I have a friend who’s really into ducks. Obsessed, actually. You might be watching a completely normal movie with him, like Casablanca, and he’ll want to freeze the film on the frame where there’s a duck in the background and carefully examine it. Or you might be discussing some minor celebrity and he’ll proudly inform you that they once had a pet duck and that while Wikipedia says it was a Muscovy duck, he has in fact determined that it was a Moulard. I enter conversations with him torn between terror at the fact that he will inevitably turn it towards ducks, and wonder at what opening he will seize on to do so.1
Sometimes I worry that I’m turning into that guy but for barbarians. One of the very first reviews I wrote here was of James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. That book is about the peoples who inhabit the rugged and hilly region of Southeast Asia known as Zomia, centered around the border between China and Laos. Scott is interested in the practices employed by the “barbarians” — the hill people — to resist domination by the much more numerous and organized “civilized” people living around them. He argues that many of the negative associations we have with barbarism — illiteracy, itinerancy, cousin marriage, religious messianism, and so on — are actually either deliberately adopted or emerge out of a process of cultural evolution that’s optimizing for ungovernability.
Zomia was an effective refuge from the state (in fact it still is — Dan Wang has a beautiful essay about fleeing to the exact same area to escape China’s zero-COVID policies). But what really stuck in my head from Scott’s book was the idea that barbarism is mostly a state of mind and a set of social practices and habits that could be employed anywhere. To be a barbarian is just to recognize that the world is full of forces vastly more powerful than you and coldly indifferent to your survival, be they criminal gangs, nation states, multinational corporations, fanatical social movements, artificial intelligences, or plain old egregores. When one of these entities turns its baleful gaze upon you, your options are to submit and be consumed, or go down fighting in a pointless last stand. But the barbarian chooses a different path — he hides in plain sight, adopts protective coloration, stays on the move, becomes an extremophile clinging to the marginal biomes and the “debatable lands”: a minnow living in crevices too poor and too narrow to interest the leviathans. And if worst comes to worst and he finds himself facing one of those monsters, then he makes himself as indigestible and unappealing a meal as he can manage.
That all sounds great, so why doesn’t everybody do it? The reason is that to be a barbarian carries serious costs. Some of those costs are material: the leviathans of the state, the corporation, etc., aren’t interested in your barbarian biome for a reason (probably because it kind of sucks). Other costs are intellectual and cultural: to be a barbarian is often to have no history or education (it can be used against you), and barbarian societies are often crippled and debased as a result. And some of the costs are psychological and spiritual: to live as a barbarian is to live as a hunted prey animal, always with a wariness verging on paranoia, building a protective shell around you that can make normal human relations even with close family impossible. Last year I read and reviewed the memoir of a modern American barbarian that makes all three of these forms of poverty all too apparent.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Imperial China, by F.W. Mote”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-02-24.
- It isn’t actually ducks.
June 11, 2026
QotD: Barbarism
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