The First Warning

They say karma works in threes, and the first karmic warning came as a confirmation of Dostoyevsky’s deep insight that “mankind can live without science, without bread, it only cannot live without Beauty”. We can add that neither can it live without Truth, without Goodness, nor without the whole realm of Ideas, be them immanent or transcendent, real or conceptual, living in the world within or beings in the world without, because Man feeds not only on bread but also on meaning. And meaning doesn’t come from the cold world of facts, but from the warm realm of Ideas.

Consequently, when the meaningful half of reality is suppressed, a violent reaction cannot be escaped, and it came under the form of an anti-Sensate revolt starting from the late 19th century and culminating into two murderous world wars.

More than Nazism, italian Fascism is perhaps the best ideological illustration of this reaction, because it is the original form from which Nazism derived as an extreme emanation. As professor Adrian Lyttleton puts it in The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929,

The more rationally ordered society became, the more non-rational became the needs of the individual in that society.

While the core of the Sensate worldview was the subjection of contemplation by action, of theory by practice, the fascist reaction, rather than reestablishing a sane hierarchy by recovering the primary role of theory in its original sense, chose instead to free action from any thought altogether :

The core of the Fascist ideology in intellectual terms was a belief in the primacy of unreflecting action, life and inspired creativity over reason and ‘dead’ systems of thought. Fascism stood for action not thought.

Therefore it was yet another manifestation of the law of enantiodromia : everything pushed to its extreme turns into its opposite. The excess of rationality leads fatally to irrationality. The excess of facts causes the retreat into belief :

In a society where technique and calculation are increasingly dominant, ‘Man feels attached to facts, driven by facts; but depressed in his feeling of freedom’. One type of response to the crisis of values and ways of understanding the world, and probably the most familiar, is the flight into sources of irrational conviction.

And so this flight into the irrational found the decisive factor of its frightening success in the fact that both Fascism and Nazism capitalized on the natural fanaticism of the youth, particularly sensitive to the appeal of the Will to Power. With the appalling consequences we all know.

Lo and behold, has the lesson been learnt ? Absolutely not. The Sensate mentality, instead of considering a balance of its unilateralism felt rather comforted by victory in its rationalistic premises. And because the same causes inevitably produce the same effects, this misinterpretation of the first warning paved the way inevitably to a second one.

The Will to Freedom

Because the same premises were still implanted, a new unfolding in the context of the post-war 20th century took place. If we follow the logical chain starting from the linear progress premise, it appears that infinity becomes the supreme ideal : infinite progress, infinite knowledge, infinite wealth, infinite growth and so on.

In the same logic, everything that stands against infinity becomes an obstacle to be overcome, leading to the No Limit ideology : all barriers, all limits, all limitations can and should be overthrown. The most striking manifestation of this ideology took place during the youth revolt in the 1960s. Again, the natural fanaticism of the youth found a new support for its expression. The Will to Power expressed itself as a Will to Freedom. But with great power and freedom come great responsibilities, and the unilateral accent put on freedom naturally moved the cursor far away from responsibility, the opposite pole of the spectrum, with dangerous consequences.

In the next decades, the doctrine of neoliberalism, based on the faith of the pure rationality of man, and establishing self-interest as the sole human motivation gradually started taking over the Western world. Competition had to become the sole regulator of human life in the name of the sacrosanct liberty.

However liberty, like all absolute values, can be ambiguous. In a 1864 speech in Baltimore, Abraham Lincoln pointed out just that ambiguity :

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty.

It appears then that absolute freedom is incompatible with absolute competition, because in the self-interest world of all against all, it necessarily means always more for the wolves and always less for the sheep.

Another outcome of this logical unfolding is the idea of globalism, which also involves a destruction of limits in the form of the elimination of borders between nations because, as the nominalist approach goes, nations don’t really exist after all. In its economic dimension, it supposes the establishment of a global market, with free movements of workers, capital, goods and services. But in the absence of any regulation, such as social and fiscal harmonization, free is far away from fair, and only wild competition can prevail.

