The Civil War of Prophets

Gunpowder Anthropologies part 2

I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house - Hamlet’s Father’s Ghost

From Weary to Demented

In part one I spelled out the task of finding lost intelligences. What exactly are lost intelligences? One could suggest they are forms of intelligence that require certain experiential wealth to even begin an inquiry into. On the other hand, they are intelligences that operated and were transmitted through social forms which have largely been abandoned (cultures, faiths, ‘ways of life’ ect.) If one wanted to define the consequences of the 1968’ era onwards, it would not be as a decadent turn away from traditions. Actually, we are more suffocated today with rules, moral debts, accusations, suspicions, and other stifling phenomena than ever before. Rather, the world after 1968 has proven equally as capable of totalitarians, brutality and prejudice as any other. For every social duty, old wisdom, rite of passage, and local custom that is dissolved into the vapours of modern globalisation, we create a new code, regulation, new social fopaux, point of obsessive humanitarian awareness, ecological fixation and so forth. To truly have short term memories would be a delight compared to the de-historicised and decultured obsessive compulsions we now live under.

There is no longer a trade-off between freedom or social cohesion. We no longer have an ounce of either. And why? Because the navigation of such situations would require a sort of intelligence which has been lost. We cannot even begin to fathom that we are not only making dogmatic trade-offs; we are now simply no different to a mentally deranged lunatic whose behaviour displays as much reasoning as if he were planning to execute his fellow inmates and then leap out of a five story window. That isn’t to say that every individual is mad or evil, but our intelligence and integrity is often anthropologically generated, transmitted and expressed. Unlike the theories of individualism that believes too strongly in the power of good men inside bad institutions, I would rather posit that reason is often incompatible with certain social structures or historical time periods.

The use of reason should not insist perpetually on ‘what is the solution’? But that answer will be informed better by asking what has been lost? What must we re-find what could even begin to allow us to answer the questions posed by these dilemmas. We should not rationally respond with ‘solutions’ but realise what has already been lost, so as to answer the future with re-animated echoes from the past; or perhaps look again to the past with re-animated echoes from the future.

It is this sense of continuity that is most collapsed today. The post-war generations were so prepared to cut themselves off from the past.(this actually means before WW2, not from WW2 itself) — and in doing so, they have not become politically forward thinking, but rather they have just become boring, ugly and dangerous to the few cherishable virtues and relationships left in this liberal, Spenglerian-winter we now live within.

It should be noted that many of these lost intelligences are expressions of what we might call patrilinear intelligence. That means, roughly, they were transmitted through patrilinear social, institutional and family structures, identifications and a matrix of values and social roles that came about through it. We speak of the religious versus secular age, the industrial versus pre/post-industrial age and so on. Yet, we never speak of patrilinear society versus post-patrilineal society, of which schismed officially sometime in the 20th century. Therefore we never speak of the main route by which wisdoms, skills and experiences were passed through.

The absolute peak moment of post-patrilineal society can be seen in phenomena of trans, who express a symptom of society that cannot even earn a moderate wisdom of how to live as beings with two different genders. This is often posited as an expression of ‘tolerance’ —as in, ‘progress’—but it is clearly an act of forgetfulness. We haven’t ‘realised’ people have a psychological complex not yet discovered, as those who still want psychology to be a ‘science’ wish for. We have forgotten simply how to be people. Now with globalised low birth rates it seems even basic reproduction—something zoo animals could achieve(perhaps with the exception of panadas) is another task that we can no longer do. Science is as much a process of amnesia as recalling or discovering; the amnesiatic character to progress is usually ignored.

Clever commentators will often posit the question ‘how can we fix the birth gap?’, as if they are inventing a method of splitting the atom or a solution to free energy. There is no ‘solution’ to the birth gap crisis (many governments have already been trying with various policies with no success). The reason there is no solution is because the answer is evident. People have been having children since the human species began. We might even say that reproduction is how it began!

