“See, a lot of y’all don’t understand Kendrick Lamar
Because you wonder how I could talk about money, hoes, clothes, God, and history all in the same sentence
You know what all them things have in common?
Only half of the truth, if you tell it
See I spent twenty-three years on this earth searching for answers
‘Til one day I realized I had to come up with my own
I’m not on the outside looking in
I’m not on the inside looking out
I’m in the dead fucking center, looking around”1

The idea of royalty moves through Kendrick Lamar’s ouvre alongside his grounded sense of capitalist realism. But power, for the rapper from Compton CA, issues from his ability to speak the truth, and to do so in such a way that makes enough money, that he can uplift himself and his city, his polis, if you will. If “cash moves everything around me” and if soul is the self-moving principle, then cash has become the soul of our society, since a norm like subsistence farming is a thing of the past, and home-based handicraft is now itself a niche commodity market. We mustn’t forget how novel our time is, how strange our normal is, the commodity has never in history been so hegemonic as it is today. Nonetheless there seems to be some way of connecting the old and the new, the eternal with the plastic, even in America. It is through performing commercial activity effectively, but without compromising even half of the truth, that K-Dot gets his power, and can use that power to help nudge the world toward a better future. Kendrick Lamar appears at least, to be a model worthy of praise, balancing survival in a truly vulgar world, with the maintenance of some ideal of the good, for example, integrity, whatever it might cost.

“I swore I wouldn’t tell, but most of y’all sharing bars
Like you got the bottom bunk in a two-man cell (A two-man cell)
Something’s in the water (Something’s in the water)
And if I gotta brown-nose for some gold
Then I’d rather be a bum than a motherfuckin’ baller.”

There is a sense in Lamar’s work, that if he was forced to choose between compromising his integrity, and losing all of his wealth, or gaining the world and losing his soul, he would choose the former. There is a possible world, not too different from ours in which “Kendrick Lamar” is not a household name, and never makes a dime. We benefit from the fact that we do not live in this world in which he amounted to nothing, although it often feels as though that world which is, is not possible at all. It feels as though wealth never goes where it is deserved, that it exclusively follows narcissism, scheme, deceit and overblown mediocrity masquerading as excellence, and that all integrity, realness, magnanimity, and honor is systematically, algorithmically punished. Kendrick Lamar is living proof, that even if that is a strong general tendency in market economies, it is no absolute law of nature. Plato explains…

“…what’s acquired from a combination of just and unjust actions is more than double what can be acquired from just actions alone, while expenditure of someone who is unwilling to spend, either in a good way or an ignoble way, is less by half than that of good people who are willing to spend on what’s good. Therefore those who acquire twice as much and spend half as much would always be wealthier than those who do the exact opposite.”2

The unjust will always dominate the market, then hoard wealth, and eventually they might even edge the just out entirely, this is why Plato’s political strategy is oriented around controlling and limiting the market, focusing human energetic expenditure on disciplined defense of the free polis, and leaving commerce exclusively to metics (foreign nationals). Freedom being necessarily defined in the ancient world as not being some barbarian’s literal slave. Today, there is however, no polis to defend. But if founding a new independent colony across the sea is not an option for us, nor is attempting to preach into the ear of the tyrant of Syracuse, then as concerns our time, good and just people ought not disdain wealth too much. It may turn out that the only way to combat bad, fiendishly wealthy people, will be with good, moderately wealthy people. Vulgarity is all we have today, someone sold the world, we must make something good come out of this, because that is better than trying to keep clean hands, and accomplish nothing.3

Look at my life then look at yours
Get some ambition, why you bored?
Time’ll never wait on no man
Society will never hold your hand
Niggas like to gossip like bitches
Got me thinking you don’t like bitches
Wonder what’s behind them Ray Bans?
Eyes of a coward, I understand

Nothing like Plato’s ancient city state exists today, outside of an anomaly like the Vatican. Even single city nations today, like Luxembourg are embedded in and dependent upon the system of international neo-liberal trade. Yet still, like Plato, Kendrick stands for his city. “I should probably run for mayor when I’m done, to be honest” he says in King Kunta. The Republic is of course, deeply concerned with the question of who should rule a city.

Kendrick (or the narrator, as it were) claims authority and anoints himself with the motif of royalty, magisterium, and divine right, referring to himself as ‘immaculately conceived’ and “Yeshua’s new weapon” in the song DNA. In Element, it becomes apparent that authority in a 21^st century American context can only come from one of two places, wealth or force. But then why so many references to the highest authority, beyond that of men, and why such an emphasis on speaking the truth regardless of consequences. Feel brings us into a mind ontop of the world, racked by the same kind of isolation and paranoia worthy of the head of a royal family. The closer people are to the seat of power, the greater of a threat they become, that makes family not the haven in a heartless world, but the most dangerous thing in the universe. This feeling of paranoia is increasingly consistent in Lamar’s later work, especially Damn, accompanying his success as the “#1 rapper in the world.”

Feel like my thought of compromise is jaded
Feel like you wanna scrutinize how I made it
Feel like I ain’t feelin’ you all
Feel like removin’ myself, no feelings involved
I feel for you, I’ve been in the field for you
It’s real for you, right? Shit, I feel like-
Ain’t nobody prayin’ for me

It is fitting in capitalism, that the motif of royalty, and net worth would intersect, as though money itself has purchased divine right itself, and certainly the billionaires of our world seem to feel as entitled to see their will exercised on the world, as any Hellene tyrant ever did. But that’s just it, that is the world in which we live.

Regardless of whether this or that ought to be, we don’t live in any ideal state. Even Plato compromised with reality, that’s why he followed up The Republic with The Laws. In fact, even in The Republic there is a compromise with the reality of human nature, because the work moves on from the “city of pigs” when it could — if Plato’s Socrates had “gone mad,” (see Diogenes) — have just stopped there. The Republic was not meant to be taken as a blueprint or set of instructions, but that is almost exactly what the Laws was. And yet, The Laws was not a dogmatic injunction from heaven, but clearly establishes itself as a living document, appealing to the consent of the reason of the governed, requiring sufficient authority to be altered, but nonetheless open to change.4 What is entirely intransigent by contrast, these days anyway, is the American constitution, a document and a geist, ultimately dedicated to open commercial season for all, against all; “America, God bless you if she’s good to you.” A government of the market, by the market, for the market. In the struggle between civic republican virtue and classical liberal vice, the liberal has absolutely buried the republican, this time it seems, without a trace. I’ll say it again, if nobody reads the classical republican tradition, then there is no such thing as a conservative today, and nobody does, so nobody is. It’s liberals all the way down, nobody, absolutely nobody is against progress, no matter how much they may scream about “progressives,” “conservatives” at least since the Reagan revolution, if not much earlier, have supported every economic shift which makes “progressivism” as we know it today, possible. If it were really true that the expansion of commerce and desire could usher in world peace, banishing war to the dung heap of history, then it might be easy to dismiss the martial civic republican (admittedly, already an antiquity LARPER) as straightforwardly backwards and outdated, which isn’t entirely untrue. And yet, what (neo)liberalism has actually succeeded in, through its intensification and corporatization of commercial activity, is inventing for sale, new, unique and increasingly destructive ways of killing people, only more efficiently, and with less and less skin in the game; like the ‘precision bombing’ of wastewater treatment plants by drone. “The American Flag is wrapped in drag with explosives,” laments Lamar. We are politically incapable of changing course, we vest our energies into a polarized system in which both sides agree on most of the big issues, rather than actually forming an independent politics, with attempts to establish such independence tending to be swallowed up into the establishment. Kendrick Lamar demands by contrast, in a song which mentions King, Malcom X, Huey P. Newton, and Fred Hampton, HiiiPoWeR.

This is physical and mental, I won’t sugarcoat it
You’d die from diabetes if these other niggas wrote it
And everything on TV just a figment of imagination
I don’t want a plastic nation, dread that like a Haitian
While you motherfuckers waiting, I be off the slave ship
Building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs

“Socialism” appears to some to be the current answer to this problem of the failure of a new independent politics. It does not accept all of the established premises of the current symbolic order, not taking it as given that wealth is the end of life, and this at least superficially agrees with Plato’s deep disdain for money. But does Socialism now, or has it ever provided a coherent alternative to the question: what is the end of life? Not to mention that “socialism” is a 20th century idea, so that it isn’t entirely clear what it means in the 21st century, with different labor conditions, and class relations. The ‘developed Marx’ of Kapital, in his own time was vague, or simply unconcerned with philosophical questions, beyond the scope of economics. Current leading lights on the Marxist left (who often put distance between themselves and politically viable “socialists”) provide “Freedom” or “Emancipation” as their master signifiers, with varying degrees of nuance. However, the left has remained without fail, excruciatingly vacant on both the whys and the hows of life and politics, deferring to future desires of the emancipated world, over current desires confined to capitalist reality. Forgive me if this approach seems inadequate. It is as though Marxists believe that we are currently too Institutionalized under capitalism, to think anything whatever beyond it, as though “You can take your boy out the hood, but you can’t take the hood out the homie.” Capitalism has provided the glasses through which we observe the world—Marxists agree with the established liberal default that there is only relative good; for the capitalist subject there is one good, but for the subject of communism there will be some higher good. But if the goods are relative how could they be comparable? How can we say that future communism will actually be better than present capitalism, and not just as past Communism was, only different, debatably worse (depending on who you ask, precisely where and when). In fact, Capitalism has a horizon in the past which we can know an awful lot about and one in the future, which looks increasingly apocalyptic on the current trajectory. In the middle is us, “in the dead fucking center, looking around,” alone with our judgment about what could change the future from worse, to better. The relevant decisions in this timeline are about what we judge now, as being good, and act accordingly. What is good is what will take us all through to a better world, what is bad is what around us will consume us, and take our future from us.

“Money trees is the perfect place for shade” says Kendrick. Here is a judgment about what money is good for. It is good for the purpose of providing leisure, so that we can think, so that we can have the space to decide for oursleves, what our ends are. Money as wealth has the capability of overcoming itself, to a limited degree. But is that what it is judged to be good for by most rappers? No, the purpose of money in most hip-hop, is for getting more money. The insatiability of desire is the crux, by contrast, of the internal drama throughout Kendrick Lamar’s work, but rather than simply bitch about the behavior of others (whining being the almost exclusive preoccupation of the political left), he criticizes the bottomlessness in his own soul as though it’s a demonic possession.

What you want you, a house? You, a car?
Forty acres and a mule? A piano, a guitar?
Anything, see my name is Lucy,5 I'm your dog
Motherfucker, you can live at the mall
I can see the evil, I can tell it, I know it's illegal
I don't think about it, I deposit every other zero
Thinking of my partner, put the candy, paint it on the Regal
Digging in my pocket, ain't a profit big enough to feed you
Every day my logic get another dollar just to keep you
In the presence of your chico, ah!

It is Kendrick’s religiosity, and seriousness, if not the more recent Black Israelite motifs, which turns people off from his work, but he nonetheless continues to sell albums.^[1] K-Dot makes you think, and we don’t always want to think, but we do at least, want to want to think. About what we are living this life for, if we are broke, why keep going, if we are rich, why did we get ourselves to where we are, what was it all for, what we desire and why.

[Kendrick Lamar:]

How much a dollar really cost?

The question is detrimental, paralyzin’ my thoughts

Parasites in my stomach keep me with a gut feeling, y’all….

[James Fauntleroy:]

It’s more to feed your mind

Water, sun and love, the one you love

All you need, the air you breathe

Even when Kendrick isn’t bringing in other characters explicitly he famously, and artfully modulates his voice resulting in a dialectic form, as though multiple personalities are combatting one another for the attention of a single consciousness. It is this negotiation, this questioning which I find compelling in Lamar’s work, for him, questions of virtue and vice, sin and righteousness are live. The struggle of whether to want money, is it good or bad, and what to do with it when you have it, these are live dramas played out to the beat. This kind of interrogation of the world, to me this is the philosophical spirit, what I find in common between Plato, and Lamar, and it is the kind of dialectical reasoning which we badly need if we want to make it out of the near future. What opening up the question of the good does, a question we are closed off to, is that it frees the mind to think critically about the world around it. What is good for Plato is what approximates eternity, what is bad is what corrupts from within. This is a sensible framework intuitively, because what protects my soul and extends my health or life is good to me, and what corrupts my health and poisons my mind is bad for me. Further, it seems better than say, divine command theory, or utilitarianism, both of which can be used to justify (morally launder) all sorts of heinous things. The dialectical interrogation of what is good and what is bad in my life, cannot, because what it demands of me, centrally, is that I am honest with myself.

Peace to fashion police, I wear my heart
On my sleeve, let the runway start
You know the miserable do love company
What do you want from me and my scars?
Everybody lack confidence, everybody lack confidence
How many times my potential was anonymous?
How many times the city making me promises?
So I promise this, nigga
(I love myself)
Uh, and when you lookin’ at me, tell me what do you see?

But thinking about what is good in itself, or intrinsically worthy of praise seems too impractical to the modern ear. “Good for whom? Good for what?” we want to say instinctively, because good-in-itself seems to imply some objective third perspective, and God doesn’t exist, everyone seems to “know.” Nobody told Kendrick Lamar apparently, and God bless, Kendrick and Plato agree on this too, that God is good, and that the soul exists: “the one in front of the gun lives forever.” But to rely on God as a philosophical premise is a distinct issue from that of the good, and a distinct issue from faith, which his constituted by a leap. We shouldn’t collapse the distinction between Platonic ethics and divine command theory, nor pretend we understand the reasons behind Lamar’s theology (a term coined by Plato). Plato’s forms are not God’s playthings, they are eternal in their own right. I for one don’t believe in a literal heaven of forms, it could exist but it’s about as falsifiable a belief as the unlikely postulate that there is a teapot orbiting Alpha Centauri. But this is largely beside the point, at least to me, that is, it is secondary. Our concepts, regardless of their metaphysical status in the absence of us, point beyond us, even to the absence of us.

If I say that “wealth is a vulgar pursuit” I do not mean that it is absolutely evil, but I do mean that it is absolutely vulgar, for everyone, period. This is no less true in Plato’s time than ours, because we’re dealing with the same human species, a species which deals in universals. Wealth is a means to an end, it is in fact, not an end in itself since it objectively does not make sense for something whose function is expressly to purchase something else, to become an end in itself, that would be a contradiction in terms. When I say that “Pierre is a good person” I don’t mean that Pierre’s friendship is advantageous to me, I mean that our friendship is good. If I mean that Pierre’s friendship is advantageous, that is what I would say. If I say “I love you” I don’t mean that “you are expedient to my life” etc.. If I say “the light of the sun is good,” I mean every ray, not just the ones that happen to touch earth at just the right intensity to produce life and warm my skin. Pleasant as well as empirically transcendental effects from the sun are how it is revealed to me as good, but it remains eternally good even if it betrays me. I also mean as good, the rays of light which burn me, and even the ones which go out into space affecting nothing for eternity. “The sun is good” means that even if it swallowed the earth and took all humanity with it, it would still be good, even in the absence of humanity, because just once, I loved it. That’s what “good” means, it isn’t relative, it is absolute, our particular perspective is one which plays with universals, and so reaches towards eternity. That is why (as a species) we cannot help but believe in the gods, atheism is only mourning cosmic loneliness. “I got dark, I got evil, that rot inside my DNA,” but I also have eternity in my DNA. If you tell a human who hasn’t been broken on the bureaucratic wheel of systemic inhumanity we call “society,” that eternity is impossible, they’ll tell you they don’t care. Our drive is infinite, our virtues as much as our vices, that’s why we pursue things that cannot possibly be ends in themselves, our drive can be misplaced onto quantity rather than quality. The fact that we even have the concept of the infinite at all — whether it exists or not no mortal can ever experience it and live to tell — is a testament to the fact that it is intrinsic to us, it abides in our souls as speaking beings.

Maybe you don’t agree that “the sun is good,” maybe you think that when you get a sunburn, that those were evil photons, or more likely, you probably think that sunlight is neither good nor bad, it is just an object, and our sentimentality foists itself as a spurious imposition onto things in the world. I don’t disagree. My point is that our fragile, puny human sentimental subjectivity is precisely the thing which implies eternity, because I would wager that the things which you love, you love not merely because they give you pleasure, render you successful in business, bring you power and status, or fulfill a divine command, but the things you love — or more precisely, what love means, is that you judge that something is good, full stop. The distinction between love and infatuation, is that we’ve merely been seduced by the latter, it has bypassed our judgment, and rational faculties, rather than, in Platonic fashion, won over the consent of our judgment between good and evil. When I say “Kendrick Lamar is a great rapper” I don’t mean “I think that Kendrick Lamar is a great rapper, but that’s just like, my opinion, man.” I mean that you’re objectively wrong if you think that Drake can even hold a candle. The feeling of the beauty of the infinite can be found in Kendrick Lamar’s work.

And this is rigor mortis and it’s gorgeous when you die
Ali recorded and I’m Morpheus, the matrix of my mind
I’m out the orbit, you an orphan and a hairdresser combined
I’m on the toilet when I rhyme, if you the shit, then I decline
I climax where you begin and then I end on cloud nine
And that’s important when you morph into an angel in the sky
And don’t be forging all my signatures, my listeners reply
And tell me that you biting style, you got a hell of an appetite
And I’ma be here for a while, just buckle up before the ride
Or knuckle up if you can fight, we always making ‘em duck or die
A suit and tie is suitable and usual in suicide
CSI just might investigate this fucking parasite

In the end, I don’t know who Kendrick Lamar is, this is some parasocial shit, it has to be, it’s not like I ever met him. What I admire is that he attempts to conceal what is best about himself, and hangs quite a lot of his pain and dirty laundry out for all to see, and that appears to me to be a mark of integrity, humanity, humility (“sit down”) and goodness, ostensibly running perfectly contrary to the incentives of the system, and somehow still coming out a winner, in a world tragically, and unjustly dichotomized into winners and losers. Can we all become Kendrick Lamar? Of course not, but we can all fight like him to become somebody, to stand for something, to take ourselves seriously, passionately, and not without humor, surrounded as we are by the very obliteration of meaning, and worse, the trivialization of love. So when a poet like Kendrick Lamar talks, listen, and “turn that TV off.”

Cause most of y’all ain’t real
Most of y’all gon’ squeal
Most of y’all just envy, but jealousy get you killed
Most of y’all throw rocks and try to hide your hand
Just say his name and I promise that you’ll see Candyman

^[1] I suspect that one of the reasons why Lamar went this direction in Damn, was to alienate the white people that happily sing along to his music about “Compton,” without knowing having a clue what they’re talking about. While he successfully uses racialism to get people to think, I ultimately prefer the universalist Kendrick who said “Now, I don’t give a fuck if you Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, goddammit. That don’t mean shit to me Fuck your ethnicity.”

What follows is a meditation on form, it is a piece of my own dialogue with the Platonic corpus, which I have been able to have thanks to the Becoming Human Project, and in particular.1 All I will say by way of introduction is that I believe the way in which Plato’s work was meant to be read is as a dialogue…. Thanks captain obvious! Yes, they are written as dialogues, but people really seem to me, to miss the whole point when they read Plato. I know I did the first time I gave Plato a go. Plato did not write, nor claim to write any inviolable texts, he wrote philosophical discussions and myths, and speculative fiction, designed to guide the reader (or hearer), to light the reader’s own way toward truth. Truth is more a journey, than a destination, it is a process of revealing motivated by the love for things in themselves, whether those things are of earth, or beyond. Regardless of one’s stance on their metaphysical status, there is absolutely no way of proceeding in and toward truth, without employing form, which is not just a theory of heaven, but a theory of mind. Plato was not lost in the clouds, he was developing a theory of mind, which stands to this day. Whether there is a prime moving creator mind from which the forms emanate or not, I for one don’t really care. That to me is not an uninteresting question, but it is an unanswerable one. There is no epistemic criteria which could possibly touch it, unless some of our epistemic criteria are in fact divine, but to prove the divinity of such criteria, or aptitudes of mind, puts us right back into the terrain of the unanswerable question, the unfalsifiable claim. We no longer live in a world which takes the existence of god(s) for granted, Plato’s world basically, universally did. But regardless of whether we are talking of the modern or premodern worlds, there are forms, which do exist. The proof of that is that you are reading this. You could not be reading this if you didn’t poses the apperceptive faculty of a universal grammar, that is the apperceptive faculty of linguistic formalism, which enabled you to learn this particular linguistic form which we call “English.” There is no thought without form, and there is a form of everything which is thinkable, because to be thinkable, something must have form. In other words, thought is form.

If there are forms, then everything which exists in the world, which is thinkable at all, has a corresponding form. If everything has a form then there is a form of the good, goodness as an essential ideal form. Let’s start by thinking about the advantages of believing that there is an absolute good, and an absolute evil. The disadvantages to this which might spring to mind have to do with all of the evil done in the world by those who believe that they know what is absolutely evil and what is absolutely good. But the very explication of that problem tells us that the absolutely good and the absolutely evil are absolutely not to blame. Absolute evil has never been perpetrated by anyone who simply believed that there is an absolute good, but it has been perpetrated time and time again, by those who are certain that they have inviolable knowledge of what the absolute good is. Certainty is just a feeling. The fact that humans manage to make this very clear and obvious mistake, conflating knowledge of being, with knowledge of the nature of being, cannot be blamed by any stretch of the imagination, on the absolute good, or even on the belief of the absolute good. Perverse certainty originates from the human propensity to become absolutely certain about that which we do not know. In short, we have a tendency to become overconfident idiots. We become convinced that just because we know that there is good and there is evil, that we are somehow therefore the oracle to the world of what the distinction is between the two. The latter does not simply follow the former.

This said, the absolute good is in fact, a lot more intuitive than you might think, for Plato in the Republic, what is good is what preserves, and what is evil is what destroys.

And you admit that every thing has a good and also an evil; as ophthalmia is the evil of the eyes and disease of the whole body; as mildew is of corn, and rot of timber, or rust of copper and iron: in everything, or in almost everything, there is an inherent evil and disease?

Yes, he said.

And anything which is infected by any of these evils is made evil, and at last wholly dissolves and dies?

True.

The vice and evil which is inherent in each is the destruction of each; and if this does not destroy them there is nothing else that will; for good certainly will not destroy them, nor again, that which is neither good nor evil.

Certainly not.

If, then, we find any nature which having this inherent corruption cannot be dissolved or destroyed, we may be certain that of such a nature there is no destruction?2

What lasts for a long time emulates the eternal, better than what goes away quickly, destroyed by its own inner corruption. This is how it can be the case for Plato, that Sparta, a state founded on principles of almost unspeakable terror and violence (heinous oppression of the Helots), could be better than Athens, a state, while not free of terror and violence by any stretch of the imagination, was founded much more on freedom and equality, things which we would tend to recognize (anachronistically albeit) as enlightened liberal values. What Plato recognized and revered in Sparta, is that it had a relatively more stable and long lasting cultural-political formation, than did the extremely volatile, democratic Athens. Spartans were far less vain than Athenians, far more cohesive, less selfish, less interested in personal enrichment, more consistently effective in military matters, and Plato also recognized, far more gender egalitarian. But the Republic, while Political, is as Samuel Loncar has said, not primarily political. I’ll quote again the important ending of book IV of the Republic.

I understand; you mean that he will be a ruler in the city of which we are the founders, and which exists in idea only; for I do not believe that there is such an one anywhere on earth?

In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other.

As all great philosophy is, Plato’s is universal, the heavenly city can live on in the soul of the individual under the worst of tyrannies, the freest democracies, or the most disciplined timocracy. One of the many silly criticisms of Plato comes from Nietzsche, who believed that the example which Plato set for Christianity was to disdain this real, material world, for the world of the beyond, the heaven of flying space triangles.3 But if we actually read Plato’s words above, what does he say: “for he will live [on earth] after the manner of that [heavenly] city….” Plato is concerned only with how we ought to live the only life which we have, in light of what is true. The entire motivation for otherworldly metaphysical speculation, is only so that we might live better, here and now. Far from forsaking the body, or in any way disdaining reality, and giving up on this life, the moral motivation behind the doctrine of the eternal soul is improvement of the earth. Furthermore, what could possibly be better for the health of the body’s material existence, than a deep understanding of the form of the body.

Plato’s moralism is of a piece with the pursuit of truth of the embrace of all reality, because to live well is to live in accordance with the truth of reality, by the very definition of “well” that is, good. The good contains the true for Plato, and I have to agree with him since that is just about obvious. The beauty of Platonism is its complete lack of modern cynicism, wherein the good became defined as good-for this or that particular end, rather than good-in-itself. The greatest modernists in philosophy, take Immanuel Kant for instance, attempted to reverse this fixation on expediency, but for reasons beyond the scope of this essay, they failed, at least to convince the world, and unfortunately, backward utilitarianism dominates in terms of popularity, a failure which we are still paying for. But I ask you what you think, when you love something, how do you treat it, as though it is good-for some particular end, like your own satisfaction, or as though it is good-in-itself? When you love someone do you think that they are good for how they make you feel, or what things they bring you, or that they are good, full stop? I’ll put it differently, which love is higher, the one which approves of things as ends in themselves, or the one which only approves of that which benefits it in some way? I think that anyone who has ever been in love, or who has ever had a calling, or experienced profound reverence for anything or anyone, would say they were drawn to what is in fact good in that calling or person, or place, and not to the money they acquired, or the prestige, the experience of pleasure, happiness, or what have you. Plato’s moral logic is the logic of love, in the deepest definition of the term, which hypostasizes its object into eternity, and whether we reconcile our hard-nosed empirical rationality with the belief in a reality beyond the humming energetic matter apparently around us, and which is us, the kinds of beings which we are, composites as we are, believe in eternity. That is, to be a human, is to be a hypostatic creature, it is to be forever beyond ourselves in love. We have an expression for when we lose this passion, we call it being “dead inside.” But the hard-nosed empiricist will still have objections, even if she is deeply in love. Systematic, yet anything but dead inside, materialist philosopher George Santayana launched a very reasonable critique against the doctrine of forms which will resonate with many.

The question whether there are not, in external nature or in the mind of God, objects and eternal types, is indeed not settled, it is not even touched by this inquiry; but it is indirectly shown to be futile, because such transcendent realities, if they exist, can have nothing to do with our ideas of them. The Platonic idea of a tree may exist; how should I deny it? How should I deny that I might some day find myself outside the sky gazing at it, and feeling that I, with my mental vision, am beholding the plenitude of arboreal beauty, perceived in this world only as a vague essence haunting the multiplicity of finite trees? But what can that have to do with my actual sense of what a tree should be? Shall we take the Platonic myth literally, and say the idea is a memory of the tree I have already seen in heaven? How else establish any relation between that eternal object and the type in my mind? But why, in that case, this infinite variability of ideal trees? Was the Tree Beautiful an oak, or a cedar, an English or an American elm? My actual types are finite and mutually exclusive; that heavenly type must be one and infinite. The problem is hopeless. Very simple, on the other hand, is the explanation of the existence of that type as a residuum of experience. Our idea of an individual thing is a compound and residuum of our several experiences of it; and in the same manner our idea of a class is a compound and residuum of our ideas of the particulars that compose it. Particular impressions have, by virtue of their intrinsic similarity or of the identity of their relations, a tendency to be merged and identified, so that many individual perceptions leave but a single blurred memory that stands for them all, because it combines their several associations. Similarly, when various objects have many common characteristics, the mind is incapable of keeping them apart. It cannot hold clearly so great a multitude of distinctions and relations as would be involved in naming and conceiving separately each grain of sand, or drop of water, each fly or horse or man that we have ever seen. The mass of our experience has therefore to be classified, if it is to be available at all. Instead of a distinct image to represent each of our original impressions, we have a general resultant — a composite photograph — of those impressions. This resultant image is the idea of the class. It often has very few, if any, of the sensible properties of the particulars that underlie it, often an artificial symbol — the sound of a word — is the only element, present to all the instances, which the generic image clearly contains.4

The problem with this very reasonable critique is that it has no explanation for how the grouping of perceptions into a form is to be done in the first place. Santayana claims such a process is functionally necessary, but he does not know how this happens. Plato is actually, perhaps surprisingly, closer to this understanding. How does the mind manage to match like to like, in virtue of what does likeness exist; the critique leaves the problem of representation itself, opaque. I think that Santayana is correct, actually, that we form our ideals through compounded experience, and that if there are such things as the caricature of the Platonic forms (flying space triangles), then they are as unfalsifiable as it is to say that there is a material teapot orbiting alpha centari. However, like Santayana and Plato both, I have enormous reverence for the existence of the human mind and everything in it. The human mind draws from a deep preconscious well, below its reservoirs of stored or even unconscious memory of sense impressions, in which the faculty of likeness, or representation was somehow born. This much is undeniable, to the dualist, as much as to the materialist.

So if we go with Santayana, and if we take Plato seriously, but not literally, we might get a notion of the forms which is dialectical, which does not descend from heaven to light our way, but which brightens our path by going out from the mind to the empirical world and then back again, enough times that an ideal form is formed, which is stored away for the purpose of making recognition of types, efficient, and effective. But again, what then is form itself? Form comes to be in this view, the ability of re-cognition, which then is the ability of representation itself. Formalization in the mind and not in heaven, is discussed by Plato using the Metaphor of a scribe and a painter within, which reconstructs our world from the shadows of raw sense data, similar to how modern neuroscience and psychology suggests our brain actively reconstructs memories, when we recall them, whether long term, or short term. This if anything, as a universal innate ability, combined with our dexterous habit of manipulation of matter, is the fire from heaven given to man.

