The New Knighthood
The New Knighthood
Our story so far (and a not-so-modest proposal).
“What is to be done?”
That seems to be the big question these days.
Far from slowing down, our mutual enemy’s movements appear to grow bolder and more destructive by the hour. And while there’s still a lot of debate about what we should do about it, a kind of dismal agreement seems to have formed that we aren’t doing enough.
Part of the reason for this deficit of action is due to the diverse composition of our forces. In the wake of COVID-19 and other recent manmade disasters, we suddenly find ourselves thrown together in a rowdy camp of strangers, whose ideas and beliefs run the gamut from godless libertarians to RETVRN-style neo-monarchists to eschatological religionists and more. Stranger bedfellows have likely never been made in all of history. Unit cohesion is a major obstacle.
That’s not to say some of us aren’t trying to connect those distant dots. For example, in a recent post my friend
proposed a model of what he calls “Maximum-Tent Morality.” The gist of his argument is that if we can agree to a minimal number of moral principles (in his case, agreement that “hypocrisy” and “delusion” are always prohibitively immoral), then it will solve the composition/cohesion problem and allow for more of us to do more things together (and in a more strategically aligned and effective way).It’s well argued as per usual, and well worth a full read. But like most ideas worth consideration, his approach has certain drawbacks.
For example, I can see his concept of “delusion” as being the source of much mischief, perhaps handing infiltrators and chaos agents yet another sneaky weapon with which to bludgeon and divide us. This is particularly the case when it comes to questions of God and Truth. I can foresee our battlefield turning very weird, very soon. If and when it does, the godless will inevitably accuse their faithful allies of delusion, and vice-versa.
It’s also possible that the “big-tent” populist approach will simply be a Pyrrhic loser in the long run, merely replacing Leviathan instead of slaying it. The result could be “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” who cannot resist using the ring’s power the moment it’s captured.
Grant addresses this danger by promoting a decentralized and means-based approach to the battle itself, hopefully reinforcing these heuristics so well that they carry forth beyond the battlefield and into the continuity of our daily lives and politics. I agree that decentralized tactics are what’s needed. Building a low-rent, deprecated version of a dragon and then riding it into the real one’s jaws might be fun, but it’s also suicidal.
As always, our weapons and tactics must turn the enemy’s strengths into disadvantages, while maximizing our own. One of the strengths of competent freemen is we can organize semi-autonomous pockets of resistance all over the map. In doing so we become a kind of combination million-headed hydra/camouflaged-Predator. We don’t want or need to meet the enemy head-on in some epic kaiju battle; for us, anywhere can become a battlefield at any time, and with almost zero centralized coordination required. That is essentially what a “resistance” is; the usual decapitation strikes won’t work as they would against our enemy, who are more likely to exhaust themselves in attempting that approach.
That said, there are always tradeoffs. The tradeoff for an “active” resistance is twofold. For one thing, appearing on the enemy’s radar at all is inherently risky, and that’s what inevitably happens when we openly declare ourselves as dissidents. A sounder approach might therefore be a much quieter one. As Sun Tzu said:
Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
In fact, some might go further, and say don’t “move” or “fall” at all.
advised Grant on their conversation thread that perhaps the best strategy is to evade and ignore the regime while it does the job for us. As another military wise-guy once said, “Never interrupt an enemy when he’s making a mistake.” What we have before us isn’t just a mistake, but a grand, maniacal collage of crippling errors, if not a snake eating its own tail.The strategic idea here is that while the enemy finishes destroying its own stupid institutions, we would be quietly building parallel versions in the background. These would include systems of education, production, communications, agriculture, trade and so forth. In doing so, we’d gradually be unhooking ourselves from their Machine. Not only would we avoid the splash damage from its inevitable implosion, but we’d be prepared to step into the void with better solutions on Day Zero.
This has been my own opinion for quite some time. Or, at least, I strongly believe that parallel systems development is necessary work we should be doing, no matter what other avenues of resistance we pursue. Grant’s concern is that we cannot hide ourselves well enough or long enough to endure the crash. He has a point; the enemy’s bloodthirst will only grow as its demise draws near, and its unholy appetite for scapegoats is unmatched. They will come for us eventually, and maybe clone-stamp something like the Waco siege a thousand times on their way out the door.
