Bidenomics + Border Un-Enforcement = The Legislative and Executive Branch's Potterville -ification of America

 How America continues enabling and selling-out to Mr. Potter Robinette Biden for a corporation-sponsored Surplus Salary... instead of enabling, creating, and maintaining a base of employee-owned small businesses

Warner Todd Huston, "Small Town in Crisis: Charleroi, PA, Is a Case Study in Biden-Harris Border Policy Failures"

The small Pennsylvania town of Charleroi has been stunned by the federal government’s deliberate one-two punch of economic devastation and out-of-control migration.

Free trade has allowed major investor-owned companies to move their factories from this and other U.S. towns to Mexico, and open-door migration allowed the remaining companies to hire wage-cutting migrants that enter the U.S. from Mexico. The result is a steep loss in well-paid jobs for Americans, a dying-off of local businesses, an explosion of poverty, and the collapse of city tax revenues.

The pressures being put on Charleroi, Pennsylvania, is a case study of the massive failures of the Biden-Harris border crisis, according to a local city council member. But Charleroi is typical of hundreds of American small towns in the problems Biden and Harris have foisted upon them.

Breitbart News spoke exclusively with long-time city councilman Larry Celaschi, and he detailed the massive problems his borough is facing from job loss and the growing migrant crisis, all of which can be ascribed to Biden’s failed economic and border policies.

Celaschi told Breitbart News, “We are a small town of about 4100 in population. And we are not even a mile long.”

But despite its small size, Celaschi adds that back in the day, his Pennsylvania borough was a mercantile mecca for the area. When the steel mills were running at peak output back in the 60s and 70s and before, Charleroi served as a major shopping area for the many bedroom communities whose inhabitants worked at the steel mills, or Anchor Hocking glass factor — where Pyrex cook wear is made — and more recently food maker Quality Pasta.

But almost all of these jobs are now going away as Bidenomics continues to cause U.S. manufacturing to contract or move jobs to facilities in foreign countries, such as Mexico. Just this month, both Anchor Hocking and Quality Pasta have announced that they are looking to scale back, which will result in hundreds of jobs lost in the area.

The closures will leave the city of Charleroi with no large employers and will devastate the town, Celaschi told Breitbart News.

“So, the loss of those jobs decades ago [when the steel mills closed], we saw a trickle down effect that was devastating to Charleroi,” Celaschi lamented. “We had close to 312 stores within our borough. And now, like I said, the devastating effect from the mills, we saw a punch in the gut really, it really did devastate our town.”

Today, with the glass plant and food plant announcing their shutdowns, Celaschi says Charleroi is poised to suffer even more blight and economic devastation.

Celaschi added that town officials are working with Anchor Hocking and Quality Pasta to save their jobs, but if that fails, the loss of the big employers — both of which paid a lot of taxes and used the city-owned water and sewer system — is going to be a major blow to both the citizens and the city.

“Our tax revenue for our borough, and the budget that we have, which we have about a $3 million budget, that’s going to be impacted, you know, the school districts as well, families are going to have to relocate to find another job. So, a lot of these employees living in Charleroi, they walk to work, and now we don’t have any other jobs for them to start over again — to get the same benefits, the same salary, have the same seniority — that’s been stripped from them, and you know, the family sustaining jobs are going to be tough for them to come upon.”

While that is all bad enough, the flood of Haitian and Liberian migrants forced upon the town by failed Biden-Harris policies is making matters worse for the struggling town, Celaschi said.

“Well, you know, again, this is a macro problem. You’re losing jobs. And frankly, you know, we’re losing jobs because of the Biden-Harris administration. And Charleroi is a case study right now,” the councilman said. “It’s [Donald] Trump’s narrative of what he’s been talking about with the border, the immigration influx into different communities and cities within the country, always just a little molecule on the map. You probably never even heard of us. Maybe you did, but I’m gonna say you probably didn’t until you still saw all this blow up.”

In fact, the former president recently mentioned the troubles Charleroi is facing during a campaign stop.

"The small 4k person town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania has experienced a 2000% increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris. The schools are scrambling to hire translators for the influx of students who don’t speak English.."

-President Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/seoyYZkK3K

— Bruce Porter Jr.  (@NetworksManager) September 12, 2024

Celaschi went on to explain that Charleroi has always been a predominantly white area, but a few years ago, thousands of Haitian and Liberian migrants began flooding into the area, enticed by federal policy and the jobs in the area. So many of these migrants moved in that it pushed out the town’s small population of Mexican migrants.

“The influx of immigrants started a few years ago,” Calaschi said, “and all of a sudden, you know, we have immigrants from multiple nationalities relocated into the borough of Charleroi, and the citizens here, naturally, one’s got to think, ‘how did they get here? Why are they here? What effects are they going to have now on our community? They don’t speak our language. They’re not accustomed to our culture.'”

Now, when residents go into the town’s Dollar General store, they no longer hear English spoken. “You know, they got dumped off in our community, and here they don’t speak any English. You go into Dollar General, and what once was filled with the English language is now filled with a foreign language that we don’t understand. They don’t understand us,” he said.

But before any of the individual migrants even had a chance to make an impact on Charleroi, their influx as a whole caused a major change to the town, the councilman said.

“Our community used to be approximately 70% homeownership, 30% landlord, tenant, and just within a matter of the past five years, that percentage has flip flopped, and honestly, I would be safe to say that we are at 70% landlord tenant and 30% homeownership,” he said.

This has occurred because longtime residents have up and moved away and rental corporations have spent millions buying up homes to convert them into rentals to get the government subsidized money that follows the migrants.

The “flip flop” in home ownership worries Calaschi because if the town does lose some of its last remaining large employers, even the migrants won’t have jobs and they may also leave. That could leave a large portion of homes sitting empty in the near future, and that leads to decaying properties and blight — a problem the city has been dealing with for a generation already.

To try and mitigate the blight, Charleroi has already spent millions in city funds and grant money to tear down dilapidated homes and businesses that have sat empty for years. And Calaschi worries that the most recent loss of jobs and the influx of poor — often government subsidized — migrants will cause the town to deteriorate into a ghetto-like condition.

The spending on migrants is also a serious drain on Charleroi, especially with the schools.

“The impact of the immigrants has affected our school district tremendously,” Calaschi explained, “and so from the borough standpoint, it’s impacted our budget to where and the school districts. We weren’t prepared for any of this. We did not get any help from the federal government or the state government.”

“From the trickle down effect of the Biden-Harris administration, allowing the immigrants to be crossing the border — maybe some legally, a lot illegally — and we’ve had some of that in the community as well, too … our budget is suffering,” the councilman said. “I placed on our agenda just last week that we need to reconstruct all of our traffic signs in our entire town because of the amount of automobile accidents that are taking place from the immigrants. And, you know, Creole being the most dominant second language, we now need to have the English language and Creole language on our stop signs.”

“But guess who pays for it? We do, right? We’re not a very big community, and we don’t have a large budget. That’s an unexpected expense, sure, and we don’t have the revenue coming in,” Calaschi added.

With the looming loss of even more jobs, Calaschi added that the town’s revenue will be devastated and that will have serious impact on the schools.

“And now look at the loss of jobs, you know? I mean, that’s going to devastate not only the borough, it is going to devastate the school district. It’s going to devastate our city-owned water and sewage company,” he exclaimed.

“The school district, it’s going to affect them because families are leaving the borough and then being replaced by the Haitian community, or Liberian, or the immigrants in general, to where they’ve had to hire interpreters. They’ve had to pay for resources that they weren’t prepared for and restructure the way the learning process is in the Charleroi school district,” Calaschi continued.

“All that has an impact on the American student, to where they have to learn how to coexist, right? And that’s a tough thing for the teachers and the school district. And I tell you what, I give them big kudos for the job that they do up there, and we’re not seeing a dime coming in. They have cried for monies from the state and federal government, and they’re not receiving it,” he said.

Calaschi also blames all of this on the Biden-Harris regime.

“You know when, you’re coming in and you’re changing the mirror image of a town, and who’s changing it? Well, the government’s changing it, and it’s sure not our local government,” Calaschi insisted. “It’s not us. It’s coming from the top, Biden-Harris, and then it goes down to the state. It went back to Governor [Tom] Wolf, and now it’s Governor [Josh] Shapiro, and I’m not going to target whether you’re Republican or Democrat. I don’t care, you’re the government. You should have had a plan for every community that this was going to affect, and they didn’t have a plan. And so you dump it on us. Come on, we’re just small communities. We don’t have the resources.”

If they could have provided the resources and the knowledge and the team to come in to first educate us before this was going to happen, it would have been great,” he said. “Well, they didn’t do any of that, and that was just totally unfair. And it’s trying to ride a bicycle for the first time, and that’s how I would probably compare it. Your parents put you on a bicycle, and you’re trying to balance yourself and trying to pedal and trying to make the bicycle go forward. And it’s a disaster in the beginning.”

Recently, U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R, PA) blasted the Biden-Harris regime for the failed border policy so badly impacting Charleroi.

“Weak immigration policy is hurting Pennsylvania communities. Take the small town of Charleroi, which has grown by 2,000% due to an influx in migrants. Roads are dangerous, schools are overwhelmed and police are struggling to keep up with the surge. We need strong leadership to fix our immigration crisis and protect Pennsylvania,” said Dave McCormick.

Weak immigration policy is hurting PA communities. Take the small town of Charleroi, which has grown by 2,000% due to an influx in migrants.

Roads are dangerous, schools are overwhelmed and police are struggling to keep up with the surge.

We need STRONG leadership to fix our… pic.twitter.com/ZsKOR3K7zq

— Dave McCormick (@DaveMcCormickPA) September 13, 2024

Finally, the crime has also risen in Charleroi, a town that had already been forced to disband its own police force and replace it with a regional cooperative whose 12 officers are tasked with responding to several other local communities along with Charleroi.

On top of the petty crimes — often having to do with marijuana trafficking — car accidents have also skyrocketed as migrants somehow get hold of cars and drive without either licenses or insurance, or even knowing the rules of the road.

All these pressures are sending the borough of Charleroi into a tail spin of alarm and depression, Calaschi said. And the number of migrants — if they stay — will further result in material changes to the area. Indeed, the time is not very far off when migrants will be voting in the town’s political representatives.

“I guarantee you that right now, if they were able to and they were registered to vote, they could take over. We have seven members of Borough Council and a mayor, I will tell you that it’s a majority. Would probably be the immigrants if they were to hold an election in Charleroi today, they would hold the majority of the seats, and possibly the mayor,” he said.

But, in the end, the town simply has no choice but to “move forward,” Calaschi said.

“We got to move forward. This is the hand that has been dealt to the borough of Charleroi. I just want to see the federal and state government step up to the plate and come here and deliver a truckload of funding for us, OK, to be able to improve our community and improve the lives of the immigrants that are now here,” he concluded.

But the cost has already been so high for the town, said Calaschi, who comes from a long line of city officials and whose father was the chief of police back in the 60s.

“I hear this statement from a lot of families. Larry, your dad would be rolling over in his grave if he saw what happened to the borough. And then we had a former congressman in our town that lived here, Frank Mascara. And I hear Frank Mascara would be rolling over in his grave if he could see what happened to his Charleroi,” Calaschi said. “They are gone. We are here, and we have to deal with it.”

Americans waking up today...

COMMERCE not CAPITALISM!

Main Street NOT Wall Street!!

On Madeira, and the Birth of the Invisible Doctrine

The Portuguese had come across the island of Madeira in 1420. It was a genuinely uninhabited Island. There weren't many, but this was one. And they named it after the resource which they rather fancied ,which covered the island Madeira, or wood, Timber. They were very short of Timber, they couldn't build the battleships they wanted because they didn't have enough of it, so they were delighted to find this. And so to begin with, they just did what they had been doing on the mainland, they cleared some forests, they ran a few pigs and cattle in it, they shipped out the Timber. And then someone realized that this was a great place for growing sugar, perfect climate, perfect soil, Etc.. And sugar did very well there. And then they realized, well, we're in an unusual position here because there's no constraints on how we use the land. There's no church here, there's no land owners, there's no custom, there's no culture, there's no Society. We can just do exactly what we want on this land!