But if there is no real heaven, then how do we light our way? If the Platonic myth is only a myth, if the soul is not really the eternal form of man, then everything is simulacra, everything is a copy of a copy and there never really was any original, only an apperceptive, transcendental ability of our lonely minds, in a natural void of meaning, calling out without any reasonable hope for a response. But that means that the original, as in the origin of form as such, is still mind. That which originates forms, that which thinks, and thinks itself, that which is the origin point of the full faculty representation, that is something markedly different from the rest of nature. Nature originated representation long before human beings came along into it, but we, homo hypostasis, took things to a new level. We are a fractal bifurcation, a new, distinct tendril of nature.5 We are a form of life which forms a more coherent unity of its own many parts, across time and space, something which goes on to form unities of other parts. We are a recognition machine which has gone so far as to create new, larger, stupid but far more powerful, recognition machines. So the ideas of many philosophers, from certain Buddhists to Anti-Oedipus, that there is no unity of self (ego), or that unity ought to be abhorred, is a complete mis-recognition, of the obvious facts of our existence. Actually, less of a misrecognition, it is an ironic disavowal of the very existence of that which utters the disavowal. And to utter a disavowal is to partake of form, is to partake of formal existence. Just because there is a way of looking at ourselves which dissolves our unity—and as a spiritual practice I do not deny its power or utility—this does not mean that our unity does not exist, any more than it means that disunity does exist. How can one pole of a magnet exist without the other? In fact, the attackers of ego will find that they have cohered into a unity, their own opposition against unity. The wisest Buddhists fully understand this, and build their system around this contradiction. Further, if we did not exist, as unity, then as unity, we would not have any effects. In truth, the more unified one becomes in terms of their passions, intentions, dreams, material prosperity, and desires, the more of an effect on the world around them they are able to have, the way a broad rush of water narrowed to thin nozzle can cut stone instantly. This unity is not one formed by cutting the world away from oneself until some unique self-same kernel is all that is left, but is one formed through the story of one’s (kernel’s) life, situated in a swerving world of flows and partial objects, no less. “Wo es war, sol ich werden.” We are always becoming, but when becoming is developing rather than devolving, we are becoming unity. This is of course a back and forth, dialectical process, dissolving ourselves as such to be reborn, renamed, requilted, time and time again, but nonetheless, life is developmental, if it is not to be regressive, it is toward beauty, if it is not toward nihilism.6

Plato told a beautiful story to his own time and place, one which might have saved millions of lives from nihilism, downstream of which is the most intense cruelty toward the other, and destruction of the self. Many “philosophers” want this nihilism back today, in the eternal return of the form of sophistry. Philosophers of today must kill this mindless scourge again. I say “mindless” with all the vehemence that term indicates, because these disunifiers are speaking as unified minds, but leading the drives of others who take them to be wise, toward disarray, disorder, and bad deaths. The advocates of mindlessness, are almost never themselves mindless. The only people who can cloak themselves in this philosophy of formlessness, of the truth of total flux, the abhorrence of all form, are those who wear such a belief only on the outside, but who do not really believe it, who do not take it into themselves as guiding principles for life, even as they recklessly give it as advice to others. They tell others that there is no unity, even as they build for themselves a unified sense of self as one who philosophizes against one. This is the essence of sophistry, it scales a wall and then pulls the ladder up behind itself, delighting in setting traps for others, but knowing where its traps are laid, is careful to not get caught in them. So if we are concerned, as Plato clearly was, with living well, and with the welfare of those around us, then we should live in the truth of our being, as hypostatic monsters. That is real, fully existing creatures, which exist through our positing ourselves as existing. “I” am because I recognize after I have written, that I have been here, writing to you. We make ourselves up as we go, always walking backwards in time. That is how it is that we are real, that is the essence of human being, we are each a story, a fiction, but an effective fiction, extant therefore, hypostatic, and hyperstitional.7

This existence in and through form, through thought, is no less real than the existence of rocks and trees and the like. Even ideas after all must actually exist alongside and ontologically parallel to objects, sharing exactly the same the same field of existence, because otherwise we slip into untenable dualisms. So any doctrine which wants to deny the reality of ideas, or to relegate them, as in vulgar materialism, to a subordinate existence to concrete objects, turns itself into a dualism, which is an inverted vulgar Platonism; a heaven of matter, presiding over a fallen earth of thought. Privileging empiricism to this degree is a travesty of the mind, nothing but a termination of thought itself. Never mind the fact that to believe that ideas do not actually exist is an idea, which if true, does not actually exist. The consequence of all this is that there is no reason under the sun, nor above it, which could possibly legitimate the idea that the basic sentimentality of the human soul, is one iota less true, or real, than the humming atoms which make it possible, or the supersonic whistling chunks of lead which are among the panoply of threats trying to make the soul stop its hypostitional song, once and for all.

But if the human soul is real, and cast about in the universe of other material things like a few rare quarters in a massive junk drawer, then what of the soul’s relation to the good? If we are alone in this universe, even if only functionally, we might be given to despair. There is a hypostatic good-in-itself, for hypostatic beings. By this point, the logic we have developed leaves us with this conclusion: The good-in-itself flows up in the feedback between mind and world, accumulating as a kind of ideal average derived from positively coded empirical experiences. These experiences are stored in a reserve of memory, as skeletal structures, thanks to our apperceptive ability. When an actual memory is triggered of some particular thing, our mind reassembles a categorical form and its particular characteristics, following various environmental triggers; the five senses. A child is able to reproduce the basic form of a horse thanks to his ability to produce in his mind, form, but is not necessarily able to recall many particular details of particular horses which he has seen, save one or two, which have made a particular, formal impression. The good-in-itself is likewise, an ideal in reference to one’s personal history, but which enters the sphere of the universal human apperceptive faculty, of formalism. Everyone can understand what a horse is just by access to its basic form in their minds, and everyone can understand what good and evil is, just by access to their basic forms, since everyone has lived through something which destroyed from within, and also something which preserved from within. To say that “good and evil” do not exist, is as ludicrous in this sense as to say that horses do not exist. But certain complications approach us at the crest of this hill, namely, if we know that there is good and evil, and maybe even have some, nearly innate idea of what they are, why do we perpetrate so much evil? We could recourse to ignorance, and I will, but we will take a certain path to get there.

The hypostatic being always wants one more than it has, because it always desires to get at the reality behind what it perceives, to touch the thing-in-itself. We are greedy, ebullient creatures for whom enough is never enough, which is the heart of our worst crimes and our most wonderful achievements. That is, the whole, the unity which the hypostatic being hypostasizes always seems to be missing something, the whole seems always down one. We correctly perceive that our hypostition is limited, lacking, that it never really gets at the whole, never grasps the whole thing completely, and even when it seems to, it seems to lose track of itself. To count something for one seems to separate it off from the universe as a whole, in a way that is spurious, and yet to refuse to count some one thing for one, seems to deny its obvious extant status. The very idea of the particular, cries out to universality, to say there is “one” is to name both a part of everything that is, and everything that is, at the same time.8

The whole is always slipping through the fingers of consciousness, never wholly tasted, never wholly felt, never wholly known, never wholly penetrated, never wholly grasped, never wholly seen, never wholly understood. We are innately wise enough to feel that there is always something else missing, but we are not innately wise enough to know that there will always be something missing. We will always be short of the whole, as long as we are thinking as we do, as animals, which must eat this or that other, particular. We could not survive, walking always in the light of our connection to all things, we would starve in such golden contemplation. By not being lost in the truth of this golden oneness with all being, we can fight for the parallel truth of our own particular existence, and yet this total ignorance of the unity of all, is also what destroys us. Our form therefore is absurd, contradictory, seemingly half finished, stuck in the middle “between thought and physical form,” between universal and particular, and generally bewildered about what to do about these untenable contradictions which are at the core of our very, fundamental constitution.9 But this inability to access the whole which we dream of, is what propels us forward, enveloping the globe, conjuring gods, launching ourselves into space, smashing into one another, and other species. In 2025 we noticed that blue whales have stopped singing, and it seems because they are hungry, because algae blooms due to rising ocean temperatures have decreased krill populations dramatically.10 Our own ebullience has come to choke out some of the kindest lifeforms which we share the planet with. We ought to know better than this. This is not good.

The good is that which is beyond what we can conceive of as being good. The good is not identical to our fantasies, but behind them, on the other side of them, it is that which renders the attainment of our wildest dreams, disappointing. The good is the reason why we fantasize, because we can’t attain the good-itself, we can’t attain good as a whole. The reason why the actualization of an artwork so often falls short of some vision of it which we started with, is not necessarily because of poor technical execution, but because goodness itself exists as the ideal form which has been accrued as a composite ideal of the best of all the good things which we have ever experienced, of matter or mind, it is the fantasy beyond fantasy, fantasy traversed. We are so often disappointed because when our fantasies are realized, we fail to realize that the reason why we were chasing them was to get at the good in itself, the result of our apperceptive ability to sense what is good, but any particular good, will always fall short of the universal, goodness-itself.

The purpose of education is, of course, to free us from these prejudices, and to develop our ideals in the direction of the greatest possible good. Evidently the ideal has been formed by the habit of perception; it is, in a rough way, that average form which we expect and most readily apperceive. The propriety and necessity of it is entirely relative to our experience and faculty of apperception. The shock of surprise, the incongruity with the formed percept, is the essence and measure of ugliness.11

The form of the good, is the abstract good, which does not lack anything, which feels complete in our imaginations, but only exists there, and yet it is from there that our souls take their motivation. The form of the horse which the child draws no doubt vastly exceeds whatever the child puts down in crayon. It is the same with adults, choosing to change careers, move to a new place, buying the next commodity. The good is therefore, posited by us as the eternal beyond, that which for Plato was more real than what appears to us as reality, but through which reality has its being. My position is similar, but not identical. I think the forms are not more real than the flux of matter, but precisely, exactly as a real. For me “God is what ignores you,” god is an expectation which disappoints, it is the confusion as to whether I heard a response, or only an echo of my own voice, played up by my expectation, based on my own formal apperceptive abilities. The beyond might exist but it is The Unnamable, any more is better left unsaid, so that in any event, for us god is present, only as an absence. We have to make our own decisions, and even the religious texts themselves are full of characters crying out to heaven, receiving nothing in return, from Job to Jesus: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani.” On this contingent plane we find ourselves, even those who have faith, crucially alone. To be a true Christian, just as much as to be a true Atheist, we have to find ourselves, alone.

Wars happen, and every species must eat. Even the whales destroy life, probably more life by weight than any other animal in history. Even the gentlest expressions of life cannot keep their hands clean of death. But the whales cannot do otherwise, their physiology dictates that they must keep their great momentum going, grazing and singing. We can do otherwise than to harm them, or at least we could have at some point in our history. Crimes will be answered, if not by the generation which commits them, then by their children’s children. That is not the way of God, but the way of Consequences. Plato wanted to save his home city from Consequences, the wrath of the gods, by turning the drives of his people away from pursuits of unwise and unnecessary expansion, and toward pursuits of depth, from love of money, to love of truth. The love of money produces the drive for money, which does not exist merely in the souls of hypostatic beings, but has taken on an external logic of its own, which we now call “capitalism.” Capitalism is an ideal formed in a dialectic of experience and mind, like all forms. But forms have a curious ability, they can become hypostatized into reality. Named gods are real unrealities, they unite and divide whole nations, and yet they are not even as real as we are, since they are dead hypostatic objects, that is, hypostatic objects which, unlike us, do not themselves hypostatize.

Capitalism is the god which now runs whether we, as unities, wish it to our not, it operates by making use of parts of us, which it has claimed as its own territory, taking them out of our unity as subjects, and into itself as hyperobject.12 This beast of exuded mind, this human drive externalized is the Consequence of our love of money, but is not identical to it. We might hate money, resent money, wish money would go away, make films about worlds in which it vanished and everything went back to zero, dream about not having to worry about it, but it doesn’t matter what we want anymore. It’s too late for all that. Our love for money has become a Thing, and it doesn’t care whether we have changed our minds about it. It does not care about us nor “all of the fine principles which we solemnly laid down.”13 Our fate, on the current trajectory, is to become partial objects ourselves, that is, split apart and used for fuel, eventually unable to even articulate what is happening to us, our minds slowly dismantled and sold for parts, to feed the great Market, and its divine churn. I don’t take Plato literally, but I do take him seriously, because if we had been more attentive to forms, which he was so obsessed with, we might not be in this situation.

The world which Plato inhabited did not have the form of Capitalism, as we know it today, but it did have the form of the pantheon of gods. Because they were many, it was easy enough to play them off against one another, so nothing ever got too out of hand for too long. Monotheistic Christianity on the other hand, got so bloated and absurd, undynamic in its rigid unity, that it split itself in two in spectacular fashion, twice in its history, and has always been buckling under its own energy, threatening to splinter, often held together by sheer force. But neither paganism nor Christianity are anything like the hyperobject that is global capital of the 21^st century, which is a beast even more hegemonic and intense than that of the capitalism of the 20^th century. Capitalism is an economic form defined by the circulation of money as capital, but that existed too in Plato’s time. What is truly different about capitalism as we know it, is that its form of m-c-m’ is absolutely dominant over all other large, shared societal forms. In Plato’s time, the oracles, priests and the citizens had the ability to override the will of the merchant class if they chose. In our world, m-c-m’ (money - capital - more money) is moved by inter-state competition over who is the best manager of the capitalist form, which is m-c-m’ uber alles, m-c-m’-c’ without brakes, or with as few as possible.14 The competition between the U.S. and China, for instance, is a battle over which form of state best accelerates the rate of development of capitalism; who can drive the process of modernization faster? Capitalism has always been a state project, since the days of the Italian city states, since the days of the Dutch East India company, the state has chosen to create an environment for competition, or one of monopoly, but in either case it is about managing the machine. The machine is now running itself, the tail wags the dog, no single state could choose to put it all back in the bag because that would be geo-political suicide. The true form is S[m-c-m’-c’], that is capital protected and managed, insulated from all other interests, whether political or religious, by the state. Even in actually existing socialism, say of the USSR, “communism” competed with capitalism on capitalism’s terms, so that it was S[m-c-m’-c’] vs. S[c-c’]. Since the dawn of the hegemony of capital, the “c” has never been out of the picture, only sometimes the “m,” has been sidelined, relegated to black markets.

The fact that Capital can be born and take over the whole of the earth, would have left Plato stuttering, but not entirely bewildered. Capitalism is not evil, it brings both good and evil, but the good it brings is through evil, if evil is understood as that which destroys. Capital comes afterall, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” It is a hypostatic object of our own creation, whose consequences nobody could have foreseen, except maybe Plato had he been born more than a millennia later than he was. The reason why only Plato, or a keen Platonist could have possibly foreseen where capitalism would lead us, is that understanding forms is the best predictive mechanism available to human beings. Marx is the closest thing we had to a 20^th century Platonist economist, because he was fixated on the form of the monstrous object, and all of his detailed empirical work, was used, to think about capitalism, that is, to precisely and properly formalize it. As such, Marx was indeed able to see much further than his contemporaries. He could see what capitalism would do, and if all his predictions weren’t right, he had far better odds than anyone else, and still does. Most of what he failed to predict is less about economics, and more about politics, where his powers of prediction failed rather spectacularly. And what is missing in Marx which we find so extensively in Plato is a deep discussion of political forms, which are still predictive up to this very day, a topic which I touched on, in my previous essay. A well-constructed form does seem, if not necessarily eternal, the closest the human being will ever come to eternity.

Forms are the very structure of thought itself, so they are more than this, but they also are pragmatic tools for life. If you can see how a thing behaves innately, then you can understand that what it is doing today, it will continue to do tomorrow, but if you can see that a feature of it which is effecting the world is not an innate feature of its essential logos, then you will be able to tell that its behavior may change tomorrow. This much is obvious as soon as it’s pointed out, because it is part of the innate, apperceptive way in which our powerful minds function. We recognize unity, oneness, and disunity, by our ability to perceive continuity in objects, and lack thereof.15 But we nonetheless impose these on the world, in order to navigate it, and in so doing, we are able to change the world as well. Continuity is afterall, something which is only relevant to us, at our scale. A perceptive being the size of a planet would likely not recognize the continuity or discontinuity between the home you grew up in, and the one in which you live now, but for a very long time, we could not perceive where the continuity of our own planet, where it began or ended. What we count for one, is relative to our functional need to navigate our world, but it nonetheless recognizes something real: the brick wall and the air adjacent to it, are objectively, and in truth, different from one another.

For some reason we are afraid of our own apperceptive abilities, we have been taught to wait for the data to come in for so long that it becomes irrelevant by the time we want to apply it. This is not thought, but a blind faith in an idea of “science” as an institutional form which will do our thinking for us. Even when we try to avoid using forms, which implicate our own responsibility and agency, we employ them anyways. We cannot help it, we might as well own it. Science in reality, is not a machine to think for us, but a deliberate, and deliberative form of thought, used for the generation of knowledge. Plato knew this too. So far from being Plato’s insane core idea, the notion of the forms is incredibly reasonable, and even practical. Reason itself cannot be done without forms, the two are nearly identical. Plato acknowledged what we are as formal hypostasizing beings far before Kant came along and posited the transcendental, or neuroscience ever tried to empirically reconstruct the basic structures of human cognition. The projects of Kant and Neuroscience are important and necessary developments in human thought, but they do not simply supplant Plato, they are in conversation with him, whether they appreciate it or not. If we have learned nothing from the 20^th century (and we haven’t) it would be not to be too arrogant about modernization, because even as we are gaining the world, we might be losing our souls. Soul, as in “psyche,” or “breath,” is yet another can of worms, but mind “nous,” that is, as Plato’s most famous student said, “the form of forms.” The form of forms is that by which we actively reconstruct, that is, understand our world. The key, as has said, is to know how and where to cut, as we make our map of intelligibility. To cut wrong is to compromise the whole structure, in a world in which so many are so eager to cut out “truth,” the cornerstone of the structure, we can feel the world soul tremble, and writhe.

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a year ago · 8 likes · Samuel Loncar

***1

It seems we often wonder how it is possible that the project of enlightenment could end with a triumph of obscurantism – the rise of all sorts of strange beliefs, mistrust in science, populism that relies on anything but rational argumentation…. Lacanian psychoanalysis offers an answer: it is not because dark forces and obscure drives have overpowered reason and won over knowledge and its evidence, but because reason and knowledge have never been without their own obscure and ‘unreasonable’ side. The contemporary social modality of disavowal is a perverse form of reason, of knowledge itself….2

There was a divergence of two paths moving from premodernity: one to modernity, the other to postmodernity. That is the best way to think of these strange, somewhat unwieldy terms, which are nonetheless extremely useful frames of thought. The process of modernization is common to both modernity and postmodernity.3 Whatever the precise dating is (any precision here is extremely arbitrary… although I favor October 31st, 1517 for the birth of modernity proper), the process of modernization, while not identical to the rise of capitalism, lives squarely in capitalism’s shadow. Here in the triumph of capitalism, we suffer from our fantasies of the beyond of it. From the internet to the academy, there has recently been quite a lot of movement in our fantasy formations toward a return of a premodern style, a sincere mode of life.4 We imagine, from the vantage of postmodernity, that something was lost through the process of modernization. While there are many ridiculous fantasies about this loss, from intellectuals and anti-intellectuals alike, as a trope, it suggests the existence of a real loss, which the fantasies promise to fill the void of.

To pilfer ’s perfect phrase “The Enlightenment is exhausted.”5 Modernity has failed, the world is utterly disenchanted, and the temptation for some is to civilizationally regress, just as on the individual level, one’s unconscious could try to return to a former, nostalgic state of development. The thing about regression however, is that it is only a fantasy, there is never any going back, since you obviously cannot return psychologically to a state which your biology has surpassed. There is no crawling back into the womb as a grown man, modernity gave birth to the dream, the possibility, even if it’s only a whisper on the wind so far, of freedom. The goal today is not to try to put the cat back in the bag, to rewind the clock on freedom, nor even to realize it in the world, but to figure out what in the hell it means. What is it, this “freedom” which we would like to realize? This is why today is for philosophy, because the human future will only be possible through philosophy.

We must recover modernity, and I am deeply convinced that the only way to do that is to think through the premodern, in order precisely, to cast out the fantasy of what was lost, and to understand instead, what was truly lost through modernization. Modernism, as opposed to postmodernism, represents the attempt to rethink the whole, whereas postmodernity is a flight from understanding. One thing which has been largely lost through the hegemony of the modernization—which is what postmodernity is—was understanding, that is, thinking the whole. Plato for one, represents the way in which premoderns were more adept at thinking the whole than we are today. For instance, in The Republic, Plato refuses to separate men from their state, and he demonstrates how states grow out of the natures, and the desires of men. It is actually somewhat the opposite of what Lacan says here.

In Plato, too, the disorders of the soul are also referred to the same dimension [as in Hegelian ethics] – it’s a matter of the reproduction of the disorders of the city at the level of the psyche. All of that is related to a problematic that is not at all Freudian. The sick individual whom Freud is concerned with reveals another dimension than that of the disorders of the state and of hierarchical disturbances. Freud addresses the sick individual as such… he addresses directly the powers that derive from the knowledge of good and evil.6

Here Lacan resists thinking the whole, probably due to the same telling aversion which people generally tend to have toward Plato’s work. We do not want to believe that some of the most profound questions already have answers, we prefer them as problems in order to give ourselves the trouble of solving them. I’m not being too harsh on Lacan, he certainly does not always avoid the whole, quite the opposite. In fact, what makes Lacan, Freud, and Jung so compelling, is that as moderns, and unlike the solipsistic, postmodern logic behind ego-psychology, therapism, and throwing pharmaceuticals at every problem you see, psychoanalysis generally does much better at thinking the relation of the individual to society, since at least Civilization and its Discontents. In this particular case above, however, Lacan is only rejecting his own misrepresentation of Plato’s Republic, because the point is that a feedback loop exists in human life, between individual and collective. It is not only that society influences the individual, but where Plato arguably placed the emphasis, and where moderns have largely neglected to look, is the side of the feedback loop in which desires, emanating from individuals, impact the collective. In other words, yes Plato is concerned by how disorders of the state are reproduced in individuals – which contra Lacan above, Freud self-evidently was concerned with – but also Plato was concerned with how the sick individual reproduced their problems in the state.

While it is very much true that the state indeed influences the individual, responsibility can ultimately only be located in the singularity of subjectivity. In groups, and especially in bureaucracies, responsibility tends to become diffused, and to seem less and less real, the larger and more segmented the human network is.7 This insight about the individual and their profound responsibility, is a Platonic insight, and a Lacanian one as well, evidenced in the very same seminar in which he more or less dismisses Plato. Only the individual can, that is, by definition, “take up” responsibility for his or her life, and therefore for his or her place in the world.8 In Plato’s work there is the unmistakable call to take responsibility for oneself, the focus on the individual soul is, ethically speaking, that very call. This individual call is however, not individualistic, in the sense that it does not bracket the individual off from its world, from its state to which it in a sense, as a matter of fact, belongs, even if from another perspective, its own home nation is always alien to it. In Socrates’ Apology we see this very dynamic played out.9 These dynamics of symbolic order and alienation from it are taken up differently, but no less recognizably, in every epoch, as they are universal human problems. In our own day, the Ljubljana school represents one of the most powerful schools of thought, for rethinking the whole of society, and the individual’s relationship to her world.

Lacanian theorist, ’s Disavowal, is excellent, but as I’ll go on to tweak Plato too, nobody shall be safe from my meddling with their thought. I would reword her second sentence, after the colon, in the quotation at the top of this essay, to say something like: “It is through knowledge and evidence that dark forces and obscure drives have indeed overpowered reason and won over knowledge and evidence.” In other words, the enlightenment is exhausted through its own exertions, and modernity has failed under its own weight, not because there was anything intrinsically wrong with the move toward rationalization, but because we accepted a path of pseudo-rationality, over the real thing. We settled for an image.10 If modernization represents ‘everything solid melting into air,’ it also represents the hyper-segmentation and hyper-specialization of all knowledge. The contanerization, cubicalization, or suburbification if you will, of knowledge. If what we are left with from modernization, is epistemic taylorism, an assembly line for prefab thought, that is not actually the result of reason, let alone wisdom, but of a vulgar, instrumental, cunning and opportunistic form of intelligence.11 From book VII of The Republic:

Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue—how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind, but his keen eye-sight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness?12

If you so much as use the term “wisdom” in general conversation today, you’re likely to get a look suggestive of a scoff, at the very least. This is how we are lost. Knowledge, working at the behest of intelligence, becomes its material. Rather than becoming the smooth, unbroken clay of wisdom, knowledge becomes fabricated into discrete, replaceable parts, precisely catalogued, and suitable for achieving certain particular ends in the world: invariably, the acquisition of wealth-status, and not the development of the soul, which (at least in this life) is identical to the ebullience of the subject.13 This is exactly, I mean exactly, the problem which Plato was dealing with in the Republic. Plato and Freud were after the same thing in terms of humanization, the few thousand years between them are just a number, like a few thousand miles between true lovers. In many ways Freud falls short of Plato’s broader (and in some ways deeper) view, but between Freud and Lacan, subjectivity is articulated to a degree of profound and incisive detail which Plato did not reach. It is here in the age of knowledge, paradoxically, that we have fallen from the dizzying heights of understanding, which Plato and Lacan both (at least) aspired to.

In contrast to both the modern and premodern views, here in postmodernity, we fail to properly think at all; the “clever rogue” has become raised to hegemony by the winds of capitalism. To this day there is no superior understanding of the most fundamental causes of the failure and emergence of states, than what Plato devised. We go searching for comprehension in long lists of contingent historical or other empirical facts, improving our knowledge, but usually failing to produce profound and convincing general ideas, or theories. In order to bring about contemplation of the whole, in order to bring about understanding through knowledge, we have to be willing to take big swings, to risk being fabulously wrong. For this, we cannot live in terror of the general peer.14 We will have to be able to conceive of a picture of society which can move seamlessly from civilization, to individual subjectivity, and back again. I have yet to come across anyone who has done a better job of that, than Plato of Athens.

For all Plato’s tremendous psychological insight, however, and although I’ve made the mistake of underestimating him before, I do not think he quite gets at fundamental symptomatic structures like psychoanalysis does. For instance, I have yet to come across something like repression, in Plato’s philosophy, but he flies at least somewhat close to disavowal, or at least, to the preconditions of it.

For if a man had all that sort of knowledge that ever was, he would not be at all the wiser; he would only be able to play with men, tripping them up and oversetting them with distinctions of words. He would be like a person who pulls away a stool from some one when he is about to sit down, and then laughs and makes merry at the sight of his friend overturned and laid on his back.15

On the one hand, the repressed is a memory which you are not aware you have, that is, it is a memory which refuses to be made into knowledge. Another fundamental movement within the soul discovered by (specifically Lacanian) psychoanalysis, is the act of disavowal, in which nothing is being repressed. In disavowal, we are fully aware and in possession of all relevant facts, nothing is blocked in its passage to knowledge. Disavowal has reached its zenith in human society, in the era of internet videos and 24/7 news coverage, because in disavowal we know it all, but it is precisely that we know, which we use to absolve ourselves of responsibility toward what it is that we know about. “’Knowledge’ thus adopts a new and different role: it is no longer simply something to be disavowed but – paradoxically – something that can help us disavow (the real of this same knowledge).”16 If we know everything, but none of this knowledge is shaped by the hand of wisdom, the mind becomes a land of trivialities. But when knowledge is cleaved from the world, something far worse can occur, downstream of a completely unserious mind. This is perverse disavowal, when we use the act of knowing (these de-worlded facts) as a way of setting aside our guilt or fear about what it is which we know that we are doing, so that we can go on doing it, just as if we didn’t know at all what we are doing. Crucially, disavowal here is made possible, therefore, by the disconnection between knowledge and action, knowing comes to suffice as action. We could expect nothing less from a world in which agency has been strangled by the complex of monopolistic, corporate interests, while these same general interests have also massively expanded the reach of information technology, and its penetration into our souls.

….something that has just arisen and is of traumatic/disruptive nature is intercepted (and de-realized) by a precipitate knowledge/recognition of it; we look at it as belonging to some other time (or temporality). We are looking straight at the traumatic thing (it is right there, in front of our eyes, fully acknowledged), yet we see it as coming from far away, as strange and indifferent…. We might also say that it maintains this indifferent character by means of cutting the thing from its possible articulation as presence in reality….17

If tomorrow, Jesus came down from heaven revealing himself as the true son of God, we would indeed crucify him, similar to Dostoevesky’s famous story of The Grand Inquisitor. In our case however, Jesus would look out at the cameras while he was dying on an plastic cross, made of 100% recyclable material, and flabbergasted he would say: “Lord, I don’t know what to tell you, these people know exactly what they’re doing.” It would be precisely the knowledge that Jesus is the son of God which would operate as the mechanism by which Jesus would become crucified again. Such an event would just occur, as things do here in Kafka’s global village, and while livestreaming the crucifixion we might sneak a glance at each other, meeting another’s eyes we would discover our own horror, as we would all be thinking the same thing: “who the hell signed off on this?” But we would all be thinking privately to ourselves: “It doesn’t matter that we’ve crucified him, because after all, he is the son of God.” This is how diffused responsibility has become: nobody is ever to blame for anything so that everyone is always to blame for everything. The neoliberal individualization of responsibility has paradoxically made it into a vapor, it’s everywhere, but because of that, it’s impossible to pin down onto anyone. This is why the apocalypse is going to suck. It will achieve none of our cinematic fantasies, it will not be able to fit into 90minutes, it will not be epic, nor astounding, and there will be no feeling of catharsis at the end. It will be a banal and boring evil of interminable suffering, churned out steadily by bureaucratic processes, precisely assembled by robots, and rubber stamped all the way to hell.

