Skullism

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Through our long investigation of the Skullists, T. and I came to develop a fascination for what we came to call Skullism, which can be defined, at least for the time being, as the collective philosophy of action, and the practical implementation thereof, towards achieving certain worldly goals, namely power over other men on a large scale to the levels of nations, ultimately to the point of having the power of life and death over as many other human beings as possible.

Any study of history will quickly discover that such individuals have apparently existed since the dawn of recorded history, and certainly before that as well, if the archaeological record can interpreted in the traditional way. In fact, the impulse to have such power of other people strikes most sane modern individuals as extremely primitive, and associated in particular with prehistoric cultures and among native tribes of recent times, and the ones that still live today as if in the Paleolithic Era. The prevalence of skull veneration among such primitive cultures is well attested.

But when T. and I spoke of the Skullists, we knew that we always implied individuals from recent history,  particular from the mid-Nineteenth Century onward, but not infrequently earlier than that, especially when tracing the lineage of earlier forms of Skullism throughout history.

Somehow though, the list of names that we gathered, that we both could incontrovertibly agree were Skullists (and we never disagreed [1]), were individuals who seemed to flourish from around the year 1830 onward. The people we became most fascinated with were ones from the mid-Twentieth Century onward.

It was clear in our mind that Skullism as we had chosen to define it and examine it, was somehow a manifestation of the modern world itself, the civilization created by the scientific and industrial revolutions.

We were both struck by the irony that such a situation could come about, given hat modernity (and especially the Twentieth Century) has not infrequently been painted in history as synonymous with the notion of inevitable progress towards ever greater openness, democracy, and egalitarianism throughout the world, touching all nations and peoples until some form of quasi-utopia society of fairness may come within reach.

Because of this irony, we came to see Skullism, and the Skullists in particular, as a kind of Bizarro World counternarrative to the commonly depicted rosy scenario about of the 20th Century as being about the Great Liberation of Peoples.

Skullism represented everything that this rosy narrative was not supposed to be about. Instead of democracy, it was about highly concentrated power. Instead of egalitarianism and fairness, it was about bloodlines and privilege. Instead of openness and truth, it was about secrecy and lies.

And of course, instead of people, it was about skulls.

[1] This not to say we did not encounter many borderline cases of individuals who had moved in the circles of Skullists and flirted with Skullism, or who were half in the Skullist world. But we tended to agree about who those individuals were, and of those who were incontrovertibly fully Skullist.