Beating Around the Bush on the Foul Spirit
To speak evil is to describe the growing hegemony of the powers of good and, at the same time, their inner faltering, their suicidal crumbling, their reversion, their outgrowth and separation into parallel universes once the dividing line of the Universal has been crossed.1
Jean Baudrillard
I
On a day like any other, commercial airplanes fly through the sky. Within them reside their passengers. But on this day, some of those planes had some particular passengers. Heads down, they run through their thoughts, and their thoughts run through them: the suffering, the loss of identity, the finding of purpose and like-mindedness; the mixes of fear, pride, and, some would even say, courage; the harkening back to loved ones, those affected and yet-to-be affected. But, most of all, there is the anticipation of glory—that great and almighty crescendo of accomplishment—and being part of it. Their heads rise and eyes open amidst a sea of red hats off to stop the steal...
Are these sorts of people comparable to those who, now over twenty years prior, hijacked a few of those planes and crashed them into American buildings? According to the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, yes. While reflecting on the 20th anniversary of September 11th, in an address at the Flight 93 Memorial Service in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, he made the comparison that the people involved in storming the Capitol on January 6th to stop the joint session of Congress from verifying Joe Biden as President (The Winner), are analogous to the 9/11 hijackers. Yes, they are “children of the same foul spirit.”
Many of us have tried to make spiritual sense of these events. There is no simple explanation for the mix of providence and human will that sets the direction of our lives. But comfort can come from a different sort of knowledge. After wandering long and lost in the dark, many have found they were actually walking, step by step, toward grace. As a nation, our adjustments have been profound. Many Americans struggled to understand why an enemy would hate us with such zeal. The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability. And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.2
If this is to be so, then we can harken back to Bush’s (and his speechwriters’) words towards the world in general in what would become The War on Terror. That, “Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them,”3 and “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” We have only been reminded of this ongoing international campaign that continues to extend domestically. We must think about the whole country and the whole world, from radical networks to governments, harboring everyone. We must also think about the reductionistic elements that make up everyone. This is our blueprint toward grace.
There should be nothing troubling or “dreadful”4 about what Bush said when there is no evidence that America itself and her citizens have learned anything, let alone the world. It is not surprising whatsoever that Bush’s comparison of 1/6 to 9/11 admits no fault or reflection whatsoever about what transpired and what resulted from The War on Terror. Nor does it recognize its externalities in media and its effects. Best of all is the sheer ease with which to baptize another significant national moment with the forms of rhetoric that turned the vengeance from the last significant national moment into an ongoing farce whose confidence and thoughtlessness in war are now firmly rooted at home and for homes everywhere else.
But we should forget all the rhetoric Bush makes, along with the counter-rhetoric of everyone else. Indeed, this is not about Bush’s statements about a shift in content apropos terrorism; it is about the world’s perception and response to a totalized world and totalized existence Jean Baudrillard describes as Hegemony.
We live through the domination of networks, ushered in through Integral Reality, which is “the perpetrating on the world of an unlimited operational project whereby everything becomes real, everything becomes visible and transparent, everything is ‘liberated’, everything comes to fruition and has a meaning (whereas it is in the nature of meaning that not everything has it).”5 With Hegemony, all have been liberated from the dialectic of the domination of the master over the servant/slave.6 The latter internalizes the former and vice versa through the integral calculus of exchange, where the “hegemon” is purely cybernetic. None of the paradigms of domination apply when subsumed by the general masquerade of Hegemony, where “it relies on the excessive use of every sign and obscenity, the way it mocks its own values, and challenges the rest of the world by its cynicism (‘carnivalization’).”7
With Hegemony, negativity (i.e., critical analysis) is absorbed and cannot perform anything it was meant to because we all internalize the dominators, along with the dominators internalizing the dominated. Hegemony liquidates all traditional strategies against oppression, where “the work of the negative, the work of critical thought, of the relationship of forces against oppression, or of radical subjectivity against alienation, all this has (virtually) become obsolete.”8 With the negative absorbed, all beneficiaries of the negative, like the alienated, victimized, oppressed, colonized, enslaved, subjectivized/objectivized, etc., end up as hostages to the system that annexes them and that has them connected to and resonant with the networks. This is until the fatality of reversibility9 emerges, where “the slave internalizes the master, power also internalizes the slave who denies it, and it denies itself in the process. Negativity re-emerges as irony, mocking and auto-liquidation internal to power. This is how the slave devours and cannibalizes the Master from the inside. As power absorbs the negative, it is devoured by what it absorbs. There is justice in reversibility.”10
We have moved through an anthropological transformation, a mutation, “a revolution in the automatic perfection of technical devices and in the definitive disqualification of human beings, of whom they are not even aware.”11 The world is no longer imagined by humans, it is now implemented through the code.
What has replaced the world is the precession of models, the precession of simulacra of the Hyperreal, a modeled world without origin,12 “a reality without limits in which everything is realized and technically materialized without reference to any principle or final purpose [destination] whatever.”13 The world that has been wrought through this iteration of globalization is not just about the simultaneous atomization, diffraction, expansion, and growth of capital; it is about the irreversible, irresistible, unalterable, and undeniable journey of total, Virtual, Universal Free Exchange, “the highest stage of deregulation.”14 This is a gift to be given to all, one that will not be refused or returned. It is a symbolic debt that cannot be annulled, a power that cannot be cancelled.
Whatever you wish to define as “real” is automatically substituted by a programmatic double more real than real that is “sheltered from the imaginary and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.”15 Force is extended through these images and models without origin, which we are only meant to cohere with and reach consensus with through complicity as hostages, whose operationality does away with any (need for) rationality “because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance.”16
“The invention of Reality, unknown to other cultures, is the work of modern western Reason, the turn to the Universal. The turn to an objective world, shorn of all hinterworlds. Concretizing, verifying, objectivizing, demonstrating: ‘objectivity’ is this capture of the real that forces the world to face us, expurgating it of any secret complicity, of any illusion.”17 This is the only Good now, deeming anything against it as “evil,” which serves as a veritable alibi for the work of the Good.18 Any notion of the good from the ancients and onwards is long gone, including the balance between good and evil and their shared opposition to one another. Traditionally, “Good does not conquer Evil, nor indeed does the reverse happen: they are at once both irreducible to each other and inextricably interrelated.”19 However, both are now autonomous and unopposed to each other through this totalized untethering of the Good.20 And what of evil? “Evil, which was once a metaphysical or moral principle, is today pursued materially right down into the genes (and also in the ‘Axis of Evil’). It has become an objective reality and hence objectively eliminable. We are going to be able to excise it at the root, and with it, increasingly, all dreams, utopias, illusions and fantasies—all these things being, by the same general process, wrested from the possible to be put back into the real.”21
Because of the unceasing march of technological realization, something viewed as totally inevitable and natural (even more so than the market), morality, for what it was, is obsolete. In the end, the globalization of exchange and its push towards total universality forces exchange for exchange’s sake and nothing else, thereby forcing an irreversible inexchangeability.
Everything held to be true or not is liquidated because the dynamics of referentiality itself have been liquidated, carnivalized, and cannibalized,22 by the work of the Virtual, which deregulates reality itself as “the highest stage of simulation, the stage of a final solution by the volatilization of the world’s substance into an immaterial realm and a set of strategic calculations.”23 Like exchange above, nothing stands in the way of their realization, yet their destinies lie in catastrophe, in reversibility, but are all the same totally insatiable.
“It is in the Virtual that we have the ultimate predator and plunderer of reality, secreted by reality itself as a kind of self-destructive viral agent. Reality has fallen prey to Virtual Reality, the final consequence of the process begun with the abstraction of objective reality—a process that ends in Integral Reality.”24 This is the extension of global power; this is the extension of the Good; this is Integral Reality; this is Hegemony. Domination had something real and imaginary behind it, like “a dual relation with potential alienation, a relationship of force and conflicts.”25 But with the hyperreality of Hegemony, there are neither conflicts nor events; the negative has been absorbed, and so the only thing that awaits Hegemony is self-destruction, fatality, and global antagonism as a result of its global reach. As Baudrillard says, “For the system (in the context of global power), this strategy of development and growth is fatal. The system cannot prevent its destiny from being accomplished, integrally realized, and therefore driven into automatic self-destruction by the ostensible mechanisms of its reproduction.”26 There is only the deterrence of events now, a “preventative terror, a counter-terror that puts an end to any possible events. A terror which the power exerting it ends up exerting on itself under the banner of security.”27 Yes, nothing can disturb the Integral Reality of Hegemony, even catastrophes.
The hostage situation characterizes all of this.
We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and exploited. Gone is the constellation of the slave and the proletarian: from now on it is the hostage and the terrorist. Gone is the constellation of alienation: from now on it is that of terror. It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history.28
It is through the hostage situation that Baudrillard brings up the problem of panic and catastrophe of events and the terror(ism) of their prevention. It is one thing to hope that the Axis of Good is there afterwards, a la a Lisbonesque earthquake for today.29 However, what if one could have predicted another Lisbon and intervened? Would the panic in its evacuation have been worse than the event? Apparently, the latter is worse, as is the intervention of the system itself. Baudrillard expands on the example of earthquakes:
We are no longer waiting for the stars or the heavens, but for the subterranean gods who threaten us with a collapse into emptiness.
