and body language: those always have the same meaning.
For example, whenever I am off the computer, I go check on them right away. Because I do this with unmistakable regularity, they have picked up on all the cues, such as me switching off the device or saying “goodbye” after a video call. They even are aware of the time this might happen. If it is around noon, for instance, they know we are not going anywhere, whereas if it happens during the evening then things are about to get fun. They start stretching and get excited for some playtime and/or a hike, since that is what I have established as the immediate result of me switching off the computer.
I have never used coercion against my dogs. I am firm in my words and strict in my body language. My consistency is enough to put me in charge, as I mean what I show. My dogs know to follow my lead because I have invested—and continue to do so—a lot of time in building mutual trust. I play with them throughout the day. I will touch and hold their paws or tail, for example. Dogs are touchy and insecure at first, as those are among their weak points. But I keep doing it to (i) prove to them that I am not a threat and (ii) to boost their self-confidence.
My benevolence also communicates the potential for harm: I am showing them in unambiguous terms that I have the means to get to their weak points very easily. They understand that I can overpower them at will. I do not do it because of who I am and how I am disposed towards them, not out of inability.
This is not something special only I do. Every carer, every parent, every dog handler, consists in this imbalance of power, at least at some point in the relationship. To be concrete, the parent can destroy the baby at any moment, but they instead use their resources to feed the child, to see it grow and prosper. It effectively is a transfer of energy, underpinned by love which is expressed as caring and as trust.
There is no caring without power. Benevolence alone cannot be care-giving. The lifeguard at the beach may only save lives if they are a supreme swimmer, for instance. This is no longer a matter of vibes and good intentions. It involves skill that has a mental and a physical dimension. The lifeguard necessarily overpowers those who are drowning though chooses not to drown them but to rescue them instead. Same for the mother who feeds her child. Not only is she powerful herself, she even has excess energy to offer it to the child.
What matters, then, is the framing of power so that it is used in benign ways. Which brings me to the topic of trust. It is about reasonably expecting that despite one’s capacity to cause destruction their demonstrated ethos is constituted thus that they will employ their power in the service of the common good. Of course, there can be betrayals, though this is the calculated risk we take in life: without even a modicum of trust, there is no closeness of any kind, no love, nothing but paranoia.
Power is not inherently good or bad. When used properly, it creates a safe space where there is freedom. It is the inappropriate application of it, else its misuse, that causes damage.
A man who is domestically abusive, for example, is mentally feeble while still being physically potent. He has not worked enough on his mentality. He is not in control of his passions. Situations easily compel him to do what he later regrets, which means that he has no clear idea where to go and no unflinching commitment to its cause. He has not broken free from his daemons. In being abusive, he is tacitly admitting that he is not in control of the situation because fundamentally he is his own victim, owning to the fact that he is not in control of himself either: the daemons are in charge.
At the political level, when people say that they support democracy, for instance, what they truly want is a system of collective decision-making that engenders a widespread sense of trust through its day-to-day processes. Trust that is the real value. To have the ceremonies of democracy like in the West, in the form of elections and televised debates, while ending up with the rule of wealth, i.e. plutocracy, is to miss the point entirely. It is how we have the Epstein class in charge; a class that if of course egregious because each of them at the personal level is governed by their most pernicious passions.
Justice is not a state of affairs we are entitled to. It does not happen on its own because some piece of primary law promises so or because the parliament has promulgated thus. In the tiny microcosm of my house, I am the authority that formulates and enforces the rules. There is justice because there is my sovereignty, the indisputable power I have over my dogs, which I exercise with prudence in the interest of care-giving and the preservation of the common good. In the grand scheme of a polity, this is the role of institutions at the political level and tutelary figures across social groups.
A society declines once the tutelary figures do not live up to their role. The teacher does not embody their teachings. The doctor is not a paragon of healthy living. The politician is only interested in their own enrichment. And so on.
Political decline is the manifestation of degeneracy that has already occurred at the moral level. Morality is the socially constructed character of a person and the defining quality of interpersonal relations. This is why we have the word “ethos” as distinct from “character”. The latter speaks of genetics and epigenetics, while the former refers to acculturation.
For the teacher to not embody their teachings, there has already been a shift in mindset, a loosening up of integrity, a malfunctioning or absence of checks, and an indulgence of some kind. Same for all authorities, to the point where a crisis in the economy, a crisis of institutions, a crisis of identity, necessarily follows from decadence of the mind, corruption, irresponsibility, unaccountability, and so on.
“Crisis”, which is a Greek word, literally means “judgement”, the same way “critical” as in “critical thinking” does. It is about discerning what is right and what is wrong, which in this context refers to patterns of behaviour or attitudes that contribute to the reproduction of society versus those which lead to its enfeeblement and subsequent annihilation.
Same for “criticism”, by the way. Only someone who understands the domain can formulate criticism, since only they can deliver judgement on what is missing and what is surplus to requirements. Criticism is the best thing that can happen to you, for it provides you with the insight to emancipate yourself from some falsehood. Otherwise, what is typically described as “criticism” is an opinion that has not been thought through.
Back to the point of decadence, there is in this regard no distinction between the personal, the interpersonal, and the collective in its present and intergenerational manifestations. Those magnitudes are harmonious only when there is concordance of ethos throughout.
Civilisations do go extinct. History is full of such cases. The Athenians executed Socratis and exiled Platon, Aristotelis, and Diogenis, among others. They did it because those figures were speaking the truth; a truth that is often painful; a truth that a sickly organism detests with every fibre of its being. Athenian civilisation was thus in free fall before it got officially wiped out by the empires of Alexander and then the Romans.
The Greeks did not disappear. They remained around as a people, though their culture disintegrated and became irrelevant for centuries before it could begin to take form again. In the meantime, what stayed behind was the Graeculus, the servile and self-disrespecting Greek, and then the Romios, the [East] Roman subject who even derided their own ethnonym of Hellenes and their ethnos of Hellas.
The West is in the same self-loathing predicament right now. Western people are complacent in their ways. In their own fantasy land, they believe they are entitled to all the institutions they think they have. They expect that the vaunted “fundamental values” will be offered to them simply for who they are and will always be around. There is no willingness in their heart to put in the hard work. What they want is more pampers, greater comforts, deeper immersion, and incessant “lalalala” to not hear the destruction in their midst.
Such is their implicit exceptionalism, which is nothing but the intellectual vanguard of a civilisation in decline. Instead of looking at the world around them and their own duty to be upright, they either adopt a victim’s narrative, such as a grand conspiracy of some sort that holds them back, or they wave their finger telling us how great they used to be. Whatever they do, they turn inward, tending to their own parochial wants without concern for the common good. This is what all zombie nations are left with: virtue-signalling and name-calling combined with opportunism before it all goes down in flames.
The Athenians were just as smug and ridiculous while they were vanishing. Those people, whom Westerners exalt as the progenitors of their own culture, did exactly that instead of heeding criticism and were consequently swept into the dustbin of history. You decline, you disappear. The gods do not bargain with you. There are no exceptions.
Back to my dogs, they are all sleeping next to each other right now. The sight is endearing. I want to give them a kiss, but will first finish writing this entry. I know that they are domesticated wolves who have the capacity to kill each other over scarce resources. No amount of training can take the wild animal out of them. The same is true for humans, but we pretend otherwise.
I am aware that my dogs can be violent but are conditioned not to. They defer to my authority instead. What I know even better, and what they understand as well, is that I am the werewolf among them who guarantees peace through vigilance; peace because I have the tools to bring destruction but choose not to; peace through a sense of the greater good; peace by wielding power, the power to provide care and be there for them.