Speaking of Waco, that’s another point of contention that could easily divide us. Kruptos believes that Grant’s proposed new competence-based status hierarchy won’t work if it doesn’t include an inviolable (and specifically Christian) spiritual ethos at its core. Otherwise, the new ladder is doomed to eventually collapse, or to transform into another tool of corrupt ambition. Instead of calling their in-group rivals “evil”, the new set of strivers will label them “deluded” or “hypocrites” or whatnot.
Meet the new boss…
I see value in both arguments. For instance, a corrupted version of Grant’s “big tent” coalition-building constitutes at least part of the explanation for how the Global Tantalus grew to be so strong and dangerous in the first place. While its methods of blackmail, bribery, piracy and graft are particularly evil, the results were largely the same; cobble together a large enough coalition of vampiric masters and their ignorant addicts/slaves to impose their will upon the rest of us. We do well to study our enemy’s tactical strengths, and perhaps even adapt some of them to work within our own context. After all, a larger coalition of freemen logically translates to a greater ability to act effectively.
But as Kruptos notes, the lack of a central ethos — and, in my opinion, of a shared story — will invite too many people into our “big tent” who don’t actually belong there, and who are deeply confused about what it is they’re fighting for. That includes people who, upon deeper reflection, might even come to realize that they aren’t against The Machine per se, but merely want to get their hands on its controls. For them, to “seize the system” is to inevitably become the system. Therefore the rest of us will wind up fighting largely the same battle as before, but now against an enemy that knows our means and methods even more intimately than the previous version.
What I’ve been wondering lately is whether there is some way to straddle these two arguments. It might be impossible; the gap between those who observe the ultimate authority of God and those who don’t might prove to be infinitely vast. Having sat in both camps at certain points in my life, I can attest that the difference isn’t merely quantitative, and could prove disastrous at some critical juncture.
Moreover, I believe that human beings require a shared language of symbols, songs and stories in order to cooperate effectively in war. Armed with such a common tongue, we become not just allies but invincible brothers-at-arms. But to develop it, we also need to agree on something more than a minimal, utility-based moral code. If we must fight, then our inspiration to do so effectively must be rooted in something deeper than the “leave-me-alone-ness” of the normie conservative or libertarian stripe.
This holds especially true for the Christian dissident, who knows that war and violence must always be the last resort. Christians are ferocious fighters when we’re forced to be, the fearless lions of God Almighty. But that innate courage can also be twisted towards an evil purpose. History is stained with the blood of unjust “holy” wars, including ones that tricked students of Christ into fighting for a devil-in-disguise.
Lately, I sense that many Christians have learned to see through this particular trick. This means that if we are to ever pick up the sword again, the war must not merely be in self-defense, but a truly righteous one. Then and only then will we commit ourselves to battle. That is the price of fighting alongside Christian men. What you get in return is a fighter who will sacrifice himself even unto death for your cause.
Yet when we look around us, we see everywhere the sneering, mocking faces of our so-called friends and allies. They launch schoolyard SCUDs in our direction, call us “cucks” and “christfags” to earn 4chan clout or whatever. And beyond these juvenile insults exists a layer of pseudointellectual vilification and revisionism which seeks to erase our own story of Reality, or to transform it beyond all recognition.
As a consequence, the average response to a call-to-arms from a godless materialist is, “No thanks.”1 We suspect we ultimately can’t trust you, when push comes to shove. We predict that you’ll eventually switch sides, because we can see that many of you are already ninety-percent of the way there.
That’s why I think Kryptos has a point when he writes (emphasis mine):
The first goal is not to build a coalition. You cannot decide upon allies unless you have an absolutely inviolable core that drives the movement. If you are all things you are nothing. This is why I make the case that the future of the Dissident Right will be Christian, because only in the Christian faith is there the potential to build that tight knit “we” with an inviolable core. All allies who come on board will do so knowing they are in the back seat of a Christian project. The rest will join with the regime, which is, frankly speaking, probably more their home anyways.
I believe this principle holds true even outside a specifically Christian context. Victorious brothers-at-arms don’t merely agree on abstract goals or methods, but on the larger story of Reality and our place within it. That’s why Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires: a bunch of illiterate goatherds had a better story. Which is not to say the “best” one, but far better and stronger than that of the Soviets or the USG.
