I've been thinking about the strange popularity of lost civilizations, medieval warriors, and the promise that somewhere in history there existed a world more orderly, more virtuous, and more deserving of our loyalty than the one we inhabit now. You can see it in the Crusader knights appearing in social media profile pictures, in the renewed fascination with Agartha and other mythical civilizations, and in political movements promising to restore national greatness or reclaim Western civilization. These images come from different histories, and the people sharing them do not necessarily understand them in the same way, although some of their contemporary uses reveal a familiar preoccupation with inheritance, decline, and the recovery of something supposedly taken away. The underlying story is appealing in its simplicity: we were once great, something happened to us, and the future depends on recovering what rightfully belonged to us.

What interests me is how often this story appears among people and institutions that continue to possess considerable political, cultural, or economic power. I want to understand how a group can occupy a relatively privileged position within society while experiencing itself as dispossessed, particularly when the supposed loss involves other people gaining rights, recognition, or opportunities that were historically denied to them. There is something deeply consequential about the conditions under which greater equality becomes experienced as an injury, especially when people have inherited a social world where their own authority was treated as ordinary, natural, or morally deserved. I keep returning to the question of how power becomes something people understand themselves as entitled to possess, and what happens when changes to that power begin to feel like evidence that someone has wronged them.

I think understanding this requires being careful about what we mean by dispossession, because the language of having something taken away can describe profoundly different relationships to power. Dispossession has a material history involving the seizure of land, displacement of populations, suppression of languages and cultural practices, denial of political autonomy, and extraction of resources that communities depend on for survival and self-determination. Its consequences remain visible in property relations, laws, economic conditions, and institutions that continue to distribute opportunities unequally. Entitlement, meanwhile, concerns what people believe they deserve, what they understand as belonging to them, and what forms of authority they consider themselves justified in exercising. We have legitimate entitlements to dignity, freedom, political participation, and the conditions necessary to live meaningful lives, although these claims become more complicated when people regard their historically privileged position over others as something they possess a special right to maintain.

Consider the difference between an Indigenous community demanding the return of land taken through colonial conquest and a settler population describing the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty as a threat to its historical inheritance. Both may speak about ancestry, belonging, cultural continuity, and the importance of place, and both may experience changes to existing arrangements as consequential for their collective future. Understanding their claims requires examining how the land was acquired, how political authority was established, whose rights were recognized, and which populations were excluded from the institutions responsible for enforcing those arrangements. The distinction matters because the historical possession of something does not automatically establish the legitimacy of the means through which it came to be possessed. A society can spend generations normalizing an arrangement that was established through coercion, while the people benefiting from its continuation come to understand challenges against it as threats to their own security.

There is a particular psychological difficulty in recognizing privilege when it has been experienced primarily as normalcy. If your religion has historically shaped the public calendar, your beliefs have informed prevailing moral expectations, and people sharing your identity have occupied many positions of institutional authority, these arrangements may become inseparable from your understanding of how society ordinarily functions. As other religious traditions gain greater public recognition, you may experience the resulting changes as evidence that your own faith is being pushed aside, even while retaining substantial freedom to practice it. The same process can occur through race, gender, class, and other relationships of power, particularly when the social arrangements people inherit have allowed them to experience their own position as relatively secure. What becomes emotionally difficult is the recognition that other people can participate more fully in public life without requiring your own identity to disappear, especially when the earlier distribution of recognition has been understood as something you were entitled to receive.

Political psychologists Stephen Reicher and Yasemin Ulusahin examine this phenomenon through their work on dominant-group victimhood, describing how members of relatively powerful groups can come to understand themselves as victims when they perceive their collective position to be threatened and believe that their group deserves to retain that position. Their research raises an important question about the relationship between actual power and people's expectations of how much power they should possess. A group may retain substantial influence over political institutions, economic resources, or public culture while experiencing the growing recognition of other groups as evidence of its own declining importance. Political leaders can then organize that perception into a story of collective injury, identifying the people or institutions supposedly responsible and promising to recover what has been lost. The experience of having been wronged becomes a way of explaining social change, while the restoration of an earlier hierarchy can acquire the moral significance of correcting an injustice.

This is also where collective narcissism becomes useful, particularly because it helps explain why a sense of superiority can coexist with intense feelings of vulnerability. Psychologist Agnieszka Golec de Zavala and her colleagues have studied collective narcissism as a form of identification in which people believe their group is exceptional and deserves greater recognition than it receives from others. The group's worth becomes closely tied to how outsiders perceive and acknowledge it, creating sensitivity to criticism, perceived disrespect, and challenges to its preferred understanding of itself. Research has connected collective narcissism to heightened perceptions of threat, conspiratorial beliefs, and hostility toward other groups, although these relationships vary across contexts and cannot explain every individual who participates in a particular political movement. What I find compelling is the emotional dependence that can develop when collective greatness requires continual confirmation from the surrounding world, since disagreement, criticism, and changing social expectations may all begin to feel like evidence that the group is being deprived of the recognition it deserves.