The hyper-rationalization of life, which as we saw was a major source of the fascist revolt, took a decisive turn with the computer and the digital revolutions, with the double consequence of the advent of the belief that ‘the mind is a computer’, forcing a dangerously reductionist definition of humanity and the contemporary ubiquity of algorithms dictating nearly every area of our lives.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which supposedly proclaimed the victory of liberal democracy and the End of History, what was left of the balancing power of the left collapsed as well, and the commodification of the world was freed for its full expression. And so today the words of the Soviet “Amerikanist” Georgi Arbatov resonate in a new light : “We are going to do something terrible to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy”. It was indeed a dangerous victory, a pyrrhic victory, because from then on the unbridled capitalist logic was given a free rein towards its own extreme. Eric Hobsbawm, who is perhaps the finest historian of the twentieth century, puts it beautifully in his Age of Extremes:

With the elimination of Soviet communism, the civilisation of (neo-)liberal capitalism is not en rose but in extremis.

The West became its own worst enemy. Its own caricature. A caricature perfectly captured in its maddest extreme two years later in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, whose psychopathic protagonist Patrick Bateman was but a Machiavelli gone mad.

Naturally this rush towards the extreme could not continue forever, and a second warning was underway. Most interestingly, it was about to come from Patrick Bateman’s idol, a real-life businessman who was cited 25 times in the novel : Donald Trump.

The Second Warning

The election of Donald Trump was indeed a true electroshock for the oblivious minds who forgot that the same causes always produce the same effects. It was to be expected that the excess of rationality would one day or another backfire and produce such a resurgence of irrationality. In fact, “backfire” is indeed the best word to describe the current sequence: The myth of Progress failed to deliver; prosperity for all became prosperity for the very few; the globalist competition between nations provoked the resurgence of nationalism; the productivist exploitation of nature started the destruction of nature altogether; the violent exportation of liberal democracy through war spurred in waves of terrorism. All the promises of the myth of Progress backfired, and the resulting anger found in Donald Trump its ideal expression : a product of the system turned against itself.

No wonder then that in the attempts to rationalize the shock, the Backfire Effect rose to prominency as a popular concept: the cognitive bias whereby the more you feed facts to someone trying to disprove their beliefs, the more they withdraw into these very beliefs. Suddenly the belief that facts speak for themselves was overthrown by the apparent reality that beliefs, in fact, eat the almighty facts for breakfast.

The modern knowledge holders, specialists and experts, journalists and commentators, unaccustomed to the realm of belief and trapped inside the peripheral and ephemeral world of facts, failed to grasp the deep forces behind the political moment. Polls, surveys and statistics were wrong all along.

Similarly, the DNC’s strategy to elevate Donald Trump as a “Pied Piper” candidate and undermine Sanders in favor of Clinton backfired as well. They forgot that the forces of history are intractable : the more you struggle against them, the more they tighten their grip, like handcuffs.

And so their rejection of the Wise Old Man drove them into the arms of the Trickster. Here we have a man who promises to make America great again through the sheer power of his will; whose denial of climate change reflects his notable anti-scientism; whose frequent blatant lies show his deep despise of truth; whose recent set of U-turns reveal that he’s a real life Trickster : a man without a plan. But with all his faults, he still has the huge merit of providing the opportunity for a profound catharsis.

Those who draw a parallel between our time and the 1930s are thus not so wrong. But even if the ground is laid for a rematch against fascism, it doesn’t mean that the match is already scheduled, for the simple reason that there are not enough players in the fascist team. Because unlike in the 1930s, the people still young enough to play are predominantly in the opposite camp.

The Will to Wisdom

Rather than the Will to Power or the Will to Freedom, the millennials generation seems to be more sensitive to the Will to Wisdom : the quest for the optimal balance between freedom and responsibility, pragmatism and idealism, eastern and western values. Millennials are a Goldilocksian generation.

It should not come as a surprise that their favorite fictional characters are often linked to the archetype of the Wise Old Man, like Dumbledore or Gandalf. It should also not come as a surprise that in politics they choose to side with the figures that are closest to this archetypal figure : Sanders in the US, Corbyn in the UK, Mélenchon in France. Rather than succumbing to the far-right temptation, they prefer the wiser just-right position. A rebalancing to the left instead of a total imbalance to the right, thus revitalizing the balancing power of the left.

Aside from the many similarities he shares with his american and british counterparts, Jean-Luc Mélenchon stands out by a crucial characteristic : the combination of his philosophical background and notorious erudition with his lifelong political activism makes that he personifies the philosopher back on the ground, the philosopher with “dirty hands”. Therefore his possible victory in the presidential election would symbolize the return of the philosopher to the center of public life, away from its periphery. The symbol he chose for his movement leaves no doubt in this regard.

