How Can You Still Toss the One Ring into the Pit of Doom Once You Have Drawn the Eye of Sauron?
- john raymond
- 2 minutes ago
- 8 min read
The question is not abstract. It is the concrete problem facing anyone in Washington—or anywhere in public life—who has finally stood up, spoken plainly, and in doing so has attracted the full attention of a corrupt power. You called out the blackmail system, you voted for transparency, you told the truth about illegal orders, you refused to bow. The Eye turned. Now it is on you, and on the people you love.
At that point, every pleasant theory about courage collapses. The problem is no longer, “Is evil bad?” The problem is, “How can I still do the right thing when I know they will come for me, and I can feel them already starting?”
That is what “tossing the One Ring into the Pit of Mount Doom” really is: not some heroic cinematic gesture, but the act of destroying the very system that protects your enemy, after it has already locked onto you and begun to close its jaws.
To answer the question, we have to be clear what the Ring and the Eye are in our world.
The Ring: exemption from consequence
In Tolkien’s story, the Ring is Sauron’s way of stepping outside the cosmogonic cycle. Everyone else—Elves, Men, Dwarves, even the lesser powers—is meant to diminish, fail, and pass. The Ring is a hack: a concentration of stolen being into one artifact so that one will does not have to shrink with the rest. The cost is a single point of failure. Destroy the Ring, and the whole exemption collapses.
Our world’s Ring is not jewelry. It is a network of mechanisms that let a small class of predators live outside the normal cycle of consequence. Compromising material. Hidden files. Captured prosecutors. Bought media. Donors and lobbyists who launder reputation. A base trained to swallow any lie and attack any accuser. The Ring is the system that says: “The ordinary rules do not apply to us. We can rape, blackmail, steal, and betray—and nothing bad will happen.”
You see it in the way certain names never quite make it to indictment. You see it in the way victims are discredited while their abusers get book deals. You see it in the way whole parties warp themselves around one man’s crimes because they know, or fear, what is in the files.
That is the Ring: not a symbol, but an actual architecture of exemption.
And every time someone in Washington bows to it—votes the wrong way, shelves the subpoena, softens the report, pretends not to have read the documents—the Ring tightens.
The Eye: targeted fear
Then there is the Eye.
In the story, the Eye of Sauron is more than a searchlight. It is focused will, hunting for the thing that can destroy him. When it lands on Frodo, he is shattered; you can feel his will buckling. The Eye is pure attention weaponized. It says: “I see you. I know what you carry. I am coming.”
In our world, the Eye is the full apparatus of retaliation turned toward you once you have made yourself dangerous.
It is the smear campaign that starts the day you break ranks.
It is the threats—explicit or implied—against your family, your staff, your career.
It is the sudden rediscovery of your past mistakes, magnified and spun until you look like the villain.
It is the donors pulled, the primary challenge funded, the pundits unleashed, the trolls mobilized, the investigations opened on you rather than on the people you exposed.
Most people in Washington arrange their entire lives to avoid ever drawing that Eye. They learn to speak in safe euphemisms, to “raise concerns” without ever naming the abuser, to gesture toward justice while making sure no actual lever is pulled. They convince themselves that this is prudence. In fact it is terror.
So the real question is: once you have already crossed that line—once you have voted for the discharge petition, signed the letter, spoken the forbidden truth on camera—how can you still carry through and “throw the Ring into the Fire”?
What casting the Ring really requires
To answer, we have to go back to what the act in the story actually entails, stripped of fantasy varnish.
Casting the Ring into the Cracks of Doom involves four hard conditions.
Refusing to wield it “for good.” Every wise figure in the story understands that you cannot take control of the Ring and use it for justice. The tool is too corrupting. The only winning move is not to play.
In our world, that means: you cannot save the country by seizing the blackmail files and quietly running the network yourself. You cannot save democracy by inheriting the propaganda machine and pointing it at your enemies. You cannot save the republic by taking over the kompromat apparatus that protects presidents and kings and promising you will only use it on the “bad ones.” If you mean to destroy the Ring, you must refuse to wield its instruments—even though they might make your fight vastly easier.
Accepting real loss on your own side. When the Ring is destroyed, the Elven Rings fade. The Third Age ends. The great beauty and magic of Middle-earth diminish. Victory comes with irretrievable loss for the good as well as the evil.
In politics, this means: if you strike at the exemption system honestly, you will not only take down your enemies. You will destroy protection racks that some of your friends, your party, your idols currently enjoy. You will reveal things about people on “your side” that you would prefer never to know. Casting the Ring away means choosing that loss. It means saying: better a smaller, more mortal world than a beautiful one balanced on a crime.