To posit a solution to the birth gap is like trying to posit a mathematical equation for breathing or for dodging a punch. The failure does not come from a lack of cognitive focus, technologies or knowledge, but a lack of collective capacity to live. It is a problem of a failed spirit or somebody who develops amnesia after a car crash. There is no solution. There is only life — and we have forgotten how to live creatively; we live now only safely. Of course, on a individual level, this failure is understandable because of a broken social contract. But on a collective and political level, it is a society run by dementia; which means in language, to be out of one’s own mind: from phrase de mente, from de "from, away from".

A political system of dementia is, in some sense, away from where it is. Quite literally it is not present enough to be effective. It experiences a temporal alienation from its own immediate being. It cannot posit a solution to an immanent problem anymore than a 16th century king could come up with a solution to a contemporary problem, or that we could for a 26th century problem.

And so maybe forgetting doesn’t quite describe the issue. It is more of an incapacity to exist within our own temporal character; an effect of a displacement from both a future and a past.

Reminder of Forgotten things

Nietzsche’s madman asked this very question when he reminded the people of his time that God is dead. He did not ask the question ‘what is the solution for his return?’ He simply reminded us that it happened. He reminded us that we forgot, not about God, given that in his time people were still extrovertly pious, but rather they had forgotten what God means. He became a thing we were ‘away from’, something had driven him out of our hearts and minds, even if we still went to church and prayed.

Socrates is probably the most famous participant in reminding people of things. Again - he didn’t expect a solution to the question ‘what is justice?’ He already assumed that people had forgotten and simply went out of his way to prove that they had, in fact, forgotten. That justice was no longer at the centre of their minds, even if it was still a rhetoric at the centre of their speeches.

We are the same today—but to a much more radical degree than ever before. We have forgotten everything, yet we live in the most arrogantly ‘knowledgeable’ time. The most basic realities such as men and women, having babies, accepting death, are now treated as gnostic pieces of esoteric knowledge; knowledge that can only be unlocked through a lifelong scholarly commitment, or a highly paid team of government advising experts.

Yet it seems to me, the entire system of patrilineal society was much better at accepting, transmitting and discussing the obvious, which in post-patrilineal society needs to be carefully elucidated to a world citizenry of amnesia patients. Of course, it wasn’t just family structures. Economics and technology have also turned us into amnesia patients. But it fits the same pattern of failing to live under demands of fidelity to some greater horizon, self-understanding or spiritual commitment; always abandoned for other things.

What energetics and tension stir such memories of what was once obvious? Freud was good at theorizing about the obvious while having the properly disagreeable temperament to ask supposedly smart people why they had forgotten the obvious. One of his theories elucidated the rivalry dynamics between fathers and sons. One doens’t need to embellish all the strange particulars of the whole Oedipal paradigm to accept that human, male psychology, is energetically geared towards rivalry dynamics.

There is an unrecognised component to Freud’s work that emerges as a response to the fact that the way in which we dealt with rivalry dynamics had broken down. Nietzsche criticised men of his time for being clones of conformity, losing the capacity to imagine themselves beyond their self-satisfied current state. These last men lacked the capacity to hate themselves, as Nietzsche put it. Not long after Nietzsche’s late 19th century malaise, Europe exploded into such a ferocity of imagining something other than itself. Then it largely lost itself again. This indicates a crisis in rivalry dynamics because a stagnation and malaise is defined by a lack of the energetic forces of rivalry — while a particularly explosive time of revolution, war and radical politics marks a difficulty to find a morally and politically acceptable use of that energy - or that their expression was suffocated for so long, it suddenly bursts out.

The manner in which these energetics are framed, followed, identified with and expressed is a matter of the old word that now makes us contemporaries embarrassed: legitimacy. This is because legitimacy involves the authority of imagining a future. I will follow up on this in future installments. But for now, it’s good enough to observe that the rivalries of history (inter-subjectively) play a huge role in what we think of as civilisation. They play a vastly different role for men than for women, and I believe the theory of the Oedipal complex points here; although psychoanalysts have not yet had the audacity to admit this(because most of them are academics). More than simply observing some banal psychological distinction in gender, this points to why historical subjectivity (in its sense of leadership, initiation, change, schisms and conservation and continuation) has typically been, through either convention or simply what has happened, largely a male task. Not exclusively or solely, but it expresses itself as its champion. This is why Jesus, Hamlet, Achilles, Napoleon are all men. Not because of some banal claim at a distinction in intelligence or skill, but because the vessel which spills its blood for the continuation of life, new horizons, miracles, conservation or impossible victories, happens for men through the possibility of giving himself to this continuity —of giving his own blood, or of this continuity being already within his own blood — whereas for women, a less dramatic but equivalent is biologically ingrained in their very existence as mothers.