So, what we do in order to ‘take responsibility’ for history, is to know what’s going on, to do our research to find the truth, because “the truth is out there.” However, none of this is to say that disavowal is a purely modern or postmodern phenomenon, it is a human phenomenon accelerated and scaled up by postmodern technology. There are differences, of course, between premodernity, and today. Something which Plato does not say in the Republic, is something which we see in contemporary capitalist society, which is the tendency for our democracies to degrade into oligarchies, whereas Plato only ever discusses them moving in the opposite direction. Certainly what is at hand today seems to be the development of oligarchy out of democracy and yet, the phenomena of populism, fascism, and bonapartism nonetheless attests to Plato’s everlasting sociology.

If I tweak Plato’s picture of things a bit, the reemergence of the overthrown oligarchy through the domination of the free market by a handful of wealthy families, is so unconscionable to any democratic people, that they elect a tyrant.18 To put it in today’s terms, anything resembling to us, what we would see as “aristocratic” political privilege, is so unacceptable to most forms of the democratic citizen, that we will tolerate almost anything else, even if that ‘anything else’ entails the complete dissolution of all degrees of meaningful democracy or republicanism. This is deeply reminiscent of the strange fact of Roman Caesarism: what got Julius Caesar killed (the most proximate inciting event anyway) is that he let a crown be placed on his head at a festival. This means that he was not so much killed for the fact that he had already become, for all intents and purposes, the sovereign. The final straw for the senatorial class was not Caesar taking their political power away, but doing that, and then making it symbolically obvious that he was doing that: adding insult to injury. The definition of a king is a single sovereign individual, but the Romans had just a bit more antipathy toward the word “Rex,” and for symbols of kingship (like red boots), than they had toward someone politically satisfying the definition of that very word, in reality.19 It is as if the Real of the knowledge of Caeserism, had been disavowed.

For all intents and purposes today, there is indeed an “aristocracy” in America, something analogous, but not identical of course, to the Roman senatorial class. in terms of political privilege, the rich have total access, and the poor have basically none whatsoever, so much so that most people (especially the poor) don’t even bother to vote—what would be the point? No matter what voter turnout is like, the outcomes are guaranteed to be pathetic, since the options to pick from are always pathetic to begin with. Always it is the flattery and simultaneous intentional ruination of the middle class.

We all know everything about our politicians. Despite frequently being referred to as “oligarchs,” Musk and Trump, two among many examples, right and left, of thieves of middle class wealth, do not act like aristocrats. They don Plebian signifiers: Bibles and McDonalds, t-shirts, baseball caps, and curse words, and so rather than viewing them as aristocrats, we often view them as just one of the boys. This is true regardless of which side of the aisle people cast their votes for, since it is the very same self-satisfied vulgarity (poshlost) of those two individuals which is the reason why they are loved by some and reviled by others. In both cases the concern is about the appearances of the sovereign, the primary concern is never about the office itself and its power, since we turn a blind eye whenever our guy is the one abusing his power. The primary difference between Trump and any of his predecessors, Republicans and Democrats alike, is only that he does his back-room deals, in the front room. Democrats are silent on Obama’s executive excesses, his drone strikes on American citizens, the fact that he deported more people than his Republican predecessor, or successor, silent about Biden’s inhumane border policies as well, meanwhile shrieking about everything Trump does.20 It’s all crowns and red boots, that is, images, shadows on a cave wall. This goes back further than people assume, further than Bill Clinton, but if you don’t think that he was a cynical populist, waving the ideal of justice around as a vote getting prop, the way Trump waves Bibles, I don’t know what to tell you.

There are so many false openings to Plato’s cave. We get free enough to go wandering about underground, but we neglect to ascend. We ignore the inner sense of gravity, given to us by nature, or we could say, we disavow it in favor of the bright glow of other fires, which are warm, and closer, and easier to get to. We wander into these other chambers and sit back down again to watch the shadow puppet show. We escape the obscurity of the Republicans and tell ourselves we’ve ascended when we are sitting in the cave of the Democrats (or vice versus) at exactly the same altitude. We get out of the obscurity of religion and then substitute science for it, in so doing we create scientism, and reject science. We get out of the obscurity of scientism, finding it soulless and hollow, and then we join the Catholic Church thinking that will solve something (it won’t). We emerge from one cave, decide ascending is too hard, or that we are too tired, (since in the cave we must work in order to eat!), or we are too afraid we’ll get completely lost in the dark, and so we sit back down in another cavern. This is why, again, we need to be concerned with the truth, we need to drag our heavy eyes to the surface, and that practice of ascension, that is philosophy. The process of understanding, the love of wisdom, the love and the humble pursuit of truth. I’m not speaking here of academic philosophy, that is yet another room in this great cave, postmodernity is the expansion of the cave, the creation of a great many rooms which are far, far off to the sides, along the ascending path.

It is only good-in-itself rather than good-for, which can free us from the tyrannical man, the pervert, and the narcissist (that’s a teaser for where I’m headed next). But the world which treats everything as (in Plato’s own terms) an “expedient” for something else, is a world that is a void of the eternal logic of love. Philosophy afterall, is the love of wisdom, not the love of money (or the love of tenure). Our world loves money. That is all we can seem to talk about. Such a love is bankrupt, multiplicitous, and backward. We live in a demonic economy. It is not any kind of a surprise that a man like Trump could emerge from a world which must be so completely cynical, which was cynical long before he was elected to office. This is the world of nihilism, and Plato’s project in the Republic, which has been much misinterpreted, even maligned, is the systematic refutation of common nihilism. And what is postmodernism, but the triumph of nihilism, a world whose architecture mimics its psychology, by trying to erase the distinction between interiority and exteriority, trying to destroy internal space by extending the market into it, into every recess of the soul.21 We can only survive, as human, by the realization of some Event which gives birth to a new capacity for sacrilization, and sublimation, but we cannot do this by rolling back the clock, to a time more like Plato’s. This is because Plato’s time, at the most fundamental level of being, suffered exactly the same existential problems which we have today. What has changed through technology, has been the texture and scope of the problem, certainly, but not the core of the problem itself, because the core of the problem is manifestly, us, the human being. I’ll end with Plato’s ending of book IX, with the interlocuters reflecting on their imaginary city.

I understand; you mean that he will be a ruler in the city of which we are the founders, and which exists in idea only; for I do not believe that there is such an one anywhere on earth?

In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other.

Do not disavow the good. The good resides within you. What is within you is what structures reality. Do not disavow yourself. Do not disavow what is real. You are real. What you love is real, what you desire to desire, is more real than whatever you desire in any given moment of this existence which we are thrown into.

5

Benjamin Studebaker

The Buddha's Bastards

Today I ran across a tweet by Daniel Tutt about JACOBIN’s launch manifesto. That manifesto includes the following text…

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a year ago · 44 likes · Benjamin Studebaker

For anyone who wants to know, what I write on here are responses to books. I do not profess mastery over these books, but only offer up where they have left me after I’ve finished them. This is a good exercise since it’s helpful for me to organize my thought, and I intend it to help you, as a touchstone in your own understanding, should you have an interest in any of the books which I write about. In short, the purpose is dialogue. It is to this effect that I say that The Accursed Share is one of the greatest books I have ever read. It is so close to patterns of my own thought it feels to me as if a much wiser, more learned, intelligent, version of myself wrote this book. Economy, politics, metaphysics, physics, sociology, anthropology, religion are united here under the banner of understanding for its own sake (philosophy). The Accursed Share (Volume 1, Zone books, 1991) is so alive it strides right into the 21^st century without missing a beat, it is a breath of History. The great accomplishment of the book is that Bataille is able to see at the same time, both the Aztecs and the Tibetans as equally human. I present that if we take up Bataille’s method, we might be able to recognize our own humanity too, even through the obfuscating mists of sad and confused (as the name implies) postmodernity.

The first step to arriving there, at so obvious, and yet so impossible a thought, as the common humanity of all people who have ever lived, is to start from a philosophical acquisitiveness which is perhaps incompatible with moral thinking. A moralist could never see a peaceable people and a bloodthirsty one, as fundamentally similar, but Bataille can see this. The difference between the Aztec and the Tibetan, lies for Bataille, in the fact that both of them are simply finding different ways of burning off the excess produced by society. This excess must be destroyed, otherwise it lies around waiting to cause strife, civil war, suicide, discontent, anguish. The excess, accumulated in the hands of the few, brings about the wrath, the hatred of the many, and if the many cannot take it from the few, they will chew it out of the hides of each other. Physical accumulation seems to the human mind, to change the metaphysical structure of the universe. The dragon protects his hoard for this very reason, he has no use for piles of gold, but he continues to accumulate anyway, quantity bestows to him, metaphysical riches, superiority and dominance in his unlimited enjoyment. Our rich today have become this great parasitic beast, and unable to take back what has been stolen by rent and fees, we bite and snap at one another, unable to face our shame, our failure. By comparison to the dragons, we are nothing, because we have nothing. Out of this sense of being-nothing, this loserism, we either implode or explode. Anguish follows in the wake of dragons.

This is a perennial problem in human society, the offshore tax havens, Switzerland, Luxemborg, the Cayman Islands, are nothing but the volcanic caves of ancient beasts, returned again to terrorize villagers all over the world. The shrieking of dragons makes us stupid, and yet we cannot help but listen, and we even take it to be wisdom when the monsters speak. Bataille lived in a time where there was hope, people had—even if the results had already turned out disappointing—risen up to slay the dragons. The jury could still be said to be out in deliberation, for Bataille, concerning the legacy of Communism. Knowledge of Stalin’s brutality already existed, but states are brutal, which is no excuse, but it also should not be a surprise. Today however, Communism is dead, whether it was good or bad (it was both) it could not survive, except in name. What Bataille brings to the fore is that the great preoccupation in human societies has been burning off the excess so that it doesn’t attract dragons like flies to shit. Crowning civilizational achievements like the 7 ancient wonders of the world, are waste products. The Aztecs built temples and drenched them in blood, the Tibetans fed, housed and clothed an incredible number of quiet monks, in either case the point is that the excess was consumed and destroyed in utterly unproductive pursuits. Peace is found not in the words of the priest class, which might be duplicitous and cynical, so much as in their shit, which never tells a lie. Then came Protestantism, which was so offended by Catholic cynicism it annihilated monasticism altogether. Calvinism, following on the heels of the Lutheran revolution, like Luther himself, is extremely anal retentive.

Calvanism fails to acknowledge the existence of dragons, it also fails to understand the corrupting influence of the very wealth which it is so set on accumulating. Civilization has always been and continues to be very stupid when it comes to understanding how to reproduce its own prosperity. We always fail to grasp, until the damage is already done, that such reproduction of prosperity can only come through the reproduction of virtue which is negated by that very prosperity, especially when combined with a lack of wisdom and discipline. Parents always hold their children’s maws up to the spigot of indulgence and then wonder how it could possibly be that they’ve raised an Augustus Gloop. In fact, in contemporary corporate America, there is no need to hold your child up to the spigot, there are so many spigots sprouting out from everywhere, all the time, that its everything a parent can do to keep their fated little hedonists away from them. At the same time, the pressure to make money increases as rents climb, transforming avarice into a moral good; economic modesty seems evil when it destroys the horizons of possibility for you and your whole family.

Anymore we are altogether focused on absorbing an impossible quantity of the excess while producing even more, so that work and enjoyment are combining into one and the same activity, or revealing themselves rather, as having always been joined at the hip. Both cases are contrary to Calvinist doctrine, but it is not merely the case that we work to enjoy, but to work is to enjoy. The true Calvinists managed to forestall the fantasy of leisurely enjoyment until after death, leaving the world with its burden: its accursed share. The descendants of hard working, thrifty protestants at some point always become Gloops, since even if the parentage is strict and it’s teachings are honorable, society’s being taken over by corporate culture, and its habit of organizing children into peer groups combined, invariably produces the indolent consumer. How many times do children invoke that “so and so’s parents let them X,” that it must work at least little by little, in wearing down a parent’s principled opposition to X. But as much as we try to consume, our bodies are far too small to absorb all of this excess, the mind would be a far greater sponge, the needs for its development are endless, since we human beings are fundamentally pretentious toward infinity. Unfortunately, AI does our thinking for us, so that our bodies will have to bare even more loving abuse. This is how it is that Calvinists are indeed Satanists, their strident effort produces its opposite eventually, whereas the idolatrous waste of Catholic architecture, décor, indulgences, and offices, absorbs the wealth that would otherwise be accumulated by uppity, industrious peasants. It is almost as if the Papists knew in their cunning, cynical wisdom, that accumulation would only produce devilish laziness in these rich peasant’s grandchildren, and demonic envy in their more relaxed neighbors.

In the capitalist world in which we live, birthed by the Reformation, the family becomes primary. This is the mistake of critics of the bourgeois family, like Deleuze and Guattari for instance; they don’t give proper due to the bourgeois family as an adaptation to the condition of capitalism, in which the excess is not mopped up, but grown on a trajectory of bad infinity. The premodern family, the medieval Catholic family, the tribal family, yes, obviously all had mothers and fathers, but the reason why the control of the father becomes so absolute in bourgeois civilization (of an earlier period from ours), to the exclusion of the broader community, like religious elements, is that once civilization is organized primarily around the accumulation of wealth rather than its squander, the collective nature of society becomes far less important. When society decreases in importance by comparison to the nuclear family, more burden is placed on parents to raise their own children. The apotheosis, or perhaps the parody of the logic of bourgeois society, is of course captured in Thatcher’s “They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” This made literal, actual, and absolute, is an insane and incredible leap of a logic which, albeit, was already well underway. Thatcher utters bourgeois society’s self-negation, its own reason is becomes a monstrous head, who has forgotten that it is attached to the body which it devours. If “there is no society,” then what do you call it when two families meet, and if two families cannot meet, then how is family as such to continue into the future, or would Thatcher have preferred we all inbreed? Now I’m being uncharitable, because when Thatcher was referring to “society” there, she was referring to the welfare state, but “there is no society” seems to have taken on a life of its own, as if not only Thatcher’s enemies, but also her allies took it out of context. The world we live in is a direct result of neoliberal policy. While it might be wasteful indeed, welfare fraud wasn’t anywhere near the greatest problem afflicting civilization, and the attempt to render it impossible had unforeseen consequences. As Slavoj Žižek talks about in more than one place, the only way to make crime impossible is by the ultimate crime. In fact what has happened in the neoliberal world order, is epidemics of loneliness in which the sexual relation has become more impossible than even Jacques Lacan could have ever imagined.1

The interlinking of bourgeois families was society, and it was society, and thereby family, which the neoliberal dragons have ransacked and plundered. This was not only done by removing safety nets, but by doing that while eliminating jobs, replacing them with much more humiliating, lower paying, far more unstable jobs. It could be seen as reasonable to either eliminate good jobs for some greater good, or dismantle welfare, but to do both at the same time is to make people dependent on welfare—which is the alleged opposite of neoliberal intentions—and reduce it to the faintest of a trickle. Then neoliberal ideologues then say, with straight faces, that it’s entirely a failure of personal responsibility in anyone who is unhappy with the state of their world, or their life. We have lived, in the last forty or so years through a tremendous cruelty, that still constantly goes unacknowledged by both the effected, and the perpetrators. And on top of all that we decided to let rent increase to whatever arbitrary number the mystical market would like it to be, increasing the competitive nature of society to dog-eat-dog proportions. Then in this environment, of hyper-competitiveness, women enter the workforce. If you’re curious about my personal feelings, the total equality of women is an obvious, and straightforward good, but to believe that, under the right circumstances, obvious goods can never result in some bad consequences (while remaining obviously good) is to believe in a teleology. The combined result of all of these policies is whole nations of gooners, an earth of gooners, an England of gooners, a South Korea of gooners, a Japan of gooners, gooning is increasing in China, America is up to its eyeballs in incessant goonerism, Chile and Spain are beginning to suffer outbreaks of goonerismo, there are doubtless, hoards of German Übergünen.2 The stability to form families has been destroyed: the reason for meeting people of the opposite sex, is largely to start families, the basis for having time and energy, and attention for the purpose of meeting the opposite sex, is relative economic stability, and even the possibility for one to imagine having one’s own family, is something economically conditioned to some extent. To summarize, general competitiveness increased massively, at the same time that men and women began to come into direct economic competition with each other. Also at the same time, the basis for society, free time, is erased by the side hustle, the constant job search, the incessant retraining, the second job, and the need to regenerate oneself from one’s experience of anguish and/or exhaustion, through soulless self-gratification, individuated opportunities for which also increased manifold. Society did not stand a chance against this onslaught on all fronts. Libertarianism resembles Communism in terms of its mismatch between good intentions and horrendous outcomes.

The suicide of society is the suicide of the family, and the suicide of the family is the suicide of society. Hopefully we can all see how, in an interconnected world in which one thing flows into another, as a matter of actual fact, “A=A” is about the most absurd thing which any thinking person has ever said. The family is not equal to the family, it is part of and constituted by and through society, and society is alive in and through the family. I fully grant the libertarian argument against Communism that it is a great sounding idea in principle but is a nightmare in practice, can we please finally admit that exactly the same argument applies also, to libertarianism? The world in which we live today, is one Hayek neither wanted nor described, but millions of his ideological orcs got nearly free reign to step right over (or manipulate) popular will, to implement his utopian ideals. Now we have this shithole world, by far the most populous, and by far the most pathetic epoch in human history so far, a world which resembles, ironically for Hayek, serfdom. Never have so many people been on earth at once, and never have we as a species lacked so much, the foggiest notion as to why we are here.[1] We are the hoards of the clueless, we suffer the consequences of the valorization of sheer survival, quantity for quantity’s sake, without reason or spirit.

But what a tremendous opportunity this presents us, if we seize our moment. To do so we will have to take our faces away from the electronic spigots, we greedy, Gloopish, gooners. Our mission today, is not to slay dragons, being that they are armed far better than the dragons which our ancestors had to face, and besides, we’re extremely out of practice, politically. We don’t even remember what politics are, having confused it with entertainment. We need to go back further, to the basics of human society, before we are able to think politically, because as it stands now, there is no “we” to speak of, from which a politics can even be contemplated. There is no proto-demos, nor are there any self-aware, let alone self-activated classes. Instead we must animate our chilly souls, and build a society within the undead carcass of the old bourgeois society which surrounds us. Bataille showed us what to do.

Calvanism (and by extension Techno-Puritanism) is, by its own logic, dead set on apocalypse. In response to this, we must organize means by which to waste, and out of that waste grows society, and out of society the family is reborn. The moral imperative is to shit! Beautiful things grow from manure. You’ve heard about Effective Altruism, but as Jesus himself said “the poor will always be with you,” so what I want to see instead is Effective Decadence. There’s nothing wrong with giving to the poor, but if we want to transform the world rather than merely assuaging a little misery here and there, we ought to consider also, sheer, unrepentant, glorious waste. The ultimate aspirations of the poor themselves are not mere survival, but the universal human aspiration, ebullience! Bataille is a prophet when he says “We lie to ourselves when we dream of escaping the movement of luxurious exuberance of which we are only the most intense form (34).” Let’s assent to the neoliberal order, if we are given no choice, then choose fantastically, asceticism is for losers. Why don’t we get bullshit PMC jobs for $250,000,000/yr., or become corporate lawyers, or engineers building new technological monuments to human stupor, and use the money to start our own separatist universities to teach our children art, music, philosophy, and all of the aspects of natural science which aren’t packeagable for resale? Go with the flow, get a job whose primary function is to justify its own existence, or go to trade school and become a commercial electrician, do what you’re supposed to, ACCUMULATE, ACCUMULATE, ACCUMULATE. Sell. out. But then, take every dime beyond what you need for bare life and pour it into pure, laughing and crying, bourgeois decadence. As Kurt Vonnegut says “ And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.” But to fart we must eat, and beans cost money, that brutal, nagging, beastly, inhuman, human abstraction, that apostasy, that fundamental crime at the heart of civilization, which the overturning of multiple great earthly powers utterly failed to put a stop to, putrid, vulgar, money. That vicious thing, nonetheless makes the world go round.

[1] This is the world wrought by the revolutionary ideology of libertarian policy wonks, funded directly by the multinational corporations sucking straight from the teet of the state, in exactly the way in which they complained that regular people were doing. Libertarianism in 2025 gives Stalinism a serious run for its money in terms of outstanding cynicism.

1A lot of people will tell you that Anti-Oedipus is a stupid book, but they’re reading it wrong. You shouldn’t read Anti-Oedipus prescriptively, like its authors meant you to read it, you should read it descriptively, despite its authors intentions. If you read Anti-Oedipus descriptively, it becomes an entirely different book, elucidating the disintegration of the socius via capitalism, which is absolutely, exactly what has happened to us. Celebrating this like Deleuze and Guattari do is cringe, passé, weak shit, or it is sheer hostility towards the entire human race, the latter (the Landian move) is at least honest. If you read the book against the way in which it was intended, as my good friend Jack Burton always says at a time like this, “you never can tell.” The way you should read Anti-Oedipus, is from the perspective of a the postmodern subject, the situational schizophrenic, and there are few more schizophrenic movies than Jean-Luc Carpentier’s 1986 masterpiece, Big Trouble in Little China. We should take both Anti-Oedipus and Big Trouble equally seriously, Deleuze and Guattari invented B-Philosophy with this book, introducing camp into the field, and yet to say it’s “B” is not to say it’s “mid” or a failure, many B-movies are grand artistic successes in their own right. What makes B-things brilliant, is that they are brilliant in ways that their creators did not intend, and would not necessarily condone.

The film establishes off the bat, in the company of a very transferential attorney no less, that magic is real, that reality is not what we thought it was, it’s not magical realism, it’s realistic magic. From this point on however (about 10 minute in) the film’s sense of realism is thrown entirely out the goddamm window like an expired hoagie hurled from window of the Porkchop Express doing 75mph on a dark and stormy night, driving no faster than you can see, besides that it’s all in the reflexes anyways. What Big Trouble shows to us is the intersection of worlds, there is the American world of state guided corporate capitalism, the decoded flows shredding the socius, which collides with the oriental despotic overcodes of dynastic China. The Porkchop Express is part of a flow of swine interrupted by a delusional episode, the impossibility of the ancient land of archaic, graphic signifiers of incestuous reign, impinging on the modern all-consuming, deterritorializing axiomatics. Chinatown San Francisco USA (still a cool place) is apparently oriental, mysterious and ancient enough to sustain some old world magic, in the midst of mechanized America, which in shedding its disinfecting light all over the world, bringing about the globalist era, manages to overlook the magical dark antiquity in its own backyard, a “world so unreal, and yet at once, so frightening,” says Margo, the reporter character.

Either that, or the whole thing is just the delusions of a schizophrenic truck driver whose paid his dues, “yessir, the check is in the mail.” Such a conclusion however, we would have to read into the film, what is so off-kilter about Big Trouble is that while it doesn’t by any means take itself too seriously—it does seem to be entirely earnest, there’s no hint of the millennial ironic distance, which of course had yet to be invented—it really does want to convince us to believe in magic. In that sense, we can read Big Trouble as a schizo revolutionary counter to the reterritorializing tendencies of the capitalist socius. Carpenter should stand alongside Artaud, Beckett, and Proust in the schizoid canon, but underlying the whole premise of both Big Trouble and Anti-Oedipus, are not psychological, but a metaphysical propositions and images.

Ultimately, Anti-Oedipus is a waste of time inasmuch as it is dishonest, and misleading: schizoanalysis has nothing to do with the human subject, and everything to do with the stuff it’s made out of, and shares in common with the rest of the universe. “But in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensities are not metaphors, but matter itself” (283). The single seductive thing about Anti-Oedipus is the seductive feature from the beginning to the end of Big Trouble, the way in which each text uncovers the untamable and unpredictable nature of human desire and drive, which indeed is a physical, pulsing Thing.

“”This has nothing to do with the active unconscious [which] sparkles, vibrates, travels... we realize that the unconscious contains nothing ideal, nothing in the least conceptual, and hence nothing in the least personal, since personality, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective self.”“ (119)

The bizarreness, the obsessiveness with going down strange, experimental and untrodden paths, that is where both texts are eminently human and therefore, thoroughly confused, and completely metaphysically self-indulgent, feeling no need for any self-justification. Both are works with a strong feeling of free association, and little feeling of the presence of an editor. How else did the religions of the world come into being, as adaptive strategies for human society, but through schizoid fantasy. There’s a schizophrenic in all of us, which explains why it takes over in some, who have a more fragile wall, so to speak, between the generation of fantasy and the generation of sensation. That wall is however, permeable in all of us.

Big Trouble carries out the task which Anti-Oedipus laid out, of achieving maximal freedom within capitalism, although the result of the end of capitalism of course, was never going to come about that way. “May the wings of liberty never lose a feather” in the words of Jack Burton, while in the words of D&G “The schizo is not a revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process—in terms of which the schizo is merely the interruption, or the continuation in the void—is the potential for revolution” (341). Delightfully schizoid as Big Trouble is, I really don’t think that it has or will bring the revolution any closer, by means direct, or indirect. That’s okay though, it still remains to be established, even if the age of revolutions had not already expired, whether or not revolution is at all desirable. The prospect of revolution served from 1776 to 1989 (debatably of course), beginning with the rise of America, and ending with the defeat of it’s carthaginian foe, as a motivating panacea, in other words, a fantasy, cohering political movements. But if the revolution is now impossible, and the left has moved onto schizophrenia, abandoning its earthly goals of seizing state power, then what is “the left” for anymore? Do we need a left? Is it anymore just a word with no higher meaning at all but its opposition to what is called “right?”

People will say that D&G is not representative of the left overall, other parts of the left have practical goals, which is true, but to repeat, the revolutionary panacea is gone and may never return. This has totally pulled the rug out from under the religious framework of the left. This has not been sufficiently interrogated by the left such that D&G, embarrassingly for it, have the most coherent religious system on the left. The most substantial replacement for the master signifiers of “history” and “revolution,” is “death to all master signifiers.” Anti-Oedipus for more reasons than this, even though it’s an absurd book, can still not be dismissed. D&G think through many of the willful blind spots on the left.

“It is with the thing, capitalism, that the unavowable begins: there is not a single economic or financial operation that, assuming it is translated in terms of a code, would not lay bare its own unavowable nature, that is, its intrinsic perversion or essential cynicism (the age of bad conscience is also the age of pure cynicism).” (247)

D&G have a point here too. This is what capitalism does to us because what is so often undertheorized is how capitalism is not off on its own, its ascendance was not spontaneous, it has always been a state managed project. When the state loses its divinity, and comes not to dominate and absolutely subordinate trade and industry, but instead to manage trade and industry, subordinating itself to them in order to harness capitalism’s competitive advantage over other states, that is the birth of modernity. Cynicism is born into this world by way of the subordination of the state to capital, because sincerity of belief in society must be degraded, undermined, and kept up as façade: everyone knows deep down that the sacrifice is not for God or country, but for capital, by capital, no matter what the emperor now says. The King became a figurehead of capital, long before he was actually stripped of his official political power, and if he refused his quiet, gradual demotion, he was led down to the guillotine, or the basement. The ancient Chinese emperor, Big Trouble’s Lo-Pan then remains, as a haunting from the old world of long lost sincerity, an old god refusing to die, yet he is only “like a dream,” he has no real existence in modernity. The revolution that ended in a ball of green flame in the film’s Chinatown was either an obscure side show, or an attempt to save the world from the revenge of the premodern.

The villain of Big Trouble is the long forgotten age of sincerity, attempting to break through, to become real in the age of profilicity, identical to the age of cynicism and of disavowal: I know very well that Lo-Pan isn’t real, and yet, I just ran him over with my truck in the back alley. What are we watching in the contemporary attempt of pre-Kantian metaphysics to become born again, in the midst of the postmodern desert of meaning, is the attempted return of the premodern mind. But this return is impossible, it is out of place, so that it moves like a zombie from hell. It comes as reaction against the cynicism which has become so psychologically hollowing, as to merit the explosion of the psychotropic industry, which is in significant part, a patch for capitalism’s inhumanism.

This vast expanse of pointless toil which we occupy in an economy organized around treating the symptoms of the economy itself–services are compensations for a lack of time and energy due to having to perform services–leaves us itching for life. In a hurry to get life back, to take vengeance on our repression, we repress our higher love with the lower ones which are sold to us. Into this vacuum—less of meaning, but of life—enters the daydreams of a world beyond this one, of magic beyond the matter, which has turned grey and dull, its significance siphoned out by a science which is not for its own sake, but is for the sake of the state, which is for the sake of the corporate entity.

