From Lobo Suelto (28/06/2024) …
We saw the two flabby gladiators fight each other like exhausted fighting dogs for the amusement of millions of spectators who must decide which of the two deserves to be president of a nation that has long been showing clear signs of moral, psychological and political decadence.
One of the two is a serial rapist, a systematic liar, a failed businessman and a fraudster; the other is a genocidal murderer. I don’t want to be forced to choose, but fortunately I’m not American.
In recent times, we have become accustomed to witnessing live numerous spectacles of horror and cruelty (the massacre of innocents in Palestine, the torture of an entire population by Zionist beasts, the massacre of young Ukrainians and Russians, the drowning of immigrants thrown into the sea by the coast guard, the murder of agricultural workers without a contract…) that the dismay I feel at the latest spectacle of cruelty offered to us by the global media may seem stupid: the exhibition of the duel between two elderly people for whom it would seem impossible to feel pity.
However, witnessing the stuttering of that confused and hesitant eighty-one-year-old man, witnessing the mocking grimaces of that arrogant and ignorant seventy-eight-year-old man, I (also) felt pity.
Can we feel sorry for a criminal who supplies weapons to the Zionist genocide, for a serial rapist who preaches the extermination of immigrants at the border?
I hate them both, as the greatest representatives of American democracy. However, I felt sorry for them insofar as they were old.
In Biden’s weak voice I recognised the sad hoarseness of my own voice.
I am seventy-five years old, and I see in myself all of the signs of the unspeakable suffering felt by white men all over the world: the decline of physical strength, the weakening of the senses and the voice, the inexorable fading of the mind.
We do not talk about old age, except with shame and hypocrisy. Respect for elders is a sign of the contempt that every young person feels for those who hold onto a power that no longer has a body, but only technique.
We don’t talk about it, but the aging of the white Western world is the most important political issue of all.
For reasons of political correctness and understandable shame, aging is difficult to analyse: Freud himself preferred not to address its psychic aspects.
A self-analysis of aging is today a priority for psychoanalysis, but also for political thought. We will not understand the global reactionary wave without reflecting on senescence.
The cultural and political movements of the 20th century expressed the youthful energy of a rapidly growing population, in which young people constituted the vast majority.
The futurism of the cultural and political movements of the 20th century was an expression of this generational composition: expansion was a biopolitical condition, even before it was an economic one.
From a certain point on, two concomitant phenomena have radically changed the generational composition: the increase in life expectancy and the decline in birth rates in recent decades.
If the fascism of the 20th century was the predatory aggression of young people who aspired to conquer the world, to subjugate the people, the fascism of this last century is the fascism of old people enraged by their own impotence and terrified by the relentless march of eager young masses hungry for revenge.
Helplessness is the core of today’s fascism; it doesn’t matter if young voters also vote for today’s racists. They are young, old, psychically fragile: the dominant white civilization is dying both for demographic reasons (a third of European inhabitants are over sixty years old) and for psycho-political reasons: depression, dependence on psychotropic drugs, dependence on the semiotic machine that absorbs every emotion and energy.
An angry and therefore insane senescence stands out on the horizon of a century that has just begun and is already dying, and this senescence brings death for everyone, because the old hate the world that could survive them.
That is why they will destroy it; they are already destroying it.
In his book on the obsolescence of man, Gunther Anders (who appears more and more every day as the great thinker of our post-future) observes that technology is the substitute for human power, and that the atomic bomb is the culmination of this substitute for power.
The dominant white, Western race is furious at its powerlessness to govern the ungovernable complexity of the global world.
If Artificial Intelligence is the stupid and emotionally paralyzing substitute for the lost thinking capacity of humans, the nuclear bomb is the substitute for the lost virile power of the dominant race.
That is why we will not escape the final curse, because the dominant race, like Samson and Netanyahu, will decide to exterminate the young people, increasingly afraid, increasingly incapable of autonomy and rebellion.