We dream of capturing that energy, too. But that is pure madness. We might as well hope to capture the energy of automobile accidents, of dogs that have been run over, or of anything that collapses. (New hypothesis: if things have a greater tendency to disappear and collapse, perhaps the principal source of future energy will be accident and catastrophe). One thing is certain: even if we don’t succeed in capturing seismic energy, the symbolic wave of the earthquake is not about to subside: the symbolic energy, so to speak, the fascinating and derisory power that such an event affords, is incomparable to the material destruction.
It is that power, that symbolic energy of rupture, that they are really trying to capture in that mad project, or in that other, more immediate one, of heading off seisms through scenarios of evacuation. The funny part is that experts have calculated that the state of emergency decreed by an earthquake warning would unleash such a panic that its effects would be greater than the earthquake itself. Here we fall into full derision: lacking a real catastrophe, it will be easy to unleash a simulated one, one while will be as good as the first and can even replace it. You wonder if that is not what “experts” fantasize about—and it is exactly the same case in the nuclear30 domain: don’t all the preventive and dissuasive systems act like virtual foci of catastrophe? On the presence of prevention, they materialize all the consequences in the immediate future. How true it is that we cannot rely on chance to bring on catastrophe: we have to find its programmed equivalent in the preventive measures.
It is thus evident that a State or a power sophisticated enough to predict earthquakes and prevent the consequences would constitute a danger to the community and the species much more fantastic that the earthquakes themselves. The terremotati of Southern Italy have violently attacked the Italian State for its negligence (the media arrived before the emergency rescue teams, an obvious sign of the current hierarchy of priorities). They correctly blamed the catastrophe on the political order (inasmuch as it claims universal solicitude for the population); but never would they dream of an order capable of such a dissuasion of catastrophe: the price would be such that people would at bottom prefer catastrophe—with all its misery it at least fulfils the prophetic demand for a violent end. It at least answers a profound need for derision of the political order.31 The same is true of terrorism: what kind of State would be capable of dissuading and annihilating all terrorism in the bud (Germany)? It would have to arm itself with such terrorism and generalize terror on every level. If this is the price of security, is everybody deep down dreaming of this?32
We are hostages to security and the programmability of death, which attempts to eliminate death and make it disappear. The suspensory dynamics of the hostage situation are all pervasive: an incalculable space of life, death, and value (i.e., exchange), where trajectories are removed from all those involved and are left to the arbitrary. There is a profusive confusion and panic over what to do with both hostage and terrorist; their total exchangeability informs their total inexchangeability. Objectively, everything is collectively out of our hands; subjectively, we must be responsible for all risks—ones we take and do not take—for they are all imposed regardless.33
Terror is the aberration of death, thus of the system itself—symbolic and sacrificial. It is a convulsion of the system. Through the multiple challenges presented by death and suicide, the system will commit suicide in response. Catastrophic collapse is only possible in this trap for the system and power through the symbolic obligation wrought by the terrorists. In the void they create through their deaths, the system, through its own powers of “hyperefficiency,” rallies and perishes.34 This hyperefficiency does not just have to be your run-of-the-mill counter-terror; there is also the hyperefficiency of media response in toto—the litany of processes that carnivalize and cannibalize its subject matter.
The 9/11 terrorists used death, along with all the tools of the system (capital and stock-market speculation, computer technology, spectacle, and the media networks), against a system that disavows death in its total positivity and exorcizing of negativity.35 Death itself is the revolt—the challenge—because the system cannot exert itself through death when that is what the stakes have been raised to—it refuses to exchange death for an even greater death.36 Did January 6th issue this challenge to the system as well through the deaths of insurrectionists and their willingness to die? This will be discussed in Part IV.
In the meantime, if we consider what Baudrillard described above as means for prevention and intervention, January 6th would have been even worse.37 What would have been made of the total roundup, neutralizing, suppression, etc., of all platformers, plotters, and perpetrators of January 6th before January 6th—or, more favorable for the media, during January 6th—no matter how perfectly executed or totally botched? Whether or not the Capitol Police were flush with extra members on duty, with the number of weapons brought and allowed through via Trump to be present at the Capitol (not to mention his thwarted desire to lead his supporters to it), it would be no less of an orgy no matter what happened. Anything is possible when suspended and inexchangeable in the hostage situation.
II
In attempting to establish this link, after all that was known, after all that transpired, and after all that has been learned after the fact of The War on Terror, all Bush has done is express the intelligence of evil. What is the intelligence of evil? A paradox of action and inner faltering, where “our ills come to us from an evil genius that is our own”38 (despite that never being the intent), one that operates through duality, through reversibility.
If evil can be considered a challenge to our sense of the world that has all our hopes and optimism pinned to it, whatever the challenges and hopes are, where those challenging events force us to say, “That ought not to have happened” (or sustained into something that beckons us to say, “This should not be”) and ask “Why?”, then we have traditionally done so through our relations with Metaphysical, Natural, and Moral evils.39 We can blame things beyond our understanding; we can blame things that happen to us through the world that we may or may not understand; we can blame ourselves and others, not to mention their interplay and priorities. But these are only things we can point to and/or name, and our attempts at building solutions against them are prone to succumbing to the intelligence of evil, which is the inability for these occurrences and what we claim to be their causes and solutions to be localizable/realizable yet simultaneously transparent. This inability is everywhere and irreducible, and so is the transparency that shows through. Not just the transparency of the Enlightenment in which we attempt to view things clearly—that we (think we) see through things as they are—but rather, because of this saturation of transparency, evil is able to show through everything.40
What perturbs us to say those things and ask “Why?” has much to do with our sense of the world and its challenges, along with what we feel responsibility for, which have undergone major shifts throughout history. The relevant shift to speak of here is how all evils, whatever their interplay/configuration, have become reduced to misfortune, like an accident, something reparable and preventable, while good has been reduced to a “hegemonic culture of happiness”41 and thus totally perfectible. This is a humanistic vision, though, to be fair, the human has been liquidated—carnivalized and cannibalized—through the vision of the code, which works with some catastrophic confusions. First, this reformulation of evil makes it synonymous with misfortune, thus erasing the fact that evil is not accidental, it is fatal.42 Evil is a destiny in the way of nothing, including good, especially when both have been untethered by this runaway Good of Integral Reality. Second, this perfectibility rests on the assumption that the human is destined for good and that there ought to be something done with it rather than it being perfect as it is. However, just as Marshall McLuhan would say that knowledge creates ignorance and wealth creates poverty, Baudrillard tells us that liberation creates new servitudes and the ideal of happiness creates “a whole culture of misfortune, of recrimination, repentance, compassion, and victimhood.”43 Everything becomes viewed through these paradigms of the Good in order to “make the world transparent and operational by extirpating from it any illusion and any evil force.”44
For the Good of Integral Reality, the three evils and the fatality of untethered evil (i.e., the intelligence of evil) are all resistances to be overcome as “evil.” Reality that cannot be realized is misfortunate now rather than a Metaphysical evil, which if not sought to be realized would then be “evil,” along with its very unrealized state. Natural disasters and bodily problems are misfortunate rather than Natural evils, since to not put them under the auspices of prevention and reparability would be “evil.”45 Transgressing against others and globalized society, for whatever reasons, is misfortunate rather than a manifestation of Moral evil, since those perpetrators have only committed such acts because they are victims of misfortune themselves, whatever those misfortunes may be,46 and have not been made Good through the objectivity of hegemonic happiness, whether due to non-engagement, neglect, sabotage, bungling, mistuning, etc. The refusal to engage and/or demonizing/attacking this project of Good (i.e., the refusal in becoming annexed and liquidated by the code) would be considered “evil.”
And the universe itself is one of misfortune, thus we must recriminate it, thereby inspiring the overall projection of resistance—thus the projection of “evil” subsuming all other evils—to the ideal finality of Good by Good. However, it is this movement of the Good itself that turns evil from its very excess. It is this fatal evil that hides behind every action, where Good attempts to expunge everything against it, which is why it cannot be localized, realized, objectivized, etc. The workings of the world, its objective existence, end up contradicted by reality itself, but not by “evil,” for “evil has no objective reality.”47 Evil is a diversion, a deviation, an endless reversion. Evil shows through the Good of Integral Reality and its incessant propagation: Good diverted from Good through Good for Good. Baudrillard gives an example from The War on Terror, where “the story of the Italian hostage in Iraq48 was a fascinating one. When the Italian secret services agent that freed her from the terrorists was killed by US soldiers, it was Good assassinating Good, Good doing Evil in the name of Good. It was a total confusion of the two, where we could see how the Empire of Good is also an Empire of Evil, because it self-destructs. Such is the fatal destiny and the curse of the Empire of Good when it wants to finish its work.”49
The Good of Integral Reality can only attempt to sniff out what appears and refuses to appear on its registers. What it cannot sniff out is the non-unity, the dis-unity of things, because that is the principle of evil, which is what has been labelled and subsequently misappropriated as the foul spirit (of which this misappropriated version will now be put in quotation marks), whereas Good is the operational “unification of things in a totalized world.”50 Yet this operationality is a part of the intelligence of evil, the evil genie of the object, through the irony of objectivity and the emanation of its strategies. After all, the Good of Integral Reality is an object of seduction whose characteristics and strategies will reverse—its inherent fatality. Forget equilibrium; only extremes. Forget synthesis and reconciliation; only radical antagonism.51
We cannot place the “ought not” onto a grid, into a model of action of what “ought (not) to be,” and vice versa. Even if we were to, it would then descend into the (statistical) indifference of total operationality and leave morality as something to be computed out, to be left to the wayside, instead of simply being rejected (like “evil” people do), rather than overcome it, go beyond it, a la Nietzsche.52 Here, with Baudrillard, like Nietzsche, the evil we are talking about has little to do with agency, with “evil-doing,” “the doer and the deed.” Thus, when Bush sought to eliminate things like “the Axis of Evil,” his and many others’ notions of “evil”—the motions and actions of a malign and maleficent “agency”—were, and continue to be, an illusion, a superstition, which means the Axis of Good is no different.
The kind of “evil” Bush and others speak of is not evil, just like the terror spoken of. Evil is a form instead of the content and intent of actions, happenings, goals, etc.—it is the reversibility of form and causality. This is what makes evil itself intelligent, for it is not an understandable object. We are understood by the form instead, which is found in everything. And everything has at least two sides to it, making it reversible, like good and evil, where the duality of the latter cannot be denounced because it cannot be localized.53 This duality, this reversibility, thus automatically enables a secret complicity, a secret antagonism. For example, when speaking about the incarnation of fanaticism and violence, it is also the “incarnation of the violence of those who denounce it at the same time as of their impotence, and of the absurdity of combating it frontally without having understood anything of this diabolical complicity and this reversibility of terror.”54
Like Baudrillard’s view of evil, terror is a form that is non-agentic as well. Beyond the proliferation and saturation of generalized responsibility and its collective blackmailing for it,55 it is a fatum, an unpredictable happening (though beyond the accident, but not excluding it and the ensuing abreaction) that is bound to take place, yet is always covered over by thoughts and models representing them as impossibilities and/or that very notion of representation as impossible. Because we cannot put an actual finger on it despite putting our hands all over it, it ends up haunting absolutely everything. And this haunting is through the duality, the reversibility of absolutely everything, not to mention our complicity in it all. It is also important to note that the terror of the fatality of a system and its acceleration, deviation, etc., towards it does not have to be malicious in the agentic sense, for terror and evil are revealed amidst the dis-unity of things, especially plans and models. It does not have to be on purpose, all the while following a purpose, like Good, or “evil.” Yes, the refusal comes from evil itself—that the evil genie of the object allows the work being done with it to be its own undoing.
The intelligence of evil can show through others when the fundamental rule of politics and the social are broken down, that rule being “corruption for some and protesting Evil for others.”56 Power short-circuits counter-power (critical thought, negativity) by sidestepping denunciation and critical analysis.57 In contrast to the assumption, the illusion, that truth belongs to the good, that evil is denounced from the moral position of good, this truth instead comes out of the mouth of evil and basks in the impunity of (professional and technical) cynicism, in shamelessness and hypocrisy, along with transparency in its confession.58 Those who unveil the truth of things do so through their abuse of it.59
How does the intelligence of evil show through Bush? When Baudrillard tells us that speaking evil “is to speak this fateful, paradoxical situation that is the reversible concatenation of good and evil,”60 we see this in responses to January 6th. When folks want to call insurrectionists terrorists and/or traitors, they are doing so for the sake of things they assume to be justice, democracy, freedom, etc., which would all be things that are deemed good. Yet the power of their denunciation is stepped over when Bush61 only speaks through the power of the system, which is as corrupt as he is. His statements only engage in the re-incantation of superstitious forces and agents as part of a fatal discourse originally stemming from the successes—thus the Good—of the world-system, which includes the reactions to it, like 9/11 and 1/6, and the reactions to those reactions, like The War on Terror then and now.62
The actual truth confessed here—which, to many, also serves as a reminder of past crimes—is that if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then it has been confessed by the perpetrator of that insanity (the spearhead of global power) that it should indeed continue, and at the detriment of other alternatives, since a part of this truth is the (cynical) fact that there are no alternatives. This is not just in reactive terms, but in preventative terms as well, all of which were originally declared long ago in Good terms in terms of propagating “the integral order of the world.”63 This is the expression of evil from a position of evil rather than its denunciation from a position of good, which automatically absorbs and neutralizes the concerns of denouncers. After all, all of those who object to this freedom and immunity of the Good will be told, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” and be labelled as “evil.” It does not matter if those who denounced the insurrectionists came to similar conclusions as Bush did; they will be annexed by the hostage situation that is this “reversible concatenation of good and evil.”64
The violence you mete out is always the mirror of the violence you inflict on yourself. The violence you inflict on yourself is always the mirror of the violence you mete out. This is the intelligence of evil.65
Evil, in the duality of diversion and irreducible reversibility, is also a challenge to power. Bush’s statements inadvertently present this challenge, in all its obscenity, as something akin to saying, “Do what we did, if you dare!” along with admitting total helplessness through rehashed incantations. It is a restaging of communication that invites fatality and seduction. And this challenge extends to terror in the simultaneous refusal and temptation of this dare and vice versa—the play of reversal.
Bush’s comparison is not just a challenge, and a challenge to everyone, but it also expresses the duality of attempting to meet that challenge. Will America stand up for itself? Will it do something different? Will it descend further through inaction? What will others do? What will you do? These possibilities and many more carry a fatal destiny. There is also the flipside of perspective and duality in which the insurrectionists will have to approach these as well, since they, just like the non-insurrectionists, are also a part of the simulation of the private sphere, government, and everything in between, in the margins, and beyond.
If progress is something that we could call an evolution (of a system), then Baudrillard would call these manifestations of global antagonism a “re-involution.”66 The total generalization and deregulation of exchange brings freedom that is more free than free, of movement and “valuating” that has absolutely nothing to do with you (the feeling and acting person), yet has absolutely everything to do about (“what” “is” “about”) you (along with “your” “feelings” and “actions”). This is important, for Baudrillard says you do not need the concept of freedom to speak of the following: that whatever burden placed upon a person is desired to be removed.67
Indeed, regarding this total generalization and deregulation of exchange, the burden is total freedom, total self-making, though not actually self-made but merely a “self”- hyperrealization in which the “self” is not even a mere vestige but a copy of a copy now obsolesced, a prosthesis falling off immediately after its emergence to be immediately replaced. This self-making does not exist because the imposition, the burden, placed upon the person is that of operationality (a “freedom” one is not in actual “possession” of). The spirit of the “self” and technics of “making” were liquidated by the code long ago. The person who would be under the traditional burden of servitude is already liberated through Hegemony, freed to become absolutely anything via passing through the Virtualization of the Universal.68 But not everybody wants to be absolutely anything (and Baudrillard tells us the Universal is not for everyone), and even if they do not feel it directly, this imperative still infuses itself everywhere. It imposes responsibility, cause and effect, upon absolutely everything, along with the simulacra of moralistic scorn of being and not being complicit with it. Hidden amongst it all are refusal, resistance, duality, and reversibility.
This re-involution emerges through the inability and/or lack of will of peoples and places to meet the Universality of the Virtual, the Virtualization of the Universal, of this total objectivity, which makes them “evil” in the profusive, virulent awareness of the system. In the profound desire to have, there is also the profounder desire to not have, for whatever reason or none at all (the meaning for it doesn’t have to exist; a Western bias). The wish to extend the game to everyone means there will always be those who do not wish to play, who have no need to do so, and those who no longer wish to play (those who tire of losing and winning). This is no moral statement; perhaps a technological one, but most certainly a symbolic one. We desire the content (which was traditionally always the old medium) but abhor the totality of the form from which it emerges and always attempt to resist it. (We cannot do this like we used to, the distinction between medium, message, and their manipulations has imploded.)69 We desired the world as a product, but when it returned us a world project, we have fallen short on every level. This, too, is like the previous statement: the Integrality of money, sex, gender, labor, markets, ecology, behavior, etc.; none of these challenges do we meet, nor will we meet.
This is the problem of the challenge of gift exchange, where gift-givers give whatever and/or the very best that they can, and when not reciprocated, can turn to vengeance. Also, those who receive gifts and cannot give in return end up turning to vengeance as well. The gift of globalizing the Universal is that of total and utter deregulation, whether we like it or not (and this is universally discriminatory), which has to do not only with the deregulation of subjects—evident in the saturation of efficient cause—but more so with the deregulation of formal cause, the object (because every new medium/object creates an environment), where the latter is of greater relevance. This is a gift for which we have nothing to give in return.
So, just like how evil is always in the background of Good, always there, there is always a resistance to the global Universal equal to that of freedom and its desire.70 And, as Baudrillard tells us, this means a passion for deregulation is thus accompanied by an equal passion for rules.71
III
If the perpetrators of 9/11 and 1/6 are no different from each other, as Bush has said, then they and their agents only revolt against Integral Reality, this Hegemony of global power, which means that this foul spirit emanates from global power itself as global antagonism.
The homelands and hinterworlds these people seek were liquidated by the Virtual long ago, along with the reality assumed to be substituting them. Terror (and not the terror Bush and others assume) is an emission from power itself—globalization—that attacks itself. This is the “cultural overlap” between them: that in the face of this gift of global power, in its prophylactic expansion of perfection and ensuing effects, they have nothing to offer in return (whether they even wanted to, let alone be worthy of), thereby turning to vengeance. “This goes far beyond hatred for the dominant world power among the disinherited and the exploited, among those who have ended up on the wrong side of the global order. Even those who share in the advantages of that order have this malicious desire in their hearts.”72 Yes, it does not matter if rich or poor, powerful or powerless, for all are equals in this anthropological helplessness—this is the only equality.73 These agents are merely obstacles to and of the Good, which entirely justifies the existence of both their respective false finalities and thus all of us. The recurring and incessantly circulating models of the Good escalate the differences of this global antagonism, this seduction of the foul spirit—by attacking the agentic misappropriation that is the “foul spirit”—which escalates the irony of this self-fulfilling predicament.
