The European Stratagem and the Redemption of Greece

In today's world, both misfortune and misery are perfectly negotiable. In a way, there is a valuation of negative values. The same applies to debt, which has both negative and virtual elements and can be traded, bought, or sold. Nietzsche speaks of redeemed debt: God has sent his son to redeem man's debt, and man will never be able to redeem it since the creditor has already done so before. Thus, man can never fully repay it and becomes a perpetual debtor. What holds true for God now applies to capital: the system creates unlimited debt that it redeems from time to time, renegotiates, and puts back into circulation, ad infinitum.

Furthermore, most regulations always affect the businessperson before the average person, ultimately shifting power from the government to private corporations. What this means for the average person is that government interference in their life is replaced by the interference of large corporations. This may allow, for example, the dumping of more chemicals into their water supply, leading to cancer.

Our lives depend on decisions made by others; we have no control over these decisions and often do not even know who is making them. ("We live in a world in which relatively few people—maybe 500 or 1,000—make the important decisions" – Philip B. Heymann, Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times, April 21, 1995). People seeking security are therefore frustrated, which leads to a sense of powerlessness. What makes us feel secure is not so much objective security but rather a sense of confidence in our ability to take care of ourselves.

The primitive man threatened by a fierce animal or hunger could fight to defend himself or travel in search of food. He did not have the certainty of success in these endeavors, but on average, he was not defenseless against the things that threatened him. The fears of modern individuals tend to be man-made. They are no longer the result of chance but impositions from others, in whose decisions, as individuals, they are unable to influence. Thus, primitive man has his security mostly in his own hands (both as an individual and as part of a small group). In contrast, modern man's security is in the hands of people or organizations too distant or large to personally influence.

FREEDOM

According to the bourgeois conception, a "free" man is essentially a cog in the social machinery and only has a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms, which are intended to serve the needs of the social machine rather than those of the individual. Thus, the bourgeois "free" man has economic freedom because it promotes growth and progress.

When we speak of "freedom," we refer to having control (both as an individual and as a member of a small group) over the problems of one's life and death; food, clothing, shelter, and defense against any threats in our environment. Freedom means having power, not the power to control others, but the power to control one's own life. One is not free if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over them, regardless of how benevolent, tolerant, and permissive that power may be exercised.

Since democracy was born in Greece, it seems that things will begin and end under the same sign. Here is the meaning of the famous story of death in Samarkand... In the city square, a soldier sees Death wink at him, he gets scared, goes to the king's house, and tells him, "Death has winked at me, so I will go as far away as possible, escape to Samarkand." The king calls Death to ask why he frightened his captain. And Death says, "I didn't mean to frighten him, I just wanted to remind him that we had a date in Samarkand tonight." Therefore, fate has a somewhat spherical form: the further we move away from a point, the closer we get to it. There will be a reversibility that will make everything, within itself, avenged. Cannetti says, "It's not worth wanting revenge, it will be fulfilled, it is automatically fulfilled through the reversibility of things." This is the shape of destiny, without referents or equivalents, without place or price. But the strategy of the system itself is to maintain an exchange that is not based on anything but possesses all the effectiveness of a positive exchange.

The virtual, our general equivalent, presents itself as something encrypted, encoded, where everything can be measured with the same reducing measure: the binary system, the alternation of 0/1. Nothing escapes this simplifying equation. Despite everything and thanks to the principle of uncertainty, there will always be this line beyond which a system, no longer able to prove itself, turns against itself.

SOME PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY

Think of history as the sum of two components: one erratic, consisting of imperceptible events that follow an indiscernible pattern, and one regular, consisting of long-term historical trends. Here we are interested in the latter.

FIRST PRINCIPLE. If a small change is made that affects a long-term historical trend, the effect of the change will almost always be transitory—the trend will soon revert to its original state. (Example: A reform movement aimed at cleaning up political corruption in a society will rarely have more than a short-term effect; sooner or later, the reformers will relax, and corruption will seep back in. The level of political corruption in a given society tends to remain constant or change slowly only with the evolution of the society. Typically, political cleansing will only be permanent if accompanied by general social changes; a small change in society will not be sufficient). If a small change in a long-term historical trend appears to be permanent, it is only because the change is acting in the direction in which the trend was already moving, thus the trend is not altered but socially pushed one step forward.

SECOND PRINCIPLE. If a change is made that is large enough to permanently alter a long-term historical trend, it will alter the society as a whole. In other words, a society is a system in which all its parts are interconnected, and you cannot permanently change any major part without changing all the others as well.

THIRD PRINCIPLE. If a change is made that is large enough to permanently alter a long-term trend, the consequences for the society as a whole cannot be predicted in advance. (Unless multiple societies have gone through the same change and experienced all the same consequences, in which case one can predict empirically that another society going through the same change will likely experience similar consequences).

FOURTH PRINCIPLE. A new type of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot plan a new type of society in advance, then build it and expect it to function as intended.

The third and fourth principles arise from the complexity of human societies. A change in human behavior will affect the economy of a society and its physical environment; the economy will affect the environment, and vice versa, and changes in the economy and the environment will affect human behavior in a complex and unpredictable way. The network of causes and effects is too complex to be unraveled and understood.

FIFTH PRINCIPLE. People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through the process of social evolution that is not under rational human control. The fifth principle follows from the previous ones.

These principles are not presented as inviolable rules but as simple guidelines or rules of thumb that can provide a partial antidote to naive ideas about the future of society.

This post is a simple cut-up of the writings of Jean Baudrillard and Theodore Kaczynski.