Sergey Nechayev: The 20th century belonged to him, and so will the 21st century

Sergey Nechayev  (1847 – 1882)  was a terrorist, an anarchist, an essayist and widely the single most reviled figure in all of anarchism. More than Max Stirner, more than Renzo Novatore, even more than the Bonnot gang. In the book Bakunin: The Creative Passion, Mark Leier writes:

"Bakunin’s careful thoughts on the nature of revolution and organization were, however, overshadowed by his relationship with one of the most repellent characters of the nineteenth-century revolutionary movements. His active work with Sergei Nechaev took up only a few months of Bakunin’s life, yet it would have immediate repercussions and would taint Bakunin and anarchism for generations to come."

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism also has some comments on the infamous bizarre Bakunin-Nechayev relationship:

"In his search for likely catalysts, Bakunin became involved at this time with a young revolutionary called Sergei Nechaev. It proved a disastrous relationship and did immense harm to the anarchist movement. Nechaev, who later inspired the character Peter Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, was an extraordinary character: despotic, power-hungry, egoistic, rude and yet strangely seductive. He exemplifies the unscrupulous terrorist who will stop at nothing to realize his aim.

Sergei Gennadievich Nechaev sorely tested Bakunin’s belief that society, not individuals, should be held responsible for crimes and transgressions. Nechaev stole money and reputation from the anarchist, inadvertently aided Marx in purging him from the International Working Men’s Association, and provided ample, if indiscriminate and inaccurate, munitions to the enemies of anarchism that they are still firing off today."

Furthermore, the book comments on his most lasting pamphlet, Catechism Of A Revolutionary:

"Whilst in Geneva with Bakunin, Nechaev wrote between April and August 1869 a Catechism of a Revolutionary which proved to be one of the most repulsive documents in the history of terrorism. The guiding principle of this work is that ‘everything is moral that contributes to the triumph of the revolution; everything that hinders it is immoral and criminal.’ It calls upon the would-be revolutionary to break all ties with past society, to feel a ‘single cold passion’ for the revolutionary cause and to adopt the single aim of ‘pitiless destruction’ in order to eradicate the State and its institutions and classes."

There also exists a biography which I have not read because it is no longer available, but I know it considers its subject a psychopath from quotes about it in other articles. So, clearly, anarchists do not think very highly of Nechayev. But let's back up: Who was Sergey Nechayev? 

Nechayev was the son of a serf (somewhat unusual for a revolutionary, who mostly had noble backgrounds, such as Kropotkin or Bakunin) who, while by no means wealthy, were able to give him a decent education. In 1865, he moved to Moscow to study and take the examination to become an elementary school teacher. However, that failed, and he moved to St. Petersburg. There, he was radicalized by Karakozov's attempt to assassinate the Tsar. He found himself working with fellow revolutionaries and developed an highly ascetic theory of the revolutionary and terrorism (which we will touch on later). There, he manipulated students by telling them lies and exaggerations regarding his own background, convincing his comrades that he was arrested by the secret police, and had miraculously escaped the Peter and Paul fortress. Indeed, manipulation will prove to be a recurring theme in Nechayev's life. 

In fact, he was just planning to flee Russia, but this way he had created himself a backstory that would grant him street cred among fellow revolutionaries. This story was very helpful when he met Bakunin in Geneva, in March 1869. Bakunin, the old anarchist, had fell out with "the people" of Russia, and saw in Nechayev a new, youthful revolutionary spirit, "one of those young fanatics who doubt nothing and who fear nothing". The relationship proved extremely disastrous. But this is when Nechayev, with perhaps some help of Bakunin (how much Bakunin had an hand in Nechayev's essays is a source of bitter controversy), wrote several pamphlets. These essays are what got Bakunin an infamous reputation as an apostle of terrorism and nihilistic destruction. On Nechayev's merciless methods, Bakunin told him: 

Nechayev as a young man.

"People’s revolutions are born from the course of events, or from historical currents which, continuously and usually slowly, flow underground and unseen within the popular strata, increasingly embracing, penetrating, and undermining them until they emerge from the ground and their turbulent waters break all barriers and destroy everything that impedes their course. Such a revolution cannot be artificially induced. It is even impossible to hasten it, although I have no doubt that an efficient and intelligent organization can facilitate the explosion. There are historical periods when revolutions are simply impossible; there are other periods when they are inevitable."

Among many other bizarre episodes in his life, he would murder a fellow comrade for questioning whether Nechayev was truly the head of a secret revolutionary society (he wasn't). Another tale comes when Bakunin was paid in advance for translating Marx's Das Kapital into Russian. When Bakunin took the money and lazied up on the translation job, Nechayev sent the man who had paid him threatening him, along with pictures of a revolver and a knife. People thought Bakunin had done this, putting Bakunin in further trouble.

Not only that, but he helped Marx into getting Bakunin out of the First International.

When he was arrested for the murder, so manipulative was he, that he succeeded in manipulating the very guards who guarded him. The Tsar himself seemed to be afraid of him, demanding that his twenty year sentence was turned into a life sentence. So dedicated was he to revolution, as he puts it in his Catechism, that when fellow radicals Narodnaya Volya offered to take him out of jail, he refused, saying that they should use their resourced to assassinate the Tsar. And indeed, the Tsar was eventually murdered.

So, why all this? What made Nechayev so memorable as a character in anarchist history. Well, it is almost entirely due to his essay, Catechism Of A Revolutionary. It is very short, so I would simply link it here rather than try and summarize it.

The essay would prove to be incredibly destructive to the anarchist cause, with people to this very day using it as an example of "proof" that anarchism is inherently nihilistic. While it did influence fellow Russian nihilists as well as some Narodniks, it influenced no important figures in the history of anarchism. Kropotkin, in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, criticizes Nechayev for his methods, in fact.

However, and this is a big however, it did influence one very important person: Lenin.

Several Lenin biographies record the following comment regarding Nechayev:

"He [Lenin] once told Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich: ‘People have completely forgotten that Nechayev possessed a special talent as an organiser, an ability to establish particular skills in illegal work…It’s enough to recall his precise reply to the question, who should be killed in the royal family? He said “the whole ektenia” [the entire list of Romanovs read out in a traditional Orthodox service]. So who should be killed? The entire house of Romanov…That was pure genius."

In other sources, he also had called Nechayev "a titan of the revolution", and said that everyone should read him and they should look for Nechayev's essays and have them published. So he was clearly familiar with Nechayev, but it is more fascinating still, to understand just how close Lenin's concept of a "professional revolutionary" that would fill the ranks in a vanguard party is to that of Nechayev's "doomed man".

Lenin argued, as a revolutionary tactician, for a vanguard party filled with professional revolutionaries. All these revolutionaries would have had professional discipline, just like the ascetic conspirators described in The Revolutionary Catechism. The Catechism describes a secret society of revolutionaries that operates with total devotion to the revolution. Since Lenin was aware of Nechayev and his Catechism, it is not at all a stretch to suggest that his model of a "vanguard party" was heavy influenced by this. Likewise, Nechayev's notion that "morality is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way." echoes several of Lenin's speeches. According to Robert Service's Lenin: A Biography:

They knew that he admired the notorious Pëtr Tkachëv’s journal Alarm and the proclamations of the still more notorious Sergei Nechaev (whose complicity in murder had caused the Swiss authorities to make a legal exception in 1872 and extradite him to St Petersburg). Lenin recommended his associates to read these materials and learn lessons from them.

