The Plain Power of the One Ring

Rewatching The Hobbit, I found myself fascinated again by the scene in which Bilbo finds the Ring. It slips from Gollum’s possession, and there it is: a simple band of gold, beautifully rounded and polished, with almost nothing to distinguish it.

The other rings are much more expressive and ornate. In the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring, we see their jewels, their elaborate settings, the different inclinations of the people wearing them. They look important. Yet the one that rules them all is the simplest, and somehow feels enormous. Mesmerizing and terrifying, despite being such a small, apparently ordinary object.

Most of the time, it does not even show the inscription. There is just the gold, its weight and proportions, and the strange impression that something immense has been concentrated inside it. The storytelling and visual representation do an extraordinary amount of work here.

I have watched these movies several times, but never read the books. I wondered whether that contrast came from Tolkien or from the filmmakers. The plainness belongs to the written story too, although the history of how it acquired its significance is less straightforward than I expected.

Tolkien had already written Bilbo’s magic ring before developing its identity as the One Ring. When a sequel was requested, the ring became the connection between The Hobbit and his larger mythology. He subsequently revised the earlier encounter with Gollum to fit what the object had become. Its initial conception did not carry the full weight we now associate with it. Tolkien was working with an existing element, but deliberately chose what to make of it. He could have introduced another object. Instead, the familiar little ring became something much more disturbing.

The people who admire the story

Whatever other ambiguities one finds in Tolkien, Sauron’s desire to subject everyone to a single will is fairly unequivocally presented as evil. Yet people with a considerable appetite for power sometimes seem determined to make this particular story accommodate them.

There is even a novel built around a reversal of its moral roles. In Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer, Mordor becomes a civilization of science and technological development threatened by the established magical powers. The familiar account is recast as a history written by the victors. The people we understood as the villains acquire a different identity, and the apparent goodness of their enemies becomes rather questionable.

That can be an interesting exercise in fiction. Yeskov himself describes a literary game that can add depth through juxtaposition with the original. But there is a difference between changing perspective and changing what happened, who people are, or what they intend.

What I find logically fallacious is using the latter to argue that one has uncovered an alternate moral reading of the original. If you rewrite the premises that determine the moral character of the story, how are the conclusions you derive from them supposed to tell us anything about the premises you have replaced? Tolkien’s world may still supply the names, the setting, and much of the sequence of events, but the facts doing the work in that argument are now your own inventions. You have written a story in which Mordor deserves defending. You have not demonstrated that Tolkien wrote one.

It is the insistence on reconciling oneself with the story that puzzles me. Someone could appreciate the warning and examine what it implies for their own ambitions. They could enjoy the books while admitting that their ego, fear, desire for safety, or appetite for power sometimes takes precedence. They could simply disagree with Tolkien.

Instead, there can be an extraordinary amount of intellectual and moral backflipping to preserve both the story’s authority and one’s own heroic position inside it.

Peter Thiel makes this especially interesting to me because I do not find him intellectually shallow or indifferent to the ideas he discusses. His interest in Tolkien, religion, and civilization seems substantial enough that I cannot explain the apparent contradictions merely by assuming he never understood the material.

Nor does it seem adequate to assume that money and hedonism explain all his ambitions. People can appreciate literature, craftsmanship, landscapes, and history, pursue grand humanistic aims, and sacrifice considerable time and tranquility in the process. There can be a sincere desire to do good, even when the rubric for recognizing goodness has become entangled with net worth, influence, or historical importance.

That is what I find most confusing. I can recognize something admirable in the curiosity and ambition while still finding some of the conclusions rather antihuman. The capacity to appreciate these things seems to be there. I wonder why it has so little influence over certain choices.

The people inside the improvement

One difficulty seems to arise when the people become an inconvenience to the society being improved.

Industrial or not, efficient or not, how much better is a society if the improvement is achieved by sacrificing people and then making life harsher for those who remain?

