The Pleasures of Collapse

Dispatches from the Soft Apocalypse

Those Pleasures to Come. –

What can one imagine?

Soon there will be a seeking for experiences outside the logic of the machine. Our pleasures at present are far too rational, far too predictable in their essence—following, as they do, that easy equation: A = B, sensory excitement = pleasure, pleasure = happiness.
This simplistic realm of logic is fast being colonized by A.I., and any pleasure that follows its pattern will soon seem debased—somehow inhuman, obscene, and therefore of a weaker, lesser sort.

Logic was only ever fit for man in that it was not shared.

In the future, it will be that which cannot be understood that will be valued: the irrational, the illogical, the unspeakable. The rich—vanguards, as ever, of man’s dissatisfaction—will be the first to set out on such avenues of seeking, settling upon devices and acts that now seem stupid, even impossible. Indeed, unimaginable—for the circuitous and mind-bending routes they will go to escape what has now become unfit for man.

Perhaps they will holiday in the sewers.
Remove certain limbs.
Attempt the extinction of all life.

In such a future, the use of logic will become a middle-class virtue—until they too are caught up in the fashion that all pleasures follow. And then, it will be for the poor and lowly to cling to the logic of old, and the bland utilitarianism it always, somehow, inspires.

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On the extremity of life. –

The real terror is to stop and consider.

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The Hospice of History (or: Imagining Something Better) –

Where has that millenarian instinct gone—that dream to end all dreams? None now imagine with any force; none seek a vision that might overturn the stars or topple the heavens. This is nihilism’s true blessing: why act for any supreme end, why fight for a better life, when every life is as meaningless as the last? Capitalism—and its Caliban, social democracy—is the best form of government for such a purposeless existence: a few pleasures of the day, a few measly promised pleasures of the morrow; no demand to be something more, to do something more; no call to some higher plane of being. Perfect! For any appeal to the exemplary is merely a reminder of the now inescapable, unexemplary nature of life.

Heaven itself has fallen to this nihilism—I mean that Christianity has also been infected by the social-democratic, laissez-faire spirit: a continual settling for the day, a wish only for more parishioners, not martyrs—not the old apocalyptic-paradise-fueled dream of annihilating the material dross that now consumes the world. Where are the anchorites of old, those spastic saints?

Socialism too—a slavish seeking: slightly higher pay, maternity leave, toilet rights! Utopia has become a dirty word—a painful reminder of the utterly pointless nature of existence. Has man learned his lesson? Grown prudent in his old age? Or has he simply settled—for the most formless of all existences?

This is capitalism’s true power: it indulges our most nihilistic tendencies.

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On the Modern Use of the Word Modern. –

A word used no longer with any sense of “presently,” but rather with an air of superiority—indeed, a great sense of self-congratulation and finality, as though the end has been reached, the apex attained. But who knows how many eons of humanity are yet to come? In a million years, when the true moderns arise, they might look back on this phase of our existence as nothing more than a late iteration of the Stone Age—a joke of pond life, perhaps? Preliterate bacteria?

Worse still, this use of the word modern—and all its appendages of superiority—might act as a hindrance to our development: a supreme failure of imagination regarding what might yet come. Or is it, more darkly, a subconscious willing? A suffering? The suspicion that the end has come…

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The Narrative Instinct. –

To turn life into a story, that is to express it as a pattern so that it may be read, that it makes sense and therefore has a meaning. This is no doubt a sentiment wished by all, and yet, articulated in such a way, is there not a problem here, i.e. that it goes against the free will we all so crave and value? For surely any limits we start setting upon ourselves places an impediment to freedom; any time we start saying: “I would not do that.” Or “That is not like me.” Or “This goes against my nature and destiny.” We shut off almost all the freedom that maybe had from life. Simply: as soon as we begin to give meaning to our life, we remove its freedom.

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Social Media / Spastic Platonism. –

The false image presented as beautiful: that one longs for the knowingly false. Everything bright, perfect—a presentation only of the ideal, reached by the select, the ironically unknowing few. A portal kept by ignorance. One ascends from the cave of sordid reality to claim those bleached and botoxed heights known only of idols. Along with Kant, I again will always proclaim it: man will have his metaphysics, no matter how ridiculous a form it takes.

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A Grotesque Success. –

What is it, really, that makes modernity such a desperate endeavor? Could it be that we finally got everything we ever truly wanted—and that it wasn’t enough?

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That Final Luxury. –

Alone, finally, in the dying of the day—while the shadows greyed and the light turned rainbow-faded—I knew this: The great luxuries of the future will be those that grant us reprieve from our many addictions. Luxuries that allow us, even for a short time, to revel in what we have long feared: silence, boredom, presence, peace.

But even the reprieve from addiction—
will become an addiction.

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White & Withered. –

The West now, as I see it, is merely a synonym for castration.

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On That Other Tyranny (or: How to Cower a People.)

In an age of historicism and easy information, how does one cower a people? How to weaken their resolve and make them prey to tyranny?
By subverting every expression of justice that might revolt against it.

How?
1. By favoring the criminal over the victim.
2. By handing out the most pathetic of sentences for even the most destructive of crimes.
3. By opening up endless legal avenues that allow for the perversion of punishment—human rights claims, therapeutic leniency, excuses cloaked in compassion.
4. By insisting the criminal is merely misunderstood, a victim himself.
5. By turning justice upside down.

Take a real case:
A woman is struck in a hit-and-run by a driver drunk and high. She suffers catastrophic brain injury. She has three young children.
If we follow the most basic form of justice—a simple balancing of scales—this man should face life imprisonment, perhaps even death.
His actions have not only destroyed one life, but likely cast a shadow over generations to come.
Children need their mother—who will raise them? The state?

His sentence?
Eighteen months.

What does such injustice do?
It introduces a general terror: a lingering sympathy for the victim that infects everyone, making everyone a potential victim.
And that is the goal—for nothing suits power more than a cowering, apprehensive people: a nation of victims.
What the victim transmits most is not rage but fear: the worry that what happened before will happen again.
Weakness and fear become the prevailing emotions of a society.

It was once too dangerous for the tyranny to have its power concentrated into a single individual so why not have thousands—empowered by law, by excuse, by sentimentality?

And as for those who support the criminal, who preach compassion while justice rots—they are the tyrant's fools, the most perverted of all, an empathy masquerading as evil.

If justice if still taught it is only so it can be abused.

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