The difference between men and women can be seen here. Motherhood does not contain a continuation of life through rivalry but through a sort of unity of foetal nurturing. As for men, the possibility of life’s continuation happens more through their subjective rivalry with previous subjectivities; or in other words, its continuation is paradoxically only possible through a rivalry. Again this is what Freud points to with the Oedipal complex, which is too easily reduced to sexuality or desire.

If one takes Freud’s idea to its limit, we see that in same sense, a man cannot reproduce, imagine a future, be loved, admired or victorious, without traversing an infracted image which moves unavoidably through his contest with his father. This is perhaps too easily labelled a pathology in the clinical sense. Pathology comes from pathos, which has dual root meaning of passion and suffering. In simple terms, the very passion of man own identity —of ‘finding himself’—only comes through a rivalry which he is not entirely sure he actually wants to win, because if he did, he would once again lose himself.

Feminists go wrong most radically when they fail to see these dynamics. They claim patrilineal customs were a conspiracy of men against women. Quite the contrary. It was a manner of dealing with the psychological reality of rivalry dynamics. Feminists may as well suggest that basic diplomacy between the French and Prussians in the 19th century was proof of a conspiracy, despite the fact they literally had a war. When the potential for conflict exists, smart people generally attempt to form dynamics of negotiation and diplomacy, power sharing ect., just as much as they will sometimes resort to direct force when those dynamics fail or are absent. Ultimately, attention is put on areas where there is a lot at stake. This is not a conspiracy.

Working around rivalry structures by accepting this duality to human nature and human relations, that could once go from war to discussion over trade deals in a period of a few weeks, is a complex reality. And perhaps the long summer created after WW2 has simply deprived us of direct experiences that remind us of situations where things are at stake. The result has been that post-war peoples have resorted to cheap moral abstractions over living and breathing realities.

Although such a stupefaction goes back further. From the very beginnings of liberal thought, of which we could trace back to Hobbes, we see a deep suspicion of rivalry psychology. Hobbes was not simply concerned with conflicts caused by squabbles over resources or other material influences. More importantly, he was concerned with what would later be called the mimetic power of ambition. He argued that the Iliad shoudn’t be translated into English as it would influence young men with regicidal feelings; a somewhat comparable sentiment to hyper politically correct era of the early 21st century that doesn’t claim thymotically-charged literature will lead to regicide, but it does suggest it will lead to a genocide, an outburst of sex crimes, national security concerns, or the collapse of ‘human rights’. Regardless, the same suspicion is there; the same fixation on an apocalypse hiding behind such a thin layer of order.

I personally believe the thinness of this layer of order is exaggerated and its density universalised into a width that is far more contingent on particular historical circumstances.

Hobbes is ultimately concerned with what Plato called thymotic psychology: what motivates one to find recognition and glory in life and in deeds. What the end of history or hauntological speculations force upon us is the nature of such psychology is so radically affected by history, and not simply by a scientific theory of human psychology or biology.

Girard famously discussed mimesis through a desire framework. Insofar that desire was the main lens by which irrational human passions (and therefore authenticity) was conducted through. Although Girard certainly never neglected the theme of violence and mimetic desire leading to violence, his theories do overlook what Plato (and Nietzsche) understood concerning the self-denying aspect to thymotic psychology. Thymos should not simply be presented as an acquisitional motivation, as it is when we desire something, even if that something is simply symbolic or signifies status or power. We also have a thymotic psychology that is entirely negative. It doesn’t really ‘want’ anything. It simply wants ‘more’, but this more is a negative space of potentiality. It is more akin to the Greek term pothos, or yearning. It is an expression of suffering as much as much as satisfaction.

