Full Fathom Five

Jackson Pollock, "Full Fathom Five" (1947)

Full Fathom Five is one of the earliest masterpieces of Pollock's drip technique. The actual origins and initial development of this technique have never been fully explained, except by reading back from fuller photographic evidence produced about 1950, two or three years after this work was painted. Like other practical breakthroughs in twentieth-century painting, 'creative accident' seems likely to have played an important part, as Pollock probed and tested methods of paint application which promote the continuousness of line rather than the broken lines inevitable in the constant reloadings and readjustments of conventional brushwork. His solution was to pour from a can of domestic paint along a stick resting inside the container, so that a constant 'beam' of pigment came into contact with the canvas (which he left unstretched on the studio floor). The character of the line was determined by certain physical and material variables that could be combined in almost infinite permutations: the viscosity of the paint (controlled by thinning and dilution); the angle and hence speed of the pouring; and the dynamics of Pollock's bodily gestures, his sweep and rhythm, especially in the wrist, arm and shoulder. 'Like a seismograph', noted writer Wemer Haftmann 'the painting recorded the energies and states of the man who drew it.' In addition, Pollock would flick, splatter, and dab subsidiary colors on to the dominant linear configuration.

The title, suggested by Pollock's neighbor, quotes from The Tempest by William Shakespeare, wherein Ariel describes a death by shipwreck: "Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes."

Sylvia Plath, "Full Fathom Five"

Old man, you surface seldom.

Then you come in with the tide’s coming

When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung

A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves

Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves

Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins

Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of origins

Unimaginable. You float near

As keeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear

Of, not fathomed. All obscurity

Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I

Cannot look much but your form suffers

Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors

Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.

The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me

To half-believe: your reappearance

Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines

Of your grained face shed time in runnels:

Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels

Of the ocean. Such sage humor and

Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-

Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole.

Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle

To root deep among knuckles, shin-bones,

Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once

Seen by any man who kept his head,

You defy questions;

You defy godhood.

I walk dry on your kingdom’s border

Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.

Father, this thick air is murderous.

I would breathe water.

The Difference between Doctors of Free Men, Doctors of Slaves, and Writers of Self-Help Books

 

Featured image: Arthur Garfield Dove. Sunrise III, 1936–37. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Katherine S. Dreier to the Collection Société Anonyme. Yale University Art Gallery (1949.3). CC0, artgallery.yale.edu. Accessed June 10, 2024.

Josh Cohen, 'Quiet Please: On Anna Katharina Schaffner’s “Exhausted” and Byung-Chul Han’s “Vita Contemplativa”'

IT’S HARD TO TALK about the everyday malaises of advanced consumer societies—“overwork,” “hyperstimulation,” “burnout”—without calling forth a critique of the explicit and tacit contracts governing our economic, cultural, and psychic lives. Don’t these words contain an implicit anatomy of neoliberalism’s discontents, its unrelenting instrumentalism, torn social bonds, and moral indifference?

And yet the same words are also ripe fodder for the perpetuation of existing arrangements, for the exploitation of our physical and mental vulnerability. Burnout, consumerism assures us, doesn’t require a new social order, just a new mattress, diet, fitness regimen, meditation program, or general attitude.

Writing about exhaustion is liable to become a symptom of these competing pulls between the polemical and the palliative—that is, to decry the illness and then look for remedies in the very forces (wellness consumerism, self-improvement, positive psychology, corporate yoga) making us ill.

Entering a chronically overcrowded market for the fickle and stretched attention of potential readers, a writer on exhaustion is all too likely caught between excoriating the society that threatens their survival and, well, surviving itself, which tends to mean not biting the cold, bony hand that barely feeds them. You can’t just lament how tired we all are, chides the superego of burnout society; you must give us practical prescriptions for feeling less tired, or at least feeling less bad about it.

One way of circumventing this dilemma, unfortunately not readily accessible to most of us, is to become a superstar in the firmament of social theory. Judging by Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (2023), a philosophical meditation on the meaning of inactivity, the Korean German thinker Byung-Chul Han, who over the last decade has put out more than 20 such brief, urgently concentrated interventions into the state of psychosocial life under late capitalism, isn’t feeling undue pressure to offer hacks on carving out a little me-time from your busy day. Ironically enough, the status conferred by achievement and fame seems to earn its holder the right to eschew any obligations toward practical guidance.

The book makes a fascinating and telling contrast in this regard with Anna Katharina Schaffner’s Exhausted: An A–Z for the Weary (2024), a glossary of burnout that explores the possible remedies for exhaustion alongside its causes and vicissitudes. The author of the excellent Exhaustion: A History (2016), Schaffner used to be a cultural historian working a full-time job in a university English department that, like so many academic posts in the United Kingdom, had long been menaced by the threat of soul-crushing administrative burdens or even redundancy.

Schaffner’s way out of this trap was to train and start a practice as a coach specializing in “helping the exhausted.” Exhausted is something like the distilled wisdom of that practice, a short compendium of reflection and counsel on the various causes and cures for exhaustion from “Capitalism” and “Dante” to “Xenia” and “Yellow.” The book attests to the depth and breadth of Schaffner’s erudition and critical sensibility. You will not find many avowed self-help books rich in discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman Melville, and Walter Benjamin, or that ask us to take seriously the depredations of neoliberalism and corporate culture as a central source of physical and spiritual corrosion.

But it’s also here that the book comes to be entangled in the predicament it’s diagnosing. In order to conform to the terms of the self-help genre, Exhausted has to carve out shortcuts from sober pessimism to peppy affirmation. Apparently leaning into a critical politics, the “Burnout” entry notes that “the happiness industry pushes individual coping strategies, while research shows that in the vast majority of cases, it is our working environments that are making us sick.”

She returns to this observation five entries later, in “G Is for Ghosts,” invoking Bartleby, titular protagonist of Melville’s great story whose famous refrain, “I would prefer not to,” would become a key slogan of the Occupy movement and a byword for the impulse to refuse. The cadaverous young copyist who one morning abruptly stops working has been sapped of all life, Schaffner notes, by “his dull and oppressive working environment.”

The unsettling power of Bartleby’s refrain for so many generations of readers is that it shuts down the circuits of negotiation and exchange, cancels all shared rules of communication. Bartleby doesn’t say yes to the attorney’s request to copy a document, but neither does he refuse or defy it. He induces outrage in his colleagues above all because they cannot fathom what he’s trying to say or why.

Schaffner seems to recognize that the power of Bartleby’s refrain lies in its sabotage of functional discourse, and at the same time, she wants to restore him to it, effectively to bring him back to work. “What, then, can we learn from Bartleby?” she asks, and unlike the attorney and his fellow employees, for whom Bartleby is evidently a hole torn in the fabric of learning, she has an answer: he can teach us to be less negative. “Let us therefore counter Bartleby’s repetitive rejoinder with a question: ‘What would you prefer to do instead?’”

Can a writer as thoughtful as Schaffner really be commending us to read “Bartleby”—Bartleby!—as an object lesson in the virtues of a positive attitude? Seeing Melville’s story reduced to a cautionary lesson in the need to have “a positive vision of what we want to do with our life,” it is hard not to resort to weary snarl.

But before rushing simply to deride the platitudinous use of this great story, we might remind ourselves that against the more abstracted and sealed-off scholasticism of so much modern academic philosophy, Schaffner wants to recover a more venerable conception of philosophy as guided by the question of how one should live. It’s a sound impulse, if vulnerable to the temptation to offer easy takeaway reassurances.

In fact, Schaffner’s book is most interesting and surprising when addressing the privations and wounds of our contemporary cultures of work and leisure, conditions that surely defy any quick fix. She introduces us to Nietzsche as the great seer of modernity’s morose instrumentalism, quoting The Gay Science on the effective abolition of joy and the vita contemplativa. Already in 1882, Nietzsche was warning that “educated people” were increasingly able to understand rest only as a peripheral function of work and the “need to recuperate,” an insight whose salience today is painfully obvious.

Another entry, “C Is for Capitalism,” gives us a fine summary exposition of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), focusing especially on its adumbration of the Lutheran injunction against “waste of time” and unproductive activity, arguing that the same morality tacitly underwrites our own codes of living and working, and pushing us to subject those codes to “critical attention.”

But passages like these only accentuate the irresolvable tensions between such critical attention and the compulsory positivity of the self-help genre. These tensions lend Exhausted a peculiarly split quality. The book stirs in us a spirit of discontent and protest against the stifling pressures neoliberalism exerts on our minds and bodies, only then to enjoin us to an equanimous “acceptance” of our feelings of anger and loss.

The subject of the first entry (“A Is for Acceptance”) is also the presiding spirit of the whole book. Schaffner quotes the Daoist parable of the farmer who “accepts both what seems initially positive and negative with equanimity, refusing to make rash judgements.” Acceptance is the basis for Schaffner’s preferred therapeutic approach, as formalized in the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

The basic thrust of this approach is to come face-to-face with our inner critic, “naming it, observing what it does without judgement and then letting it go.” ACT involves noting the ongoing broadside of the inner critic without “fusing” with it, thus turning negative thoughts “into objects of our critical discernment rather than accepting them as the truth about ourselves.” In other words, we must decline to take our superego too seriously, to be railroaded into buying its version of the truth about ourselves. In a comparison taken from ACT practitioner Russ Harris, the flow of our thoughts is likened to the rotating dishes on a “kaiten” or conveyor belt sushi bar—we simply let the unappetizing dishes or thoughts pass us by.

The comparison reveals an implicit model of the mind as commanded by a discerning consumer who knows what they like. On this model, the psychic ear hearing the negative thoughts is fully separate from the psychic mouth speaking them, notwithstanding their occupation of the same skull. It’s this kind of split that makes it possible to treat the superego’s punishing pronouncements as we might an unappetizing passing sando. But our relationship to our superego is not that of a choosy consumer. Even if we reject Freudian metapsychology, experience alone will show us that the power of the inner critic lies in our vulnerability to it, as well as in our availability to the bad news it tells us about ourselves. If simply ignoring the superego were enough to diminish it, we’d surely have tried that already.

All this may simply demonstrate an inbuilt limitation of the self-help genre: in the face of the self’s helplessness, it can only run aground. Schaffner’s appeal to acceptance feels like a way of acknowledging the chasm between the psychosocial burdens imposed by neoliberalism and the self’s capacity to bear them. It is a basic premise of her book, after all, that burnout is a structural effect of working environments that are making us poor, exhausted, and ill—conditions that severely restrict our capacity to help ourselves.

