Category: Flotsam-and-Jetsam

SOLDIER, WORKER, REBEL, ANARCH: AN INTRODUCTION TO ERNST JÜNGER

 

∗ Alain de Benoist, “Types et figures dans l’oeuvre d’Ernst Jünger: Le Soldat du front, le Travailleur, le Rebelle et l’Anarque,” was originally presented as a lecture in Rome in May 1997. The translator wishes to thank Alain de Benoist for permission to translate and publish this essay and for his comments on the translation. Thanks also to Michael O’Meara for checking and editing the translation.

In Ernst Jünger’sIn Ernst Jünger’s writings, four great Figures appear successively, each corresponding to a quite distinct period of the author’s life. They are, chronologically, the Front Soldier, the Worker, the Rebel, and the Anarch. Through these Figures one can divine the passionate interest Jünger has always held toward the world of forms. Forms, for him, cannot result from chance occurrences in the sensible world. Rather, forms guide, on various levels, the ways sensible beings express themselves: the “history” of the world is above all morphogenesis. As an entomologist, moreover, Jünger was naturally inclined to classifications. Beyond the individual, he identifies the species or the kind. One can see here a subtle sort of challenge to individualism: “The unique and the typical exclude one another,” he writes. Thus, as Jünger sees it, the universe is one where Figures give epochs their metaphysical significance. In this brief esposition, I would like to compare and contrast the great Figures identified by Jünger.

* * *

The Front Soldier (Frontsoldat) is first of all a witness to the end of classical wars: wars that gave priority to the chivalrous gesture, that were organized around the concepts of glory and honor, that generally spared civilians, and that distinguished clearly between the Front and the Rear. “Though once we crouched in bomb craters, we still believed,” Jünger said, “that man was stronger than material. That proved to be an error.” Indeed, from then on, the “material” counted more than the human factor. This material factor signifies the irruption and dominion of technology. Technology imposes its own law, the law of impersonality and total war—a war simultaneously massive and abstract in its cruelty. At the same time, the Soldier becomes an impersonal actor. His very heroism is impersonal, because what counts most for him is no longer the goal or outcome of combat. It is not to win or lose, live or die. What counts is the spiritual disposition that leads him to accept his anonymous sacrifice. In this sense, the Front Soldier is by definition an Unknown Soldier, who forms a body, in all senses of the term, with the unit to which he belongs, like a tree which is not only a part but an exemplary incarnation of the forest.

The same applies to the Worker, who appears in 1932, in the famous book of that name, whose subtitle is: “Dominion and Figure.”1 The common element of the Soldier and Worker is active impersonnality.

They too are children of technology. Because the same technology that transformed war into monotonous “work,” drowning the chivalrous spirit in the mud of the trenches, has also transformed the world into a vast workshop where man is henceforth completely enthralled2 by the imperatives of productivity. Soldier and Worker, finally, have the same enemy: the contemptible bourgeois liberal, the “last man” announced by Nietzsche, who venerates moral order, utility, and profit. Also the Worker and the Soldier back from the Front both want to destroy in order to create, to give up the last shreds of individualism in order to found a new world on the ruins of the old “petrified form of life.”

However, while the Soldier was only the passive object of the reign of technology, the Worker aims actively to identify himself with it. Far from being its object, or submitting to its manifestations, the Worker, on the contrary, seeks in all conscience to endorse the power of technology that he thinks will abolish the differences between the classes, as well as between peace and war, civilian and military. The Worker is no longer one who is “sacrificed to carry the burdens in the great deserts of fire,” as Jünger still put it in the The Forest Path,3 but a being entirely devoted to “total mobilization.”4 Thus the Figure of the Worker goes far beyond the Type of the Front Soldier. For the Worker—who dreams all the while of a Spartan, Prussian, or Bolshevik life, where the individual would be definitively outclassed by the Type—the Great War was only the anvil where another way of being in the world was forged. The Front Soldier limited himself in order to embody new norms of collective existence. The Worker, for his part, intends to transplant them into civilian life, to make them the law of the whole society.

The Worker is thus not merely the man who works (the most common meaning), any more than he is the man of a social class, i.e., of a given economic category (the historical meaning). He is the Worker in a metaphysical sense: the one who reveals Work as the general law of a world that devotes itself entirely to efficiency and productivity, even in leisure and rest.

The elements of Jünger’s worldview—his aesthetic and voluntarist conception of technology, his decisionism of every moment, the opposition of the Worker to the bourgeois, the Nietzschean will “to transvalue all values” which already underlay Jünger’s “soldatic nationalism” of the Twenties—are sometimes summarized with the phrase “heroic realism.” However, under the influence of events, Jünger’s reflection would soon undergo a decisive inflection, which took it in another direction.

The turn corresponds to the novel On the Marble Cliffs,5 published in 1939. The heroes of the story, two brothers, herbalists from the Great Marina who recoil in horror at the inexorable outcome of the Great Forester’s enterprise, discover that there are weapons stronger than those that pierce and kill. Jünger, at that time, was not only informed by the rise of Nazism, he was influenced by his brother, Friedrich Georg Jünger, who in a famous book6 was one of the first to work out a radical critique of the technological framework.7 As children of technology, the Soldier and especially the Worker were on the side of the Titans. Yet Ernst Jünger came to see that the Titanic reign of the elemental leads straight to nihilism. He understood that the world should be neither interpreted nor changed, but viewed as the very source of the unveiling of truth (aletheia). He understood that technology is not necessarily antagonistic to bourgeois values, and that it transforms the world only by globalizing the desert. He understood that, behind history, timelessness returns to more essential categories, and that human time, marked off by the wheels of the watch, is an “imaginary time,” founded on an artifice that made men forgetful of their belonging to the world, a time that fixes the nature of their projects instead of being fixed by them, unlike the hourglass, the “elementary clock” whose flow obeys natural laws—a cyclic not a linear time. Jünger, in other words, realized that the outburst of the Titans is first and foremost a revolt against the gods. This is why he dismissed Prometheus. The collective Figures were succeeded by personal ones.

Against totalitarian despotism, the heroes of On the Marble Cliffs chose withdrawal, taking a distance. By this, they already announced the attitude of the Rebel, of whom Jünger would write: “The Rebel is . . . whoever the law of his nature puts in relation to freedom, a relation that in time brings him to a revolt against automatism and a refusal to accept its ethical consequence, fatalism.”

One sees by this that the Figure of the Rebel is directly connected to a meditation on freedom—and also on exclusion, since the Rebel is equally an outlaw. The Rebel is still a combatant, like the Front Soldier, but he is a combatant who repudiates active impersonnality, because he intends to preserve his freedom with respect to the cause he defends.

In this sense, the Rebel cannot be identified with one system or another, even the one for which he fights. He is not at ease in any them. If the Rebel chooses marginalization, it is above all to guard against the forces of destruction, to break the encirclement, one might say, using a military metaphor that Jünger himself employs when he writes:

“The incredible encirclement of man was prepared long ago by the theories that aim at giving a flawless logical explanation of the world and that march in lockstep with the development of technology.”

