A Critique of Religion and Its' Versohnung Secular-Civil Equivalent Ideologies

A Buddhist master called Wenyi from the 10th century told a story: 

Once there was a monk who lived in a small temple. On the door he had written the character "spirit". On the window he had written the character "spirit". On the wall he had written the character "spirit". The master said, 'On the door you should write the character "door". On the window you should write the character "window".  And on the wall you should write the character "wall".'

The Moral: Beware of 'totalitarian' Grand Narratives and all things you're not supposed to make fun of (ie - why idealogues lose their sense of humour on certain subjects).

Excerpts from the above Hans-Georg Moeller video:

So what is religion, or what is civil religion today? First, I think it's some form of dogmatic non-negotiable master narrative that frames some sort of moralistic worldview. Then, importantly, it's strongly emotionally charged. It channels affection, it channels emotions like love and hate, it establish us and them distinctions. And you see this both in the Christian religion, but also, as I said, like in populism or in Woke-ism as civil religious post-Christian phenomena. Then, it's publicly displayed and celebrated in speech, in certain symbols, and specifically in ritualistic behavior, right? Traditionally, we have the Christian rituals and the Christian symbols. And today we have something like virtue signaling, or, in the case of the conservatives, like jingoism and nationalism. Then, it is also both civil religion, and religion, that are used to adorn economic and political actions. Christianity was used to legitimize and adorn Imperialism, right? The boats that brought the opium to China would also bring weapons and bibles.

Similar, as we showed in other videos, civil religion today is used to adorn not only capitalist corporations and their woke branding, but also even the CIA. Then, it is emphasized in education. Traditionally in Europe, schools and other educational institutions were run by the church. And today there's a very strong source, for instance of woke-ism in educational institutions.

It has to be added in Christianity we have different schisms. Later on, importantly, the schism between Protestantism and Catholicism. In Islam we have the schism between Shi'a and Sunni. And as mentioned, in contemporary civil religion, we have this schism between more left-wing woke-ism and more right-wing populism.

Perhaps the shortest definition of what Religion and Civil Religion is, is that religion and civil religion is that what you're not supposed to make fun of.

I think like Christianity in the past, and civil religion today, also produces false relief from suffering, right? It reassures society of its values, right? Defense of individual autonomy, democracy, but at the same time, it distracts from economic issues, poverty, joblessness, a critique of the commodification of everything. It all seems less important than these moralist messages. So somehow it sustains a capitalist economy by focusing on moral, rather than socio-economic problems.

Then secondly, there is an aspect of intolerance and aggression attached to it. Civil religious narratives very strongly frame both internal and external "them versus us" conflicts, right? Woke-ism and populism fight one another, on the one hand, but then, externally, they join in some form of new Cold War. Nowadays, for instance, against China, which is seen as a threat to certain core Western values that unite the woke-ism people and the populist people, again, having to do with something like individual autonomy and democracy. So it seems now that some form of new Opium War might become possible which again will be fought in the name not of Christian values, and not of the Christian master narrative, but in the name of the post-Christian civil religious narrative.

Then, civil religion, like traditional religion, provides some form of ecstasy, some form of highs. Like cocaine, it makes people feel good about themselves, gives them the moral high ground, right? You see this in virtue signaling, but you see it also in Trumpism, whatever, in the capital riots where people feel a strong sense of entitlement and feel very good about them.

So civil religion today, as the people's cocaine, also attaches itself, like traditional religion, to every aspect of life. At least it can do so, right? The media today, for instance, no longer simply report. They spice everything up with religious framing, right, depending on which media. If you watch CNN, you have a tendentially a woke-ist framing, if you watch Fox, you have a tendentially rightist, populist framing of basically everything and anything.

Then, how individuals express themselves through, for instance, memes, also, is very strongly indicative of certain civil religious persuasions. Then, of course, it also determines who you hang out socially with, right? It determines, in this sense, your social life. Then, it determines often the brand choices you make. Some certain brands are more woke, and other brands are more traditional, then, very importantly, sexuality and gender are also highly charged. Just as it was the case in traditional religion, now they're highly charged with "civil religious meaning", right? How you practice your sexuality and how you see your gender almost becomes a form of revelation and display of your civil religious faith. So again, civil religion, like traditional religion, can turn people into possessed and obsessed addicts, it doesn't necessarily do so, but it can do so. And, importantly, it defines people's identity.

It lends itself, not always but sometimes, to obsessive self-profiling, right? You identify yourself, and others, in terms of civil religion. It becomes a major profile marker that is hard to avoid, it's difficult to evade, right? It's difficult to find any neutral ground. And, thereby, the civil religious framework is increasingly internalized by users. It gives a strong boost of the sense of selfhood and of your experience of yourself. There is a strong investment in it. So, in this sense, I like the metaphor of cocaine better than the metaphor of opium when it comes to civil religion, rather than to traditional religion, because it very strongly boosts the perception of individual identity.