The richness of such unifying stories correlates well with the depth of cooperation. The lack of a good story also marks a key weakness of the enemy, which we would be stupid to not exploit. If you compare Company X’s bland “mission statement” or a WEF speech by Klaus Schaub to Tolkien’s legendarium, you might get a sense of the extreme, asymmetric advantages of the latter.
So we come right back round to the question of: “What is to be done?”
I’ve come up with my own answer, to be detailed in a later post.
First, let me tell you a story.
It was January 1, 2000 AD.
Midnight.
We celebrated in all the usual ways. Blew horns and screamed countdowns, drank and danced ourselves stupid, made a bunch of promises we’d never keep. Everywhere we looked were old toys we owned, or screens showing new toys we wanted.
Then the clock spun out another day. A computer bug did not wipe out all bank accounts. Skynet didn’t gain sentience and launch nukes. Nothing had changed, because nothing ever changed.
But we also allowed ourselves to think there really was something different this time around. Some of us had read the book of dead centuries — or the Cliffs Notes version, at least. We knew that certain rip currents and strange tides emerged at the start of each new chapter. We sensed a big opportunity was at hand. If we still possessed the language for it, we might have called it a “magical” one.
We couldn’t speak in that language anymore. It had been stripped away, alongside all other useful words and meanings, and what little remained was bound up in irony. The most educated among us had submitted to the lie that people were little more than robotic apes, after all, and that all of our gibbering could be translated to some variation of: “Gimme more stuff.”
They stole all the money too, of course. Or, to be more accurate, they loaded all past and future wealth into a thirty-trillion-foot bong and smoked it. All that was left of our inheritance were dirty slips of paper, anchored to nothing more than a carjacker’s violent threats.
Our history and heritage had been stripped away as well, replaced with toy soldiers and a bulleted list of their crimes. Some of us had been to war. Or if not us, our fathers or grandfathers. But all nobility had been bled and strangled out of those battles and sacrifices.
“You say your grandad fought in Dubya-Dubya Two?
“That’s nice.
“Now, let me remind you how big of a fucking RACIST he was…”
Those who didn’t fight abroad became casualties of a different kind. A 24/7 war was being waged against our minds. Screens bloomed all around us, like poppies in some druglord’s endless field. They eventually fit inside our pockets; infant screens who demanded our constant attention, who nagged us with their beeps and chimes. The words and pictures on these screens not only lied to us. They stole our most precious commodity of Time. Every moment we gazed into them was a lost chance to resist.
Even if we didn’t get hooked on screens, there were many other poisons to sample. These included the literal kind, peddled by dudes who weren’t doctors, but played ones on TV. The screens showed us couples jogging on sunny beaches, smiling friends at cocktail hour, a happy mommy sweeping a child into her arms, cured of her human condition at last. And in the background, an eerily calm voice rattles off the side-effects. Antidepressants that may cause deepening depression, insomnia, weight gain, hallucinations, suicidal thoughts…
But underlying all of the toxic potions and material thefts was a much older and grander scheme.
It wasn’t enough to poison us, or to steal our money, stories and songs. The real heist was a kidnapping, to a spiritual gulag that we couldn’t possibly escape because we were hypnotized to love our chains.
Put simply:
We were born under an evil spell.
The spell’s range and potency has grown with every generation. If you are under fifty years old like me, its magic has been omnipresent throughout your life. It was in the air we breathed, the books we read, the shows we watched, the webs we surfed, the clothes we wore, the toxic foods we shoveled down our throats. It was strobed into our eyes and ears from birth, bleeding over into our chaotic dreams and nightmares. No generation of humans ever suffered such dreams, invaded by ad-marketing pitch men and Hollywood perverts.
We grew up in a mist, surrounded by the spell’s whispering phantoms. They claimed we could do anything, so we did nothing much at all. They sold us games that were simulations of simulations, taught us to crave things no sane man had ever wanted.
Lately, their whisper campaign has turned into unholy screaming. They scream that men can get pregnant, that chicks can have dicks, that two plus two equals potato. They scream that gestating human babies are like parasitic infections, that a quick trip to the “doctor” will clear that right up for ya.
They scream all moral systems are relative and equally valid — except of course for the one that says, “No they ain’t, pal.” All madness was renamed virtue, because everything was virtue, because nothing was virtue, because everything was nothing. Even humanity itself was just another passing fad, in a universe of dead clockwork.
