Tomorrow I am 66. I dwell in a nation going insane. I open my atlas. Surely there is an isle in an out of the way corner of the planet prosperous and free. There is none. All are governed by men or women gripped by obedience madness. A madness instilled by poison circulating for generations. And today a madness injected to transmogrify man into a machine. A madness of sane sensible servants surrendering to Mammon saying only how can I bow lower, may I scrape the earth on my belly as I play your worm O master?
“ Late capitalism is, after all, an economic regime with all the stability of a house of cards, a Ponzi scheme of cooked books based on war profiteering, credit debt, the con-artistry of "consumer confidence," the legerdemain of corporate accountants, and the ethics of organized crime. The whole mess is exemplified in the U.S. by the largest military budget in the world, the largest prison system in the world, and the fabulous celebrity salaries of brain-dead carpetbagger executives in the ultra-spectacular hi-tech virtual-commodity economy.
In his 1930 essay on the relationship between capital and intellectual labor, Breton turned to Marx's Capital to warn of the marketplace's sick, dependent fetishization of commodities. Products of intellectual labor become commodities only if bourgeois society contrives to make them profitable. Breton himself said it best: "In the capitalist system, it is the same for certain very rare productions of the mind as for the extraction of certain precious materials such as diamonds, which, according to Marx, almost never 'completely pay their value' to those who seek them." Thirty-seven years after Breton's death, the elements and products of his own intellectual labor are on the verge of being hijacked by the manipulators of a monstrous commodity racket built around absurd "art market" values. Breton's epitaph reads "I seek the gold of time," but now this quest is obfuscated by those who reign supreme in the Time of Gold.” From Chicago Surrealist group protesting the sacking of the home and library of Andre Breton after his death.
Agamben wrote in 2001-
On Security and Terror"
Giorgio Agamben, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 20, 2001
Security as leading principle of state politics dates back to the the birth of the modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of fear, which compels human beings to come together within a society. But not until the 18th century does a thought of security come into its own. In a 1978 lecture at the College de France (which has yet to be published) Michel Foucault has shown how the political and economic practice of the Physiocrats opposes security to discipline and the law as instruments of governance.Turgot and Quesnay as well as Physiocratic officials were not primarily concerned with the prevention of hunger or the regulation of production, but wanted to allow for their development to then regulate and "secure" their consequences. While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening and to globalization; while the law wants to prevent and regulate, security intervenes in ongoing processes to direct them.In short, discipline wants to produce order, security wants to regulate disorder. Since measures of security can only function within a context of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual initiative, Foucault can show that the development of security accompanies the ideas of liberalism.
Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security becomes the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several definitive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterium of political legitimation. The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic.
https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/blog/review-michel-foucault-on-the-government-of-the-living
(Substitute in this text by Foucault for Severus the American Establishment.)
Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, who, as you all know—well, at
any rate, as I know since yesterday—ruled at the end of the second and
beginning of the third century, between 193 and 211 I think. Septimius
Severus had a palace built in which there was, of course, a large cer-
emonial hall where he granted audience, delivered his judgments, and
dispensed justice. On the ceiling of this hall, Septimius Severus had a
representation of the star-studded sky painted, which did not represent
just any sky, or any stars in no matter what position. What was exactly
represented was the sky of his birth; the conjunction of the stars that
presided over his birth and so over his destiny. His reasons for having
this done are quite clear and explicit and fairly easy to reconstruct. For
Septimius Severus the purpose was, of course, that of inscribing his
particular and conjunctural judgments within the system of the world
and of showing how the logos that presided over this order of the world,
and over his birth, was the same logos that organized, founded, and justi-
fied his judgments. What he said in a particular circumstance in the
world, in a particular kairos, as the Stoics would say, belonged precisely
to the same order of things as that fixed once and for all on high. He also
wanted to show how his reign was founded by the stars, that it was not
an error that he, the roughneck from Leptis Magna, had seized power
by force and violence, that it was not by chance or as the result of any
human plot that he had seized power, but that he had been called to the
position he occupied by the very necessity of the world. His reign, his
seizure of power, which could not be founded by the law, was justified
once and for all by the stars. Finally, third, it was a matter of showing
his, the emperor’s good fortune in advance, and how it was fated, inevi-
table, inaccessible, and the extent to which it was impossible for anyone,
conspirator, rival, or enemy, to seize the throne that the stars had shown
was due to him, and which henceforth nothing could overcome. His
fortune was good, it was certain, the past indicated this, but for the
future too things were definitively sealed. Thus, uncertain and particular
actions, a past made of chance and luck, and a future which of course no
one could know, but from which some might take advantage to threaten
the emperor, were all turned into necessity and had to be seen as a truth
on the ceiling of the hall in which he passed judgment. What manifested
itself as power here, down below, I was going to say at ground level,
could and had to be deciphered in truth in the night sky.
