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], its 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 Kier 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 Englightenment (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.

 

 

To access Dark Enlightenment 1 - on the politics of hate - please click here.  

 

To access Dark Enlightenment 2 - on exiting the present - please click here. 

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present

Nick Land contemplates taking an exit provided 

by the photographer Florian Reinhardt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

According to Foucault, Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way; as an exit, a way out, or an escape route from the past, which he thinks of as marked by darkness, barbarism, and man's immaturity [2].

Funny enough, although Nick Land thinks of his own neoreactionary philosophy as an intrinsic contradiction to the process of enlightenment, he too is looking for ein Ausgang - only he wants an exit from modernity and from the age of Enlightenment [3]. 

 

Realising, however, that there can be no turning back, Land says that any form of conservativism is thus pre-emptively (and ironically) condemned to paradox – i.e., destined to become a kind of retrofuturism; projecting something vital - but also something lost, or forgotten, or denied that existed in the past - into the future.

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence, who also sought an exit from the 20th-century and wished to step away from the light, understood this paradox better than most. His novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), for example, attempts to loosen the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [4] and find some clue as to how we might live yesterday tomorrow.

 

Nietzsche too provides philosophical justification for taking what he calls a retrograde step once man has attained a certain level of enlightenment and emerged from superstitious fears and religious concepts. In other words, he has to recognise the importance that resided in old ideas and traditions and that "without such a retrograde step he will deprive himself of the best mankind has hitherto produced" [5].    

 

Good people - the enlightened, who are afraid of the dark - will say this lapsing back into old life-modes that have been surpassed is a form of evil. Whilst that mightn't worry a Nietzschean, Lawrence was at pains to stress that this wasn't a "'helpless, panic reversal'", [6] but was, rather, something performed consciously and with care.

 

And, to reiterate: it's not a return so much as an exiting of the present into the past in order to enter the future.   

 

 

III.

 

Returning to Land, we find a contemporary thinker who is prepared to express his disillusionment with the "direction and possibilities" of the democratic political order born of the Enlightement. For Land, as for many neoreactionaries and libertarians, freedom - in the classical liberal sense - is no longer compatible with democracy and the expansion of a voracious welfare state. 

 

And many of these people have ceased to care; for them, "democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself" and they are now searching for "something else entirely: an exit".  

 

When you risk being eaten alive in what Land thinks of as a coming zombie apocalypse, then flight becomes the ultimate imperative. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] During a period of almost ten years, German filmmaker and photographer Florian Reinhardt snapped over a 1000 pictures on his iPhone of exit signs all over the world. Readers who are interested can find them in a book entitled Exit published byHatje Cantz (2021). Click here for further information on Reinhardt and his work; or here to visit his exit.art website. 

 

[2] See Michel Foucault's essay 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 32-50, in which he discusses Kant's 1784 essay 'Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?' (usually referred to in English simply as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’).   

 

[3] Nick Land, The Dark Englightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting here from the first part of this online version.  

[4] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix. 

[5] Nietzsche, Human, all Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 1. 20, pp. 22-23. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Prrss, 1987), p. 138.

 

 

To access Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate - click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate

Hate, as Nick Land rightly says, is a word worth considering: one which "testifies with special clarity to the religious orthodoxy" [1] of an age obsessed with hate speech and hate crime. 

 

With reference to the second of these things, Land writes: 

 

"Perhaps its most remarkable feature is its perfect redundancy, when evaluated from the perspective of any analysis of legal and cultural norms that is not enflamed by neo-puritan evangelical enthusiasm." 

 

That's true: for what is a hate crime - if any such thing exists - other than just an ordinary crime with the word 'hate' attached? 

 

And, one might also ask: "what is it exactly that aggravates a murder, or assault, if the motivation is attributed to 'hate'?" 

 

 

II. 

 

In response to these questions, Land says that, firstly, a hate crime "is augmented by a purely ideational, ideological, or even 'spiritual' element, attesting not only to a violation of civilized conduct, but also to a heretical intention."

 

Hate, in other words, is an offense against what Land and his fellow neoreactionaries term the Cathedral [2]; "a refusal of its spiritual guidance, and a mental act of defiance against the manifest religious destiny of the world".

 

Secondly, Land asserts that a hate crime is something that only those on the right can commit; the left is far too enlightened - or far too woke as we would say now - ever to hate; they are passionate about a cause, or morally outraged about an issue, or justifiably angry about some form of behaviour deemed offensive, but never hateful. 

 

For their's is the politics of Universal Love; a decadent creed which "with its reflex identification of inequality with injustice, can conceive no alternative to the proposition that the lower one's situation or status, the more compelling is one's claim upon society, the purer and nobler one's cause". 

 

Being one of the wretched of this earth is thus a "sign of spiritual election [...] and to dispute any of this is clearly 'hate'". 

 

I think that's correct and I'd like to see Taylor Swift, or anyone else for that matter, just shake off the truth of Land's analysis of slave morality and the manner in which hate functions for some not merely as a form of political incorrectness or criminality, but as sin.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Press, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online - click here - from where I am quoting (see Part 3). 

 

[2] In brief, the Cathedral is an overarching body composed of universities, mainstream media outlets, and many other institutions.

On the Crowning and Beheading of the Virgin Mary

Crowning - a sculpture of the Virgin Mary by Esther Strauss

Photo: St. Mary's Cathedral / Franz Wurzinger

 

 

I.

 

As a rule, I wouldn't normally support the vandalism or destruction of an artwork.

 

But I'm tempted to make an exception in the case of a sculpture by Esther Krauss [1] depicting the Virgin Mary giving birth and displayed in a cathedral in the Austrian city of Linz as part of an installation concerned with issues around women's roles and gender equality.

 

I'm not a Catholic and I don't think the work blasphemous or abominable. 

 

But it is undeniably obscene and its installation was deliberately designed in order to provoke - as the vicar for education, art and culture in the Linz diocese openly confessed [2] - so perhaps no surprise then that someone who takes their faith seriously and found the work grossly objectionable should take action.

 

 

II.

 

It's probably an age thing, but one grows increasingly weary of militants such as Ms. Krauss masquerading as artists who seem to believe their political convictions allow them to disregard the religious or cultural sensibilities of others. 

 

Arguing that whilst most works depicting the Blessed Mother have been made by men - and therefore often serve patriarchal interests - Krauss goes on to say that her intention was simply to emphasise the materiality of giving birth. 

 

For Krauss, removing the head from her sculpture was an act of brutal violence and "an expression of the fact that there are still people who question women's right to their own bodies" [3]. Ironically employing phallologocentric language, she has called for very firm measures to be taken and the police are now investigating.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] On her personal website - click here - Esther Strauß describes herself as a performance artist and writer, who, above all, loves to carry out light-hearted experiments; such as sleeping for a night on Anna Freud's couch at the Sigmund Freud Museum in London, or digging up the grave of her grandfather with her bare hands and then stripping naked so that she might cover herself with the excavated soil and mud. 

 

[2] Please give a slow handclap to the Rev. Johann Hintermaier. 

 

[3] Strauss was quoted in a Vatican City Associated Press report that was published in The Guardian (2 July 2024): click here.