As we saw with Marx, traditional religion, Christianity, was still somehow tied to sincerity-based enactment and identification with roles, specifically family roles. However in civil religion, there's a much stronger emphasis on the individual and the shaping of an individual's profile, rather than the shaping of traditional role identities. And cocaine, too, as a drug of choice today, where opium isn't that widely consumed anymore, also I think highlights a kind of narcissistic individual self-display.

So, what to do about civil religion? Inspired by both Marx and Zen Buddhism, I think it's important to acknowledge and understand its function. It's also very important to critique it publicly. Then, it's important to develop a capacity to resist, and also subvert it. And finally, as for cocaine and alcohol, for civil religion, especially on Christmas, the advice is to consume responsibly.

The Disinformation Game

A Massive Particle Physics Problem (MPPP)

Educating for the New 'Digital' Achievement Society...

from the above video:

And did the detainees, or did you know when you were going to be seeing your families again, or did they keep you in prison long, or how long was your reeducation camp time?

Well that is a good question, and that make me say that prisons are not concentration reeducation camp. In prison, detainees are kept there knowing when they are to be released. In concentration reeducation camp, you're kept without knowing when you'll be released. And the condition for your release is to make progress, and to show that you have worked hard, labored hard. That means that you are kind of held hostage to that condition for being released. And that makes many fellow detainees turn out to be informants for the cadre of the camp and also that makes the fellow detainees become very competitive to show that they are much better than their competitor fellow detainee, and that makes the atmosphere in the concentration camp very, very miserable. That's why I say that in the concentration reeducation camp, the basic and most horrible thing is the mental torture. 

So you you can kind of compare it to for instance putting a carrot in front of a horse's face to make sure that he keeps running?

Yes, but that is a very benign comparison because in the reeducation camp, you are conceived of like a horse, you know having a carrot in front of you, you never reach, but also because of that because of the striving for survival and because of all of the pressures that, not only you try hard, but also you try to excel and to compete with your fellow detainees, that makes life miserable.

[Verse 1]

We bend the knee

We serve the will

We venerate and genuflect to

Our God

Our fixation

[Verse 2]

We chase the high

We raze and burn

We're warriors and avatars for

Our God

The algorithm

[Pre-Chorus]

Social mediots

[Chorus]

Attention addiction

Attention addiction

Dopamine addiction

Attention addiction

[Post-Chorus]

Hah-ah

[Verse 3]

We fall in line

We lock step to

The beats we're played by our reflection

We go around in circles

[Verse 4]

(Doom scroll)

Doom scroll junkies (Doom scroll junkies)

We're ravenous (We're ravenous)

Devour all that we are fed by

Our God

The algorithm

[Pre-Chorus]

Social mediots

[Chorus]

Attention addiction

Attention addiction

Dopamine addiction

Attention addiction

[Bridge]

Ah-ooh (Oh-oh-oh-oh)

Ah-ooh (Oh-oh-oh-oh)

Ah-ooh (Oh-oh-oh-oh)

Ah-ooh (Oh-oh-oh-oh)

Ah-ooh

[Verse 5]

We bend the knee

We serve the will

We venerate and genuflect to

Our God

The algorithm

[Chorus]

Attention addiction

Attention addiction

Dopamine addiction

Attention addiction (Oh-oh-oh-oh)

Attention addiction

Attention addiction

Dopamine addiction

Attention addiction (Oh-oh-oh-oh)

[Post-Chorus]

Oh, attention

Social mediots (Oh-oh-oh-oh)

Oh, attention

Social mediots (Oh-oh-oh-oh)

Oh, attention

Social mediots (Oh-oh-oh-oh)

Oh, attention

Social mediots (Oh-oh-oh-oh)

Oh

On Identity Diffusion - Personal or National (Group Collective)

Identity diffusion is a psychological phenomenon where a person doesn't have a strong sense of who they are and they're not actively working on it, says Aimee Daramus, PsyD, a clinical psychologist. As a result of identity diffusion, the person may feel like they don't really know who they are.

From Sincerity...to Authenticity... to Profilicity.  The Social Engineering of the modern schizophrenic.subject, who is ALWAYS working on it (and now trying to convince others of it, both legislatively & through pronoun conventions.)

Could someone in the Group please just hypnotize me?

Squandered Trust. On the Use and Abuse of Deception in Politics

Mearsheimer suggests that most political lies fall into one of five categories: inter-state lies, fear-mongering, strategic cover-ups, nationalist myths, and liberal lies. He explains the reasons why leaders pursue each of these different kinds of lies.

from the video above dated April, 2011:

...Now, what are the two main findings in the book?  The first main finding is that there is not much Interstate lying. I was actually shocked to discover this. I thought as a card carrying realist, and a cynic about International politics, that I would find an abundance of cases of leaders lying to foreign audiences. I figured the diplomats lied all the time to each other, and they're actually famous quotes that make those kinds of arguments. That's not true. I found it very difficult to find examples of Interstate lying, and all of those examples that I have in the book I worked very hard to accumulate....

My second finding is that leaders seem to lie much more often to their own publics than the other countries. And fear-mongering, in the American case, is especially prevalent. For those of you who have any doubts about this there's a book by Eric Alderman who writes for the nation who's a very fine historian who's written a book on presidential lying. It's a remarkable book in that it's so depressing, because it's so filled with cases of our leaders lying to us.