The incapacity of 20th century writers to discuss thymos as something more than simply another form of desire, or of a ‘desire for recognition’, or as leading to suffering (when fulfillment fails), instead of being, at its core, an expression of suffering, is a topic for another day. But its complications we see today give us the opportunity to understand previous thinkers more clearly.

Hobbes posited mechanical metaphysics in order to respond to psycho-political problems. Hobbes, contrary to many conservatives, didn’t view man as so dangerous because of his nature (if by that we mean something biological). Hobbes admired animals for fitting into natural orders. Animals engage in violence, but it is not sinful violence because it is motivated by the natural disposition of survival and reproduction. Sinful violence, for Hobbes, would be that which comes from such a negative space, from a specifically human motivation that transcends survival or reproduction. Human ‘nature’ was such a problem for Hobbes because out violence doesn’t fit into the natural order, as it does for animals. It goes beyond it. Religious violence perhaps best exemplifies this aspect in the mediaeval world — and sometimes even modern world (Northern Ireland recently, and the middle East today) — while it was often something like mythology and thrasos, or ambition, that characterised it in the ancient world.

Hobbes was justified in observing this supra-biological aspect in humans. It is an astute observation of human ‘nature’. Yet, his notion of sovereignty was justified on the grounds of containing it in a manner that might be seen as the re-biologisation of humans, ironically through the civil order itself. The secondary question is whether human violence could be re-biologised, but again that is too big a question for now. One could even go so far to say that the scientific humanism that characterised so much of the post-war order from 1946 onwards , is Hobbesian in this regard. It wishes to contain the supra-biological characteristics of mankind inside a machine of positivity, material safety, cheapened social ‘recognition’, merely attached to socio-economic status, and consumption.

Scientific humanism does not achieve this through a contractual political state such as Hobbes imagined—which was always limited in its capacity for re-biologisation. Scientific humanism, the ideology of many post-war architects of international institutions such as the UN, including Aldus Huxley’s brother, Julian Huxley, viewed the capacity of modern science (including it use in social engineering) to achieve a forever lasting containment of the conflicts and psycho-politics expressed through nationalism and other secular ideologies. From 1946 onwards, Hobbes was no longer contained to the a more local kingdom or nation state as he was previously, but took on a new history of a global scientific community.

Of course there are many conspiracy theories about such types. But the basic suspicion towards them is justified. The use of a globalised community of scientists (sometimes outright scientism) is a dangerous experiment to embark on. It truly expects too much of a reductionist view of human nature to last for any significant period of historical time. It also fails to see the value in mankind’s supra biological characterises, which is why appetitive placations of modern people’s dissatisfaction is indulged almost without limit (not just in the form of consumption but also in the form of medicine). Not only is this a deeply shallow way of life to offer to human beings who are for all intensive purposes the same species with similar supra-biological needs of those in the recent and distant past.

But also because a profitable industry grows out of such scientific-humanistic containment of man’s character. Economies and government policies of mass placation intertwine into a system that then depends politically and economically on an accelerated model of cultural decay that is in constant opposition to how humans are with any reference to nature or history.

De Cive vs De Hominie

Good readers of Hobbes will remember that it is an extremely radical form of artificiality that Hobbes associated with the civil order. Recall Hobbes has two words for mankind: De Cive and De Homine (Citizen and Man). While De Hominie refers to a ‘natural’ state of man (man simply as he is), De Cive refers to an artificial state of man (man as he is within a civil order). This morphological move from one ontology to another is essentially political, and not merely ‘progressive’, in the sense of us becoming more rational, more affluent, using better tools and gaining knowledge ect.

