Praise of the covidiot by Daniel Sandmann

I dedicate the following to my former friend from Bankfurt, who canceled me over calling out the Warburgs as war mongers and criminals. In my view, the article is reaching like conclusions as we have explored by esoteric means, from a different vector. Thanks Daniel for the text and Georg for this difficult translation - Orage

 

Praise of the covidiot

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han saw today's madness crystal clear back in 2014.

by Daniel Sandmann

Translation Georg Stein

First published in German on Rubikon CC 4.0 International non-commercial

"How could all this happen?" asks lawyer Carlos Gebauer in a conversation with Walter van Rossum. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han already did the analysis in 2014 in his "Psychopolitics" and summed up the inevitable. An amazing little work, which does not disguise the "culprits", but even more highlights the connections as a whole and shows why it was possible to ruin consciousness and thinking the way it just happened. This first article about the narrow book focuses on the idiot, who is now erased from the social sphere. It becomes clear why freedom dies at the same time as idiocy.

My friends have given up as well. They perceive it as progress, caused by a natural course of things: to have given up man himself. Terefore, when I meet friends, I find myself in abandoned land. It seems, contrary to other cosmic laws, to be the intrinsic nature of the human being to give up on himself. My friends can't escape this either. And that we as humans give up the human being and therefore ourselves, should not and cannot be reflected by any consciousness. We are already too distant from ourselves. Too much we already have become numbers. Data. But this is the condition for the abandonment and its execution. A Harari and other servants of the masters babble about it quite excitedly. Like little boys who got a remote controlled car for Christmas.

In conversations – where they still take place, or something similar at least, most, however, stick to the smart devices – some refer to animals, to life forms, to organisms in general and ground the purpose of man in the endeavor to escape any anthropocentrism, to pacify the planet and thus lead man out of himself and away from himself. They identify – mostly still provided with supposedly secure jobs, state jobs, corporate jobs, pensions or reliable connections to the media – with the digital version of the termite city, the smart citiy, and viewing it as their own future, they pronounce this future like a child who repeats important terms which it heared somewhere, without understanding their meaning. That, however, is about the only childlike thing that has remained. And perhaps it is not childlike at all, but already an expression of the great usurpation.

The disappearance of man – one might find many arguments for it: the wars, the camps, the poisoning of the earth, the extinction of the animals, the cutting of the forests, the exploitation of all resources – gets the aspect of a strange process, which one has certainly often contemplated over a glass of wine in the eighties, but one never came up with this strikingly simple way. When the time has come, things are always different. One had gruesome ideas about the end of mankind. With the devices that now make it child's play to leave, that has changed. One glides weightlessly out of oneself – for decades, by the way, the feuilleton has praised what comes across as light and criticized what is perceived as heavy – while always following the word progress.

Is it the money?

In an interview, the lawyer Carlos Gebauer raises the question (1) why all this could happen the way it did. He refers to the lack of reflection, the collapse of thinking, a collapse that has made us swallow like termites the most inane narrative that has ever been set up in historical times: the corona pandemic. Including the lack of empathy in the face of assaults on all those who have dared to escape the constraints of conformity. And it should be added: Sometimes even more than the lack of empathy, occasionally there blistered bright enthusiasm for the beating by armored police. Especially among Greens and leftists and intellectuals. Wolfgang Wodarg, equally involved in this conversation,  sarcastically cites Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Money is one layer to consider in man's departure from himself. But even if it were the only one, precisely by being the only one, it would not be the only one. To place the monetary alone above the existence as a human being, goes beyond the scope of the monetary as the ultimate reason. A systematic undermining must have begun, which is not linked to money. And so, even my Kurdish friend is no longer sure, he, who was always convinced during our walks through the park in the years 20 and 21, processing the whole misery, that even in Germany the resistance would get going. Beyond the monetary and, so to speak, affronting the monetary, despite sensitive losses, the masses seem to be ready to enter the slaughterhouse. The Germans in the lead. One needs to spell slaughterhouse differently, yes. But not even that much anymore. This doesn't mean that anything would be won if people pretended not to understand just for the sake of money. But it shows that the state of consciousness is much worse.

While systematically pushed by politicians across the entire West since Corona, now not even the loss of a reasonably secure existence startles the masses. 

No wonder the sedation level of the year 2020 has been judged by the responsible authorities to be sufficient to implement measures that would have been met with horror or laughter as recently as 1970 or 80. 

Permanent relaxation and event

How this could happen has – to a certain extent – to do with money, but more with a cool permanent relaxation of the mind, which on command turns naturally into brutality. Add an intertwined, systematically introduced referenceless and nonsensical triviality of monstrous dimensions, touted as the overcoming of discriminatory traditions and taboos. No racism in the neighborhood, traditional children's literature banned from the bookshelf. In fact, a constant narrowing took place. A tattoo pluralism was created aiming at eradicating everything deviant: Values, ideologies, thoughts. The liberal-western pluralism as a totally supervised and relaxed playground without any power and above all without any concept for such. This has even reached philosophy: Bruno Latour, Jürgen Habermas et cetera. Elites: an invention of anti-Semites. This is a safe way to live. Democracy and the figures entangled with it: a theatrical performance with applause and end. Now, the curtain has come down.