“The mysterious way goes towards the interior,” said Novalis. The Rebel is an emigrant to the interior, who seeks to preserve his freedom in the heart of the forests where “paths that go nowhere” intersect.

This refuge, however, is ambiguous, because this sanctuary of organic life not yet absorbed by the mechanization of the world, represents— to the precise extent that it constitutes a universe foreign to human norms—the “great house of death, the very seat of the destructive danger.” Hence the position of the Rebel can only be provisional.

The last Figure, whom Jünger calls the Anarch, first appeared in 1977 in Eumeswil,8 a “postmodern” novel intended as a sequel to Heliopolis9 and set in the third millennium. Venator, the hero, no longer needs to resort to the forest to remain untouched by the ambient nihilism. It is enough for him to have reached an elevation that allows him to observe everything from a distance without needing to move away. Typical in this respect is his attitude toward power.

Whereas the anarchist wants to abolish power, the Anarch is content to break all ties to it. The Anarch is not the enemy of power or authority, but he does not seek them, because he does not need them to become who he is. The Anarch is sovereign of himself—which amounts to saying that he shows the distance that exists between sovereignty, which does not require power, and power, which never confers sovereignty.

“The Anarch,” Jünger writes, “is not the partner of the monarch, but his antipode, the man that power cannot grasp but is also dangerous to it. He is not the adversary of the monarch, but his opposite.” A true chameleon, the Anarch adapts to all things, because nothing reaches him. He is in service of history while being beyond it. He lives in all times at once, present, past, and future. Having crossed “the wall of time,” he is in the position of the pole star, which remains fixed while the whole starry vault turns around it, the central axis or hub, the “center of the wheel where time is abolished.” Thus, he can watch over the “clearing” which represents the place and occasion for the return of the gods. From this, one can see, as Claude Lavaud writes regarding Heidegger, that salvation lies “in hanging back,  rather than crossing over; in contemplation, not in calculation; in the commemorative piety that opens thought to the revealing and concealing that together are the essence of aletheia.”10

What distinguishes the Rebel from the Anarch, is thus the quality of their voluntary marginalization: horizontal withdrawal for the first, vertical withdrawal for the second. The Rebel needs to take refuge in the forest, because he is a man without power or sovereignty, and because it is only there that he retains the conditions of his freedom. The Anarch himself is also without power, but it is precisely because he is without power that he is sovereign. The Rebel is still in revolt, while the Anarch is beyond revolt. The Rebel carries on in secret—he hides in the shadows—while the Anarch remains in plain sight. Finally, whereas the Rebel is banished by society, the Anarch banishes himself. He is not excluded; he is emancipated.

* * *

The advent of the Rebel and Anarch relegated the memory of the Front Soldier to the background, but it did not end the reign of the Worker. Admittedly, Jünger changed his opinion of what we should expect, but the conviction that this Figure really dominates today’s world was never abandoned. The Worker, defined as the “chief Titan who traverses the scene of our time,” is really the son of the Earth, the child of Prometheus. He incarnates this “telluric” power of which modern technology is the instrument. He is also a metaphysical Figure, because modern technology is nothing other than the realized essence of a metaphysics that sets man up as the master of a world transformed into an object. And with man, the Worker maintains a dialectic of possession: the Worker possesses man to the very extent that man believes he possesses the world by identifying himself with the Worker.

However, to the precise extent that they are the representatives of the elementary and telluric powers, the Titans continue to carry a message whose meaning orders our existence. Jünger no longer regards them as allies, but neither does he regard them as enemies. As is his habit, Jünger is a seismograph: he has a presentiment that the reign of the Titans announces the return of the gods, and that nihilism is a necessary part of the passage towards the regeneration of the world. To finish with nihilism, we must live it to its end—“passing the line” which corresponds to the “meridian zero”—because, as Heidegger says, the technological framework11 (Ge-stell) is still a mode of being, not merely of its oblivion. This is why, if Jünger sees the Worker as a danger, he also says that this danger can be our salvation, because it is by it and through it, that it will be possible to exhaust the danger.

* * *

It is easy to see what differentiates the two couples formed, on the one hand, by the Front Soldier and the Worker, and on the other, by the Rebel and the Anarch. But one would be wrong to conclude from this that the “second Jünger,” of On the Marble Cliffs, is the antithesis of the first. Rather, this “second Jünger” actually represents a development, which was given a free course, of an inclination present from the beginning but obscured by the work of the writer-soldier and the nationalist polemicist. In Jünger’s first books, as well as in Battle as Inner Experience 12 and Storm,13 one actually sees, between the lines of the narrative, an undeniable tendency toward the vita contemplativa. From the beginning, Jünger expresses a yearning for meditative reflection that descriptions of combat or calls to action cannot mask. This yearning  is particularly evident in the first version of The  Adventurous Heart,14 where one can read not only a concern for a certain literary poetry, but also a reflection—that one could describe as both mineral and crystalline—on the immutability of things and on that which, in the very heart of the present, raises us up to cosmic signs and a recognition of the infinite, thus nurturing the “stereoscopic vision” in which two flat images merge into a single image to reveal the dimension of depth.

There is thus no contradiction between the four Figures, but only a progressive deepening, a kind of increasingly fine sketch that led Jünger, initially an actor of his time, then a judge and critic of his time, to place himself finally above his time in order to testify to what came before his century and what will come after him.

In The Worker, one already reads: “The more we dedicate ourselves to change, the more we must be intimately persuaded that behind it hides a calm being.” Throughout his life, Jünger never ceased approaching this “calm being.” While passing from manifest action to apparent non-action—while going, one might say, from beings to Being— he achieved an existential progression that finally allowed him to occupy the place of the Anarch, the unmoving center, the “central point of the turning wheel” from which all movement proceeds.

APPENDIX: ON FIGURE AND TYPE15

In 1963, in his book entitled Type—Name—Figure,16 Jünger writes: “Figure and Type are higher forms of vision. The conception of Figures confers a metaphysical power, the apprehension of Types an intellectual power.” We will reconsider this distinction between Figure and Type. But let us note immediately that Jünger connects the ability to distinguish them with a higher form of vision, i.e., with a vision that goes beyond immediate appearances to seek and identify archetypes.

Moreover, he implies that this higher form of vision merges with its object, i.e., with the Figure and the Type. Furthermore, he specifies: “The Type does not appear in nature, or the Figure in the universe. Both must be deciphered in the phenomena, like a force in its effects or a text in its characters.” Finally, he affirms that there exists a “typifying power of the universe,” which “seeks to pierce through the undifferentiated,” and which “acts directly on vision,” causing an “ineffable knowledge: intuition,” then conferring a name:

“The things do not bear a name, names are conferred upon them.”