In fact, this very artificiality of De Cive, is not determined by anything material but language itself. ‘A person is he to whom the words and actions of men are attributed , either his own or another’s; if his own the person is natural ; if another’s , it is artificial.’(Hobbes 1991 p,83 ). In other words, is it a politico-linguistic determination whether we are natural or artificial, or in other words, if we define ourselves or not. Animals don’t have language, so they don’t have this split between nature and artificiality. Humans have language; they have the command, the covenant and question. And through these categories, our naturalness, our normality, our adaptability is decided. If one applies this to the human-sciences, they can see how the question of self-definition becomes an intensified crisis. The question of whether or not we use such technologies to mould ourselves further into De Cive, becomes a question of who and how the sovereign defines De Cive. If it is my words that define me or his.

Obviously, to exist in a civil order, comes with the inevitability of being defined by something outside myself, at least to some degree. It is the question of how and why that determination is made, my participation in it, or exclusion and alienation from it, where the contention lies, not only for somebody democratically minded, but also for a Nietzschean, concern with the abuse of moulding-practices into something horrible like a Last Man, rests on both the nature and extent to my cooperation and agreeable ness with the particular model of De Cive, that is pushed upon me. How a nature, which here is not just natural versus convention, but is also self-definition versus being defined by someone else, is dealt with politically is crucial. It is perhaps most energetically through rivalry that this contention is played out, experienced and thought. The risk, according to the question of history, is that the build up in knowledge and the setting up of Leviathan-like structures, cancels the opportunity to involve ourselves in this discussion.

One can clearly see the consequences on contemporary practices and institutions that deal with our self-definition or well being. On the level of psychiatry and psychology, it has been rivalry psychology that has been most unfairly pathologised. Pathologies of agreeableness are normalised, medicated and sympathy is demanded. Any pathology caused by disagreeableness is border line criminalised. This one-sided clinical approach , of course, seems beyond the comprehension of most practitioners of psychology, given how influenced they have become by scientific humanism itself. After all it was the stoics who originally claimed that sin caused by vice and greed was truly evil. While the sins caused by pain and anger were redeemable. So it is not the case that such one sidedness is an inevitable conclusion of progress or civilisation. However, it is the product of re-biologisation.

There is a reason that the Greeks had so many words for this kind of pain: pathos, pothos, thymos, thrasos and so forth. Their culture was built on the redemptive aspects to this sort of pain. They elevated themselves beyond all others by accepting the disruptive and volatile presence of that sort of pain within collective and individual human life. Of course, the need to give it a form that doens’t lead to constant conflict is inescapable. There is nothing wrong with the intention of Hobbes. But the total expulsion of such psycho-political pains are quickly reaching a threshold of failure; a failure that good writers in the mid century period could have predicted.

We are meeting the limits to this expulsion within the stagnated Spenglerian winter of the contemporary world. When Freud observed the rivalry dynamic between fathers and sons, he didn’t just just make a ‘discovery’, insofar he saw a universal character to men and their fathers. He also recalled a generational-political reality; one that touches upon the need for renewal and growth.

What the Greeks called Ekpyrosis, or a turn of a specific historical time frame into a period of rebirth, is now needed more that ever. The stagnant, declining liberal world order of the late 20th century—now more a form of crisis-consumerism than a civilisational model—seems to have exhausted its beneficial potentiality. Without the capacity to even imagine a future outside the post-war paradigm(even if that retains certain aspects of liberal and social-democratic/democratic society), our future imaginary, bereft of a horizon beyond the post-war period, has become apocalyptic. Young people talk of great replacements or climate catastrophes. They do not speculate on the glories of the next decade or express a comfortable hope in ‘where things are going’. I’m not saying that their pessimism is not justified. Rather, it seems that a historical character of pure pessimism has emerged among the young.

You will note that any story, real, biblical or modern, that attempts to see past an extended era of wintery civilisational conditions, almost always signifies a prophesy; namely the prophesy of the son. The son is the male heir of a lost cause, a lost wisdom, people, or in our case, a lost-future. From Jesus Christ to Neo, he emerges with disruption—sometimes with violence. In doing so he rebalances some larger cosmic immobilisation. He pushes us forward and beyond the suffocation of such immobility. As opposed to the placid, rational and easy-consensus creating imaginaries of the future that have been constructed, both in the late 19th century and in the late 20th century, the future has often introduced itself to us with a violent disruption, not a friendly assurance of what we already believe in. Remember that in Christianity, the Messiah , comes ‘not to bring peace on Earth, but the sword.’ We are now having to relearn the future as something less agreeable and pleasant as the futures imagined in previous modern times. This revelation element is particularly difficult for rational moderns.