Han starts from the same premise, placing the emphasis more on the spiritual poverty of what he has famously called “burnout society,” for which inactivity can be perceived only as a deficiency, and not as the substantial “capacity in itself” it really is. As a region of experience that cannot be bought, sold, or otherwise put to work, inactivity is a cipher of utopia, of freedom from the tyranny of wage labor and the commodity. More radically still, Han follows Maurice Blanchot in conceiving the inactive as refractory to knowledge. Embodied in the figure of Eurydice, avatar of “night, shadow, sleep and death,” it is what cannot enter the daylit world without being instantly dissolved by it. In inactivity, the will abdicates its own sovereignty in the service of the higher state of “not-doing”: “Activity reaches perfection in inactivity.”

For Han, inactivity is not in a relation of opposition to activity but a permanent possibility within it, one to which our neurotically goal-oriented society is blind. As for Schaffner, Nietzsche is an essential thinker here. Han cites a late fragment on “inventive people” and their need for sufficient time to work without purpose or productivity. Only in such nonpurposive creativity is it possible for something authentically new to emerge, “something that has never been there before.”

Han’s praise for inactivity as midwife to the new doesn’t prevent him from using much of the second half of Vita Contemplativa to stage a sustained critique of Hannah Arendt’s advocacy for the “vita activa,” specifically what he sees as its fetish of novelty. Centered on the imposition of a sameness and conformity that blocked the birth of the new, Arendt’s midcentury critique of “mass society” failed to anticipate the emergence of a society of compulsory novelty, presided over by social media.

In this society, laments Han, “everyone thinks they are unique. Everyone has their own story to tell. Everyone is a performer of their self. The vita activa takes the form of a vita performativa.” In this world of singular selves competing for attention and status, of start-ups and new editions, meaningful novelty gives way to relentless iteration—the latest iPhone, food fad, or reality TV format.

By yoking the new to activity, Han argues, Arendt entrenches the rule of sameness, the repetitive cycle of business as usual. By disentangling us from the demands of the clock, inactivity extricates us from this cycle and creates the space for the new as a real event rather than a predictable iteration of the same. In Han’s formulation: “To oppose the compulsion of work and performance, we must create a politics of inactivity that is able to produce a genuinely free time.”

There is a palpable beauty, at once philosophical and aesthetic, to Han’s vision of the insinuation of a sabbatical time of freedom and purposelessness into the dominant time of productivity and work. This pure time, uncontaminated by the intrusions of need and obligation, makes a telling contrast with the moments of relief and amelioration snatched from the unforgiving flow of clock time by the exhausted imagined readers of Schaffner’s book.

Taken together, these two forms of time serve as an analogue to the two forms of culture (high and mass) famously described by Adorno as “two halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.” On Schaffner’s side, we have the precarious and short-lived freedom of “acceptance.” On Han’s, the ideal and impossible freedom of inactivity. Opposed to one another, these two conceptions of time are also phenomena of the same commodified logic they would each, in their very different ways, wish to oppose.

Kronos v. Kairos 

(躺平的韭菜不好割, Tǎng píng de jiǔcài bù hǎo gē)

Antifa and Antifascism

 

Squirrel Nihilism w/ Nietzsche Girl

‘Militanz’ as moralised political violence has been applied by the radical Left since the 1960s, but has scarcely been defined in academic literature. In the particular West German context, ‘Militanz’ has been restricted to attacks against objects rather than persons, in contradistinction to the terrorist attacks of the 1970s. The Autonomist movement has further theorised this concept through the caveat of the ‘three Antis’ (racism, sexism, capitalism), against which they consider their violence to be morally justified. This article offers a genealogy and definition of this 1990s Autonomist ‘Militanz’ by relying on extensive archival research and oral histories collected within the Hamburg Rote Flora Autonomist milieu. It then interrogates both this concept and the group's claims to moral authority by working within the Autonomists’ own conceptual definition to apply ‘Militanz’ categorically to a riot during the 2017 G20 summit. The article disentangles the various ideological factions who took part in this riot, and challenges media discourses that the Rote Flora Autonomists were responsible. However, it also concludes that ‘Militanz’ as a purely ‘Anti’ stance cannot legitimate moralised violence without offering any affirmative definition of appropriate political action, lest all violence become acceptable ‘Militanz’.

- Ali Jones 

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So, where does morality and the "right" to become morally righteous lie? Does it lie with the individual and his self-chosen and self-imposed and often inconstant Ethics? Does morality and right to moral righteousness lie within the State imposed/ policed/ enforced causal "frame" in which the individual functions (Nation//Laws)? Or perhaps it lies with second order observers who find themselves between the frames of their own Ethics and that of the Nation State and therefore add and apply post-hoc extra-judicial curatives such as those of the radical Left or Right (Militanz - against those deviant morals go unpunished by the "system" established under the Nation State in the name of prosecutorial discretion)? Or does morality and the right to act with moral righteousness lie with the United Nations, Security Council, and/or its' NGOs or Nations who pretend to preside and judge over "International Interests" in the name and service of humanity and sacred Human/Humanist Values? All of the above? None of the above? A United Federation of Planets?

MeThinkes  that too many second-order observational cooks spoil the stew. And justice dealing Militanz sanctioned SJW Superheroes need to remain in the comic books.

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Susie Linfield, "The Return of the Progressive Atrocity"

It is the responsibility of Western activists to know who and what they support, and to separate themselves—openly and decisively—from programs and regimes that are predicated on violence and repression.

All lies and jest,
Still a man hears what he wants to hear,
And disregards the rest…

~Paul Simon, “The Boxer”


In 1957, Albert Memmi addressed the question of the Left’s relationship with terrorism in his book, The Colonizer and Colonized. Memmi was a Tunisian Jew, equally committed to socialist Zionism and anticolonialism. The Left tradition, he observed, “condemns terrorism” as “incomprehensible, shocking and politically absurd. For example, the deaths of children and persons outside the struggle.”

But Memmi’s suppositions were outdated even as he wrote. The history of the modern Left’s romance with terrorism—not the “old-fashioned” version aimed at czars or imperial officials, but the kind directed against unarmed civilians—had already begun. It started with the Algerian War and gained momentum throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and beyond with the emergence of the Red Brigades, the Baader Meinhof Gang, the Irish Republican Army, the Japanese Red Army, the Weathermen, and the panoply of organizations included in the Palestine Liberation Organization and, especially, its Rejectionist Front. The latter held pride of place: “For the Sixth International, the Palestinian resistance is a banner ... an inspiration for the revolt of the dispossessed, both in its ends and in its means,” proclaimed Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, a prominent Egyptian leftwing intellectual and activist.

It was at this time that the oxymoronic and ethically repellent concept of what the late Middle East scholar, anti-colonialist, and socialist Fred Halliday criticized as “progressive atrocities” gained credence on the Left, particularly within the Palestinian movement and among the groups supporting it. Of course, the Palestinian national project—like Zionism—has always contained a variety of ideologies ranging from peaceful coexistence to the elimination of the other. (The latter tendency is appallingly prevalent among many members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government.) But it is no exaggeration to say that the Palestinian movement, even before the founding of Israel in 1948, has been defined by terror more than any other, and that terrorist groups have always been prominent within the movement.

In the age of the “progressive atrocity,” PLO terrorist attacks on Israelis, Jews, and civilians throughout the world were hailed as instruments of liberation. A very partial list of such incidents would include the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics (the games continued, nonetheless) and the Lod Airport massacre the same year (death toll: 26, along with at least 80 injured); the Ma’alot massacre of 1974, in which 115 Israelis, mainly schoolchildren, were taken hostage (resulting deaths: 31); the Entebbe hijacking of 1976, in which Israeli and other Jewish passengers were separated from others and threatened with death (most were rescued by Israeli commandos); the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, in which a civilian bus was highjacked (death toll: 38, including 13 children; 71 wounded); the 1982 attack on the Chez Jo Goldenberg kosher restaurant in Paris, considered at the time to be the worst incidence of antisemitism in France since the Holocaust (death toll: six, with 22 injured); and numerous other instances of air piracy. Various international groups, especially Baader Meinhof of Germany and the Japanese Red Army, sometimes assisted their Palestinian brothers “in solidarity.” Not all leftists or leftwing organizations supported these actions, but to criticize them was a sign of “bourgeois moralism” as Ghassan Kanafani, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, put it. (Kanafani, who was also a gifted writer, was assassinated after the Lod attack by the Mossad.)

Curiously, none of the groups that employed terrorism, other than the Algerian National Liberation Front, achieved its aims—well, sort of. The Algerians gained their independence, but the regime established by the NLF remains one of the most repressive on Earth—the NGO Freedom House ranks Algeria as “not free,” its worst category. The revolutions that did succeed—the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and South African revolts—weren’t nonviolent, but they largely refrained from attacks on unarmed civilians. Indeed, Marxist movements had traditionally shunned terror against civilians on both moral and political grounds. Terror against civilians demoralizes ordinary people and almost always pushes them to the Right, often into the arms of authoritarian leaders; terrorism exalts the singular act at the expense of building a mass movement. André Malraux’s 1928 novel The Conquerors, set during the failed Chinese Communist uprising of 1925, opens with a dramatic act of terror; it is Garine, the book’s hero and a Marxist, who opposes this. The dire state of the Palestinian movement today suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the use of terror and the achievement of freedom.

In recent years, the Left’s embrace of terror seemed to have ebbed; you won’t find many defenders of al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, or Boko Haram. The notable exception has been groups devoted to the destruction of Israel: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, all of which still garner enthusiasm and deluded admiration. One might have thought that an orgy of sadistic murder, of the kind that Hamas committed on October 7th, would have inspired serious moral and political self-interrogation. As the past four weeks have illustrated, however, the exact opposite is the case.

The extraordinary nature of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have swept through the capitals of the West—demonstrations that began before Israel dropped a single bomb on Gaza—has, perhaps, not been fully appreciated. Horrific massacres of unarmed civilians are, unfortunately, taking place right now in South Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Syria, and Darfur. Unforgivably, the so-called international community usually ignores them. But none inspires cries of esteem for the perpetrators and acclaim for their crimes. And nowhere are the victims—defenseless civilians, including children and their mothers—blamed for being murdered. That is what is happening now. The deadliest single day in the post-Holocaust history of the Jewish people has been greeted in some quarters with joy and—to be blunt—an entirely undisguised hatred of Jews.

Many of the sentiments that have been expressed—on social media, during street marches, and in the pages of various publications—reveal an astonishing distance from anything that might be considered rational political judgment and ordinary humanity. At the “All Out for Palestine” rally in Times Square, held just one day after the massacre, elated chants of “700!”—the number of estimated Israeli deaths at the time—rang out, and demonstrators made throat-slitting gestures. A speaker at a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally in Brighton, England, also held on October 8th, described the attacks as “beautiful and inspiring.” The image of a hang-glider—just like the ones Hamas used!—with a Palestinian flag has gone viral on the web, posted by everyone from Black Lives Matter/Chicago to neo-Nazi groups, which gives intersectionality a whole new meaning.