Further, from Nechayev's essay The Fundamentals Of The Future Social System:

The ending of the existing social order and the renewal of life with the aid of the new principles can be accomplished only by concentrating all the means of social existence in the hands of our committee, and the proclamation of compulsory physical labour for everyone. 

The committee, as soon as the present institutions have been overthrown, proclaims that everything is common property, orders the setting up of workers' societies (artels) and at the same time publishes statistical tables compiled by experts and pointing out what branches of labour are most needed in a certain locality and what branches may run into difficulties there.

For a certain number of days assigned for the revolutionary upheaval and the disorders that are bound to follow, each person must join one or another of these artels according to his own choice... All those who remain isolated and unattached to workers' groups without sufficient reason will have no right of access either to the communal eating places or to the communal dormitories, or to any other buildings assigned to meet the various needs of the brother-workers or that contain the goods and materials, the victuals or tools reserved for all members of the established workers' society; in a word, he who without sufficient reason has not joined an artel, will be left without means of subsistence. All the roads, all the means of communication will be closed to him; he will have no other alternative but work or death.

This brutal view of anarchism (which I like to call "authoritarian anarchism"), called by Marx "Barracks Communism", bears an uncanny similarity to Lenin's War Communism, the Policies of the USSR before the NEP.

So, Nechayev's authoritarian anarchism bears a lot of similarities to Lenin's own ideology, and was almost certainly influenced by it. Seeing that the Red October was the single most important event of the 20th century,  this would mean Nechayev had a massive influence on the history of the 20th century. Every Leninist revolutionary, specially the Vietcong who were ideologically trained to never give up, is a "doomed man", whose personal interests, business affairs, emotions, attachments, property and name are second to revolution.

Furthermore, I wrote in a previous essay that the future will have a revolution, and it will be extremely brutal and costly. Nechayev has already had the 20th century, but he shall have the 21st century as well. Who else, if not the "doomed man", could carry out the atrocities, the terrorism, and specially the extermination (a word that Nechayev constantly used, saying at one point "Our task is one of extermination") of all the groups that oppose the revolution? Nechayev's Catechism was reprinted by the Black Panther Party and became a personal bible to some of its members, and in the future it will again become a personal bible to many revolutionaries.

Because of this, I argue, one should study the tactics, the story and the writings of Nechayev, if not just to understand history a little bit better, then to understand what is coming in the future. Likewise, there are several books written on Nechayev, including a biography, but none of these are available online and they are long since out of print. A reprint of these could help us. Perhaps too, it would help us to translate and reprint the essays of Nechayev. I am sure that they are in some Russian archives, somewhere.

He [Nechaev] was, in short, a Bolshevik before the Bolsheviks - Orlando Figes

The Cost of Revolution

There is a lot of talk in Marxist-Leninist circles of revolution, about how we can no longer let capitalist exploitation ravage the planet as it now presents an active existential threat to the safety of the planet and thus all the beings in it. All well and good, but... What would the cost of a worldwide revolution be?

Well, to begin with, we have to understand that, in the future, millions of people are going to be killed in wars, thousands of famines in countries ravaged by battle and thousands of millions more culturally, socially and politically repressed. This is, because, there is no proletariat revolution without an immediate reaction by the Bourgeoisie. The future will make the Soviet Union, Maoist China and Albania seems like utopias.

"We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. "

Democracy certainly won't lead us anywhere. One must only look at Chile: A democratically elected socialist (and rather mild socialist at that) government was overthrown by a US supported military coup that went on to murder thousands, torture thousands more with some of the most vicious methods of torture, all for the sake of keeping profits for the ruling class high. One is a fool to believe that the Bourgeoisie will simply let power be wrestled away from them. Pretending that socialism won't require widespread violence and repression is just naive. 

Indeed, even decolonization was extremely violent and in some places war did not stop until one faction was hunted down to their very last soldier and leader.

Furthermore, for a Communist revolution to be possible, as Mao pointed out, it is entirely necessary that the opposition, deemed "reactionaries" must be stamped out. After all, the modern revolutionary is no longer just dealing with the fate of his country, but with the fate of the entire world for ecological reasons. So who are the reactionaries?

Well, for starters, essentially all of Abrahamic religions would have to be demolished. Millenia of history will be destroyed because, quite simply, the Church will always oppose a Communist revolution. Religious Organizations in the past always turn to capitalism and "reactionary politics"(See: the Spanish revolution) and the lack of a strong, repressive party would allow CIA infiltrators to destroy the revolution. The Russian Orthodox Church, per example, is incredibly reactionary, and canonizes the Tsar, which would not be allowed by the Party. Organized Religion favors, above all else, the status quo.

So, if there was to be a revolution, to be blunt, entire cultures made up of billions of people would either need to die or be suppressed into non-existence, which would undeniably lead to millions  of innocents being caught in the crossfire. In all Revolutions, the innocent have vanished. Per example,, during the Russian Civil War, the Green armies were mostly just peasants who wanted to stay out of the war, caught in the crossfire. Many German civilians in WW2 were reduced to skeletal ashes, pounded into dust by Allied bombs in what was a necessary sacrifice to hit valid military targets, such as the bombing of Dresden. This is a sad fact for the revolutionary because Imperialist powers would never let such a thing happen peacefully, the coups in South America on behalf of the US and the repression of the Chinese New Left on the behalf of the Chinese Communist Party being good examples of this. The sad fact for the religious is that the Church and religious individuals have always been associated to Counterrevolution, and will thus be purged, should a revolution happen. 

And that is just for religious sub-cultures, I need to remind you! We have not even began to touch all other subcultures that would fight against the revolution and/or be deemed "reactionary". Islamic treatment of women, the Indian caste system, female genital mutilation, white picket fence bourgeois America worshipers, racism in the Deep South, Hikikomori waifu worship culture (both in Japan and its spread to the West), K-Pop idol worship (the worst the culture industry has to offer) are just some, some elements of culture which would have to be changed under Socialism, and during the hypothetical revolution, anyone who fights to preserve these elements of culture would be killed.

To speak nothing of all the leftists who will be killed for their opposition to the Party! As we can see historically, anarchists have always been opposed and destroyed by Marxist-Leninists countries. Anarchists may be successful in creating anarcho-communist societies without reaching even nearly the repression that ML countries have, as they have in the past (Revolutionary Catalonia, Shimmin Prefecture, Ukranian Free Territory, etc) but they were ultimately completely crushed by a mix of Stalinists and Fascists fighting them. Should a revolution erupt from the barrel of gunpowder that is our modern world, I have no doubt that several anarchist revolutions will happen, and I also have no doubt that they will be crushed after a few years. 

"The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution."