This concern with transcending immediate appearances should not be misinterpreted. Jünger does not offer us a new version of the Platonic myth of the cave. He does not suggest seeking the traces of another world in this world. On the contrary, in The Worker, he already denounced “the dualism of the world and its systems.” Likewise, in his Paris Diaries,17 he wrote: “The visible contains all the signs that lead to the invisible. And the existence of the latter must be demonstrable in the visible model.” Thus for Jünger, there is transcendence only in immanence. And when he intends to seek the “things that are behind things,” to use the expression he employs in his “Letter to the Man in the Moon,” it is while being convinced, like Novalis, that “the real is just as magical as the magical is real.”18 One would also err gravely by comparing the Type to a “concept” and the Figure to an “idea.” “A Type,” Jünger writes, “is always stronger than an idea, even more so than a concept.” Indeed, the Type is apprehended by vision, i.e., as image, whereas the concept can be grasped only by thought. Thus to apprehend the Figure or the Type is not to leave the sensible world for some other world that constitutes its first cause, but to seek in the sensible world the invisible dimension that constitutes the “typifying power”: “We recognize individuals: the Type acts as the matrix of our vision. . . . That really shows that it is not so much the Type that we perceive but, in it and behind it, the power of the typifying source.”

The German word for Figure is Gestalt, which one generally translates as “form.”19 The nuance is not unimportant, because it confirms that the Figure is anchored in the world of forms, i.e., in the sensible world, instead of being a Platonic idea, which would find in this world only its mediocre and deformed reflection. Goethe, in his time, was dismayed to learn that Schiller thought that his Ur-Plant (Urpflanze) (archetype) was an idea. The Figure is often misunderstood in the very same way, as Jünger himself emphasized. The Figure is on the side of vision as it is on the side of Being, which is consubstantial with the world. It is not on the side of verum, but of certum.

Let us now see what distinguishes the Figure and the Type. Compared to the Figure, which is more inclusive but also fuzzier, the Type is more limited. Its contours are relatively neat, which makes it a kind of intermediary between the phenomenon and the Figure: “It is,” says Jünger, “the model image of the phenomenon and the guarantor image of the Figure.” The Figure has a greater extension than the Type. It exceeds the Type, as the matrix that gives the form exceeds the form.

In addition, if the Type qualifies a group, the Figure tends rather to qualify a reign or an epoch. Different Types can coexist alongside each other in the same time and place, but there is room for only one Figure.

From this point of view, the relationship between the Figure and the Type is comparable to that of the One and the many. (This is why Jünger writes: “Monotheism can know, strictly speaking, only one Figure. That is why it demotes the gods to the rank of Types.”) That amounts to saying that the Figure is not only a more extensive Type, but that there is also a difference in nature between the Figure and the Type. The Figure can also give rise to Types, assigning them a mission and a meaning. Jünger gives the example of the ocean as an expanse distinct from all the specific seas: “The Ocean is formative of Types; it does not have a Type, it is a Figure.”

Can man set up a Figure like he does a Type? Jünger says that there is no single answer to this question, but nevertheless he tends to the negative. “The Figure,” he writes, “can be sustained, but not set up.” This means that the Figure can be neither conjured by words nor confined by thought. Whereas man can easily name Types, it is much more difficult to do anything with a Figure: “The risk is more singificant, because one approaches the undifferentiated to a greater extent than in naming Types.” The Type depends on man, who adapts it by naming it, whereas the Figure cannot be made our own. “The naming of Types,” Jünger stresses, “depends on man taking possession. On the other hand, when a Figure is named, we are right to suppose that it first takes possession of man.” Man has no access to the “homeland of Figures”: “What is conceived as a Figure is already configured.”

Insofar as it is of the metaphysical order, a Figure appears suddenly. It gives man a sign, leaving him free to ignore or recognize it. But man cannot grasp it by intuition alone. To know or to recognize a Figure implies a more profound contact, comparable to the grasp of kinship. Jünger does not hesitate here to speak about “divination.” A Figure is unveiled, released from oblivion, in the Heideggerian sense—released from the deepest levels of the undifferentiated, says Jünger—by the presence of Being. But at the same time, as it reveals itself, as it rises to appearance and effective power, it “loses its essence”— like a god who chooses to incarnate himself in human form.

Only this “devaluation” of its ontological status makes it possible for man to know what connects him to a Figure that he cannot grasp by thought or by name. Thus the Figure is the “highest representation that man can make of the ineffable and its power.”

In light of the preceeding, can one say that the four Jüngerian Figures are really Figures and not Types? In all rigor, only the Worker fully answers the definition of a Figure insofar as he describes an epoch.

The Soldier, the Rebel, and the Anarch would instead be Types. Jünger writes that, for man, the ability to set up Types proceeds from a “magic power.” He also notes that nowadays this human aptitude is declining and suggests that we are seeing the rise of the undifferentiated, i.e., a “deterioration of Types,” the most visible sign that the old world is giving way to a new one, whose Types have not yet appeared and thus still cannot be named. “To manage to conceive new Types,” he writes, “the spirit must melt the old ones. . . . It is only in the glimmer of the dawn that the undifferentiated can receive new names.” This is why, in the end, he wants to be confident: “It is foreseeable that man will recover his aptitude to set up Types and will thus return to his supreme competence.”

1  Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt  [The Worker: Dominion and Figure ]

(Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932).

2  The French is “arraisonne.”  Here the verb arraisonner  has the sense of “to enthrall,”

with the dual sense of “to capture” and “to captivate.” Later in this essay,

Benoist uses “arraisonnement”  as equivalent to Heidegger’s “Gestell”  or “Ge-stell,”

which is usually translated into English as “enframing.” According to Heidegger,

the Gestell  is the view of the world as a stockpile (Bestand ) of resources for human

manipulation. Heidegger calls the Gestell  the “essence” of technology, because it is

the worldview that makes modern technological civilization possible. See Martin

Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” trans. William Lovitt, in Martin

Heidegger, Basic Writings , ed. David Farrell Krell, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper,

1993)—TOQ.

3  Ernst Jünger, Der Waldgang  [The Forest Path ] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,

1951)—TOQ.

4  Ernst Jünger, Die totale Mobilmachung  (Berlin: Verlag der Zeitkritik, 1931); English

translation: “Total Mobilization,” trans. Joel Golb and Richard Wolin, in Richard

Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader  (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1991)—TOQ.

5  Ernst Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen  (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt,

1939); English translation: On the Marble Cliffs: A Novel , trans. Stuart Hood (London:

John Lehman, 1947).

6  Friedrich Georg Jünger, Die Perfektion der Technik  [The Perfection of Technology ]

(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1946); English translation: The Failure of Technology:

Perfection Without Purpose,  trans. F. D. Wieck (Hinsdale, Ill.: Henry Regnery,

1949).

7 “l’arraisonnement technicien” —TOQ.

8  Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil  (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977); English translation:

Eumeswil , trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Marsilio, 1993).

9  Ernst Jünger, Heliopolis: Rückblick auf eine Stadt  [Heliopolis: Review of a City ]

(Tübingen: Heliopolis, 1949)—TOQ.

10  “‘Жber die Linie’: Penser l’Рtre dans l’ombre du nihilisme” [“‘Over the Line’:

Thinking of Being in the Shadow of Nihilism”], in Les Carnets Ernst Jünger  1 (1996),

49.