Designing for your own failure. Frodo does not, in the final instant, summon superhuman strength and throw the Ring away. He claims it. He fails. The Ring is destroyed because of earlier mercy and the self-destructive nature of evil: Gollum’s obsession, his fall into the fire. The wise designed the mission knowing the Ring could break the Ring-bearer, and still arranged it so that the system would collapse anyway.
Translated: if you want to destroy the modern Ring after you have drawn the Eye, you must assume you are not superhuman. You may flinch. You may sign a bad deal. You may break under pressure. You must therefore build processes that do not rely on you being Frodo at his best every day. That means public commitments that are hard to walk back. It means distributing evidence widely, not hoarding it. It means binding others into your stand so that if you buckle, the structure you set in motion keeps moving. You must arrange it so that your own eventual weakness cannot save the system you set out to destroy.
Irrevocability. The Ring, once gone, is gone forever. There is no rebuilding it, no “version 2.0” with better safeguards. The age of such power simply ends.
In our world, this means you aim not at “reform” of the exemption system, but at its abolition. You do not want cleaner blackmail. You do not want more respectable secrecy. You want an order in which it is structurally harder for any cabal to operate above the law at all. That requires courage, because a properly broken Ring will also prevent you—and anyone who agrees with you—from ever enjoying that kind of impunity. It shuts the door on your fantasies of benevolent control.
Now we can return to the question.
How can you still throw the Ring once the Eye is on you?
First, you have to accept that drawing the Eye is not a sign you have misstepped. It is a sign you finally stepped on the real pressure point. No one spends infinite resources to destroy a trivial opponent. If the system has turned its full attention toward you, it is because you have become a genuine threat to the Ring.
That realization will not make the threats less terrifying, but it will at least prevent you from gaslighting yourself. You are not “overreacting.” You are not imagining it. The Eye is real, and you called it down by doing something that mattered.
Second, you must make a conscious, explicit decision not to pivot from “destroy the Ring” to “wield the Ring more responsibly.” That is the great temptation for those who have drawn the Eye: to negotiate. To say, “Fine, I will become part of this system, but I will guide it in a better direction.” In that moment, you become exactly what you hated. You sit on the dark throne and call yourself the new light.
So you tell yourself, and others, in plain language: I will not join this. I will not take the secret protection in exchange for silence. I will not accept the quiet file, the untraceable money, the promise that they will “go easy” on my friends if I just let this one thing go. I will not wield the Ring.
Third, you have to drag your own fate out of the shadows and into the open. The more your struggle remains private—left to whispered threats and backroom deals—the more leverage the Ring has over you. Its power lies in isolation and shame.
You break that by making your stand, and the retaliation, visible. You say: Here is what I have tried to do. Here is what I have seen. Here is how they are trying to break me. You name it while you still can. You place evidence where many hands can reach it. You insist that if you fall, others know why.
This is how, even as you waver, you “design for your own failure.” You arrange the board such that your collapse does not guarantee the Ring’s survival.
Fourth, you accept that tossing the Ring will cost you things you love—status, safety, maybe your career, maybe worse—and you do it anyway. There is no painless way to destroy a structure built on fear. If fear could be defeated without pain, the structure would never have worked in the first place.
This is the part no metaphor can soften. Casting the Ring once the Eye is on you is not about feeling heroic; it is about enduring the knowledge that you have painted a target on yourself and deciding that some prices are worth paying.
Why this must be asked of the reader
The reason to put the question in the title—How Can You Still Toss the One Ring into the Pit of Mount Doom Once You Have Drawn the Eye of Sauron?—is that there is no way to keep it at arm’s length. Sooner or later, if you live in a captured system, you will be faced with some version of it.
Maybe you are a staffer with documents you are not supposed to leak.
Maybe you are a member of Congress staring at a vote that will expose a network you know is real.
Maybe you are a journalist holding a story that will get you sued into bankruptcy.
Maybe you are simply a citizen whose friends will turn on you if you say what you now know about the leader they worship.
In each case, the structure is the same. You have seen the Ring. You can feel the Eye. The path of least resistance is always the same: step back from the fire, tell yourself you can do more good later, in quieter ways, without making yourself a target.
What the whole mythology is trying to tell you is that this is a lie. There is no later in which it becomes easier. The longer the Ring exists, the stronger it grows. The more you bow, the more the habit of bowing hardens in you—and in everyone watching.
The only real question is whether anyone, anywhere, will accept the full price of unmaking: refusing to wield, accepting loss, planning for their own weakness, and shutting the door on this category of power forever.
If you have already drawn the Eye, you are already in the story. You no longer have the luxury of pretending otherwise. The only thing left to decide is whether you will stagger back down the mountain trying to forget what you carry—or whether, in whatever way is left to you, you will see the act through and let the fire take what should never have even existed in the first place.