"But that all implies" replies to me a man "that a revolution will happen. What happens if neoliberal capitalism is truly the end of history, as Fukuyama states? Or if revolutions do happen, but fail?"

To that, I am afraid that not much will change. The gears of fascism are already moving with what is essentially concentration camps working on the borders of the US, a supporter of the Brazilian Dictatorship winning the elections, several white nationalists terrorist attacks, and so on. If the Communists don't have a revolution, then as resources run low, as the environment decays resulting in masses of refugees seeking asylum, then either Fascism or Neo-Feudalism will rise. There is no escape from the coming of brutal dictatorships in the future. 

I do not say all this as anti-communist, or as a communist for that matter. But I would like to know to all those who are willing to partake in the revolution in the future: How far would you be willing to go? The coming revolution, if it is to succeed at all, needs revolutionaries to embody Nechayev's "doomed man" to a chilling degree. And the Doomed Man "knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily." and he "hates the existing social morality in all its manifestations. For him, morality is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way."

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."

The revolutionary is a dedicated man, merciless toward the State and toward the educated classes; and he can expect no mercy from them. Between him and them there exists, declared or concealed, a relentless and irreconcilable war to the death. He must accustom himself to torture.

Commentary on a passage by Stirner by Carlo Michelstaedter

'Man, your head is haunted; you have bats in your belfry! You're imagining big things and painting for yourself a whole world of gods that is there for you, a haunted realm to which you are called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! Do not think that I am joking or speaking figuratively when I look upon those who cling to something higher, and, since this includes the vast majority, almost the whole human world, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. What, then, is called a "fixed idea"?'

Max Stirner, the sad philosopher of anarchy, asks this question, and does not think that those fixed ideas bend man not because he is compelled by something that is outside him, but because he loves them. And if this love is not a necessity, it does not mean that outside of it there is no necessity. It is a part of the unified love, a perpetual reason for life, a perpetual necessity that is expressed in us, in all our desires, as in every beast, as in every plant, as in any part of nature. Our will is nothing but the act of this necessity passed through the "necessary" distance of our soul. And what about freedom? And what about free will then? ... All illusions for those who know no other state but slavery, to which therefore slavery does not exist. Such are the beasts. And so men believe in free will as they have settled into slavery so as to proclaim the only truth, the only love the chain that binds them to the wrists and the jailer - as they are beasts.

Whoever leaves this illusion immediately feels the weight of the yoke, feels the desperate pain of slavery. He could annihilate himself and be free in death. But before annihilating himself he must materially annihilate himself morally, killing the affections that bind him ... but here is the supreme mockery of the inexorable necessity. He cannot dissolve what he did not tie himself to. - I also want freedom, and I will be able to reach it ... or I will succumb. - And if I can no longer buy the illusion of freedom at the price of "enmity", nor can I stretch my back over a mountain peak irradiated by the sun, raise my eyes to the sky and contemplate, I want and can shape my life like a 'work of art, to feel in everything the infinite beauty of nature (in the broadest sense) and of the "first engine", as Leonardo da Vinci says, and to draw from every vision from every happy or sad feeling an exaltation of strength , an increase in my individuality and an increase in my vitality, and escape the necessity of things, idealizing them, ideally mastering them.

But sometimes I feel weak in the face of this ambitious dream, but free from what is commonly called ambition, a dream that does not give joy to me and to those who loved in me not the "man who lives" - that is, the one that only family members love, but the personality that transcends the petty terms of life ... I sometimes feel weak and small, and I see with horror the "animal transport" train that warns me that it should take me to the bourgeois world, triumphantly stupid ...

This short text shows Michelstaedter's own take on anarcho-egoism. Not at all unfamiliar to Stirner, but whereas Stirner is a sort of optimistic nihilist, seeing the world as his playground, a sort of "philosophy of enjoyment", Michelstaedter's egoistic vision is more pessimistic, taking a bit from Schopenhauer as well. 

Courage by Carlo Michelstaedter

Michele Ardan goes to the moon as a joke. The ship that carries the French expedition to the North Pole is baptized "Pourquioi-pas?" For the sake of the beauty of an instant and of a gesture, the French puts into play the highest human values. The beauty of a gesture is a small work of art. And if in this small work the heroic act is a necessary aesthetic element, the Frenchman becomes an hero for the sake of aesthetics, he is not an hero, he is an aesthete. But where is the reason for the beauty of a gesture? Evidently in a stronger ray in which a personality is better revealed. At the bottom of this work of art is the criterion of the value of the personality - the "moral criterion". Whether the point is high or low where the value of this personality culminates, which is to say, whether artistic intuition is vast or restricted, the relationship it has with the individual who feels it is always constant; whenever an individual dreams of moral perfection or senses an artistic harmony, he gives form - as far as his individual personality is worth - to the aspiration that ultimately exists in every man towards truth: his interest is an universal interest: the act that results from this interest in life is an act of development - of improvement,  it is an act of reduction of the cause under the rule of reason (or transformation of the ratio into causa): It's a "good" act.

But one can reply: when analyzing the moral vision of this man we find that it has the form that has become necessary and that is defined by the position that this man occupies in life: it is the result of his particular, more or less selfish interests: of his affections and his temperament. His contemplation does not transcend the elements of his life, so the interest of utilitarian coordination of the various elements of his nature - is an interest that does not go beyond the limits of his individuality: the act that results from them is a selfish act.

Certainly, contemplation does not transcend the elements of his life, but he does not contemplate them in relation to present life. Man as he contemplates has theoretical interest. The criterion of contemplation is no longer the value of the elements for life but its intrinsic reason. The lowest man can consider the moral values he attributes to things, consider it in their mutual relations, etc., and reach a moral vision much higher than he himself - considered sub specie aeterni- offers.

But this low man must then ipso facto become an elevated man, or is it necessary to say that for the translation in act of the achieved moral perfection, the intervention of a new element is necessary?

I believe that in the moment that the man with full persuasion states his thought he is - from the point of view of honesty of the intention - "absolutely good", and on the other hand with respect to a criterion of absolute judgment he has so much more value the more vast and universal it's conception is. This is the case regardless of whether he acts or not. But when his conception becomes obscure and disintegrates from that luminous point of perfect conscience and "persuasion" which he had obtained, he falls into the pettiness of his particular interests: he is "dishonest". Now, if a man has a strong theoretical interest in living a large part of life in that luminous persuasion, this man - whatever his moral baseness may have been due to the strange contingency of cases - this man will not be able not to conform his whole life to that persuasion. - And given a limited potential of conception results in him "mysticism". If the potential rises to its highest degree and we have the persistent and absolute persuasion of the truth, it can only give rise to the abnegation of individuality and death. - The world of the living is therefore exhausted all by the "mystics" and the "dishonest". There is no third party.

Every hero is a mystic - every "good" man (in the sense that was said in the first §) is a hero.

Better the Hatred by Carlo Michelstaedter

With a certain heroic air, men say that objects that do not have any commercial value are dearer to them than objects which do. Indeed, sticking to those is less expensive than sticking to those other ones - as dead Capital.
In fact, it is good prudence to place one's affection in those, which would cost them too much.

Better the hatred than the affection of the family.

TOWARDS PEACE by Carlo Michelstaedter

TOWARDS PEACE

On Rhetoric

It is concluded that rhetoric has no value in the walk towards peace, if it does not coincide with the dialectic. In effect, rhetoric is an instrument of life, and life is the end of rhetoric. Now, what is, oh Socrates, life? I would ask. It should be stressed that I do not say "which is life" but "what is". What does it mean for you and me that we talk? What is the point of life? I know well what you will answer me, arguing in speech: "What is this life, oh my dear Carlo, of which you want me to tell you what it is?". Then I will tell you: "Precisely what you and Plato in the Republic consider superior life: hic Rhodus, hic salta [Prove what you can do, here and now.]". Here, I believe, my dear, you would fall silent - through Hades - the last remedy that truly brings a good end, the one you used then in prison. But I, and with me the divine Hegesias, the Persuader of death, we will act as a benevolent chorus of this last admonition of yours, saying that life has no other purpose than life itself.

Socrates was Michelstaedter's personal idol. He is constantly referenced in his short writings, referenced as a "persuaso [persuaded person]" and Michelstaedter even wrote several dialogues in the Socratic tradition. 

Speech To The People by Carlo Michelstaedter

You beat me and you are in the right to do so! You'll kill me and you'll still be in the right! But my right is that of the free word, and your duty is to listen to me. For if the act was brutal and if it justifies the brutal expression of your surprise, it was not brutal the intentional, it was not your enemy. It is love for you, for the idea that today brings you together that has made me rebel and rebel against an enthusiasm that does not correspond to your will, O brothers, to that will that makes you strong against the tyranny of Spain. If tomorrow you still had to reunite and not with the indeterminate outrage of today, but with fresh indignation, with a fresh wound, with the threat present, if you were to meet here tomorrow and affirm your will to the end, to make success with the facts and in the present life, and for the personal interests in each and every single one of you - against the authority constituted by the law, against the authority constituted by money, against the government and the bourgeoisie - that ideal that moves you now, brothers, that marvelous instrument that you have now applauded would measure strength on you - and shots from above would respond from front, back and center; and at the sides other shots to sow death among your ranks, to drown your anger in blood, to bring down forever your most cherished hopes. As long as these hopes are vague and distant, as long as you suffer your material and social miseries in silence, you are an innocuous bunch of unhappy ones to be exploited; and bourgeois society exploits you, in peace and in silence; and as it holds on to the yoke of your need and your weakness, there is no need to make you feel the deadly force of your weapons.But it prepares its weapon in silence and peace and she knows how to cover them with the luminous appearances of humanity and progress, and you - you applaud them! ... But the day that you acquire full awareness of your rights and your strength, the day you will be gathered around your heroes, around the "Ferrer" [reference to Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, anarchist thinker and agitator] of your revolution, under the banner of liberty for the people, the day you want to affirm the beginning of a new life of justice and faith - that day, brothers, the humanity and the progress of the bourgeoisie will reveal their true face, they will hold you in a circle of iron and fire, without mercy for the slaves who rebel. - You will be slaves forever if you fail to unmask the miserable hypocrisy of the bourgeois power, which covers its defenses with flowers and hides the dagger in its bosom. But the power is yours, brothers, to you belongs the future, because you have "faith", and yours is the right. - Bourgeois society, because it has usurped power that does not belong to it, with the strength that comes only from your current weakness, since it has no other faith than the thirst for profit, no other right than tyranny, needs the science that encapsulates in it the opprobri of its arrogance, the science that gives her the immeasurable weapons of strength and devices of war that dominate the sea, the earth and the sky, needs the government that draws from your own ranks the men necessary to keep you slaves, guards, riflemen , soldiers. Brothers, you have applauded the symbol of the power that crushes you.- But you will shake yourself out of your inertia, you will all join together, you will each bear the contribution of your brotherly love and of your desperate strength, born out of daily suffering - and then you will be invincible, then this vain bourgeois power building that dominates you and that you respect, that dominates you only because you respect it, it will crumble with all its laws, its institutions, its vain science, its hypocritical morality, the armies of the preparers, the armies of the executors of the tyranny will disappear: scientists, clerks, soldiers will be extinct races, in this new world.- And it will be a world where "man" will reign, the man of work, the man who is sane of body and mind, the man who will not have a need for unjust laws, unjust because they're complicated, to be protected by his brother, not by militias and weapons laboriously devised to protect his enemies: but his faith, and the common work, and the close team of fraternal love, will be his government and law and defense in the realm of work and justice. Brothers, this man sleeps in each of you and waits for the day he will awaken-brothers, I may be a dark one, but in me sleeps the voice of that man. As soon as I go out and go back into the darkness, these are my first words and they will be my last. Tomorrow perhaps in the hands of bourgeois justice lurking around us I will suffer the fate that awaits Derrer. But if it can enlighten your conscience, hasten your awakening and approximate the advent of "man" and of the subrum, then I will be pleased with my death. Goodbye brothers - long live work and justice - death to the bourgeoisie

This speech, despite being hair-raising at times (such as briefly dismissing scientists as bourgeois), remains a rousing call for the masses to take up either Marxism or Anarchism (which one it isn't clear).

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Friendship With A Dog by Carlo Michelstaedter

The following is a translation of the short story "Amicizia Verso Un Cane" by Carlo Michelstaedter:

The black dog came to the houses of men from a place of hunger and thirst. He feared these people, yes, but he was in no spirit to run away; because he was starving for food. And the wise man saw the black dog, as trembling and hungry and reduced to the extreme as he was, and took pity on him. He welcomed the dog into his house and gave him something to eat and drink, and he loved this animal, recognized him as a living being and rejoiced in the dog's enjoyment and in his restoration; he did not notice that he loved his own life. But the landlords came, as did the parents of the wise man, and they became very angry with him, it seemed to them that he had acted as a boy rather than a man, and they chased away with strong force and great fanfare the poor, frightened dog. The wise man was indignant at seeing this, seeing them being so selfish, but said nothing; because he realized  his own attachment to life, and that he blindly placed his love on nothing, and that he himself was nothing. And he was indignant towards himself and towards his own disdain, and the intensity of life and his own demand for good made him tremble, just as attachment to life had made the dog tremble. And he feared the Night, mother of the Eumenides and punishing the blind and seers, and wished for death. But again and in pain and activity, and in love of Good and in death he recognized the attachment to life. Peace, on the other hand, has nothing to do with these things.

Cucù cantaba la rana
cucù debajo del rio.

[Spanish for:
Peekaboo sang the frog
Peekaboo at the bottom of the river.]

Because everything is nothing.

This characteristically brutal and pessimistic story reflects Michelstaedter's concepts of rettorica (societal Rhetoric to which people are enslaved by, such as the wise man) and philopsychia (Greek for "Love of Life", which also enslaves man, in a manner similar to the slave in Hegel's master-slave dialectic). Be sure to cherish your own dog, because you never know when you no longer will be able to!

