Let us have madness openly

Poisoning all who live

Whether with nature or technology, humans succumb to a sacral awe of the powers which govern their destiny and rob them of their freedom and capacity for critical reflection. This awe turns them into slaves sacrificing and serving their new idols. A society of techniques undermines human freedom by requiring that we always choose the most rationally efficient techniques for every endeavor. No business or society can afford to choose a less efficient solution for fear of being rendered obsolete by their competitors. Even as once political ritual, in ancient Rome and elsewhere, mediated the divine favors granted by nature’s deities, so today, says Ellul, politics serves the technical myth of utopia by providing the collection of rituals that create the illusion of control over the favors granted by technique. And yet we discover that contemporary political rituals involve holding hearings from technical experts who can advise politicians on the most efficient techniques which can be used to solve our problems. Technical necessity continues to reign while utopian fantasy, Ellul argues, “is a consolation in the face of slavery, and an escape from something one is unable to prevent. . . . Whenever men have taken utopian descriptions seriously, the result has been disastrous” (“Search for an Image,” in Images of the Future, ed., Robert Bundy (Buffalo N.Y: Prometheus Books, 1976) pp. 24-25.”

The ancient doctrine according to which evil is nothing but the privation of good and therefore does not exist in itself, must be corrected and integrated in the sense that it is not so much the privation, but rather the perversion of good (with the codicil, formulated by Ivan Illich, corruptio optimi pexima , "there is nothing worse than a corrupted good"). The ontological connection with good thus remains, but it remains to be considered how and in what sense a good can be perverted and corrupted. If evil is a perverted good, if we still recognize in it a corrupted and distorted figure of good, how can we fight it when we find it today in all spheres of human life?
A corruption of good was familiar to classical thought in the political doctrine according to which each of the three right forms of government - monarchy, aristocracy and democracy (the government of one, the few or the many) - inevitably degenerated into tyranny, oligarchy and ochlocracy. Aristotle (who considers democracy itself a corruption of the government of the many) uses the term parekbasis , deviation (from parabaino , to move alongside, parà ). If we now ask where they have deviated, we discover that they have, so to speak, deviated towards themselves. The corrupt forms of constitution resemble, in fact, the healthy ones, but the good that was present in them (the common interest, the koinon ) has now turned towards the proper and the particular ( idion ). Evil is, that is, a certain use of the good and the possibility of this perverse use is inscribed in the good itself, which in this way goes outside of itself, moves, so to speak, alongside itself. https://autonomies.org/2025/02/giorgio-agamben-good-and-evil/

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity