∪ - Potshots At The Sun
A Revolutionary Pessimist's Final Volley
Viva Blanqui. Pale and weak in flesh, Louis Auguste Blanqui nevertheless exudes a radiant red. A genuine revolutionary, he had little patience for those hunched over blueprints marked UTOPIA – those devotees of imagined happiness – knowing them to be as bad as the reformers. Although the latter have been hoodwinked into discounting a class analysis altogether, utopia’s drawers have that annoying tendency of seeking the whip hand’s approval. If only they could grab the ear of the powers that be then there need not be violence, “Rest assured, m’lord, our schemes are fool-proof and fully costed.”
These “madmen”, Blanqui insisted, in their abandonment of existing struggles, are little more than a nuisance. (Missing, as they do, the electrifying force of pure negativity.) Enthralled by imagined carrots, they’re better off in the TV room: zoned out and safely locked away.
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Beyond rational explanation. More reflective than anyone would care to admit, irrationalism, too, is determined. Revolutionaries must tread the perpendicular.
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The ethos of the Enlightenment set against its institutions. What is attacked as collectivism is in many cases a tactical arrangement, with freedom its end. How, it is asked by those seeking to overcome, is the limited self to carve out a meaningful existence in our overly determined present, propped up as it is by an unremitting and socket-voiding Optimism? (Give or take a sharp intake of breath.) For such people revolution is an act of self-defence.
As things stand, the talented and strong of will are simply given weightier chains. Our perverse realisation of each according to his ability…
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Everything was politicised the moment capital laid claim to everything. We on the Left are accused of needlessly “politicising” events. A banshees’ chorus: truthfully these dolts are perturbed anyone would dare question the base-level politicisation of all things. Contorted, as you, I and everything has been, into pools of capital. Nothing from this totalising perspective has value outside of exchange value. And should you be improper enough to dissent, you are hereby charged with infringing our organic laws.
By looking at the forest and seeing something other than trades, you are against nature.
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Lingering concerns. There is an argument that the objective rationality of premodernity was unlike present fundamentalisms. To be sure, everything was spoken of in relation to the prevailing creed, but it was nature humanity engaged with: the world was God’s design and the flock was inspired to think through its evident complexities. Modernity has become characterised by a single-minded focus on the map, and its ground is not ours. Where once a religious excess was held with sincerity, but fruitfully, our literalism stands monotonous and uncompromising.
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Slippery slopes. Progress (ferocious temporality) and morals (chains of the privileged).
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Another ageing commentator is astonished by the levels of duplicity in contemporary politics. I have to ask, compared with previous decades? It has always been an untoward business, but once you were its launderer.
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Of our “natural state”, Rousseau writes,
…there was neither education nor progress, generations multiplied uselessly; and as each one of them always started at the same point, centuries went by in all the crudeness of the first ages, the species had already grown old, and man remained ever a child.
It is still widely believed that prior to the modern age, humans were static creatures. Feeble and ignorant, they were more beast than man. But if we were to repurpose “enlightened” categories, it might be argued that recent history is the domain of savages.
In their Dawn of Everything Graeber and Wengrow have argued that before our society “got stuck” following the emergence of the Megamachine (Lewis Mumford saw in slave-ridden Egypt a formal parallel), human arrangements were often dynamic and politically charged. If this is true, the necessity of detaching progress from improvement has hardly been more forcibly made.
John Gray has criticised Graeber and Wengrow for trying their hand at a Fall 2.0. But whereas in the Biblical tale men were born in innocence, Graeber-Wengrow argues humans were once far more worldly, only for outlooks to dramatically close. Growing evidence suggests our forebears were far from shy about challenging social relations. Archeological digs reveal extravagant shows, full of creativity and divergence (the sapiens story as Vaudeville). All this stopped, it appears, with the advent of the state. We became trapped, in a cage built inside out.