Why is this?  It's a matter of TRUST.

RM Staff, "Mearsheimer on Where the Ukraine War Is Headed" (3/14/24)

Can Ukraine hold the line in 2024? That would be the best-case scenario—according to John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago professor and one of the leading proponents of “restraint” in American foreign policy. Interviewed on a recent episode of the “Daniel Davis Deep Dive” podcast, Mearsheimer has claimed that he considers “ridiculous” the idea that Ukraine will be able to take the offensive in 2024 or 2025. He also says he is skeptical that the West can deliver sufficient assistance in the form of weaponry and training to the Ukrainians to decisively turn the tide in the war.

Below is an abridged version of remarks made by Professor Mearsheimer, edited for clarity.

On Ukraine’s Prospects in 2024-25 

It’s ridiculous to think that Ukraine can hold the line in 2024 and then eventually take the offensive. That’s just not going to happen. They took the offensive this past summer and it was a colossal failure. And there’s no way that we’re going to arm up and train the Ukrainians by 2025, so that they’ll be in a position to overwhelm the Russians, who are arming up their forces and training their forces more effectively than we are. I think that the best we can hope for is that the Ukrainians maintain the status quo in 2024—I’m talking here about the status quo on the battlefield—and that they can do that into 2025. The real danger is that the Ukrainians are going to be defeated by the Russians over the course of this year and next year. That, I think, is the more likely outcome—that the Russians will just roll back the Ukrainians. The idea that Ukraine is going to launch some offensive in 2025 and turn the tide is delusional.

[Apart from manpower problems,] … there are three other problems that the Ukrainians face. First of all, the weaponry issue. We’re going to give lots of money, I believe, to the Ukrainians and the EU will do the same thing, but they don’t need money as much as they need weapons. And we don’t have the weaponry to give them.

Point two, if you look at what’s happened in the air war, the Russians have basically eviscerated the air defenses in Ukraine, so they’re now free to attack all sorts of targets in Ukraine, near the front lines and deep in Ukraine, and to do all sorts of damage. This is a huge force multiplier for the Russians.

And then, finally, if you look at the political situation inside Ukraine, what you see is all sorts of trouble. ... You have this fractious political situation that could even lead to a coup or possible assassination—who knows—inside of Kyiv.

On the other hand, if you look at the political situation in Russia, you remember the days when we used to talk about the fact that the Wagner Group was going to topple [President Vladimir] Putin, and Putin was in a precarious position. Everybody was wondering who was going to replace him and if we were going to live happily ever after as a result. Those days are gone—Putin is in the catbird seat. It’s the Ukrainians who are in deep trouble. So, everywhere you look here, Ukraine is in deep trouble and the Russians are doing quite well.

On Fears of Russia Invading a NATO Member State 

I think this is ludicrous. First of all, the Russians are, in effect, stuck in eastern Ukraine. It’s not like they’re on the Polish border now. The big question on the table in my mind is how much territory, if any, they will capture over the next few months. I think they will end up capturing some territory, but the idea that they’re on the verge of decisively defeating Ukraine is not a serious argument.

Furthermore, Putin has made it clear that he has no interest in conquering western Ukraine. He’s now talking about countries like Poland and Romania grabbing territory in western Ukraine that used to belong to them. He doesn’t say, “I want that territory for Russia.” He’s saying, “Romanians are going to want that territory.” I don’t believe that will happen. But nevertheless, it’s just evidence that Putin is not talking about conquering all of Ukraine. He has made it clear that he has no interest in conquering countries in Eastern European, including the Baltic states. And he would be foolish to try to do so. So the idea that he’s going to conquer all of Ukraine, then go on a rampage against NATO and we’re going to have World War III is, I think, a ridiculous argument.

On How NATO Could Respond If the Ukrainian Military Starts to Collapse 

The question I think that is very interesting, based on these stories that you see popping up now … is what the West is going to do and, more particularly, what NATO is going to do if the situation in Ukraine deteriorates over the next few months, as I described it. And again, when we talk about deterioration, we’re not talking about all of Ukraine falling under the control of the Russians. We’re just talking about the Russian steamroller, in a sense, moving westward—the Russians capturing territory in Odesa and Kharkiv, and so forth and so on. If that begins to happen and it looks like Ukraine is really going to turn into a dysfunctional rump state, and we’re going to have mud all over our face—we meaning NATO—what will the United States and its allies do then? I think there is reason to worry that we may try to intervene to rescue the situation, especially if it looks like the Ukrainian military is beginning to collapse.

