Post-Rome

Rome, Europe and West

The fall of Constantinople was not the birth of the Renaissance. Constantinople was one of the institutions through which the classical, Byzantine, Islamic and Mediterranean worlds were continuously recombined—and through its commercial networks, Byzantium also helped create the conditions from which the Genoese-centered first systemic cycle of accumulation emerged. Orientalism invents the category of centralized “eastern” power; Byzantinism transforms that category into a Roman-Christian imperial form; Prussianism selectively Europeanizes and normatively reverses it, turning centralized administration from an alleged mark of despotism into an ideal of disciplined collective organization. Rome moved from an oligarchic republican system to the more populist/democratic Principate, and from there to the openly autocratic Dominate. In its final form, imperial rule increasingly acquired a sacred or divine character associated with kingship. In this sense, Rome gradually became more “Persian-like,” and this Roman synthesis of republican institutions, imperial monarchy, and sacral kingship became a fundamental component of Europe’s political inheritance.

Power is magic and it has always been performed through the slaves, if it's done with money or fame and trust or coercion. Digital labor is telepathic and the physical, telekinetic. You either perform magic through constant mimesis or the constant outpouring of money to the businesses and projects. The office of trade and business is where you essentially learn to perform magic and if you're sophisticated enough your power is no longer limited to money and assets but rather emergent with your investment in influence and fame. Power throughout history has always been about an experiment with Darwinism for natural selection also picks the best powers to be and any philosophically sophisticated imperium is indistinguishable from the symbolic magic: when its command no longer depends primarily upon direct coercion and instead operates through symbols, institutions, rituals, money, reputation, and collective belief.

Demos is the fact of collective existence. Socius is the relation of collective existence. Cultus is the interpretation of collective existence. Post-Rome studies the right and rule that emerge from their interaction. Caesarism is no longer necessarily the conquest of the state; it is the concentration of state-relevant capacity in an individual or a tightly controlled organization. The president governs the state; the bottlenecks govern what the state can actually do. Sovereignty follows personalized control over systemic bottlenecks. Who governs the machine? Who controls the bottlenecks through which the machine must operate? The sovereign is not necessarily the person who signs the order. The sovereign is the person without whose cooperation the order cannot become reality. Politics asks, "who has the mandate?" Governance asks, "who runs the machine?" Sovereignty asks, "who controls the bottlenecks?" History asks, "who built the machine in the first place?"

Where can universal political order be installed once Rome is no longer where it used to be?

Rome did not fall; it underwent successive relocations. First, from imperial Rome to the maritime republics; then from Latin Rome to Byzantine and Frankish imperial forms; then into the political formations of Eastern Europe and the Balkans; and finally, across the Atlantic into Britain and the United States.

War spreads bodies. Terror spreads fear. Plague spreads organisms. Media spreads signs. Capital spreads incentives. Beauty wins because beauty is memorable. The memorable reproduces. What reproduces survives. The West encounters the incomprehensible by making it calculable, encounters the dangerous by making it navigable, and encounters the monstrous by making it engineerable.

133 BC is the beginning of the Roman crisis of social reproduction. Principate is monarchy disguised as restored republicanism. Marcus Aurelius concludes with the death of the philosophical emperor and the beginning of the visibly unstable imperial age. The Roman religious world increasingly developed a language in which many gods could be interpreted as manifestations, names or cultural translations of a supreme divine principle. Kali Yuga objectively began in 133 BC and ended with Constantine. The Roman analogue of a Kali Yuga can be periodized from the Gracchan crisis of 133 BC through the militarization and sacralization of imperial power, culminating in the Christianization of the Roman universal state.

Rome becomes a technology of the future precisely after Rome ceases to exist as a state. Post-Rome is not the epoch after Rome. It is the persistence of Rome in multiple temporal registers after the disappearance of Roman unity. The fall of Rome was not the destruction of a civilization but its temporal fragmentation. Roman political forms became a reusable archive from which later civilizations repeatedly constructed new forms of sovereignty. The Roman Empire did not simply disappear. Its functions were disaggregated. Political sovereignty, religious universality, imperial legitimacy, commerce, finance, and military power migrated into different institutions. Over centuries, these institutional fragments recombined into new forms of power, culminating in the Anglo-American commercial-imperial system. Empire survives not only through successor empires, but through the migration of imperial functions into new institutional architectures.

The West is not a fixed place but the zone of maximum concentration of the societies that came to constitute European/Western civilization. Its earliest formative nucleus emerged in the Aegean–Mediterranean world after the Bronze Age collapse, through the recombination of Mycenaean, Anatolian, Levantine, Greek, Phoenician, Italic and other populations.