All of this is in opposition to a “stage”-based interpretation of human existence, i.e. that it is an unidirectional story of scattered hunter gatherers becoming sedentary farmers, only then gaining the sophistication to find our true calling: taking iron horses to pig pens. Graeber-Wengrow are able to show how much more open our past may have been and, in doing so, how the future may be. It is a liberating read, far more so than anything offered by Mammon’s puppets.
Those aware of his thoughts on religion will understand Gray’s concern. An admirer of Nietzsche, his corpus highlights how followers of the bushy grenadier can themselves be guilty of that they oppose (especially the English, for even their atheists carry the Puritan strain).
In Nietzsche’s account, it was the “slave revolt” in morality which brought about consciousness as we know of it. Prior to this relatively modern upset, masters would rape and pillage without the slightest concern for the wounds they inflicted -- if anything it would enrich the plunder. As for the weak, they suffered what they must. It was the spreading of a higher consciousness, bringing with it the phenomenons of guilt, pity, moralising and often self-debilitating doubt, i.e. the sources of the current rut.
Gray has been similarly explicit. The interpretation of the Fall he favours is one in which Knowledge was kept from Adam and Eve for good reason; resorting to the one line of Eliot everyone knows, Humankind cannot bear very much reality. Consequently (and here Gray is considerably more fatalistic than Nietzsche) it is the emergent higher consciousness which not only plunged us over the edge, it excavated the chasm just a moment before.
We can then conclude that Graeber-Wengrow are not mistaken in adopting the framework of the Fall, for Gray the problem is they flipped it on its head.
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Him. I eagerly await the death of Clock God. (Scrubbed alongside the dialectical image (and to sketch this rupture of ruptures is to splash acid on our eyes) thermostat, GPS, quetiapine.)
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It is Genesis, not our dreams and our systems, that has perceived our condition. The work of the Frankfurt School helps explain how humanity “got stuck”. The very best Western Marxism had to offer, these theorists dared challenge Reason’s enthronement. Above all, it was the character of modern rationality which had drawn a curtain across the horizon. Becoming instrumentalized, intellect’s best qualities were neutered, its worst weaponized.
As Adorno and Horkhiemer wrote from exile, the disaster was undeniable. The unfettered regimes of governmental, military and scientific rationality had marched civilisation to the Midnight of the Century (as Victor Serge so memorably described those years of rallying Horsemen and revolutions betrayed). Like the enchanted broom, these expressions of rational planning had their own agenda, quite apart from the purported aims of their bright-eyed and lowly antecedents.
Our own prospects evolved. Incentives horribly inverted, it became necessary for government “departments for defence” to seek war over peace; think-tanks producing an endless stream of truly inventive ways of inviting the Apocalypse. Statesmen, too, were branded “impressive” only when casting their people at the Market, long after it developed an appetite for long-pig.
Twisted, malformed and bashed into an icon, anyone criticising reasoning of this sort is (in reference to Steven Pinker’s astoundingly dim tautology) “unreasonable”, and bulldozed to the fringe. Foreclosing any chance these institutions might be reformed or dismantled, as necessary for Life.
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Hypotheticals then lead: the double-tap of illegitimate power.
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Despite the appeal of Rousseau’s fatalism, Georges Sorel never gave up on hope. He agreed the inherent egoism of humanity was stifled under bourgeois rule, whatever it may claim about upholding “the individual”. He was more interested in the reality behind all of their magic words: of the difficulty of maintaining a private life within such a system, and the impossibility of being free from it.
But it needn’t overwhelm us. Liberté through fraternité is achievable, if only the workers lent their natural leaders and most talented strategists – the proletariat aristocracy – the strength to do away with the stagnant brim. Then, and only then (as a fellow traveller put it), would the masses be relieved from the sordid necessity of living for others.
(My realism is egalitarian, my communism highly differentiated.)
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Where Anti-Capitalism and Antichrist meet. In Nietzsche’s account, truth was turned into an imperative by Christianity. Despite truthfulness proving advantageous but occasionally, by way of moral revolt it was elevated to Law: the dictate to which all must submit. There is a parallel here in Marx and Engels, with regards “equality”. Situated within the rallying cry against feudal privileges, it had propagandist value. But to take that slogan and make it all consuming is to invite the abyss. Logically unsound (to equalise one stat necessarily imbalances another), and workers moved little by vagueness, leftists really have to do better.