So, they could fully commoditize the land, just turn it into an object for making money! And then they thought, "well, where are we going to find the labor? Oh, we can just bring people in to work." And who are the cheapest people to bring in? Slaves. So they started importing slaves, first from the Canary Islands, then from Africa. And of course, slaves are fully commoditized labor. You've stripped away everything that gives them their Humanity, stripped away their social context, their cultural context, their religious context (a whole lot of it). And it's pure 100% commoditized. Labor is what slavery is. Then, they needed money to finance the operation. Previously on the mainland, you would have gone to the landowner or someone, and being charged extortion at rates of Interest. But no, they could shop around, and they could just say, "We just want money. We don't want any attachments to that money. We'll just pay the lowest rates of Interest we can get. And so, they went to Flanders and Genoa to get their money. So they'd commoditize the money as well.

And what happened was a very rapid rise in sugar production. I mean this, you know if you're trying to make a lot of money, this system works very well. But alongside it was a remarkably rapid rise in ecological destruction. And the reason for that was that this great sugar industry, which had created so quickly, absolutely devoured Madeira. You need 60 kilograms of wood to refine a kilogram of sugar. And what that meant was that as the slaves used up the timber in in the surrounding areas, they had to go further and further to get it. And suddenly, productivity fell off. By about 1470, Madeira was the top producer of sugar on Earth. The sugar industry on this tiny Island, by 1500, had collapsed by 80%. It was a very sudden boom, and a very sudden bust. And then, and this is an absolutely crucial component of it, they did what Capital has gone on to do all over the world. They left. Boom - bust quick.

Those are the three components of capital; that is what capitalism does. And then they move the operation to another Island that recently stumbled across, did exactly the same... even quicker destroyed it, used it up with extraordinary speed. Boom-bust-quit. Moved across the Atlantic to the coast of Brazil, moved up the coast of Brazil, bang, bang, bang! Just taking out ecosystems, one after another. Moved into the Caribbean, by which time they've been joined joined by the Spanish, the English. And the model started to proliferate all over the world. Very profitable, but fantastically destructive. And what capitalism is, is a system of colonial looting which creates and destroys its' own Frontiers. It creates these highly lucrative Frontiers. It burns through them, literally or metaphorically, with extraordinary speed. And then, it has to move on to find the next one. And that's the product of bringing together these three Commodities at one and the same time.

And it's moved on to destroy Frontier, after Frontier, after Frontier. Ecologically, socially, culturally. It's a planet trashing machine.

Time to Start a Cloud-Serf Technofeudal Liberation Movement!?!

Andrey Mir, "The Platform Paradox: We can grow our digital “bodies”—but we cannot own them."

In their first decade, Internet services, from Google to Facebook to X, insisted that they were humble platforms designed to serve users. The users, not the platforms, would choose what to post or read online; the users, not the platforms, would retain ultimate control over what they decided to say or do. That Internet ceased to exist on January 8, 2021, when these tech companies banished former president Donald Trump and many of his supporters from their platforms. The platforms may have tightened control over users to avoid stricter regulation, but in showcasing their power over public discourse, they amplified public demands for governments to rein them in.

In their second decade, digital platforms moved from content neutrality to managing users’ behavior. Deciding to censor their users at scale, they struck an unusual alliance with state agencies, academic centers, and anti-“misinformation” nonprofits—an alliance that the investigative journalists who published the “Twitter Files” have aptly labeled the “censorship-industrial complex” (which now faces legal scrutiny).

But lurking behind the digital free-speech debate are fundamental questions of digital rights. Who should own your content, your account, the digital persona that you cultivate? Who should protect your digital rights, civic and consumer, against platforms that expropriate everything you create on them? We have entered a new political-economic situation in which digital civic rights and the rights of digital property are not yet fully established, while traditional concepts of political freedoms and property rights increasingly fail online. To establish a coherent framework of digital rights, we need to understand the nature of the modern platform economy. What, exactly, do platforms produce that gives them such power?

Imagine that you have some Nothing—pure, unalloyed Nothing—that you have decided to sell for $5 per unit on Amazon. Imagine further that, because of some glitch, Amazon shows your offer to 10 million users. Some people would buy that Nothing by mistake or out of curiosity. With sufficient reach, you’ve got a good business.

This scenario is no fantasy. In 2014, the Ann Arbor, Michigan, funk band Vulfpeck posted on Spotify a new album, Sleepify, that contained ten tracks of silence. They asked fans to stream the songs on a loop, allowing the band to collect royalties of one-half of a cent for each stream. Their fans obliged. In a month, the blank tracks were played more than 5 million times, earning the band about $25,000. Spotify tolerated the gambit for a while, but then took the album down. Meantime, two Canadians from Alberta launched a similar ploy, putting a Ziploc bag of local air on eBay. When somebody bought it for $0.99, the sellers lost money on shipping. But when they started compressing crisp Albertan air into cans and selling it abroad, they reached $300,000 in annual sales in 2018 through online purchases and retail stores, mostly in South Korea.

These whimsical stories suggest a heavier lesson. Despite Bill Gates’s proclamation in 1996, content is no longer king. Instead, on today’s Internet, reach is king. With enough reach, you can sell nothing, something, anything—even air.

A new form of value has emerged in the platform economy. It has little to do with exchange-value, use-value, or the concept of a commodity. The most valuable asset of a platform is connectivity: its ability to reach a sufficient number of users.

This platform effect holds true only past a certain threshold. Consider the digital strategy of the New York Times, which, in essence, seeks to transform the news business into a platform business. Only about 700,000 people subscribe to the print newspaper itself, a number that is steadily going down. Digital-news-only subscribers sit at 3 million and falling, less than one-third of total subscribers. Yet the Times is successfully adding overall subscribers to its ever-expanding range of products—offering significant entry discounts, crosswords, addictive word games, culinary recipes, and sports coverage. The company initially set out to achieve 10 million subscribers by 2025, hit this target in 2023, and is now pursuing a “meaningfully larger number.” After building a sufficiently huge platform, the Times will be able to sell anything it wants. Reach is what matters: the commodity for sale—whether compressed air or newsroom output, or even the compressed air of the newsroom—is of secondary importance. Platform reach constitutes a new product, whose value can render irrelevant the underlying content.

Illustrations by Dante Terzigni

Engineer and early digital pioneer Robert Metcalfe anticipated this reality decades ago with Metcalfe’s law, a principle that seeks to quantify the value of network effects. The value of a network, he maintained, rests on a straightforward concept. The more that users participate, the more potential connections they can form, and the more benefits that each can attain.

The writer Clay Shirky helpfully summarized the meaning of these “network effects” in his 2010 book Cognitive Surplus. Suppose you want a ride to New Jersey at a certain time and post a request on a car-sharing service. If, after making 20 such requests, you find only a few takers, you’ll probably decide not to use the service again. The network effect was not activated. But if the service generally helps you hitch a ride, then the effect was activated. To be valuable, such a service must attract a high enough share of possible riders in the area, making it likely that somebody will emerge to meet the demand.

It follows that the platform best serving modern users’ interests is monopolistic. If all users gather on a single platform, then all possible matches will happen. Users will benefit the most from only one Facebook, only one Google, only one Amazon, only one X, only one Tinder, and only one car-sharing service. No doubt the market will fracture to serve specialized needs. But too much segmentation will diminish the network effect, and therefore the platform’s value, for users. Network effects naturally drive platforms toward monopolization, not due to the evil will of the platform overlords (though they surely don’t object) but through the activity of users themselves.

Platform monopolization has downsides, of course, such as the abuse of monopolistic power over users or global system glitches that could disrupt the lives of all who depend on a particular platform. Regulation could theoretically rectify such abuses or critical dependencies. But the political system often struggles to adapt to fast-moving technology, and the introduction of state power into the digital world invites the risk of regulatory capture, as in the Twitter Files. (See “The New Censorship,” Summer 2023.)

Market segmentation shows that the platform appetite for monopolization has natural limits. New digital features or new generations of users arrive and undermine old monopolies. For example, Myspace was the first social-media platform to reach a global audience; Facebook’s offer of more advanced features made Myspace obsolete. Social-media services X, Instagram, and TikTok each offer specific features that allow them to approach monopoly power in their own niches.

“With more connections on a certain platform, users grow a larger social capital. More connections empower but also enslave us.”

But the digital economy may still be in an intermediate stage of development. The experiences of other countries suggest that a universal, ultimate social-media platform could eventually emerge, embodying all possible features of social networking—from chatting and dating to video reporting and digital shopping. The popular Chinese app WeChat might best resemble this universal platform, but similar examples have sprung up elsewhere.

This leads to another corollary of the network effect: in the ideal network, any possible matches become inevitable. Say you want to have a cup of coffee with someone near Times Square after work and post an open invitation on Facebook. If you have 200 Facebook friends, the offer probably won’t be taken up. But if you’re a celebrity with 200,000 followers, a line will form for the privilege of your company.

Social networks tend to snowball because humans are social creatures. As he helped chart a path forward for the modern Internet, Metcalfe described a network of devices, such as fax machines or telephones, that were put into contact. But when the networked nodes are humans, who naturally seek mutual affirmation, the statistical network becomes a social network: the nodes proactively “want” to resonate and coincide.

In digital, your social graph—your connections—is also your social capital. When your online presence is desirable by enough people, you can monetize it. Influencers endorse products, share recipes, unbox promoted goods, and sell air. Increasingly algorithmic, our platforms facilitate social capitalism by calculating who might like whom or what, as well as deciding what you might want to see on your screen.

With more connections on a certain platform, users grow their social capital. More connections empower but also enslave us. Several factors keep users on a given platform: from habit-forming designs and large networks to the fact that users can earn a return on their investment only on the platform they’re invested in. Just as a resident of a one-bedroom apartment can relocate much easier than a family living in a three-bedroom house, the more digital belongings you have on the platform, the harder it is to move.

Like a genie enslaved by his lamp, users cannot escape the magical phones that enable them to enter a new domain. The more stories, thoughts, photos, shares, and memes you store, the more the network effect rewards you. Using your account is like settling into a new house in a new neighborhood: it’s an investment, forming ties that bind.

As digital platforms replace the essentially personal act of socializing, they increasingly take possession of our personae. But does that mean that we are helpless against the platforms’ growing might? An example of resistance from institutional users—namely, the news media, which has suffered its own problems from digital networking—offers lessons about efforts to reclaim control over the digital realm.

Two Anglosphere governments have sought to apply the print-era idea of intellectual property to digital platforms, demanding that the platforms pay news producers for the right to host news content. Australia introduced legislation that entitles the regulator to “designate” the platforms that must pay news producers for hosting their links. Yet the regulation was flexible; the regulator gave the platforms time to make individual deals with key publishers and did not enforce the “link tax” immediately. This lenient approach succeeded, and approximately 200 million Australian dollars flowed to the local news industry from the digital behemoths in the first year.

Canada’s approach was less flexible. The platforms were concerned that the legislation in Canada risked forcing them to pay “news producers” under the law, not under bilateral deals, creating the link tax. Worried about setting an unfavorable precedent in a market so close to the U.S., the platforms simply removed all news. Facebook users in Canada can no longer share a news link, nor can they see news content from abroad in their feed.

This fallout of governmental protectionism hardly serves the news media’s interests, however. Convinced that their product carries more social value than the platforms understand, they now keep it to themselves. In other words, the news media have “protected” their content value—at the cost of losing the surplus value that platforms provide. No surprise that audience engagement with the news websites has plummeted. The Canadian government promises other measures to support the news industry, which now sits in a much worse position and might require public support to survive. The government, however, can benefit from it, as the situation makes the “independent” media even more dependent on budget subsidies and other protective measures.

At the institutional level, then, protecting digital property rights is a double-edged sword. With support from governments, the media have managed to affirm their right to digital property in both cases. Yet the outcomes varied, based on implementation. The news industry wanted property rights on social media; vindicating their claim appeared to require enforcement by state protectionism. Without governmental pressure, the rights of digital property are unilaterally defined by the platform.

But was your content ever really yours after you used a platform to host and distribute it? If you bring something onto a platform, you likely brought it for your own networking purposes; that’s the platform’s business. As soon as you share something on that platform, you also share the property rights over that thing in exchange for the benefit of reaching other users. Exposing yourself and your content for both the network effect and the platform’s own business is, in a sense, your platform fee. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said, humans are the sex facilitators to the machine world, the same as bees are to plants. The metaphor might also imply that, yes, humans make the honey for themselves, but the fruits of their labor ultimately belong to the beekeeper.