There is something revealing about the possibility that a group can gain political power while continuing to experience itself as persecuted, especially when the original grievance concerns a level of recognition that may be impossible to secure permanently. A political victory can place sympathetic leaders in office while leaving intact the conviction that universities, journalists, religious minorities, or other institutions remain hostile to the group's values. A legal change can restore an earlier arrangement while generating new grievances about people who continue to oppose it. The sense of persecution may survive because the group's identity has become organized around the belief that its rightful authority remains under threat, allowing each new challenge to reaffirm the original injury. The political importance of this process becomes easier to recognize when we consider how much energy can be directed toward recovering a position that a group believes it deserves, even after it has achieved considerable success in securing that position.

Of course, these narratives do not develop in isolation from people's material circumstances, and I think we lose something important when we overlook the economic insecurity that often accompanies changes in social identity. Someone struggling to afford housing, watching a rural hospital close, or experiencing the disappearance of stable employment has substantial reasons to feel abandoned by the institutions governing their life. These experiences can coexist with forms of racial, religious, or cultural privilege, creating circumstances in which genuine hardship becomes attached to explanations that identify other disadvantaged populations as the source of decline. A worker whose wages have stagnated may be encouraged to blame immigrants, while a parent navigating an underfunded school system may be told that teachers discussing gender or racial inequality are responsible for the institution's problems. The frustration is real, and the political explanation can redirect that frustration away from the economic and institutional arrangements responsible for producing the hardship. There is considerable power in persuading people that the source of their insecurity can be found among those with even less authority over the conditions of their lives.

This is part of why the promise of restoring greatness can be so appealing, because it organizes otherwise overwhelming experiences of uncertainty into a story with a recognizable beginning, an explanation for what went wrong, and a future in which the injury will finally be repaired. Svetlana Boym describes restorative nostalgia as an orientation toward reconstructing a lost home or historical order, often through claims about authentic tradition and historical continuity. Her work helps explain how movements can become invested in recovering a past whose contradictions have gradually disappeared from collective memory, leaving behind an image of social stability, moral clarity, and legitimate authority. The imagined golden age offers people something to measure the present against, while providing an explanation for why contemporary society feels unfamiliar or disappointing. The more complicated history of the period becomes less visible as the story is repeated, allowing the past to acquire a coherence that people living through it may never have experienced.

I've been thinking about this in relation to the contemporary fascination with the Crusades, especially as Crusader imagery has become increasingly visible within certain nationalist and far-right communities. The medieval Crusades involved religiously authorized warfare, territorial conquest, political competition, changing alliances, and violence against Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, with participants pursuing motivations that cannot be reduced to a single struggle between civilizations. Yet the Crusader who appears in contemporary political imagery is often a much simpler figure, presented as a courageous Christian warrior defending a sacred civilization against an existential threat. His armor, cross, and weapon provide an immediately recognizable image of devotion and masculine strength, while the historical circumstances surrounding medieval warfare become secondary to the qualities he is imagined to represent. Scholars studying extremist appropriations of medieval history have documented how these images can be used to support contemporary claims about national identity, religious belonging, and the supposed historical authority of Western civilization.

Pete Hegseth's embrace of Crusader symbolism makes this conversation particularly relevant to contemporary American politics, given his Jerusalem cross and Deus Vult tattoos, his 2020 book American Crusade, and his public emphasis on a warrior ethos within military leadership. The symbols themselves have longstanding Christian associations, and their meaning varies considerably across religious, historical, and political contexts. Their combination with rhetoric about defending Western civilization raises questions about how an idealized medieval past informs contemporary understandings of military authority and national purpose. I find the broader cultural appeal of the righteous warrior especially interesting because it places courage, moral certainty, religious devotion, and the willingness to exercise violence within the same imagined figure. When political conflicts are interpreted through the language of sacred defense, the exercise of force can begin to feel like the fulfillment of an obligation inherited from history.

Agartha offers another version of the relationship between mythology and entitlement, although its history is quite different. The idea of a hidden underground civilization developed through European occult writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with later interpretations associating it with extraordinary spiritual knowledge, ancient ancestry, and forms of authority supposedly inaccessible to ordinary people. Certain contemporary neo-Nazi and white supremacist internet communities have incorporated Agartha into racialized fantasies of a superior Aryan civilization, sometimes combining it with references to Hyperborea and other mythical places. Much of the imagery now circulates through memes, fantasy landscapes, ironic humor, and the visual language of social media, where extraordinary claims about human ancestry can appear alongside ordinary entertainment. The mythology becomes politically significant where it offers a fictional world organized around exceptional people whose supposed superiority establishes the boundaries of belonging.