Inequality is here for good, and despite the presumptions of fools, Marx agreed. What humans require is the ability to fulfil their psychic needs, whatever they may be. Once allowed, would not the iniquities of the world fade from concern?
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What Capital’s priest-castes do not (or are simply unable to) understand is that Marxism attacks not flesh and blood, but power, temporarily embodied. You, a nice suit – little more, bore.
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God does not play dice with the universe. Miguel de Unamuno’s biography encapsulates the follies of liberalism like few other. He played a pivotal role in the formation of Spain’s republic, only to be repulsed by an internationalist and socialist Left it brought about. So repulsed that he lent his voice and pen to the cause of Franco.
But being someone with a capacity for thought, it was not long before those beasts, with no equivalent, had him purged.
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Wounded by the cowardice of his university colleagues and fellow writers, the Jewish academic Victor Klemperer considered his options should he survive the Third Reich. In a secret diary he wrote, “the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, [I would] let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders… but I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.”
My man.
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The entire Third World went into the making of Europe.
Franz Fanon
America, land. Asia, industry. Africa… bodies.
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A fascinating chapter of Dawn of Everything concerns the origin of the political Left. Confronted with intellectuals from North America’s First Nations (who weren’t a bit impressed by early modern Europe), many whites began to question their cultural baggage. Foremost, what at all was meant by Freedom – gleaming signifier?
This indigenous critique formed the foundation of what became the internal and permanent opposition to “Western Civilization”. And while Nietzsche attacked this emerging Left as a gang of moralisers seeking power through surreptitious means, that does not sufficiently address the Marxist case (excepting those who miss the point, and there are plenty), and it misses Romanticism by quite some distance: seeking glory in defeat, it well and truly achieved it.
Enlightenment’s germ, then, is in a peculiar conjunction of Old and New World thinking, with bowed heads and stately.
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One of the defining features of this Left was a disdain of private property. As documented by CB MacPherson (echoed in Dawn of Everything) our conception of property is hardly universal. Its origins are found in Roman law, where “there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will.”
This is very different from indigenous conceptions. In these cultures, a property claim was honoured to the extent one could show an ability to safeguard a thing. Consequently, clans recognised as owning a particular animal (raven, wolf, bear, etc.) were banned from harming that species, as destruction was antithetical to their role.
But today ownership asks nothing except from others. It is a sacrament, a mythic pledge of violence inward as much as against the unassimilated. Just another of those irrationalities the disillusioned claimants to the Enlightenment, well suckled on their boss’s PR, have yet to come to terms with. You can’t stop them, it is their planet after all.
Truly, even DH Lawrence puts us to shame.
Sometime, somewhere, man will wake up and realise that property is only there to be used, not to be possessed. He will realise that possession is a kind of illness of the spirit, and a hopeless encumbrance upon the spontaneous self. The little pronouns “my” and “our” will lose all their mystic spell. The question of property will never be settled, till people cease to care for property. Then it will settle itself. A man only needs so much as will help him to his own fulfilment. Surely the individual who wants a motor-car merely for the sake of having it and riding in it is as hopeless an automaton as the motor-car itself.
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What is revolutionary pessimism, anyway? Pessimism hovers within paradox: we are one way, the Universe another. Or – all the more terrifying, It is not any which way. So beyond the comprehension of half-apes words preemptively fail. Try diverting the ocean with nails and sponges: that’s language for you.
Might we amplify the contradiction?
Better Things Aren’t Possible! Utopia: That’s A Fucking Lie!
These defeatist slogans meet:
We Can’t Risk It Getting Any Worse! Revolt Now, In the Face of Disarray!
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Undercover Boss. Receiving a visit from the munitions manufacturer as you writhe in a field hospital.
