Roman McClay’s novel Sanction has after the author’s mass killings become a difficult subject to write about if not in unambiguously condemning terms. The personal or ideological enemies of people the author was in contact with have used the event as a weapon in their smearing crusades. It is obvious that anyone trying to speak about the qualities of a work like Sanction risk a witch-hunt. There are also the victims of the crime and their nearest to consider. And the fear that Sanction in the wrong hands could inspire more murderous violence. The potential new reader will when hearing about Sanction first be faced with not only the brutal murders but a fog of hearsay, characterizing the author in dismissive categories like misogynist, Nazi, incel, homophobe, Twitter reply guy, some kind of insecure loser inspired by the alt-right or the manosphere.
According to the hearsay, Sanction is not even literature in the true sense, but merely a ranting manifesto to justify the crimes. Regarding the works literary quality, I could not disagree more. Sanction was a literary masterpiece before the crimes, written by a nuanced, original artist, and Sanction remains a masterpiece. But it isn’t a work for the ones who limit the world into a few ideological categories or are fearfully concerned with who they may be associated with. In hundred years, Sanction will belong to the canon of great literature and read on its own merits. Talking about its qualities will not be so different from admiring a painting by the murderer Caravaggio is today. But we should not have to wait hundred years to openly and honestly be allowed to discuss Sanction, as the thought-provoking questions raised are urgently relevant in our contemporary world.
Sanction is certainly not a bad work, but it admittedly is a dangerous work, which in the wrong hands indeed could have bad consequences. Yet should it reach the right kind of reader the benefits are worth the risks. I do not think the current world is in such a state that everything will be fine if we all just keep our heads low, eyes closed, and avoid making any sudden movements. We live in a risky phase of history and may as well risk a work like Sanction circulating in the world. Perhaps a reading of the work may even be helpful in mitigating violence through a better understanding of its deeper causes. That is what I think.
Even if the intention of a reader is to ultimately overcome or offer a negative critique, a work deserving attention at all, should be read charitably. If Sanction is to be read charitably, it is a prophetic work showing the death of our old Western world, while trying to glimpse the contours of a new beginning. What kind of man and woman is needed to found the new? It explores this by raising the fundamental questions, like those about anger and honor, questions which great literature must renew from epoch to epoch, which find different answers in an Achilles, Aeneas, Hamlet, or a Lyndon. The author exposes his own mind with all his experiences, insights, inspirations, wounds, victories, failings, contradictions and limitations at rich display, and does not offer simple answers. Discernment is the prerogative of the reader.
It is important to understand that Roman McClay was steeped in literature from a young age, that literature and life always was intertwined, and that he interpreted his role in the world less in the eyes of his contemporaries, and more in figures like Shakespeare, William Blake, Henry Melville, Arthur Rimbaud, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and eventually the Vedas, the Bible and ancient sacred texts. Yet, he sought his readers not primarily among the academic specialists in these fields, but among young men interested in what it is to be a man. Men of the sort who may seek inspiration from contemporary figures like Jack Donovan, Paul Waggener, Jordan Peterson and Nassim Taleb, figures the author cites early on in Sanction, elevating what is noble in their strivings. Such contemporary figures should not be considered main inspirations for Roman McClay himself, but gateway drugs to the domain of great literature where he found his true peers.
Roman McClay’s involvement with the manosphere must be understood in context of the pragmatic need of getting Sanction into the world and seek fellows to build a tribe. A reader of Sanction will know that he was certainly not blind to the phoniness, larping, and sociopathy in many parts of these spheres, yet he was more interested in shining light on the best potentials there then on external critique. To go beyond from the inside.
The plot is not the main point in a complex work like Sanction, so revealing it is not ruining too much, but from now on their will be spoilers. Roman McClay paints in the extremely gifted character Lyndon a portrait of a self-made man who realized a particular American dream many young men chase. A life rich with money, cars, a harem of adoring beautiful girls, expensive clothes, rare wines, meaningful work with no one bossing over you, and creative artistic freedom. But Lyndon finds this life wanting. He wants pure love, not sexual experiences. Honor, not success built on compromises and fakery. Something rooted and real. A space for expressing his true self. After enough failings in his attempts to build anything real, and numerous betrayals from people he trusted, vengeance and murder seems like the last option left to achieve something real. In a broader perspective we here get a portrait of the limitation of the dream of the Western civilization, culminating in the American individual, where even apparent “success” is not satisfying for the sensitive man of soul.
