ARTICLE

 

How (Most) Philosophers Have Failed Humanity

 

 

Bert Olivier

University of the Free State, South Africa OlivierG1@ufs.ac.za https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3138-1948

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the theme of "how (most) philosophers have been struck by blindness in the age of the 'great reset' and failed humanity." I have been able to trace only a few philosophers or intellectuals who have seen through the fog of dis- and misinformation to grasp the iatrocratic and corporatocratic aims of private global organisations, namely to reduce the numbers of, and enslave the rest of humanity by various lethal and otherwise destructive means. The paper initially concentrates on the question of what a philosopher is, followed by a discussion of the contributions of four exemplary philosophers who have had the perspicacity and courage to grasp the true nature of forced global events since the start of the "pandemic." It further focuses on some criticism against their position(s), where necessary providing evidence to either support or invalidate the positions concerned. Evidence is adduced for the claim that those who submitted to Draconian rules and unjustified injections did not think through the manner in which this happened, nor did the necessary prior research concerning the vaunted safety of the "vaccines" or the probable ultimate goal of forces driving the neo-fascist transformation of contemporary society.

Keywords: philosophers; iatrocracy; courage; "pandemic"; neo-fascism; Agamben

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What is certain is that new forms of resistance will be necessary, and those who can still envision a politics to come should be unhesitatingly committed to them. The politics to come will not have the obsolete shape of bourgeois democracy, nor the form of the technological-sanitationist despotism that is replacing it. (Giorgio Agamben, in Where Are We Now? 2021, 8)

There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. (Gilles Deleuze, in Postscript on the Societies of Control, 1992, 4)

Maybe in the course of forcing ourselves to act bravely, we actually do become brave. (Naomi Wolf, in The Bodies of Others, 2022, 270)

Nolite te bastardes carborumdorum (Don't let the bastards grind you down). (Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, 1985, 153-154)

 

Introduction: What is a philosopher?

To be a philosopher puts one in a difficult position, because in the true sense of the word it is usually not something that one chooses to be. Either one is a person who pursues knowledge and truth regardless of the intellectual or institutional obstacles in one's way, or you yield to these, and rely on conventional answers to important questions. I am not referring to academic philosophers, who obviously choose philosophy as a profession. Some of these may also be philosophers in the true sense, but most of them end up being what Arthur Schopenhauer notoriously called "bread thinkers"-individuals who do philosophy in service to those in power, that is, apologists for the status quo, or what Robert Pirsig irreverently dubbed "philosophologists" in his second iconoclastic novel, Lila-An Inquiry Into Morals (Pirsig 1992, 376-377):

He liked that word "philosophology." It was just right. It had a nice dull, cumbersome, superfluous appearance that exactly fitted its subject matter, and he'd been using it for some time now. Philosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to music, or as art history and art appreciation are to art, or as literary criticism is to creative writing. It' s a derivative, secondary field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host's behavior ...

You can imagine the ridiculousness of an art historian taking his students to museums, having them write a thesis on some historical or technical aspect of what they see there, and after a few years of this giving them degrees that say they are accomplished artists. They' ve never held a brush or a mallet and chisel in their hands. All they know is art history.

Yet, ridiculous as it sounds, this is exactly what happens in the philosophology that calls itself philosophy. Students aren' t expected to philosophize. Their instructors would hardly know what to say if they did. They' d probably compare the student' s writing to Mill or Kant or somebody like that, find the student's work grossly inferior, and tell him to abandon it.

Given philosophologists' ardent promotion of the thoughts of others, while refusing to do any thinking of their own, Pirsig's characterisation of academic philosophy reminds one of Immanuel Kant's (1959) well-known-but seldom practised-adage, "Sapere aude!" (Dare to think!), in the context of his essay, What is Enlightenment? Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009, 15-18) elaborate on Kant's motto in a manner relevant to the present theme of philosophers' philosophical task. They insist that, to be able to actualise the demands of freedom, it is not enough to think critically; one must learn to act critically, too. Although this may seem like a criticism of Kant, they argue in Deleuze-Guattarian terms that a "minor voice" is audible in Kant's work alongside the "major voice" of the philosopher of transcendental reason and of duty centred on the categorical imperative, by implication promoting a life of political and social responsibility. The problem with this "major voice" is, according to Hardt and Negri (2009), that it leaves existing power relations as they are. The "minor voice," by contrast, points towards an alternative to the modern conception of power that is audible in Kant's "major voice," and can be heard in the minor Kantian text referred to above ("What is Enlightenment?"). This is the voice of the revolutionary Kant.