The society is the people. It is not the machines, the spreadsheet, or the exceptional individual who has decided what everyone else ought to become. It is people, individually and collectively, with interests, attachments, and limitations that will not all fit into one coherent plan.

A useful reform can inconvenience someone. Difficult decisions impose real costs. But those costs have to remain inside the assessment. If the people who suffer disappear from the calculation, the result has become easier to optimize because the calculation no longer adequately describes the society.

Hard to Be a God

The Strugatsky brothers explore this difficulty in Hard to Be a God. Rumata, an observer from a technologically advanced Earth, lives among people undergoing violent repression. His capabilities make him almost godlike by comparison. He can do things they cannot, but deciding what to do with that advantage is another matter.

In a conversation with the physician Budakh, they consider what to ask of a god. Budakh proposes making the rulers kinder. Rumata expects crueler men to replace them.

Budakh tries a more direct request:

“Punish the cruel.”

Rumata argues that power will pass to others who may become cruel themselves. They move on to material provision, then to changing people’s desires so that work and knowledge become the purposes of their lives. Rumata can imagine the means to accomplish even that, but asks:

“Should we exchange one mankind for another?”

Budakh briefly entertains that replacement before asking instead that they be left to find their own path:

“…let us go our own way.”

I do not agree with every premise through which they arrive there. Providing for people does not inevitably turn them into dependent pets, and the possibility of another tyrant hardly makes protecting someone from the current one pointless. Rumata’s answers are worth questioning too. His superior knowledge does not make every objection conclusive.

But the progression of the exchange is fascinating. Each proposal requires changing more of the society, until the people’s own desires and dispositions become the remaining obstacle. The society can be perfected if its inhabitants cease to be quite these people.

I can understand both the temptation and the horror of that possibility. If people are not wise enough for their own good, one might help them develop, accompany them, or accept that some choices remain theirs to make. None of those options guarantees a satisfactory result. The ability to impose one is enormously tempting, especially when the suffering is real and preventable.

Budakh’s final request is difficult precisely because it leaves open the possibility of failure. He is asking for people to retain something of their own lives, even if they do not make the best of them. That does not tell Rumata how much suffering he should allow, or when he should intervene. It does make clear that a satisfactory outcome for the observer may not be the same as a life the people concerned would recognize as theirs.

I recognize some of that difficulty in my own relationships. There are people I find frustrating, relationships that are far from ideal, and plenty about my life I would like to change. I am rather detached and willing to leave people behind. Even so, when I imagine removing every quality that frustrates me in someone, I sometimes realize that the person I would be left with would no longer be them.

That does not compel me to stay, but it changes how I understand what I am dissatisfied with. A relationship can fail to be what I want without the person, or their place in my life, having been a mistake.

Even when I leave someone behind, I do not necessarily resent their having been part of my story. Would I have learned the same things without facing that frustration, or without choosing to accept and learn from it? If I rejected everyone and everything through which I arrived here, I would be rejecting a considerable part of my own life.

I am all for agency, self-design, technology, efficiency, and optimization. I want to improve things, including myself. But when I think about what I actually enjoy, my heart melts at landscapes, wholesome moments, acts of kindness, and plain companionship without anything grand about it. Much of that comes from people and circumstances I would never have designed quite as they are.

I would be wary of an improvement that made my life more satisfactory in principle while leaving me less able to appreciate it.

What the Ring reduces

Thinking about that imbalance brought me back to the Ring’s appearance.

A villain with some humanity gives us something to recognize within the monstrosity. There may be an imbalanced love, a fixation with beauty, a desire to protect something that has become ruthless. The actions remain evil, but there is a thread we can follow. We can see how a human concern has grown out of proportion and displaced everything around it.

The other rings offer something of that specificity visually. Their stones and settings suggest different tastes, different attachments, different reasons to desire them. The One Ring offers almost none of it.

It is beautiful, so I would not say beauty is absent. But it gives us very little to associate that beauty with. No jewel to draw the eye into a particular color, no ornament suggesting a creature, a landscape, or a history. Just solid gold, polished into a form so complete that nothing seems to interrupt it.