On the streets of Brighton today this woman said that the murderous mayhem of Hamas terrorists in Israel was “beautiful” and a “success”.

They killed 600 Israelis in one day which she said “we need to celebrate”.

In Britain. In 2023. Absolutely despicable. pic.twitter.com/DaRYspP7Ru

— Heidi Bachram 🎗️ (@HeidiBachram) October 8, 2023

It is likely that many of these groups—especially those composed of privileged students who promiscuously toss about words like “genocide,” “settler-colonialism,” and “fascism”—have scant (if any) knowledge of Middle East politics or history, and couldn’t tell you the difference between the river and the sea. Many are simply advertising their “anticolonial” credentials, though I imagine that the usually stern Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran must be smiling in amazement as he sees just how many protestors in the West echo his thoughts and subscribe to his plans—openly articulated—to destroy the “Zionist entity,” even if they don’t quite know that they’re doing so.

But (presumably) knowledgeable intellectuals were also quick to jump into the fray. In the New Left Review, Britain’s leading Marxist journal, Tariq Ali praised the terrorists for “rising up against the colonizers” and implied, bizarrely, that the murders resulted from Palestinian frustration with Israel’s recent enormous pro-democracy demonstrations. In the London Review of Books, Amjad Iraqi noted the horrifying nature of the attacks but praised them for “shatter[ing] a psychological barrier,” though it might be argued that civilization depends on the maintenance of such barriers.

In Dissent, a journal with which I have long been associated and that was formerly the home of Michael Walzer’s liberal-left Zionism, history professor Gabriel Winant described Israel as a “genocide machine” and argued that Israeli victims should not be grieved. Joseph Massad, a tenured professor at Columbia who teaches Middle Eastern studies and intellectual history, was unable to contain his enthusiasm: the attacks were “innovative,” “astonishing,” a “major achievement,” “awesome,” “incredible,” and “a stunning victory”; he wondered with excitement “if this is the start of the Palestinian War of Liberation.” (Thousands have signed a petition demanding that Massad be fired; tempting though this is, I maintain that these are the times to defend free-speech principles.) Some student organizations do have ties to the region and, presumably, know what’s going on there. The inaptly named Students for Justice in Palestine, the most bloodthirsty of student groups, declared “Glory to Our Martyrs”; described the massacre as “a historic win”; and demanded, “Do not let Western media call this terrorism. This is DECOLONIZATION.”

To equate such pro-Hamas groups and activists with being “pro-Palestinian” should be a misnomer, just as it would be to call violent settlers in the West Bank “pro-Israel.” Yet the clear and often overtly expressed implication—of the demonstrators, the articles, the cascade of statements and open letters—is that the October 7th attacks and the Palestinian national project are synonymous. If not, why do so many demonstrators lustily echo the Hamas program? (At my own university, much to my shame: “We don’t want no two states, we want all of it.”) Even among those who would never actually align themselves with a terror group, there is cursory—and sometimes zero—condemnation of the killers, which is replaced by censure of Zionism as a presumptively racist-imperialist project and by hasty pivots to the so-called “root cause” of Hamas’s violence.

Why the euphemistic language, as if the Left is too delicate to look atrocity in the face? At Columbia University, 130 professors, prominent scholars among them, characterized the massacres as a “military operation,” which unfortunately echoes Vladimir Putin’s description of his invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation.” (October 7th was also quite special.) In the New York Review of Books, some of our country’s most esteemed writers, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Ford—who surely know the difference between language that clarifies and language that occludes—described the murderous rampage in an odd way: “On Saturday, after sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza.”

Why the cowardly inability to face the cruelty: the infants murdered with sharp objects, the heads without bodies and vice versa, the terrorizing of children, the women stripped naked and shot point-blank, the burning of entire families, the mutilations, the torture, and perhaps most of all, the jubilant laughter of the killers as they accomplished their tasks? Letters (here, here, and here) signed by thousands of artists, writers, academics, philosophers, and journalists in the United States and United Kingdom—Tilda Swinton! Jonathan Lethem! Nan Goldin!—have castigated Israel without ever mentioning the Hamas attacks. Why this desperate attempt to “disappear” October 7th, as if it is already ancient—or irrelevant—history? The mealy-mouthed evasions and pretzel-like contortions of the cultural elite are an ignoble thing to behold. Jewish Lives Matter is, clearly, not a rallying cry for many on today’s Left.

In 1979, leftists who supported the Iranian Revolution had a rude awakening when the mullahs came to power and promptly executed them, along with secularists, union organizers, intellectuals, feminists, and everyone else who fit into the enormously capacious category of a counterrevolutionary. There was a lesson here: Activists have the responsibility to know who and what they support, and to separate themselves—openly and decisively—from programs and regimes that are predicated on violence and repression. Similarly, those who imagine that Hamas’s slaughters may have promoted “liberation,” “justice,” and “freedom” for Palestinians, as the banners demand, have a big surprise in store.

Unlike Iran in 1979, though, there’s no mystery as to what kind of state Hamas (an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) aims to create; we need only look at what it already has created. This time, no one can plead ignorance. There’s little liberation, justice, or freedom to be found in Gaza, where there are no opposition political parties, no elections, and no freedom of religion, the press, or protest. Opponents are arrested, tortured, and sometimes executed. (Yahya Sinwar, a head of Hamas’s armed wing, was known as “the butcher of Khan Younis” for his brutality toward other Palestinians.) Abortion and homosexuality are outlawed (what are those protestors with “Queers for Palestine” signs thinking?); mentioning trans rights would be unwise. It is legal for husbands to beat their wives, and so-called honor killings go unpunished. The ruling clique is notoriously corrupt, and though Gazans are very poor, Hamas is a very rich organization. “I Stand with Palestine!” demonstrators and writers proudly proclaim while lauding Hamas for having “rejuvenated a sense of political possibility” and hastening “the hour of liberation.” But what, exactly, are they standing for? And what kind of liberation will this be? Aside from the Taliban, Hamas has established the least progressive pseudo-state on Earth. The lesson of Iran has apparently not been learned; history is repeating itself not as farce but as tragedy.

Much has been written about the occupation; much more needs to be. In no way do I minimize the increasingly brazen, homicidal violence of some settlers, or the conduct of the crazy messianic zealots in the current Israeli government. An absolute precondition for any political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians will be the end of the Netanyahu coalition and its ideology, as well as the defeat of Hamas. But Hamas isn’t opposed to the occupation, and it has made this position abundantly clear. It has responded to every move toward Palestinian sovereignty, including Israel’s unconditional withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the signing of the Oslo Accords, with deepening violence, including rocket attacks and suicide bombings. (David Grossman recently told the New Yorker that had Hamas turned Gaza into a peaceful and prosperous enclave, as many Palestinians and Israelis had hoped, subsequent withdrawals from West Bank settlements would have proceeded.) What Hamas calls “usurpation” means Israel itself, regardless of borders. Any political agreement, including two states or even a binational one, is blasphemy: “So-called peaceful solutions and international conferences” stand “in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” its founding document and subsequent actions make clear.

The events of October 7th have clarified to Israelis from across the political spectrum—and should to everyone else—just what it means to make Palestine judenrein, as Hamas’s founding document and its current leaders promise. Indeed, the only way to “free Palestine from the river to sea,” as thousands of demonstrators worldwide are chanting, is to kill (or at best expel) all the Jews who live there, which is precisely what Hamas openly states is its primary goal. (Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently released a video in which she endorsed this demand, which she then ludicrously tried to spin as “an aspirational call for ... peaceful coexistence.” Perhaps she imagines that the millions of Israelis expelled from Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, Syria, and a host of other Arab countries will be offered the “right of return.”) Hamas specifies that every Muslim, including women and “the slave,” is duty-bound to join in the eschatological struggle to cleanse Palestine of “the Jews,” whom it identifies as the world’s most powerful force and mankind’s greatest enemy. October 7th was the practice of that principle.

.@POTUS, the majority of the American people are not with you on this one. #CeasefireNow pic.twitter.com/rV97zrMkad

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) November 3, 2023

The determination of many on the Western Left to either ignore this program or refuse to believe it—despite Hamas’s consistent candor about its aims and means—is a sign of intellectual Orientalism: Palestinians are viewed only as helpless, reactive victims rather than people who generate ideas and actions for which they can be held accountable. But of course they do create political worldviews and programs, and Hamas has been especially voluble of late in explaining its future plans. Just last week, Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad affirmed that his organization planned many more October 7th-type attacks until it “annihilates” Israel; a week later, Hamas spokesman Taher El-Nounou told the New York Times, “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders.” This makes calls for a “mutual ceasefire,” in Tlaib’s words, nonsensical.

Hamas Official Ghazi Hamad: We Will Repeat the October 7 Attack Time and Again Until Israel Is Annihilated; We Are Victims - Everything We Do Is Justified #Hamas #Gaza #Palestinians pic.twitter.com/kXu3U0BtAP

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) November 1, 2023

In fact, a ceasefire (as opposed to a humanitarian pause) would be entirely unilateral on Israel’s part, which raises the question of why Israel would lay down its arms against a forthrightly eliminationist enemy that holds more than 220 hostages. What would happen the day after that one-sided cessation? (Hamas has shot almost 10,000 rockets into Israel, including Tel Aviv, since October 7th; in the north, Hezbollah launches attacks.) Apparently, Hamas should be allowed to keep its bombs and bomb factories, assault rifles, drones, grenades, missiles, rockets, and tens of thousands of fighters as it plans future mass slaughters. How this will lead to anything approaching peace, as its advocates insist, rather than to war ad infinitum, as Hamas promises, is bewildering. The other option, of course, is that many believe that unending death and destruction are precisely the conditions that Israelis deserve.

Hamas does not recognize the category of “civilian” when it comes to Israelis, which is why a straight-faced, high-level Hamas spokesman could tell Britain’s Sky News: “We didn’t kill any civilians.” He wasn’t exactly lying; that’s just how he sees it. What is less well known—but is key to understanding the humanitarian calamity in Gaza right now—is that the group does not recognize the category of civilian when it comes to Palestinians. Nathan Thrall, formerly head of the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli project and a frequent critic of Israel, has pointed out that Hamas undoubtedly knew that the extraordinary cruelty of these attacks would be met with an extraordinarily deadly Israeli response. “Clearly, this act by Hamas is suicidal,” Thrall said the day after the massacre. “I think that the attacks are virtually guaranteed to bring civilian deaths [in Palestine] on a greater scale than we have seen.”