While they regard Kant's motto, "Sapere aude!" as being appropriate for expressing the meaning of "Enlightenment," they point to the ambiguous way in which this is developed in Kant's brief text. On the one hand, there is not much daring in Kant's encouragement of citizens-such as civil servants, soldiers or ministers of religion-to do "their duty" obediently as citizens, and pay their taxes to the sovereign, whatever private reservations they may have about these. According to the authors of Commonwealth, Kant is here merely affirming the European rationalist tradition of considering the Enlightenment as a process for the emendation of reason. Instead of being revolutionary, such an approach simply amounts to the reinforcement of the social and political status quo. However, on the other hand, they propose that Kant himself opens the door for reading this Enlightenment exhortation (Hardt and Negri 2009, 17):

... against the grain: "dare to know" really means at the same time also "know how to dare." This simple inversion indicates the audacity and courage required, along with the risks involved, in thinking, speaking, and acting autonomously. This is the minor Kant, the bold, daring Kant, which is often hidden, subterranean, buried in his texts, but from time to time breaks out with a ferocious, volcanic, disruptive power. Here reason is no longer the foundation of duty that supports established social authority but rather a disobedient, rebellious force that breaks through the fixity of the present and discovers the new. Why, after all, should we dare to think and speak for ourselves if these capacities are only to be silenced immediately by a muzzle of obedience?

It is not difficult to show that a discourse analysis of Kant's essay confirms their reading (see Olivier 2018). Suffice to say that, following Hardt and Negri (2009), what the "minor" Kant could teach any receptive person, concerns the necessity of distinguishing between two kinds of thought and action. The first kind would leave the established political, social and economic order intact, regardless of the "freedom of thought and expression" which may accompany it, even were such an order one of injustice. Furthermore, even if it seems to be an example of "dare to think for yourself," it would really be no more than venting one's sense of indignation about something. After all, it would lack that other element identified by Hardt and Negri's careful reading of Kant, to wit, "think (or know) how to dare!" The latter would exhort one to engage in the second kind of thought and/or action, which does not shrink from acting in a manner that resists and rejects an unjust order at all levels. Only in this way is one's moral and volitional autonomy clearly manifested.

Anyone who has the courage for such daring thinking and acting-particularly today- should be under no illusion: it would certainly carry tremendous risk, because it would challenge the greatest power complex the world has ever seen (Grand Jury 2022); one that had not yet shown itself clearly in all its inexorable force when Hardt and Negri wrote Commonwealth. Resistance to this unjust, dominant (but by no means triumphant) order has to begin at the level of bio-politically resisting or acting bodies. As many thinkers, including Hardt and Negri (2009, 18-21) have argued, theory, by itself, is powerless to bring fundamental change.

Having mentioned "courage," one should acknowledge that, since the earliest times, there have been philosophers who were exemplary in the courage they showed in the face of power. One such was Socrates, from whom one learns that true philosophers do not honour the "gods of the polis" unconditionally. The philosopher's task, by which she or he is recognised, is to question the things valued by the city; that is, they question convention. In Plato's Apology (1997, 23), referring to the charges brought against him, Socrates says to the members of the Athenian jury: "It goes something like this: Socrates is guilty of corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things." He then examines the charges systematically and easily demonstrates that he does believe in "spirits," which an accuser admits to be "gods" (Plato 1997, 26). Socrates further claims that, having shown that the charges against him are baseless, he realises that his undoing will have nothing to do with this, but with the fact that he is "very unpopular with many people" who "envy" him (Plato 1997, 26). The gist of his defence (apologia)-which, as we know, did nothing to endear him to the jury-comes where he points out (Plato 1997, 27) that the charges against him would have been legitimate if he had abandoned his soldierly duty in the battles where he had fought "for fear of death or anything else ... when the god ordered me, as I thought and believed, to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others ..." But fearing death, he further argues, rests upon the erroneous belief of thinking "one knows what one does not know." As for himself, he knows that he knows nothing of the things of the "underworld" (including death), and he opines that it is perhaps in this respect that he "is wiser than anyone in anything" (Plato 1997, 27).