Covid did not create the extraordinary power of the Chinese state; it revealed an older political technology for converting administrative authority into total social coordination. How does a state acquire knowledge of a population and turn that knowledge into executable commands? What kind of political order is capable of treating an entire population as a continuously measured and dynamically governable system? Rome gives us potestas. Greece gives us exousía. China supplies a radically different genealogy of how authority becomes executable. Covid makes that genealogy visible. Neo-China arrives from the future.

Density makes trade cheaper; trade makes density sustainable. The internet reduces the necessity of physical proximity while making certain forms of urban concentration even more valuable. The city is condensed trade. Urbanization is the spatial compression of exchange. The state does not merely govern the city; the city is one of the technologies through which governing becomes possible. Urbanitas is Potestas concentrated in space. Urbanitas is the condition of organized urban existence; Potestas is the power that organization makes possible. Urbanitas concentrates. Commercium circulates. Potestas coordinates. Urbanitas is Potestas spatialized; Commercium is Potestas circulated. Urbanitas organizes bodies. Commercium organizes flows. Code Space organizes possibilities. Potestas determines what may actually occur. Trade seeks density, and density feeds trade. Urbanism designs the environment; cybernetics designs the feedback between environment and behavior. The city is not the infrastructure. The city is the circulation of information, energy, bodies, capital, and decisions through infrastructure. A city is not a static object. It is a recursive system that senses, processes, acts, and reorganizes itself through feedback.

The Constantinopolitan Spirit: Græquodrome and the Nietzschean Master Morality

Constantinople was not simply the continuation of Rome; it was Rome transformed through the Greek world. “Græco-Rome” names a civilizational synthesis in which Roman potestas acquired a Greek intellectual and aesthetic form, while Greek paideia became embedded in an imperial, juridical, and universal order. Constantinople represents a synthesis in which Christian universalism and Roman aristocratic-imperial power coexist within a Greek intellectual civilization. Rome was lost repeatedly, but Romanness was never lost in the same way. War destroyed the empire; terror fractured its political memory; plague weakened its cities and institutions. Yet the Roman form migrated—into Constantinople, into Christendom, into law, into empire, and eventually into Europe. Civilizations do not necessarily survive by preserving their original form. They survive by losing it—and finding new vessels for what they considered essential.

The Greek course through Rome, and the Roman course through the Greek world. Constantinopolitan civilization did not merely inherit Greece and Rome; it valued, selected, transformed, and re-legitimated them. We must preserve antiquity exactly as it was but Antiquity is dead, therefore we must abandon it. What in antiquity is powerful enough to become ours? What happens when a civilization behaves as though inheritance were material for value creation rather than an obligation to mere preservation? The Constantinopolitan Spirit is Rome's will to endure by becoming other than itself; Græquodrome is the Greek–Roman movement through which that transformation occurs; Nietzschean master morality supplies the philosophical image of a culture that does not merely inherit values, but appropriates and recreates them.

How does one emulate Rome and obtain the Romanness once lost to war, terror and plague?

Where there is chaos, establish an institution. Where there is uncertainty, establish a law. Where there is dispersion, establish a road. What must be done even when nobody feels like doing it? Become like us. Enter the order, and thereby become Roman. How do we get Rome back? What would we have to become for Rome to become possible again? Make distance politically and economically less significant. Can your civilization turn foreigners into citizens, outsiders into participants, and conquered differences into productive plurality without dissolving its own center? Potestas without urbanitas becomes domination. Urbanitas without potestas becomes fragility. Romanitas is their institutional conjunction. Who destroyed Rome? What will we build after Rome? Rome is not what survives unchanged. Rome is what survives by changing. To become Roman after Rome is to become the founder of the next Rome.

How does Neo-Rome rediscover truth and wisdom?

Truth exists but cannot be said. Truth by this definition is wisdom itself; a wisdom to knowledge is a history to philosophy. Knowledge as a logic to wisdom is like philosophy as a reason for history. History is to know what happened, and why there is no one to forgive, and all to blame; or rather just one: you. Wisdom cannot be uttered for it can only be obtained through absolute silence. God will always show you the way through love and trust. All the things that you love doing and all the people whom you trust have God in them, share glimpses of divinity and elucidate rays clearing the path of your heroic liberty. There are thoughts that will never manifest themselves in words but pure instances—your Herculean call to duty is to submit to the fact that those tacit thoughts will always be the true source of your inner wisdom. The only body of work worth preserving is that of the ongoing oral traditions and for that very basic attribute, it is the only thing needn't of saving, for it does so by itself.

Shadow integration is often less something the ego consciously “achieves” than something the organism learns through repeated contact with situations that expose its own contradictions. You don't integrate the shadow by endlessly talking about your hidden self. You integrate it by repeatedly entering ordinary situations in which your hidden tendencies become consequential, and allowing experience to retrain your behavior: