Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse

 

'Democracy is as close to a precise negation of civilization 

as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into 

murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to).'

 

 

I. 

 

According to Nick Land [1], it's not only popular culture that ends up eating itself, but democracy too becomes self-devouring in what he refers to as the zombie apocalypse, which is why, as we saw in an earlier post, those who can are already searching for an exit and regard flight as a matter of imperative.

 

But what, exactly, does Land mean by this phrase; one that derives from a subgenre of horror fiction in which an overwhelming plague of undead zombies results in the total breakdown of society and leaves just a small group of individuals who have been unable to flee struggling to survive. 

 

That's what we are going to discuss here ...

 

 

II. 

 

If the idea of a zombie apocalypse entered the popular imagination thanks to George A. Romero's 1968 classic movie Night of the Living Dead, it's Land who places the idea within a neoreactionary political context [2] - although, it's true of course, that many other artists and theorists have used the phrase to metaphorically express various cultural anxieties and social tensions.   

 

Land - who, as a philosopher, is kind of a cross between Thomas Hobbes, Georges Bataille, and H. P. Lovecraft - conceives the dynamics of democratisation as fundamentally degenerative; "systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption". 

Bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, democratic governments and the people who elect them push one another further and further towards "ever more shameless extremities" including cannibalism. Idealists call this progress; neoreactionaries, however, see only voraciousness and fear that the authorities will ultimately be unable to "spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch" - i.e., the zombie apocalypse. 

 

As the democratic virus works its way through society, says Land, then concern with the past and long-term planning into the future both die away and are replaced by "a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a 'reality television' political circus". As we are trapped in a perpetual present at the end of history, it makes perfect sense to "eat it all now". 

 

III.

 

Finally, to help readers understand how we got where we are today, i.e., stuck in an age of relentless state expansion, spurious human rights, and mind control ensuring defence of a universalistic dogma, Land provides a convenient guide to the main sequence of modern political regimes, that I think it worth reproducing here [3]:

 

 

Regime 1: Communist Tyranny 

Typical Growth: -0% 

Voice / Exit: Low / Low 

Cultural climate: Pyschotic utopianism 

Life is … hard but ‘fair’ 

Transition mechanism: Re-discovers markets at economic degree-zero 

 

Regime 2: Authoritarian Capitalism 

Typical Growth: 5-10% 

Voice / Exit: Low / High 

Cultural climate: Flinty realism 

Life is … hard but productive 

Transition mechanism: Pressurized by the Cathedral to democratize 

 

Regime 3: Social Democracy 

Typical Growth: 0-3% 

Voice / Exit: High / High 

Cultural climate: Sanctimonious dishonesty 

Life is … soft and unsustainable 

Transition mechanism: Can-kicking runs out of road 

 

Regime 4: Zombie Apocalypse 

Typical Growth: N/A 

Voice / Exit: High (mostly useless screaming) / High (with fuel, ammo, dried food, precious metal coins) 

Cultural climate: Survivalism 

Life is … hard-to-impossible 

Transition mechanism: Unknown 

 

 

IV.

 

The question, I suppose, is: How seriously should we take Land's thoughts on these matters? 

 

Well, when I first encouraged readers of Torpedo the Ark to accept the challenge of his writings on dark enlightenment back in October 2015 - click here - I have to admit that I didn't take them as seriously as I do now. 

 

The world has changed dramatically in the last decade, however, and changed in a manner which, it seems to me, only lends credence to Land's analysis. One worries more now about the fate of the West than one worried ten years ago  and it seems to me that offensive strategies are required urgently if we are to avoid a zombie apocalypse (that defensive strategies, such as quarantine, just won't do the trick).

 

Although, if I'm honest, I suspect it's already too late and the election of Keir Starmer's Labour government with a huge majority here in the UK hardly fills me with hope for the future ...

 

Notes

 

[1] See Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting from the first and third parts of this online version.

 

[2] Having said that, one might recall the 1940 film The Ghost Breakers (dir. George Marshall, 1940), starring Bob Hope as Larry Lawrence who delivers a hilarious line concerning zombies and democrats: click here. 

 

[3] Note that by Voice / Exit Land refers to freedom of speech contra the far more substantial autonomy of the sovereign individual (i.e., the freedom to act without state interference and the freedom to leave when state interference in and control over one's life becomes intolerable). And note also that for all regimes, growth expectations assume moderately competent population.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here.  

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.