In Baudrillardian terms, the foul spirit is something that is always there if it is to be equated with terror(ism). After all, globalization and terror are both immoral (forms), with this globalizing of Universality itself being terroristic and terrorism being “terror against terror.”74 Terror is not here and there, it is everywhere, “which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent.”75 We should head off a potential confusion with Bush’s agentic misappropriation while we can, that being the foul spirit confounded with revolt. The will to revolt and the foul spirit are not the same. A revolt can unify, whereas the foul spirit, actually operating as the intelligence of evil, is the ominousness and inevitability of dis-unity, which can dispel the very unity a revolt may stand for, that being the fatality of its sign. The obscenity and absurdity of the system itself seduce this sentiment amongst us all.
Indeed, Baudrillard says we fantasize about the system’s inability to absorb negativity, events, and crises, along with fantasizing about its rupture amidst our media, which 9/11 symbolized. “Because it was this insufferable superpower [i.e., the US] that gave rise both to the violence now spreading throughout the world and to the terrorist imagination that (without our knowing it) dwells within us all. That the entire world without exception had dreamed of this event, that nobody could help but dream of the destruction of so powerful a Hegemon — this fact is unacceptable to the moral conscience of the West. And yet it’s a fact nevertheless, a fact that resists the emotional violence of all the rhetoric conspiring to cover it up. In the end, it was they who did it, but we who wished it.”76 The rhetoric conspiring to cover it up, in terms of purporting economic unity (“Go out and shop!”) and national pride/resiliency, had to go up against itself with The War on Terror as more and more service members, citizens, politicians, the liberated, and those left behind became more and more disenfranchised, disenchanted, disillusioned, and disheartened with it, whether they were for the war or not and its globalized underpinnings (the inner faltering and reversion of the Good)—while everyone else forgot about it. The resonance of this immanent refusal of the system, this foul wish, this foul we, has only become more obscene in the shrinkage and proliferation of communications technology since 9/11. Has this came full circle with January 6th?
Clearly, the intellectuals and the commanding heights failed to understand this “terrorist imagination that dwells within us all.” Yet, at the same time, to “truly” “understand” is just the other side of the hostage situation and the preventative terror to ward away the specter of terror, which ends up attacking the same thing, which is itself. On the other hand, maybe they do understand this dwelling imagination and monopolize it for themselves over others. They could also let it spurt out here and there as normalized and predictable content rather than anything actually radical, thus abating the radicality of their intervention and thus preventing any prevention; the real catastrophe substituted by a simulated one. After all, isn’t everything merely an exercise, a test, a simulation of the Good, where no one is in control and merely performs operations? Apropos January 6th and whatever interpretation of it, can America absorb it? Can the most powerful nation to have ever existed absorb not just the resentment from abroad but, more importantly, its own self-hatred, its own self-contempt, its own total and irrevocable resistance to globalization from every angle, every perspective, and so on (while doing Good) and export it for all others to match and, perhaps, escalate? Or will it simply undergo suicidal crumbling?
IV
The logic and methods of what Shoshana Zuboff calls Surveillance Capitalism77 attempt to (re)generate a double of the world through the preservation and reproduction of various brands of social relations as guaranteed outcomes, whether they be purchases, actions, habits, and their reinforcement and/or extinction, etc. Look at all the Big Tech companies and analytical firms with their behavioral research profiling the whole lot of us; they have doubled down on their best approximations of “your” “personality” through the incessant and exploitative accumulation of behavioral surplus.
Behavioral surplus is the left-over raw material derived from the receipt of every single action that can be digitally tracked, which has been mined and algorithmized from persons’ purchases, clicks, keystrokes, blinks, and pitch changes, i.e., everything they do, directly and indirectly, that does not end up being reinvested for the refinement of those respective original processes. This is the raw material used towards the (re)production of prediction products to (re)produce guaranteed outcomes, which produces even more behavioral surplus. These novel methods of extraction and application power an apparatus of micro-targeting that not only reaches more people in physical numbers, but more so “personally” than ever before. These go beyond all communication barriers, beyond understanding and misunderstanding, beyond sense and non-sense, beyond the environment, and beyond the territory and map. This is what these firms engage in, and it is what we and they are all informed by.
This is a double-edged sword, this perfection of a logic of reinforcing and revamping predictable and viral behavior, taken from and destabilizing the very ground it claims to support. (After all, any outcome that can be guaranteed would be Good in terms of the extension of the system.)78 This includes its own ground, whose very perfection carries its duality, its fatal destiny, its reversibility. It is all the more ironic that this is where the West currently finds its pride in its supremacy while the rest of the world attempts to follow suit or simply refuses. But there is no hill to die on when the ground has fallen through the vertigo of the hyperreal…
All of this follows the fallacy of being able to localize and visualize evil, which has reached a fever pitch through the radical behaviorism of Surveillance Capitalism. Here we see the obsolescence of capital at the tip of the spear replaced by behavioral surplus and the (re)production of more predictable behavior, of guaranteed outcomes, where whatever cannot fall into their purview will be deemed “evil,” including refusal.
When folks want to express their displeasures with the system, with globalization, and with global power, the predominant way is through social media, which runs through the logic of Surveillance Capitalism. Even those who claim to seek the overthrow of “globalists” and the like do it. Yet their very participation with this logic shapes them and “their” discourse, and vice versa. If we are going to continue on with Bush’s comparison, then we are going to run into problems, for whatever notion of refusal the insurrectionists exhibited on 1/6 is not comparable to the 9/11 terrorists.
If the insurrectionists’ claims of refusal of the system are now visualizable, thus absorbed into predictive processes and guaranteed outcomes, then is it really refusal? Is it really an expression of global antagonism? Or is it a part of the system itself, a part of the growth of the Good of Hegemony? In terms of catastrophe, it is until struck by the duality of reversion, of reversibility. Regarding terror, it depends. When we consider its ubiquity, your run-of-the-mill suicidal terror is reserved for the poor, whereas with 9/11, and 1/6 by hypothetical extension, it is terror of the rich.79 The former is always against the system, whereas the latter uses the system against the system.80 Yet everyone associated with the insurrection, rich and poor, are only using the system against those apparently in control of it. They think they know the system and its uses better than others.
The logic of Surveillance Capitalism was used to find and innervate people in resonance with popular figures like Trump, in resistance to anything to the contrary, all the while extending the processes that already liquidate and impoverish those people, whose effects are ideologically detailed and amplified through the validation mechanisms of legacy media and fed back into social media all over again as an iteration of greater radical behaviorist refinement. They were not working against the system and had little to do with the 9/11 terrorists in terms of terror. Their supposed refusal of the system is merely a part of “the plane of the real.”
While what Baudrillard says below originally had to do with the critical thought of Leftists (and their impotence continuing to this day), we can apply this to insurrectionists and the rest of the Far-Right:
We will not destroy the system by a direct, dialectical revolution of the economic or political infrastructure. Everything produced by contradiction, by the relation of forces, or by energy in general, will only feed back into the mechanism and give it impetus, following a circular distortion similar to a Moebius strip. We will never defeat it by following its own logic of energy, calculation, reason and revolution, history and power, or some finality or counter-finality. The worst violence at this level has no purchase, and will only backfire against itself. We will never defeat the system on the plane of the real: the worst error of all our revolutionary strategies is to believe that we will put an end to the system on the plane of the real: this is their imaginary, imposed on them by the system itself, living or surviving only by always leading those who attack the system to fight amongst each other on the terrain of reality, which is always the reality of the system. This is where they throw all their energies, their imaginary violence, where an implacable logic constantly turns back into the system. We have only to do it violence or counter-violence since it thrives on symbolic violence – not in the degraded sense in which this formula has found fortune, as a violence ‘of signs’, from which the system draws strength, or with which it ‘masks’ its material violence: symbolic violence is deduced from a logic of the symbolic (which has nothing to do with the sign or with energy): reversal, the incessant reversibility of the counter-gift and, conversely, the seizing of power by the unilateral exercise of the gift.81
If this objectivized refusal is part of the system, we must then ask if January 6th was actually a challenge, a counter-gift, to the system given how embedded this refusal is in the real now wrought from Surveillance Capitalism and its reality principle.
Can we extend Baudrillard’s claim of capital unilaterally giving the gift of labor,82 where the exchangeability of wages, salaries, and the like for the work performed masks this one-sided relationship, this power?83 That behavioral surplus unilaterally gives the gift of will, where the exchangeability of information for the choices enacted through one’s will—as expressions of guaranteed outcomes—masks this one-sided relationship, this power?84 Information can make things happen that money may not necessarily be able to buy. (If you are given wages to spend, then you are also given information to act on. Both are consumables.) The insurrectionists were not looking to be paid,85 and any looting and stealing was of low material returns regardless of sign-value—and it is not as if going full fascist is going to bump up wages for the long term, if even the short term.86 All they really sought after was the confirmation of disinformation and misinformation, whose confirmation baptizes them as information, and they themselves become baptized as a collection of “wills,” of “agencies,” of “actors” akin to the words attributed to Karl Rove (though he denies it).87 This is not through American imperialism, however, but rather the imperialism of the code. All they sought after was the consumption of meaning, which was really just the meaninglessness generated by the system. This does not sound like a challenge to the system like 9/11.