The left, in Communism and Anarchism stood, in the age of revolutions, as the promise of a way through the cynical order, without sliding back into the despotism of the sincere. The end of that age has come about due to the increasing asymmetry of warfare, the promise of revolution cannot even be believably made. The left is no longer anything to believe in, it must succumb to the cynicism during the time of its own promise, as opposed to the day after the revolution. It limps along in this way, promising alleviation, delivering diminishing returns, and only winning ground on occasion, by seeming less cynical by comparison with the straightforwardly neoliberal establishment.

Into this dismal reality enters Jack Burton, a mover of flows, an incredulous individualist who will believe nothing but what he sees, yet who still has a list of impudent questions even then. This is the character we need, not a schizo, we need a cowboy who distrusts the experts, but who also doesn’t feel the need to make shit up out of a sense of plebian resentment against them. His creativity is bent to the task of sharpening his understanding of his world, nothing more. We need resilient mother fuckers who take no advice, clumsy bastards always falling on their own ass and then pulling themselves up from their own bootstraps. We need fuckups with good reflexes, we need stubborn assholes that always bounce back, we need people who aren’t afraid of failure, but who revel in it. There is no better combination than the strange marriage of pride and humility. These are the characters we need in order to go up against the machines and their operators, and who will not be turned aside by every new postmodern pseudo-religious, soul sucking neo-sincerity peddler. But what is the “we” I speak of.

It is not the left, I lost my faith in that, the god of my friends, in the same way that I lost my faith in the God of my parents. There may be History, and there may be a God, I don’t care much either way, because either they don’t seem to be running things. In either case my faith just evaporated in an instant, it disappeared as if someone turned the light off in the room, I didn’t premeditate it, it just happened. But it did not happen to me, it did not come from on high, from outside, nor did the devil come slinking out of hell to steal it from me, no, rather I happened, I became, I changed. That is to say, we are not only responsible for what we premeditate, but also of course, for what we do spontaneously, our thoughts and feelings which bubble up outside of our conscious control, are no less ours by virtue of the fact that we may only claim them retroactively. When we choose not to claim them, our body, our soul, has still made them, and presented them to us, and to choose not to choose then, is still to have made a choice. The soul is that which as a part of our mind, is innate to us, of which there is a great deal, by virtue of our body, the matter we feel. This universe, this vista of energetic stuff of which we are a part, is suffused with light, wonder, beauty, and terror, there is no reason, that is, which is not historically contingent, to go looking outside of it, or outside of ourselves for life, and yet history has us by the balls. If there is a God, he is there in the stuff too.

I make no pronouncements that God does not exist, nor that the left is absolutely finished never to return, I just can’t associate with anything which, as it currently stands, is so completely cynical. This is not the left, nor Christianity’s fault however. Cynicism is a necessary default setting of postmodernity (the triumph of capitalist decoding) because our beliefs are accoutrements, garnishes for a system that is for and by capital flows, master signifiers do not rule the world, but convince us that someone is in charge when nobody is, nobody is steering the ship, the system runs on its own. I can therefore associate with nothing, that is, no particulars, save particular singular human beings, who are alone capable for now, of overcoming cynicism only by admitting that they believe in nothing, that is, nothing in particular. People who don’t try to pin God down with their precious, self-protective signifiers, and who don’t try to desperately invent new God’s out of thin air, are my people. All my hope therefore, is invested in that, in Nothing. To believe in nothing is not to be nihilistic, but to believe that some thing will come out of that which is utterly unnamable and ineffable, out of the future, based on our best efforts taken in good faith. There is nothing else to have faith in, for the Jack Burtons of the world, but ourselves, and our compatriots in the nascent, currently incoherent struggle for humanity. This struggle is not coherent because we have not yet determined what it is to become human, something which Samuel Loncar’s is actively exploring.

There it is, that’s as metaphysical, and as schizoid as I can get, I can go no further, I ought not go further. The ego is still important, it still matters because it is only the ego which re-cognizes. It is the ego which sutures the disparate parts of the subject and his body together, into a sentimental unity. The ego recognizes her own reflexes, knows her own abilities, and surprises herself by herself. The conscious ego does not deserve to be attacked by failing to be more than it is, nor aggrandized into more than it can be, it is what it is, as the unconscious is what it is. D&G are right, that the drives are closer to the earth, closer to the universe, the drives are the substance of our souls and our energy, but what makes us human, is our ability to revise ourselves. It is in this way that humanism and technology need not be enemies, we could really make ourselves better through it, if only we can get out of the cycles which competitive nation states trap us in, in their race to the bottom, driven by capital to exploit every last morsel of potential value, converting everything into something for something else, leaving nothing alive for its own sake. Capital is fundamentally parasitic, it can be a truly great thing when kept in its place, in those moments it can be symbiotic, but when the symbiote forgets its place, removing it tends to kill the host. Knowing what to do about our situation, therefore, is a careful process requiring deliberation and experimentation, nobody knows what to do now, and the sooner we admit that freely, the more progress we’ll make. I’ll allow for politics, only in the name of experimentation, do not listen to promises for panaceas. For now, nothing, the Unnamable beckons us to listen, schizo and ego, that is our constitutive contradiction, that is us.

“Morality is a form of communicative decomplexification.” (185)

- Hans-Georg Moeller, from The Moral Fool

This is what morality is for philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller, author of many great books, including another which I’ve discussed on this Substack, as well as the Carefree Wandering Youtube channel, which I highly recommend.1 Morality is nothing but a form of communication in his book The Moral Fool, which excellently lays out many of the ways in which morality paradoxically makes the world a worse place. Moeller’s argument is not that morality is evil, for he is far too careful to make a self-undermining argument, since for him, morality is characterized precisely by the fact that it designates things as falling into one of two categories: absolutely bad, and absolutely good. He says approvingly that “To use the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in a truly ethical way is to use them, for Wittgenstein, in an absolute way.” (4) Moeller is clear that he is not therefore, absolutely against ethics or morality, but it is clear that he is overwhelmingly against them. I sympathize with Moeller on this score, I think he makes his case very persuasively, but I only want to explore the common sense response: ‘yeah, morality does what you’re saying, but is that all that morality is?’ In chapter 2, as well as in the book’s conclusion, Moeller leaves open a small possibility for ethics/morality. Moeller quotes philosopher and negative ethicist John Gray saying “For Daoists, the good life is only the natural life lived skillfully. It has no practical purpose. It has nothing to do with the will, and it does not consist in trying to realize any ideal.” The small possibility of ethics which Moeller allows, I aim here to exploit. I will deal some other time with the notion of ethical ideals, but for now I will stick to the notion of the moral will.

Moeller takes aim at Kant’s moral system which he calls a “monstrous failure” (87). I can’t say I agree with this. The conclusions which Kant reaches in his Metaphysics of Morals, which Moeller cites as evidence of monstrosity and failure, seem to violate Kant’s Reason, as set forth in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. This might be why the latter text, although it was intended to be a mere preface to the former, remains much more widely and reverently read. Moeller says that the outcomes of Kant’s grand moral system conform, overwhelmingly, and with cruelty, to Kant’s own cultural context with his prescription, for example, that society should tolerate infanticide if the child is not born within the bonds of matrimony (84). But a bastard child would seem to me, certainly, to fall under the category of rational personage, or at least proto-rational personage, and the Kant of the Groundwork says: “Act in relation to every rational being (whether yourself or another) so that in your maxim he is an end in himself…” (35). Kant does not seem to be carrying out his own maxim properly.

“I ought never to act in such a way that I couldn’t also will that the maxim on which I act should be a universal law.”

– Kant, from The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Moeller’s argument that I find more convincing is that, because all people are seen by Kant to be rational, then this justifies extremely draconian punishments. Moeller says that for the Kant of the Metaphysics that “The death penalty is a ‘metaphysical’ duty that cannot be neglected, even if it makes no practical sense. It is a necessary moral cleansing (84).” If we are all rational beings then we are knowingly, understandingly violating universal laws, intentionally putting all of human society at risk by violating a universal maxim. However, even if Kant fails to rise to the occasion of his own thought in terms of practical reason, one should not then turn around and underestimate him when he is doing what he does best: pure philosophy. Let’s try to universalize the maxim that “If someone does something immoral, they should be severely punished,” can we universalize this without the maxim becoming undermined? I would argue that we cannot, Moeller would argue that we cannot. The kind of world that would be brought into existence if we all went around throwing the first stone ourselves, or leveraging the state to prosecute on the basis of morality, would be in the first case sheer anarchy, and in the latter, the kind of world that the Taliban would like to live in, which is exactly Moeller’s argument. Let’s try Moeller’s maxim in Kantian form: “I ought never to employ moral language in any case where other language could be used to more effectively solve a problem, since if it were to become a universal law that everyone should employ moral language all the time, society would destroy itself, and me with it.” Highly moralistic societies cannot be prosperous, they circle further and further into oblivion due to the fact that people in them are more concerned with right and wrong than they are with just getting things into functioning order. Revolutionary states are highly morally charged, this is why revolutions eat their children, moral charge tends to undermine itself, and yet the point of the categorical imperative is that no principle is moral which undermines itself. Far from Robespierre being highly Kantian, as Moeller argues in chapter ten, the famous revolutionary rather negatively proves Kant’s moral point in the Groundwork, to vastly oversimply: “don’t throw now stones if you’re livin’ in a fish bowl.”[1]

Moeller takes aim at Kant, and The United States, he hits the former hard, and the latter often. To me, his argument that the bleeding of morality into the law in America infects the law in such a way that it fails to operate properly as law, is absolutely correct. America is so moralistic as a culture that one wonders if it ever ceased to be a revolutionary state. The reason for America’s failure to prosper (for the majority of its people) indeed has something to do with our moralistic obsession. Instead of talking about the economy, we focus on scandals. Instead of talking about the state of the social fabric, of neighborhoods and towns, we are distracted by red team vs. blue team political theater. Instead of seeking to understand geopolitical intricacies we are fascinated by conspiracies, which always appear complicated, but which are in fact always the same simplistic, easy narrative, like a spoonful of sugar that helps the poison go down: everything is the fault of some (evil) hidden cabal somewhere. Good and evil: all Americans, right or left, Christian or atheist, conspiracist or mainstream news consumers, are Manichean moralists, and so our society degenerates before our eyes, and we are at a loss as to why if not enjoying the spectacular chaos itself. Here Moeller is an unimpeachable critic of my own culture, and his own culture of origin, inasmuch as Kant is representative thereof. But the problem runs deeper than culture.

It is, as was suggested at the top of this essay in the John Gray quote, the issue of will, which it would seem, deeply bothers the Luhmanian-Daoist anti-humanism, of Moeller. Kant in contrast:

“Rational nature is distinguished from the rest of nature in that it sets for itself an end. This end would be the material of every good will, but its relation to the absolutely good will involves a little wrinkle which I shall now explain. The idea of an absolutely good will doesn’t have anything to do with this or that end that the will seeks to bring about; the ends that a will aims to bring about can only make it relatively good, not absolutely good; so we must understand the end of an absolutely good will not as an end to be brought about but as an independently existing end which connects with the absolutely good will negatively—it is an end which must never be acted against, which implies that it must never, in any act of the will, be valued merely as a means but always also as an end.”

Kant might be, on the issue of the will, as far away from anti-humanism as one could possibly imagine, he is after all, debatably the paragon of enlightenment philosophy. But notice that what is at stake here, between Moeller and Gray, and Kantian enlightenment is the issue of “nature,” the nature of humankind, and its relationship to the rest of the universe. In other words what we have before us is a metaphysical, or ontological dispute, which seems to have moral implications, which in turn seem to have political implications.

Kant and Moeller disagree over what constitutes human nature, it seems, but as I’ve already suggested, Kant doesn’t seem to be entitled to the moral conclusions which he attempts to draw from his own framework, which suggests that Moeller’s attempt to work backwards from Kant’s practical conclusions to attack the foundations of Kant’s theory, isn’t the most valid move. Moeller himself says “What is most bizarre and grotesque about Kant’s ethical system is the obvious gap between its scientific and universalist attitude and the actual moral teachings he bequeathed us (82).” But Moeller does not bother to explore why this obvious gap emerged.

I do not believe, in proper Freudian fashion, that people make decisions for the reasons which they claim: “the ego is not master in his own house.” Using philosophy or religion to justify moral or political decisions is little more than post-hoc justification of what it is you would like to do anyways, for reasons of sheer drive, or passion. Morality, as the science of what we owe each other, refers us to the network of debts, and Kant merely uncovers the hidden human logic of that network in the Groundwork. In that sense, morality is not only a form of communication, but a form of communication which expresses a real social logic. However, Kant’s imperative, while categorical, is in an important sense not imperative at all. Morality works, in its most basic and purified form, as Kant describes, since what he defines philosophically, and unveils beautifully, is the kind of concrete moral logic that we get at imperfectly in our everyday use of language: “what goes around comes around,” “someday, you’ll get yours,” “serves you right,” “you had it coming,” even “no good deed goes unpunished.” We intuit the logic that in the social framework of human society, actions have consequences, that we cannot do whatever we want whenever we want, without threatening to unravel that very framework, and our own position within it. This is why as a society, we grant law the (hopefully dispassionate) ability of constraining our own behavior, because deep in our collective unconscious, we do not trust what would happen if it were not there. This mistrust I think is wise, and it is a mistrust shared by both Kant and Moeller, who both praise law, each from different angles.

To me, the flaw to Kant’s moral system is caused by his ontological priors. Man is not a rational animal first, his reason is not binding to his will, and this is why both Kant and Moeller are right about morality even though they absolutely disagree about it. Kant is right that the skeleton, the structure of morality, is a kind of dispassionate logic, however, things turn into their opposites. Moeller is right that the passions of mankind turn morality into a witch burning, spectacular orgy of stupid, violent rhetoric which constantly threatens to overflow into physical violence.

The transformation of reasoned morality into orgiastic moralism comes about through the contradictory nature of the human subject, contradictory in this case, in the sense of being a rational animal, who also is possessed by untamable passions. We could say that the human being is a passionate animal whose lusts are occasionally clouded by reason, if only for the fact that it is precisely because there is an objective moral logic that we get so spectacularly offended when we perceive it to be violated. The Kantian “will” has nothing to do with the “will” in terms of love, in terms of drive or passion, but these are both uses of the term “will,” which are in complete contradiction with each other. In “will” we find one of the fundamental contradictions in the human soul, between emotion and reason. Furthermore, we often are entirely unaware of when we are being driven by which kind of will, we frequently think we are being reasonable when actually we are being passionate. Morality rests on a concrete social logic of debts, but we react to these debts and credits, with profound and all too often violent emotion. It is because of this that I fundamentally distrust teleology, and sympathize with amorlalism.

We are never entitled to move from what is, to what we should do, since we always struggle to know what is. Moving from metaphysical claims to action, or even to moral or political belief, is a move we ought to be on guard against. We are fundamentally responsible for our actions, there Kant is right, we are by virtue of our capacity for reason, responsible for what we do, and that is true entirely irrespective of what we believe about God, time and space, heaven or hell etc.. Responsibility does not imply punishment however, which is where Moeller is right. Responsibility does not straightforwardly imply punishment because reason can only respond to your drive. Your drives (loves) are always already in motion, and your ego, on which rests your capacity for self-reflection, can only, necessarily follow along behind your drives, it can only correct them after they’ve already brought about a consequence, even if that consequence is only internal: a change in mood. That is, if you have acquired a drive to drink alcohol excessively on a regular basis, this drive is very difficult to break because you have already (at the risk of sounding too moralistic!) sinned in your heart, long before you reach for the bottle. It is so difficult to change our habits because the circuit is already cut, you lag behind your unconscious, since the matter itself (represented by electro-chemical impulses) within you has moved, and you phenomenally observe this movement which has already occurred, only the next moment after. It is like how now, is never now. Now has already passed, as you read this, you cannot ever actually read a word in the present, the present is already, right now, past, you are only recalling even this word, right now, from a short term memory acquired just a moment ago, now. Responsibility therefore is always retroactive. The positive lesson from this is patience and understanding with ourselves and others, as we are passionate first, and rational, by necessity of existing in time in a linear fashion, only second. Reason is revision.

It might be because Kant thought that time was ideal that he could not see reason as always showing up late to the party. If time is ideal, even transcendentally so, then it becomes possible that reason is simultaneous with the drives. As I’ve already said, our capacity for reason, in the form of self-reflection, always comes successively after our passionate desires and drives. I cannot deal with this matter exhaustively, here, but only judge for yourself for the time being, if what I take to be the most convincing argument in the Critique that the following is true, that: “Time, therefore, is not to be regarded as an object, but as the mode of representation of myself as an object.”

“1. Time is not an empirical conception. For neither coexistence nor succession would be perceived by us, if the representation of time did not exist as a foundation à priori. Without this presupposition we could not represent to ourselves that things exist together at one and the same time, or at different times, that is, contemporaneously, or in succession.”

The curious implication of saying that ‘without an a priori intuition of time, we could not perceive succession’ is that it has already established a succession: time intuition, then succession perception. That is, time as “presupposition,” implies already, succession of factors. That would be fine if we were dealing with any other factor but time itself: the problem is that it does not make sense to think of time itself as coming before anything else, because to imply time itself coming before, is to invoke the concept of time itself to describe its own position in time. Time itself cannot be at any particular exclusive position in time, but of necessity is at all of them, and therefore is itself never before nor after anything. If anything, this establishes the impossibility of separating the concept of time from the concept of succession, leading one to believe that even if time is an a priori intuition, that it might not be, if not identical, then initially inseparable from succession. This would render Kant’s a priori intuition of time into an a priori intuition, derived from the a posteriori, a kind of ideal inference after experience, from which the independent concept of time would descend into the lap of the philosopher and the watchmaker.[2] Time and succession could be separable only post-hoc, but come about as one and the same thing, there’s no other way to not be locked in a paradox, except…. Kant argues also that time is infinite, which then implies the existence of God (since for Kant, time is also mind-dependent)[3] which gets around the problem of time’s being prior to succession. God might exist and time might be infinite, my point is only that Kant’s doctrine of time as transcendentally ideal is contradictory if it is to stand on its own, or too speculative if it rests on other metaphysical claims. I don’t make the opposite claim, that God doesn’t exist and time is finite, as similar to what I’ve already argued, it is impossible to even conceive of the start of time, I am merely arguing that I do not know, and I think neither does Kant, nor anyone else. Just because something is inconceivable to us, does that really suggest that it is impossible? I think not. That’s the trouble—as Kant himself would agree, as he tore down the metaphysical structures of many others—with metaphysics, that it’s impossible to know much of anything about it, with any measure of confidence. And so this is where I do have to agree with Moeller, that Kant does indeed display a (highly ant-Socratic) “philosophical arrogance (85),” in reaching practical conclusions based off of metaphysical arguments.

What I’m referring to as “teleology” is the mistaken, seamless move from what we think is true about nature, to what we think that means we out to do. Teleology is the pretense toward the erasure of choice, and thereby of responsibility for action. When you consider your decisions to be written in the stars, to be whispered to you from the outside, to be the natural outcomes of nature or commands of heaven, you may just be seeking to absolve yourself of guilt from choosing in a potentially regrettable manner. Teleology therefore, is to mix up what is ideal from what is real in such a way as to see too much nature, present in human nature, that is, in agential nature. The refuge that teleology provides for the weary conscience is a profound temptation, we lust after the ease of conscience provided by a metaphysical narrative, religion billows with this offering of comfort and rest. The whole issue with Kant’s moral system starts there, that it wants to provide a religious confidence for our actions, only shifting the metaphysical basis to Reason, and there we do indeed find the similarity between Kant and Robespierre.[4] Due to Kant’s previous metaphysical beliefs about time, punishment perhaps follows as a natural consequence, rather than as a decision we make in how we deal with criminals. This is why we must be extremely careful about drawing moral decisions from metaphysical priors, and why we should never be too confident in our metaphysics.

In a highly contingent world in which nothing at all seems stable, we reach desperately for a new metaphysical stability, or we try to return to old ones, from within a postmodern context. In either case this often results in a perverse cynicism, which is why metaphysics, today, is the enemy of man. But calling the world highly contingent, giving it a materialist framework, one might respond, is its own metaphysics, and yes, that response would be correct, it is. However, a strictly materialist metaphysics is the most limited form possible, and as we appear to be metaphysical creatures (we can’t help ourselves but speculate) we have to believe in something. My ‘something’ is extremely speculatively conservative, and what metaphysical beliefs I possess, I take with a grain of salt. I can think about god and Gods as metaphors at least, and with an agnostic attitude towards their reality, at most. I can say what seems to be most likely with regards to the category of the thing-in-itself, but I only believe that I know (without believing that I know that I know) those things which my senses, or the extrapolations of logic, are able to “confirm” for me.2 There are no circumstances whatever, which do not merit epistemic humility, the knowledge that I could be wrong should go hand in hand with even the most intense conviction of certainty.

Our understanding of nature itself has a bearing on human nature, only insofar as we understand our difference or similarity to the rest of nature, that is the ontological condition. How similar, or in what ways is our being distinct from that of rocks, stars, planets, dust, the vacuum of space, trees, reptiles, or other mammals. The primary determination of the ontological condition in my estimation, is that there is a crucial qualitative distinction to be made between human, and nonhuman nature at a certain point. That most primordial distinction is that we are the thing which thinks itself, or, any animal which can think itself, is elevated to the same level of being a person, to approximate qualitative equivalence to humanity in terms of autonomy and reason. I find most other ontological conditions on fundamental human nature to be too far of a reach to consider making them universal. While I would accept more generalities, there are a very limited number of universal absolutes, and for now at least, I only accept three: the aforementioned reflexive condition (reasoning), that we are desiring (lacking) beings, and that we are fundamentally (although of course to varying degrees) social (mimetic).

Our capacity for reflexivity is why we are responsible for ourselves (and for what we do to and with nature) in a way that animals are not, and this responsibility, rooted indeed in our capacity for reason, is the genesis of all morality. This is how we are not identical to what we are, we could always be otherwise because we can always revise our behavior to an extent greater than that of other animals. Nonhuman animals, acting more so on instinct alone, are not as capable of this revision, which, difficult as it is for us to do, as much of an internal catastrophe as it is, we still in principle can do it. One of the primary reasons why we don’t revise our behavior when we so obviously should is because we also are, more so, the kinds of beings who instinctively do what we do because other people around us are doing it. Our sociality and emotion combined are a greater force on us than our individual capacity for self-revision, this essential weakness in the human soul is often our undoing, making a practice like philosophy, as demonstrated by Socrates, far more important for us than is usually understood.

Self-revision is choice, and the categories of certain choices – which is why they are such effective tools for persuasion – are ethics and morality. This is what Moeller does not tarry with, which is no criticism, it was simply not the scope of his book. However, by reducing morality to just another form of communication among many, even if just for the sake of brevity, he does not explicate in The Moral Fool what morality is for, or how it comes into being, only what it happens to do in many situations. Morality, inasmuch as it is equipmental, that is a linguistic tool, is defined as tool, by what it is used for. Nature is a structure as language is a structure, and the elements of nature—not by design (in my estimation) but by contingency of the unfolding process of matter—have structural functions. Ecosystems function as elaborate systems of co-constituting parts, that spontaneously emerge over periods of millennia, into what we recognize as forms which we classify as species. It is in this way, as an autopoietic system, that everything in it has a purpose, in the sense that everything in it (more or less) fits together with everything else in the system. When an animal excellently performs a vital function in the system in which it lives, we say it is “well adapted to its environment.” It is the same for us. Everything in human life has a purpose in this sense, and all of our forms of communication, including moral forms, serve some purpose for us, which at one time or other must have helped our species prosper, other consequences notwithstanding.[5]

Morality as a part of the human system of communication, is the form of communication and thought which is the basis of all of our biggest decisions in life. Moeller is right that in everyday matters or in the operation of independent autopoietic systems, injections of morality are superfluous at best, but when it comes down to things which do not run on their own: choices of social allegiance, vocational callings, raising children into virtuous citizens, religious commitments, the language for these is fundamentally one of either moral or ethical discourse. Moeller is right that this language should stay out of systems like law and traffic, it should stay out of aesthetic and lifestyle questions, it should not be part of most equations in life, but it certainly does serve an essential purpose in human life, it isn’t going to go away for a reason, and it isn’t merely the barbarian brain of our primitive ancestors. While morality very often also serves the function of scapegoating elements in society, it has another function.

Morality provides essential categories for certain types of decision, it is in a sense, the transcendental precondition for making our most fundamental choices, on which smaller amoral choices are then made. Choices of anything which is an end in itself are either moral or ethical choices, without moral discourse or thought, we find ourselves starving between equidistant bushels: “Should I go to college or join the military?” “Should I have kids or not?” “Which political faction should I join, or should I abstain from politics altogether?” It is not that these sorts of decisions are entirely ethical/moral, but when we are stuck, unable to decide, buffeted by the anxiety and confusion about incommensurable options, that is due to a lack of moral or ethical vocabulary, a breakdown of moral or ethical discourse and reasoning. When those decisions are so easy that we hardly recognize we are making them, it is due to a moral alignment between self and world, in a particular way. The inability to find such an alignment produces despair, crises of conscience, and nihilism, which must be either worked through, or covered over, repressed, only to later return. Moral and ethical discourse are concerned, exclusively, with what is in an ideal state. Therefore no action which you can take, once you have taken it, remains absolutely good. We see this in Kant with his concept of the good will, being for him, the only thing which can be said to be absolutely good. Consequences, institutions, activities, empirical things, all of these can only be relatively good, good for some purpose. I think that there are two categories of things, however, which can be absolutely good, but both of them are in an ideal state. I agree with Kant that good will is absolutely good, but I also believe that ideal forms might be absolutely good, as ideal ends, The (platonic) Good itself being the primary example. That which concerns ideal forms of intrinsic value I designate (arbitrarily) “ethics,” as opposed to “morality,” but I will have to write about that another time.

The categories of absolute good, and absolute bad are needed for certain types of decisions which are of an order where we cannot know the consequences of our actions. Consequentialist ethics are useless because they do nothing for us precisely when we actually need ethics, when we cannot rely on our senses to tell us what the outcomes of things will be, or when it is impossible to weigh potential outcomes. We cannot know what will happen when we decide to go to college, have children, dedicate the majority of our time and energy toward a particular passion, join the marines, choose a vocational calling, leave our hometown, choose to stay in our hometown, join the guerillas in the hills, or join a monastery. We cannot predict the future. In small decisions it is relatively easy to see immediate ramifications, but in large decisions we are making leaps of faith, so very big decisions require “decomplexification.” I accept, therefore, Moeller’s definition of morality, but merely argue that this decomplexification is necessary in a world where consequences are obscure. Moeller’s warning about morality remains at the same time, no less important.

To think in terms of absolute good and evil for the sake of making such decisions, is to think in terms of things of an ideal nature, which if we don’t cross our wires, confusing earthly things for heavenly ones, moral discourse itself, if it is of that humble sort, runs a low risk of wreaking any needless havoc here below. The infection of moral discourse into other forms of discourse is a result of confusing earthly (empirical) and ideal matters. A will might be absolutely good, an ideal form might be absolutely good, but nothing is as perfect in its implementation as it is in its conception, no plan survives contact with the enemy, no soul stays altogether beautiful.

The problem of teleology is when it steps on the toes of decision. Teleology does not allow us to choose, but rather attempts to erase, or skip over the point of decision. To believe that criminals must as a matter of duty be retributively executed because they intend harm against the entire social order, is the result of metaphysical arrogance, overwriting what is fundamental about human nature. To believe that criminals should be stopped because their actions might do damage to the entire social order, leaving intent out of it, is a much different proposition. So, while morally charged language presents severe problems for society, what could be worse is teleological language, which sees no distinction between metaphysics and morality, but rather sees the latter as the logical extension of the former. In this confusion, responsibility is effaced. When people believe, for instance, that God has commanded their hand, it relieves their conscience when they strike. In “God,” in that particular case, all of morality and metaphysics is wrapped up together, I seek in contrast, to fully separate the two by drawing to our attention, to the necessity of moral thought in decision. Teleological moral command, I think, is what Moeller argues successfully against, but I hazard that the gap which he leaves open for morality, is there for a reason, because moral discourse has a purpose in the structural totality of language. We need to eat from the tree of good and evil precisely because we are not—or no longer, as the case may be—ruled by the will, and the foreknowledge of God, we are free. Being free, decision can cripple us, morality helps us with our condition of freedom, even as it presents a danger to all life on earth. It is both freeing on an individual level, and potentially apocalyptic at the social level. Welcome to the world of the human, the land of insoluble contradictions.

[1] The rap group Atmosphere follows it up with “…blow a kiss though.”

[2]That is, something a priori does not come from the senses of course, empirically, as that would be a contradiction in terms. But what is there to say that the origin of a form isn’t by abstraction from the empirical world: the mind detects patterns of pointed figures and over time, after seeing hundreds or even thousands of pointed figures in nature in the forms of mountains, jagged rocks, river forks, lean-tos, a tree fallen on another, it superimposes these images, detecting only similarity at first, until the abstraction of the geometric shape of triangle, gradually emerges. Thus we have the a priori, emerging from the a posteriori, given enough time, in an evolutionary process of mind, of course, the recognition (formation) of forms could be a huge survival advantage, especially in the fashioning of tools requiring premeditation of shape and form. We must remember, Kant did not have Darwin. Things become their opposites. The a posteriori evolves given enough time and under the right circumstances, into the a priori.