It feels like concentrated greed. Not even the grandeur of an empire, or the desire to achieve something with power. Simply the desire to possess, with almost nothing else mixed into it.

Sauron’s appearance in the film prologue produces a related effect. We see enormous, angular armor, a weapon, the gestures of violence and command. We are given almost no access to a person inside it. The figure seems like a void supporting this elaborate display of force.

I am describing what the imagery does to me, rather than claiming that Tolkien conceived Sauron without a history or motives. Visually, though, the contrast is fascinating. Sauron is immense, spiky, and aggressively elaborate. The Ring is small, smooth, and almost featureless. Both give an overwhelming impression of power while leaving us very little beyond domination or possession to relate to.

The Ring’s effect on its possessors develops that reduction over time. There may initially be something they want to achieve with it. Eventually, keeping it becomes a sufficient purpose. More and more of the person’s life is organized around a single attachment, until everything outside it has become secondary.

That is what I mean by reductionism here. A concern, even an initially valuable one, becomes so dominant that whatever it cannot accommodate loses relevance. The person may still have other qualities, but those qualities have less and less influence over their choices.

Tolkien’s account of what would happen if Gandalf took the Ring makes the problem especially clear. Gandalf’s wisdom would not disappear. He would continue to pursue the good of his subjects according to his own understanding, and become a terrible ruler in the process.

The warning does not depend on his being secretly stupid, insincere, or devoid of concern for others. His genuine qualities would remain part of what made him dangerous.

Imperfect good, perfect evil

I remember a similar tendency in discussions of Star Wars, particularly the arguments that the Jedi and Republic were so flawed that perhaps the Empire offered something preferable.

The criticisms were familiar: the Jedi’s treatment of children, their failures with Anakin, the persistence of slavery, the corruption and paralysis of the Senate. Some identify real problems. But the argument often moved from a detailed inventory of those failures to a remarkably accommodating assessment of the regime that replaced them.

It felt like comparing imperfect good with perfect evil, then finding the evil more competent because it was less troubled by what it did.

The Jedi and Republic were full of doubt, restraint, inconsistency, and failure. Their obligations could pull them in conflicting directions. Intervention might protect people while exceeding their authority; nonintervention might respect a boundary while leaving someone to suffer. They could make the wrong decision, or use the complexity of a decision to avoid taking sufficient responsibility.

That deserves criticism. But a regime that resolves the difficulty by ceasing to recognize those obligations has hardly demonstrated greater moral competence.

Palpatine’s role makes the comparison stranger still. He helps cultivate the dysfunction subsequently used to justify his rule. It is unfair to count that corruption entirely as evidence against the Republic while treating the Empire as an independent solution arriving from outside the problem. Part of what we are watching is already the construction of the Empire, before it acquires the name.

Even granting some improvement in daily convenience, how good is the arrangement when there is no meaningful alternative? What happens when a citizen wants something the Empire does not permit?

The Republic’s value included the possibility of a future its inhabitants could help shape. The Empire might offer a more convenient present to some of them, but on the condition that their future remain subject to someone else’s permission.

An assessment that counts the convenience and omits that loss has reduced the people’s lives to the part the regime happens to manage well.

The danger one can recognize elsewhere

Thiel’s discussions of the Antichrist are interesting precisely because he recognizes the possibility of domination arriving through a promise to improve things.

In his conversation with Tyler Cowen, he describes the danger of a world government acquiring total power through promises to protect humanity from catastrophe. He acknowledges the technological risks, but also fears the authority that might be imposed in the name of preventing them.

That concern makes sense to me. Safety can justify coercion. An institution built to protect people can become something from which they need protection. He even explicitly recognizes that a force restraining tyranny can become tyrannical itself.

So I cannot fairly explain the disagreement by assuming he simply never finished digesting the warning. He can articulate it. What I find harder to follow is how consistently he applies it.