Similarly to that of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, we see an interesting chapter in the history of prophecies, largely because the Ubermensch is a sort of counter profit to the last-man. In fact, the Ubermensch could be seen as the intrusive Son that intrudes upon a senile, weary world, bringing it back to life. Zarathustra’s archetypal destiny matched that of Jesus. He cuts in the world to burst open a new horizon.

In truth, the Ubermensch cannot be properly understood without understanding the last man. The interesting thing about the very conception of the last man, utilised by Nietzsche and later Francis Fukuyama himself, is that he signifies a prophecy death through an auto-domestication; or in other words suicide through self-congratulation. He identifies himself with the capacity of his civilisation’s historical progress which empowers an immediate fulfilment. In other words, he loses sight of what his abundant scientific knowledge has erased and expelled. He also loses appreciation of experience, and believes that abstract morals or laws are sufficient to understand things, most of all himself.

The last man is not a prophet of doom in any typical sense. He is not a prophet of apocalyptic events or eschatological war. He declares—eschatologically—the event in which man loses himself as something with a distinct projectional-intention; in simple terms, the last man has lost the capacity of setting himself out upon a horizonal journey, finding himself through a conviction to it.

The Schism in Prophetic Character

The last man and his ‘end of history’ declares a moment in time when he drowns in his own temporality; his false sense of completeness and finality becomes a fatality— and his historical subjectivity eats himself alive. The declaration of the last man is not prophecy of war, famine, nor of better days and new horizons—but instead a prophecy of nothing more. Nothing will happen. Nothing can happen. No one will listen. Nowhere new will be found. We should do and say nothing.

The schism between the prophecies of last men and Ubermenschen is described quite beautifully in Nietzsches’ Zarathustra, specifically in the section titled Prophet (Soothsayer in some translations). The prophet states:

And I saw a great sadness come over mankind. The best turned weary of their works.

A doctrine appeared, a faith ran beside it: ‘All is empty, all is alike, all hath been!’

And from all hills there re-echoed: ‘All is empty, all is alike, all hath been!’

To be sure we have harvested: but why have all our fruits become rotten and brown? What was it that fell last night from the evil moon?

In vain was all our labour, poison hath our wine become, the evil eye hath singed yellow our fields and hearts.

Arid have we all become; and fire falling upon us, then do we turn dust like ashes:—yea, the fire itself have we made weary.

All our fountains have dried up, even the sea hath receded. All the ground trieth to gape, but the depth will not swallow!

‘Alas! where is there still a sea in which one could be drowned?’ so soundeth our plaint—across shallow swamps.

Verily, even for dying have we become too weary; now do we keep awake and live on—in sepulchres.”

In our time, the usual conflicts of class, geopolitics and morals take on eschatological characteristics. Here we see a division of prophecies. The self-satisfaction of fulfilment is struck with the darker employment of the forever-watching of tombs. An eternal employment for men whose horizonal instincts have been replaced with a flat, self congratulatory presentism. A man for which, ontologically, the future is extinct—or has collapsed into a mere extended codification of his own self-congratulatory immediacy.

On the other hand, there is the ubermensch, who wills a future through a new project. Who wishes to feel at home in great challenges with great things at stake. Ultimately, we see the spiritual war between two archetypes: One became split in two. One willing to die in order to will a future — and the other too weary even to die.

Nietzsche remarkably foresaw this division with such a great feeling all the way back at the end of the 19th century. However, it makes sense when seen historically. The end and middle of the 19th century were known as times of great peace and prosperity— and surely they were. Yet, they were also times where people had assumed the indefinite strength of their own comfortable immediacy. Peace, wealth and a superego that demands production and consumption over honour and love, usually creates a general attitude that comfort is eternal.