The Pessimist Is An Imperfect Pessimist by Carlo Michelstaedter

Life is will-to-live, will is a lack, lack is pain, all life is pain.

But everything that lives, believes to be alive and to have life; and pain is mute and continuous for all things so they don't call it pain - they call pain the revelations of the non-essence of their believed possession, the loss of what they believed to possess. So her pain is also said according to the same illusion: she complains that she can't complain in advance like she used to in relation with that thing, since that complaining is called enjoyment. She laments the loss of a thing, not its ability to be lost: The unreality of its possession. And in order to live she turns back to new things similar to those that have expired, and from that apparent possession she feeds herself, still suffering obscurely.

But he who truly wants life rejects living in relation to things that make the vain happiness and the vain pain of the others - and not being satisfied with an illusory possession, demand true possession, so that it may take shape and reveal all the dark and mute sufferings that in him take place. His life is the refusal and the struggle against all the temptations of illusory fulfillments, and not dispersing himself in the act of continuous correlations (illusory possessions) he affirms himself and takes shape and creates himself: this is art.

Art is therefore the strongest pain and the strongest life and gives the strongest joy in the affirmation of itself.

But those artists who can not bear all the weight of pain and take joy and life from this weight, but ask from life things like rewards and joy - those are the shameless: the men who come out on the street undressed.- In them the disillusionment, the pain, does not take life and form by itself by telling everyone the happy gospel of "health"; but because of its weakening, because of its request for relief and reward for the things of the way, each step is darkened and renewed with regard to everything. They give us the image of torment, the materiality of sorrows, of disillusionments, not the life of disillusionment, the voice of health and truth.

But as men do not understand more than what they in their materiality materially feel:  these imperfect artists, imperfect sorrowful souls, imperfect pessimists, are commonly called the poets of pain: the "pessimists".

In fact, men call pain not their continuous pain, which is life which they call joy, but these individual pains. The revelation of continual pain can only be done by those who do not adapt to it, continuing to delude themselves into other things, but take the person of this pain in act: in order for the true activity that leads to health, to inertia - [through activity towards peace] [originally in Greek].

The true pessimists are [Energetic] [word originally in Greek] in their pain, so they are healthy: id est they go towards health; the others are inert in pain, they want to rest, so they are sick: they gravitate towards "madness". They congratulate themselves for their life, educating themselves in their pains, taking from their wounds the person they are exposing to others with no purpose other than their "vanity". Going back to each section to see the profile itself in the shadow are "caught by vertigo".

True pessimists: Christ, Aeschylus, Ibsen, Beethoven, Petrarch, Parmenides. 

Imperfect pessimist: Lenau, Schumann, Amiel, etc.

A Young Man by Carlo Michelstaedter

The following is a short story by Carlo Michelstaedter:

A young man, educated in a religious college, is educated by how much he knows of rebellion towards human law and matures his brain in speculations about the human psyche and the mysteries of nature. He sees too much and in his bitter mood that fountain of feeling dries up. He feels it and he experiences pain, and so he, because of it, wants to throw himself into life in order to stimulate the paralyzed fibers of his mood with the strongest of sensations. And he does so. But he cannot recover his lost spontaneity and he realizes that all his enthusiasms are fictitious, he realizes tat they are always the same. And with the usual cruel honesty towards himself, he examines his own self, analyzing it and then, with a calm and reasoned resolution, he kills himself, thus restitutioning the energies that were uselessly fighting in him to Mother Earth.

Very likely a metaphor for his own life, Michelstaedter would go on to write his book Persuasion And Rhetoric, a bleak philosophical treatise in the Schopenhauerian tradition. He would deliver the book as his dissertation, killing himself with a firearm immediately after, without even bothering to defend his thesis.

Kítrinos, Ton and Emfýlios

Kítrinos, Ton and Emfýlios, three hack philosophers from ancient Greece, find themselves in the year 2019. After catching up with the following millennia of philosophy, they find themselves in a state of deep confusion...

Emfýlios: The answer seems clear in this accursed age: Believe nothing, believe not even the seemingly obvious truth.

Kítrinos: Then are we not following the metanarrative of skepticism?

Emfýlios: Perhaps... but we will be the least metanarrative followers among men, and thus as wise as one can be.

Kítrinos: Can we even have ethics beyond the pleasure principle? Utilitarianism is flawed because it just projects what you thinks is good onto everyone we can cover basic needs, but desire is complex... so all we can do is let people do what they want...equally.

Ton: Well if you choose a different set of ethics you are projecting that set  onto people, based on you thinking that those ethics is correct.Utilitarianism, in practice, will never be 100% correct, but I think it's already by far the most useful and accurate ethical theory that the modern man has come up with.

Kítrinos: But how would you apply utilitarianism to a masochist?

Ton: I don't know, this question is, perhaps, unanswerable.

Emfýlios: Negative Utilitarianism, however, can answer this question just fine: You should probably not torture the masochist if he no longer wants to be tortured.

Kítrinos: We need to deconstruct the pleasure/pain dichotomy...

Ton: At this point, we don't know what ethics really are. Or if it's anything at all!

Emfýlios: ETHICS ARE A METANARRATIVE.

Kítrinos: Your mother is a metanarrative! And she sodomizes goats.

Ton: Well, that's the one thing we know that ethics are...

Kítrinos: Can there be unknown unknowns if I know I don't know everything?

Everyone:...

Ton: Perhaps... You don't know the scope and significance of the unknown unknowns? Having read Thomas Ligotti, I must say I agree completely that human psychology directly and contradicts any sort of completely accurate self-awareness or perception.
Emfýlios: Why, of course! We specifically evolved to not be accurately self-aware. The same we evolved to breed and nothing else, which is to say, you did not evolve to be happy after you procreate, only to think that the act of procreation will bring you happiness.
Kítrinos: Nature is our stepping stone. Well, that and the language that precedes us.
Emfýlios: Nature itself must be destroyed if we are to solve this problem. Someone grab a torch, I'm going to do it!
Kítrinos: Nature is... an anchoring? In the Zapffian sense? From which you can later detach and reattach to something else. But you won't get anywhere without taking the first step.
Ton: Nicely put about evolution Emfýlios, but I must ask, what is being "accurately self-aware". Would being accurately self-aware just be not being aware at all?
Emfýlios: Good question, bad answer... What would it be?
Ton: I mean, evolution constructed all meaning for us, or so say many people, but I see this as pure delusion, perhaps even a deliberate fabrication. I don't think there's any awareness, or that hypothetical awareness would be completely empty, motionless and unchanging, nihilistic, for anything else would be fabricated meaning.
Kítrinos: And those meanings are anchorings.
Emfýlios: Perhaps accurately self-awareness is nothing but an acute awareness of oneself without the four remedies for life [Zapffe] that give "meaning" to our lives.
Ton: I guess that's an accurate, but certainly it entails severe despair?
Kítrinos: Rather, it's a point from where you anchor everything else, like an axiom.

The three philosophers are stuck in a state of aporia.