11 “l’arraisonnement” —TOQ.

12  Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis  [Battle as Inner Experience ] (Berlin:

Mittler, 1922)—TOQ.

13  Ernst Jünger, Sturm  [Storm ] (written 1923) (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1978)—TOQ.

14  Ernst Jünger, Das Abenteuerliche Herz: Aufzeichnungen bei Tag und Nacht  [The

Adventurous Heart: Sketches by Day and Night ] (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1929).

15  The following Appendix is section one of the original lecture, followed by the

last paragraph of section three—TOQ.

16  Ernst Jünger, Typus—Name—Gestalt  (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1963).

17  In Ernst Jünger, Strahlungen  [Emanations ] (Tübingen: Heliopolis, 1949). In English:

The Paris Diaries: 1941 –1942 , trans. M. Hulse (London: Farrar, Straus &  Giroux,

1992)—TOQ.

18  Ernst Jünger, “Sizilischer Brief an den Mann im Mond” [“Sicilian Letter to the

Man in the Moon”], in BlКtter und Steine  [Leaves and Stones ] (Hamburg: Hanseatische

Verlagsanstalt, 1934).

19  The first volume of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West  (1916) already bore

the subtitle: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit  [Form and Reality ]. “Gestalt ,” writes Gilbert Merlio,

“is the Form of forms, what ‘informs’ reality in the manner of the Aristotelian

entelechy ; it is the morphological unity that one perceives beneath the diversity of

historical reality, the formative idea (or Urpflanze !) that gives it coherence and direction”

(“Les images du guerrier chez Ernst Jünger” [“The Images of the Warrior in

Ernst Jünger”], in DaniПle Beltran-Vidal, ed., Images d’Ernst Jünger  [Images of Ernst  Jünger], [Berne: Peter Lang, 1996], 35).

http://toqonline.com/archives/v8n3/TOQv8n3Benoist.pdf

Do Humans Deserve to Survive?

 “The world still sings. But the warnings are wise. We have lost much, and we’re risking much more. Some risks, we see coming. But there are also certainties hurtling our way that we fail to notice. The dinosaurs failed to anticipate the meteoroid that extinguished them. But dinosaurs didn’t create their own calamity. Many others don’t deserve the calamity that we’re creating.” – Carl Safina, The View From Lazy Point[1]

Fatigue.

         Decades of fighting the wholesale destruction of the wild, witnessing the displacement of wild communities, seeing the war on wild beings continue, failing to stop fragile ecological niches from being crossed and decimated by access roads and channels, and this is how it feels: exhausting.

         I’m sure the earth is all too familiar.

         We see the studies and reports. They never improve. Previous assessments (already bleak) for the impact of climate instability on wildlife put 7% of mammals and 4% of birds in the “heavily impacted” range. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) just updated that analysis to move nearly half of all mammals and a quarter of all threatened bird species into that category.[2] That doesn’t include the quarter of all the world’s mammals that currently are threatened with extinction from habitat loss and poaching.[3] That doesn’t include the 90% of the Great Barrier Reef suffering from coral bleaching.[4]

         This list literally does not end.

         “One in five species on Earth now faces extinction, and that will rise to 50% by the end of the century unless urgent action is taken.”[5] That is the summation of the threat that a group of ecologists, biologists, and economists (of all people) came to after a meeting this month at the Vatican (of all places). There are models: attempts to quantify what can only be considered a catastrophic turn of events in the timeline of the Earth. There are campaigns: attempts to tap into some deeply buried empathy on the part of the civilized by reminding us that statistics mean rhinos, elephants, gibbons, black-footed ferrets, and polar bears.

         They aren’t dying: civilization is killing them. We are killing them.

         As industrialization crossed a new threshold, into a world where carbon dioxide has moved above 400 parts-per-million, seemingly “permanently”, we are killing ourselves as well.[6] The UK based NGO, Global Challenges Foundation, found that with current scenarios, “the average American is more than five times likelier to die during a human-extinction event than in a car crash.”[7] Not to be outdone, professional doomsayer Guy McPherson believes there won’t be a human left on earth by mid-2026.[8]

         Like everyone else worn out by having to find a morsel of empathy, even just enough to try to leverage sympathy amongst other civilized humans to even want to care about imminent catastrophe, even likely to directly impact our own lives: there’s a breaking point. We’re left wondering if we deserve to survive the extinction event that we’ve started and continue amplifying? Didn’t we do this to ourselves? Wouldn’t the earth be better off without us?

         At times, you get so deep in it that for a moment you actually feel just a fraction of this loss. In those moments, you can almost celebrate the notion of human extinction. Or at least hope that an asteroid hits the planet, setting off a chain of reactions faster and greater than anything civilization and its unfortunate human creators would shoulder. Realistically, that’s an escape, arguably one we truly don’t deserve.

         But this is the problem with that question: it’s really fucking stupid.

         It’s a pointless question that turns a real crisis situation into an existential dilemma. This is the kind of philosophical quandary that got us into this mess in the first place. The ability to disengage from reality and deflect the consequences of our actions happens because we aren’t grounded. We aren’t feeling this loss. We aren’t seeing it.

         To a great degree, we can’t. Our brains evolved for life in nomadic hunter-gatherer camps. We evolved to know relatively local populations in great and intimate detail. Our impact, prior to being scaled irreparably through technology, was largely negligible on a global scale. Our ability and reach outgrew our evolutionary capacity to understand and control it. This is the tragedy of history.

         But it is the underlying basis for our reality and the wild communities of this earth are dying as a result.

         We are dying. But this is a biological consequence, not a moralistic one. The probability of human extinction isn’t payback. The earth isn’t vengeful. A destabilized climate creates dozens of potential scenarios where the earth simply becomes uninhabitable for humans.

         That is a possibility.

         In terms of certainty, we have a little more clarity, as biologist Carl Safina points out:

“The current concentration [of carbon dioxide] is higher than it’s been for several million years; it’s rising one hundred times faster than at any time in the past 650,000 years. The planet has survived much higher greenhouse gas concentrations; civilization hasn’t.”[9]

         To treat this as an existential threat, a crisis of faith, is seeking absolution. It’s looking for an easy way out.

         That is luxury we surely don’t deserve. And for two reasons: the first being that humans didn’t create this mess, not as a whole at least. Civilization is a historical epoch. Settled societies, built around granaries and agriculture, begin to spot the earth barely more than 12,000 years ago. The cities that served as the foundation for the globalized civilization that we’ve inherited are roughly half as old. Civilizations start locally and spread by force.

         It is clear that civilization is a human issue, but against the backdrop of millions of years where humans lived in egalitarian bands, our shared lineage of primal anarchy, it is also clear that most of us are captives of this beast, not the engineers. Nearly all humans alive don’t get to really reap the benefits of an extinction-causing glut of material and economic or spiritual bounty. As many examples as we have of humans actively destroying this earth, there are infinite counter-examples of how humans have lived with and within its wild communities. If we want to say humans deserve extinction, we doom the struggling nomadic foragers and semi-sedentary gardeners for the same mess they are actively resisting. If we’re talking about what is deserved and what isn’t, I’d definitely say we don’t have the right to give up on their behalf.