What if the Ukrainian military shatters in June of this coming year? I’m not saying that will happen, but it is a possibility, right? It just shatters. What do we do then? And the Russians start moving westward and they’re on the doorstep of Kyiv. What will the Americans do … [if] the Ukrainian army shatters and we’re deeply fearful that the Russians will move to the Polish and Romanian border? And what we do is we put some troops in western Ukraine and we send a very clear signal to the Russians that we’re not interested in fighting them. Those troops are there purely for deterrence purposes, to keep the Russians out of western Ukraine. And the story we tell ourselves is that deep down we believe the Russians are not interested in western Ukraine. They’ve made that clear. Furthermore, they would end up trying to absorb all of these ethnic Ukrainians who want nothing to do with the Russians and actually hate them. So we could tell ourselves a story that went along the lines that even if we put these forces in, we wouldn’t have to worry about it escalating as long as we communicated clearly with the Russians that we were not interested in reconquering territory or fighting with them. So, it could happen. Again, I think it’s highly unlikely we would do that.

I think we will have to live with the fact that the Russians will end up conquering more territory. I’ve long argued that they would take the four oblasts west of the four oblasts they control now or have annexed so far. And they may even take a bit more. And I think there would be nothing we could do to prevent that. But we would do everything we could to sort of reconstitute the Ukrainian forces, shore them up, and do what we could to negotiate with the Russians to make sure that they didn’t take all of Ukraine and that this rump Ukrainian state remained intact.

So what kind of lies are our leaders telling us today?   And what kind of fear-mongering with respect to Russia is going on? 

from the video above (dated April, 2011):

Finally, let me just say in conclusion that the countries that fearmonger the most are democracies that wage preventive Wars against distant threats. Again, the countries in which leaders lie to their public most often about foreign threats are countries that are democracies that wage preventive Wars against distant threats. That, in a nutshell, is The United States of America given that the United States seems committed to trying to run the world, given that the United States is a democracy, given that the United States seems committed to using military force liberally. Just think about Libya. It seems that we should expect to have lots more evidence of fear-mongering in the years ahead. And therefore, it will probably be the case that when I come back here in 20 years to talk about the new addition of my book. I will reference Eric Alterman's second volume on presidential lying.

The Never-Trump Uvalde Republicans are Waiting for Godot

On Uvalde Syndrome

A Failure of Command?  A Failure of Social Relations?  Or a Failure of Character?

from Wiki:

The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim in presence of other people. First proposed in 1964 after the murder of Kitty Genovese, much research, mostly in psychology research laboratories, has focused on increasingly varied factors, such as the number of bystanders, ambiguity, group cohesiveness, and diffusion of responsibility that reinforces mutual denial. If a single individual is asked to complete the task alone, the sense of responsibility will be strong, and there will be a positive response; however, if a group is required to complete the task together, each individual in the group will have a weak sense of responsibility, and will often shrink back in the face of difficulties or responsibilities. The theory was prompted by the murder of Kitty Genovese about which it was wrongly reported that 38 bystanders watched passively.

Recent research has focused on "real world" events captured on security cameras, and the coherency and robustness of the effect has come under question.[1] More recent studies also show that this effect can generalize to workplace settings, where subordinates often refrain from informing managers regarding ideas, concerns, and opinions.[2]

America's Judicial System becomes Kafkaesque

Brian Patrick Eha, "The Boundary Between Life and Terror"

Kafka’s anxieties proved prophetic.

At midnight on Christmas Day, 1910, a sleepless legal clerk of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague was chastising himself for the state of his writing desk. It was, he fumed, “a disorder without regularity and without any compatibility of the disordered things.” In the precise, dreamlike, self-lacerating style for which he would become renowned, he cataloged the mess, imagining his desk as a packed theater; one compartment, crammed with old wastepapers, loose buttons, broken pencils, and dull razor blades, was figured as a kind of balcony where “coarse fellows . . . let their feet hang down over the balcony railing, families with so many children that one takes only a brief glance without being able to count them introduce here the filth of poor nurseries.” In his hands, personal failing had the force of social parable.

Nothing good—no serious writing—could be done at such a desk: that was the point of his self-chastisement. Yet at this desk, and others like it (including one in Prague’s historic Alchemists’ Lane), Franz Kafka created a body of work rivaled in twentieth-century letters only by that of Samuel Beckett for scouring purity of vision and linguistic spareness. Few readers who know something of his achievement—whether through the stories and parables, the impassioned letters to Milena Jesenská, the raw-nerve diaries, the Kierkegaard-inflected aphorisms he wrote at Zürau, or the broken monuments of his fragmentary novels—have failed to detect the preternatural aspect of his gift. Though little of his mature work was published in his lifetime, the writing—and the self-chastisement—would continue almost unabated until his death from laryngeal tuberculosis in 1924. Erosive diary entries near the end (February 20, 1922: “Imperceptible life. Perceptible failure”) record what the effort cost him. He presents, as much as any secular writer can, a figure of hallowed suffering.

“The perpetually trembling boundary between ordinary life and the terror that is seemingly more real”: this, in his own words, is Kafka’s theme. Even those who have never read him have a sense of what he’s about: man at home neither in the world nor in himself, exposed to the eye of judgment like bacteria on a slide. A metaphysical pressure not reducible to a single plot point or turn of phrase permeates his writing, from the early expressionist prose to the late, lonely miracles of “Josephine the Singer” and “The Burrow.” Everywhere we find the primacy of the word in danger of falling off into silence:

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never.