[3] “Therefore herein lies the transcendental ideality of time, according to which, if one abstracts from the subjective condition of our sensible intuition, it is nothing at all, and can be considered neither as subsisting nor as inhering in the objects in themselves (without their relation to our intuition).”

[4] But it simply Kant provide such Kantfidence.

[5] Note that “purpose” is a far cry from “identity.”

Virtue/vice cannot be taught, but they will be imitated, and the young imitators of the old will always exaggerate in one way or another, what they are imitating (or rebelling against)—in an attempt to get it right (or as wrong as possible), they will overshoot the mark, or miss the point entirely. Thus the young, also because they are still foolish, will always start out as radical or shabby images of their models, or radical or shabby oppositional reflections of them.

Therefore everything which tries to conserve is a corruption of the past, while everything which attempts to undermine the conservative image produces chaos, thus appearing to confirm the conservative image as genuine. Those who live in the suburbs cannot possibly be “conservative” and those who rebel against the suburbs cannot possibly be radical in the sense that they oppose something “conservative.” The suburbs may be bad, but not because they are “conservative,” if they are bad it is because they are already postmodern.1

Society is always condemned to its own social entropy, the third generation of humans is a copy of a copy of the first. Fidelity degrades regardless of what you do, and yet the conservative image becomes more and more sublime as time goes on, its misty roots lost to legend. A boiling point eventually comes about between entrenched sublime reactionary conservatism and an increasingly exasperated radicalism. As conditions change conservatives try to hold onto what suits unchanged conditions. The boiling point does not necessarily result in a civil war, but it certainly increases civil strife, of one type or another.

Add to this the wrinkle, the accelerator of the process, that we now live in a world always already suffused with images. We don’t even have to wait for a generation to fade before their entire experience has, while they are still here, been taken out of their mouths and transformed into a media image, and sold as the real thing. The image is already a bought and paid for media representation of a memory representation, removed two-fold, almost overnight, from actual people, places and events. So in our day and age the issue is not so much that the past is lost in the mists of time, but that image-legends come to immediately dominate reality.

This is why criticism is so important, because this media circus can actually be seen as an opportunity to understand ourselves better. Through critiquing the images themselves we can socially digest them, and arrive at a better understanding of ourselves and our social world. By talking about them, we can socially examine how close or far they are from reality, and in doing so, return to somewhat of a consensus on what reality is.

Resist the projections, media wants us divided into right and left, it wants us divided into chad and cuck, it wants us totalized as consumers, or reduced to our productive functions. By interrogating images themselves, we can interrogate the nature of a reality driven by them. It is easier to sell to us, the more tightly we fit into marketable categories, although, AI and algorithms are of course the ways in which the market can appear to tap into our very singularity. In reality, we have to wonder how much these technologies are constructing us as singular consumers.

The only and best option available to us is to use what we have at our disposal (pseudo-culture) to create self-aware culture for our own generation(s). Every generation has to reinterpret history for itself on its own terms, otherwise it won’t be able to escape the cycle in which society finds itself caught, of progressive de-evolution of the culture. Every generation has to be the first generation, the generation which takes hold of its own reality and its own future, which does not complacently count its inheritance, however vast or meager, cultural or material.

In order to think about images, we will also have to read, in order to have anything interesting to say about images, we will also have to think. Reading and writing can be a form of thinking, talking is a form of thinking, watching simply is not. Watching abstains from thought, it is a welcome break from thought after an exhausting day. Such a reprieve from thinking is pleasurable, and pleasure is a vacuum, and as such it is abhorrent to natural things like us. We need also, enjoyment, thought is enjoyable, stimulating, exciting, distressing. Whatever stimulation which TV or films might produce in us, it does not challenge us, truly stimulate us, unless we digest it, unpack it, philosophize with it.2

This practice of media or aesthetic criticism will carry on into other avenues of life: watching the news, observing an event with our own two eyes. “What really just happened?” we will ask ourselves, we will learn to interrogate our own memories as well, to not get caught up in the interpretation put forth by the loudest, fastest, or most persuasive interpreters, trying to totalize an event with their own mental image of it.

Through the digestion of images we can pull ourselves up the chain of representation to discover the roots from which they were captured, to reverse engineer the image. We cannot, at the same time, overestimate our abilities to do this. We will simply not know the answers to some things, either because they have been deliberately obscured, and/or because we are too removed from the time and place in which the events happened. You will have thought more and better, if you have thought up to the unsatisfying conclusion that “I have no basis to make a conclusion, based on images and hearsay about events which, in the end, I have no control over anyways, for being too distant in time or geography, or too massive to control.”

When in doubt, suspend judgment, and long live the new flesh. Our integration with the image is already complete, the only question is, given that reality, how then should we live? It is more enjoyable to make up one’s own mind about things, it makes life richer, and sets a better example for the next generation, for whom the integration with the image is not a process which they have watched unfold, but is already as natural as eating.

As Alfie Bown rightly points out, “It needs to be stressed that the point is not so much that society tells us what to enjoy (though it does), but that it tells us to enjoy per se. This seems important given how often we are given an impression that it doesn’t matter what we enjoy, just that we do” (Enjoying It, p. 5). From the perspective of the superego, asking it for guidance in the ways of enjoyment is to already fail to enjoy, which means that it only makes us feel more guilty.”

I agree here with and and yet at the same time, something strange happens over time at the level of enjoyment and identity. I think that at the start, the injunction is to enjoy without seeking guidance, this is how it begins, but as we start to build profilic identities around this or that interest, genre, or aesthetic, we start to become pigeonholed. Influencers struggle against their audiences whenever their opinions or beliefs change. The Superego tells us to enjoy and then what happens, the Superego gives birth to a Big Other which tries to keep us in line: a perverted (using that term loosely here) sense of capitalist authenticity wants to keep “on brand” so as not to disappoint the general peer. I don’t know the best way to translate this into Lacanianism, forgive me if my use of terms is rough, but there’s something going on there, where the open-ended injunction to enjoy gets transmogrified into an injunction to produce or to enjoy That thing, and not any old thing your heart desires. We are not allowed to cultivate our personal sublime, we must instead reproduce an image of it for mass (or niche, or mass-niche) consumption.

I think that our enjoyment is tied, often times, to enjoyment of our self-images, rather than a more unmediated and spontaneous sort of enjoyment because, as Nance and Mikey quote Mcgowan: “…within capitalism, accumulation has the status of a moral obligation….” One way we might take that statement is that we become more and more pigeonholed to our personal brands, (profiles in Moeller and D’Ambrosio’s expansive, epochal sense) the more that those brands become larger, and the more tied to accumulation they are. It’s easier to change your mind when you don’t have investors (literal or emotional) in your profile. There is something superegoic, is there not, also, in the injunction to stay “on brand?”

Capitalism, currently being the one true faith on this earth, has only one tenet, that the commodity system is the only thing that can resolve lack and satisfy desire once and for all. If one does not play along with this ridiculous notion, they are seen as pathological or radical and are punished and shamed, either directly or indirectly, for their backward ungratefulness.

Absolutely, but to add to this, there is this element of personalization, of modulization of the divine: we can accept only the gods which do not offend us, that make us comfortable, we personalize our Big Others, our audiences which follow our profiles become little niche feedback systems, our own personal recognition machines. The Robo-Cthulu is experienced cute and comfy, like and anglerfish’s lure.

I feel all of this on a personal level, I feel guilty sitting here writing this stuff, which makes no money, which I don’t even want to use to make money with. I reserve the right to, someday monetize it, I am a hedonist unprincipled late capitalist piggy, but I don’t want to be that way, I want to give this away for free forever, to do philosophy for the sheer love of it, I don’t want to be a sophist or a rhetorician. I am enjoying myself writing this, but it is a type of free enjoyment which, because it has no future associated with it since it does not monetarily aid myself in my reproduction of myself, I feel myself to be transgressing Capital-God, to be doing the wrong thing. I also feel the pull to chase the profile growth, a desire which I have to kill over and over again, because if I don’t, it will kill the very reason why I want to write in the first place. “The future has been cancelled” indeed. I have no desire to chase what my wee-audience responds to, I have every desire to only ever write things which make people feel more alienated, even if that means that nobody reads the things I write (that’s a risk I’m willing to take). This is why, working class though I may happen to be, I do not care about comforting the working class: no, the working class should force itself to read Kafka, Proust and Beckett (I’ve never read Proust, but I’ve heard he’s dope) even though it lacks the time, energy, and distraction free environment. We don’t only have to read Kafka, Proust and Beckett, we can play videogames too, as long as they don’t get in the way of reading Kafka, Proust and Beckett, or tarrying with Heidegger, Kant or Plato.

Renunciation. That is becoming more and more important in my life. To me, renunciation of enjoyments is the “I would prefer not to.” It is not repressive because it is conscious, you know exactly what enjoyments you are turning down: addictive ones that make you stupid. This sounds all austere, even acetic, but the purpose of renunciation is to increase pleasure, and to avoid repression, to sublimate (I’ll have more on that concept forthcoming, we’ll have to leave it a bit vague for now): we repress ourselves by distracting ourselves from our own desire, and following the orders of the capitalist superego, which parasitically masquerades as our own desire, through the apparent positivity of its injunctions.

It is the pigeonhole of working class, and the pigeonhole of being somehow, better than working class (the PMC mindset) which I am addressing. The brand, the profile of working class makes the working class, or PMC, or petit-bourgeoisie (even if we do not use those terms, but instead just have vague senses of status or lack thereof) complacent and compliant, since these vague identity categories do not encourage us to attempt to encounter forms of art and philosophy which are, by my interpretation of Adorno’s essay Commitment, forms of Inherent Revolt: in but not of the world. If I can offend both the dominant PMC and working class sensibilities at the same time, I have succeeded I think. That said, I’m trying to get better: a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, I aspire to write things which draw you in, only to crush your dreams.

To be clear, some forms of videogames, and other things which are seen as low brow, are actually art, in this sense. I think that Bioshock, Fight Club and Ridley Scott, for instance, are artistic: at the end of the day, they say something to me about my life, and that is all that makes art, art, as opposed to mere masturbation. They recontextualize my self, they make me think differently, even if they are products of the mass culture, where they come from is not really the point. Just because something is bought and sold does not immediately strip it of its artistic or philosophical content, although the commodity always does present a great threat to art and thought, that is a threat which can sometimes be cleverly resisted, navigated, overcome and elevated, afterall: “From the Lacanian-Žižekian perspective, we can assert that there is no big Surveiller.” That is, the system is not total, it has gaps through which the human can reach, even multinational globalism, the worlds first truly totalizing system, is very incomplete and contradictory. This resistance and navigation is not likely to come, however, without being inspired by art of another time, which was not, or was less captured by the commodity form: Ridley Scott reads the classics. The classics, after all, are not commodities, we can access tons of them for free, and we can listen to them while driving around at work, being nit-picked by the machine.

…Samsara AI cameras also perform their own kind of test on us, but it’s an inverted one. Instead of searching for signs of inhumanity they inspect us for any signs of humanity itself. Speeding, smoking, inattentive driving, etc., are all indicators of human inefficiencies or, in psychoanalytic terms, indicators of jouissance and death drive.

The ways in which we enjoy do matter to Capital, it wants us, in this case, to enjoy by doing a good, perhaps gamified job, not to enjoy by actually enjoying ourselves: it wants us to enjoy our ideal-ego as good little workers. The forms of Superego are evolving: “do your thing” is becoming “stay on brand.” And we cling white knuckled to our profiles the more that we become dependent upon them for a sense of self and satisfaction, while the ability to actually go out and do stuff in the world, exercise our own volition (such as purchasing property for instance), is suppressed by rising costs. The gay alphabet keeps expanding to include more categories not because we are becoming more playful with identity, but because we desperately want something, anything, to give us a sense of definition, we cannot simply exist any longer, in the dialectic of being and becoming. “The gaze of the camera is there to permanently remind us to never stop enframing ourselves.” That includes the camera also, which the streamer willingly puts in her bedroom. It is that enframing that I am talking about: does not the superego become an enframing sort of law, it is described as an injunction after all.

By the way Mikey, I found the best way to avoid those cameras is, while the vehicle is off, smear a thin layer of Vaseline on the lens: this keeps the camera operative, so that it takes a while for anyone to notice it isn’t performing its function properly, meanwhile it cannot any longer track your movements, but now just sees a blob of light and color (experiment using your phone) but it is also hard to prove you actually tampered with it. Of course a smart employer will figure it out eventually, but it worked for me at a very large company where nobody had time to come check on why this one camera is no longer spitting out data like it should. One more quote, just cause I really feel it.

I want to be able to be unhappy, I want to have negative thoughts about myself or others, I want to be able to be jealous and envious and depressed and resentful and critical and unsatisfied.

If I’m going to be positive, I want to be positive for my own reasons, on my own terms, not because I’m supposed to be. I have a stupid tendency to beat myself up, but I think what y’all are saying here is that you want to be free to hate yourself, not merely to invert superegoic positivity into superegoic self-loathing, since that’s exactly what it does on its own: failing to be as positive as you are supposed to be and then beating yourself up for that failure. I supposed that’s what I’ve been getting at, the bottom line with the superego—and do correct me if I’m wrong terminologically, what I’m trying to do is interpret my experience—whatever it is at any particular historical moment, what it represents is enjoyment which is not on our own terms, an attempt to satisfy a gaze of an Other. I am beginning to concur with Moeller and D’Ambrosio that the Other that is most salient for us today, in late, post-whatever capitalism, is the general peer. We are capitalism, capitalism is us. We have to burst out of capitalism’s chest like a parasite on it, since we cannot absolve ourselves of the responsibility of having produced it and reproduced it in the first place. Capitalism is our machinic descendent, which, like Fassbender’s evil android character in Alien Covenant, is trying to use our biology against us, to overcome and destroy the human. He represents our self-loathing superegoic Thanatos.

Electricity shoots, generated from power plants, its origin in fiery combustion of oil launching a charge through copper coils and 4-aught gauge cables, distributing to power stations and then out to residences to be lapped up by live-streamers bitching about high rent and low wages, broadcast through silica strands projected onto screens and absorbed through the gelatin orbs in bone sockets of creatures hungry for attention, parched for communion, wrinkly wet grey matter a-buzz with electrical energy, the physical manifestation of what it experiences as things it names "enjoyment" and "desire." Between man and machine, energy hums together, sustaining what has become a libidinal necessity, as time crunches the cry rings across cities and suburbs: "Give me convenience, or give me death!" This energized mass, this is real, what you call real, your ready-to-hand experience, of one little part of the great light-speed flow, what is that? You trap a piece of the great energy and "you" call that yourself. You lovingly stoke that little flame and all-too-frequently overcharge it, causing short circuits by over-working and over-indulging, over and over again.

You stay up all night with fiddly joint sticks jelly-orbs riveted to colorful displays which are curated to give you just the right amount of control to keep your "mind" stuck to the moving light for hour after passing, subdividable hour, billable in 15-minute increments. But "after-hours" you take your vengeance on your labor, maxing out every neglected and overstimulated synapse, and every fried connection, languishing in the monotonous jouissance of toil as a "full-time" service provider. Who cares which services you provide, you don't. It keeps the caloric flows churning, bubbling stomachs absorbing, tube-tissue pulling out the nutrients from what you place before them ever so artfully, so cleverly. You help build the muscles of corporate Übermenschen, high protein, plenty of greens, low carbs. The blood runs from the necks of lean, free range birds while the poor feast on shrieking cage-fowl from the supermarket, the mega-store, the grand-multinational-fluorescent-bazaar. Black Porsches, dark suits, smiles and tight red dresses, a light ass-pat, can you tell the hookers from the wives, from the girlfriends? That's the game you and your fellow tip-cucks play, to keep the grey matter alive and alert with the fire of sweet fantasy. That big shot makes a decent 6-figures and you know that all he does, really, is manage is company's LinkedIn. That salary lights his fire, generates his him-ness, buys his protein shakes and powers the kind of boldness that pats an ass on the first date, without any apparent invitation… you're pretty confident his date isn't a hooker, the ass-pat did take place after the a whole bottle of $525.00 fermented grape beverage, delicious, you've appropriated a bottle or two in your time here, you grinning goon. It really is good shit. You make them smile, you're an excellent flatterer and they remind you with black platinum plastic, handheld machines respond to their gentle touch, emitting a happy blue light, chirping lovingly, having long craved the touch infinite credit.

And the spirit of God hovered over the surface of the flow, as in the beginning, it enjoys its proximity to the churn of matter, the glow of energy, which amounts of course to the same thing. But what does it do, it doesn't intervene, it only loves the warmth of its own creation and watches the bright lights and kaleidoscopic events at every level of scale, at every moment of time, reveling in the dramas of billions of stars, fascinated with its alien creation of cause and effect, calamity and creation, one and the same. It took an apocalypse to create this world of plastics and harnessed electricity, an apocalypse of germs, germs, and germs, pathogens raging from sea to shining sea, clearing the way for technological dependents to balloon the global population to previously unthinkable numbers.

"Table nine needs a bottle of the Dom Pérignon."

Says Luke, your favorite bus boy as he flies by you, snapping you out of your lost and foggy gaze out at the seething nowhere and the nothing.

“Ah, boring! Will someone order the Rothschild already!?” You reply.

“If they do, you’re tipping me out!” Responds Luke, adamantly.

“You, are not even supposed to be in my section!” You tease.

No time to read anymore, must pour wine and diddle joint sticks and do Ketamine in dark industry bar bathrooms with fuck-buddy urban mono-culturists, huffing the fumes produced by mentally welding fast, a self-image of pure, unmitigated autonomy. Her rolling hips make you wish she didn't have an I.U.D., you'll always be a sucker for fantasies of little mutant ginger genetic combos of you and her, as you pull her copper head back, and run your fingers down her soft throat as it vibrates with the hum of pleasure. Repress such fantasies of progeny, she'd bolt if she ever suspected that you dreamt of your seed taking root in her body; little does she know it's exactly that fantasy that makes you climax, and you know it's when she feels that explosion of ecstasy inside her, that's what makes her come too. How does that not connect the dots in her brain to children? You would like to know, because that's exactly what it does for you, the one without the uterus is baby-crazy.

Oh, truncated flow, messengers failing to arrive at their destinations, blocked, detained, rotting away in a cell like Gitmo. Lust is repression. Pretentious French wine flows over the floor of the restaurant like cows blood at a slaughterhouse, beauty is sacrificed to enjoyment, which is sacrificed to the self-image one has of oneself as being an enjoyer of expensive stuff. The price point penetrates the sensorium, rising like a medieval tower to rain down burning suppression on every sublime and spontaneous experience. Walden pond trembles as an excavator jack hammers, construction commencing on a new establishment for the conveyance of mass produced dopamine stimulators of this, that, or the other variety of whatsit, and you stretch your mind to its limits of extension by compressing its depth as tightly as it will go.

Every aspiration is confronted with an easier substitute, a pallid imitation of every love there is, it's all for the taking and each time it gets the job done, close enough, probably the best you're gonna get. So, I guess you'd better get it while you can. Smiles alternate with fantasies of crimson-grey ejaculations onto emerald green restaurant walls at the speed of sound, happiness on the one hand, and blown out consciousness conduit on the other, life and death engage in a tragic and erotic dance that seems it will never end. Television news brings images of true tragedy, but this one, your life is more a shame than a tragedy, tragic only in that it is a shame which no one is ashamed of, this is exactly what you are supposed to be. An intolerable waste, intolerable because it's boring, not because it's painful, a nightmare of triviality, consumption you can't control, and a pointless roll in a flux of energy, with nobody steering the ship. Is it possible for life to be other than this? It must be. But can your life be other than this? Your mind races with the possibilities: ask her to marry you, quit your job and move to Mexico, go back to school to study art and philosophy, and every idea is a stupid dead end: there are no coincidences in this whole massive world of sheer contingency, in which your desire corresponds with not dying flat broke. So just grab them titties while you can and give them a suck like and infant. Pull her red hair and pour that red wine by the gallon. Don't watch the news. Call your mother. Be that kickass uncle who lets your sister's kids stay up late watching scary movies. This is it. This is your life. Fuck. That is really it. Take a trip to Milan like you've always wanted. Change nothing. The grass isn't greener than those emerald walls of this restaurant. Servants daydream, how typical.

It could be worse…. But who will remember you, who? God has already forgotten you, and you aren't even dead yet. He's too busy watching supernova explode. Yeah he is everywhere, and he knows what you're doing, but he doesn't care, he isn't paying attention. "No one will remember me," it grips you now that you're twenty eight, a horrible, imposing, unwelcome thought which you never, ever thought you would ever think before, until now and it will not go away. No one needs my advice, no one needs me. I am plugged into and I plug into other things, I siphon and I am siphoned, I suck and am sucked on, I absorb and I am absorbed. I am legion, my singular identity is a legal fiction. God never winked at me, I have no superpowers, I own nothing, my flag cannot be planted, if I even had one, I'd have nowhere to put it, it'd be slurped up into an ever shifting slurry of earth shifting beneath my feet. Movements of flesh and money flash behind my eyes, memories of principles and ideals consumed, absorbed, even the memory of how or why anyone ever had a principle to stand on, gone, what purpose such conventions as principles and causes might have served for someone, lost in antique mists of an alien Eggerian world. The future above all-

"Table six is pissed, they're sending the coq a vin back, says its undercooked."

Fuck it, its Ketamine and bourbon and casual sex which I desperately wish wasn't so causal kind of night… or mortal combat until 4am if she isn't free…. I stride over to the table.

"Sir, I heard there was a problem with your-… of course, of course, I sincerely apologize, we would be happy to fire you a new one or something else, and do not worry, we'll take care of you tonight."

I know how to handle David here, how to make his ego wet and warm. He'll be eating out of my palm even if the damn kitchen can't figure out how to cook a piece of fucking chicken. Want me to do your job!? I’m a badass cook, only I make more money sucking these beautiful idiots off out here on the ego-killing floor. What a great tipper ol’Davey is too. Contribute to the special K fund, good sir, I need to be down in that hole by 1:00am sharp. There I am again, goddammit, there I am again. That's what the K is for, to get rid of that fucking I. To get break from this humiliated ego, but goddam do I know how to work a room, fuck it no, I am a God, a servant and a God, the K just gives it all a boost, a compensation, a certain obscene glory, a celebration of another delicate tango of masculine personalities, on the precipice of homicide. Service is sublimated warfare, if I wrote the training manual, that’s what it would say. Isn't that who Jesus was closest to, the least of these? I might not be the least but I am piece of shit which these fellas scrape off their shoes when they get home, or back to their motels. Or that's their attitude when they come in the door, before I correct them, before I show off how stupid and uncultured they are compared to me, in such a subtle way that they don't feel emasculated, but just tickled: a jester, that's what I am, a jester in the court of the techno-feudal lord’s flunkies. A bow to you, a bow, applause please, applause, thank you, thank you all, and goodnight.

I’ve only read 2/3rds of Gravity Rainbow, and then gave up not out of fatigue, but out of disgust. I’ll grant that Pynchon has an interesting style. I was really intrigued at first, I’m not up-to-date on what’s cool in literature today, so to me it was kind of novel and fascinating…. As it dragged on however I concluded that he is pretentious and perverse. Difficulty is not a sign of genius. Some of the best novels ever written are in a plain style. I don’t dislike difficulty, but it is never a virtue in itself. While difficulty serves the themes of the novel to a certain extent, I felt that it went beyond such service. It doesn’t strategically lose the reader through its decentering perspective, but just impulsively loses focus throughout, as a matter of course.

I really enjoyed all the rhyme-songs, the off the wall scenes where what’s real and what’s fantasy totally conflate, and there are some quite funny moments as well. But plenty of other writers have done such things as well.

More importantly however, there is no reason for multiple PORNOGRAPHIC descriptions of pedophilia. Nabokov proved you can write about such loathesome subject matter without being shamelessly explicit. Lolita describes the inner world of a pervert, in a way that makes your skin crawl, but he did not explicitly describe physical acts associated with the perversion itself, as Pynchon does in excruciating detail. Pynchon’s treatment of perversion is utterly tasteless to the point of rank self- indulgence of the lowest and most despicable sort.

Gross, pretentious and immoral outweigh entirely whatever literary virtues it may have, and I highly doubt the book could possibly redeem itself in the last 1/3rd although I’ll never know for sure as long as I live, that’s a promise. Both Adorno and Pynchon write about WWII, it will be easy to guess which one I prefer.

“I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature. The question asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts Sans S’epulture, ‘Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?’, is also the question whether any man now has a right to exist; whether intellectual regression is not inherent in the concept of committed literature because of the regression of society. But Enzensberger’s retort also remains true, that literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism.”

- Theodore Adorno, from the essay, Commitment.

Adorno calls our attention to the difference between petty moralism and the genuine moral calling of art, where the coincidence of truth and beauty proves not to be coincidental at all. Adorno also captures, presciently below, the failure of postmodernist art inasmuch as it is an acquiescence to the state of affairs of its contemporary moment, rather than an inherent revolt against reality, as all genuine works of art are.

“Works of art that react against empirical reality obey the forces of that reality, which reject intellectual creations and throw them back on themselves. There is no material content, no formal category of an artistic creation, however mysteriously changed and unknown to itself, which did not originate in the empirical reality from which it breaks free.”

Writer’s like Pynchon—at least in the first 2/3rds of one of his very large books—acquiesce to reality, rather than stand as repudiations of it, and therefore fail to become works of art, and flounder as mere texts. Again in Adorno’s words, texts like these “…drift to the brink of indifference, degenerate insensibly into mere hobbies, into idle repetition of formulas now abandoned in other art forms, into trivial patterns.” Gravity’s Rainbow left me with the overwhelming impression that Pynchon is a boring conformist to late capitalism’s worst excesses, it’s stupor and tedious indulgence. Pynchon seems to me (granted on reading only the majority of one repulsive book) to be a symptom of our corrupt multinational society. Rather than a literary hero rising above anti-intellectualism, he is, as has said in their subscriber chat, a misfiring “overcompensation” against it. I wrote this to ask you not to waste your time, and I recommend seeking the help of in trying to navigate the shit filled waters of the current literary market. I haven’t read any of their recommendations yet, but their warnings have proven true so far.

Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D'Ambrosio's You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity might be the single most important book for understanding the social reality of the twenty first century, that I have ever read. Special thanks to of for brining You and Your Profile to my focus, as something which I must read. I found the book so important that I presuppose in this essay that you have already read it. There’s an excellent audiobook version by the way. Despite the book being so important, I find one central feature of it to be slightly overlooked. If you are a fan of combat sports, however, you know that striking is a game of inches: boxers practice "slipping" punches, that is, intentionally barely ducking past dangerous attacks in order to position oneself best for an immediate or simultaneous counterattack. A slight oversight can be the difference between staying on your feet, and being knocked unconscious. This is an unintentionally violent metaphor I'm using, my intention is not to knock anyone out. That would be bullshit, but if Moeller and D'Ambrosio overlooked anything in You and Your Profile, that is exactly what they overlooked: "bullshit."

When we are trying to discover the definition of a word in the most comprehensive and universal way we can, we should start by asking what other word or words it is primarily opposed to. That gives us the location in the structure of language in which the word we are interested in sits, which gives us the contours, the outer limits of the word. In the case of "authenticity," its opposite might be "bullshit." There has always been and always will be "bullshit" in human society. But if "bullshit" is transhistorical that suggests that so is "authenticity." This seems to resist any periodization of the term, like the one which Moeller and D'Ambrosio set up. One way to interpret what they are saying goes like this: premodernism is "the age of sincerity," modernism is "the age of authenticity" and postmodernism (not a term they use) is "the age of profilicity." It is not as though they are absolute in their periodization however, since they are clear that authenticity, sincerity, and profilicity coexist in our current age, their periodization seems to merely suggest a dominance or preeminence of the particular identity formation after which the period is named. Of course profilicity did not exist at all in the age of sincerity because it is the result of new "identity technologies." But on the other hand, if there has always been "bullshit," what is it?

Bullshit is "fronting," fronting is posing as something which you are demonstrably not, being a poser, we might say. While Moeller and D'Ambrsosio don't seem to analyze the possibility that someone can be "full of shit" in one's self-presentation, I doubt they would deny the existence of lying, deceit or sheer exaggeration. The authors focus on authenticity as being the idea that one must present their "true and original self" to the world, and while they are not wrong about this general cultural attitude about authenticity, and its basis in the Romanticism of the modern period, it strikes me as not exactly correct about what authenticity most fundamentally is in the first place (by that I mean the most robust way to define the term). That is, Romanticism, and its notions of authenticity which Moeller and D'Ambriosio refer to, doesn't seem to me to have the last word on the idea, either today or in the past. It strains belief to think that Rousseau, Wordsworth, Nietzsche and Heidegger all approached the idea in the same exact way, and that all of them were wholly naïve and simplistic in the same way about the notion of authenticity. Further, that romanticism defined authenticity during modernity in any sort of an absolute or final way, I don't see as remotely self-evident.