         The second reason is that whatever conclusion we reach doesn’t matter. At all.

         The problem with such a grandiose question as the fate of an entire species is that it’s unable to recognize the delusion of control we believe we have. Granted, we have militarized our ambitions. There are plots to eliminate mosquitoes now that echo the campaigns that wiped bison, wolves, and passenger pigeons out of the United States as surely as many native populations. If we doom ourselves, it will be incidentally: nuclear power, catastrophic shifts in a survivable climate, or a wholesale dependence upon a climate suitable for agriculture (a luxury we surely will lose).

         Unless there’s a particularly sinister plot to create a gas that will target and finalize humanity, our discussions on the merits of human survival are pointless. Either extinction will take us or it won’t. Whichever way that unfolds, it will be our fault, but it won’t be our choice (outside of the individual level).

         The arrogance of this kind of question is blind hubris: the same thing that got us in our predicament. And it’s the same arrogance that will keep us blind to seeing outside of it.

This is what we know: the earth is changing.

         The stability that made settlements and agriculture possible is fading, quickly. We know that politicians and priests, in every single instance of civilizations collapsing prior, could never reconcile their vision with reality. Borders increasingly become death traps. Nationalism and xenophobia increasingly become distractions. This is exactly what we face now. Our situation absolutely has precedents. What has changed is the scale.

         That is what must be accounted for. Attempts to correct the course are futile. And worse, they’re pathetic. More optimistic figures for human extinction tend to range in hundreds of years instead of decades. Are we really this resolved to defend our children’s executioner, in the event that we ourselves are spared? If we recognize that we can’t look to political, corporate and religious figures to see the wailing within the walls, then it is vital to recognize that their entire political system can’t save us. Civilization won’t save us. Agriculture won’t save us.

         We are heading into unchartered territory. But there is a precedent here as well. We have survived ice ages. We have survived massive shifts in climate. Deserved or not, humans are pretty damn adaptable. Our ancestors survived the last ice age the same way coyotes did: embracing a fission-fissure society, based around mobility, shifted from being largely hunter-scavengers to hunter-gatherers. Mobility, adaptability, resilience; the things that made us egalitarian are the things that saw us through unthinkable periods of flux. I tend to think this isn’t a coincidence.

         All of those aspects are still within us. They still shape the way we see, think, feel and interact with the world. History, the time since civilization, is a glaring contradiction to that reality, but, in the end, that matters little. There will be no cosmic justice.

         History, all of the supposed achievements of civilization, abandoned skyscrapers and power plants that will stand as tombstones to an era of unnatural and unthinkable cruelty, will become its own dustbin. There is some reassurance in that, but there is no comfort. There are predictions for how our path unfolds, but there is no crystal ball. There is no one pulling strings.

         There are certainties, possibilities and probabilities. A certainty is that things will get worse. A probability is that life will be better off because of it. Most likely, that won’t be immediately clear. Our survival, like the survival of half of all existing mammals and a quarter of existing birds, is a possibility.

         It may not be a choice, but fighting for that possibility is.

         It’s understandable to want to give in. It’s comforting to think that we might be powerful enough to wish punishment on ourselves. That penance is on our terms. But it’s an exercise in futility. A luxury we can no longer afford. If we want to resist the worst-case scenario, then we’re better off starting with the right questions. Instead of pontificating the merit of human existence, we should recognize that our own survival is intertwined with the fate of all other life. Our struggle is inseparable from theirs.

         Our lives are inseparable from theirs.

         The question should be: when will we start acting like it?

For more of this discussion, check out Black and Green Review. 

[1] Carl Safina, The View From Lazy Point. New York: Picador, 2011. Pgs 2-3.

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/13/act-before-entire-species-lost-global-warming-say-scientists

[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/one-quarter-of-worlds-mammals-face-extinction/

[4] http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/20/asia/great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching/

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/25/half-all-species-extinct-end-century-vatican-conference

[6] http://www.climatecentral.org/news/world-passes-400-ppm-threshold-permanently-20738

[7] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-human-extinction-isnt-that-unlikely/480444/

[8] https://guymcpherson.com/2017/02/faster-than-expected/

[9] Safina, 2011. Pg 71.

Here’s How The ‘Blue Whale’ Suicide Game Is Killing Teens On Social Media

 

There is a frightening trend appearing on social media sites in Russia and spreading across the world, involving a suicide game called ‘Blue Whale’ where participants win by dying.

Fears are rising across Russia and the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, over online games said to be driving teenagers to commit suicide.

The shocking game – (“синий кит”) goes by a few names:

– Siniy kit (“ a blue whale ”,” синий кит “),

– Tikhiy dom (“ a quiet house/a silent house ”, ” тихий дом “,” #тихийдом “),

– More kitov (“ a sea/a bunch of whales ”,” море китов “,” #морекитов “),

– f53, f57, f58 and Razbudi menya v 4:20 (“ wake me up 4.20 am ”,” разбуди меня в 420 “,” #разбудименяв420 “).

Although it’s hard to say exactly where and when this alarming trend started surfacing online, Russia’s Investigative Committee did announce an arrest linked to the game, which was discovered on the VKontakte social network. Spokesperson for Russia’s Investigative Committee Svetlana Petrenko told TASS that after conducting an investigation, a criminal case on charges of instigating suicide was launched.

RBTH reports, “According to the investigators, from December 2013 to May 2016, the perpetrators established eight virtual groups on the VKontakte social network to promote suicidal behavior and drive underage users to commit suicide.”

The underlying premise of the game is as follows: you sign up and are given an administrator, or curator, assigned to you. This curator gives you things to do, over the course of 50 days, and you must send proof that you have carried out their demands. At the end of the 50 days, you win by committing suicide.

One correspondent from RFE/RL wanted to see how the Blue Whale game worked, so they created a fake profile of a 15-year old girl, on the VKontake site. The following is a transcription of their online conversation:

“I want to play the game.” 

“Are you sure? There is no way back,” responded a so-called curator of the Blue Whale game.

“Yes. What does that mean — no way back?”

“You can’t leave the game once you begin.”

“I’m ready.” Then the curator explained the rules.

“You carry out each task diligently, and no one must know about it. When you finish a task, you send me a photo. And at the end of the game, you die. Are you ready?”

“And if I want to get out?”

“I have all your information. They will come after you.”

The first task given to the corespondent was to scratch “F58” into her arm. They tried to fool the curator with a photoshopped image, but the curator ceased to respond.

Over the course of about a week, RFE/RL managed to contact more than a dozen self-proclaimed current and former players and several curators.

“I am your personal whale,” another curator wrote, explaining that the game consisted of 50 tasks spread over 50 days. “I will help you take the game all the way to the end. The last day is the end of the game. If you die, you win. If you don’t, we will help you. Are you ready?”

The curator then promised to send the first task at 4:20 a.m. But by then, the curator’s account had been blocked.

Russian authorities believe the man behind this horrible creation is Filip Budeikin, who is currently facing charges for driving at least 15 teenagers to commit suicide.