The Greek letter Phi, the first letter of Philosophy, was chosen as a symbol of wisdom.

The philosophical perspective is best seen through his type of argumentation. While his diagnoses are based on circumstances (of which he’s well aware precisely because he’s on the ground), he doesn’t however induce the solutions from these circumstances, but deduces them from philosophical principles, and then incites the collective intelligence (thousands of people involved in the elaboration of his program) to find ways to apply these principles. We’re far from the Mussolinian figure solely preoccupied with action. As he put it in his last holographic multi-meeting : “philosophy commands action.”

For example, from the single premise of his “green rule”, an ecological golden rule stating that we should not take from nature more than what it can reconstitute, unfolds an entirely new organization of society, from the overhaul of the production matrix and the logic of consumption to the more abstract way of approaching life and the world in general. From this philosophical seed, the logic of the Always More is replaced by the Goldilocksian wisdom : neither too much nor too little, but the just-right measure in every area of life.

From the vantage point of the just-right middle, the sight is also wide enough to allow for an ethical perspective, and the reconsideration of ethics leads logically to the limitation of the hegemony of money. One telling illustration is that the financial circumstances of the country are not what dictate or determine the program like it’s the case with the rightwing candidate François Fillon, but serve only as an alarm that something must change. He doesn’t start with finances but with ideals like human emancipation and fulfillment, then relies on human creativity to find the necessary financial resources to fulfill those ideals. Money is neither a beginning nor an end in itself, but goes back to being a mean to higher ends.

At the same time, there is no stubbornness in the pursuit of principles because some circumstances also dictate a healthy dose of pragmatism. This is best seen in his attitude towards immigration : in view of the situation in France, he doesn’t give in to the traditional leftist stance that immigration should be embraced unconditionally, but considers that the immigrants are better off in their homes. However, he doesn’t fall neither into the Le Penian anti-immigration frenzy which makes her consider ejecting people back to the sea. As long as they’re here, says Mélenchon, immigrants must be treated humanely. This is dialectics at its finest. A Socratic conciliation of principles and circumstances.

No surprise then that his candidature stroke a deep chord within the hearts of the french youth. In return, their creative engagement seems to know no limit, as illustrated by the hilarious game Fiscal Kombat, featuring Mélenchon as a character whose mission is to shake the “oligarchs” like Christine Lagarde, Emmanuel Macron or Nicolas Sarkozy and collect coins to finance the measures of his program.

Millennials therefore may succeed in France where they failed in the US : to exercise a political and intellectual influence, and help their candidate win the election. And this philosophical dimension brought by Mélenchon, that of the non-expert philosopher, could represent a good chance for the rejuvenation of Western civilization as a whole.

It is interesting to note as well that Theresa May’s sudden decision to call for general elections, probably boosted by the recent surveys placing the Tories 21 points ahead of Labour, may sound like a sign of providence for Corbyn, who could benefit from the same dynamic, still latent in the UK but which can find in an event such as a general election a good trigger, a dynamic which could culminate in a probable victory of Sanders in the US, if he was to run again in 2020 (which he doesn’t rule out). In that case, the Trumpian warning will have been heard.

The Third Warning To Come

And so this potential triple breakthrough of socialism in the three major strongholds of Western civilization, besides putting a definitive end to Fukuyama’s acception of the End of History, would be a golden opportunity to reverse the commodification and quantification of the world, and in the process start the amending of the Sensate premises that were planted half a millennium ago, thus paving the way for the true End of History.

But this won’t happen unless we keep in mind that the deep roots of the current imbalance are neither economical nor political but essentially philosophical, and that both the left and the right stem from these same Sensate roots; it won’t happen unless we understand that a deep, lasting change can only occur if it is applied on the level of first principles, not on the surface layer of circumstances.

If we fail to cease this golden opportunity, if we fail to oppose the ideal of true humanism to that of transhumanism, the qualified-self to the quantified-self, if we fail to balance the hegemony of techno-science by the reconsideration of philosophy and wisdom, then the current order will continue its headlong rush with the prospect of a third warning that will act as a violent sanction, because it will come as a reaction to the large-scale transgression of the ultimate border : the human skin. A transgression logically inevitable given the premises. A sanction logically violent, given the transgression.

But that, is a story for another time. A time we hope never comes.