Could it be that the system wanted January 6th to happen? That this is the terror of the system exerting itself, not terror against terror? Which is not to take away from the significance of 1/6, of course, but to ask if there was symbolic violence, to ask if there was “the symbolic use of death as an absolute weapon” like there was on 9/11.88 The deaths that took place on the side of insurrection were just through basic force or natural causes, which do not present a symbolic challenge to power. Capitol Police engaged in the same traditional violence, which is not a symbolic challenge either. And the suicides that took place afterwards were not weaponized.
Earlier, it was mentioned how the one-sidedness of the gift and the inability to offer a counter-gift foment vengeance. That is because it is humiliating. What does Baudrillard have to say about 9/11 that can then be contrasted and compared to 1/6?
Only an analysis that emphasizes the logic of symbolic obligation can make sense of this confrontation between the global and the singular. To understand the hatred of the rest of the world against the West,89 perspectives must be reversed. The hatred of non-Western people is not based on the fact that the West stole everything from them and never gave anything back. Rather, it is based on the fact that they received everything, but were never allowed to give anything back. This hatred is not caused by dispossession or exploitation, but rather by humiliation. And this is precisely the kind of hatred that explains the September 11 terrorist attacks. These were acts of humiliation responding to another humiliation. The worst that can happen to global power is not to be attacked or destroyed, but to suffer a humiliation. Global power was humiliated on September 11 because the terrorists inflicted something the global system cannot give back. Military reprisals were only means of physical response. But, on September 11, global power was symbolically defeated. War is a response to an aggression, but not to a symbolic challenge. A symbolic challenge is accepted and removed when the other is humiliated in return (but this cannot work when the other is crushed by bombs or locked behind bars in Guantanamo). The fundamental rule of symbolic obligation stipulates that the basis of any form of domination is the total absence of any counterpart, of any return.90
Even if the insurrectionists share the same sentiments as the 9/11 terrorists, the former did not do any humiliation. There was no humiliation on January 6th like on 9/11 because the system itself is at work with both sides. For Baudrillard tells us that the system is completed as a duopoly through “the tactical division of monopoly” because the survival of unitary systems hinges upon the regulation of binaries,91 where things can “be organized into a game of unstable variations, from polyvalence to tautology, without putting the strategic form of the duopoly into question. It is the divine form of simulation.”92 Global superpowers instead of a single empire; the Twin Towers rather than just one of them (or the Empire State Building); vaccination and anti-vaccination; American political parties and their diffracting discourses instead of one party; power and counter-power (i.e. critical thought); all of these are examples. January 6th did nothing to disturb this binary regulation. Indeed, the Left and Never-Trumpers want the system to confront its own absurdity through its very extension; the insurrectionists and their ilk continue the extension of the system through the absurdity of trying to drive out what the system has already consumed and integrated (immigrants, persons of color, 2SLGBTQIA+ folk, non-fundamentalist religious sects, environmentalism, etc.); both will only maintain the system unless unable to meet a symbolic challenge or it drives itself to fatal outcomes.
This is the problem of revolution and lesser activities marked out by Baudrillard: if the notion of the dominated rebelling against the dominators is obsolete, then we can anticipate the obsolescence of all counter-powers upon conception, acceptance, rejection, application, etc. The dominators and dominated were not even transformed into hostages and terrorists; they already were to begin with. We are all mediums channeling the “spirit” of the code and vice versa (though there is no difference anymore); its spirit being the ubiquity of its teleonomic operationality and the irreducible seduction of the object. The insurrectionists—plotters and participants alike—along with non-insurrectionists think they are channeling the “spirit” of “their” “America,” her “patriotism,” and particular “senses” of “freedom.” But they are not; they are only channeling the code. Every pill is a part of The Matrix.
Maybe the comparison Bush made was merely incomplete: that January 6th is more akin to the 1993 attack against the World Trade Centre and thus something else awaits, thus seducing the vigilance of the Good, which “aggravates the specter of terror.”93 For, even when extending the system, it does not guarantee the insurrectionists will do so forever, whether on purpose or by accident. This is the better take since the 1993 attack and 1/6 did not involve the weaponization of symbolic death like 9/11 did (no real martyrdom, no real sacrifice on the part of insurrectionists),94 while still taking into account their respective humiliated states. Also, for my convenience, all of what has been spoken of above and below should still hold. Whether or not 1/6 equals 9/11, whether or not the system was humiliated by the former, the system will still engage in reprisals similar to when it was humiliated by the latter, thus with the same kinds of force that falter and convulse because they do not give back the symbolic violence that was either perpetrated upon it (and assumed to be apropos 1/6) or happens upon itself through its own carnivalizing and cannibalizing. What Bush tells us is that we are still haunted by the symbolic challenge, whatever it is, and all that can be done is to continue beating around the bush on the foul spirit.
V
The impunity of shameless cynicism and hypocrisy expressed through the intelligence of evil spoken of earlier is truly radical, for Good and evil are totally untethered, thus totally transparent in the revelation of evil. A radical honesty that is radical not because of its logic and methods but because of where it speaks from—power—and giving away the secret of itself in total hypocrisy, cynicism, and transparency, thus diffusing any counter-power. And nothing can be done about this impunity of “truth,” its veritable immunity from denunciation via traditionally critical means. Truth can only be revealed through evil. “Only evil can speak evil now—evil is a ventriloquist.”95 (Which means only evil can fight evil.) Beyond Bush, let us look at more examples.
Baudrillard uses the Banque Nationale de Paris slogan (now known as BNP Paribas) from the 1970s: “Your money interests me!”96 as an example. Everyone with a critical mindset knows of and complains about this truth, but the fact that the banker says it makes it all the more sinister, insolent, and offensive.
Another example he uses is from the world of French television: Patrick Le Lay, former CEO of TF1, “Let’s be realistic: the job of TF1 is to help Coca-Cola sell its products. For an advertising campaign to work properly, the viewer’s brains have to be accessible. The goal of our programs is to make them available, by entertaining them, relaxing them between two messages. What we sell to Coca-Cola is relaxed-brains time… Nothing is harder than getting them to open up.”97 Who needs folks like Harold Innis, Neil Postman, and Noam Chomsky to complain when we have a perfectly succinct statement of people’s relationship with media and vice versa?
An even better example comes from American television. In the leadup to the 2016 American election, there was much coverage about the coverage of Trump and whether that would confer an unfair advantage in the election through such vast amounts of free advertising. Former CEO of CBS, Leslie Moonves, under the windfall of massive profits due to it, had this to say: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” that “Most of the ads are not about issues. They’re sort of like the debates,” and that “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”98 Total open honesty and transparency with all its cynicism on display: that debating is not where issues are tackled and that political advertising (though not exclusive to it, of course) is not interested either; that America is not a place for itself nor its citizens, for they are all merely externalities in the growth and perfection of markets; and, most importantly, that whatever the terrible result, there was still the feeling of accomplishment and success in the air, that “The money’s rolling in and this is fun.” Again, this openness is outright highway robbery of denunciation and completely diffuses any logical retort because the logic to be unveiled has done so on its own.
Who and what is to denounce statements like these? The citizens who lack the voice and funds?99 The Left and Never-Trumpers? The formal cause, the environment: its users, the audience, the folks undergoing and participating in relaxed-brains time? It does not matter, for everyone and everything are just following the logic of the world they live through, superficially and consciously that of capital, though beyond their attention and awareness, that being the Good of the domination of networks.
“Donald’s place in this election is a good thing” because the simulacrum (and image) of Trump100 seduces the traffic (jam) of “power” and anything “counter” to it. It does not matter if “Orange Man Bad” or “Orange Man Good”: “orange,” “man,” “bad,” and “good” are all figments of the code; the extension of one of them is the extension of all of them, and with their extension comes their implosion of meaning. In fact, Trump does not even matter because it is his “place” in the election that matters and is a “good thing”—a place occupiable by anyone who is able to do so. He is totally replaceable, as has been noticed through the emergence of Ron DeSantis.101 Of course, noticing is not the same as accomplishing. And more importantly, there is not enough room for the original and the double.
One more example comes from Big Tech High Priest, Hal Varian, detailed by Zuboff. While describing the dynamics of Surveillance Capitalism and automobile insurance—the shaping and tracking of vehicular behavior—Varian casually notes the new punitive paradigm that is unfolding through novel contractual forms.102 This is what he has to say regarding vehicles: “Nowadays it’s a lot easier just to instruct the vehicular monitoring system not to allow the car to be started and to signal the location where it can be picked up.”103
Zuboff herself has an inkling for the intelligence of evil when she reflects on this statement: “Varian’s laid-back, simple prose is a kind of lullaby that makes his observations seem so banal, so ordinary as to barely warrant comment. But in Varian’s scenario, what happens to the driver? What if there is a child in the car? Or a blizzard? Or a train to catch? Or a day-care center drop-off on the way to work? A mother on life-support in the hospital still miles away? A son waiting to be picked up at school?”104 What about them? Mere externalities and nothing besides.105 Of course, it should be noted that it is not so much the problem of driving that is at issue for Zuboff (though it matters), rather it is all the talk of technological inevitability with informational dispossession outside of the driver’s awareness, where “[behavioral] surplus drawn from the driver’s experience is repurposed as the means to shape and compel the driver’s experience for the sake of guaranteed outcomes.”106 And instead of an actual vehicle, we can replace it with the sign-vehicle, with which any behavior can be shaped, compelled, predicted, etc. Yes, “Nowadays it’s a lot easier just to instruct the sign monitoring system not to allow the sign-vehicle to be enacted/perturbed and to signal the location where it can be neutralized.”
This is another hostage situation, one now generated by the profusion of guaranteed outcomes and the informational dispossession spurred on by the extraction of behavioral surplus and its prediction products. These outcomes are an extension of the banality of the Good. But, more importantly, they are signs confirming the greatest importance for Hegemony and Integral Reality (and not the Surveillance Capitalists), that being cybernetic governance, its “self”-regulation, and the extension of the code.
VI
Apropos Bush and the intelligence of evil: his statements about January 6th join in the protest of evil despite his own corruption, like The War on Terror, a failed campaign of The Empire of Good. Doing both short-circuits the work of the negative and any of its potential critical thought, thereby leaving folks to only engage in dreadful discourses (myself included) about moral hypocrisy rather than forms and environments. More importantly, Bush is wrong yet again. That is also a part of the intelligence of evil—the stupidity of power in open revelation of itself upon the very rubble it has wrought. What else does Bush say to take away the denunciation of January 6th?
“As a nation, our adjustments have been profound. Many Americans struggled to understand why an enemy would hate us with such zeal. The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability.”
This question of hatred first extended to the outsider, to the other, but it is now pointed at the enemy within. Not just within the country itself, but in every single one of us. The confusion and struggle to understand this question for all people harbors a tremendous blind spot. This harkens back to what Baudrillard had to say about the Westernized moral mindset in the face of Hegemony, where the allergy to any definitive order is universal.107 We dream of its destruction but do not necessarily do it, which is anathema to the Western conscience. This continues to influence our inability to deal with the symbolic significance of events like this and the persons who end up enraptured in them and carrying them out, along with the technology used in order to do so, not to mention to thwart it—where technology was already the object seducing all of it. That if we do not cease these misapprehensions, 9/11 and 1/6 become “a pure accident, a purely arbitrary act, the murderous phantasmagoria of a few fanatics, and all that would then remain would be to eliminate them.”108
But we cannot just eliminate them, whoever they are, whether Christian extremists, Islamic extremists, or anyone else. We must remember that these are effects of globalization and are pushed further by globalization. This is the fatality of the sign of globalization, “which explains all the counterphobic ravings about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep-seated complicity, the event would not have the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the terrorists doubtless know that they can count on this unavowable complicity.”109 (If the terrorists count on this, along with all of us, then so do the Surveillance Capitalists.)
This unavowable complicity is what allows for our blindness regarding this zealous hatred, along with our comfort over security adjustments, buffering our sense of vulnerability—as triggers and distractions—against it all. Since everyone loves to complain about social media, it is the preeminent source of comfort and vulnerability over security adjustments, of which the desired obscure object, “evil’s” exorcizing, spreads far and wide in its veritable virulence and ensuing prophylactic responses. “When domination becomes Hegemony, negativity becomes terrorism.”110 Whether or not we are comfortable with these adjustments—of which there appears to be anything and everything—we will turn them upon whatever vulnerabilities that are convenient, prudent, necessary, or none of the above, rather than the blindness of understanding the enemy and its zeal of hatred, rather than the emergent complicity that resides within all of us, let alone what seduces it, until this reverses into a catastrophic dialectic.
“In the sacrifice of the first responders, in the mutual aid of strangers, in the solidarity of grief and grace, the actions of an enemy revealed the spirit of a people. And we were proud of our wounded nation.”
And this is completely true. The sacrifice of first responders did reveal the spirit of a people, a people who will jump headfirst into total selflessness and bravery. It also revealed the spirit of a people who fought those first responders (and folks in the exposure zone) tooth and nail for money for health care from said sacrifice. The comedian Jon Stewart, along with the remaining first responders, spearheaded the effort to extend the Victim Compensation Fund to 2090.111 They pleaded their case to an empty chamber, where Stewart lambasted and mocked the congress members, present and mostly not present, about their abhorrent use of patriotism for social clout, all the while forgetting about the very patriots they love to parrot about. Trump eventually signed this into law. Americans should be proud of how they continue to fight for their very lives. Never forget.
For 1/6, beyond the analogue of the Capitol Police, it revealed the spirit of a people that cannot deal with January 6th nor its spirit, whether as power or counter-power: the suspension of the hostage situation. There is nothing to be proud of regarding the brazen hubris of plotters and participants, nor regarding the total lack of aggressiveness—the predictable shyness—of those seeking “justice” compared to 9/11, nor squaring off the former who continue to act unabated, like the Supreme Court, the Sedition Caucus, the corporations and their owners still donating to them and profiting from The Big Lie (whether they believe the lie or not), and Trump himself. It has been up to the media to turn up the heat, of which they are the harbingers of terror as well; they do it all for the ratings and clicks, not the people, let alone the nation.112
But do not take this only in the traditional sense of “the media,” some ominous yet all-too-transparent cabal of companies, agencies, owners, governments, and all their interests. One should take it in the ubiquity of media as formal causality and its apotheosis through the likes of Surveillance Capitalism. Yes, what are the guaranteed outcomes of and for first responders? What are the guaranteed outcomes of and for insurrectionists? What are the guaranteed outcomes of and for those seeking accountability and justice from the insurrectionists? What are the guaranteed outcomes of and for those above and below in the hierarchy of things? These now help to make up “the solidarity of grief and grace” in which the revelation of the foul spirit shows through “enemies” and “people” alike.
“In these memories, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 must always have an honored place. Here the intended targets became the instruments of rescue. And many who are now alive owe a vast, unconscious debt to the defiance displayed in the skies above this field,” where our memories of 1/6 have the Capitol Police in the halls of honor.
Ironically enough, insurrectionists were under the impression the Capitol Police would switch over as instruments of rescue since authoritarians and fascists love to “back the blue,” but instead became intended targets when this particular stripe of blue defended the Capitol of The United States of America with honor and bravery. They not only defended the Capitol, but they also defended everyone in the building who was deemed an enemy. Those enemies, those intended targets, like Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, are also instruments of rescue, since, in the very first place, they simultaneously perpetuate and denounce the same system of corruption that inspires folks like this,113 naturally and algorithmically, while not baring any serious teeth about the threats of folks that would have murdered them, along with many others, if not for the bravery of the Capitol Police.114 Pelosi is a stooge, and Pence is a doormat: mere conduits and nothing besides.
Even Pence’s past words of denunciation only say the quiet part out loud about the insurrectionists; that they have tons of support and just have to be voted in by any means necessary.115 Also, like a victim of abuse who has not been helped or refused to be helped, he downplays the terrible things done and attempted to be done to him and projects them onto others: “I’m not going to allow the Democrats or the national media to use one tragic day in January to demean the intentions of 74 million people who stood with us in our cause. And I’m not going to allow the Democrats to use one tragic day in January to distract attention from their failed agenda and the failed policies of the Biden administration. We’re going to focus on the future.”116 And Pence would be right, for there is nothing the media nor any political mechanism can do about a cause that is totally devoid of cause. Indeed, it is only an expression of hypertely, which no one is actually in control of. Of course, the cause cannot be “their” “cause” if hypertelic, thus he and the 74 million actually have no intention “toward” the “cause,” merely the performance of operations, since the desires of intentions have been usurped and liquidated through the teleonomical operationality currently promulgated through/fronted by Surveillance Capitalism. And the “focus on the future”? Only the focus on the simulacrum, which the media, the Democrats, and everyone else perform in, operate in, too. The simulacrum does not conceal the future; it conceals the fact that there is none and reproduces this concealment, whose fact is then merely a part of the “vertigo of interpretation” through the precession of models—a single fact engendering all models simultaneously, a veritable magnetization of the event.117 And let us not forget that the technological infrastructure that attempts to organize these dynamics is a Good thing, remember? Who and what is going to defy all of that? What single point of vulnerability exists to be exploited, and by whom? Yet again, another hostage situation!
And so, just like the 9/11 first responders, the Capitol Police, and those who were able to join later, will have their spirit and defiance rewarded just the same for their sacrifice—in denial,118 pussyfooting, and aggression—by the very halls they defended!119 Never forget.
And what of those in the “exposure zone,” which, for 9/11, consisted of those living, working, and being educated where the terrorist attacks took place in New York City, where the ensuing destruction and debris ravaged the physical and mental health of all in its vicinity and were thus inevitably affected like the first responders? The exposure zone for 1/6 has less to do with the physical Capitol and more to do with information and the networks—the performance through and of the Virtual—the planning of everything, the live-streaming of everything, and the ensuing circulation of sounds and images amongst the globe afterwards into the past and future for the immanence of the total presence of real time, the engendering of models abroad; essentially the profusive abreaction of all.
The attack and the ongoing saturation of media have us all breathing in the dust of information, thus also misinformation and disinformation. After all, for Baudrillard, “disinformation comes from the very profusion of information, from its incantation, its looped repetition, which creates an empty perceptional field, a space shattered as though by a neutron bomb or by one of those devices that sucks in all the oxygen from the area of impact. It’s a space where everything is pre-neutralized, including war, by the precession of images and commentaries, but this is perhaps because there is at bottom nothing to say about something that unfolds, like this war [The War on Terror], to a relentless scenario, without a glimmer of uncertainty regarding the final outcome.”120 The profusion of information leaves us with less and less to actually talk about other than becoming pushed further and further into the clasp of global power and global antagonism—the precession of images and commentaries has been there, and all of it is relentlessly recommended to us!
