The Butterfly Dance Ends Everything
Below is Henry Paget – the first Marquee of Anglesey.
Henry Paget was born in 1768 in pre-industrial London. Henry would enter the military and become one of the most decorated officers of the Napoleonic era, leading a famous charge at the Battle of Waterloo.
Through his military heroics, Henry was elevated to the noble rank of Marquess, establishing the Marquess of Anglesey for his descendants with its seat at Plas Newydd, an estate in Wales.
Below is also Henry Paget.
This Henry was the Fifth Marquee of Anglesey (his great grandfather the aforementioned Henry being the First) and was born in 1875, well after London had industrialized and Britain had become the richest nation on the planet.
While his forbears had struggled through the horrors of muddy battlefields, this Henry led a different life – he attended Eton and was a devotee of theater and society.
He would spend his immense wealth on elaborate parties where he would dress up as a butterfly and perform his famed butterfly dance (see here), floating through the crowd while waving a voluminous white robe as if they were wings.
Some speculated that he was gay, but there was no evidence of him being sexual at all – what he was at the end of the day was a classic narcissist, who was fascinated above all by himself.
Things didn’t end well for this Henry.
Butterfly parties turned out to be expensive and eventually saddled him with over $100mm in debt. He died bankrupt at 29.
The Paget family never recovered.
While they would keep their family estate in Wales for some time, that too would eventually end up being sold in 1975.
Thus ended the Paget dynasty – capable of surviving all sorts of wars but not the butterfly dance.
The grandfather conquers, the son maintains and the grandson loses is how the Arabs describe it (every culture has some version of this proverb).
What makes the Paget story so poignant is just how closely the family’s rise and fall mirrored that of the British Empire.
The First Marquess elevated his family to prominence as the British Empire took hold.
His achievements secured a luxurious existence for his great grandchild who would preside over decadent gatherings as the Empire peaked.
The family would finally be relieved of their ancestorial state in 1975 just as the Empire was fully extinguished.
What is also notable is how starkly different the two Marquees would appear.
Henry I looks to be a rough military man while Henry V dresses like a Victorian lady.
This might seem coincidental, but according to the feminist academic Camille Paglia, there is nothing coincidental about this metamorphosis.
As a civilization gets more cosmopolitan, it will get more androgenized and the differences between the sexes will become blurred. Androgenization peaks right before the civilization begins to go into terminal decline (see her speech).
Evidence of this phenomena exists within art.
In both Ancient Greece and Rome, the representation of the ideal man starts out as something overtly masculine and brutish. As these states became more cosmopolitan, male sculptures take on a more feminized form. This feminization peaks right before these imperial states begin their descent into disorder. Right before Rome fell, the sculptures were depicting the ideal man as a “wet noodle” as Paglia describes it.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what is happening.
· Step 1) A society becomes dominant initially through martial virtue – so dominant that its survival is all but assured.
· Step 2) Having escaped the Darwinian survival pressures, this society has more free time, which it devotes to becoming more cosmopolitan.
· Step 3) As society gets more cosmopolitan, traditional values and restraints are thrown out and you are free to cosplay and ignore the values that got you there.
In other words, Henry I’s ability to charge into a French artillery line granted his great grandson the ability to throw butterfly dance parties. One always comes before the other.
Now, history doesn’t end with the grandson.
The family or nation in the dissolution stage is typically taken over by those much closer to the state of nature, the barbarians at the gates. These folks might be bereft of culture but they retained their martial virtue. Thus the Visigoth take over from the Romans, the Americans from the British.
So where are we, as Americans, in this historical cycle?
To answer that question instead ask - what do we find brave today?
Is it the man leading the cavalry charge or the man cross dressing at a high society party?
Clearly, at the moment, we are in love with the latter.
We don’t just prefer the Fifth Henry over the First Henry but have invented a whole nomenclature for attacking the First Henry’s of the world. They are called out for toxic masculinity and for being purveyors of the patriarchy. Their achievements that built the wealth and safety and prosperity of today are denigrated and minimized.
We in turn celebrate the Fifth Henry in all his narcissistic delusion. If the Fifth Henry wants to believe that he is a female butterfly, we agree with him and castigate anyone who disagrees with this fantastical reality.
Generation Z is in many ways a realization of these broader effort to stamp out the First Henry in favor of the Fifth. We have a whole generation obsessed with confounding gender norms and doing performative dance pieces to large audiences on social media.
Thus, America’s empire will end – the way all empires end – not with a resounding military defeat but with the Butterfly Dance.
(Except this time, the dance will be broadcast in real time on TikTok to our friends in Beijing who would gladly take our place at the top of the pecking order).