Rhetoric and Crucifixation (Tragic Pyrrhonism Pt.1)

Let us imagine a narrative, any narrative, whether that be communism, Nazism, nationalism of any kind, any political stance, any narrative whatsoever, regardless of its truth and falsifiability.
Let us imagine a cross, it's bloody timber and the holes caused by the nailing...

I know an individual, who goes by ze/zir pronouns. Ze is a communist (a Marxist-Leninist, if I am not mistaken), anti-family, anti-childhood, anti-age of consent, anti-gender and so on. While this person is real, it is hard to not think of zir as being sort of emblematic of the so-called "internet leftist".

Let's call this narrative, or this amalgamation of narratives, cross #1.

Before this, ze was a white nationalist.

Let's call this second narrative cross #2.

We do not control our own beliefs. Because of the way time works, we never "are", rather, we are always becoming. So we are always crushed between who we were (a white nationalist) and who we are becoming (a communist). When we reflect upon who we have become, we will see a multitude of people (a multitude of crosses...): Our "younger self" as effectively died, as will our "young adult self" and our "adult self", until our "old self" suffers a more literal death.

Think about the suffering this can cause. Any look at the average white nationalist will notice that these people are unhappy, constantly complaining about this and that, of the degeneracy of the world, of the multitude of imaginary conspiracies that they need to anchor themselves to in order to not fall in the black hole of despair.

Likewise, changing ("dying") from a white nationalist to a communist can cause quite a lot of suffering as well: One has to completely reinvent oneself, to admit their wrongness completely, to see what they thought of as truth as being repulsive. Perhaps this would be nothing if we were completely rational creatures, but we are not: We associate what we think is the truth (narratives) with our own identities. To change this radically is to effectively commit metaphysical suicide.

And now communism causes them the same sufferings.

I hope the message is clear: We do not carry our cross. Instead we are crucified on our own narratives, and when we think we have "figured it out", when we change narratives radically, we merely change crosses, we go from Cross #1 to Cross #2, but we are crucified on our own rhetoric all the same and thus suffer all the same.

We are either this way, or we are not at all...

Reflections on God and religion

Jesus Christ must have been a psychopath -Peter Wessel Zapffe

Why should God continue to care for us? Is it not with the utmost hubris that the so called "humble" Christians continue to think that God would even want to care for us for this long? If history repeats, it only follows that God would soon tire of us.

The idea that an omnipotent, sentient being could spend millennia doing nothing without committing suicide breaks one from any religion. Either God is so alien to us as to be irrelevant, or we are arrogant to assume we are special to him in any way and not just one of his countless creations, no different than a pebble.

Mankind is born into the sufferings of the world, and is then cast into the fiery pits of Hell for eternal suffering as it cannot reach redemption in this world. Why then, do the Christians continue the cycle of endless suffering, even as they claim to reject all the things of this world?

Satan would have never have casted anyone into the pits if everyone's father and mother didn't hand the sufferers from their mothers' womb straight into the claws of the Devil.

What God likes is that not of this world, his own kingdom rests in another world. What Satan adores, however, is present in every facet of human nature and behavior. How arrogant are the Christians then, in thinking that God would want anything to do with a species like us! God would be far fonder of oysters, those harmless, quiet, unmoving beings, than he would ever be of us!

If humans are a reflection of their Creator, it only follows that God was in immense suffering... or inflicting immense suffering on another entity.

Julius Bahnsen and I Have A Special Plan For This World: No Escape.

When everyone you have ever loved is finally gone
When everything you have ever wanted is finally done with
When all of your nightmares are for a time obscured
As by a shining brainless beacon
Or a blinding eclipse of the many terrible shapes of this world
When you are calm and joyful
And finally entirely alone
Then in a great new darkness
You will finally execute your special plan

I have recently finished reading two of the shorter works by one Julius Bahnsen, one of the three main representatives of German Idealist Pessimism during the 19th century, the other two being Edward Von Hartmann and Philipp Mainlander, Bahnsen being by far the most obscure of these three thinkers. In these readings, I have found several similarities to Thomas Ligotti's disturbing poem I Have A Special Plan For This World.

In Bahsen's thought, which could be accurately described as absolute, unrelenting pessimism, there is no possible redemption or salvation from this world (as opposed to Schopenhauer, who advised either asceticism or a calm contemplation of art, or Mainlander, who thought universal redemption was inevitable because of entropy through some very clever readings of his contemporary physicians, namely Boltzmann). Likewise, he thought that any attempts at reaching redemption from existence are doomed and delusional from the beginning. "Redemption from existence" is exactly the "plan" of the narrator:

Imagine he said all the flesh that is eaten

Man is a self-conscious nothing.

The teeth tearing into it
The tongue tasting it's flavor
And the hunger for that taste
Now take away that flesh he said
Take away the teeth and the tongue
The taste and the hunger
Take away everything as it is
That was my plan
My own special plan for this world
I listened to these words and yet I did not wonder
If this creature whom I had thought sleeping or dead would ever approach his vision
Even in his deepest dreams
Or his most lasting death
Because I had heard of such plans such visions
And I knew they did not see far enough
But what was demanded in a way of a plan
Needed to go beyond tongue and teeth and hunger and flesh
Beyond the bones and the very dust of bones and the wind that would come to blow the dust away
And so I began to envision a darkness that was long before the dark of night
And a strangely shining light
That owed nothing to the light of day

The narrator seems to think that all existence is a grind, from the line: "Once more we are mangled by a great grinding fear". The wording here, grinding, is particularly reminiscent of Bahnsen's epitaph "Vita mea irritus labor", latin for "My life was pointless work". 

Likewise, the following verse has several Bahnsean elements in it:

There are no means for escaping this world

It penetrates even into your sleep

And is his substance

You are caught in your own dreaming

Where there is no space

And a hell forever where there is no time

You can't do nothing you aren't told to do

There is no hope for escape from this dream

"There are no means to escaping this world / It penetrates into your sleep" Is a very Bahnsean notion. There is no means to escape the horrible suffering of existence because of the principle of contradiction, which is to say, Bahnsen says that there was not one single, "cosmic" Will like Schopenhauer thought, but rather, every individual had several Wills in himself, the Will to do something, and these Wills contradicted each other, thus making the individual forever miserable since his desires are always contradicting each other. Thus, even in sleep, there is no escape from existence. Likewise, it's interesting that Bahsen thought that there would never be a sort of escape from existence, and it would just continue on forever. Life is just a nightmare for him, and this imagery seems quite like his ideas. One would be remiss to not mention Alfred Kubin's novel The Other Side, which took influence from Bahnsen as well as Mainlander.

The entire verse about "designs upon this world" applies as well: Just like Mainlander, Bahnsen disagreed with the leftists who thought that existence was fundamentally good, it was just made into suffering by this or that entity. For Bahnsen, no revolution, no utopia would relieve us from suffering, not because revolutions or utopias are impossible, but because the problem relies on existence itself. Reality itself is ontologically painful, and thus, neither right-wing nor left-wing "solutions" would fix Humanity's suffering.

he verse about "the funny man" might as well be about Bahnsen too, thought it is likely a reference to John Doe from Ligotti's story The Frolic: Bahnsen believed that it was humor that it was "in possession of the correct ethical metric" because it was only humor that could simultaneously relieve tension and suffering and acknowledge existence (which is to say, the "being" of whatever grotesque thing is the subject of the comedy) as being nightmarish. Referring to the man, his walk and his plan seems to coincide with this. 

