Maybe Norbert Elias was right after all, “if humanity can survive the violence of our age, [our descendants] might consider us as late barbarians.”

Nestar Russell

GPT

Elias had a way of pulling back the veil on “civilization” just enough to show the blood still wet on the drapery. And if you’re pairing him with Nestar Russell, that’s a fascinating juxtaposition—civilizational critique from both ends: the sociogenic and the existential-mythic.

“If humanity can survive the violence of our age, [our descendants] might consider us as late barbarians.” 

That’s not just a critique—it’s a kind of tragic foreshadowing. It assumes both a future and a reckoning, but holds them loosely, like someone unsure whether to whisper or weep.

Elias saw the "civilizing process" not as moral evolution but as a long, slow repression—of instincts, violence, spontaneity—mediated by shifting structures of power. The irony being: the more we internalize those constraints, the more violent the explosions when they rupture.

So maybe we’re not late barbarians so much as barbarians in denial. And the dream of civilization was never about peace—but about organizing violence more efficiently, more invisibly.

Nestor Russell, too, has written about perpetrator behavior, right? Especially in state violence—how ordinary people come to participate in extraordinary harm. That kind of analysis makes Elias' point even sharper. It’s not that we’re slipping into barbarism, but that barbarism never left; it just got more systemic, routinized, maybe even polite.

The question is: are we worse than earlier barbarians because we know what we’re doing—and do it anyway?

And maybe that’s where the ad hoc Gnostics circle back in. They don’t trust the world because they suspect something deeper is rotten—not just systems, but being itself. It’s not just “we are late barbarians,” but: we are entrapped souls wearing late barbarian skins, spinning dreams so we don’t dissolve.