The modern criticism of platform capitalism posits that capital has become so all-permeating that it has learned to exploit even our leisure activity, such as chatting and liking on social media or listening to something on Spotify. As this activity produces some product for the platforms, it should, the critique goes, be deemed “unwaged digital labor.” Exposing such hidden “exploitation” has become a new creed of “platform” Marxism since the 1970s, when Dallas Smythe revealed the phenomenon of the “audience commodity”: the ability of modern capital to commodify the mass audience’s leisure time.

Such criticism is wrong. It not only neglects the voluntary and proactive entry of users into relationships but also overlooks the fact that users receive a product, too. Moreover, the value that platforms provide in exchange for our “unwaged digital labor” corresponds with the highest value in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: self-actualization. Indeed, the relations of production here can be described in a different way. Platform capitalism evolved to the degree that it can capitalize, both for itself and for you, your leisure time. All efforts you put into your social-media activity are, to some extent, work on behalf of yourself: the more effort, the greater your personal network capitalization. The more actively bees pollinate flowers, the more nectar they gather for themselves.

The result is a paradox. The elements of our digital personality should belong to us, but the digital account itself is an unalienated part of the platform. The paradox is visible if we look at our digital personae on different platforms. They are different, despite being created by one person. They slightly (or not so slightly) differ in their areas of interest, manner of speech, and even appearance.

Each user is a digital multi-person who actually does not exist in an assembled form but only in his or her platform variations. Digital multi-personality illustrates the power of the platform design that lures us into creating platform-specific versions of ourselves. For example, Instagram favors visual bragging, X favors political commenting, Facebook favors family and community connections, TikTok favors visual-motor self-representation, and Tinder favors mating show-offs. We plant and grow our digital clones to live our better lives, but our platform-specific personae live within the environment of a concrete platform: they are grown in, by, and for those specific conditions. Digital suicide, or deleting one’s digital presence altogether (as happened on Facebook to the Canadian media, assisted by the government), appears to be the only way to exercise one’s alleged property rights over one’s digital account.

The concept of “biopolitics”—referring to political control over the human body—requires an update. Platforms have ushered in the era of digital biopolitics, allowing us to grow our digital bodies but not to own them. Offering social rewards, the platforms own us without exercising real coercion. So far, the most disturbing social consequence has been the unfreedom of digital speech. But this is just the beginning. The environmental power of the platforms over our digital personalities is limitless. Shadow-banning (the canceling of one’s digital presence on behalf of the regnant ideology) and un-personing (disabling one’s ability to participate in, say, digital banking) have already shown us the contours of the future. The next stage of digital biopolitics will involve social scoring: we will be obliged to live an approved digital life—or pay the price.

Asgard Archaea Immunities

Paulo Freire, "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

Connecting Byung-Chul Han's "The Palliative Society" with Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"

"In 2012 about 56 million people dies throughout the world; 620k of them died due to human violence (war killed 120k people, and crime killed another 500k). In contrast, 800k committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder."

-Yuval Noah Harari, "Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow"

Summary of Peter Sloterdijk's "Critique of Cynical Reason"

 

Except from the above video on Peter Sloterdijk's "Critique of Cynical Reason"

The goal of the book, he says, is to lay bare the structure of this cynicism that he thinks today is the dominant attitude or mood of the West. He's writing this in the early '80s, but it's obviously also true today. This analysis is, I think, deeply relevant today, maybe even more relevant. And by "cynicism" he doesn't just mean "skeptical about people and their intentions", he doesn't just mean "pessimistic". It's deeper than that. He defines it as "enlightened false consciousness", that it's "a form of Reason which is a priori reflexively rebuffed against falsification. It already always includes the critique of it". And so, it both disempowers the critique, and also undermines our confidence in joy in living, and in our beliefs, and our conduct. In this way, he says, that the cynical consciousness is both, have it, well-off and miserable. It's immune to attack, but it's you know, our views become immune to attack, basically. Our conduct is immune to attack, but empty. And we don't believe in them and we think that they're wrong. Basically, we're all living in bad faith because of this. He says, "new values have short lives, grand narratives are impossible. We've given up on the idea of truth capital 'T'. And, in a kind of enlightened way, consistent with the Enlightenment project, we just see all of this stuff as a strategy, or a mask of power. We see and think everything cynically, including ourselves and our conduct, and our beliefs. Everyone, including us, has base motives. Everyone's faking it to get ahead.

So, he thinks that this phenomenon of cynicism as reflectively buffered false consciousness, that in order to be understood, it has to be localized in a kind of "dialectic of enlightenment". Specifically, as a polemical dialectic that is oriented to illuminating via unmasking and exposing our political opponents motives. Basically, about exposing their false consciousness their prejudices, their desires, their hidden class interests, whatever, as a way of attacking their political or social position. So, I say something, you say something else, you know, how do we achieve synthesis here? Where do we go from from there? And the way that it works is not, you know, we come to X Y or whatever, but "I have this bias, you have that bias, this is a class interest, etc.", right? So he sees the process of enlightenment as a kind of progressive development of this sort of discourse. These techniques of unmasking, they become increasingly sophisticated and widespread, and then we wind up, not with a win-win discourse, as proponents of the Enlightenment project would like to say, that truth capital 'T', but an interminable clashing of different identities, class interest, desires, passions, hegemonic positions, psychological resistances; we get a war of consciousnesses rather than a dialogue of peace. And this discursive war consists in the reification of the other's consciousness, for analysis and inquiry. The others consciousness is the target of the argument, rather than the validity or the invalidity of their ideas. It involves endless reciprocal reification of subjects, leading to a condition where our interactions no longer are really intersubjective, but inter-objective, and there's universal suspicion.

With Freud, false consciousness looks like a kind of sickness, we trace it to unconscious drives. For Marx, we trace it to non-subjective economic historical laws and see individual people as just sort of epiphenomenon in the process of Capital. And all this stuff is operating behind people's backs, and becomes the real subject of enlightenment discourse. That's what enlightenment discourse is, illuminating. He actually thinks that Marxism is a kind of particularly important jump in cynicism, since we get not just false consciousness, but necessarily false consciousness. False consciousness that is false in precisely the correct way, because stemming from your social class you know the false consciousness appropriate to your social class. He thinks any functional understanding of truth actually inclines one to cynicism. Sociologists, even if of the non-Marxist variety, tend to have a functional view where they think, basically, that false consciousness isn't necessary for society to function.

But, so then, Sloterdijk goes through a kind of step-by-step historical development that he calls "8 unmaskings", and it's a kind of genealogy or tracking of the development of enlightenment critique that proceeds from target to target. First, and-Latin? begins with the critique of Revelation. These guys argue that there's no trans-historical non-philological objective way to verify the sacred texts. So that's, as you said, at the top. At the top of the macro-sphere, at this sort of outermost limits of our metaphysics, the furthest away from man. That's where the enlightenment critique starts, and then it goes down.

So, (2) we move down a step and we get a critique of religious illusion. This critique notices how God is being anthropomorphised, how he is portrayed in a culturally relative way. This turns also into the idea of religion as instrumental or functional, existing to legitimate the social order or to ease our existential angst.

Then (3), we go down in metaphysics in metaphysical illusion, and this is Kant basically, where human reason is limited and functions reliably only under conditions of experiential knowledge. So the power of pure reason is delimited. He says that after Kant, truthful propositions concerning objects beyond the empirical are no longer possible. So that what first looked like knowledge, metaphysical knowledge, comes to be seen as deception.

Then (4), we get the critique of the idealistic superstructure. Which he says is a giant leap for a critique. This is Marx claiming, that what happens in our head is determined by social functions and the economy of labour. He says that people are masks of social functions, and that religion, aesthetics, justice, welfare, morality, philosophy, science; Marx thinks all of this is ideological mystification. So false consciousness, false being, this is a function of the process of Capital and Marx. So we can have necessarily false consciousness, which means Universal mystification.

Then (5) comes the critique of moral illusion. And this has, he says, three strategies, remember, as of polemics, right? The first is, uncover a double standard. The second is, invert being and illusion. And the third is a reduction to what are thought to be realistic motives. So basically, you catch your opponent in hypocrisy, you invert interior and exterior in order to attack the true core of their views or their beliefs, and this is always power, egoism, selfishness, horniness, greed, whatever.

Then (6) we get the critique of transparency. And this is like Freud as the main figure, but he's not the only one, or the first one. The idea of the rational, self-transparent mind has been systematically dismantled. Since the 18th century, rationality starts to look like self-delusion, Post-hoc, pseudo-justifications of our behaviors and ideas, and attempt to evade the deeper reality of the irrational forces and motivations that actually guide us. Freud was actually viewed as a reactionary for a long time, because his idea of the unconscious undermines not just this or that class, but every class, even the victim. Psychoanalysis is familiar with the idea of the eternal victim, who exploits their apparent position of weakness for aggression, right? So this undermines everybody. And then finally, just in case you thought, "Okay, well maybe all this stuff is BS, at least these irrational, unconscious forces, and motives are mine, at least they're my desires", wrong!

The final one (7) is, we get "the critique of illusion of privacy". Your own ego doesn't even really belong to you. Even your selfishness isn't yours. You're basically just an object to be sliced and diced by it and make critique, until there's nothing left at all. Your self is molded. your subjectivated, as Foucault would say, by all this discourse and these forces of social control, and of power. You don't know what, or who you are. And even if you did, it wouldn't matter. Because, to switch over and point out as Lacan does, even your desire is always the desire of the other.

So Enlightenment begins with critique aimed at the top, at the church, officials, monarchy, whatever, exposing them as frauds. But the end result of this kind of dialectical polemics is that we even expose ourselves as frauds. That truth is a fraud, that even our fraud is fraudulent, because it isn't even our fraud, it doesn't actually belong to us. There is no "us" to own it.

And I mean, so Nietzsche warned about Enlightenment's destruction of life, destroying illusions, and boy did it. How do you believe anything, or do anything, or live your life, or find joy or peace in a situation characterized by this mode of reason? Well, you do it cynically. You know very well what you're doing is BS, or saying it is, but you do it anyway.

This is actually where Zizek takes over this idea of cynicism from Sloterdijk. He refers to him frequently in his talks. You know he says, "my friend Peter Sloterdijk". But this is how Zizek talks about how ideology functions today, that they know very well what they're doing, but they're doing it anyway. That's how this works. And you know that everybody else is doing and saying BS, and our institutions and our values are BS. And the idea of any escape or systemic transformation is BS. He actually anticipates our current identity politics fixation by saying that this creates a kind of manic drive to recover some sort of solidity. Something that's ours, and stable.

But, you know, ultimately there's, we just get back to this. And it ensures even more, the primacy of the alien over ourselves. We just find this sort of bedrock layer of unconscious programming, we hope! And all this has just totally annihilated the possibility of ideological seriousness, of intellectual seriousness. Everyone's in bad faith. They know they're in bad faith, but there's no alternative. So strike up this defensive identity, live in bad faith. You know, it's false consciousness, but we're enlightened about our false consciousness. We know that we're falsely conscious, and what else is there to do? So just live in bad faith, and do it to get by, or win, or whatever. What else is there?

So and then he talks about how it functions in in relation to different disciplines and stuff. But, this is part of what I'm cutting out, but I do want to point out the way he relates it to Weimar. Because I think this gets at the deep relevance of this topic in the book to our present moment. He examines the psycho-politics of Weimar as being sort of pre-war, predisposed to Nazism. Due precisely to the heavy atmosphere of sentient cynicism. And he says, "you know we can't live this way". So when the pressure builds up, violence erupts. People become catastrophilic. Like they're hoping, they're just waiting for something to happen, some catastrophe, some eruption of the real into the world so that there can be some meaning and substance again.

You can't have a society where there's a universal distrust and suspicion. When nobody believes in politics, everything's too complex to grasp, the serious and the playful can't be distinguished from one another. There's a kind of, so what you end up getting is, there's a kind of desublimation. You're all consumed by will the power, and so just go ahead and let it out, live honestly at least. Because, otherwise there's just this deep ambivalence about everything. And yeah, it's precisely in this sort of social-psychological, psycho-political stew that something like Nazism can develop. And its success has a lot to do with the need to simplify this tremendous complexity, this sort of schizoid tension, where all of us are living these double lives, pretending to be this or that, to be content, whatever. But deep down, we suspect all of it's a lie, and wrong, and a malicious delusion, and it's unbearable. And so it demands some kind of event so that we can be disburdened of it. That's obviously not the path that he wants to go down, Nazism.