However, information for Baudrillard already melts down and devours whatever encounters it.121 How much of our foundations, beams, and supports of identity, recognition, and meaning creation have been consumed by this universal acid of information, whether or not by accident, thereby leaving space for implosion?122 Or, in organic terms, how much of the social body has been consumed by this autoimmunity via information, thereby leaving room for the body to submit to entropy?123
Folks refuse to consider the transformational sense of information because they would have to (re)consider the bias of communication that mediates it, along with the emergent effects of disinformation and misinformation (and beyond the respective Machiavellian uses of them [grounded more so in final and efficient causes]), since the profusion of information brings disinformation and misinformation. The Virtual perfection of Integral Reality is itself an operation carried out by all three: knowing that it must and always resolves to resolve itself and its surroundings (without actually resolving itself); Good diverted from Good through Good for Good. There has not been any clearing, restoration, or revitalization of the exposure zone or those affected. Can there be?
“Many of us have tried to make spiritual sense of these events. There is no simple explanation for the mix of providence and human will that sets the direction of our lives. But comfort can come from a different sort of knowledge. After wandering long and lost in the dark, many have found they were actually walking, step by step, toward grace.”
There is no simple explanation for the mix of providence and human will because you cannot localize a destiny like providence (its only destiny being reversal, by the way) or the “human” “will” when the latter pair hinge upon a whole cacophony of communication biases that may or may not ever find adequate balance amongst themselves and their users, let alone the concepts in the play of balance (and perhaps they were never meant to be balanced). Universal Free Exchange has wiped out any notion of direction in life (not to mention what we consider “life”) when time itself and movement in general have come under the domination of networks. And this goes far beyond what the Surveillance Capitalists have achieved through their retrieval of direction—which, like information, brings disinformation/misdirection—in the extension of operationality of scenery and programmatic responses that users continue to fall for and reinforce: their comfort (food) of knowledge. The Surveillance Capitalists themselves fall for this misdirection, though not in the sense of truth and lie, but in terms of fatality. That, as a mode of operation, despite its attempts to the contrary, it simply must see itself through, though it will end up diverted away from their goals and the Virtual illusions (which, like reality, are liquidated as Virtual Reality, as Integral Reality) distributed and livestreamed to its user-bases.
With the foul spirit, where “the increase of the power of power heightens the will to destroy it,”124 which is universal in all of us, we can find great irony in the fact that providence, thus God, are against themselves. “When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicides. It has been said that ‘Even God cannot declare war on Himself.’ Well, He can. The West, in the position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and declared war on itself.”125 This divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy of the West now reside in Surveillance Capitalism’s providence of instrumentarianism borne out of radical behaviorism: “the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behavior for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization, and control.”126 Through it, they seek to replace trust (with people, institutions, companies, groups, governments, etc.) with total certainty via their extraction and prediction imperatives.
However, they are blind to the fact of certainty’s reversibility. Certainty creates uncertainty, which skips over distrust and perturbs the emergence of panic, for it obsolesces trust. Do they know where, when, and how this uncertainty will reach a fever pitch? Do they have plans to deal with it similarly to an evacuation from an impending earthquake? If they do, then are they just enacting the terror of the Good? Are they just gambling on responses that might as well resemble the response to suicide with more suicide? And what will all of the above look like? Perhaps it already takes place.
The grace folks walk toward involves tracking and getting high off the simulated scent of the “foul spirit,” nothing more. This is not “connecting people,” despite all the available forms of communication and their interplay of effects, from simplicity to ecstasy. The only grace taking place is that of Integral Reality. “Walking step by step” is merely the optimism of footfall toward the non-event.
VII
The Good continues to come for all of us since the fact has officially been reasserted that the world lives under the auspices of terror and counter-terror and that those who harbor terrorists are no better or worse than the terrorists themselves. Yes, and again, as Baudrillard notes, “There is a fierce irony here: the irony of an anti-terrorist world system that ends up internalizing terror, inflicting it on itself and emptying itself of any political substance—and going so far as to turn on its on population.”127
Even more ironic is the fact that if evil is not localizable, then it is not accurate at all to call the manifestations of global antagonism “children of the same foul spirit,” for that would mean their origin would be localizable to a creator, whether familial and/or spiritual. We are operations and their emergent refusal from the profusion of models without origin, in which the copies are not even supreme but the form of circulation is. Unbeknownst to many, all that is chased after is the dis-unity of things through the totalized attempt at the unity of things.
America was humiliated on 9/11 not because it was caught off guard but because it suffers from perceptual blindness. That blindness ended up being extended through revenge, whose stability of reasoning was never (meant to be) present abroad and at home but carried on with a sense of duty and, most importantly, a promise… to and of what? The Good. None of this will be any different for 1/6. Whatever comes of the aftermath, insurrectionists and non-insurrectionists alike are helpless; neither have saved nor will save their country. They will fail to exact revenge on whatever “evil” they come across.128
Thus, there is no problem with the fact that Bush speaks evil, or, more accurately, that evil speaks through Bush. It was quite inevitable. This Good, technologically divine reductionism of evil, that inevitably and increasingly whittles away at everything everywhere at every time, comes to more and more obscene solutions in the face of its growing faltering. And so, it was also inevitable that the ante would continue be upped in the eradication of terror, in the extension of Good, and thus in the extension of evil.
Baudrillard, J. (2005). The Intelligence of Evil: Or, The Lucidity Pact (p. 24). BERG.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 17.
Baudrillard, J. (2010). The Agony of Power (p. 33). Semiotext(e).
Ibid., p. 35.
Ibid., p. 36.
What is reversibility? In short, finalities are never final and ends are never met, they only reverse.
My position is based on reversibility, which seems to me to be the true symbolic form. It is more an indetermination or a total instability of principles, and it is evil because it contradicts all possibility of rebuilding the world.
Gane, M. (2002). Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews (p. 177). Routledge.
Everywhere, in every domain, a single form predominates: reversibility, cyclical reversal and annulment put an end to the linearity of time, language, economic exchange, accumulation and power. Hence the reversibility of the gift in the counter-gift, the reversibility of exchange in the sacrifice, the reversibility of time in the cycle, the reversibility of production in destruction, the reversibility of life in death, and the reversibility of every term and value of the langue in the anagram. In every domain it assumes the form of extermination and death, for it is the form of the symbolic itself. Neither mystical nor structural, the symbolic is inevitable.
Baudrillard, J. (2017). Symbolic Exchange and Death (p. 23). SAGE.
The Agony of Power, p. 59.
Ibid., p. 79.
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (p. 1). University of Michigan Press.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 18.
Ibid., p. 52.
Simulacra and Simulation, p. 3.
Ibid., p. 2.
The Intelligence of Evil., p. 39.
The Agony of Power, p. 110.
Baudrillard, J. (2003). The Spirit of Terrorism (p. 13). Verso Books.
Ibid., p. 14.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 29.
Carnivalization in the sense of parody and masquerade. Cannibalization in terms of “cannibalization of reality by signs, or of a culture by itself,” like how one goes about “cannibalizing a car, using it as spare parts.” The cannibalization of a culture thus entails “tinkering with its values like spare parts inasmuch as the entire system is out of order.”
The Agony of Power, p. 35-6.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 44.
Ibid., p. 27.
The Agony of Power, p. 33.
Ibid., p. 61.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 119.
Baudrillard, J. (2008). Fatal Strategies (p. 61). Semiotext(e).
For a wonderful take on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and its provocations to the history of philosophy, please refer to Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, by Susan Neiman.
We can also think of climate change, the attempts at reducing its effects, and pandemics…
Again, pandemics. And here we can use two extreme examples: Anthony Fauci and Donald Trump. Both did not want to start a panic with Covid-19. And both were harped on for wishing to avoid one.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Fauci did not advocate the use of masks for the general public. This was not out of nothing to fear from the virus, but that the fear was going to localize in the health sector, which would be front and center with the pandemic. They could not afford any shortages of masks and thus would need masks more than the general public at first (before the massive surplus of them to overcome this problem). This is quite the sly maneuver, since if he made a big brouhaha, then panic would manifest, and masks would be literally devoured by those affected by the information (to use and/or hoard and profit from) rather than strategically important areas that would help more people.
(Fauci Admits Why Americans Were Initially Misled About Wearing Masks).
With Trump, he played it down in the beginning because he did not want to cause a panic in general, for no elected official craves complexity, let alone bad news (Bob Woodward book: In Trump interviews for 'Rage,' president says he downplayed coronavirus threat). Of course, the potential accuracy of this statement is just a mask for indifference and neglect (despite actually encouraging people to get vaccinated, though ceased to do so when his base cussed him out), in which more people died than had to, even without the terror of the State. Of course, the State, under the Trump administration, tried to get rid of it, akin to brushing it under the rug. This also included the states, of which many also did their own brushing, to actually clean the mess or deny it all and brush it somewhere else yet again. All the while, Trump took any credit he could for victories against the pandemic. In short, he engaged in denial, flip-flopping, and navigating towards re-election; the health and safety of Americans were a lesser priority.
Regardless, initially, one can argue that they were in the right to not cause a panic, their motives notwithstanding. In fact, they do not even matter, for, in the end, they are only playing to their crowd, that indecipherable object we call the masses. “‘Playing’ ‘to’ ‘their’ ‘crowd’” are all terms and a statement that no longer fall into human possession, thus also liberty and security. Those are only operational terms now—a performance in a field of generalized terror and deterrence.