This becomes particularly difficult when the idea of progress attunes that assumption to its maximal arrogance. The Madman who proclaims God is dead, was, according to Sloterdijk, proclaiming the prediction of an immune collapse within the collective social body. But the growing disbelief in God was just one side of the story. The other was a frustration at the inability to perceive a greater temporal existence. In other words to conflate comfort simply as the product of individual or collective ‘talent’. Not as something temporary, fragile and subject to higher forces.

Any investigation of rivalry must take into account the temporal tension innate to human rivalry dynamics. In fact, it is entirely ironic that a society so ‘progressive’ with such sentimental grandeur about progressive historical changes, now finds the energetics of rivalry so intolerable. This could be because the very notion of an end of history, implies only a qualified allowance of rivalry, until the perfect system is built, and then we should all shut up, drop out; say nothing, be nothing and most importantly do nothing. Except for the fact that we don’t end up doing nothing. We become watchers of tombs. We become observers of a living, breathing culture turned into frozen statues and museum pieces. This is more than boring. It turns our own non-partciaption into a idol to worship. These sepulchers are not simply remnants of the past that demand remembrance in some basic sense. They are peculiar idols of historical death, instead of the earlier idols of biological death. They are worshiped as guarantors of our own exclusion from history. It is the velvet rope, the plastic screen and the academic prudence to ‘artifacts’, that separates us from this beast we call history. It is that separation - the plastic screen - that we worship, not old object inside it. There is a kind of unexplained horror in this, of which does not appear very leisurely at all.

When Caesar visited Alexander’s grave, he did so not as a museum customer or a tomb watcher, but as something which dealt with the thing directly, and not behind a velvet rope. If we see this collapse in temporality as failure to cultivate rivalry dynamics, then we can see the value of the immediate social tensions and processes of moving through historical time. Sons who would try out-do their fathers, both of them often forgetting the wisdom of their grandfathers—sometimes they compensated for their own fathers’ forgetfulness and remember the wisdom of their grandfathers. A psycho-political reality (that was never seen until very recently as exclusively progressive) once understood that we must live in a society that accepts and sublimates these rivalry dynamics into its own social and metaphysical existence. Law, culture, and foreign policy all contained collective memories that we bound tight with the tensions of rivalries. Nowadays, we see, to name just one example, an attempt to create law without rivalry. No hate speech, for example, which means no challenge, no rivalry; a very pleasant sort of codified life, mass produced for men like Bret who works in HR and likes to play golf with his dad sometimes on weekends.

Father transforms into dad. Men and women merge into the same corporate gloop and all time flattens out into a forever summer of a dull lack of ambition or conviction. Many people inheriting bad historical memories will say ‘maybe it’s still the better way’, relative to historical example number 15678. But language itself shows us how such comfortable flatness fails to map onto to a psycho-politics that is perhaps far more ingrained into human life than the past seventy years would like to admit.

The word "rivalry" comes from the Latin word rīvālis, meaning "a rival, adversary in love; neighbour." The root of this word, rīv(us), means "stream" or "brook". Originally, rīvālis described people who used the same stream, implying a shared resource and potential for competition.

Rivalry does not, as its etymology shows, stem from a moral flaw, an abstract ideal nor an excessive energy. It stems from the reality of coexistence. Poetically, a stream, constantly moving, that we all share in, not just in space but also in time, perfectly illuminates this reality. We share in a continuity of time with those we often don’t even know the names of. We are brought together, but are also tensed in opposition. There is somehow an inherent political tension to a civilisation that has built up much historical self-awareness. Perhaps this was not so much of a problem for hunter gatherers, who simply exhausted their time here and moved on. But in more complex civilisations, something is always left behind: a member of the negotiating table who never reveals his presence. Again — a hauntological presence.

It is not just progressives that fail to accept and make use of rivalry structures innate to the psycho politics of complex societies. Hobbes’ state of nature was never meant to be a historical reality, but a structural reality. The civil order wasn’t formed at a specific date. But the great Leviathan does contain in it a historical optimism: that the use of legal and political structures can expel some great evil that was not possible to expel before those structures had formed.

