Dear all,
Needless to say, that with such a title (in French it was published in 1946 as the Lettres sur la bombe atomique), it had to be bought and read for you. The book is a succession of letters written right after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, at this very specific point of time where the slaughter had ceased, and the world was forever changed by the realization that human beings could from now on destroy themselves and the Earth.
During the transition between last and this year - between the Obama administration and the new one - between a world that seems, in retrospect, to have been predictable and so easy to live in, before non-linear causality broke through in public discours (see Hypernormalisation for more on that), my grandfather died. I know, another important piece of information for the world wide web - the echo chamber of self-centeredness. It's not so much that he died that is worth writing about, it's that he was the last of his bataillon - of the French Free Forces. The last to have survived battles such as Bir-Hakeim, El Alamein, etc. He also was someone complex - and that's it. But with him disappears another member of this generation who fought and saw so much destruction at such young age. Of course, the level of unpredictability and the multiple alarming factors in our current world make the comparison with 1938 very easy. Some objective factors are there again, like the rise of inequalities - more specifically, of the discrepancy between the richest and poorest in different societies, the precarisation of people who expected life to be much easier, the in your face corruption of the financial and political system post-2008, nationalism, islamophobia - the new component with climate change and scientific denialism.
So, this situation sucks. However, navel-centeredness oblige, let me continue my sad story. So, while, like so many of you, i was strolling in the background noise of worry that is currently unravelling, i was also strolling in an English-speaking bookshop in Paris, and I came across this book by Denis de Rougemont:
Needless to say, that with such a title (in French it was published in 1946 as the Lettres sur la bombe atomique), it had to be bought and read for you. The book is a succession of letters written right after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, at this very specific point of time where the slaughter had ceased, and the world was forever changed by the realization that human beings could from now on destroy themselves and the Earth.
So to make it short, a lot is interesting, but interesting is not interesting. What struck me in the book was that de Rougemont describes a conversation he has with an American doctor
He then argues that now that the bomb is here, what is needed is the control of man. I bet that in the upcoming years, someone will use a bomb, potentially on Europe - given karma, and also, the personality of one some who just got elected and who suffers the type of personal corruption known as après moi le déluge, after me the flood, ie, I will not be bothered with the consequences of my actions, nor will I ever drop all the violence that made me survive and become who I am (because if I do, I, the sense of myself, will die). And even without that, a very strict control of men, via technology and its implications (see China's surveillance program), in terms of internalized compliance, and emphasis on individual submission to the collective, will overflow and become the rule of the so-called new world. This was all contained, in a nutshell, in this moment.
Or maybe it wasn't but the symbolic correspondance makes it sound like a good story.
Anyway, the only thing that I wanted to add, was that, well, hmm, I truly don't believe that control of men is needed - on the opposite, my experience, and, from what I've gathered, that of other people is absolutely discrediting this idea. I think that we actually are suffering from the totalitarian expansion of the mentality of control - and that more of it is just going to produce more of the unwanted, unexpected (and for some, very expectable) side-effects that control implies.
I've lived in the past years mostly fully free of my day (I had jobs but I've always had the feeling that I had chosen the constraint of their schedule, and I tried to make them short-term in order to earn enough to sustain the rest of my days), and I can assure you that let free, unrestrained, people are not likely to murder each other or stay at home binging on Netflix or porn (or maybe they will, but just for a moment, for as long as it takes them to reorganise their lives with that newfound freedom to decide for oneself - it is, after all, very countercultural).