Fatal Strategies, p. 40-2.
Ibid., p. 56-7.
The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 18.
Ibid., p. 19.
Ibid., p. 17.
And one can also wonder about the masses’ deep-down dreams for events…
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 152.
Neiman, S. (2015). Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (p. 22). Princeton University Press.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 14.
Ibid., p. 139.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 145.
Ibid., p. 146.
Unless, of course, undercut by neoliberal biases of capital and information that see the market as more natural than nature anyway, where any resistance to its reduction of market misfortune would be deemed the greater “evil” than any natural disaster and its overcoming. For example, anything involving climate change.
The environment itself is misfortunate, after all. Nature and Nurture are twin misfortunes.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 159.
The Agony of Power, p. 115.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 14.
Fatal Strategies, p. 25.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 13.
Ibid., p. 160.
Ibid., p. 163.
Fatal Strategies, p. 59.
The Agony of Power, p. 38.
Which means that power will also short-circuit itself—a fatal strategy.
The Agony of Power, p. 37.
Ibid., p. 39.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 162.
Someone who, at the very least, represents power (as himself or through the legacy of institutions that have not changed all that much since) and is not a figure of good to many.
It doesn’t even matter if we call Bush’s words denunciatory, for the intelligence of evil shows through them.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 162.
And we can also see this through Bush’s legendary Freudian slip when speaking of the Russian aggression against Ukraine and mixing it up with the American aggression against Iraq, where he then corrects himself and says, “Iraq too.” Yes, the revelation of the intelligence of evil through the Empire of Good and the “reversible concatenation of good and evil” are on full display!
George W. Bush Mixes Up Ukraine With Iraq In Big Freudian Slip
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 163.
Ibid., p. 53-4.
Ibid., p. 50.
Folks would be correct to offer counterpoints to this statement, whether they be rooted in privilege, corruption, moral luck, a configuration of them, and more. However, privilege, corruption, moral luck, and any other critiques have already been liquidated through the Virtual. You are free, Virtually speaking.
Simulacra and Simulation, p. 82.
Have we seen this with anti-vaxxers, for whom there may be only one route left, that of sacrifice, of death? That they are no different from terrorists using the unpredictability of death to raise the stakes against the system? Terror separated from terrorist, since terror is the form, not the content. And, because of that, one should also ask of its opposite—the vaccinated—about the preventative terror exerted upon institutions, along with businesses, big and small alike, on their own accord or not, who prevail or do not, all for the sake of the system as well. Also, in China, where the content of lockdowns are more likely to be victims of starvation, neglect, and more than the virus itself. The masses are form and content. We are all hostages and terrorists.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 50.
The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 6.
There is no difference between Donald Trump, Robert Mercer, Alexander Nix, Steve Bannon, and the poverty-trapped (the poverty of finance and/or identity) malcontent. Forget calling them racists, xenophobes, and nativists. Call them equals and see if they will all truly wear that as a badge of honor.
Steve Bannon: 'Let them call you racist ... Wear it as a badge of honor' - ABC News (go.com)
The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 9.
Ibid., p. 10.
5. Theory Fictions: Baudrillard in the Contemporary Moment. Jean Baudrillard (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Surveillance Capitalism is “A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, predictions and sales,” where a new global architecture of behavioral modification takes the stage from the production of goods and services, whose new collective order hinges upon total certainty.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (The Definition). PublicAffairs.
There are many potential examples of this, but let us continue on with the hot topic of vaccination. That the virus is real and vaccines and masks work well enough to be used means that much is programmable in terms of consensus and refusal. Indeed, the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike are totally predictable, with their algorithmic propagation an extension of the Good. If this is the case, then is there really any unpredictability of death, of sacrifice for the anti-vaxxer? Is the only terror taking place the terror of the system? One could surmise so, for this sets the staging for so much communication—for new media and legacy media alike—that it is a behavioral goldmine for Surveillance Capitalists. They would let the system implode at the behest of information and capital.
The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 23.
Ibid., p. 19.
Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 57-8.
Ibid., p. 63.
Ibid., p. 6.
Which prompts many a thought about the will to power and ressentiment, for what has become of the resistances to be overcome?
Though that is not to say they would not capitalize on their involvement in terms of street cred and the like.
And it would not matter if the insurrection was successful and America underwent full-blown fascism, for it does not matter who/what is at the forefront of global power—the extension of the Good. It could be Islam, it could be Communist China, it could be Orthodox Christianity, it could be patriotic socialism, it could be MAGA, or it could be the status quo. But it does not matter, for all would have to contend with the specter of global antagonism, and all would still be haunted by the intelligence of evil.
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
The Agony of Power, p. 94.
One should legitimately point out that the insurrectionists and their ilk do not hate the West, but wish to restore their idea of it. However, that is not the real West. The real West has been liquidated and is now a harbinger of Integral Reality, of Hegemony, which raises the stakes of cultural liquidation against all other entities.
Baudrillard, J. “The Violence of the Global” Ctheory.
Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 89.
Ibid., p. 90.
The Agony of Power, p. 96.
While we can describe January 6th as a hostage situation, as explained above, that does not mean there were folks physically taken hostage. People were trapped, hiding, and fleeing. Besides, the insurrectionists did not even intend to create a hostage situation (and not once did the word “hostage” come up in the Wikipedia entry); they just wanted to overturn results, murder their enemies, and “take back” America.
The Agony of Power, p. 39.
Ibid., p. 37.
Ibid., p. 37-8.
Especially the funds in the wake of Citizens United, though this is comparing gaps that were already far beyond the citizenry to begin with. Repealing it will do something, but no doubt there will be emerging dynamics that skip over these struggles.
Trump is full of reflection, but most of it is the usual self-aggrandizement, deflection, and propaganda. However, that does not mean he cannot express the intelligence of evil: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.” What is critical discourse supposed to say in the face of such honesty, such transparency, and such truth?
Whose relationship with Trump will be that of competing professional wrestlers, where “putting one over” will be sabotaged/botched out of pride. Both live and die by the crowd (of which all live and die by the image [of which all live and die by the algorithm]), but sometimes one will not go along with the script (which might be a part of the script), even when one stands to gain from being a loser.
What Zuboff calls the uncontract, for it takes out all of the social dynamics (observable and unobservable) from traditional contracts.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 220.
Ibid., p. 219.
Ibid.
Besides, those mishaps can be monetized through driving services partnered with the insurance companies: the driver can be transported to the train-station or hospital, along with the child to day-care or the son back home from school, at extra charge. Also, punitively speaking, the rich and powerful can continue to pay their way out of this and that, while the non-rich can grow deeper in financial and behavioral debt. In short, the excuse would be that those latter folks simply did not work hard enough to afford the mileage to escape from their mistakes (or “their nature,” since racists, eugenicists, and the like are going to absolutely adore these dynamics and their mechanisms).
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 218.
The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 6.
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid., p. 5-6.
The Agony of Power, p. 60.
Another American civil war might be bad for America, but it will be great for CBS, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Twitter, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, SpaceX…
To “overcome” it, but eventually become corrupt themselves. After all, this is no longer organic and grassroots with their usurpation through companies, governments, billionaires, and their collective infusion of dark money, behavioral surplus, data, information, etc.
We also see this with Mitt Romney’s statements about President Biden’s agenda, that he should get the country “back to normal” as opposed to being FDR. (Sen. Mitt Romney says Biden was elected 'to stop the crazy' and argues that voters weren't asking him 'to transform America' (msn.com)) Yet that very normal, amidst all the so-called varieties of the political spectrum, is what is attempted to be countered. Regardless, Biden does not need to hear this anyway if one recalls his statements about this very “normal,” that everything is fine and we got over it fine, and that people (especially the young ones) should stop complaining (Biden Doesn't Want to Hear Millennials Complain: 'Give Me a Break' (newsweek.com)). Neither can nor will “stop the crazy,” by the way.
Simulacra and Simulation, p. 16.
And already there has been simultaneous denial and faux patriotism.
New right-wing conspiracy: Jan. 6 officer suicides appear "suspicious" | Salon.com
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 122-23.
Simulacra and Simulation, p. 80.
And not just via terrorism but the suicidal collapse of the system as well.
In a sense, via Baudrillard’s hypothesis on information, perhaps January 6th was not a baptism as information through misinformation and disinformation, but rather a witnessing and participation of the neutralization, of the entropy, of an already degraded event—another kind of baptism altogether.
The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 7.
Ibid.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 352.
The Intelligence of Evil, p. 119.
The Left and Never-Trumpers will get nothing out of tossing Trump and Co’s bodies out of a helicopter into the water, just like the whole of America got nothing out of Osama Bin Laden’s journey to the depths. They cannot be put in prison besides Guantanamo Bay, for if they were put in any other place, then they would be treated like child abusers or royalty. But if they were dropped into Guantanamo, then they would serve no purpose other than purposeless suffering. Extraordinary rendition and indefinite confinement did little for the nation. Again, we come to the problem of the hostage situation and (in)exchangeability…
Fantastic article, really enjoyed it. People have a hard time understanding Baudrillard's understanding of Good and Evil. It seems quite clear now that only evil can save us from good. A recent example is the debt ceiling. It is only the far right of the GOP that is prepared to do what the Left only dream of: the collapse of the economic heart of the empire. Also one of the solutions is also q fatal strategy: the trillion dollar coin. The creation of which would reveal the illusionary heart of money.
I really like you description of the terrorist/hostage binary which I always had trouble understanding.