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The tale weavers of the current system, of which Francis Fukuyama is the most readable, are silent about the West’s war on democracy. Typical of liberal chauvinists, he imagines “freedom of choice” as the defining characteristic of the post-WWII order.
Surely now, with the Great Bear dead and stinking up the map, we formerly-Free can acknowledge how, say, Greek and Italian potential was suppressed in the name of a greater ideal (Capital)? Post-war Europe may have had an endless assortment of canned goods, a stylish range of automobiles, but the window of political acceptability was often determined elsewhere, by the “responsible white men” of Langley. This meant dynamite in the south and flashy rags among the better bred – GLADIO and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in turn.
All considered, old Europe got off lightly. Vietnam (limiting ourselves…) risked extinction as Liberty rained down upon them, courtesy of Dow Chemical.
How did we win [the Cold War], I asked.
Winarso stopped fidgeting. “You killed us.”
Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method
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Capital, wots’ it all about? A pathological accumulation of occult riches? But I worry that concedes too much.
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A totem cracks the earth. If incantation becomes a collective’s route to Liberty, that soothing breeze will be little more than “a solemn complement of violence” (Merleau-Ponty).
Because if we are not addressing tangible concerns (i.e. real, deleterious barriers to self-empowerment), magic words, however pleasant, “in isolation, or understood as a principle of discrimination… like the law according to St. Paul, are nothing more than a cruel god demanding his hecatombs.”
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Seeing through by seeing. To the surprise of someone, Jordan Peterson is clueless about Dostoevsky. He regularly cites the great Russian novelist in his secular-but-perhaps-not crusade against anyone to the left of Pinochet. While it is true that Dostoevsky grew dissatisfied with his former comrades, unlike the trained psychologist he could understand them. The Russian Nihilists (the OGs) were outrageous, irresponsible and at times “malevolent” – but their enemy was hardly better: the bourgeoisie, gaudy and transparent as their Crystal Palace.
There they sat in Gallic finery, decrying Tyranny, all the while imposing the drudgery of proletarianisation. Between sips of wine (fortified so they might imitate their Western “betters”), they put in a good word for Liberty, and toasted the Tsar’s latest crackdown.
One did not have to endorse particular ends and means to see the sickness lay not with adolescents, but with an age. Much as the American contemporary Wendall Phillips explained:
Nihilism is the last weapon of victims choked and manacled beyond all other resistance. It is crushed Humanity’s only means of making the oppressor tremble.
But all this passes a thinker as superficial as Peterson by (impassioned foe of the Trickster, having never suffered the King’s blows). Nuance eludes him, despite the constant appeal to its notion; and as a result Peterslam will remain tormented by jinn.
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The key to being a lifestyle intellectual is to spin a passing fancy – be it a homoerotic flutter, the drop upon hearing could you explain, deciding that, yes, that must have been my mug on Roger’s desk – into the most deep and pained excavation of Being to ever grace telescreens. If one is new to this, diction is key. The mere presentation that you are someone who has thoughts can (through the necessary channels) net you the reputation of “thought leader”.
As is so often the case, what is beneficial for the bank balances of men is a condemnation of Man.
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The reigning ideology denies its enemies: we are all on side, Team Humanity. Taken at its word, the state can freely wallop asylum seekers, the “nonproductive” and the global poor.
Only the oddest of counter-punches are felt. And then we ask, without a hint of irony, “Why do they hate us?”
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One ought to acknowledge the significance for mankind of the simultaneous invention of gunpowder and printer’s ink.
Karl Kraus
Freedom and capitalism, synonymous: Who is to blame but riches and its scribe? We open markets, while you are a bandit.
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“You have to meet people where they are,” he said, and lifted the sewer grate.
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It is only under an organisation of pessimism that hope has any purchase. (Suffering will endure, it is simply a matter of how we allocate it.) An optimistic society has no need of it, and Doom makes a most convincing pretender.
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We are still modern. The insistence we have moved on betrays a characteristic optimism.