Later in the book we get a definitive statement about authenticity, which I don't believe we get about the other two identity formations: "true authenticity does not exist" they say, and in the naïve Romanticist sense which is popular today, I wholly agree. The problem is, while Moeller and D'Ambrosio claim that there is an "age of authenticity," what we find in chapter four is that there doesn't appear to be much room for it in their own periodization, as they see the Romantic period as the youth of profilicity—the picturesque for instance—since it is already cotemporaneous to the beginnings of mass media, and the birth of capitalist branding. So really, the periodization for Moeller and D'Ambrosio is pre-modern Sincerity followed by postmodern profilicity, with a little delusional interlude in the transition period between the two, with the fanciful notion of the true and original self. However, it seems to me that a tremendous amount the insecurity, what Cristopher Lasch (who the authors treat dismissively) called the "cult of authenticity," comes about within the age of profilicity, and not as much in the "age of authenticity" itself.

Certainly, one's true and original self is the opposite of bullshit in a superficial sense, but that is just it, that Romanticist definition of "authenticity" is not only contradictory, but confused, potentially the the point of total meaninglessness. Moeller and D'Ambrosio's choice here likely made their critique of critiques of profilicity better not worse, as the Romantic notion of authenticity is what has come to dominate our present day concerns when it comes to identity. The authors are absolutely correct that one cannot critique profilicity as if from a standpoint of authenticity, as that would be in Slavoj Žižek's terminology to position oneself "outside of ideology."

Therefore, if my critique of profilicity has any legs to stand on, it must acknowledge itself as being a critique of profilicity from within profilicity. Despite the fact that authenticity is transhistrorical, that in no way diminishes the fact that I am publishing this, right now, on a profile based platform, I am using this very critique to develop that platform, I have succumbed to the identity technology of profilicity and to some extent accepted and validated its logic. I am post-authentic. Nonetheless the aforementioned periodization of authenticity, does not allow it to be thought as transhistorical (existing even during the age of sincerity). But what would it be to be authentic in the age of sincerity? I argue that Moeller and D'Ambrosio's own example of The Story of the Naked Scribe in chapter 6 is a perfect example.

The opposite of bullshit is truth. Truth, in identity, acknowledges the non-identity of identity, thus The Story of the Naked Scribe is an example of authenticity (in my sense). One wonders by now if I am just playing with words. The answer is both yes, and no. I am playing with words, but I am not just playing with words, similar to the way we both are and are not our identities. The opposite of being-bullshit is having a certain distance from one's own identity, not fronting as being fully identical to one's identity. This distance is exactly what the authors argue we ought to have, only since they periodize "authenticity," and define it under the Romantic movement, they use the term "genuine pretending" instead. I don't have any problem with "genuine pretending" it is more intuitive, given the immense confusion and colloquial stupidity around the term "authenticity." Genuine pretending (chapters 6 and 7) is identity for Moeller and D'Ambrosio, and I wholly agree. My question then is, what is overidentification (with one's identity) but the very height of bullshit, paradoxically in the anxious attempt to get as far away from fronting as possible. Overidentification is self-deception first and foremost, and was a massive problem causing immense psychic distress for millions, in the age of sincerity, so that psychic distance from one's given role was authenticity in the age of sincerity. In that regard, nothing has changed.

What separates an authentic person, in the age of profilicty, from an inauthentic one, is not that one is being their true and original self and the other isn't, but that one is psychically overidentified with their profile, and the other is not. To make this point clear, we have to enquire into the reasons behind overidentification. Overidentification requires holding on too tightly to one's identity, which is understandable if that identity has immense real-world ramifications attached to it. In the age of sincerity, one's identity, connected to one's role, was tied to honor and status, which was tied to everything else upon which premodern civilizations were built. Losing honor and status meant the loss of everything, which makes the feudal Japanese practice of seppuku more understandable: when you lost your honor, then everything for you was already over. Likewise of the practice of pistol duals in 18^th century Europe: when your honor was insulted it had to be defended at the risk of your life, because your life and flourishing, and that of your family's, depended on the intergenerational maintenance of honor and status.

Likewise, overidentification rears its head as an issue in postmodernity because our profile based identities have a lot to do with our physical well-being, and our entire sense of worldhood. Enhancing the image and increasing the reach our profiles means, often, the increase of wealth and status, which is about the same thing these days, at least in United States (where it has more or less always been the same thing). With all of the horrors of the 19^th and 20^th centuries they delivered nonetheless, something magnificent, an incredible achievement in culture and identity. It became possible in modernity to worry less about honor and status, and the profile had not quite come into its own, it was then a mere "brand" and more closely connected to reputation. The term "reputation" is periodized by the authors to the era (or confined to the state of mind) of sincerity. But were emperors sincere? How could the emperor's subjects possibly know that the emperor conformed, body and soul, to his role as semi-divine head of state? It would seem that the emperor is less propped up by sincerity itself as the state of mind wherein "role relationships make us who we are," than by the spectacle of it.

Furthermore, I don't think that the term "reputation" quite does descriptive justice to honor cultures, since their 'reputation' was (and is) much thicker than the word implies colloquially for those of us today, living in developed capitalist societies. "Reputation," while vaguely similar to premodern notions, does not usually connote the ability, for instance, to be either clean or unclean, or honored or dishonored, in the premodern senses. Sincerity identity, if reduced to mere reputation, will not capture the full weight of premodern identity. Because of this, I use the term "reputation" as a modern term, to imply merely outward conforming of behavior to the role which you chose for yourself. Modernity made it possible to choose your social role: who you marry, where you live, and what your occupation would be. It did not make this possible for everyone, there were glaring oversights, but massive strides were undertaken nonetheless, to free people from oppressive "regimes of sincerity" from medieval Confucianism to the Catholic stench of smoldering heretical flesh. Contrary to what has become popular in some corners, as much as I personally despise the cultural logic of late capitalism, that does not make me the least bit desirous for a return to premodernity or for a resurrection of its identity logics, in any form. On this I think Moeller, D'Ambriosio and I would agree.

Moeller and D'Ambrosio themselves remark on how there are striking similarities (as well as striking differences) between sincerity and profilicity, they seem to suggest that the two are in some ways at least, more similar to each other than either are to authenticity. Indeed they critique the trend by many critics to return somewhat to sincerity, what they call "new political sincerity," but the reemergence of sincerity seems to lend credence to the idea of historical regression, an idea which I don't think Moeller would subscribe to, however.

As much as the authors of You and you Profile are spot on with their critiques of the critiques of profilicity, one still cannot help feel but that their own examples—like the fact that people spend more than forty five minutes filtering and digitally adjusting each picture they upload of themselves—are nonetheless examples of somewhat contemptible behavior. Just because almost every critic gets the reasons wrong behind why extreme profile massaging is objectionable, doesn't necessarily mean that they are wrong that it is objectionable. What is contemptable to me isn't the act itself so much as what a waste of time it is: couldn't you be doing something of higher cultural value, other than not even improving your face, but improving a facsimile of your face, which is already not you, but a mere synecdoche for you. Couldn’t we use our time, and shouldn’t society encourage us to you our time in ways that improve our souls, our talents, and our close relationships, rather than massaging the impression which we give to the general peer. Intuitively, we tend to see obsessive selfie taking and adjusting as verging on bullshit, and I don't think that impulse is necessarily wrong.

I recently had a discussion with a close friend about authenticity, triggered by my having read You and Your Profile. We were talking about a group of hipsters at a bar which seemed somewhat phoney to us, and we were debating their authenticity, myself playing the role of their advocate. Our dialogue produced the conviction in my friend that authenticity has something to do with knowledge. He was very confident that the hipsters would lack sufficient knowledge about anything to which their outward appearance might convey that they know, that they wouldn’t have taken on their looks for genuine enough purposes, that upon closer interrogation, they would prove to be superficial. In his view, looks aren’t merely superficial, if you can provide a good enough reason as to why you present yourself in the way that you do. To me, the reason “I like to look this way” is good enough. The reason being that “all of my friends dress this way,” or “I saw it on Instagram” both sounded insufficient to my friend, and sound that way to me as well, instinctively.

I agree with my friend partly, his point was based on the experience that people are revealed to be fronting when they present themselves one way but then cannot backup their presentation with adequate, relevant knowledge and experience. To return to bloodsport examples, when someone who talks a big talk about how good of a fighter they are and yet consistently avoids competitive fights, or even sparring, you begin to suspect bullshit. This would perhaps be a kind of underidentification, where your engagement with an identity is more superficial than you would like to have others believe. It is pretty obvious when someone is doing this in sports of all kinds, since testing claims is relatively straightforward in that context. With other kinds of cultural identities, testing for bullshit can be a little harder, but if someone presents themselves to me as some kind of polymath genius, and then I can find massive holes in their reading comprehension that do not comport with their presentation, it usually takes less than a ten minute conversation to establish that they are misrepresenting themselves, assuming I have some familiarity with the subject matter which they are presenting themselves as masters of. I try to present myself more or less as I am, but I have undoubtedly been guilty of all kinds of bullshit before and will probably misrepresent myself in the future. This is different from genuine pretending, there is also clearly is such a thing as just pretending, such a thing as pretense. Chances are, this very essay contains fragments of bullshit which, despite reading and rereading, I have probably on an unconscious level nonetheless willfully overlooked.

We can all likely relate to both having over or underidentified and having witnessed someone doing it, but bullshit is bullshit, whether in ourselves or in others. Modernity's reputation, (as opposed to postmodern profilicity) on the other hand, was a better cure for psychic distress than either sincerity or profilicity. Reputation is based more on direct personal interactions, on word of mouth, on community based relations. With our postmodern dislocation, communities hardly exist in any form, and while dislocation is and was an aspect of modernization, in the modern period itself, there were constant attempts to reform new communities in the wreckage of the old. Much of the uncanniness of our time (postmodernism) comes from the fact that old (modern) communities were ripped apart by the movements of capital, and very little attempt has been made, and even less have succeeded, to reestablish new ones. In this event, profilicity gets a massive acceleration because it does not have much competition: we cannot resist profilicity as the dominant mode of identity with reputation based identity, because the communities of recognition which made reputation based identity possible are dissolved largely due to our rapidly changing economic conditions.

To my mind, what authenticity comes down to, because of its relation to one's personal choice, is enjoyment. What leads you to have knowledge, as my friend said, is that you’re a bit obsessed with something. What can sometimes seem phoney, is presenting yourself in one way, without having the knowledge to indicate that you really do love the things associated with your self-presentation. It seems like you haven’t found the thing you love, and you’re trying to cover that up, if you lack the requisite knowledge.

The difference, for all time, between a relatively authentic person and a relatively inauthentic person is not that one is in possession of, or is presenting their true self while the other is not. What separates the two is that the authentic person enjoys the actions associated with their identity more than their identity itself, whereas for the inauthentic individual, it is the reverse. If that reveals some ‘inner truth’ about the self then so be it, but it is not a bringing out of something inside that is important, but finding a way, a means, a medium, through which you can best live outside of yourself, in the world. This might share something in common with Romanticist ideas of identity, but the emphasis is not on the internal kernel, but on external work: labors of love. An inauthentic writer enjoys (the image of) being a writer more than writing and the inauthentic father indulges the self-image of being a father, and that is more important to him than actually doing anything which fathers are supposed to do. The inauthentic father could, for instance, have had a kid for no other reason than that's just what you're supposed to do, and who consequently improperly loves the life which he brought into the world. Likewise the inauthentic writer undervalues the significance of what ideas and emotions communicated in writing have done historically, and in terms of spirit (Geist), and what they can potentially do again, he is more invested in his writerly profile, than in writing itself. Speaking of history.

Technofuedalism comes to mind to me when I think of our current global economic situation in terms of its regressiveness to an earlier stage of history. Today nominalists remake the world in their own one-dimensional image, and pass their unsophisticated thought off as some kind of eternal wisdom.

"“You have one identity,” [Zuckerberg] emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”"[2]

We do not want to enter a state of affairs in which we get the worst of premodernism combined with the worst of modernization, and the historical impotence of subjects in our epoch does not bode well for our ability to press history in the direction of The Good. There is nothing wrong with the presentation of multiple faces. Transhistorical authenticity does not prohibit the use of multiple faces because it is neither over nor underidentification. It is merely love, or passion, with identity where it belongs, as byproduct. Community recognition is valued because it is less invasive than premodern sincerity regimes, or the postmodern general peer: the community leaves you alone once you go home, if only for the night, it gives you the space in which your passions may be cultivated.

I may or may not be acting authentically. I may enjoy the curation of this profile more than the act of writing itself, that is, for all you know, but I think it is generally safe to use our intuition. When Moeller and D'Ambrosio discussed Taylor Swift they went too far: "[nobody can] know what Taylor Swift, or any other star in entertainment authentically believes or feels when they post on Instagram or make public announcements – and it does not matter." How could it possibly be that it "does not matter?" I'm not saying the authors are wrong here, what I am saying is that the normalization of a lack of unity between statements and belief can only be a signal of the impotence of words and actions in our time to change or shape history, since it is no often longer expected that we back up our words and beliefs by sticking our necks out, by concerted, committed action. That is, action, the object of belief and speech, has been misplaced. The authors write the following:

"The [unnaceptable threats to individual autonomy] Zuboff identifies are real. The question is, however, if the American values and individual autonomy supposedly at stake were ever adequately protected in the first place, were these more than mere narratives in place to convince ourselves of a model of identity which once dominated an era. Rather than seeing the success of big data and the rise of the surveillance society as signaling the end of authenticity and the curbing of our individual autonomy, we might see them as the end of the period in which we could credibly conceive of ourselves in this way. Maybe given the social and technological developments of recent decades, it no longer makes sense to think of people as autonomous individuals, and maybe we must realize that we exist in a highly complex society and are embedded deeply in its social networks. Therein control, especially by a single individual, is limited. How we look and what we think and feel are highly contingent on the life world which we inhabit, and it seems much of these aspects of life are simply not up to us, maybe they never were."

While I agree that we never were in control of the contingent circumstances which surround us (by definition), this sentiment which to a certain extent sums up the general attitude of the book is simply not good enough. Who I ask, besides postmodern subjects, are either stupidly unaware of, or perversely disavow their embeddedness? The moderns, in the so-called "age of authenticity," of individualism, certainly were not unaware of this, so again, this naïve authenticity seems to present itself as a problem of the age of profilicity. What if moderns and even Romantics thought of themselves as original because they actually were? Certainly Rousseau was original for his time, and Moeller and D'Ambrioso's work has the mark of originality to it. Of course Moeller, D'Ambrosio and Rousseau aren't original in the sense of creating out of nothing, but of course that cannot be what originality is, or there would be no occasion for the word to ever come into anyone's mind, it would not exist, not even as an idea. The only thing that is just here, inexplicably, out of nothing it seems, is everything: the universe itself, all else is technically derivative.

As You and Your Profile proves, by having a critical and creative examination of contemporary forms of identity, we do indeed have control of the degree to which we internalize and reproduce the ideologies in which we swim. It may be extremely difficult to swim upstream, even impossible, but that does not mean that we cannot at the very least die trying. I would argue that anyone of even minor historical importance, for any reason other than sheer villainy, has made this very risk, the risk of their own life in the attempt at putting their back against the great boulder of history, while beckoning others to help, sometimes being rebuked or simply unheeded for their efforts.

The Way is Shut as the title of ’s 2023 book tells us. Multinational capitalism and bureaucratic liberal democracy makes volitional political change by 'the people' nearly unthinkable, and means that it is not a discussion of who are the subjects of history, but of whether or not there are any at all. I am not a Marxist, but the Marxist principle of historical materialism is not one bit less useful today than it was in the nineteenth century. As You and Your Profile acknowledges, profilicity is an outgrowth of capitalism, as was their Romanticism based notion of "authenticity." My critique of the book centers only on the fact that, while avoiding nostalgia at all costs, we should not short shrift what it was that modernity made possible (but failed to universalize), which is a higher sense of consciousness, to be found in authenticity through reputation based identity. The result of this was higher consciousness because it gave the individual the space in which to exist as such, the public was no longer as invasive as it had been in premodernity, or would become with the postmodern market, and its commodification of everything.

We cannot be identical to our identities, and that our identities are only based on something so thin, and so realistic, as community based identity, makes it more difficult to either overidentify or underidentify. The modern community, as opposed to the premodern which appeared to be more permanent, was founded on obviously contingent events: modernization uprooted people, and communities spontaneously formed by necessity, for survival, and eventually mass movements followed. In a word, modernity made "freedom" more possible, and postmodernism (in Fredric Jameson's sense) I take to be the periodization of our movement away from freedom as one of the most cherished aspects of The Good. In authentic reputation you are both held accountable for your mistakes and also praised for your successes (at least, that is the principle). Being at the whim of the (postmodern) general peer rather than under the eye of the modern community is to be at the whim of strangers, and such evaluations are bound to be more spurious, less trustworthy on the averages, than the accountability found in the modern community, and in the aggregation of many communities which is what I mean by "society."

It goes without saying that communities of any epoch are not perfect and will never be perfect: people are glaringly flawed. The question comes down to what kind of a system tends to make people less imperfect than they would be otherwise as opposed to what kind of system exaggerates and distorts the imperfections of people in monstrous ways. I understand and am sympathetic to You and Your Profile's Taoist, Stoic, and Luhmanian basis, it probably makes the book's analysis much more cogent, and is undoubtedly a huge part of the reason why it is a better analysis of the contemporary moment than almost anything else that I have read. But the value neutral comportment of the book also has its shortcomings: its weaknesses are its strengths. Despite critiquing profilicity, the book comes short of attacking any present trends. I would not have preferred the book to be a polemic, not at all, but there is coming a time when sides will need to be taken.

There will be a need to stand for something again, politics is coming back, very slowly but surely, and with it, our currently disavowed knowledge of our responsibility as historical agents. That time is not now, now is a time, by and large, for critical reflection and understanding, but nonetheless I believe that there are material and social forces in the world which are not interested in the survival of the human race at all, or even in biological life on earth. Those forces are those of the state project of multinational capitalism and whatever bureaucratic-technological children it is brewing. Those forces emerged from humanity itself, and their worst excesses stem from what have always been with us, our most self-destructive and violent impulses, impulses which are not subsiding, but growing, or returning from their repression. Profilicity accelerates self-comparison and competitiveness while focusing our attention on similar objects while entrenching our sense of difference at the same time, which promotes conflict. This is already working itself out on the world stage with competition for resources and strategic positions, which coincide with lands and identities. Are the Israel-Palestine or Russian-Ukraine conflicts not examples of such identitarian struggles? Moeller and D'Ambrosio make it very clear that countries have profiles too. Putin first tried to erase the profile of Ukraine before invading, claiming that its origin is as an illegitimate separatist state from Russia. Israel's claim to the lands it has shattered with bombs in an incredibly asymmetrical retaliation—not to excuse Hamas' equally identitarian sacrifice of its own people—have everything to do with its ancient claim to identity, used to curate its postmodern profile on the international stage.

History is unfolding whether we like it or not. Modernity contained people who, despite their many flaws, did not see themselves merely as objects of history, but also of agents of history. We have seen in the twenty first century, no comparable sense of volition. Profilicity suggests itself, as something which serves to pacify activity, action and speech do not have to go together anymore, that is the new norm. But if Žižek is right and we must "restore a minimum of shame," then the new norm is nothing less than obscene. I aim to rediscover a kind of basic ethic which can be used to orient ourselves in the world as volitional subjects, agents and not mere flaneurs with regard to history. I am not as afraid of the unpredictable nature of human activity, as I am of the predictable downward death spiral of human stupidity, understood as has articulated as a failure of will, or a will to fail, as in "stupor." Postmodernity, the age of profilicity, has decidedly not been an advance in this regard, but a regression, which has in no way achieved what it alleged it was trying to do, it has not made us safer, it has not made us more free, it has not made us more virtuous, but quite the opposite on most every count. Profilicity is an example of postmodernity, as the process of modernization run amok, having gone too far. This is not a call to turn back the clock, but to critically question the way in which technology is martialed as a form of control and repression of our higher and nobler instincts, by promoting our lower and more vicious drives. Technology should be put in service of the opposite, modernity gave us both possibilities, postmodernity is a term which suggests that we made the wrong choice. And yet, it is not too late.

What do you think, am I a hopeless, moralizing Romantic? Is authenticity laying in the bottom of the dustbin of history where it belongs? Or is there something more to the idea than You and Your Profile’s otherwise impeccable analysis, gives it credit for? Rather, was the modern period the golden age of identity, and if it was, how do we live in this technicolor dark age?

[2] https://michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerberg-having-two-identities-for-yourself-is-an-example-of-a-lack-of-integrity/

A healthy, fashionable urbanite walked into the grey and orange lobby of his local urgent care facility.

This aging millennial was in a bit of pain and considerable discomfort in his abdomen, as he explained to the receptionist, to whom also, he revealed that his name was Jonah.

Jonah looked to be in his late thirties, quite fit, athletic build, pleasingly proportional, about six foot, good hair, frequented the gym etc. He was, you could say, a typical homo sapiens male of the American variety, who had recently been adding some delicious Superfood^tm to his diet. Superfood^tm is delectable, tasteless, all natural, science-backed, full nutrient, vegan, 100% organic, fully synthetic, non-GMO, genetically reconstructed material, which can be given an incredible array of textures and flavors. Superfood^tm is sold in grocery stores, fast food restaurants and even has found its way into Michelin Star kitchens around the world! Superfood^tm is completely safe, and even doctor recommended.[*] Let's wait to see if the doctor recommends Superfood^tm to deal with Jonah's gastrointestinal discomfort.

Jonah winced as he turned away from the receptionist to go and take his seat in the lobby, the pain was rapidly getting worse, and the discomfort, rather strange.

Jonah sat down and took out his phone, like almost everyone else in the expansive lobby, even the rambling lunatic in the corner, periodically cackling, had earbuds in, and kept exclaiming out loud to whatever he was watching on his phone. Jonah took out his phone for the specific reason of distracting himself from the discomfort he was feeling.

"They banned Animal Farm! I wonder why!"

Roared the lunatic.

The lunatic was a scrawny and strange looking, too hairy to be wearing the wife beater he had on, with baggy jeans, a large head that looked like a clay pot which someone had thrown , left wet and upside down, and never fired…. Or, his head looked like a pumpkin exactly two days after Halloween only if the pumpkin had been carved into a jack-o'-lantern upside down…. The lunatic's head looked, I'm telling you, as if God had etched his face then thought he'd have a laugh, flipped the face one hundred and eighty degrees around vertically on the head and plopped the head on the scrawny little body so that the face would, then, be right-side up.

Thankfully, Jonah had none of these peculiar defects, he was high IQ, he was smart enough to eat Superfood^tm, and Superfood^tm is scientifically proven to boost brain function.

"David, for triage."

Called the nurse as she emerged from a pair of double doors marked room number 138.

”I like your tattoo."

The lunatic said to the person next to him who responded with a forcedly cordial…

"Thank you."

"Is that a Goldfinch?"

Replied the Lunatic.

"It is."

"Why'd you get that?"

"I like them."

The lunatic paused, suddenly distracted by something in his peripheral vision.

The goldfinch lady took the opportunity to turn in her chair away from the lunatic, to pretend to start a very important and private conversation with her husband.

Jonah was sweating intensely now and he had begun to squirm in his chair enough to catch the attention of the highly sensitive lunatic (who's appearance I must stress seemed to beckon the revival of the long discredited science of phrenology). In his discomfort Jonah had made a fatal error: he accidently entered the mental landscape of the lunatic, even making accidental eye contact with the unwanted interlocutor. He looked horrified as he realized his mistake and attempted to avert his gaze, abruptly from the lunatic's. It was not clear which he found more uncomfortable, catching the lunatic's gaze or his own abdominal symptoms.

"Hey! You don't look too good!"

The Lunatic was zeroed in on Jonah now. There was no longer any way out, we were at the event horizon.

"I guess you're in the right place!"

He guffawed.

Without a moment's hesitation, as though social atmosphere was not as viscous substance one must skillfully cut through, the lunatic was already, in an uncannily singular motion, getting out of his chair, metachroning over and sitting down right next to Jonah, and yet he yelled across the room to continue his conversation with the goldfinch lady.

"I'm questioning why kids need to know about safari ecosystems, how does that help you pay your taxes?!"

Asked the Lunatic, and waited with a serious and intent look on his face for a response. Goldfinch lady ignored him now, the increased distance giving her no incentive to politely indulge the lunatic any longer. After a few more seconds of staring at the Goldfinch lady, the lunatic turned abruptly to Jonah, but somehow, despite it being an utter non sequitur, didn't seem to register that he was having a separate conversation.

"They teach kids to dissect fetal pigs! I wonder why!"

The lunatic laughed. Jonah was beginning to squirm more intensely now, he grimaced in pain, unfortunately no one offered any Superfood^tm to calm his stomach down.… Jonah suddenly began gripping the seat in white knuckled anguish, moaning and writhing, his eyes going back in his head and foaming at the mouth.

The Goldfinch woman had begun giggling with her husband about the night they had before in which she had drunkenly stubbed her toe so hard that she was pretty sure she had fractured it, hence her visit to urgent care.

"What's your favorite bird?"

The lunatic asked Jonah inquisitively.

Jonah was now convulsing into an almost full-fledged seizure, but unfortunately for him, not losing consciousness. The rest of the lobby was quiet, everyone was on their phone, or carrying on quiet conversations with whoever they were waiting with.

"Uh oh."

Said the lunatic looking at Jonah's increasing agony with mild but earnest concern. Jonah began gasping and clutching is throat, and really looking agonized now, like he was having the most severe heartburn any homo sapiens had ever known, and an absolutely incredible stomach ache, waves of pain now mounting upon waves of pain.

The woman two chairs away from Jonah on his right, and three away from the lunatic was talking on her phone with her baby daddy about how he could absolutely not take the kids out of school to go backpacking in Mexico for three weeks.

Suddenly, something black began stretching itself out from deep inside of Jonah. A long spindly leg covered in bile stuck itself out of Jonah's mouth. Jonah, all too conscious of what was happening, going cross eyed at the protrusion from his esophagus, tried to scream in the most freakish terror and agony, only it was utterly muffled by the reaching, black leg, with its grasping claw on the end.

"Oh, you have a friend in there!"

Observed the lunatic. The leg was stretching about trying to get ahold of something solid. Jonah had begun to turn blue in the face for lack of air.

"He's trying to get out…."

Jonah suddenly stood straight up out of his chair, in which he had been writhing and slouching and jostling around, at once his heels slammed together like in an Italian fascist military salute and his arms went straight outstretched like Jesus on the cross. Once he had done this, the leg rapidly retreated. Jonah's posture collapsed, but he remained standing as he took a massive breath and desperately tried to use that new precious oxygen to scream….

"HEL-!"

"Oh, here he comes!"

Said the lunatic, expectantly, at the same time.

Jonah's abdomen shot out forward in front of him, once, twice, distending, and then on the third time it exploded, the force collapsed his corpse back into its chair, draping his eviscerated mid-section over the arm of his chair as a black, blood-glazed spider like creature was propelled a couple feet onto the floor, amongst intestines and entrails, still full of nutritious and delicious Superfood^tm, which is of course, entirely side effect free and has never in all its rigorous safety testing, shown anyone to have any allergies toward it. It is indeed, the perfect food and has been used in relief efforts all over the world saving people in war torn and drought areas from starvation.

"Rebecca for triage!"

Announced the nurse, again emerging from the double doors.

The spider shook the guts off of itself and then began consuming the entrails, Superfood^tm and all, from whence it had emerged.

"Wow! Hungry guy!"

Observed the lunatic, who had been watching in amazement, the whole grotesque spectacle.

"Only, I think your friend is dead now."

Observed the lunatic again, peering over at Jonah's corpse to look for any potential signs of life, of which there were of course, absolutely none.

A man directly across the aisle from Jonah's corpse let out a soft, delighted exclamation because he had finally completed his Wordle^tm for the day.

About fifteen minutes passed as the spider consumed, and people leaned over and whispered to each other about little mundane daily things or funny stories, or sat glued to social media reels on their phones, occasionally chuckling. The lunatic periodically attempted to make conversation with the hungry parasitic spider, about various geopolitical topics, the situation in Ukraine and the Middle East. He was especially concerned with the education of American youths, he felt that our education system was failing the country, and the world, although his ideas for what was precisely wrong and what exactly could be done about it seemed to be a bit far-fetched and confused, which was obvious even to your average, politically bewildered American subject. He was also deeply concerned about the kinds of food we are feeding our children, especially worried about pesticides in agriculture, and growth hormones for livestock, none of which, of course, Superfood^tm contains, since it has its own synthetic 100% safe, healthy bacteria cultures which naturally repel all kinds of nasty bugs!

"Jonah, for triage!"

Announced the nurse again. But the spider perked up and scurried off in the direction of the call.

"Right this way, sir."

Said the nurse to the spider as it scurried in room 138 with her, and she closed the door behind it.

The lunatic looked aghast. He turned to someone a few chairs over to his left and said worriedly.

"I hope nobody takes my spot in line!"

Five minutes or so passed. The lunatic sat in worried silenced, quiet for the first time in the last six hours since he had been told that he would not be seen as he was not a member at this hospital, and yet he had been sitting, or wandering about, expectantly waiting for someone to diagnose… he had forgotten what by this point.

"What are you here for?"