So, might as well hop on social media, kids!
Become an influencer! Or a follower!
Who are you influencing today? Who are you following?
The answer was never who, but what. We were all following and influencing the lyrics to the darkest song. Now, everybody sing-along:
You say there’s a problem?
Outsource it!
Or take it up with the manager, buddy. Let him outsource it.
Either way it’s not my problem. I’m a busy man.
I’m trolling libtards/MAGATs on Twitter. I’m swiping left on Tinder. I’m packing a massive bong hit. I’m building a Minecraft palace in a bitmapped sky.
Besides, I’m too tired to solve it, anyway. So very tired and weak. Ask me again tomorrow, or maybe next Tuesday.
I’m taking my pills now, and going back to bed.
The bitter truth is we never left our beds to begin with. But the lullaby isn’t the same as the spell. It’s merely a side-effect, like the “permanent psychosis” listed on your prescription bottle of Getbetterol. The spell’s actual effect is much more dire.
Its casting began so long ago that its current crop of wizards don’t know how or when it started. Many don’t even know that they’re casting it at all, and are as bewitched as the rest of us. That’s because it has grown in size and complexity over time, evolved so many new means and methods that it looks less like a single spell than a massive grimoire, a tome to rival the Necronomicon.
But embedded in its magical black core was one very simple command:
Destroy.
We were bred to be the sleeper-agents of mass destruction.
When we weren’t busy masturbating ourselves to death, we would instinctively vandalize and desecrate anything remotely beautiful or true. We’d tear truth limb-from-limb, split it into a billion Humpty Dumpty pieces. Our educators armed us with an arsenal of scalpels and disintegration beams to serve this purpose, and perversely rewarded us for our skill in wielding them. But the ultimate target for destruction was always going to be ourselves.
Well done, Billy!
You’ve deconstructed the Earth down to its molten core.
Now: point that little ray-gun at your head and squeeze the trigger.
And so there we were: robbed of the past and the future. Skinned to the bone and left to dangle in a void. Immersed in a choking smog of propaganda, hypnotized by the flash photography of porno shoots and crime scenes. We were robotic kamikazes programmed to self-destruct, blissfully unaware of who programmed us or why. Those secrets would be taken to our suicidal graves, and all the plastic consoomer debris of our lives would be duly scraped into a landfill.
The mega-rich would get mega-richer. The psychopaths would rule and live forever. We would own nothing and eat bugs.
Everything was going according to plan.
Then, something very strange happened.
We woke up.
Not all of us, of course. And not all at the same time. A spell this strong and widely cast doesn’t break easily, or all at once.
But enough of us have at least begun to wake up. And as we did, we blinked our eyes in amazement at the smoking wreckage of our raped and looted facsimile of a world.
Somehow, for some reason, we had not been destroyed.
Why?
Was it because of our innate strength?
A stroke of dumb luck?
The grace of God Almighty?
Many of us had answers at the ready, and some of those remain at odds. We were a camp of strangers forced together by necessity. There are heated debates among us, and there will continue to be. That’s the price of fighting as freemen.
But what seemed beyond debate was that none of us were ever going back to sleep again. We’d had more than our fill of the spell and its narcotic dreams. A lifetime of it, actually.
We’d had enough of the wizards who cast it, too. Hiding in plain sight all our lives, these fools were suddenly framed in the harshest of all spotlights. They weren’t interested in hiding anymore. They were in the mood to flaunt and brag about their victories. To twerk their spandex-clad assholes in our general direction, to let their freak flags proudly fly.
Some of us laughed hysterically at the sight of them; this horde of retarded clowns and mutants who pretended to rule us looked like the cast of the blackest comedy.
But it also stirred the deepest well of anger within us, and especially anger at ourselves. We suddenly realized how close they’d come to victory, and how badly we’d failed in stopping them at every step of the way.
Shame burns righteously, and our own shame burned in the deepest place. We realized we’d failed not only ourselves and our ancestors. We had inherited the Earth and swiped left. In doing so we had failed the whole of the human race, straight back to Adam.
But we were awake now.
And so, we started finding each other through all the smoke and flame.
And we started talking.
We are still talking, here and elsewhere.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; communication is a prerequisite to all but the simplest of actions. And because we were stripped of our best words long ago, the project of developing a mutual language is critical to our cause.
That said:
We must act.
