Every political order begins with a group that decided not to flee. It is the impossibility of flight that urges the competitive circumscription of space. Territory is the name given to the space that arises when a group decides to contest. The emergence of territory is the most archaic of all political acts: it is the most intimate because it is the most concretely possible; it is the origin of all law, all norms. It is the gesture that makes all survival possible, for it creates the space without which the group cannot exist. Without it there is no Asabiyyah — the disposition to fight for the group, to act in concert when external violence threatens the destruction of the individual element. According to Ibn Khaldun, it is Asabiyyah that converts a mere aggregate of individuals into a real political unit — that is, which enables the group to fight for survival in a given territory. It is scarcity, therefore — badawa, roughness — that produces Asabiyyah. In Asabiyyah, the survival of each depends on the loyalty of all. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, more than a sociological phenomenon, Asabiyyah is a technique — of combat, of survival. It is a specific and singular form of organization of perception and action. What it forms is a horde, Meute — a pack. The pack is the oldest and most powerful form of human organization. It is the packs that, organizing a small number of excellent individuals, harmonize them around an immediate goal — predatory, existential, martial. It is no coincidence that the pack stands out and imposes itself upon the most debilitated and sickly form of grouping: the herd. The agency density of the pack — that is, its capacity to mobilize collective energy effectively and precisely — is what distinguishes it ontologically from the mass. The mass has numbers; the horde has decision.
It was Deleuze and Guattari who first grasped the dynamism of the horde’s organizational form. As a primitive territorial machine, it inscribes, organizes, marks, and fights over a land, for a project of power or collective organization. Unlike the inertial expenditure of the herd, the horde operates a direct and effective codification: it organizes and potentiates its flow — a flow of force and power. The horde, we said, is the formation that transforms raw space into territory; and if all emergence of the socius depends on the territorial inscription of the nomos — of the nomos of the earth — it is because every νομος is already a νεμειν: a taking, organizing, dividing, distributing. This is none other than the origin and motive of the founding of cities. Every city arises as a container of energy. It is less a marketplace than a palisade, less a plaza than a citadel. The city is a territorial machine that amplifies the human capacity of the horde. It „stores“ the discipline and knowledge that the horde developed in mobile life. The territorial inscription of the city is a particle accelerator: it accumulates, concentrates, and processes social voltage with precision. As Lewis Mumford affirms, the king [the horde’s leader] is the first chief engineer who fused military discipline with technical-strategic planning. The citadel is the first container of the urbs. In it, the functions of command and the storage of surplus meet. The hunting horde, once settled, becomes the vanguard that projects onto physical space the order that previously existed only in its will to domination. By its own energetic concentration, the city multiplies the efficacy of human effort; and what was once a band becomes a high-pressure nucleus capable of transforming the physical environment through precise coordination of its human contingent. That is why a horde makes use not only of its own forces and faculties; it also deploys, as an exploitable resource, the properties of matter. Having taken a territory, the horde inscribes upon it its image: the image of its will; and it maps onto space the resource chart and the strategic zones of its power project.
It was Alan Testart who first identified that material availability — whether corporeal or physical — does not, by itself, maximize the action capacities of a grouping — in other terms, its power stock. Only the management of the human stock and the capacity to mobilize physical resources through organized collective action can catalyze the physical stock and convert it into usable energy for the evolutionary propulsion of culture. The tendency that Testart identified in certain pre-state societies — the inability to make evolutionary leaps due to disorganization and poor management of their physical stock, causing stagnation and vulnerability — can precisely explain a great part of the rise and decline of human groupings throughout their historical development. For the horde, all politics is thermo-politics.