His anxieties, his parables of inhumanity proved prophetic. As a Czech Jew, he found the German that was his literary tongue irreducibly foreign, almost a language of the enemy—as it would become for his fellow Jews. Kafka’s characteristic mode is rich in paradox and enigma, but not mystification. His uneasy dreams, we now recognize, anticipated Auschwitz.

Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, the eldest child of a middle-class Jewish family. Until 31, he lived with his parents—his father owned a dry-goods store—and, apart from a few significant vacations, work trips, and rest cures, he spent his entire life in Prague. At one point, he dreamed of running away to Berlin to be a freelance writer—a gambit familiar to any impecunious young person with literary ambitions who settles on journalism, as Kafka had it, as “a way of earning money that halfway suits me.” Instead, he put his impressive ratiocinative powers to work earning a law degree and serving as a legal advisor at the insurance institute. The work split him in two. There was the daytime doctor of law, preoccupied with factory conditions and industrial accidents; and there was the nocturnal writer of visionary fiction. The first great triumph of this second Kafka came on September 22, 1912, when he wrote “The Judgment” in a single eight-hour span, from 10 pm to 6 am, feeling “terrible strain and joy.” No sooner had he finished than he crept into his sisters’ room to read the story aloud.

So it went. Overworked, insomniac, neurasthenic—he did his life’s work in fugitive hours, when, conscious of his immense literary abilities, he felt capable of anything. At other times, he sank into suicidal despair. Despite rehearsing time and again in his diary the cost to his writing, physical health, and sanity of this “horrible double life,” he kept getting promoted at the office, even after being diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917 and suffering a bout of Spanish flu the following year. “Why does my name appear on the first page of the enemy’s notes?” he asked himself. “I can’t say.” And he kept having breakdowns. His life reads like a parable by Kafka.

Yet it’s impossible to imagine one Kafka without the other. His training in law, which included a brief practice in the provincial high court and criminal court, his work at the insurance institute, his management of his brother-in-law’s financially troubled asbestos factory during the war—“Wretched factory,” he griped—inform the characters and situations of his fiction. Just as real legal terms are employed (and distorted) in The Trial, whole passages in The Castle can only be called bureaucratic farce. The dance of the files—a protracted scene in the corridor of an inn, where a pair of porters distribute documents from a cart to the officials residing there, who fight to take possession of the files without showing their faces, while the hapless protagonist, K. (having intruded on this private ritual), looks on in amazement, thereby breaking one of the cloistered society’s many taboos—is as tightly choreographed as any ballet. The verbal gusto of the sequence suggests Kafka’s transport while writing it. The farce is of a special kind, however, delightful to the reader but never to K., who finally is bounced out by the landlord and his wife. “But what had he done? Repeatedly K. asked, but for a long time he could not elicit an answer, because his guilt was all too self-evident to them, and so they never even remotely considered that he might have acted in good faith.”

Guilt in Kafka is always self-evident; the justice system is unjust, yet impossible to overthrow. The judge of “In the Penal Colony” has one guiding principle: “Guilt is never to be doubted.” It’s the logic of show trials, of “enemies of the people” (prosecuted under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code), of the worst kinds of racial animus. Following anti-Semitic riots in November 1920, Kafka wrote to Jesenská, his Czech translator, who would later join the Czech resistance and die in a concentration camp:

I’ve been spending every afternoon outside on the streets, wallowing in anti-Semitic hate. The other day I heard someone call the Jews a “mangy race.” Isn’t it natural to leave a place where one is so hated? . . . The heroism of staying on is nonetheless merely the heroism of cockroaches which cannot be exterminated.

From an author famed for a story about a man transformed into a giant insect, the phrase “heroism of cockroaches” is telling. Gregor Samsa awakes to find that he is an ungeheueres Ungeziefer, pictured often as a kind of cockroach or beetle but with the adjective connoting something not only enormous or monstrous but also deeply unsettling—the inverse of geheuer, “comfortable” or “familiar.” These weren’t the first anti-Semitic riots in Kafka’s Prague. We frequently discover in his diaries a precise record of things he saw, people he encountered: the features of a face, details of dress and deportment. Discrete incidents gathered, in his sight, into a looming shadow. Kafka made up his fictive worlds not only out of inner anxieties but also out of acts of acute perception.

At his death, Kafka had only a small reputation, as a minor surrealist. Luckily for world literature, he had a bosom friend. Max Brod, as literary executor, could be counted on to violate the anguished Kafka’s request to burn, unread, all his private papers and manuscripts. Brod lost no time in getting his dead friend into print. By 1947, the adjective “Kafkaesque” had entered the English language.

The dead, as any antiquarian can tell you, make great nourishment. But Kafka? Thin, tubercular, diffident, breaker of three engagements, author of three unfinished novels, he seems unpromising fare. Death brings change, however, especially to genius. In 1946—the year before “Kafkaesque” was coined—Hannah Arendt wrote to the publisher Salman Schocken of Kafka’s nutritive value: “Though during his lifetime he could not make a decent living, he will now keep generations of intellectuals both gainfully employed and well fed.” The manuscript of The Castle lay protected for years in a Swiss vault. The manuscript of The Trial was auctioned in 1988 for a record sum by Sotheby’s. Like Samson scooping honey from the lion’s carcass, countless scholars, critics, editors, and translators have found their author surprisingly sweet.