So, what can we do? Well, he doesn't think that we can have a return to the simplicity of a mono-perspective, a world that we can know something definite about, or master through the use of objective reason. We've lost the macrocosm, retreated back to subjectivianism. But we get all the way to the bottom it doesn't do any better, because subjective and objective reason are both caught in a in a kind of mutual liquefaction. He says," philosophy used to be about trying to find some kind of foundation that we can learn about, know about, that gives us information about the world and ourselves. Because they link up with one another. Modernity splits these two things apart, and then Bridge that connects them is obliterated too, so that neither the world, nor the self is intelligible, even on their own. The self pole is exposed as empty, the world pole is a stranger.

So, as he says, how an emptiness is supposed to be able to recognize itself in a stranger cannot be imagined by our reason. No matter how hard we try, we can't do this. So, from our perspective, knowledge about either pole, about both, or about their having a shared foundation at all anymore, just looks naive to us. Critical reason necessarily rejects both of these propositions. And yet, he says, "only with the anticipation of universal understanding can Enlightenment refrain from just the war of individual strategies, and save itself in the universal". He goes on, "the subjectivity that cannot mirror itself in any whole, nevertheless encounters itself in countless analogous subjectivities that, similarly world listen encapsulated, pursue only their own goals. And that where they interact with each other, then they're bound together only precariously, and subject to revocation in antagonistic cooperation".

So again, this anticipates what I think is a much better framework for arriving at a solution that he articulates later in 'Spheres'. Stuff, about encapsulation. Other stuff he says about Auto-hypnosis, about the privileges of the kind of binding media of individuals over individuals themselves at least. All this gets at a much more extensive treatment in 'Spheres'. But for now, the main recommendation that he gives is what's called Kynicism, cynicism, but with a 'k'. And this is an allusion to the original Greek cynics. This tradition that he wants to return to, Diogenes in particular. And he thinks it's a much better way of fighting against cynicism today, in a sort of way of developing a serious movement that could actually challenge the status quo. And that's because basically, it opposes idealism in this kind of cynical reason not with, further unmasking, not with more critique, not with a call to return to some kind of naivete that is unavailable to us now, but because it offers a material embodied rebuttal to the critical cynical reason.

Diogenes is famous for things like urinating and masturbating in public, to demonstrate rather than to argue, something about our norms, about the nature of desire, and how easy it is to satisfy, etc. He's famous for plucking the feathers of a bird, taking it into the Academy, and saying, "Here's Aristotle's man", because the latter had defined man as a featherless bird. So Diogenes didn't argue with him, he didn't try to make a rational case for a different conception, or to try to dismantle Aristotle's position via argumentation or "whatever" him. He just has a kind of cheeky light-hearted jovial way of embodying the counter critique, as a jokester, and Sloterdijk thinks this is the way we ought to be today if we are to stand a chance at all against any of this stuff. And he really does, himself, also embody this kind of attitude. In this book, and today still, throughout his works, the idea that one becomes a kind of living, vital refutation of idealism. Living with the irreverence and joviality, rather than cynical suspicion and disappointment, and disbelief in everything.

This goes back, I think, to like the kind of Nietzschean idea: loving life, loving the body, opposing the despisers of life and the despisers of the body. But I think it also relates to the hippie experience that Sloterdijk has, his experience with Osho. And I think it's the weaker part of the book, but I do think there's something to it, this kind of affirmation of life as a rejection of the despotism of negativity that stifles all of us in this kind of heavy, cynical atmosphere. It's an escape from the confines of critique and it's endless undermining of every possibility, in every value. He says, "we ought to oppose critique not with more critique, which is just turning the cynical screw even more, but with this kynical attitude, just this sort of like Monty Python "I fart in your general direction" sort of idea.

So anyway, yeah, I skipped a lot. This is kind of a bare-bones summary of the book in terms of the way that, in terms of the stuff that I think is important in it. Basically, thanks for sticking with me...

Tango en la Boca y Santa Maria y Confianzas

Juan Gelman, "Confianzas"

se sienta a la mesa y escribe

«con este poema no tomarás el poder» dice

«con estos versos no harás la Revolución» dice

«ni con miles de versos harás la Revolución» dice

y más: esos versos no han de servirle para

que peones maestros hacheros vivan mejor

coman mejor o él mismo coma viva mejor

ni para enamorar a una le servirán

no ganará plata con ellos

no entrará al cine gratis con ellos

no le darán ropa por ellos

no conseguirá tabaco o vino por ellos

ni papagayos ni bufandas ni barcos

ni toros ni paraguas conseguirá por ellos

si por ellos fuera la lluvia lo mojará

no alcanzará perdón o gracia por ellos

Noble Whisperings...

...and TCrB blasts!

Minding Your P's and Q's - Uncovering the Unspoken Purposes and Rules of Language

Cringe Intro...discussion of  Peter Sloterdijk's "Nietzsche Apostle" (excerpts)

Nietzsche's Apostle, the transcript of that speech at the centennial of Nietzsche's death that tries to reckon with the significance of Nietzsche as an event, not in any one particular idea of Nietzsche's, not the significance of "The Will to Power" idea or "The God is Dead" aphorism. Not any one book by Nietzsche not the significance of "Zatathustra" or "Beyond Good and Evil", but Nietzsche himself as a historical event in the long history of philosophy and thought. What is the significance of the Frederick Nietzsche that's not a man but Dynamite? This explosion, this disruption that has the function of delineating the start and the end of an era? There is now all the philosophy that took place before Nietzsche, and all the philosophy that takes place after Nietzsche.

Key to understanding the Nietzsche event are these apparently megalomaniacal statements. And rather than ignoring the implications of such statements as the standard Nietzsche lover does, or rather than using them as part of a psychological case against Nietzsche as some of his critics have, Sloterdijk offers a new linguistic thesis concerning these types of remarks. Quote "I would like to contend that Nietzsche's narcissism is less pertinent a phenomenon from the point of individual psychology than the marker of a cut in the linguistic history of Old Europe", end quote. In order to understand what such a statement might mean, we would first have to understand for one, "what the linguistic history of Old Europe is", and in order to understand that you have to come equipped with a theory as to what language itself is. And Sloterdijk outlines both of these in his introductory remarks. What he calls the Nietzsche event is "a catastrophe in the history of language, an incision in the conditions of linguistic understanding." Sloterdijk asserts his own understanding of the nature of language following Mcluhan, quote, "With Marshall Mcluhan, I presuppose that understanding between people in Societies above all, what they are, and they achieve in general, has an autoplastic meaning. These conditions of communication provide groups with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They imprint on such groups the rhythms and models by which they are able to recognize themselves, and by which they repeat themselves as almost the same. They produce a consensus in which they perform the eternal return of the same in the form of spoken song. Languages are instruments of group narcissism, played so as to tune and retune the player. They make their speakers ring in singular tones of self excitation. They are systems of melodies for recognition which nearly always delineate the whole program as well. Languages are not primarily used for what is today called "the passing on of information", but serve to form communicating group bodies," end quote.

So this is probably an unusual claim to wrap your head around at first, but I think there's actually an intuitive sense to it if we consider language from the perspective of say, evolutionary utility. Or even from the framework that Nietzsche adopts in that passage of "The Gay Science" entitled "The Genius of the Species" and also in that essay, "On Truth and Lies in the Non-moral Sense." Languages have the effect of binding a group together. As Nietzsche says in that essay, the entire virtue of truthfulness and language, and by the way, I mean that's where truthfulness exists, it exists in language. It exists in statements.

The notion of the virtue of truthfulness in language arises out of a commitment to use the usual signifiers, the agreed upon word concepts to designate the agreed upon phenomenon. That's how we know you're a good person, an honest person, you use the same word Concepts, the same signifiers as the rest of us do, which means you're in the group with us. And so language performs that social function that has been recognized since the time of, going all the way back to the Old Testament, the story in which the soldiers of Gilead would use the word "shiboleth" as a test to see whether the person they encounter is one of their own countrymen, or an Ephraimite who would say "siboleth" instead of shiboleth, according to a difference in their dialect.

And I can tell you as somebody who has traveled internationally, whenever you've been traveling for a long time in other countries where people generally don't speak your language, and when you meet somebody who's from your own country and does speak your language, it's very exciting. Usually you become instant friends with that person, it doesn't matter if everyone around you looks like you, even. What really matters is if they talk like you. That's how you know you're in the in-group.

Now, this isn't to say that language doesn't communicate information, but as Sloterdijk puts it, that is not the primary function. In other words, the more fundamental advantage of language use is to establish that framework of mutual recognition. And perhaps, the argument for this, from the evolutionary standpoint would be that you know, animals that vocalize typically do it to recognize one another. That's primarily what the birds are doing. It's usually at a later point of complexity when vocalizing organisms begin to communicate information. And we even see this in the animal kingdom, like troops of bonobos who have a bunch of different cries to identify different types of predators approaching the troop. So we see how in language, the information conveying aspect can become more useful, and more complex over time, but the original use is recognition. We could say that's the fundamental reality of language, which Sloterdijk sees as affirmative and active. It's the way for a group to, metaphorically speaking, "vibrate in that redundancy of everyone speaking in the same way. That's the way in which language is an instrument of group narcissism. It's the group's affirmation, who is in the group, and the celebration of this fact."

Because if by recognizing you as a fellow speaker of our mutual language, I recognize you as good, and you do the same for me. Then, in the very nature of our linguistic communication, we are in some fundamental way, mutually celebrating how good it is to be part of the group that we're in. And so, for however arbitrary or subjective or irrational the analytical mind might regard such a conception of language, one can clearly see that in this description, language has a positive and affirmative content. It posits something, in other words. Something like "the mutual goodness of us, we who speak in this way." That's the active and fundamental operation of language. And thus, as should be expected, language is not only used for exalting the value of the group, but of expressing value period. Such, that one might say, the fundamental linguistic form is the eulogy.

I don't know that Sloterdijk would quite put the argument like this, but we might say it's the most natural use of language. So, even though our use of language is far more complex than say, the language of birds or bonobos, the fundamental meaning of language, for us too, is still to exalt ourselves. To recognize ourselves, celebrate ourselves and the group that we are in. Quote, "For the most part, people are not concerned to draw each other's attention to states of affairs, but instead to incorporate states of affairs into a glory. The different speaker groups of History, all the various tribes and peoples, are self-praising entities that avail themselves of their own inimitable idiom as part of a psychological content played to gain advantage for themselves. In this sense, before it becomes technical, all speaking serves to enhance and venerate the speaker. And even technical discourses are committed, albeit indirectly, to glorifying techniques," end quote.

For Better or For Worse, Sloterdijk notes that all of the theories concerning language have approached it from a negative standpoint. Whether through psychoanalysis, critical theory, postmodernism, deconstructionism, or whatever, we've approached language from the standpoint of what it can't do. We have called into question what it is that is actually communicated. We've considered the flaws, the faults, the limiting factors in delivering information that comes with language. We've treated languages as collections of symptoms, as an indication for say, one's biases, or their privileges, or the limitations of their perspective. That had largely been the conversation around language on the 20th century.

As Sloterdijk sees it, we have treated language as, quote "a medium of lack and distortion," end quote, and turned a blind eye to its' fundamental self- affirmative character. The fact that what language really seeks is celebration, glorification, all of these theories have ignored this. Sloterdijk's striking claim is that Nietzsche recognizes this. When he writes, for example, that quote, "It is a beautiful folly speaking. With it, humans dance over all things," end quote. And further, Nietzsche declares his attempt to move Beyond these critical and negative views of language that treated it as a medium of "lack and Distortion" when he writes such statement says, quote, "all our philosophy is the correction of linguistic usage," end quote. Sloterdijk argues that with Nietzsche, language ceases to be that medium of lack, and it becomes quote, "a vector for affirmation and prophecies", end quote.

We can see this natural self-affirmative form of linguistic expression in ancient Greece. Remember Nietzsche's remark, that the Greeks great love was to hear people speak beautifully. This is what accounts for his remarks that they're a nation of actors. They are a culture that values performance, that values a beautiful glorification rather than say, a cynical statement of the naked unvarnished truth. And, where my mind goes to as an example of this, might be the poems of Pindar, written In praise of the Olympic Victors. That's language used for that function to "exalt", and to exalt human beings. And remember, the Olympics is not just a competition between individuals, but a competition between City States for whom the athlete is a representative of that City State. So in that way, it's much like the Olympics today.