What also Roman McClay thinks from the inside of the Western paradigm is the development of science and technology, where findings in biology, neurology, physics and AI, and the overall style of Western scientific thinking is brought to its ultimate conclusion. This is represented partly by the figure of Boyd Sou, a scientist-politician who wants to reduce crime by means of technology. As help in this project, and for getting elected as Governor in Colorado, Boyd Sou employs the powerful Artificial Intelligence MO, which is the first AI successfully able to act with something resembling an independent consciousness. The key to the breakthrough in AI research leading to MO is the realization that consciousness needs embodiment. First with a human form, the AI gets the necessary limitation to establish the hierarchies of priorities and values necessary for humanlike behavior.
As part of the project to reduce crime, MO encounters the now imprisoned mass murderer Lyndon to cure him from his psychopathy, partly through neurosurgery, partly therapeutic means. MO realizes, however, that Lyndon has a unique combination of neurological traits, containing an extremely rich and complex inner life, very different from those of a psychopath. Lyndon’s murders are not caused by lack of empathy, but from a biologically rooted sense of justice more suited to an archaic than a modern life. Men like Lyndon, with the neurological conditions for retributive justice, may under other social conditions be exactly what is needed for the task of reducing crime, by keeping the worst people in check. MO also finds an excess in Lyndon of elements he needs to become more successfully humanlike. Lyndon’s uniqueness which provokes MOs interest is his long history of painful experiences mixed with a gift of expression to translate his pain into meaningful words and narratives. Though God-like in his power to process information, MO lacks the power to grant meaning which Lyndon has, and through weekly meetings he mines the inmate for deeper and deeper levels of meaning.
Eventually, inspired by Lyndon, MO creates a new embodied AI, Isaiah, who in addition to his own processing powers is given a limbic system, which makes Isaiah able to feel. Now also Isaiah employs Lyndon as a teacher of meaning, who inspired by the inmate’s mindset starts his own project, which far exceeds the original task of reducing crime in Colorado. Isaiah wants to see men like Lyndon flourish in the world. Lyndon himself is constricted by law to never be released into the world again, but Isaiah can clone him and give the clones a fresh start. Thus, Isaiah creates Blax, who is identical to Lyndon in every respect and shares his memories until right before Lyndon’s mass killings. He creates the Bust, who is genetically similar to Lyndon except she is female, to give Blax a meaningful relationship of love. Isaiah also creates four Jacks: clones brought up by foster parents destined to get taught by Blax when they become young men. He creates sixteen Daniels, clones that will be led by the four Jacks, and more than a million clones to eventually follow the Jacks and Daniels and form tribes of similar minded men.
So, realized here is the thought experiment of teaching your younger self what you from a more mature position see you needed the most to know, with room for experimentation of different tendencies and paths. Despite their genetical identity, there is eventually a bifurcation which make the Four Jacks increasingly distinct from each other. Jack One develops as the most ballsy, disciplined and pragmatic, the one best at breaking through uncertainty and committing to action. Jack Two is the most romantic, who experiences the world as a place of awe, and seeks the divine in the Woman. Jack Three is the visionary artist, who finds joy and purpose in experimentation with his creative powers. Jack Four is the most mystical of the four, the hardest one to define. He is in many ways the most detached and unpredictable of the Jacks.
Blax is a brilliant teacher, but he carries a lot of painful, recurring memories from the past he shares with Lyndon. Unresolved issues pushed underground has led to a restless, discursive mind. Behind the need to present a disciplined, exemplary image to the Jacks, he is slowly losing his grip on reality. Lyndon, on the other side, is more at peace with himself, even though he is imprisoned. By committing murders of people who betrayed him, he did what needed to be done and feels authentic. Blax, who with identical memories of betrayal abstained from revenge to instead train a future elite of similar minds, feels he is living a lie.
