Against Sargon’s Tie
by James Doone
James Doone challenges Sargon’s revival of the tie, turning a simple fashion debate into a deeper meditation on class, masculinity, and civilization itself.
Lately I have noticed that Sargon has been on a quest to resurrect the wearing of ties with suits and to counter the move brought in by the Dark Lord Blair to go sans tie to appear more down to earth and one of the people. Dan often likes to wear colour shirts without a tie, and Sargon has started wearing a plethora of very nice three-piece suits and he looks dapper and smart, and for the record, I like Sargon and always have, I’ve been a Sargonian since around 2014 when I began watching him and to this day I still enjoy his videos, so do not take this as a condemnation of Sargon; this is merely a disagreement on policy.
I disagree with Sargon on this matter for numerous reasons, but let us begin with this reason: ties are a useless piece of cloth that has no function apart from aesthetics. Now I am not a utilitarian and I am a huge proponent of beautiful architecture and art, but on this one matter I reject the tie specifically, for it is ultimately a symbol of the bourgeoisie and of middle-class, white-collar bureaucracy. Ties are bourgeois. They are not the uniform of the salt of the earth, the blue-collar workers in the mines and factories, nor are they the attire of warriors in their foxholes or sailors on the seas in the rigging. They are the uniform of safe and comfortable office workers and the laptop class. The Soviets in the early stages of the Bolshevik coup, due to their ideology of Marxism, jettisoned the wearing of ties in favour of tunics (military and civil) and peasant attire to show their proletarian status and to avoid the claim of being capitalist exploiters of the proletariat. Look at any clip from the 1920s and you shall see Stalin et al. walking around in black boots, cavalry trousers and leather or cloth tunics with flat caps or peaked caps to show their working-class status, though Lenin was a middle-class lawyer and ‘thinker’. I do wonder if he ever got his hands covered in dust or clay. One good thing the USSR did was to mandate, due to their socialist ideology, that all the middle classes had to work some time in the fields on the collective farms picking potatoes to keep the academics grounded to prevent ivory towerism. Can you imagine the so-called ‘academics’ of today working in the fields? I cannot, but they should be made to by the state — for the good of the collective comrades!
The tie is the flag of the administration man, not the armour of the warrior or the robe of the priest. It is the lunar symbol of the bureaucratic man, like our current ‘dear leader’. We should not be promoting the civilisation of the bureaucrat; we should be wishing for a civilisation of the warrior prince, the cleric of the Adeptus Ministorum, we should wish for a solar civilisation of the black Templar, not the HR department with their tie and their water cooler. Sargon is promoting the managerial culture; instead he should be saying we should be wearing the humble tunic of the farmer, or the miner and worker, rather than the attire of the urban apparatchik. Sargon wears trainers with a suit, which is a faux pas. Ties are bourgeois, and Faustian civilisation is not built on ties but on faith in the God Emperor. Men should not be wearing suits at all, for they are white-collar attire; men should be dressed like Cossack soldiers on the shores of the Volga, or German farmers in the Alps, or gruff Scotsmen in their mines, simple earthy colours like brown, black, navy blue, grey, olive green, and without ostentation or pomp. Ties should be consigned to the flames. Men should look like a marine, green jacket with simple trousers and boots. Men should dress like a strong oak. Thus ends my thoughts on the matter.
“Honour the farmer, not the merchant.”
— De Willingtona
The polemic against the tie as a “bourgeois symbol” collapses under minimal scrutiny. It is an example of rhetorical passion masking conceptual confusion — a series of aesthetic impressions mistaken for analysis.
1. Confusing Form with Essence
The writer confuses an object with an ontology. A tie has no moral quality. Its meaning depends on intention, not material. To denounce it as bureaucratic is to confuse signifier with substance — a typical modern reduction of culture to costume.
2. Historical Error
The tie did not emerge from bourgeois offices but from aristocratic and military origins. It descends from the seventeenth-century cravat, worn by Croatian mercenaries and adopted by the French nobility as a sign of rank and discipline. Its lineage is martial, not managerial. The white-collar world merely inherited it, as the bourgeoisie so often inherits the ornaments of the nobility it imitates.
3. The Romantic Fallacy of the Worker
The idealisation of peasants and miners as moral exemplars is sentimentalism disguised as realism. Hard labour is not a sacrament. Virtue is not produced by calluses any more than decadence by linen. Authenticity is an interior state, not a uniform.
4. Ideological Contradictions
The essay praises the Soviet rejection of the tie while simultaneously admiring the tunic of the soldier and the peasant’s garb. Yet the Soviet tunic and the Cossack uniform belong to opposite mythologies: one egalitarian, one hierarchical. The result is a confused fusion of Marxist asceticism and feudal romanticism — neither coherent nor credible.
5. Misdiagnosing Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy is not a wardrobe problem. The Soviet Union, which abolished bourgeois dress, produced one of history’s most suffocating bureaucracies. The vice lies in the spirit, not the fabric. Replacing ties with tunics would change nothing; the bureaucrat would simply wear a different symbol of his emptiness.
6. Aesthetic Hypocrisy
Finally, the text condemns aestheticism while indulging in it constantly. Its nostalgia for “dust and soil” is as decorative as the silk it despises. It merely reverses the vanity — preferring rustic romanticism to refinement.
Conclusion
The attack on the tie is a minor symptom of a deeper malady: the modern confusion between form and essence. The tie is neither a chain nor a halo. It can be worn by the tyrant or the saint. The moral question is not what adorns the neck, but what steadies the mind.
A civilisation will not be saved by abandoning the tie, but by rediscovering discipline, vocation, and purpose beneath whatever garments it chooses to wear.
Us folks in the blue collars see ties for what they are, and when appropriate. We will wear them also. So a contextual consideration ought to be made.