Now comes a compelling new translation, by Ross Benjamin, of the complete, unexpurgated diaries, running to 670 pages (including endnotes and index) in a handsome Schocken hardcover. Reading the unfinished novels beside the Diaries is enlightening: they reveal how much in Kafka’s fiction derived from personal pain and how much goes beyond it, as the critic George Steiner explained in a 1963 essay:

Kafka’s nightmare-vision may well have derived from private hurt and neurosis. But that does not diminish its uncanny relevance, the proof it gives of the great artist’s possession of antennae which reach beyond the rim of the present and make darkness visible. The fantasy turned to concrete fact. Members of Kafka’s immediate family perished in the gas ovens. . . . The world of east and central European Judaism, in which Kafka’s genius is so deeply at home, was scattered to ash.

Afflicted with a fearful attunement to the shape of things to come, Kafka presents us with the spectacle of a man trying to claw his way inside his own life. No sooner is he in than he wants out again. He empathized with secondary characters in novels and plays, who fulfill their roles in the plot and then disappear. Tormented by loneliness, he found sociability difficult, even unbearable. (“In me myself without human connection there are no visible lies. The bounded circle is pure.”) As a child, he thought dolled-up streetwalkers the most beautiful of women. As a grown man, he visited brothels. “I estrange from her a little by getting so physically close to her,” he remarked of the woman to whom he would, on two separate occasions, become engaged. In Judaism, too, what appealed to him were partly the “beautiful strong separations. . . . One sees oneself better, one judges oneself better.”

Little in Kafka remains constant, but always there is this separateness, this sense of leading an inner life totally distinct from that of his fellow human beings—who, therefore, can’t truly be called his fellows—together with the hope that his extreme alienation might contain its own antithesis; that outcasts like him might not only be welcomed into the bosom of the human family but that their outcast nature paradoxically might ensure no less. In a diary entry of 1911, he fancies that a Jewish couple he knows are “people who due to their separate status are particularly close to the center of the community’s life.” In time, Kafka got his wish: a deeply personal, almost hermetic corpus of fiction, written on the margins of a declining empire, now occupies a central place in twentieth-century letters. In his work—coterminous with his life—marginalization is a means of more clearly apprehending the heart of things. Distance guarantees intimacy or is a form of intimacy itself.

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” From the opening sentence of The Trial, Kafka registers the totalitarian state as rooted in falsehood, bent on turning neighbor against neighbor. Records scrutinized since the fall of the Soviet Union suggest that one in every three or four citizens of the USSR denounced someone to the regime. K. is “condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance,” for the specific charge against him is never stated.

But as the narrative develops, the terrible implication goes deeper. It is not merely that every one of the accused is prima facie guilty (the kangaroo nature of this strange parallel court system is clear enough) but rather that absolutely everyone in society stands accused; everyone is always potentially guilty. If some people walk around free, it’s only because the authorities haven’t yet gotten around to issuing warrants for their arrest. “Show me the man,” said Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the secret police, “and I’ll show you the crime.” Real acquittal in this judicial system is a thing of folklore, myth.

Gradually, the hopelessness of Josef K.’s position is borne in upon him. Even those who seem to oppose the system, or to be impartial observers, are in fact its apologists and agents. Kafka captured for all time the nightmarish legalese of totalitarian bureaucracy, wherein meaning is not withheld so much as fuzzily diffused, in sublingual fashion, through the tissues and into the blood. “The only proper approach is to learn to accept existing conditions,” Josef K.’s lawyer tells him, excusing the court. One must take care “not to arouse the ire of the bureaucracy.” What bureaucracy, exactly? Without ever making its labyrinthine structure clear, Kafka is masterful in suggesting a shadowy court hierarchy, half-competent, cloaked in secrecy, and terrifyingly powerful—a court whose high-level decisions are never published or shared with defense counsel—receding ever further out of reach of the defendants and their attorneys, into some dark empyrean.

Slandered. Some translations say “telling lies about,” but “slandered” feels nearer to the bone. In July 1914, Kafka went to Berlin to end his engagement to Felice Bauer. “The tribunal in the hotel” is what he called the confrontation with his fiancée, her sister Erna, and their friends Ernst Weiss and Grete Bloch, with the last of whom Kafka had carried on an intense correspondence. (She was later murdered at Auschwitz.) What must Bauer’s family and friends have said about him? The ex-fiancée herself, on a carriage ride, let him have it, venting “well-thought-through, long-saved-up, hostile things.” Kafka, plagued with guilt, asked Bauer’s parents not to remember him unkindly. He told Bloch in a letter that, just as she had judged him on that day in the Hotel Askanischer Hof, now it was he who sat in judgment over himself.