Amir Tibon, a leftwing journalist who lived in Kibbutz Nahal Oz (where 14 were killed and five kidnapped), observed that on October 7th, Hamas “knew they had signed the death certificate of thousands of Gazans. For them it was a price worth paying for the joy of murdering my teenage neighbor and kidnapping children. They knew Gaza would suffer terrible, shocking destruction. They did it anyway.” Hamas has since affirmed what Thrall and Tibon knew: “Without a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big,” Khalil al-Hayya, a top official, told the Times. In fact, Hamas has always found that carnage in Gaza—and the hatred for Israel that it engenders—is among its very best tools. Dead Palestinian babies and dead Israeli babies both serve its purposes, albeit for different reasons. The fact that this is incomprehensibly perverse doesn’t make it less true.

Israel is, of course, accountable for the decisions it takes, including the siege of Gaza, which I believe is morally wrong, and the ground invasion, which isn’t. Though it did not seek this war, it is fully responsible for its actions and their consequences, including unintended ones. The civilian toll in Gaza is appalling. But the enormous numbers of unarmed Palestinians who have been, in Hamas’s parlance, “martyred” are no problem for the leadership: as the group’s founding document explains, “Death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of ... wishes.” That is not mere rhetoric; as the massacres unfolded, senior political leader Ismail Haniyeh insisted that “victory or martyrdom” are the only choices. Ordinary Palestinians, who had no say in the attacks, may see things differently. They are stunned by and terrified of the fury of the Israeli response.

IN HIS OWN WORDS: Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh, from the comfort of his home in Qatar: "We need the blood of women, children, and the elderly of #Gaza... so as to awaken our revolutionary spirit."

Listen to this vile terrorist scum sacrifice his own people, while living in the… pic.twitter.com/GL7ZTfa5Dw

— Embassy of Israel to the USA | #IsraelUSA75 (@IsraelinUSA) October 27, 2023

Even as the corpses pile up, Hamas remains unconcerned; just last week, Hamad brushed off civilian casualties by explaining, “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.” Moussa Abu Marzouk, another spokesman, has insisted that the group bears no responsibility for the fate or well-being of Gazan civilians and has acknowledged that its extensive network of underground tunnels is meant to protect Hamas fighters, not civilians. (Unlike the “martyrs,” including children, whom Hamas is proud to sacrifice, its fighters are safe underground where they hoard stocks of food, fuel, medicine and, of course, weapons. Much of the senior leadership, however, lives in luxury in Doha, Tehran, and other cities.) Hamas’s desire for dead Gazans has never been more evident than in this war. It has not joined the international calls for a humanitarian corridor, and it refuses to release the kidnapped hostages, which is the precondition for ending the siege.

There is, and always has been, another tradition, another sense, of what it means to be “progressive” and to stand with the oppressed. In 2011, Fred Halliday wrote an essay titled “Terrorism in Historical Perspective.” It is the most intellectually and morally lucid work on the subject that I know. Halliday addressed himself to his comrades on the Left and made a crucial argument: Any movement that claims to represent an oppressed people must act in an ethical way even if it is not in power and perceives itself as weak.

Oppression is not a carte blanche for severing heads from bodies, shooting hundreds of young festival-goers, bludgeoning people to death, murdering children in front of parents and vice versa, killing naked women point-blank, and kidnapping babies and the elderly; there is no universe in which these are revolutionary, emancipatory, or anticolonialist acts, much less “beautiful” ones. Sadism and violence are not synonyms. Sexual torture cannot be anti-imperialist—nor is it an understandable, much less inevitable, response to oppression. An eliminationist program is not a freedom charter. History has proved, again and again, that terrorists and freedom fighters aren’t the same, which is why the former never achieve anything approaching either liberation or justice. There is no room for “yes, but.” Why, when it comes to the deaths of Israelis, is this so hard to understand?

The Western Left’s response to October 7th will, I believe, be viewed as a moment of moral corruption on a par with the defense of Stalin’s purges, Czechoslovakia’s antisemitic show trials of 1952, the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and Poland’s antisemitic expulsions of 1968, along with the denial of the Khmer Rouge genocide (see under: Chomsky, Noam) and the adulation of China’s vicious Cultural Revolution. Since October 7th, there have been a handful of liberal and Left writers who have written bravely and honestly: Jonathan Freedland and Howard Jacobson in the Guardian, Michael Walzer in the Atlantic; Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times, Alan Johnson and Cary Nelson in Fathom, Seyla Benhabib on Medium. They are, alas, exceptions. Halliday’s leftism—the leftism of humane universalism rather than anti-imperialism—is in eclipse, as was Memmi’s.

Except in Israel. Somehow, that nation of genocidal-white supremacist-fascist-settler-colonials has produced a Left that still adheres to the traditional principles of universalist dignity and equality, and that isn’t too squeamish to recognize terrorism for what it is. It rejects Manichean reductionism—something it can ill afford—and can therefore hold more than one thought at a time. It understands that Israel is a powerful country and that it is existentially threatened by its enemies. It understands that it is a perpetrator of the occupation and a victim of terrorism. It knows that one can oppose the way in which Netanyahu’s government is conducting the war while also avowing that a war must be fought. It understands that vanquishing Hamas and defeating the fanatical ultra-nationalists in its midst—and in its government—are not only related but utterly interdependent. It rejects the concept of collective guilt, whether of Israelis or Palestinians. It has a pretty good understanding of what antisemitism is. Of necessity, it comprehends tragedy. Its tone is sober rather than histrionic. These are the people who have done more to defend Palestinian rights and promote Palestinian sovereignty than all the West’s self-aggrandizing decolonialists, boycotters, and anti-imperialists combined.

Michael Sfard is one of Israel’s most important human-rights lawyers; he has spent his life defending Palestinian rights inside and outside of courtrooms. He recently condemned, in the harshest terms, Israel’s political response to October 7th:

Israel today is a country and society where ... lawmakers from the ruling party are openly and unashamedly calling for a “second Nakba,” where the defense minister orders a denial of water, food and fuel to millions of civilians, a country whose president, Isaac Herzog, Israel's moderate face, says that all Gazans are responsible for Hamas’ crimes.

When the political and military leadership loses all restraint and approves ideas about a massive blow to civilians, we’re creating a society where the process of stripping away the humanity of the people on the other side of the border has been completed. And when that happens, the inferno is near.

But he also addressed his (putative) allies:

Not far from us, on their own way to the black hole, hover those who call themselves members of the “progressive left.” They’re finding it hard to unhesitatingly condemn—and without fleeing to the “context”—a satanic orgy of destroying civilian Israeli communities near Gaza, along with their residents. Some are even blabbering something about decolonization being an ugly process; that’s what happened in Algeria and Kenya, for example.

I read that and die of shame. Maybe you didn’t understand, but the struggle to end the occupation and achieve independence for the Palestinian people is part of the universal struggle to defend everyone’s human rights, not vice versa. The idea of the sanctity of human life, the noble idea that every person has basic rights that shouldn’t be undermined, isn’t a tool for implementing Palestinian independence but the other way around.

The Western Left, basking in the safe, prosperous cities of the liberal democracies, lives in a very different world from the one Michael Sfard inhabits. Its moral rot may have suddenly become clear, but an ethical collapse takes time to develop. October 7th reveals the long-simmering theoretical confusions, and the moral void, that dominates many of today’s “progressive” movements. A Left that is fixated on “decolonization” mistakes a death cult for a liberation movement and is unable to recognize a bloodbath, even one that was filmed, and publicized worldwide, by the killers themselves. A Left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy. A Left that divides the world between racists and antiracists and is obsessed with “people who look like me” can’t understand that the clash of two national movements has nothing to do with color or race.

A Left that celebrates diversity vilifies one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse countries in the world. A Left that prizes itself on defending refugees castigates a nation founded almost entirely by refugees—among the most immiserated and persecuted in history—as “settler-colonial.” A Left that divides the world between noble “native” peoples and the aliens who pollute them reproduces the neo-fascist worldview of the far-Right, from Donald Trump to Marine Le Pen. A Left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protestors demanding women’s freedom; the homicidal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad; and Hezbollah, another fundamentalist Islamic group that is dedicated to Israel’s destruction and that terrorizes, and sometimes assassinates, fellow Lebanese who oppose it. What kind of Left gets into bed with such forces? Nor has it noticed that, since October 7th, ISIS and al-Qaeda have urged Muslims to step up worldwide “operations against the Jews” in solidarity with Hamas.

And so, as always, the eternally vexing Jewish Question emerges, though many on the Left seem to think it’s been answered. A Left that has spent years, and spilled mountains of ink, tediously insisting that anti-Zionism cannot morph into antisemitism is unable to discern, much less clearly denounce, a militia of avowed Jew-killers. A Left that sees systemic racism in every nook and cranny—and in every (white) heart—can’t recognize the systemic antisemitism that results in mass murder. “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands!” a Hamas terrorist exulted as he called his parents, in the midst of the October attacks, to tell them the good news and send photos to prove it. That cry—both modern and ancient—must also be seen as a root cause of October 7th; that, too, is a key part of its “context.”

Individually and collectively, Israeli leftists have expressed their sorrow, their shock, and their anger at the Western Left’s betrayal. Crucially, they have tried to educate their supposed comrades about what a true Left response—to both the occupation and October 7th—must be. A group statement signed by some of Israel’s most prominent intellectuals read in part:

Many of our peers worldwide have expressed strong opposition to Hamas’s attack and have offered unambiguous support for its victims. Prominent voices in the Arab world, too, have made it clear that there is no justification for sadistic murder of innocent people. However, to our dismay, some elements within the global left, individuals who were, until now, our political partners, have reacted with indifference to these horrific events and sometimes even justified Hamas’s actions. ... And there are even those—no small number—for whom the darkest day in our society’s history was a cause for celebration.

This array of responses surprised us. We never imagined that individuals on the left, advocates of equality, freedom, justice, and welfare, would reveal such extreme moral insensitivity and political recklessness. ... We emphasize: there is no contradiction between staunchly opposing the Israeli subjugation and occupation of Palestinians and unequivocally condemning brutal acts of violence against innocent civilians. In fact, every consistent leftist must hold both positions simultaneously.

Sociologist Eva Illouz was even more blunt. She closed a recent article in Haaretz with this farewell note:

Many Arabs, within Israel and without, have shown the compassion the doctrinal left has so shockingly lacked. They have stood by our side. It is them with whom we must build a party of humanity determined to bring justice and peace. The global left has made itself irrelevant from now on. 

The Left in Israel, unlike the global Left, recognizes that Hamas must be eliminated, not appeased. “A country that doesn’t kill the people who tried to murder my daughters, and those who sent them, has lost its right to exist,” Tibon wrote. Civilians in Gaza must be protected whenever possible, but Hamas’s concealment of fighters and weapons within the civilian population and civilian sites guarantees that the war will be extremely ugly. Postwar, new political landscapes will emerge, though only a fool would predict what they’ll be. (One thing is clear: the political leaderships of both peoples have led them, and each other, to ruin.) October 7th, Tibon wrote, “hasn’t changed my belief, based on a cold, calculated reading of reality, that in the long run we must find ways to share this land. ... But first we must survive.” It has become obvious that there are many on the Left who dispute that last sentence.