Since such great Leviathans were formed (in whatever date we can claim the first one was) they have undergone a series of continual changes. But these changes are not just legal or material. They change in their self-understanding. When they act, they must act with a certain assumption of what they are for and where they came from.(as already shown, they initiate a transformation of man from De Hominie to De Cive). However, after world war two, that self-understanding not only changes in the most peculiar way possible, but it also created the first ever truly globalised self-understanding (or perhaps lack of self-understanding).

Since WW2, the entire architecture of such Leviathans — a practice of producing biblical monsters by name — ‘development’, state building, bureaucracy, conflict mediation of all kinds, law, economics and even media and medicine, declared the official full-historicization of Hobbes. Everything before 1946 became a state of nature—everything after 1946, a new civil order. It is largely this barbarising of history before 1946 that blocks off the past for us contemporaries, making our presentism a traumatic expulsion of memory, and not simply a gentle easing of memory through time.

Thus the benefit of communism was never simply as a political system in itself, but as an open historical space that kept this blockage from consuming our minds. An alternative model of society lived alongside liberalism, and until its downfall it made it more difficult for a total monopolisation of ‘civil order’ to be owned by one people, one system and one generation. With the fall of communism that became possible. Therefore when Derrida claimed communism was a spectre haunting Europe, he really meant rivalry; or a distinction or outside of any kind. The rivalry of communism to capitalism, the rivalry of one time to another, one generation to another, one vision to another, people to another, or idea of a good to another.

Overwhelmed by a historical character that thinks being risk averse is now the only personality trait of being civilised, the arrogance of such people forgot that rivalry itself was not totally expellable. For one reason if not all them, because within rivalry it contains both imagination of what is not obvious or present, and the recognition of what is distinct. These seem too ontologically real to be truly and permanently driven out. And if we continue to assume the development of civilisation has its end in its full expulsion, this will be the end of what we have known so far as civilisation, itself.

Perhaps Freud, for all his wisdom, failed to grasp the true perspective by which the intrusion of rivalry creates tension upon our psyches. He assumed that the father was the universal intruder (into the relation of the mother and child) that bestows a sort of reality principle. Today—in a hyper-capitalistic and feminised, gerontocracy whose relationship to the future has turned utterly apocalyptic and nihilistic—it is the Son whose presence contains a reality principle; it is the reality of the future that has the power to break us from our nihilistic hypnosis. While the father is disruption to the present from the past, the son is a disruption to the present from the future. It is the unity between those disruptions that, I’m sure there already is, or rather should be, a clever theological term to describe.

Progressive society has totally expelled any threat from the past —from the father—but what remains is the reality of the future, which no society touched by post-war globalisation seems to be able to navigate with a shred of honour. In other words, progressive society has not failed because the past beat it, not because it was ineffective at expelling the past, but because it has lost the capacity to do anything with such an opening. Progressive society now has also no future.

The luxury retirement home of the globalised boomer regime fears not the father firstly, but the son, who becomes the father; not the past, which it has already cataclysmically been expelled—melted from solid substance into air, as Marx wrote—but the future which, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, seeks his revenge from the future itself.

Therefore ‘reality’ today, inside an affluent, individualistic, self-serving, appetitive gerontocracy, will not assert itself through sober self-regulation or wise tradition(at least primarily)—but only through the more cataclysmic eruption of those more loyal to a will to a future than loyal to an appetite for an immediate present. It is a distinction between a future—as a mere expression of comfortable novelty, always indulging and gratifying with the immediate conveniences of technologies and markets—versus the future as will towards something higher, which is also open to the past, not through mimicry, but through a noble admiration, of which must be realised.

And so, if Marx claimed the world is now split between bourgeois and proletariat—and its eschatology would be a war inside that encounter, then we could alter this division to a war between prophets. On one side, a prophet comfortably ready to drown in pleasant cynicism and self-satisfaction. The other: more than simply a will to a future, but self-realisation into a future. One that asks itself, as did the follower of Zarathustra: ‘Art thou not thyself the wind with shrill whistling, which bursteth open the gates of the fortress of Death?’