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Sadly, as is often the way, it won’t take much for the refugee, migrant or non-national to be sacrificed at the altar of Order (a pleasing way of saying “the procedures currently shafting you”). And although politicians of the Right prepare the knives and incantations out of genuine feeling, cynicism compels liberals along.
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It is all too typical for Americans to externalise the roots of their troubles. Liberals see Putin’s grubby paws behind anything remotely disagreeable, as the Right insist on identifying any foreigner who may have corrupted their perfect, stable, unifying – legacy culture.
One would have to be especially dim to claim relativism and identity politics were unsought imports. Is it surprising, given the nation’s history of racial and sexual persecution (to say nothing of genocide), that Americans have long traded in identity politics? In point of fact, the Boogeyman of today’s rationalists(™) – the dreaded Frankfurt School – baulked at the pragmatism, racialism and Boasian relativism they encountered across America. In their flight from Nazism they left much behind, but unlike some colleagues, their idiosyncratic mix of Kant and Hegel weren’t harassed at customs. It was a source of stability, at least at the start.
Over time, this predominantly Jewish cadre began to see that the racially-minded Yankee theoreticians were onto something. As irrational as “thinking with the blood” is, it was a social fact, and therefore a reality one had to deal with. Even if Adorno did not apply much significance to his Jewish heritage, there were many others who did, and to it they were willing to attach all manner of absurd and dangerous theories.
Black thinkers had long been denied the privilege of seeing themselves as “post-racial”, and at the turn of the 1940s, it was made apparent to exiled Europeans just how absurd and dangerous it was to imagine they were.
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In their opposition to theory, those who style themselves as Empiricists claim you, NOT I, are in the grip of Idea. Yet no-one, excepting those most stupified by common sense, truly discounts events.
Yes, it is those declaring in unison, “as opposed to the dreamers and firebrands, I strive for the provable; the comforting stories we were told at the teat,” who are in league with abstraction.
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Hypocrite! If you seek a candidate who already lives in perfect accordance with their stated values, look no further than the helplessly compromised.
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This house believes debate is an inexcusable act of self-harm.
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ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK the voices of moderation. The older conceptions of friend-and-enemy promise mutuality in a way liberals struggle to conceive. They may acknowledge the humanity of their political opponents – therefore being instilled with all the inherent worthiness that entails, etc., that unacknowledged Christian notion – but in order to excuse the violence of their side, they insist upon a moral superiority: “Poor things, ignorant to the greatness we are (ever) on the cusp of achieving.”
Rachel Greenwald Smith puts it thus: My conquest of you serves the larger goals of Humanity. In contrast what is dismissed as tribalism (otherwise known as a sober understanding of power) does not warrant such moralising. There is an appreciation that every group pursues what is in their best interests, and that can hardly be considered “evil”.
And what have wiser men claimed? From Heraclitus down to Sorel they have seen the truth in war. It is just, for the killer will be killed in turn.
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So many political non-entities, clinging impossibly to their cyber-agora. You want to parse through the meaning of Eclipse, play semantic games with extinction. You know nothing, and this is not politics. But, what’s that? You’ve expelled a new thought experiment which convincingly proves with these exact parameters in place, even if one were turned into a post-World stick figure, there could very well be ways to counteract cannibals and heat stroke.
Stop. The very extent of your potential is as a speed bump.
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I think, because I have enemies. Whatever else you may say about him, Carl Schmitt was acutely aware of what the renunciation of hate entailed. Liberals, as they never cease reminding us, have unending tolerance for anything and anyone… right up until they have done cataloguing them. At that precise moment, these strange people with their inexplicable practices and funny costumes can be safely deposited into the dustbin of History. We, Humanity, go forth.
This might explain the impetus behind those famous compilations of Native American images, such as those by the painter George Catlin and the photographer Edward Curtis. Commissioned by wealthy liberals on the east coast, the brief was to capture the last, dignified moments of a dead race. All the while, aware that the riches they had access to were a direct result of snuffing out the noble savage. (Another, less serious example sees Rowan Atkinson playing a British MP, who announces, “I like curry, I do. But now that we have the recipe…”)
Those who have allowed enmity to define them perversely need their object of scorn. Those who have decided, coldly, reasonably, that they have learned all they possibly can from this oddity or another, need only their books and decanter.