Having clearly-and no doubt to the chagrin of his audience-demonstrated his own intellectual and moral superiority compared to his accusers, it was to be expected that the jury would exercise its power over Socrates by finding him guilty and sentencing him to death, as they did. But why cite this as an illustration of courage-specifically moral courage? Because Socrates was willing to die for his conscience-oriented belief in something more valuable than Athenian valorisation, ostensibly, of its Olympian polis religion, but in truth really of paying obeisance to conventional Athenian practices of kow-towing to the rich and powerful (and probably corrupt). This is the lesson we should learn from Socrates in the present global situation of an immensely powerful so-called "elite" forcing the world population to toe the line of "pandemic" lockdowns, "vaccinations," and soon of obeying "climate lockdowns" (Dean 2022; Fillingham 2022). This is a lesson that the majority of "philosophers" (or "philosophologists") clearly have not learned, with the exception of a few courageous ones, as well as, of course, many other individuals, such as Elon Musk (RT 2022), who openly called on Twitter for Dr Anthony Fauci to be prosecuted because he had lied (RT 2022a) about gain-of-function research, and people had died as a result. Musk was knowingly invoking the ire of mainstream narrative-supporters, if not worse-like Socrates, Musk seems to be willing to die for his belief in freedom, it appears (Brown 2022). If philosophers, of all people, cannot discern something more valuable than obsequiously caving in to the demands of what is known as the New World Order (NWO), then there is scant hope for humanity.

 

Philosophers and the Current Crisis

Against the backdrop of the introduction, above, it will be unsurprising that, since the start of the Covid-19 "pandemic" (in scare quotes because it was no real pandemic; Olivier 2021a) I have been astonished by the number of professional philosophers who have evidently succumbed to dubious tactics and informational mendacity, regardless of how transparent, on the part of those authorities who ordered mask-wearing, social distancing, "lockdowns," and eventually promoted seemingly hastily developed "vaccines" (which were no real vaccines; The Exposé 2022a; 2022b) as the only way to combat this flu-resembling disease (Kennedy 2021; 2022). From the available evidence it appears that many, if not most philosophers-or more generally, intellectuals (Tucker 2022)-have been struck by some kind of cognitive anaesthesia (or worse, cowardice) in the age of the "great reset," and hence failed humanity, in so far as philosophers are precisely those people who should exemplify independent, autonomous and courageous thinking (as explained earlier). Just how anaesthetised they were is shown by their failure to take note of what an independent stance on all these measures amounts to by the example of Sweden, which respected its own democratic constitution by refusing "lockdown," mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing-in other words, protecting their economy and relying instead on issuing advisories on how to minimise the risk of infection by the virus, and on their citizens' common sense.

To elaborate briefly on this matter, in a study that articulates an alternative perspective on lockdowns clearly and cogently, Professor of Public Health, Eyhal Shahar (2021), published a commentary significantly titled "Not a shred of doubt: Sweden was right." Referring to the counting of the deceased during an epidemic (the task of epidemiology), Shahar (2021) observes that today:

The most counted country is probably Sweden, a stubborn dissenter that refused lockdowns, mask mandates and contact tracing. By the time of this writing, 14,349 Swedes have reportedly died from the coronavirus. Has the Swedish model failed? Were the lockdowns justified? Were the economic and social upheavals in most of the world an unavoidable necessity?

The answer to all is a resounding no. The first (and not the only) witness-Sweden.