Who are we, you ask?
We are the knights of a fallen world.
Raised on filth and chaos, lied-to and gaslit since the day we born. Trained to destroy.
We’ve been pumped full of every toxin, subjected to every twisted experiment. We’ve had our imaginations beaten out of us by ad-marketing-pimps, had our hearts bled dry by attention-whores. We ate every punch in every rigged fight, got stabbed in every dark alleyway, took every cheap shot to our brains and balls, swallowed and snorted every drug.
And — somehow — we are still standing.
Our Enemy has made a critical error in judgment. It thought it could continue to play the same old tricks, divide us forever along the same old lines. It grew fat and lazy, pursued quantity over quality in its clownish agents and their wacky schemes.
It is dying before our eyes. Even its so-called “elite” condottieri and managerial henchmen are running out of gas and time. The vampires among them persist, of course. They are plotting their Next Big Trick as we speak, despite all failure signals. But they can no longer “win” in the traditional sense; their victory conditions are laughably absurd, and they’re more likely to blow the world up than to eternally rule it. But, like all monsters, they will only become more dangerous in their death throes.
That’s where we come in: a motley crew of orphans and outcasts, who must transform ourselves into something more.
In fact, our goal isn’t to “restore the knighthood” according to some incomplete or fictional RETVRN movie playing in our heads. We must become the greatest knights who ever lived, surpassing all others in our character, competence and effectiveness.
Ironically, we are well-positioned to do precisely that, and have the Enemy itself to thank for it. In arming and training us for maximum destruction, it has sown the seeds of its own.
We are the unlikeliest band of heroes imaginable.
We hail from different lands, different philosophies, different religions. We speak in different dialects and tongues. But we have all escaped from the Leaning Tower of Babel, and are learning to speak in the same voice when it counts. And we are fast learners.
We have been and remain a tortured lot. Our evil rulers take sadistic pleasure in tormenting and denigrating us. Luckily, they are also the stupidest people alive, and have accidentally handed us all the the tools, weapons and armor required to overthrow them.
Whoops!
But they haven’t merely handed a gun to a raccoon.
They have forked over a panoply of exotic, bleeding-edge armaments, to a race of superpowered apex-cyber-monkeys trained to rotate tesseracts on the fly. We haven’t just “read more” than them; we know more, and can do more with what we know.
Worst of all, they couldn’t get us to hate each other or ourselves enough to jump (Lord, how they tried). All of their twisted schemes and spells meant to weaken us have built our strength instead.
The new knights are already here.
Our quest is nothing less than to save the world.
We are ready.
Cool story, bro.
But how does it work?
I have some ideas about that. Here’s the short version of my proposal, in the form of a thought experiment:
The New Knighthood is a network of dissident actors, charged with the noble task of getting shit done. This is accomplished by a system of knightly projects. Each knight designs his projects with specific and measurable goals in mind, which he then pursues either independently or in concert with other knights.
A knight’s ultimate Enemy is the globalist technocratic regime which seeks to enslave Mankind. It has many tentacles, and so our knighthood should have just as many methods to deal with them. There may therefore be knights of engineering, finance, medicine, criminology, chemistry, statistics, art and so forth. What matters is that the knight must be able to adapt his expertise to serve some useful purpose in the cause of human liberation.
At least one of a knight’s core competencies must therefore pose a conceivable threat to the enemy regime. A Knight of the Law, for example, could wage war with his court filings and trial arguments, while a Knight of Programming might write software that circumvents or destabilizes the enemy’s own tools of oppression.
That said, the threat a knight presents to the Enemy need not be direct or cause obvious damage. For example, a knightly project might be to build a parallel system for others to take refuge in, and then swear himself into its protection. Above all else, a knight is a man equipped with a dangerous imagination, who can turn even the most seemingly benign subjects and structures into tools of liberty and war.
All members of the knighthood are “equals” in the sense that they are sworn to the same mission: to free humanity from the enemy’s evil clutches. But the knighthood is also competitive and hierarchical by design, these being the keys to excellence and success.
Each knight is therefore conferred a dynamic rank based on the scale and success of his projects, to be tracked and updated via an ecomony of encrypted blockchain tokens. This system will also function as a discreet communications and project management portal, whereby individual knights can declare support for projects that are currently in motion or propose new projects of their own.2
A knight’s rank isn’t merely a status symbol. It is a measure of his functional effectiveness, to be taken into consideration when pooling resources and personnel for his projects. Rank will be further stratified according to the vassalage system, with allegiances bound upward to lieges of superior rank within a given domain of action/competence.