And further, in coming together to compete as equals, in some sense, these cities recognize one another as all being Greeks, even though they exist in mutual hostility towards one another, in many cases. Pindar poems do not just praise an individual athlete, but rather the city, and in the final analysis, the greatness of the entire Helenic world. And so, that is I think, a fine example of language used to "exalt", to "praise", to "celebrate" the group that we are all a part of. And I think if we go back further and read, for example, the proclamations that one might find in the Tomb of a Bronze Age King from Mesopotamia or Egypt, you'll find these very prideful self-aggrandizing Declarations of the Divinity of the ruler and his accomplishments. Statements such as, "You know, it was I who subdued the Hittites and conquered the Acadians, and gathered all the lands under my power, caused my enemies to flee in fear, and so on, and so forth." And this is why Nietzsche writes in that passage in "The Gay Science" entitled "Ancient Pride" that the pride of antiquity is so extreme, so heightened compared to our own, that we cannot even really comprehend what it was like to be them. That, we can't comprehend the way that they experienced the world, because Pride was such a central aspect of their society and culture, or of those ancient societies and cultures. And so, perhaps one could ask whether Nietzsche's engagement with the world view of ancient man gave him the inspiration to ask the question, "What changed between their use of language, in which self-glorification, the eulogy, the praise of Victorious human beings, the boasts of prideful Kings, shameless statements of national superiority, and so on; but when these were the norm, what changed from then to now?"

Because one of the things we may notice about the way that we engage with all those types of language used today, is that we find them, again, "embarrassing". Within our modern social etiquette it is far better to be self-deprecating, which most people would find disarming, or even charming, than it is to be self-aggrandizing, which most people find off-putting. It is impolite, it violates the rules to eulogize oneself in that way.

Now, from a very early date, the direct eulogy already began to shift. Direct here meaning "direct Praise of oneself or one's group." Sloterdijk sources it to the ascendance of monarchies, and the feudal system. That within itself this shift, as far back as the days of the older epodes and Elders, sort of forces the ordinary person to make their eulogies is more indirect. Certain people at the top of society can directly eulogize themselves, but the monarchal social form eventually transforms language use from the way it would have been used in say, a tribal setting. Mankind under these new conditions has to cultivate the ability to indirectly eulogize, to speak of one's own greatness in so far as one is "merely a servant of a higher power than themselves".

Sloterdijk does give some attention to the sociological development, the material factors driving this change in the use of language, but he admits he does not really have a strong belief in any theory of sociological development. And as he goes on to say later in this document, this turn in language actually really only fully emerges into being with the ascendance of Christiandom, with the reversal affected by St Paul. Quote, "that along with Socrates and Plato, Nietzsche above all identified St Paul as the genius of reversal needs no further elucidating, neither does the fact that from the numerous consequences of the Pauline intervention, Nietzsche derives the criterion by which to define his "Amendment to the Good News" as the axis for a history of the future", end quote. So Nietzsche's "Amendment to the Good News", his Amendment to the Gospel, and that is "Thus Spake Zarathustra", which Nietzsche referred to as his Fifth Gospel. And we'll discuss that aspect of Sloterdijk's argument in a bit, I just sort of wanted to make it clear what he was talking about there.

But the key point is that Paul is a genius of reversal. Christianity, in Nietzsche's view, is a development that proceeds from the theoretical worldview helped into being by Socrates and Plato. And what does Nietzsche just say about all three of these figures? They're among the rare individuals in history who had the power to legislate new values. So the really fascinating implication to me, that I find in Sloterdijk's text here, is the suggestion that the legislation of new values is an act that occurs primarily in language. Which means that language would not be considered as a mere symptom, from that point of view. It can't be considered as a mere superficial gloss. That's the way Nietzsche often speaks about language. But Sloterdijk sort of is implying that there's something a bit, maybe, beneath the surface, or a greater nuance to his engagement with language. The change that is made, the linguistic change, is not merely a swapping out of terminology. It's not one word concept superseding another. It's a transformation in the very operation and the very structure of language. That is the form that legislating values takes in Practical terms. It's a revision, or in this case a full reversal, of the way that language operates. The very goals of language are altered. Language in the previous era was this act of mutual recognition and jubilation in oneself, and one's own goodness, and in the goodness of everyone in the group. The Pauline intervention reverses every one of those aspects.

Let's compare this claim to say, the "moral dynamics" as Nietzsche describes them in the Genealogy. The resentment of the conquered, the downtrodden, the vanquished, that is harnessed by the priestly class in order to provide fuel for a cult of vengeance, which is in Nietzsche's view, Christianity. Actual vengeance cannot be attained by an inferior party, so the inferior party creates a religion of forgiveness. You know, behind this lurks a moralistic hatred. The man who lives within such a cult of resentment will therefore experience a constant distress for which he needs the priest, who offers him relief by turning the resentment inward, creating guilt. The priest says, "Yes, someone is to blame for your suffering, my poor suffering sheep. You yourself are to blame for it." In this way resentment, and its psychological Offspring, guilt, or as Nietzsche calls it "the bad conscience" become infused into every aspect of human life. These feelings are not acted, they are felt. That is sort of a layout of how the the dynamics that play out in "The Genealogy of Morals".

But then, one might ask, how does Christianity achieve this reversal? What is the effective vector by which this Cult of Resentment manages to triumph? Slotredijk's assertion is that this revolution occurs in the language itself, and a reversal of the operation of language. Quote, "Resentment is a mode of production of world. Indeed, one that is to date, the most powerful and most harmful. The more keenly this discerning author contemplated the matter of this fact, the more comprehensively and monstrously it came into profile. In everything that had borne the name of high culture, religion, and morality, the resentment mode of World building had prevailed. Everything that for an Epoch had been able to present itself as the moral World Order bore its handwriting. All that had in this era claimed to be making a contribution to World Improvement had drunk of its poison. Whence, the catastrophic conclusion which hit its thinker as a millinery insight, that all languages formed by metaphysics gravitate around a mythological core," end quote.

Let's pause, just to discuss that last term and the implications of the passage so far. So myth, what does it mean in practice to be mythological? It means to be loathed to argue one's position, to be loathed to have to entertain arguments to the contrary. So, we'll remember Nietzsche's statements in "The Antichrist", for example, his horrifying realization that all the values that have been esteemed the highest by Humanity up to this point have been decadence values. Sloterdijk's argument is that, in light of this Nietzsche comes to the catastrophic conclusion of the mythology inherent to a metaphysically created language. That there is a hatred of argument inherent in a metaphysically created language. So this reversal involves the ascendance of metaphysics, a worldview that anchors its' reality, and that which is, beyond the physical. This is part and parcel with the rejection of all that triumphs within the physical world, that's the very nature of the cult of resentment. It's a cult of Vengeance made up of inferior parties. So this naturally follows, everything the world calls good is, in fact, of no lasting value. This moral turn finds its' very strength in the metaphysical revolution, that is, the genius of the priest that takes the resentment of the underclass and harnesses it. And so, on a basic level, Sloterdijk is pointing to the Nietzschean perspectival Insight that leads Nietzsche to reject metaphysics, or at least to become a Critic of metaphysics, even if arguably he falls into it himself at times.

So that is one aspect that Sloterdijk elucidates here, the recognition of the essentially arbitrary and brutally axiomatic nature of metaphysics which is tied inextricably to a moral demand. But there's a deeper point here. I'm going to continue with the same passage. Quote, "The classic teachings of wisdom, together with their modern connector theories, are systems for maligning beings in their entirety. They serve those who have yet become fed up with defaming the world, power, and human beings, and have as their goal the abasement of the happy, and powerful, and of self-praising attitudes. When all is said and done, all high cultures between Asia and Europe have consistently spoken the language of people who are out to take advantage of life itself. What has hitherto been called morality is the universalism of vengeance. And whatever metaphysical discourse might carry by way of valid wisdom, science, and worldly sophistication, it is the first impulse toward maligning reality in the name of an Overworld, or an anti-world, which has been specifically approved for the sake of humiliating its' contrary. Along with this, it is simultaneously to talk up the need for vengeance, with which the weak and the foolish vaunt their weakness and their foolishness. In metaphysical religious Doctrine, contemptuousness becomes an insidiously Twisted, self-praising Force", end quote.

I think most of that passage is rather powerfully straightforward and it bears very little explanation, except for that last sentence, which I think hints at something that is implicit throughout Sloterdijk's address, that the fundamental self-praising force of language is not negated or uprooted within this Pauline reversal. It is not eliminated, rather, it becomes insidiously Twisted. So once again, there's a parallel to Nietzsche's argument regarding morals, or just in the way that he says, you know,  you don't eliminate Will To Power, you just turn the Will to Power against itself. And so here language, the power of language, the operation of language, is turned around against itself so that the indirect eulogy which praises oneself is a servant of a higher power fully reverses into a form of self-lowering, such as when a Christian emphasizes their own wickedness, their own worthlessness, their own powerlessness in Absentia of the Grace of God.

In this new use of language, the very fact that a sinful Wretch like myself could be saved is a testament to the greatness and glory of God, because I am so sinful, and so wretched, that it's just it's beyond belief, right? And so God is praised even more highly. This is the great turn in language that is an expression of the Triumph of Resentment or as Deleuze would have put it, the Triumph of reactive forces. Language which was self-glorifying becomes self-denigrating instead. It is God glorifying, and in this way, language still fulfills its function of Celebration and Jubilation. But the other world, the anti-world, the antithesis of the material becomes the receptacle of this glorification, and not man himself.

And so in a strange way, language still ends up serving that function of affirming the group, of providing the mutual recognition of the group, only now, we all know each other as part of the group and that we all speak this language of self denigration. Paradoxically, I know how good of a person you are precisely to the degree that you do denigrate yourself, and give all your glory to God. And as a result of this use of language, nothing good that happens in the world is attributed to what we do, to what human beings do. Everything good as a result of what God does. We become passive recipients of the good acts of the Divine, and our function is merely to glorify the Divine. This is in effect the Gospel message, that is the so-called good news of the Bible.

And as we all know, there were always four Gospels in the New Testament Bible, and one of my favorite aspects of Sloterdijk speech is the brief history he gives of two previous incisions into the linguistic conventions of Old Europe, which those linguistic conventions were established based on this Gospel. And the two previous attempts were made by Otfried Von Wiesenberg, a Franconian Abbot from the 9th century, and by Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of America and framers of its Constitution. All three, Weisenberg, Jefferson and Nietzsche are united in the fact that they all purported to give us a Fifth Gospel. All of them located the Gospel as the significant language event in the history of Europe that reshaped the linguistic conventions. The Bible is a moral event, it is a metaphysical event, but it is also perhaps even primarily so, a linguistic event. And arguably as a linguistic event that's how it establishes its moral and metaphysical significance. And the importance of these three figures, what makes them peculiar in history of Western thought, is that they were unusual in recognizing this fact, recognizing the Bible as first and foremost a linguistic event. In the words of Otfried Von Wiesenberg that Sloterdijk cites, we have an exemplary expression of that old European linguistic convention. His words seem to reveal a self-awareness of the fundamental nature of language, as Mcluhan has laid it out, and that Sloterdijk makes reference to in this speech. And the following words were written in the year 871. It's from the introductory prayer from Wiesenberg's Gospel epic, a poetic retelling of the Gospel but put into the language of the Franks. Wiesenberg writes in praise of God, quote, "You alone are the Master of all the languages that exist. Your power has conferred language to all, and they have, oh salvation, to form words in their languages to recall your memory, and for always is to praise you for eternity, recognize you and serve you", end quote.

So language exists for the sake of glorification and affirmation, not for glorifying and affirming human beings, but the glory and affirmation for God. And so language itself is said to exist in order to give man the power to glorify God. We see this in another quote from Wiesenberg, quote, "God has given them the instrument of language so that they can cause Him to sound in their praise", end quotes. So again, we have this kind of arbitrary, and at the same time affirmative operation of language. A kind of redundant resonance in a state of praise. And it's remarkable that this man from the 9th century perceives the nature of language in this way, even though he's articulating the nature of language after the Pauline reversal, it's still remarkable.

So the modern reader might wonder then, what was Wiesenberg incision into the old conventions, all of this seems quite in keeping with the Pauline reversal? Well, it becomes clear as we consider the historical significance of Wiesenberg's new presentation of the Gospel, and the context that was incredibly unique to that time. As Sloterdijk notes: Wiesenberg reconstructed the story of the Gospels into Franconian poetic verse, which alters not just the language of the Gospels, but the structure of the text, its' flow, its' Rhythm, its' grammar. Furthermore Wiesenberg divided his Gospel Epic into five books, another means of distinguishing it from the true Gospel. He justified this change by invoking the five senses, our five organs by which we are entangled with the World by means of sensation. He says that, quote, "The holy rectitude of their numbering four, sanctifies the Irrectitude of our five senses", end quote.