To substantiate his argument, Shahar (2021) conducts a complicated but convincing analysis of several charts that compare the deaths in what he terms a "flu [influenza] year" with the deaths during the current "pandemic." Elsewhere (Olivier 2021) I have summarised his argument in detail. Suffice to quote his conclusion (Shahar 2021):

To remind us, the hysterical response to the pandemic was not due to fear of an excess annual mortality of 4% or even 10%. The apocalyptic forecasts, which caused the world to shut down, predicted about 90,000 deaths from the coronavirus in Sweden by the summer of 2020: 100% excess mortality! No wonder policy makers around the world prefer to forget those predictions ...

The pandemic has taken its death toll, ranging from large to small in different countries and within countries, and mostly affected the frail elderly. But the lockdowns and panic were unsubstantiated, prevented nothing, and caused indescribable damage to society. Sweden's statistics tell us, unequivocally, that in much of the world lives have been lost and livelihoods have been destroyed-in vain.

It is superfluous to elaborate on the widespread reaction to Sweden's decision about its "pandemic" response (for such an elaboration, see Olivier 2021). The point is that, for philosophers-or intellectuals more generally-Sweden's is a position to be emulated, given its independent, brave decision-making. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, not many of my colleagues have done so. I have been able to trace only a few philosophers or intellectuals who have seen through the haze of lies, mis- and disinformation (Olivier 2022), to grasp the corporatocratic and iatrocratic goals of unelected members of private global organisations, namely to reduce the numbers of, and enslave the rest of humanity by various lethal and otherwise destructive means (Wilson 2022; 2022a; Zeee Media 2023; Grand Jury 2022). Honourably, this includes Giorgio Agamben, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Byung-chul Han, Naomi Wolf, Jordan Peterson, Matthias Desmet, Shane Moran, Emma Hay, Nathne Denis, Jenna Donian, and Inge and Adrian Konik, and excludes the unlikely likes of Slavoj Žižek (a personal disappointment to me; Žižek was always one of my philosophical heroes), Jürgen Habermas, Benjamin Bratton, and (unthinkable as it may seem) internationally renowned ethicist, Peter Singer, who incongruously proclaimed it to be a moral duty for people to take the Covid "vax." (Did he forget about the ethical imperative regarding the integrity of one's body?) It also excludes the vast majority of philosophical colleagues in South Africa, to their discredit and my initial great puzzlement, but includes most of my present and ex-doctoral students, to their perpetual credit.

It is worth dwelling briefly on Singer's (2021) position, where he compares the duty to be "vaccinated" against Covid-19 with the obligation to wear a seat belt while driving a car. While the latter is clearly an infringement of our personal rights, he argues, the former is not, because not wearing a seatbelt is a choice about one's individual safety, while choosing to be (un-)vaccinated against Covid implicates the safety of others. Singer invokes John Stuart Mill's famous dictum, that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." It is easy, ostensibly, to agree with Singer on this point, provided it be certain, humanly speaking, that what seems to pose a threat to people is, in fact, preventable by that which power recommends. Given the (by now) widely demonstrated fact that none of the "vaccines" prevent one from contracting Covid-19, nor transmitting it to others, or dying from it (The Exposé 2022), it is safe to say that Singer-even as late as in August 2021-failed to take cognisance of this, still clinging to his unfounded insistence that the Covid-19 "vaccines" prevent people from dying and from getting infected.

Could a supposedly critical thinker like Singer be brainwashed by the mainstream media and iatrocratic "health" organisations so easily? Apparently, yes; the least one would have expected him to do is to look elsewhere for alternative information. I believe that Žižek, too, was too hasty and trusting-he, of all people, who is a Marxist Lacanian "master of suspicion"! This is abundantly clear from his view, that "vaccines bring hope," let alone his remark: "Distribution of the vaccines will be our biggest ethical test: will the principle of universal distribution that covers all of humanity survive, or will it be diluted through opportunist compromises?" (Žižek 2020). My disappointment in Žižek-who, as psychoanalytical thinker, should know what the likely explanation (to be addressed below) is for his (and Singer's) failure to comprehend the reasons for their gullibility (Grand Jury 2022)-is compensated for by some other thinkers, however.

