The Shire stands as a symbol for a rural and peaceful life but their protected way of life is only possible because of the the military might of others and this is explicitly alluded to several times...for example in a conversation between Merry and Pippin (which I just happened to read to my kid yesterday!):
"Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not."
Before the events of The Lord of the Rings, hobbits maintained a tradition of archery and other martial skills, partly due to past conflicts such as the Battle of Greenfields (1). By the time of the Scouring off the Shire, Merry, Pippin, and other veterans of the War of the Ring organized quickly taking up arms. According to the appendices, they managed to eliminate nearly two-thirds of Saruman’s invading force , displaying both tactical coordination and surprising courage. (Treebeard also notes this in The two towers) It’s a powerful reminder that, in Tolkien’s world, even the humblest people are capable of heroism when defending their home.
All I'm saying is that it only takes a small shift of perspective to see how the LoTR will appeal broadly to anyone who believes in good vs evil narratives - whichever side they appear to be on from one's own point of view.
“Gandalf’s the crazy person who wants to start a war… Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.” - Thiel 2011 Details
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/takedemocracyback.org/post/3lk4u55a... it's an interview from the September issue of details magazine 2011, has largely been scrubbed from the internet
So in the case of Thiel, he read LOTR and identified with the villains, which is about as large a misreading of Tolkien as one can make
It's not. They always acknowledge that their army will be much too small to defeat Sauron's in a war. They luckily win a battle outside Gondor. They defeat Sauruman only with a deus ex machina moment of supernatural aid. But when they march on Mordor they send only a token force; they know they can't win that way. They can only slow down and distract Sauron.
The way they win is trust in innocence, a thing and a plan that Sauron can't even envision - that's explicitly Gandalf's thinking. Sauron never imagines that a couple of essentially civilian hobbits, the least powerful people, would be given the Ring, and that they'd enter Morder on their own, that they'd have the courage, and that the good guys would actually destroy something of that much power when they could use it.
> it only takes a small shift of perspective to see how the LoTR will appeal broadly to anyone who believes in good vs evil narratives
I agree in a way: People who don't read the book with a little thought can just read a superficial action adventure, good guys fight bad and win. And Peter Jackson's films are 90% the latter.
While they may be wary of others with power, right "libertarians" are often attracted to wielding the power themselves - falling to the same exact "I will do good" fallacy as wielders of the Ring. Truly being disinterested in concentrated power means acknowledging that larger non- "government" entities are capable of coercing individuals (eg informal force or even just economic stickiness), not definitionally ruling it out to remain ignorant of it.
