Dio’s Lore II: the path unresolved and the missing moral centre
Do you like pseudo-BAPist autobiographical music 'journalism'
My chief purpose in part I of this ‘series’ was to give the reader a sense of the moral ambiguity and unresolved conflicts inherent in Dio’s Lore. Herein I proffer for your delectation several further reflections on the same broad themes. Throughout, I will try to keep subheadings as pretentious as possible and to squeeze in as many facile references to Nietzsche, BAP and Classical philosophy as I can.
Part I:
(i) Thymos, the id and euthymia: the path unresolved
As I said in part I of this little-regarded excursus, the ephebe is a psychologically fragile creature—almost hopelessly so in the modern West, where his status has never been lower. Yet he also possesses unequalled and indomitable heroic will (to the ancient Greeks, a product of thymos). This is is demonstrated in certain…historical instances.
To a far less admirable (YMMV!) degree, I and my Dio-loving frens were also full of thymos. We were TVFF KIDZ. We scorned conformity to the artificial hierarchies imposed on us by the timid philistines who, then as now, were the guardians of social authority: narrow, unworthy, time-serving teachers and public officials.
It is entirely natural that our response to illegitimate authority was to challenge it in whatever childish and unsalutary ways we could: drinking, smoking cigarettes and weed, girlfriends always at hand. Among institutional authority figures the last seemed to provoke a particularly vicious envy, masquerading as moral disapproval—classic ressentiment.
More than this, we established among ourselves natural hierarchies of ascending life. Within instinctively chivalrous limits we engaged in competitive violence and took mortal physical risks with heedless bravado. By intutition we were ‘positive nihilists’: DESTROY EVERYTHING and let nature take its rightful place. Even now I think we were onto something.
That RJD understood, and shrewdly catered to, the heroic-insurrectionary aspect of the ephebic psyche is evident in songs such as this:
There are many such exhortations in the American heavy metal canon of the Reaganite 1980s, which compared to today was an age of unashamed cultural self-confidence and vitality. The negative aspect of the expressed sentiment (there is really only one) is that it contains nothing but the self and its desire for recognition as such—that is, *merely for its own existence*—by society as it is. In spite of its sheer aural POWAH, this is not the bellowing of thymos; it is the infantile whining of the id.1
At the height of my rebellious phase (14 to 16), The Old Man used to tell me that heavy metal was ultimately conformist. Now I get what he meant. Rather than contesting the existing (dis)order, it tacitly affirms it. What sensitive young man can truly act on the world given the re-channelling of his overflowing thymos, back into the infantile id? I am not accusing RJD of conscious participation in any kind of conspiracy, but this same diversion of thymos to id is the essence of ‘youth culture’ in general under late-stage global capitalism.
This is one reason the Boomers—and Gen X, and now Millennials—are by and large such loyal foot-soldiers of THE REGIME (globohomo? neoliberalism? whatever you want to call it). Their natural ephebic thymos was early turned by ’youth culture’ back towards the id—and they never grew out of it. For more recent examples, consider the popularity of rap (NOTICE ME NIGGA!) or, on the openly political level, the exhibitionism of the obviously astroturfed Extinction Rebellion. Perpetual enthrallment to the id awaits Zoomers in their dotage, just as it did Boomers and Gen X before them.
As always, modern ‘conservatism’ is of absolutely no use in this connexion. ‘Conservatives’ worship authority and hierarchy as values in themselves. I am by no means the first to point out that this is an elementary ‘category error’ which leads them always to defeat. Unnatural hierarchies and illegitimate authority are unhealthy, and the concepts in themselves are no grounds for judgements of virtue or justice. What’s more, valorisation of the categories for their own sake results in meek submission to the status quo; there is no room for the exercise of thymos in authority worship.
As The Old Man recognised long ago, the problem with double-time heavy metal blood-pumpers like Stand up and Shout is not that they activate thymos; the problem is that they do not.2 Caught between the crushing weight of ‘liberal’ youth culture and the hapless inertia of ‘conservatism’, the insurrectionary potential of the ephebe is neutered. It is misdirected away from dissatisfaction with THE REGIME, towards inordinate childish self-regard and the desire merely for a recognised place in the current way of things, regardless of its justice or virtue.
Of course the ephebe eventually grows out of his childish rebelliousness. But the path to true manhood, a state in which he would become more than a docile accumulator of money and objects, remains unresolved. Imprisoned by popular culture in the chrysalis of the id, a condition fundamentally unchallenged by modern ‘conservatism’, he will never threaten THE REGIME. Thymos is a powerful force that can (re-)create history; the id is feeble—it can never break out of the Eternal Present, the default state of mere life.
Moreover, as the ancients understood, without the proper harnessing of thymos there can be no euthymia. Is it any wonder that the world is now full of frustrated, dwarfish child-men whose thymos never fully emerged in the first place? They are forever caught in the middle:
This, to my mind one of Dio’s best songs, can be read as a commentary on the child-man phenomenon (it’s not).
(ii) The missing moral centre
Moralfagging in art (let us stretch the definition of the latter, for the sake of argument) is never interesting. One reason Dio’s Lore retains its fascination for me in middle age is its amorality. This lends it a uniquely attractive tension.
Most 1980s heavy metal is to me comparatively boring, because it is firmly grounded in conventional morality (CS Lewis, a great and a wise man, called it The Tao). Iron Maiden’s lore consists basically in boys-own storytelling: the identity of the goodies is always obvious, even if they rarely win, and the band’s sympathy with them is equally plain. Saxon is much the same. Metallica and Megadeth were really into writing songs about war (of course), drug addiction, crooked preachers (THE 1980s metal song topic) and suicide—and they let THE KIDZ know that all of them were BAD THINGS. Slayer, in whose lore the goodies never win, were not Nazis or devil-worshippers but likewise, in the final accounting, upholders of conventional morality. The grisly and/or pseudo-occult imagery of these bands is beside the point; it’s really just a gimmick.
The semiotics of Dio, which I covered in part I of this ‘series’ (the cornuto hand-sign, ‘Murray’ the demon mascot, the band logo flipped upside down to read ‘DEVIL’—it’s REAL!), are not in themselves any more revealing of Dio’s essential ‘moral positioning’ (sorry) than they are in the case of any other 1980s heavy metal band.
Yet Dio’s Lore is congruent with the band’s ‘branding’ (sorry again) insofar as it is Luciferian: the individual’s will and his imagination are everything. Moreover, it’s not just that your parents don’t understand you; it’s that they might be deliberately thwarting your access to revelation.
The nature of this revelation is dimly encoded in RJD’s favourite words—talismans, really—which occur again and again in Dio’s Lore: fire, wheels, hearts, dreams, stars, fly, sky, eyes, dark, light, black, white (no it’s not racial)—and, most repetitively and obsessively of all, RAINBOWS (no it’s not about Tr00ns, although…see post-post-post-postscript in part III). In Dio’s Lore, dark is never morally ‘privileged’ (sorry yet again ok no more ugly jargon) over light, or vice versa. There is no moral centre at all.
All RJD’s favourite talismans are signifiers of a kind of amoral revelation, in which the individual’s phantasy re-imagines (but cannot re-make) the world. Particular songs are furnished with these talismans as though their mere presence has an esoteric purpose more important than any discernible exoteric meaning. They are pieces of a mysterious revelatory puzzle which only the ephebe’s imagination can solve—and, should the opportunity not be seized at the crucial moment, the possibility of revelation will be lost forever.
We bring you fantasy, we bring you pain
It's your one great chance for a miracle
Or we will disappear never to be seen again
We bring you beautiful, we teach you sin
We can give you a piece of the universe
Or we will disappear never to return again
And all the fools sailed away
As I said in part I: to an adult all of this is mumbo-jumbo; but to the ephebe it is profound, because it chimes with his psyche at exactly the right time. He is not equipped to perceive, however, that he is being shepherded into a developmental dead-end, wherein the id unrestrained whimpers impotent in the void of the Eternal Present.
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Yes this is a huge overstatement, in prose of deepest purple
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PLIZ NOW YOU READ PART III!!!!
Yes I know it's Freud—sorry about that—but eros, the roughly equivalent concept in Plato, doesn’t work as well in this case.
They’re a great accompaniment to weight training however.
Fascinating, but I should note that the ephebi were trained to fight and kill, the mannerbunds were primarily war and raiding bands to initiate young men into manhood.
Modern rebellious youth are not mannerbunds, the gangs of leather wearing metal heads are not ephebi. I know you are aware of this, but I just wanted to make it clear (for myself in writing) that young men like myself would've done well under a system where real ephebi were being trained and raised by the old guard of men. Instead, we are bereft of direction and our energies are wasted.
I saw a note you just posted talking about BAP but it did not direct or link to the specific article you were seemingly responding to. Wondering what's up with that.