What elevates to something like clairvoyance Kafka’s personal pathologies—one can only guess at how each twist of his shy, disturbed psyche would be medicalized today—is that the tortured isolation recorded in his diaries is precisely what the inhuman systems he apprehended want: for the individual, stripped of outside help or companionship, finally to stand naked before the machinery of the state, utterly at its mercy.

Didn’t a painstaking defense—and any other kind would be senseless—didn’t a painstaking defense simultaneously imply the necessity of cutting himself off as far as possible from everything else? Would he successfully survive that? . . .

While his trial rolled on, while the officials of the court were up there in the attic going over the trial documents, he was supposed to conduct bank business? Didn’t that seem like a form of torture, sanctioned by the court, a part of the trial itself, accompanying it?

Twentieth-century history is a house of horrors. To be haunted in a haunted house is no defect of character. In Spindelmühle, a resort Kafka visited in 1922 to convalesce, and where he began to write The Castle, the hotel miswrote his name as Josef K. Time had not lessened his feeling of being hunted or condemned. “Shall I enlighten them,” Kafka asks his diary, “or shall I let them enlighten me?” At last, the identification with his protagonist was complete.

Politically, Kafka sends us back to first principles. What is human subjectivity? What moral standing does the individual possessed of an inner life have in the face of tyranny or mechanized abjection? Granted that our fundamental rights are inalienable, what forces seek to alienate us from them? On what grounds do we guard our privacy—our dreams and aspirations, our cherished beliefs and disappointed hopes—from encroachment by an all-controlling state?

Kafka, whose own subjectivity was unstable, couldn’t stop imagining worlds—bordering on our own—where the individual is ground down or senselessly annihilated. One of the densest parts of The Castle is also the most moving: Olga’s story of her and her father’s tireless efforts to atone for an offense given to a Castle official.

For this slight, the entire family has been de-personed. Abandoned by his customers and neighbors, his business ruined, his health finally in shambles, Olga’s father ceaselessly petitions the Castle, but his entreaties are rebuffed:

What did he want? What had happened to him? What did he want to be pardoned for? When, and by whom, had a finger ever been raised against him at the Castle? He was indeed impoverished, having lost his customers and so on, but this had to do with everyday life, with trade matters and the marketplace, and was the Castle supposed to take care of everything? But in reality it did take care of everything, yet it couldn’t crudely intervene in developments for no reason other than to serve the interests of one individual. . . . What could one forgive him? At most that he was now senselessly pestering the offices, but that’s precisely what was so unforgivable.

Behind the Castle’s closed doors, remote from the life of the village they superintend, the officials are a bureaucratic class that wields power while escaping accountability. This is a stinging satire of Austro-Hungarian officialdom, but not only a satire.

Finally, Olga hits on the idea of enrolling her brother in the ranks of Castle servants. But even to enter the Castle service as a low-level employee—or an even lower-status “semi-probationer”—is an arduous process, fraught with hidden difficulties and contradictions. The good reputation of one’s family is of paramount importance; yet sometimes a disreputable candidate, through his sheer unsuitability, will arouse the interest of the officials. “But sometimes that doesn’t help the man gain admission but only endlessly prolongs the admission proceedings, which are not terminated but simply broken off after the man dies.”

Here, as elsewhere in Kafka, there is the sense of legal procedures unnaturally prolonged, even beyond death—a kind of modern harrowing of the corpse. The Trial ends with Josef K.’s execution: “It seemed as though the shame was to outlive him.” It is Olga’s vain hope that the invisible authorities who assign guilt may be propitiated; she hopes to enter the good graces of “whoever is observing me and my actions from up there.” Yet these mandarins, for all their frenetic activity and voluminous files, are strangely powerless: “For is an individual official capable of granting pardon? At best this might be a matter for the administration as a whole, but even it is incapable of granting forgiveness; it can only judge.”

Kafka is a virtuoso of such paradoxes and subversions. “My prison cell—my fortress,” runs a late diary entry. An artist once asked him to pose nude as the model for a Saint Sebastian. It seems symbolically apt, Kafka standing in for the saint pierced with arrows—a figure of fascination for twentieth-century writers and artists, from T. S. Eliot to Yukio Mishima. In a note from 1914, it is his own hand that Kafka imagines pinning him to the wall. Later, he entertains the idea that man’s true original sin consists in his perpetually making the accusation that “the original sin was committed against him.”

For much of the twentieth century, Americans could absorb Kafka with more aplomb than could his European readers, for whom the disturbing stories had come true. “From the literal nightmare of The Metamorphosis came the knowledge that Ungeziefer (‘vermin’) was to be the designation of millions of men,” Steiner wrote. When German high civilization fell into depravity, Americans were shocked but not complicit. Rereading the novels now, the discovery is how timely they are. Kafka’s visions of men choking on red tape, of societies oppressed by a hypertrophied administrative class, have an uncanny relevance.