There was an age where the self-proclaimed Christian ideology and its leading institution would control human life given that you know, man has sinned, and can not hope to be out of the bale of tears without submitting to the virtuous guidelines of the Institution (represented by the priest as an expert). Nowadays, it seems that the scientific age is producing another kind of ideology in which man again can not be let free, this time, not because he has sinned, but because left alone, he will be likely to refuse to participate in the consumption machinery - so, in a nutshell, depression, and all forms of what is called mental health problems. Thomas Szaz puts it best:
It seems that we are in for long centuries of vast brutality, where any form of dissent will be medicalised and solved by technology (see parts of the biotech industry that is now emerging and is supposed to solve the problems of a generalist approach to diseases - so-called personalized medicine, with its heavy reliance on data and control to monitor the technology, the use of implants and other specific stimulators to force the body to stop doing whatever is destroying it, refusing the mere possibility that bodies actually react normally to environmental or collective conditions, and the complete disdain for the cost and aftereffects of technology). You don't want to go to work? You can't seem to be able to have sex? You are overweight? Have Parkinson? Well, my lad, no worries - the problem is you, yes, but not just you - the culprit are the dopaminergic neurons of your brain - or this protein receptor that doesn't seem to work, etc.
Of course there are some wonderful and amazing developments, refinements, in what is being currently developed all over the world. Yet, my main argument is that the extension of knowledge, the furthering of that same story of the Ascent of Humanity (to quote one of Charles Eisenstein's titles), a humanity that is extracting itself from the formless, pointless life of amoebias and lions to exert control and dominance over the world, thanks to its superior intelligence - a capacity for symbolic thinking (and for collective hypnosis) that made it equal to the Gods (and made them pointless), see Genesis and Daniel Quinn's Ishmaël.
* In Ishmaël, Quinn argues that the Genesis basically is the surviving story of the humans who have been oppressed and murdered by our forefathers - those who settled for agriculture, labor division, civilisation etc., and wiped out hunter gatherers and herders out of the globe (the only remaining tribes being currently dealt with). The story says that once some humans decided to go against the natural rhythms of life (in hunter gatherer life, if the earth went through a period of drought then life, including human life, would whither, but every form of life would accept that the timing of life and death was not theirs to judge, and human groups would not proliferate excessively since they had to adapt to whatever their surroundings could provide), it was the beginning of our times - the war against the world. It seems now that this becomes blatant and we are doomed to what looks like collective suicide - which, one would expect, was very clear to those sons of Abel who, while being decimated, conquered and integrated to the rising Empires, knew that *this ain't going to end well*. Quinn further argues that what the rising humanity was setting up is a way to put oneself at bay from the gods, saying, *oh there's a drought and everyone dies? Well, b*tches, not me.*. I'll let you make the comparison with our current era, and you'll feel the pain of Abel. What the-people-who-think-they-need-no-gods could not really see is that because they are humans, and because the access to the symbolic world which makes human think of themselves as better, if not just different, from the rest of what is, their knowledge is always limited, and will always be posterior to that which is. So whatever their assessment of good and bad, and no matter how much data they gather, they can not know, in a sense of exhaustively capture that which is.
On the opposite, because knowledge is always old, what they've actually started was the end of evolution - the sterilisation and deadening of the world, because everything must then be sacrificed to obtain more knowledge (today, data being thought to be a source of knowledge, but being just another fragmentation of experience), because, certainly, some of the aftereffects of this original mistake are being felt, but because we can not possibly go back to the root of the mistake, we have to solve it with more of the same > you know, again, Lorde's you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. I know that noone is gonna read this and tell Xi, Elon, and the others, guys, we should really listen to this massage girl, and then they'll all fall on their knees and wipe some tears for they had been arrogant and how could they not see it, but you know, still. Whatever overly fucked-up world the Anthropocène is bringing with it, time will not help. The mistake, the first mistake (and honestly that applies to each single one of our lives) is to believe that you know better - that you can have mastery over life - and that that which you think is better actually is better (I mean I think that whatever I do somehow is correct, otherwise I couldn't do anything, but I know that it probably isn't always, and mostly, my decision making is always renewed, in the sense that I never know in advance what is going to be good. If you know me you know how undecided I am, not because I lack will, or probably because I really lack will, given that I can't understand how you can superimpose whatever your sense of self is demanding to that which is wanting to arise, if you let it space to be).*
Okay so you can go and read Ishmaël, sorry for the digression.
