When Inferior Men Rule

Xenophon on the Superiority Proper to Rule

“That the inferior should be ruled is a law of nature.”

— Xenophon, Cyropaedia

Before the usual bevy of shallow literalists rushes in to flatten Xenophon’s words into the facile syllogism that, if the inferior are naturally ruled, then whoever happens to rule today must therefore be superior, let it be said plainly:

Those who rule us today are not superior.

Xenophon’s point is simpler than this vulgar reading allows, and within that simplicity lies something far more primordial. It reflects an iron law recognized across the classical world: rule properly belongs to the superior, to those who possess the greater capacity for excellence and are therefore fitted by nature to command.

But this must not be confused with the crude and rather puerile assumption that whoever happens to hold power at any given moment must, by that fact alone, be worthy of rule. That is a tenuous and naive conclusion, a circularity, really, resting on a shallow conflation of rule with excellence.

Xenophon is not giving nature’s warrant to whoever happens to occupy the throne or command the state. Mere possession of power does not confer legitimacy. He is stating a principle rooted in the order of nature itself: authority properly rests upon excellence.

That inferior men now occupy the seats of power throughout the Western world does not refute the principle. It reveals its violation.

Such conditions are better understood as symptoms of decay and inversion, a kind of Nietzschean transvaluation of the natural order itself, in which true hierarchy has been displaced and the unworthy have risen where the capable once stood. They mark disorder, not the abolition of hierarchy itself, for hierarchy belongs to the structure of life and therefore cannot be eradicated.

The Western world is now locked in a life-or-death struggle against this inversion, one that will determine whether our people, and with them our civilization itself, will survive, or collapse beneath the weight of the very falsehoods it has enshrined.

For that reason, the lesson is not to deny hierarchy, nor to submit to the hollow thing now enthroned in its place, but to recover the older principle beneath it: rank must answer to worth, and power to the stature of the man who wields it.

What must emerge, then, is a new elite: superior men, men in whom greater capacity has become excellence in abundance, whose discipline and measure are not imposed from without, but arise from an inner nobility of soul. Such men stand as living reflections of the natural order itself. Only through them can the present corruption be overcome, and the grotesque parody that now passes for “Western civilization” be swept from the stage.