Finally, at the very end, the first verse is repeated, only broken, somewhat depressed, melancholically... This repetition, for me, always indicated that the "special plan" would never come to fruition, it's just a fantasy that the narrator holds to endure the constant grinding, and at the end, perhaps he realizes this, somewhat like how the narrator from The Bungalow House knows his maxim in a way he never did before. All hopes of fixing this universe are ultimately doomed, for the narrator dreams of an utopia of non-being, but he dreams of an utopia all the same, a place where there are no more contradictions, and like Bahnsen said: "The world is an inextricable tangle of contradictions of the most tragic negativity."

No More Philosophers.

No more Plato, he's in the world of forms now.
No more Epicurus, no more pain or pleasure now.
No more Seneca, at least he didn't cry though.
No more Mainlander, dead as his God, hanging from the noose.
No more Bahnsen, at least there's no more suffering that way.
No more Michelstaedter, crucified on rhetoric no more.
No more Zapffe, no Last Messiah being buried in the fingernails of midwives and pacifier makers.
No more Spengler, oh well, at least he won't have to see no decline.
No more Cioran, didn't even remember who he was.
No more Schopenhauer, but I guess it's better that way.
No more Leopardi, as sick of life as he was of health.
No more Kierkegaard, together with his God at last, what a laugh.
No more Jean Amery, so sick of life he wrote a whole book about it.
No more Caraco, he missed his mommy too much, went straight after her.

My life is pointless work.

How Stephen King misunderstands horror.

"Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station."
-Thomas Ligotti

“[It’s] cold, I’m not a cold guy,” King told BBC arts editor Will Gompertz. “I think one of the things people relate to in my books is this warmth, there’s a reaching out and saying to the reader, ‘I want you to be a part of this.’ With Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ I felt that it was very cold, very ‘We’re looking at these people, but they’re like ants in an anthill, aren’t they doing interesting things, these little insects.’ ”

This, quite simply, is a microcosm of how Stephen King fails utterly to understand horror. Horror, for Mr. King, seems to be something warm. Well! Excuse my hubris, but I would argue that, yes, horror, proper horror, is very much a cold thing. That's why we call it chilling! Who has heard of horror that is warm? Warm is associated with good health, with a good disposition, with softness and tenderness, with a cozy fireplace. Do any of these things speak of horror? Of the uncanniness of being, of something pernicious that lies behind our reality, or even of cheap thrills?

Second, King himself says he is not a cold person. Perhaps for the best regarding his personal life, but... does this not speak volumes about how inadequate King is to write horror? The greatest literary horror masters were all as far as warm as one could get. Edgar Allan Poe's writings are cold, depressive and personal, while the man himself had a deeply troubled personal life which granted him insight on a variety of psychological disorders, and this reflects on his stories. Likewise, Lovecraft was a depressive, a borderline agoraphobic, scared of everything... Nick Land, hopped up on amphetamines, Ligotti suffering from anhedonia and severe depression, Kafka, while not always considered a horror writer, was a bunch of neuroses shambling about in a bipedal approximation of a man, Bataille and his grotesque obsessions with sex... Let us not be shy and say it: Good horror writers were, at large, what the neurotypical world would consider disturbed individuals.

King sees horror as an optimistic reactionary: Life is great, it's an amazing thing, until some horror, always traditionally scary and always highly defeatable comes along. There is nothing uncanny for Stephen King other than wholly fictional monsters. Ultimately, it's fictional nonsense to help us escape from the far more terrifying real nonsense, in which the writers I mentioned before helped elucidate upon.

His prose is slipshod, perhaps because Stephen King is hardly a writer's writer, and I doubt any Stephen King fan cares about prose.

His characters are cartoons: An homophobe will always be going on about how much he hates the gays, a racist will always be out shouting the N-word. No characters develop any amount of psychological depth or insight.

His plots always disappoint and at times go into some really stupid territory, such as the Turtle from It, just for an example off the top of my head.

His novels are absolutely bloated with useless queens: picking up any of his tomes is like picking up some veiny, throbbing insect queen about to ejaculate her brood into the world. This is not as noticeable in his earlier works, but in his later works, as he has likely long since stopped needing an editor to sell books anyway, so the bloating is horrendous.

He repeats his story elements nonstop: His characters are often times just him (writer, famous writer, smoker, had a car accident, alcoholic or drug abuser, and so on), Small towns in Maine, gratuitous sex, religious Christian fundamentalism, disproportionate retributions, teens being tossers, adults being useless, completely tasteless and cartoonish depictions of abusive parents... one could go on.

He admits he writes "the literary equivalent of McDonalds," but he also acts shitty when academia doesn't take him seriously, which results in one of the cringiest scenes in all of fiction when the poor, oppressed Stephen King self insert stands up to the big bad intellectuals for not taking his pulp crap as being a valid work of literary fiction. 

He's likely one of the best pop authors out there (if only because other mainstream horror writers are even worse) but when he dies, he will be largely remembered because of the movie adaptations of his works, which are nearly always superior to the source material (massively so in the case of The Shining.)

Spengler, Zapffe, Ligotti and the "Nerd Fandom".

Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt (as Communism also has a spiritual reflection) by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively, violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition.

-Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

According to philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, in his essay The Last Messiah, human beings have naturally evolved an intrinsic need for meaning and purpose in their lives while the environment where they evolved in lacks both.

We have gotten a surplus of consciousness, says Zapffe, for we are the only animals in nature that can realize the tragic meaningless of our existence in which we are brutally thrust without a choice. To cope with this, Zapffe notes, we have come up with four remedies for life, which Thomas Ligotti, in his Conspiracy Against The Human Race cites as being the following:

(1) ISOLATION. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by relegating them to a remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the attic whose existence we deny in a conspiracy of silence.

(2) ANCHORING. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos, we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God, Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.

(3)DISTRACTION. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors, we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash. The most operant method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands only that people keep their eyes on the ball—or their television sets, their government’s foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their place in society or the universe, etc.

(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by making an open display of them.

Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

In his philosophical masterpiece of pessimism The Conspiracy Against The Human Race, Thomas Ligotti comments on these four strategies as they evolve over time: 

[...] with the passing of generations the more profligate will become humanity’s means of hiding its disillusionments from itself: the more brainless and delusive its isolation from the actualities of existence; the more stupefying and uncouth its distractions from the startling and dreadful; the more heavy-handed and madcap its anchorings in unreality; and the more callous, self-mocking, and detached from life its sublimations in art. These developments will not make us any more paradoxical in our being, but they could make all manifestations of our paradoxical nature less effective and more aberrant.