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Yes, the future has been sold.
The Universal
Mark Fisher, pre-dated and outclassed by Blur.
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Without a regressive element liberation is simply refinement.
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Marx did not come from Mars. You would be forgiven for thinking that the red thread of twentieth century politics, brought into fruition with 1917 and thwarted in the ‘90s, a blood red.
Who does not know courtesy of The Black Book of Communism that the great socialist experiment ended in 100 million corpses? As a result, there are few names more villainous in our imaginary than Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot.
But what is less noted, if at all, is the fact that these figures were reacting to especially potent moments of capitalist crisis. The support the Bolsheviks received was in large part thanks to their promise to halt Russian participation in WWI, that hopeless melee and the meat-grinder of a generation. Mao offered his people independent development in a country ravaged by famine, civil war and foreign powers. And the midget Pol Pot? He emerged from the US’s disastrous crusade against Third World liberation in Indochina. One which saw a colossal bombing campaign —more terrible than anything permitted during WWII —which left Cambodia, alongside Vietnam and Laos shattered and toxified. (All told, over four million tonnes of Minnesota can be found scattered across Indochina, packaged in devices called Rockeye, Daisy Cutter and Pineapple.)
This is not to absolve Stalin and his ilk, their murderous campaigns were unforgivable, and should never be forgotten. It is, however, to give them context. All too often communist leaders are spoken of as if they were imposed on history, rather than being integral to it. If you were to take Pinker, Francis Fukuyama or the Black Book hoaxers seriously, you’d come away perplexed at why anyone would want to diverge from the rational, enlightened and all-together natural march of capitalism.
In fact capitalism had a very specific and peculiar origin. Arising in England because of a uniquely market-dependent tenet class (a consequence of the Black Death and brutal feudal relations), it likely would have fizzled out were it not for the forceful outsourcing of this model, in the form of empire building. It is here, in the rapacious expansion of capital – and its logic demands perpetual growth – we see the counter movements come into effect, likewise inescapable.
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A group of teenagers leave me with a black eye and sore ribs. I compose myself and return to the street (fortunately my phone was not with me), then yell back, “Bunch of savages!”
Despite myself, all my heroes are uncivilised.
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What, you think our country is so innocent?
Establishment types despised Trump not as a result of his habitual lying. It was because ever so often he stumbled upon a devastating truth.
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One must allow ambiguity to flourish in all domains except politics. It is here the act of defining (and confining) is ignored to your detriment. Whatever is claimed, politics is no art, for it’s restrained by a means and ends alien to the creative process. It is a science, and real politicians are better served studying the procedures of decontamination.
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Unjust synthesis. To resort to Isaiah Berlin’s categories for just a moment. We can see what are called “negative liberties” to be the moral accompaniment to the rise of capitalism. It was the minority pursuit to do away with the obstacles to private wealth accumulation which produced such demands -- doing away with the taboo on usury, the cultural antipathy to fences. (Such a world, constructed around the locus You May…, is surely a desolate one.)
Positive liberties, like Polanyi’s double movement, were in turn a response to the rampant industrialization the “negative” engendered. The Stanford Encyclopaedia describes this type of liberty as encompassing “the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realise one’s fundamental purposes.” The majority of those liberated, now free to truck, barter and exchange, found this new day had no room for ancient privileges; and only a very particular use for them. Free to do almost anything, they had the power to do just as they were told.
The bourgeoisie had turned the world upside down, and then the monster disclosed itself.
Mammon, Our Savage God
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I used to blackout. This happened enough times I determined that if souls are indeed fictional, every time the stream of consciousness is broken death has occurred. A deteriorating meat puppet reawakens, with an entirely new “I” assimilating its memory and inclinations.
Could civilisation be understood in much the same way? The accumulated knowledge gathers, more so, now exponentially, yet the vessel is sapped of the strength to go on. We know more, wish and demand for even more, but the body is less and less capable of attaining the bare minimum. We are a golem, crumbling.