This hyper-armed powerless race of men, the infamous race of Biden, Trump, Netanyahu and Putin, will use the only power they have left: the power to annihilate everything.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Impotence, dementia, nihilism
From Lobo Suelto (28/06/2024) …
We saw the two flabby gladiators fight each other like exhausted fighting dogs for the amusement of millions of spectators who must decide which of the two deserves to be president of a nation that has long been showing clear signs of moral, psychological and political decadence.
One of the two is a serial rapist, a systematic liar, a failed businessman and a fraudster; the other is a genocidal murderer. I don’t want to be forced to choose, but fortunately I’m not American.
In recent times, we have become accustomed to witnessing live numerous spectacles of horror and cruelty (the massacre of innocents in Palestine, the torture of an entire population by Zionist beasts, the massacre of young Ukrainians and Russians, the drowning of immigrants thrown into the sea by the coast guard, the murder of agricultural workers without a contract…) that the dismay I feel at the latest spectacle of cruelty offered to us by the global media may seem stupid: the exhibition of the duel between two elderly people for whom it would seem impossible to feel pity.
However, witnessing the stuttering of that confused and hesitant eighty-one-year-old man, witnessing the mocking grimaces of that arrogant and ignorant seventy-eight-year-old man, I (also) felt pity.
Can we feel sorry for a criminal who supplies weapons to the Zionist genocide, for a serial rapist who preaches the extermination of immigrants at the border?
I hate them both, as the greatest representatives of American democracy. However, I felt sorry for them insofar as they were old.
In Biden’s weak voice I recognised the sad hoarseness of my own voice.
I am seventy-five years old, and I see in myself all of the signs of the unspeakable suffering felt by white men all over the world: the decline of physical strength, the weakening of the senses and the voice, the inexorable fading of the mind.
We do not talk about old age, except with shame and hypocrisy. Respect for elders is a sign of the contempt that every young person feels for those who hold onto a power that no longer has a body, but only technique.
We don’t talk about it, but the aging of the white Western world is the most important political issue of all.
For reasons of political correctness and understandable shame, aging is difficult to analyse: Freud himself preferred not to address its psychic aspects.
A self-analysis of aging is today a priority for psychoanalysis, but also for political thought. We will not understand the global reactionary wave without reflecting on senescence.
The cultural and political movements of the 20th century expressed the youthful energy of a rapidly growing population, in which young people constituted the vast majority.
The futurism of the cultural and political movements of the 20th century was an expression of this generational composition: expansion was a biopolitical condition, even before it was an economic one.
From a certain point on, two concomitant phenomena have radically changed the generational composition: the increase in life expectancy and the decline in birth rates in recent decades.
If the fascism of the 20th century was the predatory aggression of young people who aspired to conquer the world, to subjugate the people, the fascism of this last century is the fascism of old people enraged by their own impotence and terrified by the relentless march of eager young masses hungry for revenge.
Helplessness is the core of today’s fascism; it doesn’t matter if young voters also vote for today’s racists. They are young, old, psychically fragile: the dominant white civilization is dying both for demographic reasons (a third of European inhabitants are over sixty years old) and for psycho-political reasons: depression, dependence on psychotropic drugs, dependence on the semiotic machine that absorbs every emotion and energy.
An angry and therefore insane senescence stands out on the horizon of a century that has just begun and is already dying, and this senescence brings death for everyone, because the old hate the world that could survive them.
That is why they will destroy it; they are already destroying it.
In his book on the obsolescence of man, Gunther Anders (who appears more and more every day as the great thinker of our post-future) observes that technology is the substitute for human power, and that the atomic bomb is the culmination of this substitute for power.
The dominant white, Western race is furious at its powerlessness to govern the ungovernable complexity of the global world.
If Artificial Intelligence is the stupid and emotionally paralyzing substitute for the lost thinking capacity of humans, the nuclear bomb is the substitute for the lost virile power of the dominant race.
That is why we will not escape the final curse, because the dominant race, like Samson and Netanyahu, will decide to exterminate the young people, increasingly afraid, increasingly incapable of autonomy and rebellion.
This hyper-armed powerless race of men, the infamous race of Biden, Trump, Netanyahu and Putin, will use the only power they have left: the power to annihilate everything.