As a child I discovered in about 4th grade -1966- Dystopian literature. A little later I discovered Shirer “Rise and Fall of The Third Reich” and Albert Speer. Probably this is why my original major was History. In any case, this Dystopian theme has been a river taking me to the sea. First I start with this excerpt from “Only a God Can Save Us": The Spiegel Interview (1966). Then moving forward to a different thinker, in a different place with a similar idea I think of this America of mid-2022.
SPIEGEL: It is obvious that man it never [complete] master of his tools -- witness the case of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. But is it not a little too pessimistic to say: we are not gaining mastery over this surely much greater tool [that is] modern technicity?
Heidegger: Pessimism, no. In the area of the reflection that I am attempting now, pessimism and optimism are positions that don't go far enough. But above all, modern technicity is no "tool" and has nothing at all to do with tools.
SPIEGEL: Why should we be so powerfully overwhelmed by technicity that...?
Heidegger: I don't say [we are] "overwhelmed" [by it]. I say that up to the present we have not yet found a way to respond to the essence of technicity.
SPIEGEL: But someone might object very naively: what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning. More and more electric power companies are being built. Production is up. In highly technologized parts of the earth, people are well cared for. We are living in a state of prosperity. What really is lacking to us?
Heidegger: Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don't know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] -- the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today. Recently I had a long [209] dialogue in Provence with Rene Char -- a poet and resistance fighter, as you know. In Provence now, launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion. This poet, who certainly is open to no suspicion of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of man that is now taking place is the end [of everything human], unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power.
SPIEGEL: Well, we have to say that indeed we prefer to be here, and in our age we surely will not have to leave for elsewhere. But who knows if man is determined to be upon this earth? It is thinkable that man has absolutely no determination at all. After all, one might see it to be one of man's possibilities that he reach out from this earth toward other planets. We have by no means come that far, of course -- but where is it written that he has his place here?
Heidegger: As far as my own orientation goes, in any case, I know that, according to our human experience and history, everything essential and of great magnitude has arisen only out of the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition. Contemporary literature, for example, is largely destructive.
SPIEGEL: The word "destructive" in this case is bothersome, especially insofar as, thanks to you and your philosophy, the word has been given a comprehensive context of meaning that is nihilistic [in tone]. It is jarring to hear the word "destructive" used with regard to literature, which apparently you are able to see -- or are compelled to see -- as completely a part of this nihlism.
Heidegger: Let me say that the literature I have in mind is not nihilistic in the sense that I give to that word.
SPIEGEL: Obviously, you see a world movement -- this is the way you, too, have expressed it -- that either is bringing about an absolutely technical state or has done so already.
Heidegger: That's right.
SPIEGEL: Fine. Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action?
Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinknig and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.27
SPIEGEL: Is there a correlation between your thinking and the emergence of this god? Is there here in your view a causal connection? Do you feel that we can bring a god forth by our thinking?
Heidegger: We can not bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait [for him].
Then: https://thelampmagazine.com/2020/07/13/politics-cannot-save-us/
The post-political age, by contrast, is marked by the triumph of technological society over political society and is ultimately “governed” by technologically driven processes deeper and more extensive than the rule of law, processes which simply bypass rather than destroy the hollowed-out institutions of a decadent political society. Post-political rule is marked by new forms of social coercion and political action exercised outside the bounds of these institutions and institutionalized processes of political deliberation and by new forms of political causation without deliberation and attributable to no particular agency. Who, exactly, can be held responsible for the riots we have seen or the phenomenon known as “canceling”? And who can decide to stop them, whoever they are? Post-political society operates principally through a self-organizing system of political causation without any real bearers of political responsibility. With “smart” devices as prosthetic attachments and social media mediating our relation to the world, this system operates internally upon our psyches as well as externally upon the world—indeed it blurs the boundary between interiority and exteriority—without a controller pulling the levels of power. Aldous Huxley, prophetic though he has turned out to be in so many ways, apparently could not imagine that his Brave New World would not need a Mustapha Mond, still a character from the political age. Even the New York Times, the source of so many inputs into the system and a great manipulator of it, must ultimately bow to its exigencies. Post-political rule is “the rule of nobody,” to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase, which should not be confused with the absence of rule. Those in today’s “resistance” who have staked their eschatological hope on the overthrow of Donald Trump may be surprised to discover that the most powerful tyranny of all, and the most difficult to overthrow, is the tyranny without a tyrant.
Heidegger in 1966
https://www.communio-icr.com/articles/view/augusto-del-noce-on-the-new-totalitarianism
. Against the great majority of his contemporaries, Del Noce thought that, in spite of its democratic institutions and its professed liberalism, this new society did not mark a sharp break with the totalitarian tendencies that had emerged in the course of modernity, and that in fact “the widespread notion that the age of totalitarianisms ended with Hitlerism and Stalinism is completely mistaken.”1
According to Del Noce, the telltale sign of totalitarianism, which he had observed firsthand as a young man in the 1930s and 40s, is the “negation of the universality of reason, so that any form of opposition to established power . . . supposedly does not express rational concerns but conceals interests of class (according to Communism) or race (according to Nazism).” In other words, totalitarian systems monopolize power by affirming that rationality itself is political. They claim that their ideological narrative coincides with rational discourse and thereby exclude a priori all forms of criticism. In the 1960s, Del Noce recognized a reappearance of this phenomenon in the tendency by the advocates of the sexual revolution to deny the rationality of their opponents by attributing their stances to moral or psychological conditions such as “repressed psychology,” “bigotry,” “hatred,” “prejudice,” “animus,” etc. Del Noce observed that the politicization of reason was now being conducted in the name of the human sciences that had gained new prestige since the end of the war: psychology, anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis. This latter, in vulgarized form, underpinned the program of sexual liberation, viewed as a “struggle against repression” and the “breaking of taboos.” Del Noce argued that this trend was just one manifestation of a broader and deeper phenomenon: a new, nameless, “quiet” “totalitarianism of technical activity, [in which] all human activity is interpreted as finalized to transformation and possession.” Whereas older totalitarianisms politicized reason on the basis of a philosophy of history (Communism) or a mythical racial narrative (Nazism), the new one does so through the ideological invocation of “science” in a very broad sense. The result is, nonetheless, a “subordination of culture to politics,” which to Del Noce is precisely the defining characteristic of totalitarian societies, and is also perfectly compatible with the preservation of the formalities of democracy. His argument is interesting and deserves to be elucidated.
__________________