Political violence is not one thing. The person who attacks a courthouse for being a symbol of oppression, the person who attacks a government minister for betraying the king, and the person who attacks civilization itself for existing — all three are using violence, but they are not doing the same thing, and they cannot be explained by the same theory.
Here is the framework: violence always has a direction, and that direction reveals the story the violence is telling about power. Three archetypes cover the territory.
Violence to restore order: The legitimate relationship between ruler and ruled has been broken by intermediaries (bad advisers, corrupt bureaucrats, rapacious administrators). The violence is not against the idea of authority — it is for a better version of it. Kill the middlemen and restore the organic contract.
Violence to create order: Order doesn't pre-exist — it must be fought into existence by the right kind of men. Chaos and war are not problems to be solved but the conditions in which true hierarchy can emerge. The violence proves who deserves to lead.
Violence to destroy order: Order is the problem. Every form of hierarchy, every institution, every symbol of organized human society is a mechanism of domination. The violence aims at erasure — not reform, not replacement, but dissolution.
These three archetypes have names in the strange taxonomy of political thought: anarcho-monarchism, anarcho-fascism, and anarcho-primitivism. They sound oxymoronic. What they are, in practice, are three different theories of what violence is for — three deep archetypes about how power organizes itself, drawn from real historical impulses that predate any ideology that claims to represent them.1
Each archetype draws on a different psychological source:
Anarcho-monarchism draws on the loyalty instinct — the biologically ancient drive toward a recognized focal leader who earns their position through demonstrated quality and fulfills obligations to followers. This is not the bureaucratic state loyalty of tax compliance. It is the loyalty of the war-band: I will follow this person into danger because they have proven themselves worthy of my life.
Anarcho-fascism draws on the proving instinct — the need for men (and it is almost always men in this archetype) to demonstrate their quality through adversity. Physical courage, endurance of pain and fear, willingness to use violence and absorb it — these are the tests by which a man learns what he actually is. War is the testing ground because nothing else provides sufficiently real stakes. The warrior who discovers himself in combat cannot discover that same self in peacetime.
Anarcho-primitivism draws on the alienation instinct — the visceral sense that something has been lost in the transition from a simpler, more embodied existence to the complex, mediated, bureaucratically organized life of modern civilization. This is not an ideology anyone has to learn: most people have felt it. Standing in a too-bright office building, filling out a form, waiting on hold — the feeling that this is not how humans are supposed to live.1
J.R.R. Tolkien, writing to his son in 1943, said something that should be quoted more often: "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy."1
What Tolkien was describing is the experience of the organic contract — the feeling that somewhere beneath the layers of bureaucracy, administration, policy, and procedure, there is a simpler and truer relationship between a ruler and those they rule: mutual obligation, earned loyalty, visible accountability. The king who fails is personally answerable. The soldier who dies does so for a person, not an abstraction.
The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 is the clearest historical example. The English commons did not rise against monarchy. They rose against the advisers, administrators, and lawyers who had, in their understanding, corrupted the relationship between King Richard II and his people. The watchword of the rebels was "With King Richard and the true commons" — they explicitly claimed the king's side against his own government.1
The target of the violence was lawyers and administrators, not the institution of monarchy. The rebels wanted the organic contract restored, not abolished. More than 100 villages petitioned for copies of the Domesday Book to apply for tax exemption based on freedoms granted nearly three centuries before. This is not a revolution. It is a renegotiation — a demand that the terms of the original agreement be honored.
The monarchical instinct is not nostalgia. It is the experience of recognizing — viscerally, not abstractly — a quality in a person that makes you willing to accept their authority. Every time someone responds to a charismatic leader with something that feels like relief ("finally, someone who knows what they're doing"), they are having a mild version of the monarchical instinct. The anarcho-monarchist archetype says this instinct is legitimate, that it points toward a genuine need the state-as-bureaucracy is constitutionally unable to fulfill.1
Jack Donovan, a writer in the reactionary tradition, articulated this archetype with unusual clarity: "New, pure warrior-gangs can only rise in anarchic opposition to the corrupt, feminist, anti-tribal, degraded institutions of the established order. Manhood can only be rebooted by the destruction of their future, and the creation of new futures for new or reborn tribes of men."1
Stripped of its contemporary ideological context, the structure of this claim is ancient. It is the koryos — the Indo-European institution of the youthful war-band. Young men expelled from their home communities in a ritual of separation, sent out to prove themselves through raiding, cattle-stealing, violence. They return — or don't. What comes back, if it comes back, is a man in the full sense that the culture recognized: someone tested, forged, capable of sitting at the table of adult warriors.