In a disturbing interview with the saint-petersburg.ru media outlet, Budeikin admitted the real number was 17 and said his victims “died happy. I gave them that which they did not have in their real life: warmth, understanding, connection.”

One such victim was Galina Sibiryakova, a 19-year-old from Karaganda. She was found dead on Feb. 7 by her parents. The family claimed the teenager used her phone to stay in constant contact with someone on Skype, reports Astana Times.

Currently, authorities in Kazakhstan have blocked access to the “death groups” on social media, and in Central Asia, Kazakh Interior Minister Kalmukhanbet Kasymov has called for creating a national database of social-media users. In the capital of Kyrgyzstan, police have begun searching through schools to check children for signs of cutting or for suspicious messages on their phones.

While this may seem like an overreaction to some, others find the actions taken by authorities to be justified. Blocking of any sites with hashtags #SeaOfWhales, #BlueWhales, #WhalesSwimUpwards and #WakeMeUpAt420, as well as #F58, and many others has already begun.

Suicide is a real issue in these countries, and the children who fall victim to this game are lied to and led by a fear that someone will come after them or their family if they don’t follow the rules. One teenager reported receiving a message that stated, “Your mother won’t reach the bus stop tomorrow.”

Another participant who referred to himself as Ivan said he tried to quit the game by blocking his curator. However he later received a message from another curator saying, “You can’t hide from us.” Ivan blocked that account too and had no further issues, nor did he receive any more messages.

Despite the threats that many Blue Whale players have received, there have been no reported incidents of any kind related to the game outside the virtual world.

It might not be easy to understand what draws kids into these types of games, but the signs of a suicidal child can be recognized if you know where to look. Thankfully, the Youth Suicide Prevention Program has outlined some of the more noticeable characteristics found in depressed or suicidal teens.

Most suicidal young people don’t really want to die; they just want their pain to end. About 80% of the time, people who kill themselves have given definite signals or talked about suicide. The key to prevention is to know these signs and what to do to help.

  • A previous suicide attempt
  • Current talk of suicide or making a plan
  • Strong wish to die or a preoccupation with death
  • Giving away prized possessions
  • Signs of depression, such as moodiness, hopelessness, withdrawal
  • Increased alcohol and/or other drug use
  • Hinting at not being around in the future or saying good-bye

As always, you should take any mention of suicide seriously, and reach out to these resources for more information and guidance on what to do in these situations.

Crisis Text Line

Teens In Crisis Hotline

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Grim Thoughts and Gallows Humor in Eugene Thacker’s ‘Cosmic Pessimism’

In his recent study of mass murder and suicides, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Franco Berardi notes that “in the contemporary aesthetic production it’s easy to detect the signs of a sort of dark zeitgeist.” One needn’t look far: dystopian YA novels in bookstore windows; another season of True Detective on TV; Mad Max: Fury Road in theaters.

While it’s true that these works offer occasional flickers of light, the characters, or what Milan Kundera calls our “imaginary selves”, generally live without it. In one of the only moments in Mad Max: Fury Road when Max articulates a complete thought, he says, “You know, hope is a mistake.”

Indeed, the dark zeitgeist is all around us. Chuckle if you want, but these are good times for grim thoughts, and some of the best and freshest writing is coming from Eugene Thacker. Some readers may know Thacker from his introductions to E.M. Cioran’s books; others will have read In the Dust of This Planet and his other “horror of philosophy” books.

For those unfamiliar with Thacker, a newly-published collection of aphorisms titled Cosmic Pessimism would be an entertaining place to start. Truth be told, Thacker is not nearly as gloomy as one would think, and though he charts familiar ground here, the presentation is a bit more lyrical than what we get in his other books, and accompanied by abstract black and white artwork. At 55 pages, Cosmic Pessimism is less taxing than one might fear, yet more thoughtful than one might expect. For example, we learn early on that there are different types of pessimism:

“Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds.” Cosmic Pessimism, instead, is “a pessimism of the world-without-us”, a notion of “primordial insignificance”.

Whether pessimism is actually a philosophy is something that Thacker questions. “The very term pessimism suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can hope,” he says, with a wink.

And there is plenty of fun to be had here, everything from buried Joy Division lyrics, to entries like this one:

Kierkegaard: life is a tightrope. Nietzsche: life is a jump rope. Kafka: life is a trip rope. Schopenhauer: life is a noose.

Cioran: life is a noose, improperly tied.

Thacker’s own pessimism is playful, but never trite, and sometimes even personal:

Cioran once wrote, ‘I turned away from philosophy when it became impossible to discover in Kant any human weakness, any authentic accent of melancholy, in Kant and in all the philosophers.’ I keep returning to Kant, but for the opposite reason. Each time I read, and witness the scintillating and austere construction of a system, I cannot help but to feel a certain sadness—the edifice itself is somehow depressing.

James Wood says that a good writer notices things, which is precisely what Thacker does, as when he distinguishes between fatality and futility or doom and gloom. The latter two terms especially we use without a second thought, even though “doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end”, whereas gloom “is atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings.” In other words, “if doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life.”

The edge of heavy, lugubrious passages like these is blunted not only by gallows humor, but also by numerous anecdotes about Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Chamfort, and others who write in a pessimistic vein. It’s also worth mentioning that Thacker is, at times, critical of pessimism (“There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds”) and recognizes that it can be spiteful: “a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz…”.

There is a hint of self-criticism in his words, yet a pessimistic disposition, or what Thacker sometimes calls a philosophical disenchantment, remains valid. After all, as Paul Mason argued in The Guardian, the dystopian world of Mad Max no longer shocks us because it’s too close to reality (17 May 2015). If this is true, then Thacker’s eloquent Cosmic Pessimism must be both an articulation of and monument to our dark zeitgeist.

 

22-Year-Old Man With Sleep Paralysis Recreates His Nightmares In Photos, And It’s Terrifying

Click image to view video
Click image to view video

Photographer Nicolas Bruno spends his days like the rest of us, but his nights are very different. And terrifying. 22 year-old Nicolas has been suffering from sleep paralysis for 7 years now, which means that he experiences his nightmares more vividly than regular sleepers.

Sleep paralysis is a condition that happens when we are about to enter rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. In it, our bodies paralyze themselves to stop us from acting out our dreams, but Bruno’s mind is awake and experiencing horrific hallucinations. This forced him into insomnia and depression: “I thought I was possessed by demons,” he said.

Everything changed when one high school teacher suggested he should document these terrors. He has been battling his fears with photography ever since. “This project has gifted me a sense of who I am,” he said. “It gave me the strength to persevere in life, to create art and speak to people. It gifted me art, and I don’t know where I would be without it.”