It is in the horde, therefore, in the pack, that men first experience what will later come to be called power — that efficient capacity for action. In it, select men learn together to coordinate and refine movements, to extract and dynamize resources, to plan and await the decisive moment to act. More than an amorphous organism, like the herd, the horde is a sophisticated political coordination where all hierarchy is produced through virtue and talent. If it is fierce, waiteri, as the Yanomamö call it, it is because it indicates a continuous disposition to act, to face catastrophe when the moment demands it; to endure the real risk of pain without retreating before its rawness. The horde depends on virtue, waiteri: it is a continuous and cultivated disposition, a habit forged by and for the real exercise of risk. Among the Yanomamö, the men of greatest waiteri are those who have the most allies, the most followers, the greatest capacity to mobilize the group — not because they possess title or wealth, but because they repeatedly demonstrate that quality which all recognize as the most scarce and most necessary. The horde forms around this human war machine we call virtue. Virtus, from vir — man; from viris — strength. If the pack filters and selects its members, it is because it cannot survive without it: the existential quality of the band. The pack knows that even in times of peace the lack of talent is harmful. To take and organize the land, its Landnahme, to inscribe its existence in space and form territory — to form an order — the horde knows it must first organize and master itself. What characterizes the horde is that it is the only grouping that trains systematically beyond its immediate survival needs. It is prepared because it exercises when it has no need, submits itself to difficulty when it could avoid it, artificially produces conditions of scarcity when scarcity has ceased to exist — badawa. The horde is, therefore, an active nobility, a creator of values and culture; and if it cultivates, it is because it self-cultivates. All culture is, at its origin, a practical system of (self-)cultivation. The pack is always autarchic and monopolistic in its impulse: it governs itself and produces, by itself, its technique of self-governance — its anthropotechnique. Unlike the herd, the horde fights at every moment to be more than it is, and transforms, through self-violence, instinct into excellence, dissatisfaction into virtue.
The differentiation is less formal than ontological; for it is the vertical imperative — Vertikaler Imperativ, as Sloterdijk would say — that is, the existential obligation to always become more than one already is, that separates and distinguishes the mode of being of the horde from the environment of gregarious mediocrity of the herd. It is for this reason that Dumézil affirms that only the horde can achieve sovereignty-order and inscribe it in matter. It is the horde that first creates and then transmits its anthropotechnique through initiation and training. As he states in L’Enjeu du guerrier: „The initiation of the warrior consists in the domestication of his own inner fire. Fury must not be a blind explosion, but a controlled tension that transforms itself into technical efficacy. The hero is he who, having reached the apex of his strength, places it entirely in the service of a superior order, transmuting brute violence into sovereign authority.“ It is only from this vantage point that we begin to understand that Asabiyyah and the hunting capacity of the pack are both a heritage and a construction. It is the capacity to master oneself — one’s own body, instincts, and mind — as well as the available elements of the environment, and to transmit them as technical and technological memory that allows the qualitative maintenance and survival of the band through time — its epiphylogenesis. The excellence of the horde is possible because its stock of human talent, in its effective self-maintenance, manages to store memory outside its bodies — in tools, in writings, in institutions, in architectures — and transmit that memory to generations that did not live the experiences that produced it. Technique is therefore the third layer of human memory, after genetic memory and individual memory: it is the externalized collective memory that constitutes a culture as an entity that persists beyond the individuals who compose it. Anthropotechnique stores time and discipline. The habits of rigor, vigilance, and obedience, forged in the horde’s struggle for survival, are „frozen“ into the structure of the laws and stones of the urbs, allowing civilization to operate at a new level of complexity. A horde that fails in this process knows it is condemned to lose, with the death of its founders, the knowledge that made them effective.
Territory is like a magnetic force field: its law is the law of the constancy of power: the quantity of power, potency, and energy remains, ultimately, practically constant; and any loss of territory, organization (of mind or body), or efficacy in the use of energy is automatically lost or credited to another. For this reason, the greatest enemy of the horde is not, in the first instance, another horde, but rather the herd. Contrary to what one might imagine, it is the herd — organized or potentiated in number — that entangles, in the thin and tepid web of its inertial structure, the myriad of antipodal and dynamic actors who, tearing their bonds, threaten its power project. Weak life also fights to exist: this is the herd’s will to power — to exhaust the creative quality of forces in order to maintain its meager capacities for action. Counter-intuitively, it is the herd, and not the horde, that first occupies spaces of power. Identifying the elements that become herd is the condition of existence of the horde: it identifies them and eliminates them, in its surroundings or in its midst. Only thus does it free space for action.