And yet there was once a discourse, there was criticism, there was subversion, and although probably an epiphenomenon, arises the question that Carols Gebauer poses. There is a need to get to the bottom of this question and thus of things as they are. There is a need to show connections. Because the spirit, though almost gone, is not quite dead yet. And I also think – completely free of philosophy and systematics – that an awareness of what is happening, what is happening to us, is a first prerequisite for stopping the course and turning the tide. At least a prerequisite for not losing hope. Because what perhaps really triggers the turning is not awareness, but an event, not predictable and not accessible by data. But to hold the line, so that such an event, if it happened, would still be readable and could create an impulse in us, that is what I understand as an order. From wherever ordered. An order to be here. 

The spirit from South Korea and romanticism

And so I search for thoughts, for texts, for forms of comprehension, for knowledge, which lead to an answer to Carlos Gebauer's question, and I find it in a text that was written shortly before 2014. This is the text I want to read. In this post. And in various subsequent ones. I was triggered by Birgit Naujeck and two of her articles about the smart world (2). These articles start and end with a quote from the book "Psychopolitics" by Byung-Chul Han (3). And to my surprise, this work, small in scope, showed up somewhere on my shelf, unread, I merely needed to pull it out. 

Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean metallurgical scientist and philosopher, settled in Basel, working in Germany for many years, first as a professor, then as a freelance author. If he seems to be well connected to the media, this should not be valued in any way. After all, the journalists who interview him or review his books do not grasp who they have before them. They do not understand that he cancels their profession. His interviews with them, however, he cancels right along and also his publications in the literature business. But even this should not prevent reading him, because in his lines there are monstrous things. They bear the monstrosity that I sought. I read the text, not the author, who, it may be mentioned, considers it his task to set the spirit of German Romanticism and perhaps Buddhism – I know few about the latter – against the times. And perhaps to save it. 

And I do not start at the beginning, but almost at the end of his little book. There, where is stated, a couple of years before Corona, that the German politician Saskia Esken (SPD), was right with the term "covidiots" – obviously uttered without any consciousness at all. My reading departs from this coordinate.

Reading in Han's little book

Han writes: "Today, the type of outsider, fool, or idiot seems to have all but disappeared from society. Total digital networking and total communication greatly increases the pressure towards conformity. The violence of consensus suppresses idiotisms."

Truly, society has never been so equal and so completely without discrimination and so ready for violence; even the philistines of the seventies seem chaotic in comparison. What is the role of the idiot in this?

Han writes: 

"The idiot is an idiosyncrat. Idiosyncrasy literally means a peculiar mixture of body fluids and the resulting hypersensitivity. Where it is necessary to accelerate communication, the idiosyncrasy is an obstacle because of its immunological defense of the other. It blocks the unbounded communicative exchange."

Han continued:

"Necessary for the acceleration of communication, therefore, is immunosuppression. The immune reaction is massively suppressed so that the cycle of information and capital flow accelerates. Communication reaches its maximum speed where the equal reacts to the equal. (...) It is precisely in the hell of the equal where communication reaches its maximum speed."

Immune catastrophe "spiritually" foreseen

This is – in as few lines as possible – not a mere description of what happened, but rather an explanatory description, a realization, a key. Never had the human immune system been so globally-systematically taken out, and never had the advance of the only permissible attitude been so rapid. And this quite concretely:

Concretely, humanity was reduced to a physical body and concretely, with needles and accompanying measures, its immune response, that is, the rejection of a foreign, pharmaceutical, unquestionable command, was overridden.

A command for which the force of resistance must be suppressed and thus overridden: This is what power commands. Power, however, does not exist, according to the decade long staging, and to the message on the screens.

Han anticipates it in 2014, not the power and its executors in the first place, although he speaks of "regimes" and "power techniques" – more on that soon – but the immunosuppression. He anticipates that it must be the immune reaction that is to be suppressed, because the immune reaction qua resistance stops acceleration (efficiency, optimization), an acceleration that as such can have only and solely itself as its purpose – the philosopher Paul Virilio equates acceleration with war: Acceleration is the highest violence – and deletes every content: every reflection, every critique, every potential danger for the capital, a capital that, because it is constantly fleeing from the loss of power, in the end is absorbed by acceleration, or rather is acceleration. That by this process the human being must be hurled out – into nothingness – is self-evident.

The immune system as the last hurdle, formulated by Byung-Chul Han in 2014. That is what keeps man from disappearing. The hurdle has been taken. 2020. We are at the end. Though still capable to read this. And perhaps to do something more – after all: vaccination rates are not high everywhere.