On Byung-Chul Han's "Psychopolitics"

Anton Cebalo, "Living in a Time of Psychopolitics: How an idea by philosopher Byung-Chul Han helps us reframe our world"

In the early 1970s, psychologist Herbert Freudenberger wrote of a condition he was seeing more and more among his patients: emotional exhaustion coupled with a loss of motivation and commitment. He called it “burnout” — borrowing a term initially used in the underground by those suffering severe withdrawal from drug abuse.1

It quickly caught on both clinically and among everyday people, helped by Freudenberger’s autobiographical style in describing it. He had experienced the condition himself in bouts. But more importantly, the diagnosis came at a critical time in American society as it was transitioning to a more “post-industrial” way of life, yet another term coined around the same time.2 Americans were graduating in greater numbers and increasingly pursuing knowledge-based work in offices, which was especially susceptible to stress and psychological ailments.3

The “burnout” of professionals in a “post-industrial” society: the two ideas were clearly linked. They also provided a window into the new era, one that was loosely being called the “Information Age.” The immediate relevance of Freudenberger’s ideas was obvious, and would soon be made into wellness questionnaires by psychologist Christina Maslach and others. By the 1980s, corporate management realized this malady was here to stay and began to craft methods specifically for dealing with demotivated labor.

These developments have since had time to deepen and mature, and today are more relevant than ever. In the last two years, many workers have resigned, often suddenly, due to a lack of fulfillment and burnout in what’s been called the “Great Resignation.” These familiar sentiments are the starting point for philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s writings which have grown popular as of late.

In his 2017 work Psychopolitics, Han writes of how power today has grown reliant on manipulating psychological states, uniquely made possible by technologies of control. Its symptoms are of the mind, like burnout and diseases of despair, coupled with addiction and compulsion. Understanding psychopolitics helps us to reframe the time in which we live, where one’s mental state has become a leading place of conflict.

Life Under Psychopolitics

Psychopolitics opens with an ominous statement: “freedom will prove to have been merely an interlude," something that's most felt when "passing from one way of living to another."4 Byung-Chul Han views the current situation as the turning of a new page, whose psychological ailments constitute a “profound crisis of freedom." The forces responsible operate on a level which he calls “psychopolitics.”

While Byung-Chul Han writes clearly, he also has a tendency to write aphoristically, very much in the style of a pamphlet. He is best known for his social diagnoses, writing often on themes like alienation, burnout, and how market demands have broken up the social fabric. Psychopolitics itself is a collection of short essays and a distillation of his worldview.

The book, however, is not historical by any means which may confuse the reader over how any of this is unique to our time. After all, psychological techniques on the unconscious, either in the realm of politics or markets, have been used to great effect since the early 20th century. For example, can fascism be called a form of psychopolitics? It certainly relied on mass psychology.

Psychopolitics is not "psychology applied to politics," though. Han describes psychopolitics as a new stage in how we relate to power, made possible by online life. Long ago, in agrarian societies of the past, power was exercised by the sword and threat of death.5 In succeeding industrial societies, power was exercised not by the threat of death, but by discipline and regulation over life. It needed to efficiently manage the physical bodies needed for production.6 Now in post-industrial societies, power is exercised by allowing individuals to exploit themselves in an open, transparent, and increasingly zero-sum environment. Rather than controlling bodies, Han argues psychopolitics is mainly about souls and minds.7

Because sentiment travels fastest in the digital realm, Han likens psychopolitics to a "dictatorship of emotion" in its ability to manipulate desire and opinion.8 In such an environment, "freedom switches over to compulsion" and addiction is rampant.9 Participation is easily reduced to grievance and complaint.10 Grand narratives of the future that used to motivate the past break down.11 This is because there is no longer a "political we" like before nor are there clear classes of mutual antagonism, Han argues.12 Instead, a world dominated by psychopolitics produces a constant "inner struggle against oneself."13 The boundaries between work and leisure weaken as well.14 And trust altogether declines because “the more we are confronted with information, the more our suspicion grows.”15

The ideal subject for psychopolitics according to Han is the always-optimizing "self-entrepreneur" who is unable to form relationships "free of purpose."16 Such social relationships, he argues, would ideally be the basis for healthy, non-coercive freedom. Psychopolitics tends to instead produce generalized anti-sociality.

Han’s writing tends to cut through the noise with concise insight, and I don’t want to quote the entire book here. But what is most convincing about his view is how abundantly clear its symptoms are.

In a previous post, I have already covered the ongoing “social recession” and community decline. Still, there are other signs we live in psychopolitical times: random acts of anti-social violence; deep democratic discontentment17; historical amnesia and memory loss18; and an unprecedented rise in mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, insomnia, and attention-deficit disorders.19

In many ways, it is evident we are living in a psychopolitical time, one especially susceptible to maladies of the mind and soul. A quote for today ought to be “protect me from what I want,” a phrase Han borrows from artist Jenny Holzer.

Byung-Chul Han’s Dystopia

While these are all pressing problems in their own right, what really strikes the reader when reading Han’s work is the alarming tone. Really, what he is intent on illustrating are the dire stakes if we do not undo “that which is changing freedom into coercion.”20

On this question, he unabashedly sets his target on “Big Data,” the platforms and market forces exploiting psychopolitics. The tech monopolies operate on a vast scale, transforming people into raw data and “quantifiable selves” amenable to surveillance, manipulation, and directed consumption. These entities allied with the state could leverage psychopolitics and its proclivity for emotion to simulate desired outcomes. It is creating a situation where, Han believes, “free will itself is at stake."21

He writes:

In the age of digital psychopolitics… influence takes place at the pre-reflexive level.

For human beings to be able to act freely, the future must be open. However, Big Data is making it possible to predict human behavior. This means that the future is becoming calculable and controllable. Digital psychopolitics transforms the negativity of freely made decisions into the positivity of factual states.

Persons are being positivized into things which can be quantified, measured and steered. Needless to say, no thing can be free. But at the same thing, things are more transparent than persons.22

The disciplinary power [of industrial society] discovered “population” as a productive and reproductive mass to be administered carefully. Reproductive cycles, birth and death rates, levels of general health, and life expectancy provided the objects for regulation.

However, this approach is unsuited to the neoliberal regime, which exploits the psyche above all. Big Data provides the means for establishing not just an individual but a collective psychogram, perhaps even the psychogram of the unconscious itself.23

[Digital psychopolitics] manages to intervene in psychic processes in a prospective fashion. Quite possibly, it is even faster than free will. As such, it could overtake it. If so, this would herald the end of freedom.

It is possible that Big Data can even read desires we do not know we habor… [thus] rendering the collective unconscious accessible... in the position to take control of mass behavior on a level that escapes detection.24

The invisible technological forces that Han describes are already in play, molding culture and politics. The thought of a society managed through algorithmic prediction and suggestion is a disturbing prospect. Yet, I am also encouraged by the fact that these systems have so far failed miserably in predicting the future. Human spontaneity is still clearly present nowadays, often expressing itself in spite of any attempt at control, albeit very chaotically. Society has not yet been reduced to just inputs and outputs.

Living in Spite of Psychopolitics

Byung-Chul Han illustrates a grim picture of technological control and emotional manipulation, whose complexity is hard to fathom. Still, we interact with it every day, and part of its appeal is it is mostly curated for us. A psychopolitical breakthrough was the popularization of the “infinite scroll” in the early 2010s, as timelines moved away from being strictly chronological, with Facebook leading the way.25 This also coincided with social media being less about connecting with real-life friends.

A while back, I stumbled upon an essay written in 2017 on a website called Graphite Journal. In it, an anonymous user writes, “the internet is larger than any one metropolis, but browsing it today feels like walking down a narrow circular hallway.”

They go on to recount a story of how in 1956, philosopher Guy Debord looked over some sociological studies on Parisian city-dwellers and noticed something similar. He was surprised to find their movements across the city quite limited, “forming a triangle with little deviation.” From such a realization, Debord proposed the idea of the dérive: the conscious decision to pass through areas and moods previously untraveled, drawn by whatever attraction one finds. The goal of dérive was to reject the narrow hallways one is forced into, and instead, turn them into bigger worlds. “It is high time that we develop a dérive for the internet,” the user writes.

When I read Han’s work, I’m reminded of the need to cultivate thoughts and worlds beyond what’s curated for us. And perhaps that also starts with cultivating our physical public spaces and third places as well, so that we have an actual home and community outside of psychopolitical dynamics. Oddly enough, I think the solution, in this case, seems fairly straightforward although admittedly difficult to carry out in practice.

1 Wilmar B. Schaufeli, “Burnout: A Short Socio-Cultural History.” Pg. 105, 107.

2 American sociologist Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society in 1974.

3 What makes post-industrial society possible is the growth of knowledge-based work led by educated workers. In 1960, only 41% of Americans finished high school and just 7.7% graduated college. See below.

 

4 Byung-Chul Han. Psychopolitics (2017), pg. 1.

5 Psychopolitics, pg. 19.

6 Industrial society concerned itself with administering bodies. One of its breakthroughs was Taylorism, a form of scientific management that became popular at the turn of the 20th century named after Frederick Winslow Taylor. It was a new way of organizing labor and capital in production. This would be applied to state planning, and later utilized by both fascist and communist-aligned governments to transform their public.

Some other focuses of modern industrial society were eugenics and demographic questions.

7 Han borrows this “body and soul” language from philosopher Gilles Deleuze who he quotes. Disciplinary society was about the body and psychopolitics is about the soul.

8 Psychopolitics, pg. 46.

9 Psychopolitics, pg. 2.

10 Psychopolitics, pg. 3.

11 In Revolt of the Public (2013), Martin Gurri writes that the new digital public is largely a negating force that tends to break down all authority and norms. This is because it struggles to form a positive vision of society. This fact is a core feature of psychopolitics as well according to Han.

12 Psychopolitics, pg. 6.

13 Psychopolitics, pg. 5.

14 Many can vouch for feeling like work and leisure bleed into each other. In some cases, online life can completely distort one’s internal rhythm and sense of time which is why sleep disorders are more common nowadays.

15 There’s a widely-shared quote by Harvard Biologist E.O. Wilson who said that “we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom.” It should be said that more and more information does not necessarily confer more meaning. In fact, it’s the opposite. Han talks about this in a recent interview with Noema Magazine.

16 Psychopolitics, pg. 2.

17 In 2019, Cambridge University’s Centre for the Future of Democracy recorded the highest level of discontentment across all democracies since it began conducting survey research in 1995. There’s been no follow-up since the pandemic.