From here the necessity for Revolution becomes urgent— Desperate. The limbs must be broken and refashioned in such a way to live up to today’s needs; anything less will cripple dawn’s me.
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And their children wept, & built
Tombs in the desolate places,
And form’d laws of prudence, and call’d them
The eternal laws of God.
William Blake
I disagree. Blairite truths are eternal.
John Rentoul
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Terry Eagleton has said of conservatives: they think things are bad but could conceivably be a lot worse. Whereas radicals think things were very bad, but could be much improved, and liberals believe things just keep getting better and betterer. The primary ideological conflict is between the latter and those clear-eyed about the world’s state. There will be time for patricide later.
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These political opponents are not friends I just so happen to disagree with, for they wish me to persist against my will. How comforting it must be to have arrangements already conducive to your needs, with only the concern of slightly higher tariffs to crease that pampered crown. If you wish me to be a toiler, a cog or in awe, there is no other word for it: you are my enemy, and it is imperative that I rid myself of you. In the interim, and there is no point in denying it, I want my impression to haunt you in between the backseat and corporate chairs. Only, for it to feel less a stroll and more like the march of the condemned.
This way of thinking is more instinctive to someone of the Right. Treacherous and uncompromising, prerequisites for success.
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Why are the rich such bastards? The French resistance leader-turned-poet René Char suggested that, with their instincts so tied up with the property they own, they have lost sight of Life per se. The wealthy see themselves as custodians of a fund, almost entirely abstract, and appreciate little more. As a matter of fact, their digitised numbers and high-rises can survive all manner of floods, wildfires and pogroms. – And what do you know, this portfolio here may see a healthy growth should another Nyamata kick off.
Chomsky used to speak about how the “Masters of Earth” would not permit planetary suicide. Not while they owned it. But he underestimates the Vandals, be they facing or eclipsed by honour guard. They are unconcerned if extracting the marrow will collapse the arched frame. I’m alright Jack, no thing is irreplaceable.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
TS Eliot, The Rock
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The danger of levelling. A dialogue between a slug and lion: Sam Harris explained to Chomsky that by not setting out to murder, but just-so-happening to drop heavy ordinance on hospitals, the pax before Americana is assuredly well earned. Pronounced intention, he would have us believe, is all that matters. (Chomsky was taken aback, clearly unprepared by the inventive depths of Philosophy’s Final Boss.)
But in his insistence that a disinterest in the consequences of our actions – i.e. contempt – equates with blamelessness, all Harris succeeded in doing was letting the mask slip. It is little wonder this slimeball decided to end all “dialogue” with the Left, those Western Humanitarian features tend to turn stomachs in the light.
Be sceptical of Sceptics. Because once emotion is discounted from the calculus, we are on the road to algorithmic war. No longer needing to, we stop imagining the suffering of others; conflict becoming thoughtless and pitiless. Anders:
No war in history will have been more devoid of hatred than the war by tele-murder that is to come. ... [T]his absence of hatred will be the most inhuman absence of hatred that has ever existed; absence of hatred and absence of scruples will henceforth be one and the same.
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Let me be out-Law. The inescapable issue with freedom is as mere sentiment/nice thing, it has no content. In this liminal space ideals can be moulded by any fool into any form, and today everyone has a go. Who does not extol some brand of Freedom? And yet who, outside of some particularly nasty billionaires, has experienced anything approaching complete freedom of action?
Even on its own terms, the law which liberals and libertarians seek to put outside, above and to grant the last word, castrates and nullifies human desire at every turn. You may very well say that is the point, but dare we take the next step?
In the West freedom has come to mean the unmolested ability to say what one wants and to publish as one wishes (should one find a gatekeeper willing to accede). Go off the tarmacked path, and they’ll cite Western prostration to “political correctness” and, more rightly, our elaborately managed bare lives as impositions. A man from the Balkans explains: should someone dishonour my family, it is only right – nay, it is my duty – I butcher his. If I see an attractive girl, adds the Brahmin... What is the liberty to lampoon your government (never the State) in comparison?