Post–Twitter Files, it is plain that our present regime has begun to resemble what Guy Davenport called “the kind of Orwellian liberalism that is teleologically indistinguishable from totalitarianism.” Note how, in the space of a single generation, activism on behalf of various identity groups has passed from pleas for tolerance, to demands for acceptance, to coercive mandates of affirmation. Orwellian liberalism in a democratic society emerges not as democracy’s obvious antipode but in the guise of democracy fulfilled, as a more perfect vehicle for the “will of the people.” This is the rationale by which progressives today agitate in favor of ending the Electoral College or packing the Supreme Court. This is also the rationale by which the FBI flags posts that it wants social-media platforms to remove. Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, in the days before the 2020 presidential election, was widely seen as, and proclaimed by U.S. intelligence officials to be, not the election interference it manifestly was but a righteous effort to combat election interference. Checks and balances erode; an ethos of personal liberty and responsibility is supplanted by the administrative will to power. The call is coming from inside the Schloss.

I once swapped phone numbers with an intern in the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs. Her business card, long out of date, has served for years as a bookmark in my old paperback edition of Kafka’s Diaries, page 301: it is August 2, 1914, and the Great War has just begun. Freud, when he hears the news, is almost hysterical with delight. The 25-year-old Wittgenstein dutifully enlists as an infantryman and is eventually awarded two medals for valor; the knowledge of the unsayable that he will carry out of no man’s land will inform the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his first major work. Kafka in his diary is terse, even blasé, as if this most suicidal of wars were a horror foretold: “Germany has declared war on Russia.—Swimming in the afternoon.” (In Benjamin’s version, “Swimming” is given as “Swimming school,” somewhat marring the pithiness of the remark.)

Kafka wanted to join the war effort and was fit enough but was exempted, at his employer’s request. So he sat out of it, preoccupied with his “dreamlike inner life,” while the new century exploded in what the scholar Hugh Kenner termed “the first European war to be planned by typewriter.” (The torture device of “In the Penal Colony,” significantly, is also a kind of writing machine.) When Kafka did bear direct witness to history, the run-in was almost a premonition. An air show at Brescia in 1909 (Blériot aloft and Puccini in the stands) furnished the budding writer with the subject of his first published work. Scarcely two years later, an Italian pilot tossed grenades from the cockpit of his Blériot XI monoplane onto Turkish troops in Libya—the first aerial bombardment in history.

At times, I prefer the original Diaries, published in the late 1940s, with translations based on Brod’s bowdlerized German version. In many ways, however, the new Diaries outdoes the old. It is not only that Benjamin restores the formerly redacted names of people still living at the time of the original publication, or that he rescues certain passages that Brod, trying to establish his friend’s reputation, thought indecent or otherwise inadvisable. (“His apparently sizable member makes a large bulge in his pants,” Kafka observes of a fellow train passenger.) Of greater interest is the more faithful rendering of the author’s idiosyncratic prose. Entries break off abruptly. Disparate ideas are linked by commas only, as though set down in tearing haste. Strings of adjectives go by with no commas at all. Grammar, under the weight of profound emotion, buckles. “Wherever possible, I tried to preserve the unpolished elements of the text, like fragments, non-standard punctuation, inconsistencies, mangled syntax, and many other departures from traditional German,” Benjamin told Asymptote Journal. His aim: to present readers with a “less sanctified” literary figure.

The presentation of a warts-and-all Kafka is in keeping with the spirit of our age, which is intolerant of saints. But less polished, in this case, is hardly less profound. Brod knew what he was safeguarding when, on March 14, 1939, with his friend’s manuscripts stashed in a rucksack, he and his wife, Elsa, fled by night train—the last train that would cross the Polish border before the Nazis marched into Prague—to the edge of the Black Sea. There they booked passage on the liner Bessarabia; en route to Tel Aviv, they stopped in Istanbul, Athens, Crete, and Alexandria, as though opening the way for Kafka’s writings to capture the imagination of the world. “One unfolds in one’s nature only after death,” he had written.

Dead at 40, an age he had hardly expected to reach, Kafka was fated to give us the language, as well as the mood, by which we could approach a century of bureaucratic and mechanistic horrors—a century that may yet prove, in the West, to be the last literate century, in the sense of the written word structuring, as it once did, our modes of understanding. The emphatic hold over us that acts of eloquence had in the past has weakened considerably. No longer does language seem to encompass the full measure of present reality. Much in our picture of the world is now literally pictorial; and where the younger generation has embraced the spoken word, instead of literature, by way of podcasts and short-form videos, it is often a kind of dog English they speak—steeped, at one end of the spectrum, in the jargon of critical theory and, at the other, in subliterate slang. “A book,” the 20-year-old Kafka declared, “must be an ice-ax to break the sea frozen inside us.” Will we find in years to come that other tools serve just as well? The evidence so far is not encouraging.

Kafka practiced to the end what he called the “strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving consolation of writing.” Just as his example can chasten and inspire, so his corpus may serve as a redoubt from which to mount a principled resistance. If humane culture is to survive by way of language, if hard-won individual freedoms are to win out over central planning, there are dropped threads in his work which American writers today would be wise to pick up. Or, as the author himself remarked, “The hollow burned into our surroundings by the work of genius is a good place to put in one’s little light.”