18 L. M. Sacasas on his substack blog The Convivial Society has written some excellent essays on how the internet distorts our sense of time and memory.

He writes:

On the internet, there is no present, only variously organized fragments of the past.

We no longer encounter the past principally as a coherent narrative informing our present and future action into the world. The past, is now encoded in ponderous databases, and it can be readily and endlessly re-interpreted, reshuffled, recombined, and rearranged. This activity is what now consumes our time and energy.

On the internet, fighting about what has happened is far easier than imagining what could happen.

Because we live in the past when we are online, we will find ourselves fighting over the past. Because our fighting is itself inscribed and inscriptions cannot be defeated only overwhelmed, it very quickly becomes part of what is fought over. The casus belli recedes inexorably from view as it is layered over by the cascading inscriptions, which themselves become things to be fought over. Soon, it becomes impossible to map the course of the conflict or even make sense of it. And nothing changes.

19 The alarming rise of mental disorders is well-documented, largely affecting those who grew up digitally. A turning point seems to be around 2012. But there has been a steady increase in prescriptions for anti-depressants, SSRIs, and ADHD medication since the 1990s as well.

20 Psychopolitics, pg. 2.

21 Psychopolitics, pg. 60-61.

22 Psychopolitics, pg. 12.

23 Psychopolitics, pg. 21.

24 Psychopolitics, pg. 63-65.

25 https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/6/5469952/facebook-goes-back-to-basics-with-latest-news-feed-redesign

Ridiculous Men...

Fyodor Dostoevsky, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" (1877)
Translated by Constance Garnett

Chapter I

I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me - and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly dear to me. I could join in their laughter--not exactly at myself, but through affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as I look at them. Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they won't understand it.

In old days I used to be miserable at seeming ridiculous. Not seeming, but being. I have always been ridiculous, and I have known it, perhaps, from the hour I was born. Perhaps from the time I was seven years old I knew I was ridiculous. Afterwards I went to school, studied at the university, and, do you know, the more I learned, the more thoroughly I understood that I was ridiculous. So that it seemed in the end as though all the sciences I studied at the university existed only to prove and make evident to me as I went more deeply into them that I was ridiculous. It was the same with life as it was with science. With every year the same consciousness of the ridiculous figure I cut in every relation grew and strengthened. Everyone always laughed at me. But not one of them knew or guessed that if there were one man on earth who knew better than anybody else that I was absurd, it was myself, and what I resented most of all was that they did not know that. But that was my own fault; I was so proud that nothing would have ever induced me to tell it to anyone. This pride grew in me with the years; and if it had happened that I allowed myself to confess to anyone that I was ridiculous, I believe that I should have blown out my brains the same evening. Oh, how I suffered in my early youth from the fear that I might give way and confess it to my schoolfellows. But since I grew to manhood, I have for some unknown reason become calmer, though I realised my awful characteristic more fully every year. I say 'unknown', for to this day I cannot tell why it was. Perhaps it was owing to the terrible misery that was growing in my soul through something which was of more consequence than anything else about me: that something was the conviction that had come upon me that nothing in the world mattered. I had long had an inkling of it, but the full realisation came last year almost suddenly. I suddenly felt that it was all the same to me whether the world existed or whether there had never been anything at all: I began to feel with all my being that there was nothing existing. At first I fancied that many things had existed in the past, but afterwards I guessed that there never had been anything in the past either, but that it had only seemed so for some reason. Little by little I guessed that there would be nothing in the future either. Then I left off being angry with people and almost ceased to notice them. Indeed this showed itself even in the pettiest trifles: I used, for instance, to knock against people in the street. And not so much from being lost in thought: what had I to think about? I had almost given up thinking by that time; nothing mattered to me. If at least I had solved my problems! Oh, I had not settled one of them, and how many there were! But I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.

And it was after that that I found out the truth. I learnt the truth last November--on the third of November, to be precise-- and I remember every instant since. It was a gloomy evening, one of the gloomiest possible evenings. I was going home at about eleven o'clock, and I remember that I thought that the evening could not be gloomier. Even physically. Rain had been falling all day, and it had been a cold, gloomy, almost menacing rain, with, I remember, an unmistakable spite against mankind. Suddenly between ten and eleven it had stopped, and was followed by a horrible dampness, colder and damper than the rain, and a sort of steam was rising from everything, from every stone in the street, and from every by-lane if one looked down it as far as one could. A thought suddenly occurred to me, that if all the street lamps had been put out it would have been less cheerless, that the gas made one's heart sadder because it lighted it all up. I had had scarcely any dinner that day, and had been spending the evening with an engineer, and two other friends had been there also. I sat silent--I fancy I bored them. They talked of something rousing and suddenly they got excited over it. But they did not really care, I could see that, and only made a show of being excited. I suddenly said as much to them. "My friends," I said, "you really do not care one way or the other." They were not offended, but they laughed at me. That was because I spoke without any not of reproach, simply because it did not matter to me. They saw it did not, and it amused them.

As I was thinking about the gas lamps in the street I looked up at the sky. The sky was horribly dark, but one could distinctly see tattered clouds, and between them fathomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a star, and began watching it intently. That was because that star had given me an idea: I decided to kill myself that night. I had firmly determined to do so two months before, and poor as I was, I bought a splendid revolver that very day, and loaded it. But two months had passed and it was still lying in my drawer; I was so utterly indifferent that I wanted to seize a moment when I would not be so indifferent--why, I don't know. And so for two months every night that I came home I thought I would shoot myself. I kept waiting for the right moment. And so now this star gave me a thought. I made up my mind that it should certainly be that night. And why the star gave me the thought I don't know.

And just as I was looking at the sky, this little girl took me by the elbow. The street was empty, and there was scarcely anyone to be seen. A cabman was sleeping in the distance in his cab. It was a child of eight with a kerchief on her head, wearing nothing but a wretched little dress all soaked with rain, but I noticed her wet broken shoes and I recall them now. They caught my eye particularly. She suddenly pulled me by the elbow and called me. She was not weeping, but was spasmodically crying out some words which could not utter properly, because she was shivering and shuddering all over. She was in terror about something, and kept crying, "Mammy, mammy!" I turned facing her, I did not say a word and went on; but she ran, pulling at me, and there was that note in her voice which in frightened children means despair. I know that sound. Though she did not articulate the words, I understood that her mother was dying, or that something of the sort was happening to them, and that she had run out to call someone, to find something to help her mother. I did not go with her; on the contrary, I had an impulse to drive her away. I told her first to go to a policeman. But clasping her hands, she ran beside me sobbing and gasping, and would not leave me. Then I stamped my foot and shouted at her. She called out "Sir! sir! . . ." but suddenly abandoned me and rushed headlong across the road. Some other passerby appeared there, and she evidently flew from me to him.

I mounted up to my fifth storey. I have a room in a flat where there are other lodgers. My room is small and poor, with a garret window in the shape of a semicircle. I have a sofa covered with American leather, a table with books on it, two chairs and a comfortable arm-chair, as old as old can be, but of the good old-fashioned shape. I sat down, lighted the candle, and began thinking. In the room next to mine, through the partition wall, a perfect Bedlam was going on. It had been going on for the last three days. A retired captain lived there, and he had half a dozen visitors, gentlemen of doubtful reputation, drinking vodka and playing stoss with old cards. The night before there had been a fight, and I know that two of them had been for a long time engaged in dragging each other about by the hair. The landlady wanted to complain, but she was in abject terror of the captain. There was only one other lodger in the flat, a thin little regimental lady, on a visit to Petersburg, with three little children who had been taken ill since they came into the lodgings. Both she and her children were in mortal fear of the captain, and lay trembling and crossing themselves all night, and the youngest child had a sort of fit from fright. That captain, I know for a fact, sometimes stops people in the Nevsky Prospect and begs. They won't take him into the service, but strange to say (that's why I am telling this), all this month that the captain has been here his behavior has caused me no annoyance. I have, of course, tried to avoid his acquaintance from the very beginning, and he, too, was bored with me from the first; but I never care how much they shout the other side of the partition nor how many of them there are in there: I sit up all night and forget them so completely that I do not even hear them. I stay awake till daybreak, and have been going on like that for the last year. I sit up all night in my arm-chair at the table, doing nothing. I only read by day. I sit--don't even think; ideas of a sort wander through my mind and I let them come and go as they will. A whole candle is burnt every night. I sat down quietly at the table, took out the revolver and put it down before me. When I had put it down I asked myself, I remember, "Is that so?" and answered with complete conviction, "It is." That is, I shall shoot myself. I knew that I should shoot myself that night for certain, but how much longer I should go on sitting at the table I did not know. And no doubt I should have shot myself if it had not been for that little girl.

 

Chapter II

You see, though nothing mattered to me, I could feel pain, for instance. If anyone had stuck me it would have hurt me. It was the same morally: if anything very pathetic happened, I should have felt pity just as I used to do in old days when there were things in life that did matter to me. I had felt pity that evening. I should have certainly helped a child. Why, then, had I not helped the little girl? Because of an idea that occurred to me at the time: when she was calling and pulling at me, a question suddenly arose before me and I could not settle it. The question was an idle one, but I was vexed. I was vexed at the reflection that if I were going to make an end of myself that night, nothing in life ought to have mattered to me. Why was it that all at once I did not feel a strange pang, quite incongruous in my position. Really I do not know better how to convey my fleeting sensation at the moment, but the sensation persisted at home when I was sitting at the table, and I was very much irritated as I had not been for a long time past. One reflection followed another. I saw clearly that so long as I was still a human being and not nothingness, I was alive and so could suffer, be angry and feel shame at my actions. So be it. But if I am going to kill myself, in two hours, say, what is the little girl to me and what have I to do with shame or with anything else in the world? I shall turn into nothing, absolutely nothing. And can it really be true that the consciousness that I shall completely cease to exist immediately and so everything else will cease to exist, does not in the least affect my feeling of pity for the child nor the feeling of shame after a contemptible action? I stamped and shouted at the unhappy child as though to say--not only I feel no pity, but even if I behave inhumanly and contemptibly, I am free to, for in another two hours everything will be extinguished. Do you believe that that was why I shouted that? I am almost convinced of it now. I seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended upon me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for me. I say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist for anyone when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like a phantom, as a mere appurtenance of my consciousness, for possibly all this world and all these people are only me myself.