From the commentary on the book-”It is this question of obedience that perhaps needs to be taken up again today over and against a Lacanian psychoanalytics which posits this in terms of the individual and the injunctions of his or her Super Ego. How might we effectively redefine the government of the living not in terms of the production and management of ‘obedient’ subjects or ‘docile’ bodies and the containment and regulation of ‘disobedient’ subjects or ‘criminal’ and ‘deviant’ bodies but instead through notions such as ‘care’ and ‘responsibility’? Here, On the Government of the Living concludes appropriately with an indictment of what Foucault saw as contemporary resignation to the notion that ‘we are all Oedipus’, an indictment which seems no less relevant today:
‘You don’t have to be Oedipus, unless, of course, an amusing mind tells you: but yes, yes you do! If you are obliged to tell the truth it is because without knowing it, despite everything, there’s a bit of Oedipus in you too. But you see that the person who tells you this in the end, does no more than turn the glove inside out, the glove of the Church.’ (p.312)”
https://classicalstudies.org/power-oedipus-michel-foucault-hannah-arendt
Foucault analysed Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus in a series of essays and lectures from the early 1970s-to early 1980s. Across these works, Oedipus becomes a significant protagonist in the development of his thinking around the nexus of power/knowledge. In the wake of the critique of the Freudian Oedipus developed simultaneously by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and by Jean-Pierre Vernant in his essay ‘Oedipus without the Complex’ (1981; first published 1967), Foucault presents Oedipus ‘as not the one who didn’t know but, rather, the one who knew too much’ (2000, 24). Foucault drills deep into Oedipus’ identity as a knowing subject to show how his pursuit of truth is firmly linked to his wielding of power.
In particular, Foucault characterises Oedipus’ knowledge as the knowledge of the tyrant. He contrasts what he calls Oedipus’ ‘alethurgy’ to the divine truth saying of the oracle and Tiresias and to the witness statements of the messenger from Corinth and the shepherd of Cithaeron. Oedipus’ inquiry in Sophocles’ play ends by bringing divine knowledge into harmony with the truth telling of the slave. But in the coming together of these two realms, the kind of tyrannical knowledge that Oedipus represents is bypassed: ‘Oedipus was necessary for the truth to appear…but he was eliminated as a kind of “excess”’ (2014, 81). What Sophocles’ play dramatizes for Foucault is the emergence of the juridical subject. Oedipus’ quest helps to bring this about but effectively replaces the power of the tyrannuswith the nomos of the people. As Foucault concludes: ‘The public square that stages the judicial institutions assures, guarantees, and confirms what has been said through the flash of divine prophecy’ (2014, 81).
Wordsworth
THERE is a bondage worse, far worse, to bear
Than his who breathes, by roof, and floor, and wall,
Pent in, a Tyrant's solitary Thrall:
'Tis his who walks about in the open air,
One of a Nation who, henceforth, must wear
Their fetters in their souls. For who could be,
Who, even the best, in such condition, free
From self-reproach, reproach that he must share
With Human-nature? Never be it ours
To see the sun how brightly it will shine,
And know that noble feelings, manly powers,
Instead of gathering strength, must droop and pine;
And earth with all her pleasant fruits and flowers
Fade, and participate in man's decline.
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
https://brownstone.org/articles/machiavelli-globalists-why-elites-despise-independent-thought/
In the centuries since Machiavelli was writing, we have seen a vast expansion in the size and scope of the administrative state, and as thinkers from Francois Guizot to Anthony de Jasay have shown us, this great framework of government has come into existence largely on the basis of this caring aspect of raison d’Ètat. It is not that, as Nietzsche had it, the state is merely a ‘cold monster’ imposing itself on society unbidden. It is that a complex series of interactions has developed, with the state convincing society that it is in need of its protection, and gaining society’s consent for its expansion accordingly.
To return to Foucault (whose writings on the state are among the most important and insightful in the last 100 years), we can think of the state as having emerged as a series of discourses by which the population, and groups within it, are constructed as being vulnerable and in need of the state’s benevolent assistance. These groups (the poor, the old, children, women, the disabled, ethnic minorities, and so on) gradually increase in number such that they eventually make up more less the entire population.
The ultimate dream, of course, is for the state to find ways to make literally everyone vulnerable and in need of its help (for its status will then surely be forever secure) – and I hardly need to spell out for you why Covid-19 was seized upon with such gusto in this regard.
This, then, is the basic story of the development of the state since Machiavelli – essentially, legitimising the growth of state power on the basis of helping the vulnerable
Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis?
‘Why is this important?
The reason is that there are those who argue against the contemporary application of lessons learned from the horrors of Nazi medicine. Some say that “Nazi medicine” was not real medicine or science: We cannot even call what the Nazis did “medicine,” since medicine contains within it an assumption of rigor and beneficence.
This is an objection I hear from medical scientists, who point to safeguards such as the Nuremberg Code (1947), the Declaration of Helsinki (1964), and the Belmont Report (1978) as proof of the radically different nature of science today. But this argument is circular. It defines science as “good science,” (relegating anything unethical to “bad science” or “pseudoscience”) when in fact these very safeguards were born out of abuses from what was then the most scientifically advanced country in the world. Medicine then, as now, is not somehow immune from this abuse, as the horrific postwar abuses at Tuskegee and elsewhere make clear.
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis established a “biocracy,” which ultimately murdered millions of innocent persons. The notion that doctors were somehow “forced” to participate has been shattered as myth; Proctor’s (1988) unparalleled volume makes this vividly clear; Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors (2000) meticulously traces both the medicalization of death, from eugenics to euthanasia to Auschwitz, and the stories of physicians who perpetrated genocide, were subjected to it, and resisted it. Thus, with a wealth of historical research on the subject, a full accounting of this progression from trusted healers to state-sanctioned killers is beyond the scope of this essay.’
[link to www.tabletmag.com (secure)]