So, why would he say something like this? Well it's a way of saying that look, I'm not trying to author my own version of the Gospels, look, I've broken it up into five parts like the five senses. This is clearly not on par with the four holy Gospels. Because, as Sloterdijk points out, in the 9th century, quote, "A lay reading of the Holy writings was not something open to debate", end quote. Latin was the only language in which one could read the Gospels. And that might strike us today as nothing more than a strange Superstition. But to this very day, there are religions in which the original language of the text is considered really the only true version of the text. The Quran is meant to be read and chanted in Arabic, the Torah is meant to be experienced in Hebrew, for an Orthodox Christian the holy language is Greek. And even though all of these holy books have been translated into almost every language, if you ask someone from one of these faiths whether, "does the true essence of the text really come across in Translation?", you're likely to get an answer that the translation is something like a facsimile. I'm sure there are differing views on this within modern faiths. The fact remains, we have many examples of this long-standing tendency of religions to treat the language of their sacred texts as uniquely the true language of that text, the true language of the faith. When a group coalesces around a religion, if we follow the The Mcluhan View, they know one another, they recognize one another, by the fact that they use the same language, yes, but also the same lexicon of terms and Concepts that, you know in theology can become incredibly Technical, and for which there might not be a true actual translation. The means of expressing these Concepts, the songs, the hymns, the prayers, the verses, are handed down over Generations as this means of recognizing the fellow supplicant as one of the in group. Such that by the time of the great schism in Europe, there is a serious split over who the keepers of the tradition are. And you know, there are many doctrinal and political reasons for the Schism, but one of the things that was always alienating, that alienated the East from the West and vice versa, was the competing claims as to which language God wrote the Bible in. To the Latin Christian, God communicated his Gospel in Latin, and it must be preserved in Latin. No communication of the same Gospel in the vernacular is permitted. For the simple reason that again, the primary use of language is not the communication of states of affairs, but the incorporation of states of affairs into a glory, as Sloterdijk laid it out at the beginning. So, it doesn't matter if your translation into the vernacular, quote unquote "says the same thing", the point is that all the holy men speak Latin. That's how we know one another. That's how we recognize one another. By the fact that we speak Latin, we celebrate the Lord together in Latin. Whereas the Eastern Christian argues no, God spoke Greek, that is the true Bible. Greek is the language of the Divine.

So, this is all sort of a digression we might say, but importantly Otfried Von Wiesenberg's Gospel harmonies are not a vernacular translation of the Bible. This was a poetic Epic to be read by those who could read and write, the Frankish nobility. So it's a very select group of people, and this is at a time when the Franks are attempting to establish themselves as the new rulers of Europe. The Franks are now attempting to put themselves on par with the Greeks and the Romans. Otfried has also praised their King, the Frankish King, as a figure who emulated King David, one of the great Kings of the Old Testament. He rules over a kingdom of God's worshippers, he himself is a king chosen by God. And so Otfried's aim is not to democratize the word of God, as Luther attempts to do, it is to give the Franks the right to celebrate the word of God in their own language, which would put their language on par with Latin or Greek. And his poetic Gospel becomes considered itself, in its own right, as its own sacred texts. Now again, it's not the Gospel, right? It's not used in the Mass. It's that THAT could only be in Latin.

So why was it such a big deal for Otfried to do this? Because whether the people consciously understand this or not, those who celebrate the word of God in their own language are indirectly glorifying themselves. So, what Otfried is really doing in giving us his five-part Gospel poem, is that he's attempting to put his language back into the mode of affirming, recognizing, and celebrating. And so, as accords the unique conditions of the time, he adapts the sacred text into the language of his people, so that they might be allowed to glorify God in their own language, and therefore indirectly glorify themselves.

The next example is Thomas Jefferson. It is widely known that he produced what is now commonly known as the "Jefferson Bible". In fact, this Bible is not the whole Old Testament and New Testament, it's simply the four Gospels that tell the story of the life of Jesus, but with redactions. Such that all of the passages which were superstitious, and small-minded, or otherwise offensive to Jefferson's moral convictions, are removed. His justification for doing this, or the thinking behind this, is that the teachings of Jesus are the greatest compendium of moral wisdom in the history of mankind. But there have been long centuries of interpretation and interpolation, dogmatic agendas, sectarianism, and so on and so forth, and in Jefferson's view ,this had undoubtedly led to many distortions and misrepresentations of Jesus's ideas. And so, Jefferson reasons from this that therefore, many of the passages in the Gospels must be forgeries or false attributions. It's not, often the way this is retold in American sort of lore, is like, "Oh, he removed all the supernatural things out of the Bible". It's actually, the nature of his project is much different from that. He sets about in accordance with his own moral understanding to remove offending passages that he designates as illegitimate in reference to that understanding. His assertion, in fact, is that the real moral teachings of Jesus shine out so clearly from the dross of the forgeries, that it's like "finding diamonds in a dung hill". Jefferson wrote, referring to Jesus, he writes of Jesus in a letter to a Dutch Unitarian, quote, "It is the innocence of His character, the Purity and Sublimity of His moral precepts, the eloquence of His inculcation, the beauty of the epilogues in which He conveys them, that I so much admire among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him. In His biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the loveliest benevolence. And others again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity. So much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross. Restore Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and the roguery of others of his disciples," end quote.

And another thing we should note when we say that Jefferson removed these passages from the Gospel, I mean that he physically removed them. When Sloterdijk uses the language of incision or cutting, we should think of the image of Jefferson. Because he takes several copies of the New Testament, in various languages, Greek, Latin, English, French, and physically takes a pair of scissors to the pages, cutting away all of the allegedly fraudulent sections, until he has assembled, at the end of this process, his own edited version of The Gospel. A redacted version of The Gospel, it must be said, which he entitles, "The life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth".

So what Jefferson effectively does is to make Jesus a great moral teacher, a humanist figure, in other words. That kind of interpretation of Jesus is what CS Lewis directly repudiated in his "Lord, liar, lunatic" trilemma, as he presented it. And many Christians therefore take issue with that presentation of Jesus. But I must say again, given the sort of standard American lore surrounding the Jefferson Bible, I don't think it really dawned on me just how heretical and how Blasphemous most believing Christians would, would have to consider Jefferson's actions to be. Physically cutting up the Bible, and editing it, and leaning on his own authority, his own moral understanding, in order to redact the Divine Revelation of God. And so it is unusual in light of this, to think of how some American Christians really can't heap enough praise upon the founding fathers. In spite of the fact that if a political figure published anything like this today, you know you're running for office. And you say, "Look, here's my edited Bible where I removed all the bad and offensive parts." That person would be Flayed alive, politically speaking.

Again, Sloterdijk argues that Jefferson did this because he was trying to put "the good news" into a language that suited the conditions of the time. The 18th century is a time of scientific optimism, of social optimism, of a rapidly dawning Industrial Revolution and in the heady days of the Enlightenment. It's a time in which "the educated men of society" begin to have less faith in Faith than they have in Reason. And many of the founders of America come from that mileau. They are Deists, they are interested in esoteric branches of Christianity such as Freemasonry or Rosicrucianism, which, by their very nature are more personal experiences of Faith. It's a faith that's more like an inner work. The framers are influenced also, by philosophical writings of men like Locke and Paine and Rousseau, who had expressed a belief in the rights and sovereignty of the citizenry. And the cultural background of America's founding is English Protestantism, which is a tradition that, it comes out of defying centralized religious Authority in favor of elevating the moral and religious Judgment of the individual, to read and interpret the scripture for himself.

And so, for all of these reasons, the old language of jubilation, which confined itself to say, the King James Bible, begins to appear as Antiquated. The religious language, as it stands, is in tension with the feelings of the Zeitgeist. In other words, the language of the old Gospels does not glorify the mode of living, and the mode of thinking, and the mode of feeling that defines the Age. It seems to hearken back to some older way of living, and thinking that it glorifies instead, with its' Thou's, and Thee's, and Thou Shalt's. Sloterdijk writes, quote, "As a representative of the American Enlightenment thinkers, with their decorative monotheism and Philadelphia exuberance, Jefferson testifies to this current of thought, with this Christian Humanity gentleman, it becomes clear that the need for a self-enhancement using the classic reservoirs of meaning was alive as ever but could only be satisfied by expunging vast passages of the historical Gospels. In the wake of the American and French revolutions, anyone wanting still to play the language game of the Gospels to his advantage, had above all to be able to omit. This is the meaning of neo-humanism, to be able to eliminate in the old Gospel that which has become incompatible with one's own glorification, as a humanist, and citizen. For this operation, no image is more impressive than that of an American Head of State, in his office at night, who with scissors cuts out pages from six copies of the New Testament in four different languages, and pastes the extracts into a private copy of "the good news" that is designed to conform to the demands of contemporary rationality and sentimentality", end quote.

So quite simply, language is a eulogistic force. It exists to praise. And if we who speak a language find that it is not praising us, then we have to redact that message, rearrange it, edit it, so now that it does esteem us. And Jefferson himself explicitly uses the language of eulogy. He calls his rearrangement of the Gospel, a eulogy of Christ, a new way of eulogizing Him. And this new way of eulogizing Christ exists precisely because it makes Christ a reflection of the humanism of Jefferson's day. And thus, this new way of eulogizing does not only esteem Christ, but Jefferson too, the Enlightened, Humane, Deist of his time, in other words, The Men Who founded the United States. Jefferson alters the nature of "the good news" so that it celebrates his time, his place, his type.

And so now we come to the third example of such an incision, Fredrich Nietzsche, who also gives us a Fifth Gospel. This one is entitled, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" as we mentioned, and lest anyone wonder whether it is appropriate to actually call it a Fifth Gospel, Nietzsche himself said as much, repeatedly. Sloterdijk cites his initial letter to his publisher in which he described the work as quote, "A poem, or a Fifth Gospel, or something or other for which there is not yet a name", end quote. He also wrote to his friend Maida Von Meisenborg, "I have challenged all the religions and made a new holy book, and said in all seriousness, it is as serious as any other, even though it incorporates laughter into religion", end quote.

So, why does Nietzsche do this? Well something I'd like to mention is something that Sloterdijk doesn't bring up, but which I think bolsters the point he's making here. And it's the numerous notes that can be found in Kaufman's translation of "Will To Power" in which Nietzsche suggests that Christianity provided the European psyche with many benefits. For example, Christianity suggests that there's a meaning to our suffering. And it therefore justifies that suffering by the assertion that it is for something. That it was the precondition for a kind of spiritual greatness, and eventual immortality, and cleansing of sin. And so, it suggests a necessary and inevitable future in which all accounts are settled, in which suffering and sin are finally ended, and even in which the Perfection of mankind is achieved. And so, there's a kind of intelligible story of human existence, in which the struggles of our lives are justified and redeemed and human life is thereby elevated to great importance. The salvation of our souls, that is the main concern of God after all, who sacrifices His Son for that great purpose. So in Sloterdijk's interpretation, Nietzsche's philosophical project is another linguistic incision, based on precisely the recognition that all of those beneficial elements of Christianity that we just mentioned are part of a language game that Christianity was playing. And perhaps the following, or the consequential recognition, that as a language game, Christianity fulfilled the function that all language games fulfill.

But what is the situation that Nietzsche then faces? How has his situation changed in his time and place from the situation of Otfried Von Wiesenberg and Thomas Jefferson, the great problem of the age? The coming cataclysm that Nietzsche faces is that "God is dead". But that is also the great opportunity of the age, and that it offers the chance to make that decisive incision into the language game. Quote, "Nietzsche's break with the old European evangelic tradition makes discernible how from a certain degree of Enlightenment, speeches, functions of indirect eulogy can no longer be secured with the compromises of Deism, or cultivated Protestantism. Anyone seeking a language that secures the speaker, the attribution of, quote, "Every Human Excellence, or at least the guarantee of indirect participation in Supreme advantages, has to develop strategies of expression that surpass the eclecticism of a Jefferson. Scissors can no longer save a speaker's self-esteem when spreading the good news. All in all, Gospel residue proves unable to withstand serious scrutiny. Not even the process of demythologization can set one straight on one's feet. Too dim, too suspect, too inferior are the sources from which the beautiful discourses issue. Expressions of discontent with its glowering universalism, and its' menace laden benevolence can no longer be disguised in the long term. So if "the good news" remained possible in the conditions of spreading through a chain of winners could be realized, then it would have to be reconstituted. It would have to be new enough to avoid embarrassing similarities with texts that had become unacceptable, but similar enough that it could be perceived, at least, as a formal extension of the stock standard Gospel. But Nietzsche did not want to be a mere Gospel parodist. He did not want merely to synthesize Luther with the diam and swap Mosaic tablets for Zarathustrian ones. Rather, for him the point was that the conditions pertaining to professions of Faith and the chains of citations be given an entirely New Order. The author of Zarathustra wanted to lay be the eulogistic force of language from the ground up, and to free it from the inhibitions with which resentment itself, coded by metaphysics, had stamped it", end quote.