I remember that as I sat and reflected, I turned all these new questions that swarmed one after another quite the other way, and thought of something quite new. For instance, a strange reflection suddenly occurred to me, that if I had lived before on the moon or on Mars and there had committed the most disgraceful and dishonourable action and had there been put to such shame and ignominy as one can only conceive and realise in dreams, in nightmares, and if, finding myself afterwards on earth, I were able to retain the memory of what I had done on the other planet and at the same time knew that I should never, under any circumstances, return there, then looking from the earth to the moon--should I care or not? Should I feel shame for that action or not? These were idle and superfluous questions for the revolver was already lying before me, and I knew in every fibre of my being that it would happen for certain, but they excited me and I raged. I could not die now without having first settled something. In short, the child had saved me, for I put off my pistol shot for the sake of these questions. Meanwhile the clamour had begun to subside in the captain's room: they had finished their game, were settling down to sleep, and meanwhile were grumbling and languidly winding up their quarrels. At that point, I suddenly fell asleep in my chair at the table--a thing which had never happened to me before. I dropped asleep quite unawares.

Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it! My brother died five years ago, for instance. I sometimes dream of him; he takes part in my affairs, we are very much interested, and yet all through my dream I quite know and remember that my brother is dead and buried. How is it that I am not surprised that, though he is dead, he is here beside me and working with me? Why is it that my reason fully accepts it? But enough. I will begin about my dream. Yes, I dreamed a dream, my dream of the third of November. They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream--oh, it revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of power!

Listen.


Chapter III

I have mentioned that I dropped asleep unawares and even seemed to be still reflecting on the same subjects. I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart--my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.

In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or are stabbed, or beaten, but you never feel pain unless, perhaps, you really bruise yourself against the bedstead, then you feel pain and almost always wake up from it. It was the same in my dream. I did not feel any pain, but it seemed as though with my shot everything within me was shaken and everything was suddenly dimmed, and it grew horribly black around me. I seemed to be blinded, and it benumbed, and I was lying on something hard, stretched on my back; I saw nothing, and could not make the slightest movement. People were walking and shouting around me, the captain bawled, the landlady shrieked--and suddenly another break and I was being carried in a closed coffin. And I felt how the coffin was shaking and reflected upon it, and for the first time the idea struck me that I was dead, utterly dead, I knew it and had no doubt of it, I could neither see nor move and yet I was feeling and reflecting. But I was soon reconciled to the position, and as one usually does in a dream, accepted the facts without disputing them.

And now I was buried in the earth. They all went away, I was left alone, utterly alone. I did not move. Whenever before I had imagined being buried the one sensation I associated with the grave was that of damp and cold. So now I felt that I was very cold, especially the tips of my toes, but I felt nothing else.

I lay still, strange to say I expected nothing, accepting without dispute that a dead man had nothing to expect. But it was damp. I don't know how long a time passed--whether an hour or several days, or many days. But all at once a drop of water fell on my closed left eye, making its way through the coffin lid; it was followed a minute later by a second, then a minute later by a third--and so on, regularly every minute. There was a sudden glow of profound indignation in my heart, and I suddenly felt in it a pang of physical pain. "That's my wound," I thought; "that's the bullet . . ." And drop after drop every minute kept falling on my closed eyelid. And all at once, not with my voice, but with my entire being, I called upon the power that was responsible for all that was happening to me:

"Whoever you may be, if you exist, and if anything more rational that what is happening here is possible, suffer it to be here now. But if you are revenging yourself upon me for my senseless suicide by the hideousness and absurdity of this subsequent existence, then let me tell you that no torture could ever equal the contempt which I shall go on dumbly feeling, though my martyrdom may last a million years!"

I made this appeal and held my peace. There was a full minute of unbroken silence and again another drop fell, but I knew with infinite unshakable certainty that everything would change immediately. And behold my grave suddenly was rent asunder, that is, I don't know whether it was opened or dug up, but I was caught up by some dark and unknown being and we found ourselves in space. I suddenly regained my sight. It was the dead of night, and never, never had there been such darkness. We were flying through space far away from the earth. I did not question the being who was taking me; I was proud and waited. I assured myself that I was not afraid, and was thrilled with ecstasy at the thought that I was not afraid. I do not know how long we were flying, I cannot imagine; it happened as it always does in dreams when you skip over space and time, and the laws of thought and existence, and only pause upon the points for which the heart yearns. I remember that I suddenly saw in the darkness a star. "Is that Sirius?" I asked impulsively, though I had not meant to ask questions.

"No, that is the star you saw between the clouds when you were coming home," the being who was carrying me replied.

I knew that it had something like a human face. Strange to say, I did not like that being, in fact I felt an intense aversion for it. I had expected complete non-existence, and that was why I had put a bullet through my heart. And here I was in the hands of a creature not human, of course, but yet living, existing. "And so there is life beyond the grave," I thought with the strange frivolity one has in dreams. But in its inmost depth my heart remained unchanged. "And if I have got to exist again," I thought, "and live once more under the control of some irresistible power, I won't be vanquished and humiliated."

"You know that I am afraid of you and despise me for that," I said suddenly to my companion, unable to refrain from the humiliating question which implied a confession, and feeling my humiliation stab my heart as with a pin. He did not answer my question, but all at once I felt that he was not even despising me, but was laughing at me and had no compassion for me, and that our journey had an unknown and mysterious object that concerned me only. Fear was growing in my heart. Something was mutely and painfully communicated to me from my silent companion, and permeated my whole being. We were flying through dark, unknown space. I had for some time lost sight of the constellations familiar to my eyes. I knew that there were stars in the heavenly spaces the light of which took thousands or millions of years to reach the earth. Perhaps we were already flying through those spaces. I expected something with a terrible anguish that tortured my heart. And suddenly I was thrilled by a familiar feeling that stirred me to the depths: I suddenly caught sight of our sun! I knew that it could not be our sun, that gave life to our earth, and that we were an infinite distance from our sun, but for some reason I knew in my whole being that it was a sun exactly like ours, a duplicate of it. A sweet, thrilling feeling resounded with ecstasy in my heart: the kindred power of the same light which had given me light stirred an echo in my heart and awakened it, and I had a sensation of life, the old life of the past for the first time since I had been in the grave.

"But if that is the sun, if that is exactly the same as our sun," I cried, "where is the earth?"

And my companion pointed to a star twinkling in the distance with an emerald light. We were flying straight towards it.

"And are such repetitions possible in the universe? Can that be the law of Nature? . . . And if that is an earth there, can it be just the same earth as ours . . . just the same, as poor, as unhappy, but precious and beloved for ever, arousing in the most ungrateful of her children the same poignant love for her that we feel for our earth?" I cried out, shaken by irresistible, ecstatic love for the old familiar earth which I had left. The image of the poor child whom I had repulsed flashed through my mind.

"You shall see it all," answered my companion, and there was a note of sorrow in his voice.

But we were rapidly approaching the planet. It was growing before my eyes; I could already distinguish the ocean, the outline of Europe; and suddenly a feeling of a great and holy jealousy glowed in my heart.

"How can it be repeated and what for? I love and can love only that earth which I have left, stained with my blood, when, in my ingratitude, I quenched my life with a bullet in my heart. But I have never, never ceased to love that earth, and perhaps on the very night I parted from it I loved it more than ever. Is there suffering upon this new earth? On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love. I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left, and I don't want, I won't accept life on any other!"

But my companion had already left me. I suddenly, quite without noticing how, found myself on this other earth, in the bright light of a sunny day, fair as paradise. I believe I was standing on one of the islands that make up on our globe the Greek archipelago, or on the coast of the mainland facing that archipelago. Oh, everything was exactly as it is with us, only everything seemed to have a festive radiance, the splendour of some great, holy triumph attained at last. The caressing sea, green as emerald, splashed softly upon the shore and kissed it with manifest, almost conscious love. The tall, lovely trees stood in all the glory of their blossom, and their innumerable leaves greeted me, I am certain, with their soft, caressing rustle and seemed to articulate words of love. The grass glowed with bright and fragrant flowers. Birds were flying in flocks in the air, and perched fearlessly on my shoulders and arms and joyfully struck me with their darling, fluttering wings. And at last I saw and knew the people of this happy land. That came to me of themselves, they surrounded me, kissed me. The children of the sun, the children of their sun--oh, how beautiful they were! Never had I seen on our own earth such beauty in mankind. Only perhaps in our children, in their earliest years, one might find, some remote faint reflection of this beauty. The eyes of these happy people shone with a clear brightness. Their faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a serenity that comes of perfect understanding, but those faces were gay; in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy. Oh, from the first moment, from the first glance at them, I understood it all! It was the earth untarnished by the Fall; on it lived people who had not sinned. They lived just in such a paradise as that in which, according to all the legends of mankind, our first parents lived before they sinned; the only difference was that all this earth was the same paradise. These people, laughing joyfully, thronged round me and caressed me; they took me home with them, and each of them tried to reassure me. Oh, they asked me no questions, but they seemed, I fancied, to know everything without asking, and they wanted to make haste to smoothe away the signs of suffering from my face.


Chapter IV

And do you know what? Well, granted that it was only a dream, yet the sensation of the love of those innocent and beautiful people has remained with me for ever, and I feel as though their love is still flowing out to me from over there. I have seen them myself, have known them and been convinced; I loved them, I suffered for them afterwards. Oh, I understood at once even at the time that in many things I could not understand them at all; as an up-to-date Russian progressive and contemptible Petersburger, it struck me as inexplicable that, knowing so much, they had, for instance, no science like our. But I soon realised that their knowledge was gained and fostered by intuitions different from those of us on earth, and that their aspirations, too, were quite different. They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours; for our science seeks to explain what life is, aspires to understand it in order to teach others how to love, while they without science knew how to live; and that I understood, but I could not understand their knowledge. They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves. And perhaps I shall not be mistaken if I say that they conversed with them. Yes, they had found their language, and I am convinced that the trees understood them. They looked at all Nature like that--at the animals who lived in peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them, conquered by their love. They pointed to the stars and told me something about them which I could not understand, but I am convinced that they were somehow in touch with the stars, not only in thought, but by some living channel. Oh, these people did not persist in trying to make me understand them, they loved me without that, but I knew that they would never understand me, and so I hardly spoke to them about our earth. I only kissed in their presence the earth on which they lived and mutely worshipped them themselves. And they saw that and let me worship them without being abashed at my adoration, for they themselves loved much. They were not unhappy on my account when at times I kissed their feet with tears, joyfully conscious of the love with which they would respond to mine. At times I asked myself with wonder how it was they were able never to offend a creature like me, and never once to arouse a feeling of jealousy or envy in me? Often I wondered how it could be that, boastful and untruthful as I was, I never talked to them of what I knew--of which, of course, they had no notion--that I was never tempted to do so by a desire to astonish or even to benefit them.