Law is pernicious infringement, and jury duty infinitely more precious than choosing should your local representative for business interests sports a red tie or blue. If you really seek some semblance of freedom and equality, with this right your responsibility is to let the crooks go.
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Technophiles and progressives make wishes to “human ingenuity” the same way Christian apologists appeal to God. The latter have zero evidence the Almighty would grant a better tomorrow, whereas the others…
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Fukuyama considers the eventual granting of rights to African Americans and women all part of the grand liberal story.
The fact that self-proclaimed liberals endorsed illiberal ideas and policies in the past does not mean that the doctrine was incapable of acknowledging and correcting these mistakes…
These pompous Whiggish narratives ignore the radical movements which, developing quite apart from the prevailing creed, empowered themselves. These were bitter struggles in which troublesome women, racial “inferiors” and the unwashed masses rebelled, forcing a redefinition of Man. (An imperfect scaffold to be sure, and one whose precarity is becoming more apparent by the day.)
Neoliberalism however, for our infamous digger of History, can now be seen as an “extreme” aberration, outside of proper Liberalism (It’s the Real Thing). After all, who with the least bit of sentience could deny Thatcherism’s failure?
This nuanced appreciation of ideological trajectories - that what germinates can sometimes become something quite unexpected, even self-defeating - is never conceded to the Left. Seeking to mitigate the calamities of the global capitalist turn is, from beginning to end, bad. Just look at the Red Terror! The Gulag! Douglas Lain! In one way this shrill clamour is right, but it stops before becoming interesting. The Left is a disaster, a lost cause with few redeeming qualities, and yet wrong life cannot be lived rightly. Because what if that turning taken generations ago sent humanity careering over a cliff?
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Concrete fetish. They jest about paving over the world’s green, and then solemnly reveal the blueprints.
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Thought is never innocent. How accepting, you already have justifications for tomorrow’s pogrom!
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The Palestinian is my brother not because he shares a human frame. It is because he too has no future.
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The left is irrelevant to the present trajectory, and for that it deserves some credit.
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If we could but communicate with the Mosquito, we would learn that it too swims through the air with this same pathos and feels within itself the flying centre of this world.
Nietzsche
I picture the flailing electorate. Only the wild gesticulations of this one go beyond the parasitical. (Democracy: framed registration papers hang above child brides.)
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Games Without Frontiers. Our nuclear peace: the sun on which empires set.
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Beyond… no forms.
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In a space which has invested the market with an awesome unintelligibility once reserved for God, this… Finding no shame in superficiality they are nothing more than the desire of ad-men. Conceived of in boardrooms under a fluorescent light, you are one with a coke-fuelled scribble, at once consumer and product.
Worse, much worse than anything out of speculative fiction, witness Man. Failing to rise to the piano keys of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, the people today resemble a Farmer Says See n’ Say, tatty and hand-me-down.
Whether the silky clew curdling below the maw, or writing blindly through intestine halls, can you not tell? You are FREE.
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With mahogany Stalin went too far. The idea that you can get anywhere without destruction is a fool’s notion. You must burn it all then mimic the flame.
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When will the people become enlightened? When they have bread and when the rich and the Government will have ceased to hire perfidious journalists and venal speakers to mislead them; when the interest of wealth and that of the government be amalgamated with that of the people... When will their interest be amalgamated with that of the people?
Never.
After guillotining the Incorruptible, the vultures found this scribble among his personal effects. What it reveals detracts nothing from the mission he set himself. Robespierre is here shown as the hopeless knight – a defunct but noble archetype. The last knight ushering in the final night.
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In truth, I feel the residue of some race long extinguished. They were not angels, my people, but they respected things for which this alien tongue has no words. While my host struggles with the death of their “God” (not yet recognising His replacement, for the hymns do not stir) I am incapable of articulating my loss.
What is to be done? The universe is silent. The world is silent. I am silent.