Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” is usually described as a novel about violence, the American frontier, Manifest Destiny, or the darkness of human nature. Reading it as a scholar of human security, however, I found myself returning to a different question: Who, in this world, is actually secure? “Blood Meridian” is filled with the institutions and practices we ordinarily associate with security. Governments, armies, borders, military expeditions, contracts, armed groups, territorial authorities, and systems designed to identify and eliminate threats abound. Yet the people who inhabit McCarthy’s borderlands remain profoundly insecure. More troublingly, the mechanisms created to provide security repeatedly become sources of insecurity themselves.
That distinction lies at the heart of human security. The 1994 United Nations Development Program Human Development Report helped shift the referent of security away from territory alone and toward people, describing security in terms of human life and dignity and linking it to freedom from fear and freedom from want. Contemporary United Nations formulations continue to describe human security as people-centered, comprehensive, context-specific, and prevention-oriented. The fundamental question therefore shifts from whether the state is secure to whether people can survive and live with dignity. Read through that lens, “Blood Meridian” gives us a disturbing lesson: political authority can survive while human security collapses. Even more unsettlingly, institutions can successfully pursue what they define as security while making the people caught within those systems less secure.
Captain White and the Promise of Order
The novel introduces this problem early through Captain White, who recruits the Kid into an unauthorized military expedition into Mexico shortly after the Mexican-American War. His justification is familiar in the history of intervention: Mexico is presented as incapable of governing itself, while Americans possess the strength and supposed civilizational superiority necessary to impose order. White understands security through territory, sovereignty, military power, and control, while the human consequences of imposing that order barely enter his reasoning.
McCarthy dismantles the fantasy quickly. White’s expedition is annihilated by Comanche warriors, and the Kid later encounters his former commander’s severed head preserved as an object of display. The image is grotesque, but it also reduces White’s expansive rhetoric about nations, civilization, and conquest to its most basic human consequence: a body destroyed by violence. This pattern repeats throughout the novel. Security is articulated in grand political terms, while human bodies experience its consequences.
When Security Becomes a Market
The Glanton gang makes this contradiction much more explicit. The authorities in Chihuahua face a genuine security problem as Apache raids and warfare threaten settlements across the borderlands. Their response is to outsource violence. John Joel Glanton and his men receive a government contract to hunt Apaches, with payment tied to the scalps they produce. The novel specifies the terms of Glanton’s contract: one hundred dollars per scalp and a much larger bounty for a particular Apache leader. The arrangement effectively transforms security into a market.
The government wants greater security, while Glanton wants payment. Initially, those objectives appear compatible because killing the government’s designated enemies generates the evidence required for payment. The problem is that a scalp is a poor measure of security. Once human remains become proof of successful security provision, the measurable output begins to replace the original objective. The question is no longer simply whether communities are becoming safer. It becomes how many scalps can be produced and converted into money. The consequences are catastrophic. Glanton’s men expand their killing beyond the people they were contracted to hunt. Mexicans and other Indigenous people become victims because their bodies can also be converted into profit. The men hired in the name of protecting Mexican communities eventually become a threat to those same communities.
This is where McCarthy’s borderlands become particularly revealing through a human-security lens. The failure goes beyond a state simply lacking the capacity to protect its population. The state has acted. It has identified a threat, developed a policy, delegated coercive power, established a metric for success, and paid for results. Yet the insecurity emerges partly from the security policy itself. A system meant to reduce violence creates an economic incentive to keep producing it.
The Security Provider Becomes the Threat
The reversal becomes complete when Glanton himself becomes a wanted man. He entered the system as someone authorized to hunt people upon whose lives political authorities had placed a monetary value. Eventually, political authorities place a value on his own death. The security provider has become the security threat, yet the underlying logic remains remarkably similar: identify the dangerous person, attach a financial incentive to eliminating him, and use violence to produce the desired result.
This circularity matters because violence has failed to eliminate insecurity. Instead, it has generated new actors who require additional violence to contain them. The trajectory resembles a security-policy cycle: the state confronts a threat, delegates violence, gives that violence economic value, and watches as the contractor gains autonomy, civilians become targets, and the contractor becomes another threat to be eliminated. From the state’s perspective, Glanton’s category shifts from contractor to outlaw. From the perspective of a civilian facing an armed Glanton, that distinction may provide little protection. This is precisely why human security changes the analytical question. Instead of asking only who possesses legitimate authority, it asks what that authority means for the survival, livelihood, and dignity of actual people.
The Ferry: From Contractor to Sovereign
After the scalp economy collapses, Glanton does not cease being powerful simply because government authorization disappears. At the Colorado River, his gang finds another way to convert coercive power into economic power by controlling the ferry. Glanton no longer requires a state contract. He controls armed men and a strategic crossing travelers need, and control of that infrastructure lets him control mobility, extract money, and impose his own terms. He has moved from state contractor to something approaching a local sovereign.
Here McCarthy exposes another weakness in a purely state-centered understanding of security. Formal authority and lived authority are not always the same thing. A government may possess sovereignty on a map, but for the traveler standing beside the Colorado River, the person controlling the crossing possesses immediate power over movement, property, and potentially life itself. The ferry should enable mobility. Under Glanton’s control, it becomes an instrument of predation. Something that should contribute to human security becomes a mechanism of insecurity. The eventual destruction of Glanton and much of his gang by the Yuma does not establish a stable security order. It destroys the violent order Glanton had temporarily imposed, continuing the novel’s recurring cycle of violence, authority, and insecurity.