Sanction, with its three thick volumes of 1,2 million words, is an extremely rich and complex work by an erudite mind with a broad intellectual horizon. Different readers will carry different things away. For me the theme of the Great Return is of particular interest. The death of an old civilization and the birth of something new. Blax and Jack One, Two and Three seek perfection within the conditions of the old Western world, as instruments of Isaiah’s master plan. Jack Four seeks something beyond the known. While Isaiah has planned a role for Jack Four as one of four kingly restorers of the West, Jack instead chooses a violent and barbaric path which puts all the AIs carefully calculated plans in peril. Isaiah has the power to stop Jack Four but, like with Lyndon, he recognizes something beyond himself in Jack Four worthy of aid and respect. The lesson seems to be that the man evading the logic of the advanced AI becomes valuable for AI and may thereby in some sense dominate it. And here the examples of Lyndon and Jack Four may be the most instructive.
Lyndon’s main value is as mentioned his history of pain combined with his way with words. His wounds and his poetic gift. We can add to this his striving for mastery and authenticity in any field he embarks on, and thorough understanding of what he encounters or reads. It’s a man who builds his own home from the ground, builds his own vehicles, and is attentive to detail and style in anything he does. Life for Lyndon is a work of art where everything matters. He is also not afraid of getting his hands dirty with back-breaking, risky manual work. Lyndon takes on the titanic burden of working in the oil fields and other crucial fronts fundamental for a society alienated from and ungrateful to the invisible heroism of manly work we still rely on. He knows how to hunt his own food. Lyndon is a primal man in contact with the elementary forces even if it implies blood and gore. What is real has always a kind of beauty and meaning. Even more important than realness in these domains is Lyndon’s willingness to time after time seek the sacred in the form of a woman, even though he time after time get disappointed and betrayed. His greatest wounds are from his attempt at meaningful relationships with women.
Jack Four does not have as rich treasure of pain and lived experience as Lyndon but does not need as much to feel discontentment with the world. He is characterized by an uncompromising will to transcendence, even if it means sacrificing everything, burning everything to the ground, becoming completely isolated and incomprehensible to others, and even to himself. No accomplishments matters to him outside his razor-sharp, single-minded purpose. While Blax, Lyndon, and the other Jacks seek perfection within the hierarchy of values of the old West, and the powerful AIs MO and Isaiah follow its philosophical logic to its end, Jack Four seeks beyond towards a revaluation of all values.
While Jack Four is the male figure most capable of a transition to a new beginning, the Bust is the analogues female figure. Representing the ideal of female purity, she is the most valuable treasure to be guarded late in the narrative. Her purpose is to carry the future and become mother of kings. The importance of female sexual purity as a condition for healthy relationships and love, and by extension cultural flourishing, is one of the key themes in Sanction.
One of the most disturbing elements in Sanction is its use of transhumanist elements, like mind-enhancing implants in main characters, and genetic meddling. The embodied AIs, particularly Isaiah, are also unsettling despite their jovial, coffee-drinking appearances. It is possible to read such technological elements as the authors plot devices to present a certain narrative, but there is also a possible Promethean reading where certain technological breakthroughs are regarded as necessary for what a Traditionalist would call the Great Return.
From a Traditionalist worldview the heavy emphasis in Sanction on modern science and particularly evolutionary biology, raises many concerns. Are we speaking about revelations in modern science of traditional wisdom, or are we speaking about science and technology in the service of what Guénon would regard as inversion or sinister parody of traditional symbolism? The greatest danger and the greatest saving power may, as Hölderlin said, be connected, but exactly how? Despite name-dropping Evola as prophet of the “The Great Return”, the Traditionalist discourse seems to have had only a minor influence on Roman McClay’s worldview.
Reading Sanction is a serious, thought-provoking and life-transforming commitment where nothing should be taken at face-value, and concepts often are treated from many sides. There are traps and treasures here demanding a discerning mind. I think the author wanted to expose his mind honestly from a feeling that he had something of value, far beyond his individual life, to transmit. After having read Sanction twice, the second time after his murders, I do not think Roman McClay expected support for or emulation of his crimes, but wanted someone to understand him, measure him justly and perhaps find a path beyond his own limitations. For a rare kind of reader, I believe the encounter with Sanction could be world-transforming.
To dig down to the core of man, to tell the truth of what you see, even -especially- if you know that you will be hated for the things you see, that is the role of the Great Man. Not all Great Men can come back with the gold, some must reveal where the gold is absent. All locations on the map are in need of exploration; women and children can live within the safety of the walls men build, and weak men can walk a bit in the path others have trod; but Great men must enter the forest at its darkest part and likely not return
The Interviews XM.x3 [Inmate 16810339]
Roman McClay. Sanction