The Crusades and Agartha emerged from very different traditions, and their contemporary uses vary widely, although some political appropriations reveal a shared investment in the idea that a particular population possesses an exceptional historical inheritance. The Crusader offers an image of the sacred warrior defending a threatened civilization, while racialized versions of Agartha imagine an extraordinary civilization whose people possess qualities that supposedly distinguish them from ordinary humanity. Both can provide a sense of personal significance through identification with an imagined community whose greatness has already been established. Someone can come to understand themselves as an inheritor of courage, moral authority, spiritual knowledge, or exceptional ancestry through symbols whose historical meanings have been selectively reconstructed. I wonder how much of the attraction lies in the opportunity to feel connected to something larger than oneself, particularly when everyday life offers comparatively little certainty about identity, purpose, or belonging.

The more troubling dimension emerges when these imagined inheritances are used to establish who deserves authority over other people. Historical mythology can turn an existing social preference into something that appears ancient, sacred, or inevitable, allowing a movement to describe its political ambitions as the recovery of an order whose legitimacy has already been established by the past. This is especially powerful when the story includes the belief that someone has deliberately stolen or corrupted the group's inheritance. Immigration can be described as an organized project of replacement, religious pluralism as evidence of an attack on Christianity, and expanding recognition of gender diversity as proof of civilizational decline. These explanations give social change an identifiable antagonist, allowing people to interpret uncertainty as evidence of a struggle against an enemy who must be confronted before the imagined order can be restored.

There is a particular danger in this process when the recovery of power becomes associated with protection, because restrictions on other people's autonomy may begin to appear morally necessary for the survival of the community. If a group understands itself as the rightful defender of civilization, challenges to its authority can be interpreted as threats to the social order itself, particularly when those challenges come from populations historically denied equal participation. Political disagreements over education, immigration, religion, gender, or democratic representation can acquire the emotional significance of a struggle over collective existence. The idea of defending something sacred may provide reassurance that the measures taken against perceived opponents are justified, especially when the people affected have already been portrayed as responsible for the community's decline. The moral language of protection can make it easier to overlook the consequences of policies that expand institutional authority over the lives of others.

Historian Roger Griffin's work on fascism offers another perspective through his account of palingenetic ultranationalism, which centers on the promise of national rebirth following a period of perceived decline. His framework concerns a specific form of revolutionary ultranationalism, although it helps illuminate how movements can invoke an idealized past while pursuing dramatic transformations of the future. The imagined golden age provides a model of national or cultural greatness, while contemporary political action is presented as the means through which that greatness will be recovered. The promise of restoration can therefore support projects involving technological innovation, institutional restructuring, military expansion, and new forms of social organization, even when the world being proposed has never existed in precisely the form its advocates imagine. The appeal of historical greatness becomes a way of authorizing a future that can be considerably more ambitious than the recovery of any actual past.

This pattern also appears in movements whose ambitions are organized around expansion. Nineteenth-century American Manifest Destiny, for example, drew legitimacy from the idea that the United States possessed a providential responsibility to extend its authority across the continent, combining religious justification with racial hierarchy, territorial entitlement, and promises of civilizational progress. The imagined future of national greatness helped justify the dispossession of Indigenous nations and the extension of American political power over territories already inhabited and governed by other peoples. Restoration and expansion can become closely connected when political movements describe their ambitions as fulfilling an inherited historical destiny, particularly when they claim that certain populations possess a special right to determine the political arrangements governing others. What matters is the relationship between the historical claim and the authority it is being used to justify, including whose freedom becomes dependent on the fulfillment of someone else's understanding of greatness.

This brings me to bell hooks and her writing on domination, particularly her attention to how hierarchical relationships become embedded within ordinary social life and reproduced through institutions, cultural expectations, and interpersonal relationships. We learn what authority looks like through families, classrooms, religious communities, workplaces, and the many other settings in which we encounter expectations about obedience, leadership, morality, and belonging. These experiences can shape what feels safe or familiar long before we develop explicit political beliefs, especially when particular forms of authority have been consistently associated with stability or protection. A person may grow accustomed to social arrangements in which certain people make decisions while others are expected to accommodate them, and those expectations can become part of how they understand a properly functioning community. Political movements promising to restore an earlier social order may appeal to these learned relationships, offering familiarity and certainty during periods when established hierarchies are becoming less secure.