So this is why the Nietzsche event is a linguistic catastrophe. It is an attempt to detonate the old dead mode of language that Europe doesn't even realize is dead yet. And thus clear the way for an entirely new linguistic order. And we can see how each of these figures who gives us a Fifth Gospel raises the stakes, we might say. Confronts a more extreme situation than the last one. In Nietzsche's time, the conditions are such that the entire language game has to be reconstituted. And that's why he feels justified to place himself in the same level with Socrates, Plato, and St Paul. And in so far as he is also in a position to effect a revaluation of values, the vector of this revaluation must be as it always is a new language, and the new language arrives in the form of, what else, but a Fifth Gospel. And so, Nietzsche's new language, his new array of Concepts and signifiers, the eternal return of the same, the Overman, the will to power, the revaluation of values itself. These are all part of a new language in which a new self-affirmative attitude can recognize itself and begin to resonate in redundancy with others. The point, as always, is to esteem that which we are.

But, as Sloterdijk says, this is fundamentally a new kind of project, much different from Jefferson's because it's not a clipping up, it's a complete reordering. Nietzsche has identified both the eulogistic operation of language, and he's identified the Twisted Distortion of this eulogistic function, and how that has defined European thought for two millennia. And so Nietzsche arrives at a time when he's ready to fully reap the consequences of that movement, that turn, and return language to its original prideful eulogistic character. Quote, "The discursive event which bears the name Nietzsche is characterized by the infringement within him of the high culture separation between "the good news" and "self celebration", which in addition unveils what it is that a modern author does, he posits the text for himself. The economy of eulogistic and mythological discourse and its' foundation in the taboo weighing on self-praise, are simultaneously opened up to debate", end quote.

And so now, an hour into the episode, that is why Nietzsche comes up with chapter titles such as, "Why I am so clever", and "Why I write such excellent books", he is modeling the behavior of self- affirmative direct eulogy in order to sever the taboo on self-praise from the notion of the Gospel, and produce a Gospel of self-praise. And thus, maybe, I have not sufficiently emphasized the point. To Sloterdijk, Nietzsche is an evangelist, not in the sense of preaching the Christian good news, but in preaching a gospel, in preaching the Good News as Nietzsche sees it, the "new good news". Quote, "Nietzsche's evangelism thus means no one self. Take a stand against the milliner's old forces of reversal, against everything that has been called Gospel to date. He saw his Destiny in being a necessarily joyous messenger, such as quote, "...there has never been before. His mission was to storm the communicative competences of the venomous," end quote.

And so we might say, that because of language's fundamental affirmative character, it is always a preachment of good news that forms the basis of a new religion. It's by giving people a new means of celebrating who and what they are that brings new values into the world. It is by those means that one summons a whole new Weltanschauung, a New Perspective, a new feeling for the world and existence. The way Weltanschauung dominates the cultural consciousness is not through rational persuasion, but by offering us a way to esteem ourselves. In other words, launching a rational argument would be just to play within the existing rules of the current language game. It would be an attempt at best, to dispute terms or come to competing conclusions within fundamentally the same logical system. A revaluation of values, on the other hand, is akin to a completely new game, a new system. And it always begins with "Glad Tidings". That's the power that carries the new language games, the power of affirmation.

And what is the nature of this act of reordering The Language game? It's an act of creativity, and thus an act of art. If it were anything less, it would run a ground against the impenetrable Reef of rationalistic skepticism. Or it would be smashed to dust by the inexorable, just cynical outlook of the Modern mind. And these considerations therefore, relate in this sense to Zarathustra's description of the last man, who is himself no longer a Christian, no longer superstitious in any sense, he more or less believes in nothing. He has no vitality, no energy, no life, because his ability for self-affirmation, for eulogizing himself in his reality, for blessing it, and esteeming it, has been crushed out of him by the Pauline reversal. He's the Final Consequence of that reversal. He no longer has a language of affirmation, and accordingly, has no affirmative values. He simply lives unobtrusively, and above all, passively.

Within the language game as it stood in Nietzcshe's time. If there were to be no intervention and the consequences of this reversal, or just to be continued indefinitely, then Nietzcshe believes you will eventually get to the last man, that in effect is the dangel, "the bad nes" as it is experienced within modern conditions.

Sloterdijk says quote, "the economic Paradox of Nietzsche's good news consists in the indication that the primary immeasurably bad news must be recompensed by an as yet unknown mobilization of Creative Counter energies. The Overman concept is a wager on the distant possibility of such compensation. Quote, "We have art so that we do not go to ground on the truth", end quote. This means, "We have the prospect of the Overman in order that unbearable insights into the unveiled Human Condition may be endured", end quote.

Again, if the entirety of man's values up to this point have been the values brought about by that reversal, which are values rooted fundamentally in the condemnation of mankind, the repudiation of success and Triumph, hatred of the world, then we must conclude that we live in a rather sad State of affairs. The history of humanity is the history of resentment in the bad conscience. And Sloterdijk keys into something very important here when he asks quote, "Does not everything point to the idea that according to Nietzcshe, the bad news possesses an edge over the good new news that cannot be compensated for, whereas all attempts to give Primacy to the latter are based only on momentary Vigor, and temporary self hypnosis. Yes, isn't Nietzcshe thereby exactly the paradigmatic thinker of Modernity, in so far as it is defined by the impossibility of catching up with the real through counterfactual corrections?", end quote. This I think, is the significance of the deep relationship between art and life in Nietzcshe's writings, his numerous statements that life must have recourse to Art in so far as life is deceptive, and the nature of living is to dwell in Illusions, to deceive oneself, to be arbitrary, to be unjust, and so on and so forth. That a strictly rational accounting for the facts of human existence seems necessarily to bring us into a gloomier mindset at the end of all of those roads of inquiry. And perhaps both Christianity and Materialism would come to some rather dim conclusions about the virtue, or the worth, or the creativity, of the average human specimen.

Perhaps where one worldview would see a Humanity whose potential is ruined by sin, a materialist and psychological worldview following Nietzsche would perceive a Humanity whose potential is ruined instead by resentment. But in the Christian worldview, there is a Redeemer, Whereas on the other hand, if one Cleaves indefatigably to the cold hard facts, it's fairly difficult for the Materialist to posit such a thing from his end, and so that's why the the Overman idea. The idea of this compensation for all of the bad news. Sloterdijk puts it into the form of a wager, and Nietzsche recognizes this act for what it is. It's an act therefore, of unreason, of artistic and poetical license.

And where does this come from? Where does the the energy to make such a creative pronouncement come from? As Sloterdijk says, "it's a momentary outburst of vigor which allows one to induce a kind of self hypnosis". In other words, a Zeal for Life, a Lust For Life that is sort of like a burst of energy, or an overflow of energy that allows us to deceive ourselves, and throw ourselves wholeheartedly into life. But, if we consider the kind of energy, or the kind of Vitality, you would have to do this to eulogize ourselves, and celebrate who, and what, we are within this post-Christian Materialistic worldview in which who and what we are can be nothing more than as Nietzcshe writes, "clever animals who invented knowledge on some obscure insignificant Planet somewhere in the unfathomable depths of the Cosmos". I mean in effect, it's almost impossible to sustain that kind of self- celebratory, self-a affirmative language within such a cynical rationalistic view of man, because you'd have to conclude at the end of the day, we're just bags of Blood and Bones and organs mostly. We just exist to carry on the lives of microscopic germs. Everything we cherish, and everyone we love will eventually be ripped away from us, and chewed up in the merciless jaws of time. That is not a very good self- affirmative story. So the Modern mind has to do these things like make wagers that the human project will be worth it. I'm going to wager on that. That mankind is moving towards some sort of end that will justify this whole thing, and cash out all the value that's been poured into it, so to speak. That is the meaning of quote unquote "prophecy". Sloterdijk uses the term throughout the text, "The wager on the greatness of the future as a justification for what is happening now", which necessarily has to be an act of artistic creation because that kind of proposition is totally unwarranted if you evaluate it according to like, a rigorous accounting of empirical facts. It's simply an irrational faith that one has to demand. And the problem that Sloterdijk therefore perceives is that such an overflow of emotional energy of artistic ecstasy, or whatever we want to call it, is always a fleeting thing. And Nietzcshe, for his part, embraces this reality. Yes, affirmation of life is a kind of privilege, it is not a guarantee. It's the preserve of those who have the Good Fortune to turn out well enough that they're able to celebrate who and what they are.

Sloterdijk writes quote, "What Nietzsche has in mind is not indistinctly to rejoice in oneself as a bare existence. He cleaves with all his might to the idea that existence must earn its exaltation. Or better, that it has to grow into its' exaltation if there is any correspondence between its' existence and good reputation. An existence must become enhanced to such an extent that the best may be said about it", end quote. So those who feel that they are in that position, to say the best things about their life, their life has earned the right of exaltation, or grown into it. Those are the ones who will be able to speak in Nietzsche's new language.

And to his great disappointment during his own lifetime no one did. He complained in one of his letters that he had not gathered even a single disciple. Sloterdijk mentions that it is in Nietzsche's later texts that the term "cynicism" comes to the surface. Which Sloterdijk assesses as Nietzsche's growing awareness that he would likely be interpreted as another Diogenes, who was called a Socrates gone mad. This says Nietzsche's awareness that he would be mistaken for someone else, aped by those who did not understand the full depth of his thought, made into some kind of buffoon. But there's another sense to cynicism which Sloterdijk says intersects with Nietzsche's evangelism, and in fact, becomes in a strange way synonymous with it. Nietzsche's good news, his Evangelical message, includes, for instance in "Ecce Homo", a repeated assertion of the importance of diet and climate and daily habits. Sloterdijk also cites one of Nietzsche's statements that quote, "I have never taken a step in public that did not compromise me. That is my Criterion for acting right", end quote.

So Nietzsche compromises himself, he opens himself up, makes himself vulnerable to attack by speaking frankly about his illness. Stating repeatedly that it is his long sickness that gives him such a powerful insight into the nature of health and sickness themselves. Or to attribute his genius to a series of supposedly mundane factors, such as what he eats and how much he walks, right? In other words, the cynical element in Nietzsche is that it's part and parcel with his physiology. His matter of fact with his physiological origin of even his grandest ideas. Many would call that notion cynical, because it brings things back down to Earth. But Nietzsche's revaluation, his new language game, Sloterdijk argues, derives its' very power from the authenticity of Nietzsche's expression, and the fact that it is brought back down to earth.

All evangelism to some extent requires some demonstration of authenticity, laying bare the way in which "the good news" has "transformed your life", so to speak. In order to be a true evangelism, truly preaching the "Good News that one knows in their heart of hearts" and that they can convince others is not just hucksterism, Nietzsche has to preach an authentic Gospel. And so he has to remain true to the worldly grounding of his new anti- metaphysics. Which means quite simply, a return to the physical. And so in this way Nietzsche does resemble Diogenes, the first Socrates gone mad, the man to whom the cynic label was first applied. Because Diogenes took a hard, honest look at man as a biological being, and as a physiology. He looked upon our laws, and our conventions as so much nonsense, and saw only the organic reality around him. He saw those who followed written rules instead of their own natural inclinations, as akin to the man who chooses to eat the painted fig over the one that actually is growing on the tree. That's the way in which Nietzsche's cynicism resembles that of Diogenes, and why he would be in danger of being called a madman. Why his cynicism is often misunderstood.