My main argument, then, is that the extension of knowledge, and the killing of Earth - the doom-like taste of human history - go hand in hand. It's inescapable. There is no other choice but to give up completely on these ambitions, and, as religions loved to ascertain it, submit. But not submit obediently, but somehow trust in the unforeseability of the world - trust that, no matter the mistakes and shortcomings of human understanding, it's just poop-talk. And I mean, those of you who had some experiences in beauty, gratitude, if not life altering spiritual awakenings (ahem, which may be too much), you already know what those moments whisper to you - it does matter - what you do does matter - but also, the victorious storyline does not hold it completely - no matter how much control is exerted upon man.
He then argues that now that the bomb is here, what is needed is the control of man. I bet that in the upcoming years, someone will use a bomb, potentially on Europe - given karma, and also, the personality of one some who just got elected and who suffers the type of personal corruption known as après moi le déluge, after me the flood, ie, I will not be bothered with the consequences of my actions, nor will I ever drop all the violence that made me survive and become who I am (because if I do, I, the sense of myself, will die). And even without that, a very strict control of men, via technology and its implications (see China's surveillance program), in terms of internalized compliance, and emphasis on individual submission to the collective, will overflow and become the rule of the so-called new world. This was all contained, in a nutshell, in this moment.
Or maybe it wasn't but the symbolic correspondance makes it sound like a good story.
Anyway, the only thing that I wanted to add, was that, well, hmm, I truly don't believe that control of men is needed - on the opposite, my experience, and, from what I've gathered, that of other people is absolutely discrediting this idea. I think that we actually are suffering from the totalitarian expansion of the mentality of control - and that more of it is just going to produce more of the unwanted, unexpected (and for some, very expectable) side-effects that control implies.
I've lived in the past years mostly fully free of my day (I had jobs but I've always had the feeling that I had chosen the constraint of their schedule, and I tried to make them short-term in order to earn enough to sustain the rest of my days), and I can assure you that let free, unrestrained, people are not likely to murder each other or stay at home binging on Netflix or porn (or maybe they will, but just for a moment, for as long as it takes them to reorganise their lives with that newfound freedom to decide for oneself - it is, after all, very countercultural).
There was an age where the self-proclaimed Christian ideology and its leading institution would control human life given that you know, man has sinned, and can not hope to be out of the bale of tears without submitting to the virtuous guidelines of the Institution (represented by the priest as an expert). Nowadays, it seems that the scientific age is producing another kind of ideology in which man again can not be let free, this time, not because he has sinned, but because left alone, he will be likely to refuse to participate in the consumption machinery - so, in a nutshell, depression, and all forms of what is called mental health problems. Thomas Szaz puts it best:
“Modern psychiatric ideology is an adaptation- to a scientific age - of the traditional ideology of Christian theology. Instead of life being a bale of tears, it is a vale of diseases. And, as in his journey from the cradle to the grave man was formerly guided by the priest, so now he is guided by the physician. In short, whereas in the Age of Faith the ideology was Christian, the technology clerical, and the expert priestly; in the Age of Madness the ideology is medical, the technical clinical, and the expert psychiatric.”
Szasz, T. S. (1973) Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man. Calder and Boyars, London.
It seems that we are in for long centuries of vast brutality, where any form of dissent will be medicalised and solved by technology (see parts of the biotech industry that is now emerging and is supposed to solve the problems of a generalist approach to diseases - so-called personalized medicine, with its heavy reliance on data and control to monitor the technology, the use of implants and other specific stimulators to force the body to stop doing whatever is destroying it, refusing the mere possibility that bodies actually react normally to environmental or collective conditions, and the complete disdain for the cost and aftereffects of technology). You don't want to go to work? You can't seem to be able to have sex? You are overweight? Have Parkinson? Well, my lad, no worries - the problem is you, yes, but not just you - the culprit are the dopaminergic neurons of your brain - or this protein receptor that doesn't seem to work, etc.
