“Individuals or humans can only “communicate” – live – outside of themselves. And being under the necessity to “communicate,” they’re compelled to will evil and defilement, which, by risking the being within them, renders them mutually penetrable each to the other.”
“What is substantially rejected in evil is a concern with the time to come. It’s precisely in this sense that longing for summit – that our impulses toward evil– constitute all morality within us.Morality in itself has no value (in the strong sense) except as it leads to going beyond being and rejecting concerns for a time to come.”
“Morality has value only when advising us to risk ourselves.”
– Bataille, On Nietzsche
One can look at the meta-narrative and meta-mythology of our time as a projection of the contents of the individual Psyche – with all of its as-of-yet dissociated aspects and sub-personalities, its yearning for freedom and desire for cruelty, abandonment; longing to be unconscious, subjected, enslaved; its parasitical and predatory and altruistic tendencies that are imprints of biological evolution, overlapping and interpenetrating.
Our world is enigmatically straining toward unity and dissolution, simultaneously. Both individually and collectively, we long to evolve to a state of self-sufficient responsibility and conscientious autonomy; and to devolve back to childish dependence expressed through tantrums and violent outbursts. Humanity simultaneously yearns to be one, and to be none – like the binary interplay of the basic unit of our computer code, which has come to underlie all aspects of our socially and technologically constructed “reality.”
“Now, from the formal point of view, the tendency of subsumption presents itself in terms of a linear logic: the reality of capitalist dominion is realized as systemic and totalitarian. The whole of society becomes productive. The time of production is the time of life. At this point, however, the formal and linear tendency must recall its own reality: it is the tendency of capitalist development. But capital is a relation, a relation of exploitation. … The fact that all has become productive does not negate the asymmetry of the productive relation: in other words, it does not negate the fact that it is exploitation that constitutes the relation of production.
“…The capitalist series annuls itself in the formality of the time of destruction, of disintegration, of waste; the series of multiple times of the antagonistic standpoint is resolved in the long and consistent revolutionary time of the communist constitution. … Time will increasingly appear to us as the real material from which communism is constituted.”
– Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution
Capitalism is inherently based upon relationships of domination and exploitation: It cannot, therefore, be reformed, but must be superseded, transmuted, shattered and reconstituted. “Communism” has so far revealed itself as a series of monstrous dystopias and shadow projections. And yet, it is obvious that a social system without domination or exploitation would be based in cooperation and symbiosis – in a self-realization of humanity as a planetary super-organism, as one indivisible being. Whatever the details, such a system would then reveal itself as the ideal form of what communism points toward. It would take the form of a collective social organism, in integral and harmonic relationship with itself, and also the planetary ecology that nurtures and sustains it.
The problem of evil will never go away; neither can we avoid or evade it. The reconstitution of society on principles of cooperation and symbiosis must therefore integrate the destructive and dissolutive tendencies of the human being in a way that serves the whole. We see how this is possible when we look at the religions of Ancient Egypt or the classic Maya who worshipped both the light, constructive and dark, destructive aspects as a polarity, Quetzalcoatl/Horus and Tezcatlipoca/Set. In Capitalist economics, the sociopathic and destructive tendencies are liberated and freed of constraint. Thus, the destruction of the natural environment and the homogenization of the world under a regime of domination happen as a strictly logical and formal sequence.
“The new age consists in humanity’s passing over from the stage of “taking” to the stage of “giving.” It must become clear to human beings that he who gives will receive, and that the more he gives, the more he will receive, if he but truly gives. … To give oneself is the act of creation. The time when man was guided and gifted is passing; he must now nourish his existence out of himself. This is only possible by beginning to return the which God gave to man as his own abundance. … We live at the end of the seventh day of creation; at the end of the day of rest. The next creators will be human beings, or the world, their world, will perish. For if the creator rests, the world cannot remain in existence”
– Georg Kuhlewind, Becoming Aware of the Logos
The logical and formal sequence can only be interrupted through an act of conscious will, through the individual’s determination to give himself, to sacrifice his illusions, to surrender his fantasies of control, to overcome his need for egoic projections through the subjugation of others or the endless parade of luxuries. The revolution away from capitalist domination is an inner revolution that then becomes expressed, reified, in new social structures and technical systems – just as the social and technical world we have inherited is the reflection and reification of the bourgeois self, believing that its autonomy required separation and alienation, standing over other men and the world.