GPT-5.2 has gotten a lot better… this is a much better retelling than my previous post of The Refusal of Reciprocity by GK Chesterton
I’m still not good at LLM-assisted revisions … so I wasn’t able to successfully weave in the nomenclature for this temperament as “The Children of Tuesday”. For that you’ll have to read my prior post.
THE REFUSAL OF RECIPROCITY (A MODERN RENDITION)
In an earlier argument I suggested that barbarism, as it actually appears in the modern world, is not chiefly a matter of ignorance, nor even of cruelty. It is something much more precise and much more dangerous: it is an active hostility to certain elementary human ideas. It is not that the barbarian does not know these ideas; it is that he denies them. He knows what a promise is, and he repudiates it. He knows what a limit is, and he overruns it. He knows what a rule is, and he treats it as something written in pencil for others and invisible ink for himself.
The clearest example is the contract. Modern power—especially modern bureaucratic power—has developed a remarkable talent for promising sincerely on Monday and explaining earnestly on Tuesday why the promise no longer applies. It assures us that circumstances have changed, necessities have arisen, contexts have shifted. This is not foresight; it is infantilism. It is the moral logic of the child who has listened patiently to every reminder of what he agreed to do, and then answers with perfect honesty, “Yes—but I don’t want to.”
There is, however, another idea even more basic than the promise, and so basic that it is usually invisible. It is the idea of reciprocity: of give and take; of the simple fact that what applies to me applies, in some intelligible way, to you. This idea is the foundation of justice, of humour, and of sanity. And the modern barbarian appears unable to grasp it at all.
He cannot quite manage the thought that, from the other person’s point of view, he himself is the other person. This is the root of all comedy and all morality, and it is precisely what the new seriousness cannot tolerate. Carried through institutions and policies, this mental defect produces a curious pattern: an ability to feel wronged without ever feeling unjust; to feel endangered without ever feeling threatening.
Thus modern nations lament the violation of their borders with lyrical intensity while regarding the violation of other borders as a regrettable technicality. They speak with genuine sorrow of their own insecurity while singing cheerfully about the instability they export. They will annex a river, a market, or a digital commons, and still write moving editorials about the sacredness of their own small stream. This is what it means to be non-reciprocal; and you will find it everywhere that power is worshipped without reflection.
It is important not to confuse this with mere brutality. Brutality is human, and therefore universal. Civilised nations have all, at one moment or another, panicked, revenged themselves, or committed horrors under stress. Charges of cruelty tend to cancel each other out. But the distinguishing mark of the true barbarian is not that he hurts others more, but that nothing is mutual. He laughs when he wounds and howls when he is wounded. He treats outrage as a privilege rather than a condition.
This mentality can be seen most clearly in the way rules are invoked. No sensible person believes everything printed in the news; and no journalist believes even half of it. We therefore discount accusations, qualify reports, and suspend judgment. But what we cannot ignore is the official justification. When a government admits that certain acts were “severe” or “unpleasant” or “unprecedented,” and then defends them on the ground that severity was the point, it is at least being coherent. Terror may be defended as a tactic; history is full of such defences.
What is astonishing is when the same authority, having justified the breaking of rules as necessary, immediately turns to complain—indignantly and legally—about others breaking rules. The barbarian cannot understand why this strikes us as comic. He would be genuinely hurt if we replied that treaties are scraps of paper, or that regulations are flexible when they inconvenience us, or that frightening civilians is useful policy everywhere. He does not see the contradiction, because he does not see the mirror.
Every game requires rules that bind both sides. The barbarian loves games of war, competition, and prestige—but he cannot actually play them, because he believes the rules exist to reward his victory, not to define the contest.
The same principle appears in social rituals. Take the duel, which modern people rightly regard as absurd or obsolete. Wherever it existed, however, its essence was equality: two armed men agreeing to risk together. The duel may have been foolish, but it was symmetrical. What is truly barbaric is not the duel, but the one-sided duel: the idea that honour can be preserved by striking someone who cannot strike back.
This appears today not only in physical violence but in institutional forms: the public shaming of the powerless by the powerful; the moral language of courage used against those with no defence; the sword drawn against a man holding nothing but a receipt or a username. No civilised culture mixes honour with such acts. No sane person believes his dignity is restored by humiliating a cashier, a waiter, or a child. If a society does, then its word for honour means something closer to what we would call prestige—a thing that grows by subtraction.
At the root of all this is the same absence: the refusal to imagine oneself on the receiving end. Even when modern powers fight wars, praise discipline, and award medals, they are often praising different gods. One side praises courage as the willingness to face danger; the other praises efficiency as the ability to apply danger. The difference is not in the metal worn on the chest, but in the meaning behind it.
This failure of reciprocity shows itself not only between nations or classes, but even in the most intimate relations. Marriage, like war, is a kind of duel—except that civilisations have tried, with varying success, to make it a fair one. Some cultures gamble on comradeship; others on courtesy. Some risk freedom; others ritual. But in all these cases the woman gets something back: power, reverence, independence, or authority.
There is only one arrangement that gives her nothing back: the arrangement that calmly assumes inequality as a permanent fact. Where the man sits because he is a man, and the woman stands because she is a woman; where domination is not passionate but procedural. This is not cruelty; it is colder than cruelty. It is the same logic that draws a sword against an unarmed opponent: the logic of caste disguised as order.
The same blindness appears in relations between cultures. Any civilisation may fear another; fear is natural. One may fear invasion, destruction, or chaos. But the modern barbarian performs an extraordinary trick: he warns against barbarism and then adopts it as policy. He explains carefully why certain horrors would be unthinkable if done by others—and then orders them done by himself. Reduced to its logic, the argument is simple: I may do this because I am me; you may not do it because you are you.
This is the final refusal of reciprocity: the belief in unprovable superiority. It always collapses at the beginning of thought rather than the end. The only test of supremacy is identity. If you are superior, it is because you are yourself. History is then rewritten backwards to explain why this was inevitable.
The tragic irony is that this philosophy cannot even succeed on its own terms. A people who cannot imagine another man cannot civilise him. A people who cannot see tomorrow cannot lead history. A people who cannot see themselves in others will eventually be unable to see themselves at all.
Wherever the poorest remnants of humanity still remember that a bargain binds both sides, that a quarrel has two faces, that an enemy is still a man—that remnant has the right to resist any culture that begins by smashing the mirror of the mind. For the first act of the new barbarism is not conquest, nor cruelty, nor even lies.
It is the destruction of that inner reflection by which a man recognises his neighbour—and therefore himself.