Because we fight as freemen, a vassal knight retains the choice of whether or not to lend his time and resources to his liege’s projects. However, such inaction will be automatically reflected in his rank, which may only rise by lending support to other projects, or by completing successful projects of his own. Increased rank leads to increased resources from a pool, which is then spent into ever greater projects and results.
Applicants to the Knighthood should be ready to present their case, in accordance with the following values and prerequisites:3
Be Competent
Be Dangerous
Be Active
Be Hilarious
Be BASED
Get “Rich”
Wear Armor
Be Humble
Build a House
Be Good
The result will be a force to be reckoned with like none before.
Our new knight is not merely a soldier, let alone a kamikaze or cannon fodder. He is a mystical warrior-poet in service of Truth and Light. He lives his life as though it was worthy of epic poetry, and so becomes an agent of Beauty as well. He is competent in all the arts of war, but yearns for the maximum peace and joy that Earthly existence will allow. He loves all life, including his own. But he is willing to sacrifice himself even unto death should the need arise, making him the most dangerous foe imaginable.
Even a single knight is a formidable opponent. But if we coordinate our efforts, we can build an ethos and lineage structure that will endure not only the ravages of war, but will carry forth into the peace and prosperity to follow.
For now, all we have is the beginning of a story on a page. We must write the rest of that story in the brick-and-mortar substance of reality. I have some thoughts about how to do that, too.
On the other hand I’m just some lost cat on the internet, with a few crazy ideas rattling around in my skull. I probably wouldn’t qualify for anything more than the lowliest rank of knight as I envision them.
Besides, there are plenty of smarter cats out there, including ones who read this blog.
Your own thoughts on the subject of “What is to be done?” are therefore welcome, as always.
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And if he’s anything like me, he might add a colorful “Fuck off,” too. I’m getting a little tired of blind people calling me stupid.
The development of such a system would be an example of a knightly project in itself.
These proposed requisites will be fleshed out (and perhaps modified) in a separate post.
Great work - every bit as beautifully written as thought provoking as I'd expect from you.
In my opinion, there does have to be some sort of thinning of the dissident herd at some point. Numbers are valuable up to a certain point and there will come a time where in-fighting will become a problem. I always return to the parable of Gideon's army when this topic arises; in the end, it's better to have a small but united number of principled individuals than an undisciplined, panicky horde. Another piece of advice I was given pertaining to this very topic of "punching right" or "finding allies" is that any team that openly invites any old gaggle of losers should expect to lose. You're only ever as strong as your weakest link.
Love it.
Re: unity, I think this is less important than some people want to believe. If the project in your eyes is "rebuild the American empire" (or whatever dead empire whose ruins you live among) this is the wrong way of thinking about it.
We don't all need to be on the same page and have the same story. It's not that we have been homogenized into the wrong set of beliefs. Homogeneity *is* the problem. Empire is not a desirable end-goal. It's what got us here in the first place, and they're unstable by nature. Where we're going there will be no empires, at least not for a while.
I love Kruptos' ideas about faith-based communities. I want him to succeed. But if he's successful there is no place for me there, because I don't believe, at least not the way he does. I could pretend - lie - and probably pass. But then I'd have lost my integrity, and isn't integrity one of the pillars we're trying to rebuild here?
But this is fine. The world is a very, very big place. And it's a tiny nothing compared to what's beyond it, if we can figure out how to get there. I have my doubts about that, but if it doesn't work out the world we've got is plenty big enough.
There's enough space for tens of thousands of cultures with their own faiths and values and visions, with plenty of neutral territory in between, if they're scaled appropriately. The way they have been for most of history and all of prehistory. The whole map of human space-time is tribes countries and kingdoms, with a few highly visible smoking craters left behind by failed empires. Hundreds of billions have lived the former way, and a few billion at most the latter way. Empire is an aberration.
So may be a dozen or a hundred knightly orders, not one. Until our shared enemy is broken, scattered and ground to dust, we are allies. After that we go our separate ways in peace and mutual respect. Our descendants, maybe not long after, will end up in conflict. This is fine. This is historically normal.