We all know how a horde begins; and the Männerbünde can well be characterized as its most intimate prototype. It is the alliance among the excellent that gives rise to a new grammar, a new chain of values — a new culture. Unfortunately we also know how it ends. As Khaldun demonstrates, once scarcity is gone, once situations of struggle and danger are mastered, opulence and comfort — hadara — do not merely fail to produce asabiyyah, but actively dissolve it. The excess of comfort demands the pursuit of pleasure, which diminishes the cultivation of rigor. The imperious need for growth and aggregation elevates numbers but dilutes the demand for selection; it brings and produces elements with no strength for risk, no disposition for pain and sacrifice. Specialization disconnects; technicalism erodes talent. New, unprepared, deluded members do not attain quality or have no awareness of the objective. The man who delegates without certainty of fidelity loses control over his defense. Newly trained elements enjoy the benefits of the horde without the responsibility of having created them, and the sclerosis of strength sadly awaits the hour of its abbreviation. The horde becomes a herd, and the hunting pack gives rise to the generic type of human being who demands absolutely nothing of himself. The new group is content to be what it already is; and, absent a vertical imperative, it lives in a tepid way off a glory to which it has no right. The law, the word, the body, the mind become opaque, while real force and power shift to some other space of which they have neither knowledge nor breath to explore. Entropy leads to internal dispute, the poor vortex of those who live off scraps.
We live, today, in the time of catastrophe and ruins; the time of institutionalized formulas with decreasing efficiency; of the residual legitimacy of past victories that we are no longer capable of replicating. Formal egalitarianism, procedural pluralism, and bureaucratic cosmopolitanism are the remnants of a world in sad agony. The current democratic mass is, as a greatly deformed image of an innocuous herd, structurally the group most incapable of any effective collective action: it is too large and too mediocre to coordinate, too heterogeneous to converge, and too anonymous to hold its members accountable. Mass democracy, in this sense, is the most vulnerable and least fit for survival regime that political theory knows. That a horde has always been at the origin of the imposition or regeneration of a culture is what makes clear to us that the hunting pack is a latent and historically always-active political organization. Living in a period of civilizational entropy and collective mediocrity is what makes clear to us that a new horde demands its flourishing. As Guillaume Faye once said, the future will be archaic or it will not be. This does not mean a return to the past, but the construction of an efficient and cohesive technical horde capable of imposing a new grammar and form of cultivation. The task, as he himself said, „is to combine the ethics of the warrior with the competence of the engineer, the sacred of the tribe with the precision of the laboratory, the loyalty of the clan with the global vision of the strategist.“
The moment of the new horde has arrived. The new horde urges itself into existence. The new horde cannot fear taking space and forming a new territory within it; it cannot hesitate to inscribe, with the body, a new cultural power project. The new horde cannot retreat from the necessity of imposing rigor upon its members, sifting them in an ever more selective manner. It must manage its stock well. The new horde uses available technology to exponentially enhance its self-cultivation, and to mental and physical exercises it adds a detailed knowledge of technology. The new horde cultivates language and exercise, and tends to the forms of transmission. The new horde unites and organizes effectively and cohesively toward its objective. Its territory is no longer merely spatial, but cybernetic, cultural, linguistic, symbolic. Its members are hunters: they know how to move through all these lands. Territorial expansion causes them to refuse torpor and to devote themselves exhaustively to the daily vertical imperative. The new horde knows it has come to compete voraciously for more space. The new horde comes to create new cities, to establish new urbes. The new horde has come to endure, to impose the magnificence of its works. The new horde needs more space — terrestrial, sidereal. The new horde knows the urgency of new leaders, charged with absolute strength and virtue, technical and demanding self-mastery. The new horde is partisan and party, autarchic and monopolistic; it has its hardware and its software, its technique and anthropotechnique, its own grammar and its language. The new horde knows that not everyone will be able to enter the horde; and if it moves, coordinates, gives form, it is because it is a force that generates more force: it fills, not empties; it gives, imposes, and lends — it does not ask. If it needs the number, it arranges it, mobilizes it. The number believes it is part of the horde, but the new horde knows who truly belongs. The new horde maximizes its capacities for action and fights for power; for it knows this is its hour, and that, in times of entropy, the hour for action has come.
As in the Corinthians‘ speech to the Lacedaemonians, the horde „fears that, with its advance, its acquisitions will put at risk what it has left behind. They are quick to seize upon a success and slow to retreat from a setback. They commit their bodies without hesitation to the cause; their intellect they jealously keep to employ it in their service. A plan not executed is for them a definitive loss; a successful enterprise, a relative failure. The deficiency created by the failure of an undertaking is soon filled by new hopes; for only they are capable of calling conquest what they desire, by the swiftness with which they act upon their resolutions. Thus they toil in difficulties and dangers all the days of their lives, with little opportunity for enjoyment, always occupied in acquiring: their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them hard work is less a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in one word, one might say they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.“
Every political order begins with a group that decided not to flee. The horde begins when the group decides for the fight.