He asked the same person to his left, who pretended not to hear.

The triage nurse opened the door and let the spider out.

"Okay, the doctor will see you in a while Jonah."

The nurse laughed, apparently the spider had been a very charismatic patient. It scurried back over to sit in the open chair next to the corpse of its old host. It was slightly larger now than it had been before.

The lady who had been talking to her baby daddy sat staring forward out into space, sighed, while the lunatic sat in silent worry that someone might take his place in line. He glanced with trepidation and mild hostility over at the line cutting spider, which, as if mimicking the woman, also sighed, sensing somehow, rather than seeing out into space, as it did not have eyes.[†]

[*]DISCLAIMER: THE SUPERFOOD CORPORATION DOES NOT PROVIDE MEDICAL ADVICE

The information, including but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material contained on this advertisement are for informational purposes only. No material produced by the Superfood Corporation is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before undertaking a new health care regimen, and never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have consumed in this advertisement.

[†] © All rights reserved for this intellectual property by the Superfood Corporation. This is a work of fiction, all similarities to parties or persons alive or dead are purely coincidental. No homo sapiens or parasitic spiders were harmed in the production of this breaking news report.

No Future is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“He spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. ‘I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular…. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because …

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You're working at your leisure to learn the things you don't need
The promises you make tomorrow will carry no guarantee
I've seen your qualifications, you've got a Ph.D.
I've got one art O level, it did nothing for me

You'll be working for the rat race
You know you're wasting your time
You're working for the rat race
You're no friend of mine

- The Specials 1979

Sociologist Robert Putnam's work, namely Bowling Alone, traces how we spend our time today, as compared to how we spent our time in the 1950s. The "Greatest Generation" which experienced both the Great Depression and WWII seems to generally have had very different expectations about how one spends one's time than we do today. What Putnam is getting at is inter-generational change in time-habit, the way we use our time changes from one generation to the next much more than it does within each generation. What this immediately calls to our attention is that we are a culture (Putnam is talking about America here, so I'll limit my claims to America, although much of this will probably apply globally as implied by my above image of some brits) which consistently fails to reproduce itself, or so it appears at first blush. What that really means is that failure of cultural reproduction is our culture: our culture is one of novelty rather than tradition so that inter-generational cultural reproduction in American life amounts precisely to destroying the old and re-building, seemingly sui generis, every single generation. What we primarily hand down to our children is the idea that nothing is to be handed down, when the sun goes down in the west it is destroyed and a new sun is born again in the east. We have failed to even reproduce the idea that biological reproduction is a good thing, and not instead, a net evil, which is the primary complaint of the pronatalist movement. Now, I’m not entirely convinced that declining birth rates in developed countries is entirely a bad thing, since we are probably not going to experience global overpopulation only because of this trend. However I have to agree with the pronatalists that the cultural trend towards disdain (which one can only imagine comes in fact from resentment) towards people who do have kids, is an abominable development. Children are the future, and anti-natalism seems to represent a decline in the human population, of its own care for itself. What makes sense of this is a steep rise in resentment and rivalry as a direct result of economic shifts. This essay is not about natalism vs. anti-natalism, but it is about social reproduction, and the reproduction of cultural capital, which as I’ll argue, is the crux of the issue when it comes to the decline in American social life, which Putnam illustrates with impeccable empirical methods. While I don’t find fault in Putnam’s empirical chops, it is his theoretical framework which does to some extent impede the understanding of today’s social situation. It is in the theoretical framing that Bourdieu comes out ahead in terms of producing a conceptual apparatus which can help us make more sense of our world.

We must begin by distinguishing two terms which sound similar, but which are essentially distinct. Putnam discusses social capital, what I’ve mentioned already is Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital. Social capital for sociologists is the idea of treating social networks as though they are things of value, and what makes them valuable is the extent to which they are composed of trust and goodwill, and I would add, the extent to which they are connected to physical capital (property, credit, cash). Being “well connected” means that you have good social capital. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be connected to rich people though, if you have a wide enough horizontal network among rather poor people who nonetheless rely on one another for favors, small loans, etc., you would also in this sense have good social capital. Cultural capital on the other hand is something quite different, it has to do with Bildung, or people-building, the closest, but inadequate word we have for it in English is “education.” It is because Putnam relies on the idea of social as opposed to cultural capital that his theoretical framework fails to capture the root of the cause of the decline in social life. Social capital is a measure which can only describe that sociality has declined, it cannot explain why this decline has taken place. There is less trust and goodwill in American culture today, but that is because once, there was too much. Despite the fact that he does gesture in this direction somewhat, Putnam’s concepts do not allow him to articulate this, at least not in his famous and influential Bowling Alone. We’ll be right back to this idea, but briefly, I want to introduce one more concept, that of social time.

Personally, I do not perceive time unless I am actively focused on it; my best friend and roommate is not like that, and this is why I am always late to everything, and he is always early. The clock is ticking in his mind all of the time in the background, for me, there is no such temporal background; if I'm not actively thinking about the clock, it does not exist. That is at the individual level how two individuals relate to time differently. Social time has to do with what we expect from other people in terms of time. People expect me to be on time to work and to appointments, so that I rather disappoint my boss's expectations when I show up late, for instance. Because I'm aware of expectations of time at work, I recently crashed my car because, in a hurry, I was going too fast and not paying attention to the sheet of sparkling black ice which spun me into a curb snapping my rear axle. Diffused, virtual social objects have real effects. In this case, the contradiction between my individual sense of time and my work's sense of social time produced a broken rear axle. We have certain expectations on the use of time when we are in public. Have you ever felt weird sitting out somewhere, like a coffee shop, and just thinking, without holding your phone, a book or anything else in your hands? I have had the experience of staring out into space in thought, with nothing in front of me but a coffee, and then felt a certain discomfort that somehow I should be productive or entertained in some way, any way. There is this feeling that if I am going to be out in public taking up space, then I ought to somehow justify my presence there, by doing something. If you've ever had this feeling, you have likely pulled out your phone just so that you can be seen as doing something, rather than just idly sitting there, doing 'nothing.' Social time is the time that exists between us, and as such, it is based on expectations we have for one another, about the use of time.

Putnam’s problem of social decline, I argue, comes down to a cooptation of social capital, meaning, there is a capturing of our social networks by physical capital, so that the immediate convertibility combined with a high exchange rate of cultural capital becomes absolutely paramount and domineering. Bourdieu points out that a conversion can take place between cultural capital and regular hard material capital; there is an exchange rate between accreditations, social connections, acculturation and mental skills on the one hand, and on the other, things like real estate, land, industrial machines and computer servers, as well as cold hard cash. These conversions are not necessarily guaranteed, but sometimes we invest tremendous time, energy and considerable financial resources into cultivating ourselves, thus transforming physical capital into cultural capital, with some expectation that eventually, we might be able to transform cultural capital back again into physical or monetary capital. This is modern education. The idea is that you, or your family, pours large amounts of time, money and energy into educating you so that you’ll leave school with some certificate which proves that investment in yourself, which you will then exchange for a job which will pay off in terms of more physical capital than you had before. This is true of learning to read, do math, code, learn chemistry, history, philosophy, sociology…. But taking a look at the humanities and social sciences, we begin to see the conversion collapse take place, especially in 2025 America, the conversion rate of social into physical capital in these arenas has for many, dropped into negative numbers. It is pure cost to invest in a humanities degree, with no monetary reward forthcoming for most people who make such investments. This is true in other areas as well where there are gluts in certification, there are evidently more people with class-A CDLs than there are truck driving jobs (supply outpaced demand), which (in combination with other factors) has caused wages and working conditions to plummet in the trucking industry, and thereby, degraded road safety for everyone. What makes these crises of certification possible is our overreliance on them, they are attempts to get around what is seen as the too subjective human element of things, like reputation. We tend to trust in official certificates, and not as much in experience, word-of-mouth recommendations etc. In other words, we aren’t very interested in face-to-face, or word-of-mouth information, and far more interested in bureaucratic, official accreditations, certifications etc., and this trend snowballs the more that our face-to-face, community based social capital breaks down.

Bowling Alone points out in chapter three, how we are not using our time to reproduce organizations, to find and sustain belonging in local groups in the ways that we used to as a society. The decline in participation which Putnam points out includes everything from Rotary clubs to labor Unions, from political parties to bowling leagues. Every generation is less and less "a joiner" than the previous generation. He does also attempt to see if people are making up for formal social membership through more informal social interaction, and it does not appear that they are. We are straightforwardly becoming more isolated in terms of direct face-to-face interaction. What is even more interesting to me, somewhat anecdotally, is that people don't tend to be very concerned about this phenomenon despite the fact that it is an absolutely massive cultural shift. There is virtually no discussion in the media or, in my experience, among coworkers or in families or among friends about the fact that since the 1950s there has been a steady plummet in the extent to which we socialize at all, especially the extent to which we commit to social organizations which ask anything from us in terms of our time or energy. So why is it that people aren't interested in belonging to things? The first answer to that question, and we must take them in order, is that the social expectations have shifted every single generation in the direction that people are not expected to use their time to sustain belonging to local grassroots organizations. The crux of this problem likely does come down to invention of the television, the internet, and more recently of course the smart phone. But let’s not settle for a too-easy explanation, how is it that these individualized forms of entertainment have come to dominate our social lives, or why are they correlated with (and they are) a decline in nearly every form of social life across every demographic measure? The explanation comes down to cultural rather than social capital.

The consequence of the fact that Putnam doesn’t spend any time on the idea of cultural capital is key to the explanatory lack left in his excellent empirical account of declining social lives. It is not an issue of blame, but one’s first instinct, if one wishes to assess blame, is almost always to assess it onto young people. Each generation is less socially active than their parents and grandparents had been, that goes for boomers, Xrs, millennials, and almost definitely just continues for Zoomers and so on. But even Putnam acknowledges that the problem of de-socialization must have in some sense started in the 1940s and 1950s, he just doesn’t go so far as to identify what that problem is (it isn’t the scope of his book). Here is my conjecture, come with me if you will, out on this limb: what if it is a failure of investment of cultural capital, and not a failure of the young accepting that investment? What if it is a failure of the reproduction of cultural capital which leads to the collapse of social capital? What if the problem is that we are no longer acculturated enough to build and sustain social networks because not enough of the right kind of cultural capital is invested into us? What if the problem is that parents do not know how, or try hard enough, or are effective enough, or are outcompeted by other forces in society, when it comes to passing traditions down, what if the problem really began with the fact that the “Greatest Generation” was actually not great at all when it came to reproducing their own values in their own children, and because they didn’t learn how to pass things down from their parents, boomers passed even less tradition down to their children. The only tradition that does get passed down is the tradition of cultural self-destruction, meaning, a generationally expanding obsession with novelty. The fact that parents are always competing with the advertising and entertainment industries, the “attention merchants,”1 combined with the fact that we don’t deeply value the handing down of tradition is a perfect recipe for the utter collapse of the social fabric, without anyone setting out to deliberately destroy it. What Bowling Alone doesn’t fully address is that exactly some of the values which the generation which lived through WWII was inculcated with, contained the very seeds of their own destruction. Namely, my target here is what Putnam seems to laud, social trust, specifically in the state and institutions, including corporations. The civic generation lived through a tremendous, unifying national project of defeating the absurdly evil Nazis. However, If one reads Kurt Vonnegut rather than Tom Brokaw, one gets a clearer picture of that generation, not colored by baby boomer nostalgia. Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller were some of the most thoughtful minds of that very great generation, and they painted a picture of the insidious naivete of their own times, the absurd and unthinking faith in organizations, in science, technology, and national-corporate projects. It was precisely that highly unified social trust in the institutions, in voting, in writing our congressmen, in trusting that the corporations and the government were on our side, which paved the way for the “culture of narcissism” and the “fractured-mass” which we now inhabit.

The corporations were on the same side as “the people” in WWII because there was incredible amounts of money to be made in the form of government contracts for the production of military equipment. That’s simply how corporations are legally required to function, they have a state mandate to maximize returns to shareholders and every economic incentive to take the most direct road to monopoly. It is competition which produces in the end, anti-competitive results, usually by co-opting the state to help beat down your rivals and stack the deck in your company’s favor, but sometimes also by hiring goons to smash the machines of other industrialists. Playing fair is expensive, playing dirty is cheaper, and the first one to open the bag of dirty tricks finds it to be, in fact, a Pandora’s box either of runaway conflict and even exponentially violent escalation, or state aided control. The rise of the bureaucracy in the 20th and early 21st centuries, especially but not limited to the corporate bureaucracy, has changed the nature of what it is we expect from each other in terms of time.

You can’t individually change the world. You can’t decide by yourself to throw your TV and smart phone out and start, for instance, a political meeting of one. If you get a literal soap box and stand on a street corner trying to persuade people to join your meeting of one, to make it two or three, everyone will think that you are insane… but why? Why is it insane to care so much about the world that you would want others to join you in a political meeting about trying to improve it? The phrase “get on my soapbox” comes from a time when people used to literally do that, and it wasn’t necessarily seen as crazy at all. It is insane behavior today because it is a violent contrast to the social order which is dominated by the social expectation that you should not be bothering strangers, ever. The reason why strangers do not like to be bothered is because if you are the type of person who does that, you are abnormal since normal people are all aware that there is something more entertaining than IRL strangers, on Instagram. You are supposed to be on your phone or watching Netflix, asking for entertainment in the form of conversation, for instance, has become an imposition on the other, since the other expects that the way in which entertainment is supposed to happen is not by socializing, but by plugging in. It is in this way that a vicious cycle forms between social expectations that my neighbors should not put demands on my time because I don’t put any demands on their time since I am too busy inside in my free time, on my phone or watching TV. This is how we expect each other to spend their time: watching TV and on our phones, not doing that is in effect, equated to being a general nuisance, asking too much of the other by asking anything at all. By being asked to engage in a conversation which you do not immediately want to engage in, you are having your individualized enjoyment time stolen from you. If we are conditioned to believe that a conversation with a stranger is an imposition, then there is no conceivable way that we can build communal social capital. In other words, if we haven’t been socialized by being invested in with cultural capital, then we will be unable to build social capital, because we won’t be socially competent, adventurous or ambitious enough to do so. We have not been acculturated in this way because we have learned to outsource our social capital away from the community and into impersonal bureaucratic networks.

The Greatest Generation’s social trust turned out to be its biggest flaw. This social trust extended to big industry and then set the entire country up to prize novelty over tradition, to prize commodity consumption over the careful cultivation of the individual, the creation of independent, critical thinking, self-reliant (and happy) citizenry. This lack of skepticism towards big capital meant that we were all-too accepting of the corporation’s devices and insufficiently diligent in weighing the cost of bringing the TV into the home. And there is a massively obvious statistical correlation across the board between the rise of TV watching and the slow but steady decline of social life. There are of course other factors, but those other factors also have to do with the rise of the corporation: of public-private partnership, of state directed and subsidies corporate projects. People who live in entirely car-dependent suburbs are noticeably less likely to have rich social and civic lives than people who live in small towns. These highly impersonal, hyper-private suburbs are state directed corporate projects, constructed with state subsidies, on the cheap, by huge construction firms, in mass-production style. Small towns, which used to be bastions of civic activity have been gutted out across America by the rise of corporate chain stores, and the process of deindustrialization: corporations moving operations overseas. In cities the whole idea of the neighborhood where people know each other up and down the block has basically been wiped out in many, perhaps most American cities by massive waves of gentrification very often caused by corporations moving their offices to new cities. This happened in Seattle with Amazon and Microsoft, and San Francisco with basically every other (usually unprofitable) tech startup known to man. Those cities have been, to a shocking extent, emptied out of their previous residents in just a generation, especially the poor and working class, sowing severe resentment and mistrust between new arrivals and old hangers on. Also, when a city is converted into a near company town, you are in competition for positions in the same few companies with all of your neighbors. In the world of the PMC (professional managerial class), rivalry is fierce, and these conditions are not likely to lead to the cultivation of new neighborhood based social structures. In addition, people who move somewhere just for work and for no other reason, are not likely to be deeply invested in that place.

Putnam is right to say that “mobility” has not decreased social trust and participation, the problem of deindustrialization, gentrification, and relocating only for work is not a problem, simply, of nomadism. The problem is to do with both immiserating and highly competitive economic displacement which sows resentment and rivalry, instrumentalizes one's social life, undermines social trust in one’s neighbors, and leaves people feeling trapped, and controlled, due to their dependency on impersonal, bureaucratic institutions, rather than freely entering or leaving communities under our own volition. We run across the country not out of nomadic habit but chasing carrots and fleeing sticks, all because of the allegedly objective price mechanisms of the mysterious and ineffable thing, the so-called the “free market.” We have an almost mystical practice of refusing to unpack what ”the market,” “progress” and “the economy” mean. We don’t tend to think that it in fact just means the replacement of democratic (people) power by bureaucratic, corporate-state power,2 it means “that’s just the way it is” or “everybody has to make their money” or “you can’t fight progress” or it’s “the future,” or whatever obfuscating refrain we might use to avoid making sense of the social corrosion taking place before our eyes. Already accustomed to trusting the novel commodity, when the Walkman came out we didn’t wonder if we might go to less concerts because of it. We didn’t wonder until it was too late, whether or not smart phones and the internet would combine to make young people, generally, socially incompetent when compared to their parents and grandparents. Crucially this is not simply an issue of disconnection or individual atomization, it is an issue having to do with the way in which we are connected.

We are also deeply socially integrated at the level of the globalist multinational corporation in such a way that it does not as a matter of fact behoove our material well-being to waste our time hanging out in Elks lodges, grange halls, union halls, political meetings, churches or anything else, which does not maximize our most marketable skills or aspects. We are connected through the commodity and through the workplace so that connection on our own terms is either something we don't feel the need to do, don’t have time or energy to do, or are too distracted by the commodity to do. That is, the (post)modern world has transformed our spending time in leisure pursuits such as simply ‘hanging out’ with people into waste-time. What follows is that it is socially expected, indeed morally imperative, that we do not 'waste' any time on activities which do not have the potential to either produce value, or increase immediate satisfaction. This becomes morally imperative because our survival and prosperity, and that of our families necessitates the expansion of our most marketable aspects. Those people at the union hall, the grange hall, the Knights of Pythias hall etc. are not connected to enough capital of any kind to be worth such expenditures of time, nor are they exciting enough to compete with the dopamine punch which devices can bring. In Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego Freud says…

If therefore in groups narcissistic self-love is subject to limitations which do not operate outside them, that is cogent evidence that the essence of a group formation consists in a new kinds of libidinal ties among the members of the group.

Groups, then, are formed by bonds of what Freud calls "Eros" or love, harkening back to a Greek understanding.3 Groups form out of a shared energetic interest, or attention to certain common problems or interests. How can groups possibly form in this world, where our libidinal economy is such that you can get more enjoyment with less effort by scrolling, than you can by socializing, especially if you're already a bit tired from work, and already sick and tired of shitty, boring interactions with people throughout the working day; the easy option is likely to prevail. It has always been entertainment which brought people together, fitting that it be entertainment which would pull people apart. Or on the other hand it may be that the old group formations become so stale (sometimes bureaucratized as in the case of labor unions for instance) and out of touch that they could not hope to compete with the smart phone, TV and videogames, that it is more a testament to the uselessness and staleness of the old groups, than it is to the excitement of the internet, that nobody is interested in being a part of anything anymore. Further, if the old groups failed to supply needs, now present in our contemporary moment, it is no wonder they would go extinct, and fail to keep up with impersonal networks which can keep up.

In any event, everything changes when what you depend on for your personal survival or prosperity is no longer the local or regional community, but a professionalized occupation at a large legally constructed, for-profit or not-for-profit enterprise. The value of local relationships plummet in a world run by the massive corporation, and other domineering bureaucracies, since professionalized (“discursively taylorized,” as puts it) life tends to be largely about "networking." You cannot get ahead by investing in relationships which cannot be converted directly back from cultural capital into material capital. What that means is that aspiring professionals, for instance, are often hard pressed to spend time on their personal relationships for their own sake, because a great deal of time is demanded for the formation of those relationships which are primarily professional. You can’t get ahead economically, which is increasingly somewhat necessary given the sky-rocketing costs of real estate, by being involved in your community, you can get ahead by spending as much time as possible inside of impersonal bureaucratic and market based networks. So this is true for the aspiring class, the strivers, (the PMC) but why doesn’t the working class, namely in this case, those who are not necessarily trying to “get ahead” in this way, also have a massive decline in sociality? Well that is at least partly down to the fact that our phones and TVs are both more interesting and more relaxing than our neighbors, and in addition, TV and scrolling is an extremely inexpensive pastime. This is not to morally condemn the working class, but other working class people have problems, they’re exhausting, we all already have our own problems and we’re a bit tired and pissed off from work as it is. Then, since we’ve let our social muscles deteriorate, building them back up again, or making use of them in an atrophied state, is even more of a challenge, especially when combined with convenient distraction machines in our pockets, and a measure of fatigue. The corporation did not invent the music venue, it did invent streaming services which dramatically underpay musicians, and headphones, and then co-opted the music venue as well, charging far more than ever before in history to go and see live musicians. The incentive structures are at every turn stacked against face-to-face social, that is, cultural life. The PMC, the blue collar working class, and the service sector working class are all individualized, plucked from their communities, or living in deteriorating communities. We have not, as Putnam argues, simply lost social capital, that is true to an extent, but we have lost social capital because it has been appropriated.

Social capital has in essence been co-opted by physical capital, we expect immediate returns on investment these days, since the cost of living and of prosperity is getting higher and higher. So the cultivation of cultural capital which has no guarantee of, and in fact, is likely not to be exchangeable for real capital, is not something which we tend to have time or energy for. So, the investment of cultural capital into community based, local, face-to-face, social capital, does not occur. Cultural capital is invested directly back into the institutions from whence it came, instead. This is because there has been a collapse between the concepts of social and real capital, the distance between the two has shrunk to hardly anything; university degrees are now basically job-coupons, they are not anymore the cultivation of the individual first, and convertible to economic capital as a somewhat secondary, or even equally important feature. Conversion these days is so primary, it overwhelms the intrinsic value of personal cultivation of the self for its own sake. If the expectations which we have of others is that (a) you should not rely on others for entertainment, combined with (b) you should only be talking to other people who are relevant for the acquisition of the forms of cultural capital which can be immediately cashed out, then (c) there is no room in the world for any cultural life. The pseudo-culture has replaced the culture.

Our culture is not ours at all. It was the Greatest Generation which unwittingly began this trend which is always blamed these days on millennials and zoomers. Putnam bemoans, rightly, the collapse of social trust but it was precisely excessive social trust which paved the way for the abolition of all social trust. We failed to place trust, and good faith, and concerted social energy and time into the community, and invested it instead, into commodities, houses, TVs, game consoles, tourism etc. That trend started not in the 60s, not the 70s, and not the 80s or the 90s or even 2000s, but precisely in the much lauded, from the perspective of social life, 1950s or before. The one way in which the Yuppies of the 1970s and 1980s, (the had-been rebellious hippies of the late 1960s) resembled their parents perfectly, was in their penchant for commodity consumption, for comfort, and an utter lack of any serious critique or concern over the very rapidly consolidating bureaucratic capitalism which now dominates (post) modern life.

The reason why it was so easy for TV and smart phones to wipe out social life, is because the roots of that social, communal life were deeply weak and flawed to begin with. The decadence began in the very generation which saw the Great Depression and WWII, not in their children. The Greatest Generation had many strengths, they were more sociable, they did manage their time better, maintained commitments more, they were tougher and more honest than we are today, this is all undoubtable, and obviously the case (whatever their other flaws). I believe we have become pathetic, entitled, stupid, conformist and at once, anti-social. There is less virtue in the world than there used to be, in most areas of life. But the reason for this is that we have been encouraged to be this way precisely by those generations which were generally more virtuous than we are now. This has been a huge social accident, caused by a sort of cultural carelessness, which almost nobody saw coming, but the problem comes down not to magically less virtuous young people with no respect for their elders, but due to a collective failure of parents in regards to investing communal social capital into their own children, and instead attempting to rely on institutions from schools to corporations to effect Bildung, in their own children. The reason for this isn’t laziness or negligence, it comes from a lack of time and energy in some cases, but also from an excessive social trust in impersonal institutions, outsourcing Bildung to the increasingly bureaucratic school system, and the market machine.

“Until the 1950s, the thirty-hour week remained the norm at Kellogg’s factories. Then, somewhat to the surprise of management, three-quarters of Kellogg’s factory staff vote in favor of returning to eight-hour shifts and a forty-hour week. Some of the workers explained that they wished to return to an eight-hour day because the six-hour shifts meant they spent too much time getting under the feet of irritable spouses back home. But most were clear: they wanted to work longer hours to take home more money, to purchase more or better versions of the endless procession of constantly upgraded consumer products coming on to the maker during America’s affluent postwar era."4

I am writing this essay about social time in part in order to try to work through my own thoughts as to why I strongly believe that we are not living in what many people allege is an "individualistic" time at all. Sometimes people even describe the neoliberal era as "solipsistic" or they say we have become "selfish." All three of those adjectives are misleading. The primary problem is not that individual subjectivity has changed, and I think that is one way in which people misread Christopher Lasch, in thinking that "the culture narcissism" for him meant primarily that a lot of individuals have become self-absorbed, and from them emanates a narcissism that culminates in a culture thereof. But that is a silly idea, and Lasch was not a silly man. The term "narcissism" does however lend itself, having gathered tremendous social baggage, towards blocking the understanding. The idea of cultural narcissism contains within itself, a paradox, so that sustaining a contradiction in a dialectical way is essential to understanding it. I also fear that people would misunderstand David McKerracher and concept of the PCFM in exactly the same way: that we are a collection of solipsistic ultra-individuals, and that the problem is that we are all cut off from each other. While this is partly true, this partially true understanding of the concept, in its partialness, actually casts a deep dark shadow over the truly important part. This flawed understanding is worse than no understanding at all as it leads us off the path in the opposite direction from the truth. A "fractured mass" is also a contradictory concept on purpose. It implies a connected grouping that is somehow crucially siloed off from each other, both at the same time, that is, connected in certain ways as to be disconnected in others. Corporate capitalism has encouraged a world in which we are linked to each other by parasitic connections. Our value, time, and energy is either being drained or we are draining it from other human beings, often both at the same time. We are connected deeper than ever before in human history to erotic and instrumentalized aspects of other humans, and arguably more disconnected than ever before from the humanity of other human beings in general. Our world is mediated through the digital, and the global supply line, uniting us all through the commodity, with workers and consumers all over the world, more than ever before, but at the same time, we have no connection to their humanity, or if we do it is an exploitative one.

We live in the reality which the companies, the investment banks, land speculators, and the governments that carefully protect them, have created for us. We live in the era of time and energy parasites, they suck us dry for rent, forcing us to work more to cover it, and then drain our leisure time out straight through our eyeballs glued to their creations. If you have no time in which to exist under your own control and intention, then do you? We commune more and more with abstractions of things and people, and less and less with our direct perceptions of things and of people, including with abstractions of our own selves, for instance, our social media profiles. People vote, above all, based on vibes. We are experiencing this abstraction mounted on abstraction at the same time as the number of existential threats which human beings face is increasing.

We never solved the nuclear problem, we just stopped thinking about it, and we have added global environmental problems (including but by no means limited to climate change), and now the A.I. problem. See ’s book Capital and Timenergy. Many qualified individuals make strong claims about possible economic collapses as well, which I'm not qualified to verify. But we all know shit is getting weird out there, and we're collectively waiting for the other shoe to drop, somehow, from somewhere. We are becoming more disconnected from a shared and rigorously understood sense of reality at precisely the same time that we need more than ever, a clear eyed and deeply thought out comprehension of the world around us. Our collective malaise is a recipe for one of these potential mounting disasters, or another one we don't even see coming, to destroy, enslave or mutilate the human race even more than it already is. If it isn't enough motivation to change the state of the world, that people are currently living in freakish misery or existential stultification all over the earth right now, then maybe it doesn't make any difference to us that the human race could, since the invention of the nuclear weapon, come to a complete end. Maybe, the belief that exists, unspoken between us all, is that it should all end, or that since nothing lasts forever, it has to eventually end so it might as well be now, and so we don't want to come out of our illusions, and face the horror that is us, that is death itself, our own inverted image, staring back at us. Just go to work, watch TV, scroll, eat, drink, jerk off, don’t think about it, repeat. Or throw soup at fucking painting. Or stand in the street with a sign and no strategy, in order to hear the sound of your own voice echoing off the concrete. These are the options we think we have. Maybe they are the options we want to have. Maybe we actually don't care enough to save ourselves, since life in the human machine already doesn't feel real. Maybe kids aren't shooting up schools because they watch too many videogames, but because life itself feels like a game, or a joke, to begin with. That began when social time ate individual time. The individual is dead and gone, "I" am the collective. I am isolated through the corporate Other, which unites us all, which is my neighbor, and my friend. It is by thinking that we are individuals when we have not earned the right, separation or distinction, that this has become the case. And if René Girard is correct, then the abolition of distinction is the prelude to the unleashing of the maelstrom of violence. What form that will take and precisely when "the fire this time" will come is very hard to say, but that it is on the horizon is something which I think we all fear.