More info: nicolasbrunophotography.com | Facebook | Instagram (h/t: cnn, lostateminor)

30 Years Later, RoboCop Is More Relevant Than Ever

 

Has there ever been a movie more misunderstood than RoboCop? Paul Verhoeven’s hyperviolent dystopian cybersatire was released 30 years ago and almost immediately joined the likes of The Prince, Watchmen, and Wall Street in the great pantheon of works whose points have been completely missed by legions of fans and imitators. RoboCop was intended to be a viciously hilarious attack on police brutality, union busting, mass-media brainwashing, and the exploitation of the working class by amoral corporate raiders. Alas, all too many people only noticed the viciousness, not the targets thereof. As a result, the film’s subsequent sequels, spinoffs, and 2014 remake have been generally straight-faced. If they’re socially biting at all, their criticism is mild in comparison to their carnage.

https://youtu.be/bsbVnrOkcr8

Unfortunately, we can now add another faux-boCop clunker to the steel pile: Fox’s new police procedural APB, which wears its admiration for RoboCop on its high-tech sleeve. The female lead (Natalie Martinez) is named “Murphy,” a near-certain homage to the real name of Verhoeven’s titular super-cop. The show borrows much of its basic premise from the 1987 masterpiece: A corporation privatizes a police force and puts advanced machinery on the streets to combat soaring crime. Alas, it lacks any of the visceral criticism of its forebear, opting instead to celebrate generic cop work done with fancy toys. That’s a goddamn shame, because RoboCop is more relevant today than it’s ever been. Indeed, if we had collectively heeded its warnings, America might not be in the dire situation it finds itself in today.

If you haven’t seen RoboCop, you could be forgiven for assuming the movie is an earnest thriller, given its basic plot outline. In a near-future version of Detroit, a sleazy firm with the delightfully over-the-top moniker Omni Consumer Products* (or OCP, for short) buys up the police force — ostensibly to fight crime more efficiently, but really to test out brutally violent hardware to sell to the military. They could not give less of a shit about the actual police, who are planning a strike, and when one of the boys in blue gets shot to pieces by an OCP-allied gangster, his brain is surreptitiously harvested to make a cyborg cop with a computer-driven consciousness. After a rocky period as a warrior against criminality, he turns on his masters and regains his individual dignity.

https://youtu.be/zbCbwP6ibR4

 

But the plot is only half the story of RoboCop. More important are the tone and stylistic flourishes, which are astoundingly good ventures in pitch-black comedy. Newscasters announce nuclear armageddon and accidental presidential assassinations with ignorant cheer; folks use comically oversize guns to shoot at their victims for 20-second stretches, unrealistic blood squibs firing left and right; everyone watches a TV show in which buxom ladies hit on a hideous old man who incongruously shouts, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” at random; an elementary school is named after Lee Iacocca; and so on. It depicts a fallen world where tragedy long ago faded into farce and we’re supposed to ridicule virtually everything that goes on. If you’re not laughing, you’re not paying attention.

That is, in a way, the tragedy of RoboCop — you really do have to pay attention to get it. It’s a victim of its own success, insofar as what makes it hilarious is how straight-faced everything is. There are no winks to inform you that it’s time to giggle, so if you’re only half-watching, you’ll miss all your cues. That said, if you do pick up what the film is putting down, you’ll see a remarkable degree of significance for the world of 2017.

In 1987, Verhoeven and writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner were extrapolating Reagan-era greed and enthusiasm for privatization by imagining a corporate takeover of public services. Now, that’s barely an extrapolation — it’s a serious proposal made by a startling number of America’s most powerful industrialists. OCP dreams of throwing off all government control in its Delta City community, and it’s hard to watch the movie now and not think of it as a kind of land-bound seastead. The Peter Thiels and Tim Drapers of the world have, in their infinite wisdom, concluded that government more or less doesn’t work and that folks would be far better-served if they were part of an entirely private polity that values entrepreneurship above conventional citizenship. Today’s techno-utopians may prefer Jobsian asceticism instead of the coke-addled sneers of Miguel Ferrer’s Bob Morton, but their ideology is closer to Bob’s than they may like to admit.

RoboCop makes a profoundly good case against privatizing the police force and, by extension, any public necessity. Sure, it makes the obvious critique that the profit motive drives people to carry out obscene miscarriages of justice like, well, using a near-dead body to secretly build a super-robot that can be shopped around to the highest bidder. But there are even wiser points, as well. In a nod to the robo-fiction of Isaac Asimov, RoboCop has to obey three hard-wired laws, along with a classified fourth. We eventually learn that the last directive prevents him from arresting or attacking any employees of OCP, thus exempting them from the very law enforcement they make it their business to enact.

That plot point echoes current controversies over Facebook and Google. As the saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product, and Facebook and Google — as well as a bevy of other digital entities — make their billions by mining users’ personal information. Each takes our secrets and our intricacies and auctions them off, but in a cruel irony, they themselves are black boxes. Some people are banned without explanation; others are allowed to remain, despite ostensibly breaking the terms of service. The core algorithms, so crucial to countless users’ businesses and lives, are opaque and will remain so until the sun dies.

Like OCP, Facebook and its ilk exempt themselves from the things they do to everyone else. RoboCop teaches us that a private service, be it a police force or anything else, will inherently lack the transparency and accountability that (at least in theory) is built into an entity beholden to the public through elections, recalls, impeachment, and the like. We trust free-market libertarians at our own risk.

What’s more, RoboCop teaches us that, when the forces of corporate overreach are at work, we have to retain power against them — power that comes not from robot suits, but from unions. Early on, we learn that the overstretched and underfunded cops, who receive not a whiff of the cash that OCP is stirring into its R&D division, are contemplating a strike. This becomes a running bit in the film, especially as the uncaring OCP chieftains start to favor their shiny RoboCop over the concerns of the actual folks on the beat. (To Verhoeven’s credit, the force has a substantial number of tough women, not just dudes.)

An officer who’s acquiesced to OCP control muses that “we’re not plumbers, we’re police officers — and police officers don’t strike.” The guy is, of course, totally missing the point: The fact that cops don’t usually strike makes a potential strike all the more potent. Not everyone has a tin exoskeleton, but everyone can create the collective armor of a picket line. Even then, though, there has to be a society-wide appreciation of unionization, as RoboCop points out — when the strike is put on the table, an OCP exec gets stoked about the idea of using it as an opportunity to put more robots on the street. In other words, RoboCop was talking about the tension between automation and working people well before it became a topic at the highest levels of political and economic debate. It’s hard to imagine these ideas coming up in a sci-fi film today, largely because union membership is so passé, free-falling at a rate that makes 1987 look positively communist. RoboCop’s pro-labor message was powerful then, but it’s vitally urgent now.

So, too, is the way Verhoeven and his collaborators confront actual police work. RoboCop is a metal personification of extrajudicial police violence, destroying bodies and lives with casual aplomb. He bursts into an attempted convenience-store stickup and viciously beats the gunman, then, without attending to him medically, bids the owners a calm “Thank you for your cooperation” and walks out. He reads a thug his Miranda rights while punching him bloody. He also has no idea how to interact with the community — after stopping an attempted rape, he holds the victim and, in his inhuman, metallic monotone, declares, “Madam, you have suffered an emotional shock. I will notify a rape crisis center.” She looks terrified.

