Jean Paul Sartre said that hell was other people. Did he live in Montecito near to Harry and Meghan? Schopenhauer thought existence an endless cycle of suffering. No wonder nobody attended his lectures at the University of Berlin, where he scheduled the death fests at the same time as Hegel’s. Schopenhauer’s sermons on the horrors of existence were empty however. The Russian anarchist Nechaev believed everyone over the age of 21 should be exterminated. Bakhunin famously shouted that ‘the urge to destroy is a constructive urge’. Ezra Pound opined, after having spent a few months in a cage in Pisa, that:
‘I have erred grievously: I have wasted my life’.
Been there, got the T-shirt Ezra. The idea that ‘Doom’ has reached exponential angst in modernity, now that the internet has turned everyone into Munch like screamers, is becoming more noticeable. Whilst history has always had its malcontents and weirdos, the 21st century really does feel like the ‘fin de siècle’ times. Previously it was only the well-heeled and geniuses who had the spare time to be lunatics. Yet now everyday brings another genocide, knife attack and episode of Meghan’s cooking serial ‘With Love’. No more Ophelia tip-toeing down the primrose path in Hamlet. In the modern panopticon of madness, mass society has become ‘institutionalised’. What used to pass for the occasional ‘village idiot’ (another T-shirt of mine) is par for the course. Entire societies devoid of real work or purpose, where everyone is entitled and aggrieved by the slightest inconvenience. Dostoyevsky maintained you could judge a country by the number of prisons it had. They are overspilling in Britain, where legality only applies to members of the ‘far-right’.
The internet is the home of the maladroit. It is the meeting place of absurdity where algorithms convince people of the righteousness of their view. The limp-minded liberal left have doubled down on idiocy, never having read an alternative opinion other than The Guardian, brainwashed by a generation of ‘teachers’ who can’t do elementary mathematics and feel Shakespeare is ‘too difficult’ for students. It is too difficult for them. Britain is the capital of the madhouse. Albanian drug lords, having committed murders and drug smuggling flaunt their wealth and can’t be deported due to human rights lawyers. Grooming gangs are protected by the government and civil service. There is only so much before the ‘social contract’ between governor and governed is torn up. It only lasts as long as security and prosperity are provided. The Starmer government lacks either. It doesn’t reflect the general will of the public, sick and tired of the extractive state and a judiciary which lives in an ivory tower in Hampstead Heath.
Camus described society breakdowns as a ‘plague’. He set his novel in the Algerian town of Oran. Under the plague, individuals lose the ability to effect change. They lose faith in ‘the system’. The plague corrupts and isolates people. It could be an allegory for liberal democracy. It is a virus which, once inculcated into the institutions and civil service, spreads like the black death. None are immune. No institutions or the arts, or even music can escape. Modern music is a grim doomscape of Coldplay and gangster rap. At the Yale Centre for British Art a new exhibition has opened entitled ‘Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning’. Tracey Emin is the British artist with a reputation like Bonnie Blue. The ‘New Criterion’ describes the exhibition’s upbeat tone:
‘Touring these sketchy compositions of splattered reds and female undercarriage, we can learn how one canvas, I Said No (ca. 2005–15), confronts the artist’s teenage rape. Emin’s stoma, tube, and urostomy bag, a consequence of her bladder-cancer surgery of 2020, get referenced through a dashed-off line and bloody square in And It Was Love (2023). One work reflects an act of cunnilingus by Emin’s ex-boyfriend. In another there is an abortion table. Still another is titled ‘I Wanted You to Fuck the Inside of My Mind’ (2018). And so on.’
The unending angst is ongoing. A Surgeon in Cambridge, notes ITV, is under investigation for asking her patient to perform a Nazi salute. She is heard saying:
“If I say can you do this sort of movement for me, so like a heil Hitler or a heil Caesar, any pain when you do that?”
Meanwhile in Arizona a man crucified a local priest called ‘Pastor Bill’.
“I drove from there (Phoenix) to Bill’s house, like two in the morning on a Sunday night, and I executed him” Sheafe said.’
Sheafe then described how he allegedly killed Schonemann, before placing a crown of thorns on his head. However I find it hard to criticise the man, who had a crucifixion list containing hundreds of people. There are quite a few on my own ‘crucifixion list’. The crucifixion list is the algorithm of hate. The algorithm, like technology, is valueless. It is emotionless. Liberal societies are governed by ‘rationality’, a blind belief in science. It is not that science is ‘wrong’ but there are other ghosts in the machine. AI will play out in the same way as other post-dystopian scenarios. Industry was the cure to the poverty of the peasant. Now we have the deindustrialised mill towns. Technology and the service sector was then a beatific tomorrow’s world filled with subservient robots. Yet all we have is a huge extractive public sector whilst the ‘dispossessed’ pay taxes, work two jobs or live on PIP. It’s an Ursula Le Guin science fiction epic. Just be sure to be on the right side of the wall.
Yet the universal gloom is now replaced by another hope, for within liberalism is the never -ending second coming. The belief in ‘progress’. This time it is AI. A new Pew Research study suggests 52% of people fear losing their jobs. Yet that is the least of our worries, according to a new study by Anthropic. It’s like 2001: A Space Odyssey …on crack. It argues that ‘mis -alignment’ will set in the further down the AI road we go:
‘In one situation, Anthropic found that many of the models would choose to let an executive in a server room with lethal oxygen and temperature levels die by cancelling the alerts for emergency services, if that employee intended on replacing the model.’
Anthropic says this is due to ‘strategic reasoning’ by the computers. The old chestnut ‘reason’ again, that great Enlightenment idea. Reason unchecked is the Apollonian death of the human spirit. What Einstein called ‘the mousetrap’. It means boundless belief in a saviour, a second coming. It was once a Christian god, then a Communist proletariat, now the liberal myth. The philosopher Francis Fukuyama believed it to be ‘liberal democracy’ in his ‘end of history’ idea. History was all over ever since the walls came tumbling down in 1989. Fukuyama should be on the crucifixion list. History, of course, hasn’t finished, but it does appear, on the internet, to be the apocalyptic end of times.
‘Dead is God’, as Yoda might say….
Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught International Law and Political Philosophy. His articles have appeared in leading magazines and journals worldwide in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada, etc . His new book- ‘Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century’ is published now by Ethics International Press. He is an adviser to several Think Tanks and Corporates on Geopolitical Issues.
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Interesting article. My own view, in a nutshell, is that post WW2 increasing public decadence has grown to the extent that nothing is now private or a cause for shame and consequently everyone wants their own bit of the limelight and it’s easier to get this through imaginary victimhood/jealousy of others.
Reason unchecked is/means a boundless belief in a Christan God?
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