The Germanic Harii, described by Tacitus, operated in this register: "their shields are black, their bodies dyed. They choose dark nights for battle and strike terror by the horror and gloomy appearance of their death-like army. No enemy can bear their strange and almost infernal aspect."1 This is the anarcho-fascist archetype at its most archetypal — men who have left the norms of ordinary social life behind and organized themselves around the experience of violence, identity achieved through ferocity rather than institution.
The academic Daniel Woodley identifies this as fascism's core: "Fascism is distinguished from liberalism by the aestheticization of struggle and the glorification of paramilitary violence as primary features of political action... for fascists 'creative violence' is contrasted with the insipid cowardice of liberal intellectualism: violence is not just a means to an end, but an intrinsic value in itself."1
The koryos preceded fascism as a concept by 3,000 years. What fascism-as-ideology did was take an archetype that had been a specific cultural institution (the war-band initiation) and generalize it into a political program. The Harii didn't have an ideology. They had a practice.
John Zerzan takes the argument against civilization back further than most: not just agriculture, not just the state, but symbolic thought itself is the root of alienation. Writing, art, number — all of these represent a "radical split in the world," a beginning of the human detachment from nature. Cave art and clay figurines, for Zerzan, are not beautiful achievements but the first signs of something going wrong.1
This position is philosophically incoherent at the same time as being emotionally recognizable. The incoherence: you cannot write about the problem of writing. The emotional recognition: the feeling that something was lost in the transition to complex society, that there is a more embodied, less mediated way of being human that we are increasingly unable to access, is real and widely shared.
Pierre Clastres provides a more rigorous version of the primitivist argument. His fieldwork among Amazonian tribes produced a startling reversal of Hobbes: the state doesn't prevent the war of all against all — it creates the conditions for it. Primitive violence, for Clastres, is not proto-statal but anti-statal: "the machine of dispersion functions against the machine of unification; war is against the State."1 Permanent violence at the community scale keeps power from accumulating. The violence itself is the immune system against hierarchy.
The eco-extremist wing of primitivism draws this to its conclusion: since civilization is the problem, any violence against civilization is legitimate. Buildings, infrastructure, technology — all fair targets. Their writing circles around the same central claim: that wildness itself is the goal, and that anything which stands between humans and wildness deserves destruction.1
Understanding these three archetypes changes how you read political violence:
They sort by direction, not intensity. All three can produce extreme violence. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 killed the Archbishop of Canterbury. The koryos raided entire communities. Eco-extremists have bombed infrastructure. But the direction tells you what kind of society would satisfy the violence: Anarcho-monarchism wants the organic contract restored. Anarcho-fascism wants a space where the right kind of men can prove themselves. Anarcho-primitivism wants civilization gone. These goals are not compatible with each other, which is why movements that mix the archetypes (as many real political movements do) tend to fragment.
Most revolutionary movements contain all three simultaneously. The French Revolution had all three operating in shifting coalitions: monarchists (restore the true king), proto-fascist war-bands (the armies that became the Napoleonic order), and primitivists (the anti-clerical, anti-institutional wing). Understanding which archetype is dominant at any given moment predicts which direction the violence will turn next.
The archetypes explain why political violence rarely achieves stated goals. Anarcho-monarchism destroys the corrupt intermediaries but cannot force the king to be worthy of the loyalty that was offered. Anarcho-fascism creates conditions for the strong to emerge but provides no mechanism for organizing what comes after. Anarcho-primitivism destroys the hated institutions but cannot simultaneously destroy the consciousness that created them.
The Haida people of Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of British Columbia) are the closest real-world approximation to the anarcho-fascist warrior archetype operating as a functioning society rather than as an ideology.1
They were a complex maritime hunter-gatherer people — not stateless in the sense of having no social organization, but organized through kinship (Eagle and Raven moieties with genetically distinct mitochondrial DNA lineages), prestige (the potlatch as the mechanism of wealth redistribution and status assertion), and warfare (the canoe raid as the primary mode of resource acquisition and territorial defense).
The warrior selection logic is documented by anthropologist David Jones: "Boys who showed the right personality traits (surliness, aggressiveness, hostility, insensitivity, violence) were educated as warriors. Trained in the martial arts, these young men practiced running, swimming, and diving and were taught to be cruel and treacherous and to ignore all rules of decent social behavior. Their people disliked and feared them because of their violent outbursts... They carried rocks to attack people who irritated them. Never smiling or laughing, they walked with stiff, jerky motions... never wore a shirt or robe over their right shoulder, so that they would always be ready to fight."1
This is the Dysgenic Shaman's opposite: not the wounded and marginal chosen for their ability to cross into other worlds, but the aggressive and antisocial chosen for their ability to impose this world's will on other people. Both exist in the Haida system — the shaman class and the warrior class — but the warrior archetype defines the culture's external face.
The results were remarkable. In 1794 the Haida captured an English vessel and killed the entire crew. In the same year they captured the Eleanora, another English ship, suffering no casualties. Against crews with muskets and cannons, in ships far larger than their cedar war canoes, they attacked and won. The canoes themselves were engineering achievements: carved and steamed to be lightweight, fast, and precisely maneuverable in the complex inlets and bays of their territory, capable of carrying warriors into hand-to-hand combat with European naval vessels.1
The Haida's Wikipedia page records their response to the comparison with Vikings: "The Haida are known for their craftsmanship, trading skills, and seamanship. They are thought to have been warlike and to practise slavery. Anthropologist Diamond Jenness has compared the Haida to Vikings while Haida have replied saying that Vikings are like Haida."1
That inversion — not us like them, but them like us — is the anarcho-fascist archetype expressed with perfect cultural confidence. We are the standard. You are the comparison.
When analyzing any episode or movement of political violence, the following questions sort the archetypes:
What is the stated relationship to authority? Anarcho-monarchism wants authority properly constituted. Anarcho-fascism wants authority earned through violence rather than granted by institution. Anarcho-primitivism wants no authority at all, or a version so primitive (kinship, immediate social recognition) that "authority" is the wrong word.
Who are the targets? Anarcho-monarchists target intermediaries — lawyers, administrators, advisers — not the head of the hierarchy. Anarcho-fascists target whoever prevents the war-band from operating: the state's monopoly on violence, effeminate social norms, institutions that channel young male energy into bureaucracy. Anarcho-primitivists target the infrastructure of civilization: power grids, railways, factories, symbols of modernity.
What does victory look like? Anarcho-monarchism: the corrupt layer removed, the organic relationship between sovereign and subject restored. Anarcho-fascism: chaos sufficient for the right men to prove themselves and form new hierarchies. Anarcho-primitivism: civilization ended; humans living in something like the pre-agricultural state.
What is the movement's relationship to hierarchy? Anarcho-monarchism accepts hierarchy enthusiastically if it is the right kind. Anarcho-fascism creates hierarchy through the violence itself (who survives, who leads, who proves themselves). Anarcho-primitivism claims to reject hierarchy but almost always produces one — the most violently committed members end up leading. All three produce hierarchies; the archetypes differ in whether they acknowledge this.
Anarcho-monarchism's failure: Restoring the organic contract requires a king worthy of it. The Peasants' Revolt restored nothing — Richard II was not the king the rebels imagined, and after the initial negotiation collapsed, the rebellion was suppressed. The archetype generates loyalty before it verifies the object of loyalty. Misplaced monarchism produces the court of a weak or corrupt king defended by genuinely loyal subjects.
Anarcho-fascism's failure: The war-band can prove and forge men. It cannot govern. The koryos returns home (or doesn't). Donovan's warrior-gang creates the conditions for a new order but has no theory of what that order should be, only of what the men who build it should be like. In practice, anarcho-fascist movements either become conventionally authoritarian (they find a state to serve) or dissipate when the conditions of chaos that sustained them end.
Anarcho-primitivism's failure: You cannot destroy symbolic thought using symbolic thought. You cannot write against writing. The argument for returning to pre-civilizational life is made using the cognitive tools of civilization: language, analysis, publishing, the internet. Primitivism contains an internal self-contradiction it cannot resolve — and in practice, its most committed adherents either abandon it for more conventional radicalism or move toward the anarcho-fascist archetype (the eco-extremist as warrior against civilization, rather than returnee to nature).