Thiel himself encourages entrepreneurs to aim for monopoly. In 2009, he wrote that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. I am left wondering whose freedom is being preserved, and what influence the other people retain over the conditions of their lives. A system does not have to govern the entire planet to leave those subject to it with very little room to refuse.

Palantir, which he co-founded, presents its work as compatible with privacy and civil liberties and has advocated stronger legal protections. It also supplies ICE with systems supporting immigration enforcement and deportation operations. That work is taking place while democratic checks in the United States are deteriorating: V-Dem’s 2026 assessment downgraded the country from a liberal to an electoral democracy. The claim to be strengthening democracy needs to be considered alongside what the government is doing with the additional power.

I want to know what limits actually apply to these systems, and what people can do when their use violates the freedoms they are supposed to protect. Good intentions and statements of principle cannot provide the same security as an effective ability to contest a decision or stop an abuse.

The possibility of benevolent power becoming oppressive is much less useful as an insight if it is applied chiefly to the people one already opposes.

Contrarian to whom?

That selectivity also makes me skeptical of the contrarian identity surrounding parts of the technology and investment world.

Being at odds with the broader public can coexist quite comfortably with conformity to the people whose approval matters most to you. A position that sounds outrageous in one setting may be the safest possible thing to say among your peers.

I am particularly unconvinced when the supposedly radical conclusions keep pointing toward greater financial upside, fewer constraints on the speaker, and more deference to the speaker’s judgment. A profitable idea can be true, and an unpopular conviction sincere. But how does that independence behave when the disagreement concerns a practice the speaker’s own circle profits from?

There are other ways to be unconventional: aesthetically, in one’s relationships, in the kind of future one wants to build, or through an ethical commitment that costs something. Contrarianism could involve standing one’s ground for someone vulnerable, building something beautiful without an obvious financial return, or simply living in a way that makes sense without requiring a hostile audience.

Unusual clothing proves very little by itself. Still, the contrast can be funny: enormous ambitions to redesign human existence, accompanied by a rather narrow range of acceptable ways to be a person.

The ability to defy the public is not much evidence of independence if it stops at the boundary of one’s own subculture.

The improvement I would actually want

My own aesthetic and lifestyle give me little reason to defend stagnation. I do not benefit from a world that is slow, socially restrictive, or hostile to experimentation. I would like considerably more room for people to do their own thing, including people whose idea of improvement differs from mine.

Nor do I have any interest in romanticizing bureaucracy. Delay can kill. Institutions protect incumbents. Failing to develop a useful technology can have serious consequences. Slowness is hardly evidence of wisdom.

But a procedure may be pointless overhead, or it may be how someone affected by a decision gets to contest it. Treating both as friction makes the intervention easier while concealing part of what it removes.

Social media and smartphones have made substantial contributions. Their usefulness does not establish that every decision about advertising, privacy, recommendations, or user control was technically inevitable or necessary for financial sustainability. Some choices serve the owners better than the users, even within a genuinely useful product. Those choices deserve to be assessed as choices, rather than accepted as the unavoidable cost of progress.

The distribution of benefits and risks matters too. A contribution can be real without warranting the authority its makers claim over everyone exposed to its consequences. People may have good reasons to hesitate before being included in somebody else’s civilizational experiment, particularly when their share of the risk is less optional than their share of the benefit.

I recognize some of that impatience in myself. I am an engineer, and vulnerability does not come particularly easily to me. Perhaps my interest in the humanistic side of all this is itself an attempt to find a missing piece in optimization. I do not claim to have escaped the habit I am describing.

But I have noticed something about the periods when I was more detached. They were easier in some respects. I was not happier. I learned less from people and enjoyed less of what they brought into my life.

I could still become fitter, hotter, smarter, and better at my work. The improvement was real, but very little of it reached the emotional layer. Nor did withholding that part of myself seem to make the other improvements especially greater.

In both cases I remained human, with frustrations and limitations. Neither brought me remotely close to some blissful, transcendent condition. But one left me more able to appreciate myself and other people. The other contained considerably more rejection of both.