Hell of the equal

Later, when we begin with Han's book, we will take a closer look at the process towards equality or towards the digital – in the form of acceleration and, according to Virilio, of war. Because this "hell of the equal" – in materialized form: the digital – is a prerequisite for all of us – I stress all of us – to agree with the immunosuppression and any other narrative that is devoid of logic. And even more than agreement: people surrender clapping and stomping identificationally to the disabling of their immune system, see it as a promise of salvation, proclaimed by (pharmaceutical) priests, a promise of salvation that tolerates no opting out – total solidarity – and for which bureaucracy showed its ugly face.

And it is precisely in this respect that Han's text does a decisive job. He does not focus on geopolitics and secret services, not on "perpetrators," he also questions – which may be wrong in some respects – certain strategies of the regime as triggering factors or causes – shock strategies, for example – simply in order to highlight what is concretely and really going on and has been going on in relation to man, what happened to consciousness so that things could become as monstrous as they came to be. 

Han's densely written anticipation of the inherent necessity of the neo-liberal, feudal-capitalist system to disable the immune system, carried out in 2020 on a global scale, emphasizes that this "event", which for many took the world by surprise, basically had to arrive.

And this is not inferred from pandemic related catastrophe exercises – with Han this is not an issue – the death of the immune system and thus of the human being is rather presented by Han as the necessary last spiritual figure of a striving for power, which ends in the "hell of the equal". Here the smart terminal, also in the hands of the Corona resisters at all times, plays a decisive role.

Idiot as destroyer of the equal

The role of the idiot, banished from society, is thus now preordained: The idiot is the disruption of acceleration. He pursues the evasion of the unevitable, he opposes the like and the like-mindedness, he ensures the strengthening of the immunological defense. The role of the idiot is that which defends the practice of freedom. As said before, an Esken could not know that she was epistemologically correct with the concept of the "idiot".

Byung-Chul Han states: 

"In the face of the compulsion to communicate and conform, idiotism constitutes a practice of freedom. (...) The idiot is a modern heretic. Heresy originally means choice. The heretic is therefore someone who has a free choice. He has the courage of deviation from orthodoxy. (...) The idiot as a heretic is a figure of resistance to the violence of consensus. He saves the magic of the outsider (4). In view of the increasing compulsion to conformity, it would be more urgent today than ever to raise the heretical consciousness. Idiotism opposes the neoliberal power of domination, its total communication and total surveillance."

This also makes it clear that the crackdown that has been taking place since 2020, especially in the Western world, is not communist or socialist, as is repeatedly postulated. For the narrative and the smoothing and the obfuscation, the regime uses socialist kitsch elements; the regime and the process, however, are feudal-capitalist in nature. 

Lars von Trier made the film "Idiots" in 1998. At least the theme was still given as a film title and content, although von Trier even then risked his exclusion from the permissible corridor of opinion like hardly any other of the internationally "respected" film makers and in this respect he certainly does not represent the paradigm in this industry. In this film, in which "normals" play "lunatics" to the point of authenticity, the subversive function is demonstrated. The resistance shown in the idiotic behavior is a resistance that de-constructs, exposes, and thus brings to consciousness the context of consensus. The idiot carries out an analysis of the prevailing conditions. And from the point of view of the regime must – Esken is right, of course – be destroyed.

The idiot as an epistemologist is – especially with regard to the composition of the current federal government this demarcation is important – the opposite of the lunatic. But he is not per se armed against patterns against which he opposes. He sometimes comes from power itself, and in Trier's film, after all, the idiots are only acting. At least most of them. But this in no way deletes the decomposing and thus deconstructing function of idiocy.

What we don't know: Whether the covidiots can still turn the tide. But that does not change the dignity of idiocy in a time of total like-mindedness. And if Han – let us anticipate this much – does not realize that idiots who do not act, are not smartly eradicated, but pay a martial price for their practice of freedom, a price that has been transferred from feudal-absolutist times to smartness, this does not diminish the insightful value of his remarks with regard to Carlo Gebauer's question "How could all this happen?". 

We will read in Byung-Chul Han's "Psychopolitics", because it does not only postulate already in 2014 the immunosuppression as a globally targeted event, does not only elevate the idiot as a freedom fighter, it also explains why all this could happen to us.

Sources and Notes:

(1) Compare https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/wertlose-auswertung 

(2) Compare https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/smarte-politik and https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/smarte-politik-2 

(3) Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics. Neoliberalism and the new techniques of power, Frankfurt 2014.

(4) Significantly, explicit tribute was paid to the outsider in popular music culture from the sixties to the eighties. Stars did not merely stage themselves as outsiders, they sometimes really were such, or at least came onto the scene as outsiders. And quite a few songs dealt with the theme of the outsider; "The Outsider" by the relatively average and not very flamboyant singer and rock musician Ian Hunter comes to mind. Today, the outsider is the Nazi, and even stars who had their beginnings in those outsider times incessantly stage themselves as showpieces of the permitted corridor of opinion.