Are these archetypes biological or cultural? Stone Age Herbalist treats them as "organic impulses" — something close to biological drives that organize political life regardless of ideology. Whether this is literally true (there are biological substrates for loyalty, proving, and alienation) or metaphorically accurate (the archetypes recur across cultures) is contested. The recurrence is real; the biological claim is speculative. [POPULAR SOURCE — requires engagement with evolutionary psychology literature] [SPECULATIVE]
The Haida and the warrior-selection claim. The Jones quote about warrior selection ("surliness, aggressiveness, hostility") comes from a secondary source (Jones's synthesis of anthropological literature). Whether the Haida specifically selected warriors by these traits, or whether this describes Northwest Coast warrior culture generally, is not clear from the text. [POPULAR SOURCE] [UNVERIFIED]
The political ideology framing. Using "anarcho-monarchism," "anarcho-fascism," and "anarcho-primitivism" as analytical categories risks importing the political valences of those terms into what is meant to be a structural analysis. The essay acknowledges this but doesn't fully resolve it — Stone Age Herbalist's own political sympathies (dissident right) are more evident in this essay than in the anthropological ones, and the framing of the three archetypes is not politically neutral. [POPULAR SOURCE — strong ideological framing; structural observations may be separable from the political valence with which they're presented]
The political archetypes essay is the most openly ideological piece in Berserkers, Cannibals & Shamans — the author's dissident-right perspective is overt rather than embedded.1
Stone Age Herbalist draws on Tolkien for anarcho-monarchism, Donovan and Tacitus for anarcho-fascism, Zerzan and Clastres for anarcho-primitivism. These are not scholarly sources in the usual sense — Tolkien is a novelist, Donovan is a polemicist, Zerzan is an activist. Only Clastres (Society Against the State, 1974) is a rigorous anthropological source, and his work on Amazonian societies is well-regarded in anthropology.
The tension worth holding: the structural observation — that political violence has three basic orientations (restore, create, destroy) — is analytically useful and does not depend on Stone Age Herbalist's political sympathies. But the examples chosen to illustrate each archetype reveal the framing: the Peasants' Revolt is given a sympathetic, loyalist reading; Donovan's warrior-gang manifesto is presented as expressing an "ancient" truth rather than a contemporary political position; primitivism is given the least sympathetic treatment. A different analyst using the same tripartite framework might emphasize different historical examples and arrive at different sympathies for each archetype.
The Haida material stands somewhat apart from this: it is ethnographic rather than ideological, and Stone Age Herbalist's evident admiration for the Haida reads as genuine rather than politically motivated. The Haida as case study is the strongest part of the essay precisely because it grounds the abstract archetype in documented practice.
The three archetypes connect the political domain to psychology and the anthropology of violence in ways that neither generates alone.
Psychology — Berserker Rage States: Berserker Rage States — The koryos war-band is the institutional technology for producing berserker states in young men. The Harii's dark-night warfare, the body-dyeing, the black shields — these are not aesthetic choices but induction mechanisms: creating the collective altered state in which the RAGE circuit runs without cortical supervision and individual fear dissolves into group momentum. Anarcho-fascism as an archetype is, at the neurological level, an attempt to recreate the conditions in which transient hypofrontality — the berserker state — becomes the operational mode of a small group. The insight neither generates alone: the political archetype of the warrior-gang is the cultural container for a specific neurological state; strip the culture away and you have the mechanism; strip the mechanism away and the culture has no engine.
History — Secret Societies and the Biology of Hierarchy: Secret Societies and the Biology of Hierarchy — The koryos is the war-band; the secret society is what happens when the war-band becomes institutionalized and its knowledge restricted. Hayden's 12-characteristic model applies to the koryos: restricted membership, initiatory suffering, theatrical performance of hierarchy, knowledge controlled by the experienced. The transition from koryos to secret society is the transition from the anarcho-fascist archetype (create order through violence) to the anarcho-monarchist archetype (maintain order through controlled strangeness). Both are organizing strategies for male youth energy — one releases it outward, the other contains it inward. The insight: the koryos and the secret society are not opposite institutions but adjacent phases of the same organizational problem: what do you do with young men who are too dangerous to ignore and too useful to suppress?
Three young men, three different impulses to violence. One wants the king back. One wants to fight his way to the top of a new hierarchy that doesn't exist yet. One wants to burn down everything that calls itself a hierarchy. The page calls these three psychological sources — loyalty instinct, proving instinct, alienation instinct. They look like three different drives. They are actually one circuit running in three different modes.
Anarcho-monarchism's loyalty instinct is the kin-detection circuit, fully engaged on a target. The Green-Beard Effect names the circuitry. The system recognizes a focal leader through proximity, demonstrated commitment, and culturally-validated markers — royal lineage, charismatic presence, mythologized identity. When the markers are present and the circuit fires, the experience is not I have decided to support this leader. It is this person is my person, my obligation is automatic, my loyalty is felt as obvious. The Peasants' Revolt demand for the king's organic contract is not nostalgia. It is the kin-detection circuit firing on a leader-target it has been calibrated to recognize, and the rebellion against intermediaries — lawyers, administrators — is the same circuit refusing to register bureaucratic abstractions as legitimate kin-substitutes. The bureaucracy's failure to recognize this circuit's operation is what generates the violence.
