On Thymos
Thymos is the artistic will to matter. It is the desire for recognition—to be written in history—to make history. The word comes from the Ancient Greek concept of ‘spiritedness’, or ‘honor’. Plato described thymos as one of the two horses driving the chariot of the soul; it is what sends Achilles to storm against the Trojans, and what sends Hector out to oppose him. It is felt in the rush of blood and breath you experience upon imagining your future greatness; when you will become who you are. Thymos is the most potent drug there is: more pleasurable than heroin, more grandiose than cocaine, more ungrounding than ayahuasca. And just as with these lesser substances, it absolutely can kill you.
When you imbibe thymos, you commit to re-sculpting the world in your own image. However, the idealistic concept of one’s thymic project must always precede any tangible form of it—to change the world, you must first believe you are one of the rarified few who can. So one begins with a dream and must converge that dream to reality. The greater the dream, the greater the high of consuming its idealistic concept, but also the greater the dysphoria it engenders with the present.
In tech, people talk about founders having a “reality-distortion field”, but really this is just them navigating the tension described above by repeatedly lying about the actuality of their dream in such a way that, by the time they are called on it, it has become true. This is the story of Steve Jobs and Sam Bankman-Fried, Jensen Huang and Elizabeth Holmes. There is no principled distinction to be made between any of these figures. They are surfers zipping along the crash of fantasy and reality. They are drunk drivers driving the car at 120mph with no seatbelt. They are high. What disjuncts the visionary from the fraud is not integrity, but skillful navigation of thymic energy. Essentially: do they figure out how to drive the car drunk or wrap it around a telephone poll?
When someone achieves success, we say they have “made a name for themselves”. Taken literally, this is another kind of reality distortion, a rewiring of the semiotic order to accommodate a new sign for the elevated individual. “Larry and Sergey”, “SBF”, “zuck”, “sama”. These monikers are not nicknames but direct claims of semiotic authority, legitimized on the individual’s thymic actualization, deployed to further their will-to-power. Yet at the same time, in this very act of “stepping into history” the individual also becomes something far more fragile. They become inscribed in their assumed historic identity—now totally dependent on the steady drip of thymos to keep them whole—they must eventually perish in it. Per Land, “to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse”.
Maximally powerful is maximally fragile. A handful of sand bricks a supercomputer, a faulty o-ring incinerates a spaceship, a misplaced semicolon crashes the linux kernel. For humans, power is wrested in semiotic authority and achieved with thymos. But you must be very careful to never overdose on this substance. To become ungrounded between future and present, to lose track of what is ideal and what is real, to come to believe you can dictate reality and not just distort it. It is an unpleasant fate, sometimes a permanent one. The car has been crashed. The self is dissolved into a scattering array of vectors.
The future is a desert. We are not native to its environment, we are not supposed to live there. But some of us try nonetheless. Thymos is the definite assertion of your will over the future—a claiming of land on an imagined continent—a declaration of war on an all-too-real present. It is the spice melange, the divine right of kings, the mandate of heaven. And yet communion with the divine is always a leap of faith, and for the truly ambitious, victory always sits uncomfortably close to annihilation.
“Whatever is the lot of humankind I want to taste within my deepest self. I want to seize the highest and the lowest, to load its woe and bliss upon my breast, and thus expand my single self titanically and in the end go down with all the rest.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part