Such overcompensating intensity feels especially chilling in the Trump era. The new president frequently depicts the “inner cities” as hellholes rife with murder, gangs, drugs, and (his favorite term) carnage. It’s not unreasonable to think the man in the Oval Office would love to see RoboCop put on the streets, fighting violence not with any kind of structural reasoning or community improvement, but rather the simple language of brutality. The irony is that he’s also in favor of unrestricted access to guns, which is another essential point of critique in RoboCop — everyone has firearms, and they accomplish nothing but mayhem and dismemberment.

Unfortunately, the mayhem and dismemberment is all that some people enjoy about the film, the ultimate insult to RoboCop’s teachings. We’re supposed to laugh at and loathe the use of violence. In this, the movie is a spiritual sibling to Verhoeven’s other tragically misinterpreted masterwork, 1997’s antiwar satire Starship Troopers. In both tales, the impulse to fuck other people up and over leads only to empty souls and dead bodies. The vulgarity of television and interpersonal conduct leaves everyone debased and pitiful. Our present moment is one in which the ability to take what you want at all costs, without the slightest bit of empathy, is espoused at the highest levels of society — in other words, a moment that RoboCop prefigured three decades ago. It’s time to listen to what the movie screams at us, to reengage with a movie that is simultaneously funnier, more thrilling, and more socially astute than most ever made. A RoboCop renaissance? I’d buy that for a dollar.

http://www.vulture.com/2017/02/foxs-apb-is-the-latest-show-to-misunderstand-robocop.html

The current political reality

“We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.”

‘Deep Dark Web’: Mysterious Universe Where Any Information Can Be Found

Up to 80% of the Internet is said to be hidden in the so-called “deep web,” which can be accessed using special search systems, like the Tor browser. Often, the “deep web” is associated with criminal activities, like firearms sales and drug trafficking.

The deep web is a kind of mysterious place where one can find everything that has been published on the Internet, but can’t be accessed via traditional search engines. In other words, it is collection of websites that are publicly visible, but hide the IP addresses of the servers that run them.

“There are various services within this universe. Some are used to protect delivered information, conceal identities or ensure anonymity,” IT expert and CEO of TIB company Maximiliano Alonzo explained in an interview with Sputnik Mundo.

At the same time, Alonzo noted that the deep web can be used both — in positive and negative ways.

“The deep web is like a scalpel: in the hands of a doctor it can save lives, but in the hands of a criminal, it can kill. So everything depends on its use. There are certain countries in which citizens have a limited access to the Internet, and the deep web is for them an alternative way to receive information,” Alonzo explained.

The concept of a deep web appeared with the occurrence of the first search engines. All data that can’t be accessed by Google is available via special search systems, like the Tor browser, which makes it impossible to trace the identity or address of its users.

“If a user tries to access a certain web site, his IP address gets registered in the system and makes it possible to identify the country, the city and even the identity of the user. The Tor system can change a person’s data and make its access anonymous,” the expert explained.

The deep web contains any kind of information and is often associated with criminal activities (like firearms and drug trafficking as well as personal data sales).

For instance, the sales of a fentanyl drug caused a wave of deaths and were ultimately prohibited by one of the Dark Web marketplaces.

Earlier, it was also reported that hackers sold on the deep web hundreds of millions of personal passwords from websites such as LinkedIn, MySpace, Tumblr, Fling.com, and VK.com.

Bewilderment a poem by Rumi

Bewilderment

There are many guises for intelligence.
One part of you is gliding in a high windstream,
while your more ordinary notions
take little steps and peck at the ground.

Conventional knowledge is death to our souls,
and it is not really ours. It is laid on.
Yet we keep saying we find “rest” in these “beliefs.”

We must become ignorant of what we have been taught
and be instead bewildered.

Run from what is profitable and comfortable.
Distrust anyone who praises you.
Give your investment money, and the interest
on the capital, to those who are actually destitute.

Forget safety. Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.
I have tried prudent planning long enough.

From now on, I’ll be mad.

– Rumi

A revised portrait of psychopaths

Study finds that they do feel regret, but it doesn’t affect their choices

When most people hear the word psychopath, they immediately think of a Hannibal Lecter-style serial killer who is cold, calculating, emotionless, willing to do or say anything to get their desire.

And they’re not alone. For decades, researchers studying psychopathy have characterized the disorder as a profound inability to process emotions such as empathy, remorse, or regret.

A recent study, though, suggests that psychopaths are not incapable of feeling emotions like regret and disappointment. What they cannot do, it seems, is make accurate predictions about the outcomes of their choices.

The study, co-authored by Joshua Buckholtz, associate professor of psychology at Harvard, and Arielle Baskin-Sommers, assistant professor of psychology and of psychiatry at Yale University, offers a new model of the disorder that could shed important light on the decision-making process of psychopaths. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The assumption has always been that they make these bad choices because they can’t generate negative emotions like fear, or appropriately respond to emotional signals generated by other people … but we turned that idea on its head.”

Using an economic game, Buckholtz and Baskin-Sommers were able to show that while psychopaths have normal, or even enhanced, emotional responses in situations that typically elicit regret, they have trouble extracting information from the environment that would indicate that an action they’re about to take will result in the experience of regret.

“There are two components to regret,” Buckholtz explained. “There is retrospective regret, which is how we usually think about regret — the emotional experience after you learn you could have received a better outcome if you had made a different choice. But we also use signals from our environment to make predictions about which actions will or won’t result in regret. What differentiated psychopaths from other people was their inability to use those prospective regret signals, to use information about the choices they were given to anticipate how much regret they were going to experience, and adjust their decision-making accordingly.

“It’s almost like a blindness to future regret,” he added. “When something happens, they feel regret, but what they can’t do is look forward and use information that would tell them they’re going to feel regret to guide their decision-making.”

“These findings highlight that psychopathic individuals are not simply incapable of regret [or other emotions], but that there is a more nuanced dysfunction that gets in the way of their adaptive functioning,” Baskin-Sommers said. “By appreciating this complexity, we are poised to develop more accurate methods for predicting the costly behavior of psychopathic individuals.”

Using a measure of prospective regret sensitivity, Buckholtz and Baskin-Sommers were also able to predict whether and even how many times study participants had been incarcerated.

“Contrary to what you would expect based on these basic emotional-deficit models, their emotional responses to regret didn’t predict incarceration,” Buckholtz said. “We know psychopathy is one of the biggest predictors of criminal behavior, but what we found was that behavioral regret sensitivity moderated that, raising the suggestion that intact behavioral regret sensitivity could be a protective factor against incarceration in psychopathic individuals.”

While the study upends the pop-culture image of psychopaths, Buckholtz is hopeful that it will also provide a new direction for scientists who hope to understand how psychopaths make decisions.

“We actually know very little about how psychopaths make choices,” he said. “There have been all sorts of research into their emotions and emotional experience, but we know next to nothing about how they integrate information that we extract from the world as a matter of course and use it to make decisions in daily lives. Getting better insight into why psychopaths make such terrible choices, I think, is going to be very important for the next generation of psychopathy research.”

A revised portrait of psychopaths