Anarcho-fascism's proving instinct is engineered childhood-proximity bonding, deployed for adult violence-cohort formation. Childhood Proximity Engineering specifies the mechanism. The koryos war-band the page identifies — Indo-European male-initiation institution — is the historical template for deliberate bonding-engineering through shared hardship at a developmentally critical age. Young men removed from their natal communities, placed in conditions of shared danger and deprivation, develop the same neural bonding patterns the kin-detection circuit produces in early childhood — but compressed and intensified through stress synchronization. The result is a brotherhood whose loyalty exceeds family bonds because the bonding hormones (oxytocin under sustained shared cortisol) match what early childhood produces in genetic siblings. Donovan's "warrior-gangs" and the Harii war-bands run on this mechanism, deliberately or not. The proving instinct isn't about individual self-discovery. It is about forging the bonding-substrate that will make the cohort lethal as a unit.
Anarcho-primitivism's alienation instinct is the modern environment's failure to supply the inputs the kin-detection circuit needs for baseline operation. This archetype's neural substrate is negative rather than positive — chronic mismatch between the circuit's expected inputs (small-scale community, embodied recognition, sustained cooperative work, ecological embeddedness) and the modern environment's actual inputs (anonymous strangers, screen-mediated relations, atomized labor, ecological dissociation). The alienation the page describes is the kin-detection circuit producing the affective signal of I am not in the right environment for my system to function. Zerzan's intuition about civilization-as-error is, in this reading, the circuit's own dysphoria voice — the body's report that the environment is wrong, generalized into political-philosophical claim. Clastres' insight that primitive violence functions to prevent power accumulation is the kin-detection circuit's collective work to maintain the conditions under which it can operate properly.
The handshake produces a differential diagnostic the page alone cannot generate. Disabling anarcho-monarchism requires supplying alternative kin-detection targets (institutions that themselves register as legitimate-leader objects, which is what well-designed civic institutions historically did) or disrupting the markers that allow the circuit to fire on illegitimate leader-targets. Persuasion cannot reach this; the loyalty operates beneath the verbal-deliberative layer. Disabling anarcho-fascism requires disrupting the conditions that allow the bonding-engineering to occur (preventing young men from being isolated together in conditions of shared deprivation under charismatic leadership) or providing alternative cohort-forming environments that channel the same mechanism toward non-violent outcomes — sports teams, non-combat military service, intensive cooperative work. Once the bonding has formed, it cannot be argued away. It must be redirected or the cohort must be disrupted. Disabling anarcho-primitivism requires re-establishing the proximity-and-recognition conditions the circuit needs for baseline function, which means structural changes to community organization rather than ideological response. Telling the alienated person they are wrong doesn't address the circuit's accurate report that the environment is mismatched to its expectations.
Each archetype is the kin-detection circuit operating in a different mode under different conditions: present-and-firing-on-a-target (monarchism), bonded-into-a-cohort-against-a-target (fascism), starved-for-proper-input (primitivism). The page's three psychological sources are not three separate evolutionary modules. They are three operating modes of the same circuit. This explains why the three archetypes can transform into each other — an alienated primitivist who finds a cohort becomes a fascist; a fascist whose cohort dissolves becomes an alienated primitivist; both can collapse into monarchism if a charismatic figure emerges. The transitions are not ideological pivots. They are reconfigurations of the same neural substrate's operating mode.
The harder thing this handshake says: political violence is not primarily an ideological phenomenon. It is the kin-detection circuit operating at scale, in different modes, with ideology supplying the cultural narrative that makes the circuit's operation feel like meaningful political action. Disable the ideology and you do not disable the violence. Disable the circuit's misfire conditions and the violence loses its substrate.
The Sharpest Implication
The tripartite framework suggests that political violence is never ideologically arbitrary — it always belongs to one of three structural types with different goals, different targets, and different theories of what comes after. This means that any political movement can be classified not by what it claims to believe but by what it is actually trying to do with violence: restore, create, or destroy. When the classification diverges sharply from the stated ideology — when a movement claims to be restoring order while its violence is actually trying to destroy it, or claims to reject hierarchy while creating a strict internal one — the divergence is diagnostic. Something important about the movement's actual character is visible in the gap between its stated archetype and its operative one.
Generative Questions