Judge Holden and Security Through Total Control
If Glanton shows us what happens institutionally when coercive power escapes its original purpose, Judge Holden supplies the philosophy that lurks beneath the novel’s obsession with domination. Holden wants to know everything. He collects specimens, sketches artifacts, studies languages, records natural phenomena, lectures on geology, and attempts to incorporate the world into his enormous intellectual system. His curiosity initially resembles scholarship, but McCarthy gradually reveals something much more disturbing. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent,” Holden proudly declares. His ambition is sovereignty through knowledge.
Holden explains that humanity can become “suzerain of the earth” only when it has identified and exposed everything in nature to human understanding. When asked why he uses the word suzerain, he explains that such a ruler exercises authority even where other rulers exist. He then makes the implications explicit: autonomous life cannot exist independently of his authority. His philosophy pushes the novel beyond nineteenth-century frontier violence because Holden represents the logical extreme of security understood as control. The unknown produces vulnerability; knowledge reduces uncertainty; knowledge enables control; and control promises security. Taken to its endpoint, however, that logic requires eliminating autonomy itself. Nothing can remain outside the system, nothing can remain unknown, and nothing can exist independently.
The Judge’s worldview therefore raises a question that remains relevant far beyond McCarthy’s borderlands: At what point does the pursuit of security through ever-greater knowledge and control begin to threaten the people it supposedly protects? The question resonates in an age of mass surveillance, biometric identification, predictive technologies, persistent observation, and AI-enabled intelligence. These technologies are vastly removed from McCarthy’s nineteenth-century setting, and “Blood Meridian” should not be treated as a prediction of twenty-first-century security practices. Holden’s philosophy instead exposes a recurring temptation in security thinking: the belief that sufficient knowledge can eliminate uncertainty and sufficient control can eliminate danger. Human security begins from a different premise. The person is a subject whose survival, livelihood, and dignity constitute security’s objective.
When War Becomes Its Own Justification
Holden eventually pushes this logic further in his great discourse on war, arguing that war contains its own authority and justification and culminating in his declaration that “War is god.” For Holden, violent struggle decides. Power establishes authority, the defeated disappear, and the victors impose meaning on the outcome. It is difficult to imagine a worldview further removed from the central concerns of human security.
A human-security perspective evaluates the same world by asking what happened to the people within it. Who survived, who was displaced, whose livelihood disappeared, whose community was destroyed, who lived in fear, and who possessed the power to protect themselves? These questions prevent victory, territorial control, or the elimination of an enemy from serving automatically as evidence that security has been achieved. Holden measures order through the triumph of one will over another. Human security measures it through what happens to the people who must live with the consequences.
The Kid and the Possibility of Mercy
This tension makes the Kid more important than he initially appears. He cannot be transformed into a conventional moral hero. He participates in extraordinary violence and rides willingly with men who commit atrocities. Yet McCarthy repeatedly leaves small spaces between the Kid and Holden’s total philosophy of domination. The Kid sometimes helps others when doing so provides no obvious advantage. He hesitates, and at certain moments he shows mercy. These acts are small and morally insufficient against the scale of violence surrounding him, but that may be precisely why they matter.
Holden’s worldview makes domination fundamental. If a person possesses the ability to harm another and chooses, even occasionally, not to exercise that power, then violence is no longer completely inevitable. Mercy therefore becomes a small challenge to the Judge’s universe. The Kid does not provide an alternative political order or a coherent philosophy of human security. His occasional reluctance to exercise violence simply preserves the possibility that domination is a choice rather than an unavoidable law of human existence.
Who Is Actually Secure?
By the end of “Blood Meridian,” nearly every institutional structure encountered along the way has failed to provide lasting human security. Captain White’s expedition ends in slaughter. Government scalp contracts create incentives for indiscriminate killing. The Glanton gang evolves from security contractor into security threat. The state’s bounty system commodifies human bodies, control of the ferry transforms critical infrastructure into an instrument of coercion, borders fail to protect the people living around them, and armed groups create temporary orders through force only to be destroyed by other armed groups. Through it all, Judge Holden survives. He dances at the end of the novel, proclaiming in effect the permanence of the world he represents. Whether Holden should be understood literally, symbolically, historically, or even supernaturally remains deliberately unresolved. What is harder to escape is the idea embodied in his survival: systems of domination possess an extraordinary capacity to reproduce themselves.
This is where “Blood Meridian” speaks most powerfully to human security. McCarthy was not writing a treatise on a concept that would emerge formally more than a century after the events he depicts, and the novel offers no security-policy prescription. His borderlands nevertheless force us to confront a distinction that remains central to security studies: the security of political authority and the security of human beings are not necessarily the same thing. A border can be defended while people remain afraid. A threat can be eliminated while communities are destroyed. A security operation can meet its metric while creating new insecurity. A state can authorize violence without retaining control over those who exercise it. An institution can even accomplish the task it was designed to perform while failing the people whose security supposedly justified that task in the first place.
The 1994 Human Development Report proposed shifting from thinking primarily about the security of territory to the security of people. That move remains foundational to the human-security approach, which places the survival, livelihood, and dignity of individuals and communities at the center of security. Blood Meridian offers a grim fictional landscape through which to understand why that distinction matters. The question is never simply whether security exists. The more important question, in McCarthy’s borderlands and far beyond them, is: security for whom?
References
McCarthy, C. (1985). Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. Random House.
United Nations Development Program. (1994). Human Development Report 1994: New Dimensions of Human Security. Oxford University Press.