A few weeks ago I gave a lecture entitled ‘The Great Disorientation’. It covered a lot of ground, as our present disorientation is indeed very great. Confused, overloaded, we stumble from update to update, constantly refreshing, all the while reducing our individual and collective capacities to comprehend and respond. The world is maxing out, and maxed, yet the response is to double down and double up. Cartoon villains makes it easier to blame ‘them’, not ‘us’, but escalation is a dance that requires partners.
Recalling this line from Malm and Carton in Overshoot:
Seven words from Theodor Adorno summed up the situation: ‘society is not in control of itself.’
Escalation across the board, and onboard. The International Air Transport Association expects that passenger numbers will reach 5.2 billion in 2025. This figure presumably will be accomplished, given that passenger demand was up 10% in January 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. I’m not stopping, you’re not stopping, we’re not stopping. More, Moore, and MOAR!
The condition Malm and Carton describe can, and should, be generalised:
Whatever follows next in the crisis will inevitably spring from this fundamental condition: the obduracy of business as usual; its extreme inertia in the face of consequences; the practical refusal to heed the calls to stand down or even just moderate a little bit.
One might object to claims of ‘business as usual’ given all things mega and MAGA in the United States. In a way, however, what is unfolding there can be seen as a rather contradictory, stupid and vengeful reworking of the famous line from The Leopard: ‘Everything must change so that everything can stay the same’.
Returning to the content of the lecture, there are two quotes from it that have stayed in my head. Something about presenting them to a physical audience amplified their resonance. Both are from Germanophone novelists writing during Europe’s collapse into war across the first half of the twentieth century. Both speak to how different spheres of society are connected together, and what follows when this relationship is forgotten or broken.
From Herman Hesse’s wonderful, The Glass Bead Game:
Experience soon showed that a few generations of lax and unscrupulous intellectual discipline had also sufficed to inflict serious harm on practical life. Competence and responsibility had grown increasingly rare in all the higher professions, including even those concerned with technology…
People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.
It took long enough in all conscience for realization to come that the externals of civilization—technology, industry, commerce, and so on—also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality.
It is possible to read this in multiple directions. From one side, there needs to be a healthy respect and recognition for the material conditions that we rely on, as well as the ways that our socio-economic systems are structured and function to provide us with the ‘goods life’. Most basically, this means overcoming ‘energy blindness’, appreciating the inputs and efforts that make our lives possible, alongside the costs that come with the ways we collectively live. Certainly, an important component of modernity is increasing complexity and with it increasing specialisation, nonetheless, it is remarkable how disinterested many are about even the most basic workings of our day-to-day existence.
And from the other side, Hesse identified the moral thread that runs through different spheres and enterprises in society. When this is cut, and there is innovation without restraint, technology without limits, authority without responsibility, agency without ethics, one can expect dissolution and danger to follow. This leaves agency to flourish in a negative, parasitic mode: the capacity to take and destroy, not to build and defend. It is vitally important not to lose sight of the multifaceted logics for fundamental norms and values that bind power and curb our worst instincts.
These judgements lead to the second quote, which is from a novel I have raised before, Hermann Broch’s Sleepwalkers. Returning to his depiction of a process of a ‘disintegration of values’ that brings with it ruin and destruction:
…in this absolute devotion to logical rigour, the Western world has won its achievements,—and with the same thoroughness, the absolute thoroughness that abrogates itself, must it eventually advance ad absurdum:
war is war, l’art pour l’art, in politics there’s no room for compunction, business is business,—all these signify the same thing, all these appertain to the same aggressive and radical spirit, informed by that uncanny, I might almost say that metaphysical, lack of consideration for consequences, that ruthless logic directed on the object and on the object alone, which looks neither to the right nor to the left; and this, all this, is the style of thinking that characterizes our age.
Radical, ruthless lack of consideration of consequences. How many actors can this description now be applied to? The ledger becomes more imbalanced, the debt grows. Over time, the ramifications and retributions flow and follow, they accumulate and congeal.
For all the seeming contingency and confusion of the conflictual contemporary, it is possible to read it as being something of a logical advance or endpoint to a series of dissolutions and failures. To those who are shocked, it must be asked: Why? What took you so long? What did you expect? One does not need to be Zizek to notice a few clues in Batman (‘There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne’).
If we constantly prioritise individual wants, demands and desires, should we be surprised if there is no recognition of common good? For there to be common sense, there must be both sense and a commons, increasing we lack both.
Returning to Leo Tolstoy’s What Is to Be Done?:
We did not do it, did we? And if not we, who did?
We say, “It is not we who have done all this; it has been done of itself”; as children say when they break anything, that “it broke itself.”
To conclude, another Germanophone writer from those same dark times, Bertolt Brecht. In the prior note on ‘the brutal and the stupid’, I recalled his line, ‘The palace of culture is built with dog shit’. This is worth restating, for what else can be said about present conditions, as Ted Gioia has powerfully detailed (see his 2024 and 2025 summaries of how flat and flattening culture™ has become). Staying and finishing with Brecht, for he rightfully wrote with contempt when watching the contemptible:
They sawed off the branches on which they were sitting
And, shouting, exchanged knowledge of
How one might saw faster, and fell
Crashing into the depths, and those who looked on
Shook their heads as they sawed and
Went on sawing.