 

 

Class Sketch

Mssrs. Cleese, Barker, and Corbett in the Class Sketch 

Written by Marty Feldman and John Law

The Frost Report (7 April 1966)

I.

If I remember my political theory correctly, then class consciousness refers to an individual's knowledge of their socio-economic status which allows them to judge where their own best interests lie. For Marxists, the hope is that by raising awareness of inequality and injustice, etc., one increases the chances of collective action and, ultimately, revolution.      

However, whilst I've always been aware of myself as working class and fully conscious of what that entails - and whilst I've always had a certain level of mistrust for the middle classes - I've never been motivated to join the Labour Party or align myself with those on the far left who long for power and to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.  

In the end, I just don't care enough about even my own interests; certainly not when these are conceived in material terms of ownership. According to my Armenian friend, Vahe, that's because I'm too other-worldly, suffer from a form of false consciousness, don't fully understand the historical process, blah, blah, blah ...


II.    

In a short essay written in 1927, D. H. Lawrence argues that the gulf between social classes is very real and very deep, though there are now, he says, only two great classes: middle and working; the aristocratic upper class having entirely been absorbed into the bourgeoisie.

Indeed, notes Lawrence, even the working class share in the aspirations of the middle class; to be successful and to have a lot of money in the bank. However, there remains a very real difference and division which is rooted in feeling and in the politics of touch:

"What is the peculiar repugnance one feels, towards entering the middle class world? [...]
      What is the obstacle? I have looked for it in myself, as a clue to this dangerous cleavage between the classes. And I find it is a very deep obstacle. It is in the manner of contact. The contact, among the lower classes [...] is much more immediate, more physical, between man and man, than it ever is among the middle classes. The middle class can be far more intimate, yet never so near to one another. It is the difference between the animal, physical affinity that can govern the lives of men, and the other, the affinity of culture and purpose, which actually does govern the mass today.
      But the affinity of culture and purpose that holds the vast middle class world together seems to me to be an intensification today, of the acquisitive and possessive instinct." [39]

       
III.

Like Lawrence, I was  born among the working class. My father too went down the mines when he left school - though unlike Lawrence's father, he hated it and didn't last long as a collier. After the War, he and my mother - at her instigation - moved south, to London, leaving their old life in the north east of England behind. Eventually, they ended up in Essex in a newly built two-up, two-down council house, where I was born.

My father was employed in a non-managerial position at the Bank of England printing works in Debden. My mother was a traditional housewife, who occasionally did part-time jobs outside the home if money was particularly tight. She had hopes for me and my sister, but nothing too grand or ambitious: some kind of clean office job that paid well. Like the Lawrence household, ours was absolutely working class: tabloid-reading, football-loving, and ITV-watching. 

Of course, one is never entirely shaped by or a prisoner to the past, to one's background, to one's class. But one can never quite escape it either. Or - in my case as in Lawrence's - one never really wants to escape and move up in the world, or get on in life. Why? Well, according to Lawrence, it's because this involves too great a cost; one has to sacrifice something vital and vibrate at a different pitch of being, as it were.

For between the classes exists "a peculiar, indefinable difference" that determines the way the heart beats. This might sound like nonsense, but I know exactly what Lawrence means. And I understand entirely why it is he never quite managed (or wanted) to climb up the social ladder, even when offered a helping hand to do so:

"No one was unfriendly. [...] But it was no good. Unless one were by nature a climber, one could not respond in kind. The middle class seemed quite open, quite willing for one to climb into it. And one turned away, ungratefully. [...]
      And that I have not got a thousand friends, and a place [...] among the esteemed, is entirely my own fault. The door to 'success' had been held open to me. The social ladder had been put ready for me to climb. I have known all kinds of people, and been treated quite kindly by everyone [...] whom I have known personally.
      Yet here I am, nowhere, as it were, and infinitely an outsider. And of my own choice." [37-38]

Precisely: here I am nowhere, with nowhere left to go.

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Which Class I Belong To', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 33-40. 

See also 'Myself Revealed' in the above text, pp. 175-81, which is essentially a variant of 'Which Class I Belong To', that concludes: "I cannot make the transfer from my own class into the middle class. I cannot, not for anything in the world, forfeit my passional consciousness and my old blood-affinity with my fellow-men and the animals and the land, for that other thin, spurious mental conceit which is all that is left of the mental consciousness once it has made itself exclusive." [181] 

Note: 'Myself Revealed' was included in Assorted Articles (1930) under the title 'Autobiographical Sketch'.