This "passing of generations" is, of course, nothing more than the evolution of a civilization. Which is where Spengler comes in. If we are to believe Spengler, major civilizations go through a series of steps: Creation - Myth - Stories - Art - Realization - Rationalization - Technologization - Destruction.
A culture declines over time, after it has gotten all of its myths, all of its realizations out of the way, whereas the "age of enlightenment" arrives and, in proper Socratic fashion, everything is questioned, every God overthrown, every authority figure scrutinized, every status quo analyzed. After this, there follows a quick technologization, and the society, eventually, after getting all of its own essence out, dies, whereas the cycle begins again (Such as Western Medieval society arriving out of the ashes of Classical society.)

Well, what's new about this? Nothing at all. And to further degrade the borderline nonexistent structure of this post, I want to argue about a comic. This comic, to be specific:

Looking at the man in the comic and how he represents it's author, as well as the culture, the society he represents, one can see two things:

1): A man who is trying to escape our ghosts, who cannot anchor himself to his ghosts, as I explained in my last post.
2): Because the anchors associated with the Ghosts of our past, he has instead preferred to enter the world of distractions, to such an extent that, indeed, they become anchorings, and in the case of our artist and many others, inspiration for sublimation, to "let it out".

One look at Twitter or any such website will show you that these people are frustrated, bewildered, anxious. Despite being catered to more than ever, they are extremely unhappy and always getting worse. They're always protesting, boycotting, screaming into the void (a scream borne of a nightmare that no one hears) because Superman did the wrong thing in a movie or Wonder Woman's clothes were too suggestive or anything of that kind. Life has become a living nightmare for these people (as most of them are veterans of this kind of shlock), and when the novelty wears off, it threatens to encroach on the core of their distraction itself, so they will borough themselves deeper in it in hopes of escaping this metaphysical dread, and thus they refuse life as life presents itself.

Going back to Spengler and Zapffe, this is an example of post-rationalization anchoring. After the realization and Enlightenment age has killed God by snuffing out any rational belief in God or Gods, we are only left with secular anchors, secular religions. Like a fandom.

Look at what the comic is saying: what he depicts as insufferable horror is simply living. He imagines himself leaving this horror (the horror of existence) behind, transitioning instead into a pleasant world of children's cartoons (a distortion of the world-in-itself and of life-in-itself). The thing to understand here, above all else, is that this escape never actually happens, it's a marketing trick, a capitalist hoot, just like car companies marketing themselves to men during a middle-life crisis, and just like buying a sports car won't make a middle-aged man more virile, consuming nerd entertainment won't free you of the hardships of life and existence, so that comic strip has never happened, is not happening and will never happen. You don't escape life just because you're watching a cartoon. Life's horror is much life a horde of ants, they can stop biting you momentarily, and you feel relieved for a while, but no matter how hard you deny these horrors, they will still be there, crawling over you, tingling and making sure you never completely forget about them.

So, just like Ligotti wrote about our remedies for life becoming increasingly more absurd, so did Spengler predict this. By losing God, we have resorted to all sorts of religious anchors, in which we worship "the brand", in a glorious declaration of our decline as a civilization. As more and more generations become disillusioned with their previous anchors, so will the next generations scramble for more and more absurd ones.

Do not think I am religious for a moment because of my statements: All of these historical steps develop dialectically and are... basically inevitable. When I talk of "decline", I do not speak of it as a reactionary who wishes for a "better" previous age, but of it as simple stages in our history.

This bizarre and "madcap", as Ligotti writes, anchors are nowhere better exemplified in nerd culture. Nerd culture is a bizarre form of crypto-capitalist religion. It's an entire class of adults who take their pop culture consumer brands more seriously than anything in real life, regardless of practical on non-practical usage. 'Fandoms' are pagan sects worshipping the One True Commodity in its many different forms.

"Nerds" (not in the sense of people who enjoy traditionally "nerdy" things, rather, people who subscribe to fandoms inside nerd culture) are really easy to manipulate for political ends, with the military recruiting gamers being the latest and most blatant example. Idpol liberals, as well as nerd reactionaries, live in the make believe bullshit world of the Brand.

Absurd anchors in the age of decline. With age, they get more and more ridiculous. One can only wonder how much more nonsense is there left for us to endure until the planet is finally quiet and there is no more nonsense ever again. And I have no doubt that end of nonsense will itself be a form of nonsense. 

Stuck in the Overlook Hotel

The specter of lost futures haunts today just like the specter of Communism haunted Europe a century ago. You can find these lost futures everywhere, from movies to TV shows to music... For a far-leftist, regardless of his allegiance, it can feel like he is a stuck in the Overlook Hotel... the past keeps trying to reclaim him in the form of the present violently rejecting him. The same, of course, applies to the far right. Lost futures for everyone.
The Overlook Hotel is stuck in a history of violence with the ghosts of it's past enacting their violent bidding on the individuals of the present... is that not what is happening today? How many anarchists find themselves hopeless, instead hoping for the lost future of, say, a Free Catalonia, a Free Ukraine, a Free Korea? How many Stalin-apologists would rather fight the Nazis with the Red Army, how many neo-Nazis would rather fight the red army with the Nazis? These are all, of course, hauntological fantasies that turn individuals to violence, sometimes verbal, sometimes physical, but it does make our world, the so called Western world, very much haunted.

Just like the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel encourage Jack to kill his family so it can have him again (he has always been the caretaker, after all), so does the ghost of, say, dead anarchists in 30s Catalonia influence someone in Antifa to protest violently, or the ghost of Hitler and the Nazis influence individuals at Charlotsville to murder, in a more literal comparison.

Our ghosts beckon us towards hauntological fantasies of futures that never became.

Of course, there have been similarly violent actions for ideology before that were not hauntological. The difference is that these particular actions were done out of an original ideology, a new ideology, for a new future, rather than an ideology that froze in the 20th century (just like Jack Torrence freezes at the end of the The Shining, he can always thaw out) and has now thawed out in the form of nostalgia for lost futures, ghosts from the past.

We all live inside the Overlook Hotel, but it seems it's freezing soon... (Apocalyptic visions of WW1-levels of infantry brutality and climate change disasters...)

Much like the Hotel's anachronistic aesthetic, we can see praise of ghosts in the form of crusade aesthetics, Nazi day dreams, specters of Vietnam, Klan imagery on the "youthful" right-wing of today.

With all the specters going around in modern Western political talk, it's hard not to feel like we are being suffocated in the Overlook Hotel's droning atmosphere, while the Jack Torrences of this world see nothing but the beautiful aesthetics of their hauntological dreams. This notion of our past being eternally haunting is deeply disturbing, and I suspect this is what makes The Shining so effective.

When Jack Torrence says to Danny "I'm right behind you Danny". Obviously, in-universe, but one would be remiss in ignoring the thematic weight to this statement. He is predicting Danny's future. He's "right behind him" all the time, because of the trauma of the experience in the Overlook Hotel, the damage has already been done, Danny will be traumatized and it doesn't matter if Jack Torrence gets him or not because he already harmed him.
Likewise, returning to our hauntology analogy, the damage has already been done.
It doesn't matter that fascism and communism fell in the past, because they have been "thawed out" in the 21st century.

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.