I think this is part of why political attachment involves so much more than a person's calculated assessment of material interests. People invest emotionally in the institutions that give their lives continuity, in the stories that explain their family's place in society, and in the cultural arrangements through which they have learned to recognize themselves as belonging. When those arrangements change, the resulting uncertainty may involve questions about personal worth, collective identity, and the reliability of inherited ways of understanding the world. The promise of restoration can offer relief by describing those changes as evidence of an injustice that can be corrected, especially when the movement provides a recognizable enemy and a leader willing to confront that enemy. The possibility of recovering a familiar hierarchy can become closely associated with recovering a sense of security, even when the hierarchy itself has contributed to the insecurity experienced by others.

I keep wondering about the people whose experiences are missing from these accounts of greatness, particularly when the period being celebrated depended on inequalities that its beneficiaries experienced as ordinary features of social life. An era remembered for strong family structures may also have restricted women's economic independence and opportunities for political participation, while a period celebrated for national prosperity may have distributed its benefits through racial exclusion, exploited labor, and the dispossession of communities whose suffering rarely appears in nostalgic accounts. A society remembered for its religious unity may have treated dissenting beliefs as threats, and a civilization celebrated through its military achievements may look very different from the perspective of the people it conquered. The same historical period can produce memories of security for some and memories of exclusion or violence for others, which makes the question of whose experiences become authoritative central to any political demand for restoration.

There is also a relationship between historical memory and the institutions responsible for preserving it, because schools, religious organizations, museums, universities, political parties, and media institutions all influence which accounts of the past become familiar and credible. A population may inherit a narrative of national greatness that celebrates expansion while giving relatively little attention to the displacement of Indigenous communities, or a history of social stability that overlooks the people whose autonomy was constrained by the institutions being remembered. These omissions influence how people understand the legitimacy of contemporary demands for restitution, equality, or political change. When previously excluded histories become more visible, the resulting disagreement concerns the meaning of the past alongside the distribution of authority in the present, particularly when established narratives have helped sustain a group's sense that its position within society is deserved.

This returns us to the distinction between dispossession and entitlement, which I think becomes most important when collective grievances are translated into demands for political action. People can have deeply meaningful relationships to their histories, traditions, and communities while holding very different claims about what those relationships entitle them to control. A community seeking the recovery of land taken through documented processes of conquest raises questions about historical accountability and the continuing consequences of dispossession. A movement seeking to restore an earlier distribution of political authority raises questions about how that authority was acquired, whose interests it protected, and whether its recovery would constrain the autonomy of people who have since gained greater recognition or participation. The emotional intensity of a grievance tells us something about how people experience their circumstances, while evaluating the claim requires examining the institutions, histories, and material relationships through which those circumstances were produced.

I wonder whether some of the difficulty lies in how closely belonging can become associated with occupying the center of social life, especially when a group's historical identity has developed within institutions that consistently affirmed its authority. The experience of greater pluralism may require people to encounter competing understandings of morality, community, and national identity without assuming that their own interpretation will determine the arrangements everyone else must inhabit. That can be genuinely unsettling, particularly when people have understood their traditions as the foundation of social order and their own position as an inheritance that should remain secure across generations. Yet the desire to recover that security becomes politically consequential when it depends on limiting the opportunities of others to participate in defining the institutions through which they live.

Perhaps this is what I find most revealing about the image of the lost civilization and the people who understand themselves as its rightful heirs. The fantasy offers a world in which questions of belonging and authority have already been settled, where the legitimacy of one's position can be established through an imagined inheritance, and where restoring the community's greatness promises to resolve the uncertainties of the present. The people excluded from that imagined community become easier to understand as threats to the restoration, particularly when their demands for recognition challenge the historical arrangements through which the group's identity has been maintained. I am interested in what happens when people begin to question the assumption that their own security requires those arrangements to remain intact, and whether they can understand the histories that shaped their communities while acknowledging the experiences of those whose lives were constrained by them.

The larger question, I think, concerns how we learn to understand collective belonging in societies where political authority is increasingly shared, historical narratives are being reconsidered, and inherited social arrangements are subject to challenges from people who were previously excluded. These changes can produce uncertainty, grief, resentment, and genuine questions about the future, all of which deserve to be understood within the material and historical circumstances that give them meaning. They also create opportunities to reconsider what we believe we are entitled to possess, including whether the authority we have inherited can be justified through anything beyond the fact that it has historically been ours. I keep coming back to the difference between recovering something unjustly taken and restoring an authority that was never justly held, and to the possibility that the longing for a golden age sometimes expresses a deeper difficulty with imagining a future in which one's own group can belong without having to occupy a position above others.