Of course there are some wonderful and amazing developments, refinements, in what is being currently developed all over the world. Yet, my main argument is that the extension of knowledge, the furthering of that same story of the Ascent of Humanity (to quote one of Charles Eisenstein's titles), a humanity that is extracting itself from the formless, pointless life of amoebias and lions to exert control and dominance over the world, thanks to its superior intelligence - a capacity for symbolic thinking (and for collective hypnosis) that made it equal to the Gods (and made them pointless), see Genesis and Daniel Quinn's Ishmaël.
* In Ishmaël, Quinn argues that the Genesis basically is the surviving story of the humans who have been oppressed and murdered by our forefathers - those who settled for agriculture, labor division, civilisation etc., and wiped out hunter gatherers and herders out of the globe (the only remaining tribes being currently dealt with). The story says that once some humans decided to go against the natural rhythms of life (in hunter gatherer life, if the earth went through a period of drought then life, including human life, would whither, but every form of life would accept that the timing of life and death was not theirs to judge, and human groups would not proliferate excessively since they had to adapt to whatever their surroundings could provide), it was the beginning of our times - the war against the world. It seems now that this becomes blatant and we are doomed to what looks like collective suicide - which, one would expect, was very clear to those sons of Abel who, while being decimated, conquered and integrated to the rising Empires, knew that *this ain't going to end well*. Quinn further argues that what the rising humanity was setting up is a way to put oneself at bay from the gods, saying, *oh there's a drought and everyone dies? Well, b*tches, not me.*. I'll let you make the comparison with our current era, and you'll feel the pain of Abel. What the-people-who-think-they-need-no-gods could not really see is that because they are humans, and because the access to the symbolic world which makes human think of themselves as better, if not just different, from the rest of what is, their knowledge is always limited, and will always be posterior to that which is. So whatever their assessment of good and bad, and no matter how much data they gather, they can not know, in a sense of exhaustively capture that which is.
On the opposite, because knowledge is always old, what they've actually started was the end of evolution - the sterilisation and deadening of the world, because everything must then be sacrificed to obtain more knowledge (today, data being thought to be a source of knowledge, but being just another fragmentation of experience), because, certainly, some of the aftereffects of this original mistake are being felt, but because we can not possibly go back to the root of the mistake, we have to solve it with more of the same > you know, again, Lorde's you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. I know that noone is gonna read this and tell Xi, Elon, and the others, guys, we should really listen to this massage girl, and then they'll all fall on their knees and wipe some tears for they had been arrogant and how could they not see it, but you know, still. Whatever overly fucked-up world the Anthropocène is bringing with it, time will not help. The mistake, the first mistake (and honestly that applies to each single one of our lives) is to believe that you know better - that you can have mastery over life - and that that which you think is better actually is better (I mean I think that whatever I do somehow is correct, otherwise I couldn't do anything, but I know that it probably isn't always, and mostly, my decision making is always renewed, in the sense that I never know in advance what is going to be good. If you know me you know how undecided I am, not because I lack will, or probably because I really lack will, given that I can't understand how you can superimpose whatever your sense of self is demanding to that which is wanting to arise, if you let it space to be).*
Okay so you can go and read Ishmaël, sorry for the digression.
My main argument, then, is that the extension of knowledge, and the killing of Earth - the doom-like taste of human history - go hand in hand. It's inescapable. There is no other choice but to give up completely on these ambitions, and, as religions loved to ascertain it, submit. But not submit obediently, but somehow trust in the unforeseability of the world - trust that, no matter the mistakes and shortcomings of human understanding, it's just poop-talk. And I mean, those of you who had some experiences in beauty, gratitude, if not life altering spiritual awakenings (ahem, which may be too much), you already know what those moments whisper to you - it does matter - what you do does matter - but also, the victorious storyline does not hold it completely - no matter how much control is exerted upon man.
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