They were as gay and sportive as children. They wandered about their lovely woods and copses, they sang their lovely songs; their fair was light--the fruits of their trees, the honey from their woods, and the milk of the animals who loved them. The work they did for food and raiment was brief and not labourious. They loved and begot children, but I never noticed in them the impulse of that cruel sensuality which overcomes almost every man on this earth, all and each, and is the source of almost every sin of mankind on earth. They rejoiced at the arrival of children as new beings to share their happiness. There was no quarrelling, no jealousy among them, and they did not even know what the words meant. Their children were the children of all, for they all made up one family. There was scarcely any illness among them, though there was death; but their old people died peacefully, as though falling asleep, giving blessings and smiles to those who surrounded them to take their last farewell with bright and lovely smiles. I never saw grief or tears on those occasions, but only love, which reached the point of ecstasy, but a calm ecstasy, made perfect and contemplative. One might think that they were still in contact with the departed after death, and that their earthly union was not cut short by death. They scarcely understood me when I questioned them about immortality, but evidently they were so convinced of it without reasoning that it was not for them a question at all. They had no temples, but they had a real living and uninterrupted sense of oneness with the whole of the universe; they had no creed, but they had a certain knowledge that when their earthly joy had reached the limits of earthly nature, then there would come for them, for the living and for the dead, a still greater fullness of contact with the whole of the universe. They looked forward to that moment with joy, but without haste, not pining for it, but seeming to have a foretaste of it in their hearts, of which they talked to one another.

In the evening before going to sleep they liked singing in musical and harmonious chorus. In those songs they expressed all the sensations that the parting day had given them, sang its glories and took leave of it. They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked making songs about one another, and praised each other like children; they were the simplest songs, but they sprang from their hearts and went to one's heart. And not only in their songs but in all their lives they seemed to do nothing but admire one another. It was like being in love with each other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling.

Some of their songs, solemn and rapturous, I scarcely understood at all. Though I understood the words I could never fathom their full significance. It remained, as it were, beyond the grasp of my mind, yet my heart unconsciously absorbed it more and more. I often told them that I had had a presentiment of it long before, that this joy and glory had come to me on our earth in the form of a yearning melancholy that at times approached insufferable sorrow; that I had had a foreknowledge of them all and of their glory in the dreams of my heart and the visions of my mind; that often on our earth I could not look at the setting sun without tears. . . that in my hatred for the men of our earth there was always a yearning anguish: why could I not hate them without loving them? why could I not help forgiving them? and in my love for them there was a yearning grief: why could I not love them without hating them? They listened to me, and I saw they could not conceive what I was saying, but I did not regret that I had spoken to them of it: I knew that they understood the intensity of my yearning anguish over those whom I had left. But when they looked at me with their sweet eyes full of love, when I felt that in their presence my heart, too, became as innocent and just as theirs, the feeling of the fullness of life took my breath away, and I worshipped them in silence.

Oh, everyone laughs in my face now, and assures me that one cannot dream of such details as I am telling now, that I only dreamed or felt one sensation that arose in my heart in delirium and made up the details myself when I woke up. And when I told them that perhaps it really was so, my God, how they shouted with laughter in my face, and what mirth I caused! Oh, yes, of course I was overcome by the mere sensation of my dream, and that was all that was preserved in my cruelly wounded heart; but the actual forms and images of my dream, that is, the very ones I really saw at the very time of my dream, were filled with such harmony, were so lovely and enchanting and were so actual, that on awakening I was, of course, incapable of clothing them in our poor language, so that they were bound to become blurred in my mind; and so perhaps I really was forced afterwards to make up the details, and so of course to distort them in my passionate desire to convey some at least of them as quickly as I could. But on the other hand, how can I help believing that it was all true? It was perhaps a thousand times brighter, happier and more joyful than I describe it. Granted that I dreamed it, yet it must have been real. You know, I will tell you a secret: perhaps it was not a dream at all! For then something happened so awful, something so horribly true, that it could not have been imagined in a dream. My heart may have originated the dream, but would my heart alone have been capable of originating the awful event which happened to me afterwards? How could I alone have invented it or imagined it in my dream? Could my petty heart and fickle, trivial mind have risen to such a revelation of truth? Oh, judge for yourselves: hitherto I have concealed it, but now I will tell the truth. The fact is that I . . . corrupted them all!


Chapter V

Yes, yes, it ended in my corrupting them all! How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood. Oh, at first perhaps it began innocently, with a jest, coquetry, with amorous play, perhaps indeed with a germ, but that germ of falsity made its way into their hearts and pleased them. Then sensuality was soon begotten, sensuality begot jealousy, jealousy--cruelty . . . Oh, I don't know, I don't remember; but soon, very soon the first blood was shed. They marvelled and were horrified, and began to be split up and divided. They formed into unions, but it was against one another. Reproaches, upbraidings followed. They came to know shame, and shame brought them to virtue. The conception of honour sprang up, and every union began waving its flags. They began torturing animals, and the animals withdrew from them into the forests and became hostile to them. They began to struggle for separation, for isolation, for individuality, for mine and thine. They began to talk in different languages. They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that they had ever been happy and innocent. They even laughed at the possibility o this happiness in the past, and called it a dream. They could not even imagine it in definite form and shape, but, strange and wonderful to relate, though they lost all faith in their past happiness and called it a legend, they so longed to be happy and innocent once more that they succumbed to this desire like children, made an idol of it, set up temples and worshipped their own idea, their own desire; though at the same time they fully believed that it was unattainable and could not be realised, yet they bowed down to it and adored it with tears! Nevertheless, if it could have happened that they had returned to the innocent and happy condition which they had lost, and if someone had shown it to them again and had asked them whether they wanted to go back to it, they would certainly have refused. They answered me:

"We may be deceitful, wicked and unjust, we know it and weep over it, we grieve over it; we torment and punish ourselves more perhaps than that merciful Judge Who will judge us and whose Name we know not. But we have science, and by the means of it we shall find the truth and we shall arrive at it consciously. Knowledge is higher than feeling, the consciousness of life is higher than life. Science will give us wisdom, wisdom will reveal the laws, and the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness."

That is what they said, and after saying such things everyone began to love himself better than anyone else, and indeed they could not do otherwise. All became so jealous of the rights of their own personality that they did their very utmost to curtail and destroy them in others, and made that the chief thing in their lives. Slavery followed, even voluntary slavery; the weak eagerly submitted to the strong, on condition that the latter aided them to subdue the still weaker. Then there were saints who came to these people, weeping, and talked to them of their pride, of their loss of harmony and due proportion, of their loss of shame. They were laughed at or pelted with stones. Holy blood was shed on the threshold of the temples. Then there arose men who began to think how to bring all people together again, so that everybody, while still loving himself best of all, might not interfere with others, and all might live together in something like a harmonious society. Regular wars sprang up over this idea. All the combatants at the same time firmly believed that science, wisdom and the instinct of self-preservation would force men at last to unite into a harmonious and rational society; and so, meanwhile, to hasten matters, 'the wise' endeavoured to exterminate as rapidly as possible all who were 'not wise' and did not understand their idea, that the latter might not hinder its triumph. But the instinct of self-preservation grew rapidly weaker; there arose men, haughty and sensual, who demanded all or nothing. In order to obtain everything they resorted to crime, and if they did not succeed--to suicide. There arose religions with a cult of non-existence and self-destruction for the sake of the everlasting peace of annihilation. At last these people grew weary of their meaningless toil, and signs of suffering came into their faces, and then they proclaimed that suffering was a beauty, for in suffering alone was there meaning. They glorified suffering in their songs. I moved about among them, wringing my hands and weeping over them, but I loved them perhaps more than in old days when there was no suffering in their faces and when they were innocent and so lovely. I loved the earth they had polluted even more than when it had been a paradise, if only because sorrow had come to it. Alas! I always loved sorrow and tribulation, but only for myself, for myself; but I wept over them, pitying them. I stretched out my hands to them in despair, blaming, cursing and despising myself. I told them that all this was my doing, mine alone; that it was I had brought them corruption, contamination and falsity. I besought them to crucify me, I taught them how to make a cross. I could not kill myself, I had not the strength, but I wanted to suffer at their hands. I yearned for suffering, I longed that my blood should be drained to the last drop in these agonies. But they only laughed at me, and began at last to look upon me as crazy. They justified me, they declared that they had only got what they wanted themselves, and that all that now was could not have been otherwise. At last they declared to me that I was becoming dangerous and that they should lock me up in a madhouse if I did not hold my tongue. Then such grief took possession of my soul that my heart was wrung, and I felt as though I were dying; and then . . . then I awoke.

It was morning, that is, it was not yet daylight, but about six o'clock. I woke up in the same arm-chair; my candle had burnt out; everyone was asleep in the captain's room, and there was a stillness all round, rare in our flat. First of all I leapt up in great amazement: nothing like this had ever happened to me before, not even in the most trivial detail; I had never, for instance, fallen asleep like this in my arm-chair. While I was standing and coming to myself I suddenly caught sight of my revolver lying loaded, ready - but instantly I thrust it away! Oh, now, life, life! I lifted up my hands and called upon eternal truth, not with words, but with tears; ecstasy, immeasurable ecstasy flooded my soul. Yes, life and spreading the good tidings! Oh, I at that moment resolved to spread the tidings, and resolved it, of course, for my whole life. I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings--of what? Of the truth, for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes, have seen it in all its glory.

And since then I have been preaching! Moreover I love all those who laugh at me more than any of the rest. Why that is so I do not know and cannot explain, but so be it. I am told that I am vague and confused, and if I am vague and confused now, what shall I be later on? It is true indeed: I am vague and confused, and perhaps as time goes on I shall be more so. And of course I shall make many blunders before I find out how to preach, that is, find out what words to say, what things to do, for it is a very difficult task. I see all that as clear as daylight, but, listen, who does not make mistakes? An yet, you know, all are making for the same goal, all are striving in the same direction anyway, from the sage to the lowest robber, only by different roads. It is an old truth, but this is what is new: I cannot go far wrong. For I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth--it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul for ever. I have seen it in such full perfection that I cannot believe that it is impossible for people to have it. And so how can I go wrong? I shall make some slips no doubt, and shall perhaps talk in second-hand language, but not for long: the living image of what I saw will always be with me and will always correct and guide me. Oh, I am full of courage and freshness, and I will go on and on if it were for a thousand years! Do you know, at first I meant to conceal the fact that I corrupted them, but that was a mistake--that was my first mistake! But truth whispered to me that I was lying, and preserved me and corrected me. But how establish paradise--I don't know, because I do not know how to put it into words. After my dream I lost command of words. All the chief words, anyway, the most necessary ones. But never mind, I shall go and I shall keep talking, I won't leave off, for anyway I have seen it with my own eyes, though I cannot describe what I saw. But the scoffers do not understand that. It was a dream, they say, delirium, hallucination. Oh! As though that meant so much! And they are so proud! A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted--you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times--but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness--that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

And I tracked down that little girl . . . and I shall go on and on!


THE END.