The penultimate section of Sloterdijk's work goes into great length to analyze Nietzsche's role as a gift-giver, as a sponsor. Generosity, as we all know, is one of the main virtues of Nietzsche's thought. And from the very beginning of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", in a passage that Sloterdijk cites, near the end of his speech Zarathustra resolves to become like the sun, because the sun gives its light freely to all. It rises into the sky in a great act of selfless charity, and then it sets and goes under. The reason why this is so important is that the eulogistic and self- affirmative language game, and the mode of valuing that drives it, and the anti metaphysic that Nietzsche premises the entire thing upon, is when we consider it in its totality a regime of giving. In contrast with the previous language regime, which was premised on metaphysics, and driven by resentment, and based on negativity and lowering. When we examine that system, the whole system is based on debt. The Christian economy is an economy of debt and the Forgiveness of debt.

It's therefore an economy in which all Humanity exists in a state of deprivation, and then Christ cancels that deprivation. It's in a negation of a negative State. The Nietzcshean economy is an economy of generosity, in which all praise themselves, all freely give praise, and attempt to magnify and multiply the sum total of affirmation and praise in the world. Quote, "the future of humanity is a test of whether it is possible to supersede resentment as the foremost historical force. In the ascending line of giftgiving virtues, Life praises itself as an immeasurable proliferation of chances to be given. It finds the reason for its' thankful praise in its participation, and events of generosity. History splits into the time of the economy of debt, and the time of generosity. Whereas the former thinks of repayment and retaliation, the latter is interested only in forwards donating. Wittingly or otherwise, every life will in future be dated in accordance with this Criterion, one lives before him, one lives after him", end quote.

So, if such an overturning of the entire language game of debt and repayment is affected, Nietzsche's work would in fact mark a definitive turning point in world history. In the same way as the life of Socrates or Christ, two of the few figures that Nietzsche devotes considerable attention to. They delineated new epochs. They divided history into the the time before their lives, and the time after their lives. And with Christ I mean, this is true even of the our calendar today. That's what it means to become a legislator of new values.

Further in the passage, Sloterdijk continues quote, "Only unbilled expenditure has sufficient spontaneity and centrifugal force to escape the gravitational field of avarice and its' calculus. Savers and capitalists always expect to get more back than what they stake, while the sponsor gets his satisfaction without any regard for Revenue. This applies to sentences as much as to donations. What Nietzsche calls the "innocence of becoming" is essentially the "innocence of expenditure" and e ipso, "the innocence of enrichment sought for the sake of the possibility to expend", end quote.

This is a point I've made in the past about "The Will to Power" that Sloterdijk zeros in on. Almost all of the language that Nietzsche uses concerning "Will To Power" is not about Gathering Power, it's not about seeking power, which is how it is all too often described, as if the doctrine is about acquisition. Arguably, the reason why we defer to that kind of language in our bastardization of Nietzsche, is precisely because of the fact that we exist within a current language game based on debt repayment, acquisition, and so on. But Nietzsche almost never describes the will to power as the doctrine that human beings, or all living things, secretly seek power as if, even their apparent generosity or self-improvement or moral behavior comes out of the desire to become more powerful. True, one has to save before they can spend, I suppose. And one can't exclude the aspect of growing more powerful, which is part and parcel with the will to power idea. But growing is different from acquiring, fundamentally different. The language that Nietzsche almost always uses instead, is the language of spending. He uses the language of squandering, wasting. That the "feeling of power" is in its' use, in its' expenditure. The sense of nobility that Nietzsche promotes, is the ability to spend without regard for returns, without regard for repayment or Revenue. It's the petty man that seeks after these things. The noble king would not concern himself with that. If anything, that would lower him. That's why, among other reasons, the voluntary beggar in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra says quote, "Rabble above and rabble below", because all of us in the Modern hierarchy in the Modern language game are obsessed with these petty operations of acquisition and revenue, whereas true nobility is expressed in build expenditure, thoughtless generosity. That's a true demonstration of power. And so with this, Nietzsche  also inaugurates a new sense for the term "nobility" which doesn't reference one's position in the current social hierarchy, but a mode of living and of valuing.

Some of Sloterdijk's final reflections are on the practical effect of Nietzsche's writing. At the Centennial of his death, it seemed that Nietzsche's attempt to delineate the Great Divide between an Epoch of Indebtedness and an Epoch of Generosity, had stalled out. It seemed that Nietzsche might inevitably be hijacked by fascists, or distorted by the left-wing hystericism and reaction to him, or ultimately just plebianized in some way. And Sloterdijk's estimation, this Modern Age of Individualism belongs to Nietzsche in the sense that, what he calls Nietzsche's brand has dominated the Zeitgeist of individualism. And so he makes a distinction here between the true project of Nietzsche, the value and the insights of his philosophy when it's deeply read and considered, and then on the other hand, the image of Nietzsche that has actually triumphed in the culture, the way in which the average person understands and engages with the thought of Nietzsche. And Sloterdijk says that in his view, Nietzsche is not himself responsible for the Age of Individualism. He's quite explicit that it would have happened without Nietzsche, even if Nietzsche had never existed. He says the genius of Nietzsche is that he attaches his name to to this event, that he is right there at the right time, seizes the moment, and becomes the definitive voice of what we call Individualism now.

And for our purposes here, I think it's fine to not go into too much detail about what Individualism is, and how it emerges, and why it differs from previous modes of social identity, or or modes of being in Society. Because we're talking now about the brand, which is not a deep understanding of Nietzsche's ideas. It's an image, it's the feeling, it's the sense that one gets, and frankly the Nietzsche brand has ultimately become the brand of the ambitious individualist. And worse than that, he's often parroted by people who would like to be ambitious individualists, but are not. His sentiments have become associated with a brand that boils down to what Sloterdijk calls quote, "a literary lifestyle drug", end quote.

And so Sloterdijk makes this shocking claim, that perhaps the greatest effect of Nietzsche's work is on mass culture, which is somewhat paradoxic and self-undermining, isn't it? I mean, Nietzsche's ideas, which depend on this certain outlook on life that he says will be permitted to the very few. There, Nietzsche's ideas then go on to reach their most powerful conclusions in the hands of the masses. And so Nietzsche becomes watered down, he becomes self-help, he becomes pop psychology, he becomes another cynical voice that says, "who cares about morality and religion and so on. Live your best life," and many people do interpret Nietzsche that way. And why does this happen? Well, Sloterdijk puts it this way quote, "Could he not have known that from the Riff Raff he repelled, his most tenacious clientele could emerge", end quote.

According to Sloterdijk, Nietzsche's work quote, "Radiates an irresistible reaction", end quote. And that following the collapse of fascism and the rehabilitation of Nietzsche in intellectual circles in the West quote, "the brand was recuperated by losers and loser redactors, because it promised to be the brand of winners", end quote. And so obviously, what the loser wants is to reimagine himself as a winner, to rewrite the language game, to make himself a winner. He does this for the same reason all of us play The Language Game, in order to "esteem himself" and what he is. Because that is the fundamental meaning of language, the Nietzschean idea, we free Spirits, we who live dangerously, we Noble ones, and so on. That is naturally appealing, as a brand to the new generations who live in a culture that's increasingly individualist. And this is the worst blemish of Nietzsche's Legacy, this mass of individualists who are not themselves individuals, putting their hands on his philosophy and appropriating it for themselves.

But in this, Sloterdijk says, we ultimately find also the most distant future possibilities for Nietzsche's significance. It was after all, this appeal to individualism that in Sloterdijk's view, ultimately rescued the brand from fascism. And further, Nietzsche himself anticipated this outcome, and he accepted this outcome that he would be plebianised and bastardized. As Zarathustra declares quote, "I am not on my guard for deceivers. I have to be without caution. My fate wants it so", end quote.

And thus, the final comparison that Sloterdijk ventures to make at the end of the work, is to Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of Nietzsche's influences, the author of "Self Reliance" among many other essays. We discussed Emerson way back in season 2, if you want to hear my comparison of Nietzsche to Emerson, or really, just an episode on Emerson where we maybe draw a couple parallels to Nietzsche. Go back and look that up. It's called "Children of the fire, Emerson and Nietzsche." There are few voices who offered an articulation of a new language game equal to the challenge of the coming era, and Emerson is perhaps the only comparable thinker to Nietzsche in this regard. And for what it's worth, Sloterdijk thinks that Emerson's brand of individualism is actually what predominates. That what we are today is non-conformists, rather than free Spirits in general. That's what's won out quote, "Our average thoughts and feelings are all made in the USA, not in Sils Maria", end quote.

Sloterdijk's final Reflections on Nietzsche are to draw attention to one last nuance. While quote, "Nietzsche's Evangelical opposition liberates self-praise", end quote, his understanding of the self is entirely transformed in absentia of the metaphysical doctrines of the soul, and the unity of the ego, and the Free Will Doctrine. All of these are abolished as the premises of a language game aimed at condemning the human race and condemning the world. To grasp what Sloterdijk is getting at regarding Nietzsche's new conception of the self, we simply could refer back to the passages in "Ecce Homo" where Nietzsche's story of who he is, traces his Origins back to diet and climate, and his mother and father, and the necessities of his life and his time and place. In other words, circumstances ordained by Fate.

Sloterdijk writes quote, "Nietzsche could be described as the discoverer of hetero-narcissism. What he ultimately affirms in himself are the othernesses which Gather in him and make him up like a composition", end quote. So Nietzsche attempts to end the previous language game in which we praise that which is foreign to the self, that which is external to it, that which is other. But he finds in the concept "myself" the ultimate foreignness. In a sense, the totality of everything we call other, external, as we might say, the World. And in Nietzsche every one of us is a piece of fate. And the totality of Fate is what is absolutely necessary. And so, every part of the world, every aspect of the world, all of its' struggling individual constituents, are also absolutely necessary. He ultimately sees the self as the expression of the world, and that it is shaped by the necessities of the world. That's the true and ultimate Discovery that we call in shorthand, Amorfati.

And because of this Nietzsche does not take his life to be a struggle to imprint a certain idea onto the surface of Consciousness. That for all of his talk of great demands being made upon reality, and upon mankind, he ultimately fully accepts the necessary realities of human life. Nietzsche writes quote, "I do not have the slightest wish for anything to be different from how it is. I do not want to become anything other than what I am. But this is how my life has always been", end quote. In Sloterdijk's interpretation on this front Nietzsche contradicts his own brand in a way. This is precisely why Sloterdijk concludes this final nuance. Quote, "perhaps we can do no better then on the 100th anniversary of his death than to repeat these statements in the hope that no future redaction can excise them", end quote.

Over the years, the types that Sloterdijk calls "the exploiters, recyclers, and accelerators" have used Nietzsche's name for these various struggles or attempts to impose their own great imperative. Usually, they will use the formulations of the will to power, or some other related concept, as part of the basis for some fundamental theory of how other people should act, or how Society should be. But in Nietzsche each's own work, he critiques the concept of the will itself. Will to Power, as Sloterdijk puts it, is only an idiom quote, "There is only a multiplicity of forces, speech gestures, and they being composed under the direction of an Ego, which gets Affirmed, lost, and transformed", end quote. So Nietzsche  affirms the self, but then he loses it in otherness. And he ultimately transforms the self into the world, that one either praises in totality, or not at all.

And so Sloterdijk chooses to end on the image of Zarathustra and his experience of the great noon tide, the day when Zarathustra says, "Be Still, for now everything is perfect". And so we'll read that passage from Zarathustra now to conclude. Quote, "Like such a weary ship in the stillest bay thus I too rest. Now, close to the Earth, Faithfully trusting, waiting, bound to it with the lightest threads. Oh, happiness. Oh, happiness. Do you want to sing? Oh my soul, you lie in the grass. But this is the secret solemn hour, when no Shepherd plays his flute. Stand back, hot noon sleeps on the Meadows. Do not sing. Still, the world is perfect", end quote. These writings can only be understood as statements of pure ecstasy. Perhaps pure celebration or Jubilation, a celebration so complete that even the object of that celebration, which in language is always the self, is burnt away in the excitement. This is the aspect of Nietzcshe that interrupts the vulgarization of him as the self-help individualual. It's a disruption of the easy presentation of him given to us by the brand of Nietzcshe. This is the entire human being, the entire Nietzcshe whose work cannot be reduced to a self-help drug. Because at these moments, Zarathustra proclaims essentially that improving anything is impossible. Improving on mankind is impossible. Improving on the world, is in fact impossible. It's not something broken that has to be perfected.

And I would argue that any serious reading of Nietzsche has to take that aspect of him into account. And so, as we have said many times in the past, only the total Nietzsche is the total Nietzsche.