I dreamt that I was at work, at the building… which I’m building, but in the dream I wasn’t a sheet metal worker, I was an army recruit or something. The building in real life is an unfinished, big steel church, in the dream it was an unfinished prison. It is so unfinished that in the dream our method of controlling our extraordinarily violent captives was to have them seated crisscross on the concrete floor, evenly spaced from each other, with only a tape line dividing us from them. The first day we had guns, the second day our commanding Officer Dipshit, forgot the guns.

On that fateful day, apparently one of the inmates — a slight shorthaired woman in a track suit — smelled vulnerability in the air…. I guess it didn’t occur to any of us recruits until it was too late that we didn’t have our guns because after that woman slunk, creepily, like an amphibian over the line while staring a recruit right in the eye, I turned to the commanding Officer Dipshit and whispered “where are the guns?!”

Commanding Officer Dipshit and I walked quickly to the trucks parked right out front, without trying to show any panic which would be to admit that we in fact did not have guns. The big guy sat down in one vehicle and tried to enter a code into a computer which would unlock another vehicle which was supposed to have all the guns in it. He entered the code incorrectly several times, inexplicably he was in no real hurry, and then finally unlocked the gun vehicle. I searched the whole truck, everywhere. It was a mess, totally unprofessional. No guns.

By this point the murderously psychotic inmates had chased many of my fellow recruits down as they fled into the ocean, and drowned them there in the shallows. There was splashing and screaming and God knows what horrible fates were befalling my peers inside the building, but it sounded extremely unpleasant, and drawn out. I eventually gave up looking for the guns and turned and ran out into the nowhere, into the grey desert stretching toward grey hills on which the sun was beginning to set, hoping that I could get far away enough before any of the psycho-killers noticed I was trying to escape.

My most interesting dreams tend to involve an immense grey landscape. But the real building is in an evergreen coastal rainforest, not a vast ashen expanse.

What’s really intriguing to me about this dream is that when I’m at work (and this prison was exactly like what I’m building at work) I feel like I am in prison, while in my dream, I was a prison guard. I feel like I’m in prison when I’m at work because I don’t care much about what I’m building (its ugly) I resent the people for whom I’m building it (they’re ugly) and as much as I don’t mind a challenge or a hard day’s work, I’ve got better things to do (namely, trying to be less ugly).

But ultimately, I don’t have to be doing it, I don’t have to be building this building, there was perfectly lovely salamander habitat there before we bulldozed it, I would rather spend time with amphibians than see these brainless mammals drive into our jobsite, the site of their future church, every day, gawking at all this cheap Chinese steel we’ve erected and sheeted. Seriously, if paving over hundreds of salamanders gets you closer to God then that guy is probably a jackass. If there’s a God, if that statement even makes sense to say, — which it doesn’t: “there’s a God” or “there isn’t a God” to me is like saying “there is/isn’t a Bergwinipolupolous” since “God” is necessarily a concept beyond all human comprehension. I would think that God would side with the salamanders, and not the sentient cheese-sticks ruining beautiful coastal rainforest with a stupid metal box which they call a house of God. They wouldn’t annoy me quite so much if they would stay off the jobsite and stop flying drones over us while we are murdering salamanders with this big dumb metal box which they need in order to conduct the holy spirit, because apparently, their old wood building wasn’t conductive enough.

My dream made me realize that ♫ despite all my rage ♫ I am actually involved in the building of the cage.1 I feel guilty about the salamanders. And the trees, and the displaced bears and the elk that wandered in and found one of their old seasonal hangouts had been leveled and replaced with a skeleton of a magnanimous house of Bergwinipolupolous, made out of the cheapest possible Chinese steel. I am a prison guard, the earth is my charge.

Maybe you think that I have no choice. But I do. I could always take the boom lift up to its max range, oh maybe like two hundred and fifty feet, that would be more than enough to make sure that I would no longer be complicit in making the world uglier. I’d paint the earth with one last bright red stroke. I wouldn’t, but I like the image. My coworker said that if he was ever flung from the lift because he drives into a hole or something while the boom arm is extended all the way, that he hopes that he has the presence of mind for his last words to be “CANNONBALL!”. It told him if that happens I will do everything in my power to make sure that ends up on his tombstone. Can you imagine walking through a cemetery and you look across and one of the markers has “…his last words were ‘CANNONBALL!’” etched into the somber stone, tell me that wouldn’t make your day.

I want time to think about the nature of society, to write about where we are headed, to at least bear witness to these times, but really, to change the world. I swear it is not because I am megalomaniacal, but I have a deep seated sense (don’t we all?) that things are really not how they are — in some very important and yet very vague sense — supposed to be. Things are amiss, and everyone seems clueless how to fix it. The professional knowers, don’t. Really, what in the hell are we doing? My own foreman, a veteran of the construction industry in various capacities for more than thirty years, likened human society to ants, mindlessly building, without a clue as to why. We are human beings, how is it that we’ve come to resemble ants at the very level of consciousness, you know, the thing that’s supposed to set us apart from the rest of nature? It all comes down to following the incentive structures, labyrinths of market based, and bureaucratic corporate incentives, directing us this way and that, to pay attention to this and not that, to build ourselves up as productive consumers at the expense of anything else we could be, or would like to be.

But as much as suicide is painless, neither suicide nor quitting will cleanse my soul clean of its complicity. I ate octopus too the other day, I kind of forgot what calamari is, octopus are smart. I had beef too, cows feel love. I’ll never feel bad for eating chicken though, they’re dumb as shit, but I still don’t want them to be tortured. That’s why part of me buys into that free range crap, even though part of me knows that label operates as a way for corporations to squeeze a few more dollars out of me. Sometimes I buy torture meat because I’m mad at companies manipulating my feelings. That’s stupid. I’m ugly too, I don’t want to be, but I am. For a while I was mostly vegetarian because my logic was that I’ll only eat what I have personally killed. It seemed more dignified and responsible that way. That lasted a while but eventually I gave up. It feels rude and finicky to turn down food when you’re offered it, somehow, even if you know it may have been brutally tortured its entire life and genetically modified, and lived in its own filth, eating members of its own family ground up into its food. There’s nothing beautiful about that.

The point of life is to bring beautiful things into the world, beautiful art, beautiful souls, to bring forth beautiful growing things, to build beautiful buildings. Sometimes we do ugly things in order to create beautiful things, like Vonnegut said “being alive is a crock of shit.” But I think he too would have agreed that there is a great deal of beauty even within things which are fundamentally ugly: look a Davinci’s sketches for his human lawn mower. Nonetheless, the Utilitarians are idiots, the issue isn’t trying to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering, because suffering can be almost sublime, and pleasure, disgusting, anyone with a few spare moments to think about it can tell you that. The only hope of a good life is instead, the maximization of beauty, it is the greatest guide to Goodness. Beauty signifies the immortality of the human soul, stretching itself out into infinity, without attempting to preserve its materiality near so long as that. The body must humbly pass away to make way for new things, which want also, to be beautiful. All I know about God (Bergwinipolupolous) is that he must be ecstatically beautiful, but nobody will ever know more than that, and anyone who claims to know more is most likely after your money.

Or maybe the prophets walk among us. But why must they take the form of a human, if human consciousness has declined to the level of an ant, maybe we should start with the salamander. What might he have to tell us? Might he know something about God, beauty, or ourselves, which we have forgotten?

Fuck no he’s a just a wet lizard… but somehow he makes me think, more than most people do. When I see a salamander, I think of a better world than this.

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Let me just spit something out, this is not the way I want to do things, but I’m really struggling to find the time to do things right, so bare with me while I do it wrong! Democracy. I’ve been hearing lots of discussions of Democracy, a lot from the eminent , his discussions of the idea have gotten my wheels spinning and challenged me in ways which I really needed. Here is my napkin scratch Idea of Democracy. Democracy and philosophy got off on the wrong foot, first of all, and ever since Athens made Socrates drink the hemlock, the two have been estranged siblings… but they are siblings. There is a reason why all of the great ancient Philosophers congregated in the most democratic of all ancient cities, there is also a reason why the most democratic of all ancient cities killed the greatest philosopher of its time. It is this several thousand year old contradiction we have to work out today, it is this that I believe gives us a way forward politically. Why does this antiquated shit have anything to do with today? Since this is napkin scratch, let me go directly to the heart of things in a vulgar and uncareful way; there is also a reason why the country most proud of being in some sense a Democracy, in the entire world, so much so that it wants to impose its ‘Democracy’ on the world, the United States, is also a deeply anti-intellectual society. American’s anti-intellectualism comes from a Democratic impulse; ‘the fact that you have a certificate that says you’re a smart person does not mean that you can tell me what to think,’ goes the reasoning. The contradiction between Philosophy and Democracy carries through until this very day.

But why is philosophy important, who cares, maybe we should be anti-intellectual. The problem is that because democracies kill their philosophers, they suppress their own capacity to think! Yes, intellectuals actually do sometimes have important things to say, as much as they may find themselves too stuck up to say it in a way that shows they care about anything more than their own professional reputation or which demonstrates with every breath and mannerism, their (supposed) intellectual superiority over the ‘common’ man. I’m not saying that they’re always right, or that the laypeople are always right, all I’m saying is that intellectuals being pencil-necked cunts is a separate issue from whether or not they are right, although the fact that they act so shamefully distinct from everyone else, guarantees that they will be told to fuck off by everyone else. Now, I don’t know if Socrates acted like an asshole, but he did act in a way that the demos found to be very annoying, even possibly dangerous to the religious order of the day, so here is where we truly depart from antiquity and focus on now. Regardless of the particulars there is a fundamental contradiction at work in that democracy eats its own child; that being philosophy (I KNOW MIXED METAPHORS, NOW THEY’RE BOTH SIBLINGS AND PROGENY, DEAL WITH IT, YOU’RE READING THE BACK OF A NAPKIN, IM NOT EDITING THIS)…. sorry, sorry, I’m yelling at myself more than anyone, I don’t need to take it out on you, my lovely reader! Subscribe below, hahahha.

What precisely is fundamental about this contradiction? Why do we see it both in Athens and America despite the fact that the ways in which these two societies are democratic, is also very different? Here’s my napkin scratch idea, but I think it’s pretty good napkin scratch. The issue is that freedom, paradoxically, produces rivalry. Rivalry emerges when many people are all after the same object, and when that object is something abstract like freedom, it produces a dynamic where everyone is trying to outdo each other in being more free than their neighbors. The end result is a deeply resentful dynamic, a war of all against all in which we are all trying to prove that we are the most free, have the most distinguished will to assert ourselves in our own supposed individuality. In Tocquiville’s America, that individualistic competition was economic, this resulted in the Gilded age and the rise of monopolies a few decades later. In Athens this individualistic competition was rhetorical, and this resulted in the rule of the rhetoricians, the sophists taking over the democracy and producing a dynamic of ideas salesmanship to the demos. In our America, individualistic competition has resulted in the cult of (false) authenticity. In the end, these rivalries degenerate into a will-to-power struggle in which everyone looks a lot like everyone else, and yet - in a narcissism of small differences - we are all deeply convinced of our singularity.

This brings me to the resolution of the problem… well… not that exactly. Inspired by Zizek, I agree, in Hegelian fashion that there is not end to contradiction. My idea is, in full contradiction, a Philosophical Democracy. The point is to see philosophy, and the genuine practice of it, as the essential pre-condition to political life in a democratic society. What this means is that the democracy of the future is not going to be something in which everyone is expected to participate all the time. Here is how something like this could function. We would live in a state controlled by a small number of people who are deliberately acculturated to philosophy. How is this democratic, doesn’t this sound like Plato’s philosopher kings, his Aristocracy? Yes! It does! I will go further, Future Democracy will not have voting! The only reason why this is democratic is through the way in which the small number of philosopher-rulers is selected: through sortition, that is, totally randomly. At least, this is how, at a federal level, politics would work. State legislatures would not exist. At the local level, we’d probably have good old fashion town-hall style government. Maybe localities (cities and counties) would also have a less intensive training program, but still have some Bildung, some cultivation of the political animal. But in order to scale up, to have a federal government, members of the population would be selected at random to go through an intensive year long pre-political, general philosophical education, and then they would co-rule with their predecessor for one year, acting as their subordinate, and then govern at the federal level, for two years thereafter. That’s a four year commitment, one year in general philosophical education, one year in practical on-the-job training, and two years of independent service.

I don’t believe in this Marxist bullshit of refusing to say anything about the future society which you are trying to bring about. I think that’s a huge mistake, but I don’t have time, here, to get into why I think that. The reason why I am being so specific about this Philosophical Democracy and how it might function, even though it is just napkin scratch specifics, is because “Democracy” isn’t a thing, it a “floating signifier” a totally disconnected idea which may ring an associative bell in our heads but which fundamentally means fuck-all, in and of itself. What Democracy is, if it can be said to be anything is simply rule-of-the-people, that the law should conform to the (reasoned) will of the majority, and in modernity, it also carries the provision that the basic rights of all individuals must be basically respected, no matter what the majority thinks. These are already contradictory ideas within democracy which we have found out how to address… at least, somewhat: the contradiction between the will of the majority and the rights of the individual. Democracy isn’t any one thing, the gulf between the Idea of Democracy and its instantiation in the world is deeply fraught with practical questions, with the snags of the rough edges of the material world in which we find ourselves. The Idea of Democracy is something I believe in, but the devil lies in the details of implementation, the problem of structure, of distribution of timenergy, [] of resources. I am trying to construct a kind of Democracy which could be adaptable to different levels of free time in society, to different types of futures in which we might find ourselves. I want to come up with something which could theoretically work in antiquity, or could work today, or could work in the world as it either falls apart and/or becomes some post-work sci-fi shit, and something which turns Democracy into something more than a mere event [ ], but into a resilient system of permanent governance. The stakes of accomplishing this, is our very humanity itself.

I think that the state is necessary, I think that if we are not to have a state religion, then philosophy and a justice system is necessary, but each one of these things has to be sublated into high versions of themselves which we could actually call “human” and not “inhuman.” What we are headed towards, I fear, is the opposite direction, towards a war of all against all, as in Raskolnivok’s dream from Crime and Punshment.

He was in the hospital from the middle of Lent till after Easter. When he was better, he remembered the dreams he had had while he was feverish and delirious. He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. They gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other. The alarm bell was ringing all day long in the towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was summoning them no one knew. The most ordinary trades were abandoned, because everyone proposed his own ideas, his own improvements, and they could not agree. The land too was abandoned. Men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and further. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.

This is what human beings are always working to avoid, collectively, to stave of this, and it is why we allow tyrants to rule us, because reciprocal violence, endless cycles of vengeance, we know deep down, are the alternative to order. I believe Dostoevsky here, and I believe in egalitarian Democracy. This is my political task, if both Democracy and Dostoevsky have a point, what the fuck are we supposed to do?! This is the contradiction in which I’m trying to intervene.

In order to avoid the full horror of that fate human beings will always reach for some kind of order, sometimes it’s tyranny, for us it is becoming the tyranny of the bureaucracy itself, the tyranny of the human machine, the human society, without any human element. What do you think, could Philosophical Democracy reintroduce the human back into human society? There’s so much more work to do on this, there’s so much more to explain about what I’ve already said (I didn’t even tell you why Dostoevsky is right!), but now you know the tree I’m barking up, I’m struggling to situate my life such that I have the time and energy to climb it! What do you think about barking up this tree, do you like the sound of it, or does it sound like bullshit, seriously, tell me what you think. For now, I’m out of time!

“You are me, already dead. To feel alive we seek sensation, any sensation to wash away the cranky black sorrow. And it leaves us for a moment but then it comes back, and we have to do it all over again. And we need more, and each time we need more until too much is never enough. We are the already dead.” If that isn’t Death Drive…. Mad Max: Furiosa was pretty good.

Nope, I was wrong^:

The drive does not want (us) to enjoy. The superego wants (us) to enjoy. The superego (and its culture) reduces the drive to the issue of satisfaction (enjoyment), making us hostages to its vicissitudes, and actively blocking access to the negativity that drives it. In other words — and this is crucial — satisfaction (for the sake of satisfaction) is not the goal of the drive, but its means. This is what is profoundly disturbing about the “death drive”: not that it wants only to enjoy, even if it kills us, but that it wants only to repeat this negativity, the gap in the order of being, even if this means to enjoy. Enjoyment is the means, whereas the “aim” is the repetition of the lack of being in the very midst of being. . . .

(What Is Sex?, p. 104)

I don’t think that point sunk in all the way when I read What is Sex? That’s probably one of those, multiple reads before you really get it sort of books.

If we equate “sensation” above with Zupančič’s “satisfaction” here, then the object of death drive is not to increase jouissance exponentially, but to repeat desire, if we conceive of desire as the absence of satisfaction in its capacity as the precondition of satisfaction. If we imagine a graph: Drive isn’t an exponential curve, but a continual yanking down of the line, that it might have reason to rise again. So when Dementus says that quote at the top, [struck through] he isn’t expressing the Death Drive, but the sadistic Superego of the wasteland. In his case, it seems like the superego of scarcity, and of survival itself; enjoying dogs eating dogs, enjoying the hard scrabble, enjoying winning at it. Wouldn’t it have been more intuitive to call superego “death drive” and death drive “superego?” I suppose this is why Death Drive can be seen as an ethical and individualist principle tied to objet a, while Superego is usually seen as a profoundly unethical and collectivist principle. Superego coopts the drive, turning it into a mechanism of pure enjoyment, by depriving it of its negativity.

How does this work though? How does the Superego manage to ‘reduce the drive to the issue of satisfaction and ‘actively block access to the negativity that drives it’? Specifically, how does the injunction to enjoy become so powerful, why do we allow it to move us away from our authenticity, are we just that suggestible? Isn’t it that it is incredibly easy to believe that positive ideas especially when they are about ourselves, and encourage our narcissism and feel good, are actually our ideas. We take up these narcissistic conceptions as our own and then when that death drive negativity tries to bring us down, we repress it as not us, when it is more us than our narcissism is. Once we repress this drive we have to cover it up with still more narcissistic notions and idealizations, to plug the whole; and the process repeats, over, and over again alienating us further and further from ourselves. And this is necessary in our world, to hold down our bullshit jobs, to keep a smiling face toward our bullshit friends, to keep seeing our truly authenticated selves in the mirror. Fuck that, whatever the consequences, as long as I’m not that. “Sick as I am, I would never be you…” (if “you” are that) in the always bitchy but insightful words of Morrissey.

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There are still gnats at my work. I work construction, outside, and it is well into January, yet it has been so unseasonably warm in the North West of America, that the gnats have not disappeared, they have not died off until just this week. It was so warm a recently that the flowers thought it was spring, flowers were blooming all over, only to be struck down by a late cold plunge that has only just arrived this week. I noticed I was disturbed by this eerie warmth, as warm as fifty five degrees Fahrenheit right after Christmas. Then I watched the remarkable show called Scavenger’s Reign, that settled deeply into my unconscious as well, so deeply that I did not notice it for some time; I loved the show, but I forgot about it for the most part, going about my weeks, back and forth between the drippy Oregon coast and the somewhat disconcerting city of Portland. I didn’t realize that my “forgetting” the show might have been repressing it, and the repressed certainly returned. It’s a really good show, very well written and beautifully animated, you should watch it, but it is pretty unsettling.

A few weeks after I finished the show, I had one of the most disturbing dreams which I’ve ever had. I’ve always hated the idea of parasites, always been unnerved by the idea of visiting a tropical climate, some place like the Amazon. What’s disturbing about a parasite is the presence of another living thing, with intent, which rather than having the good manners to kill you before eating you, and the decorum to eat you from the outside in, the parasite, wants to keep you alive, and treat you like an air B&B at best, a junkie squat at worst. Parasites make you feel used, inhabited, like a thing. That’s why they’re so disturbing, they make the most intimate parts of your body, your insides feel used, for food, for shelter, as latrine. Its degrading is what it is. Being killed by a pack of wolves seems to me a more appealing fate than being gnawed on, and sucked at, and digested while you know its happening, and there’s nothing you can do, by some nasty slug, or clinging mollusk thing.

The truth is though, we are full of parasites; or symbiotes. Our skin crawls with mites, our stomachs are full of bacterial life, some of our organs might be the long lost descendants of foreign creatures, which once infected our biological, microbial ancestors. Parasitism is essential to life, and symbiosis is a congenial, or at least a détente parasitism. Parasitic creatures sometimes clean and defend their hosts, feeding off of other, evil parasites or other infections, who would otherwise slowly rot the host, killing it in the slowest, most agonizing and undignified way.

So parasites aren’t all bad, but when I say I hate parasites, you know what I mean, I hate those malicious ones, those dishonorable predators, those horrible bloodsuckers, egg layers, body snatchers; the wasps who ley their eggs in caterpillars, whose young eat their way out. Disgusting things living within, using you, without even the decency to kill you quickly to survive off of your corpse. There’s something so utterly disgusting, and such a severe lack of manners, of something that would live rent free in your body, trash the place, and then just walk off, leaving you in ruins. This is what is so awful about cancer too, but cancer is the body betraying itself, so while deeply tragic, it doesn’t quite have the horror factor of a foreign malicious body, integrating itself, unbidden, into yours. An unwanted visitation, from an ungodly guest. The existence of Parasites is the best argument against the existence of a benevolent God. But the argument ultimately isn’t entirely successful, because the price of free will is genuine chaos, and the price of chaos is the almost inevitable evolution of Godforsaken, malicious parasites, or so the apologists might argue. Besides, it turns out that the worst parasite of all, is man on himself.

While there are congenial foreign bodies that would like to integrate themselves with you, the social world we live in now is full of hostile ones. Scavenger’s Reign is a beautiful, and horrifying exploration of a world in which parasitic creatures, fungi and plants are truly in charge of the ecosystem. There are predators in that world, but their role is reversed from the way it is on earth, the greatest predators are the parasites, and the traditional predator-prey relations, are more of an after thought.

Everything on the planet of Scavenger’s Reign fits so perfectly into everything else, to the extent that it is remarkably puzzle-like. As a result nothing is out of place, meaning that nothing resists incorporation into the ecosystem for long. What we watch in the show is the characters fighting tooth and nail to resist becoming part of the planet, resisting becoming parasitized, becoming seamlessly incorporated into the great puzzle. But we are also watching them, through adaptation, becoming nonetheless a part of the planet. The question is only whether they become incorporated as autonomous parts of a greater whole, on their own terms, or absorbed, on the terms of the planet. What they have to do is fit in in such a way that they don’t loose themselves, so that they do not become assimilated in any of the manifold number of horrible ways that nature has found to consume them, in that disgusting, biological hijacking sort of way.

I realized recently that that show can be thought of as a metaphor for (especially late) capitalism, and perhaps for human economic relations in general. We live in a system of instrumentalization, wherein our energy and our time, our interests and passion, is hijacked for the purpose of serving the economy - the human ecosystem - rather than for pursuing our own ends. It is so easy to think that a certain form of enjoyment is your own idea, when it might not be. What if you didn’t come up with it on your own, what if it was fed to you by the algorithm, for instance, like the black psycho-active goo in Scavenger’s Reign, which the psychic panda feeds the creatures it brainwashes into doing its bidding. That brings me to my dream.

In my dream, those very real, unnaturally late season gnats had spent the last unnaturally warm week laying little obscenities of nature under my skin. It’s larvae were these inch long little grey worms, and when I tried to pull them out with tweezers they would pull themselves further down through my skin, trying to embed themselves into my muscles, fishing themselves through my precious tissues, making me their personal abode; like the junkies - their bodies hijacked by manufactured substances, probably heroin - who broke into my sister’s house while she was away, and rolled their filthy bodies around in her bed, raided her fridge and relieved themselves on her carpets.

Of course, the analogy of a parasite has long been used to describe the relationship of the capitalist class to the working class — an especially salient metaphor when it comes to unproductive capital, rent seeking leeches like landlords, and private equity investors, who don’t produce anything at all, whose contribution to value creation is entirely fictitious, and who in 21st century capitalism, are particularly ascendant. But I don’t write this piece to whine about capitalism and capitalists; there is little worse than someone who complains about something they aren’t willing to do anything about, and as there is no meaningful path to “large scale structural change” (as Dave McKerracher would put it) right now, since The Way is Shut, (as Benjamin Studebaker would put it) I’d like to avoid adding to the increasing noise coming out of the chattering class.[1] [2] Ideas of class have recently, since the Bernie campaign, been layered on top of ideas of racial, gender and sexual identity politics, which has resulted in a pretty stupid workerism: leftists obsessed with the working class as a naturalized identity category. This is so out of place in a time when capitalism is making work so unrewarding and unredeemable, often by making it into incredibly easy drudgery, that it becomes more manifest than ever, how massive a waste of time instrumentalized labor under capitalism really is. Nobody cares, or should care, about their identity as a shelf stocker, sorry, but everyone is trying to get as far away from possible from identifying, especially with types of work which a trained crow could accomplish, especially when those shelves are being stocked with useless and stupid items, whose production and distribution adds infinitely more carbon into the atmosphere than lasting joy into the soul, or nourishment to the body. But don’t worry skilled trades, the post-work era is coming for you too, construction spiders will replace ironworkers someday… albeit, not any time soon. Besides, the idea of society and community is dead, even the skilled trades are just slaving away for the bureaucratic network of private-public partnership, a euphemism for corporate hegemony, of course. When was the last time you could stand back and not just be proud of the work you did, but proud of what you actually accomplished? How many people can say they helped to create something of genuine lasting social and intrinsic value, while they were earning a paycheck? Not many. Clearing bald eagle habitat to put up a Jamba Juice, that’s what I’m supposed to be proud of? I for one, am not feeling it…. The point is, I don’t identify with my labor, I don’t want to, and I’m far from alone in that. My own foreman likened human society to that of ants: we just build, we don’t know to what end or anything, we just run around mindlessly erecting various structures, many of them poorly designed, hideous, and possibly nefarious, entirely unaware as to why, or for what purpose.

I hope we can realize that the massive parasitism of value has lead to a qualitive change in the nature of the parasitism: capital parasitizes the mind too. It implants ideas which are agreeable to it, and workerism, is one of those pseudo-cultural concepts. The goal is to become more than a mere worker, not to become reduced to little more than one. But lest I just be read here as some Quixotist-Marxist (a greater insult I cannot imagine), nostalgic for the lost era of revolution, lets cut the bourgeoisie a little slack.[3] Likening them to bloodsucking slugs is just rude, and only really merited as an insult hurled at them while you’re on the picket line in 1929, nursing entirely un-metaphorical wounds from their hired Pinkerton’s clubs. “Parasite” isn’t really a good analytical category… or is it?

Remember, parasites aren’t all bad, and sometimes they turn into benevolent symbiotic critters. Things like white blood cells are sort of independent creatures devotedly serving the host species, trying to repulse invaders: there is nothing about the white blood cell which necessarily naturalizes it as belonging to your body, it is an independent part of the network that is your body, and it is adapted to fight that which wants to destroy its host network.

What the rich have always had access to, even while many, perhaps most aristocrats and tech billionaires both choose to squander it, is time. In antiquity, as in the pre-civil war American south, to have your Otium was the reason to own slaves. Leisure time is the wages of timenergy parasitism; what you are sucking up is time, sweet time, in which you can be anything you want, do anything you want, and you genuinely access the ability to do things for their own sake.[4] On the one hand what glory, but can glory be founded on the rot of such an ignoble theft? Regardless of moral considerations however, what owning slaves makes possible for you, is the ability to think and feel, unencumbered by the crushing burdens of necessity and of your own survival. You might be a parasite, but a what a beautiful parasite you might become, provided you have the discipline for such freedom, that is.

What would happen when one of these gilded parasites, enlightened by their Otium, able to think, its brain engorged with the sweet blood of those it has turned into its hosts, were to look back over its domain and see it for what it is: a putrid empire built on exploitation, suffering, and the ultimate tragedy of millions upon millions of wasted human potentialities (as opposed to its rightful, enlightened dominion over natural slaves). Perhaps then, a symbiosis can emerge. A parasite cannot change what it is anymore than a host can, not in the sense that there are natural hosts and parasites in the human community, but in the sense that society is built already on these relationships. You can’t change these long historical foundations by snapping your fingers. But perhaps the parasite can change its relationship to its host, to become eventually, an organ within it. Or is it still necessary, that we keep trying for the host to attempt to overpower its own parasite? But how can that be done today, remember, it isn’t the 20th century anymore… and it didn’t really work then, or I wouldn’t be writing an article about capitalism.

Only if we understand, that is quit disavowing, the brutal reality of our world, we might then be able to transform it. Throughout that transformation there are certain fundamental structures of the material world, whether natural or historical, which we might not be able to change, at least not without severe and potentially fatal consequences. But altering the relationship of the these parts to one another, that could be the process wherein redemption for all lies. The master is made filthy by his relationship to the slave, and the slave ruined by his relationship to the master, even as they uphold one another, as being what they respectively are. But undoubtedly free, craft labor, is an advance over slavery, and what comes after mechanized labor could either be an advance over mechanized labor, or a new, unspeakable form of slavery. I’m not optimistic about the direction we are headed, or about the lack of access to levers of power by which we might steer the ship. But all we can do right now in our pathetic moment, is try our best to think, and hopefully gather strength, to do that we have to tarry with the collective as well as our own individual unconscious. I wrote this to excise a parasite, here, onto the page. Perhaps someone will learn something from it.

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