 

Courageous Philosophers: Lévy, Agamben, Han and Wolf

First, it is worth taking note of Bernard-Henri Levy's stance on the matter, in his book, The Virus in the Age of Madness (Lévy 2020; see also Smith 2020). Lévy (2020, 14) was struck by the increase in "medical power" during the Covid-19 "pandemic," and he clearly regards such power as both unwarranted and perilous. By drawing on Michel Foucault's work, Lévy argues that the latter has shown that governments have learnt equally from hospitals and prisons, but when comparing Foucault's account of the "management" of plague epidemics in the 18th century with the contemporary response to Covid-19, he opines that "... until now, never had things gone quite this far ... Never had we seen, as we did in Europe, heads of state surrounding themselves with scientific councils before daring to speak" (Lévy 2020, 14-15).

While commending the doctors and nurses who treat Covid-19 patients at great risk to themselves, Lévy reminds his readers that physicians are just as prone to making mistakes as ordinary people, and indeed, other scientists (Lévy 2020, 16):

... doctors do not always possess more information than we do, and there is something a little absurd in the blind confidence we place in them. Doctors know, as did French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, that the "scientific truth" we implore them to deliver is never more than a "corrected mistake."

From his examples of such medical mistakes it is clear that Lévy did not have the benefit of hindsight when he wrote this book, and that he would probably have changed his mind about criticising a medical doctor for being sceptical about "social distancing" from what has since been brought to light about its true intent as a "pandemic protocol" (Agamben 2021, 29-31; Han 2021; Wolf 2022, 20). With the same hindsight he might have realised why Dr Didier Raoult's recommendation of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19, together with his person, was ridiculed by his colleagues, although he should be given credit for smelling a rat when confronted by this collective "resentment" (Lévy 2020, 17-18; see also Kennedy 2021, 76-97).

Furthermore, scientists do not always agree; on the contrary, Lévy observes (2020, 17):

I know that the "community" of scholars is no more communitarian than any other ... it is riven with fault lines, divergent sensibilities and interests, petty jealousies, esoteric disputes, and, of course, fundamental differences. I know that the research world is a Kampfplatz, a battlefield, a free-for-all no less messy than the one Immanuel Kant bemoaned in metaphysics.

Levy's third reservation is probably the greatest reason for concern. Reminiscent of Foucault, Lévy cautions against "hygienics" and elaborates (Lévy 2020, 18): "... there is a doctrine of hygienics that goes something like this: health becomes an obsession; all social and political problems are reduced to infections that must be treated; and the will to cure becomes the paradigm of political action . the effects of that doctrine can be horribly perverse." With admirable prescience, Lévy (2020, 18-19) cites as example of such perversion the "shameful eugenics" of two early 20th-century doctors who advised the French minister of health at the time; it is by now no secret to the informed among us that eugenics is central to the programme of the globalist group driving the present power-grab (Grand Jury 2022a). Invoking Plato's authority in the Statesman in this regard (Lévy 2020, 20-21), he reminds readers that Plato discarded the notion of an iatrocracy (rule of physicians)-which would be founded on a useless "nosology of 'cases'"-opting instead for audacious and strong "citizen-guardians" to "think through" trying times and tackle them politically. In other words, medical doctors should not rule, but instead abide by their important calling, to cure the sick. Nor, in Levy's judgment, should politicians use them as subterfuge for dubious actions and laws.

It is clear that Lévy regards the response to the Covid-19 "pandemic" as excessive, comparing it to previous pandemics that left a trail of death in their wake. In the previously quoted remark (Lévy 2020, 14-15) he puts his finger on the source of the trouble-"heads of state" deferring to medical authorities unmistakably signals that what is at stake is "unquestionable" power-power over citizens of putative democracies. The philosopher who saw this almost immediately after the advent of the "pandemic" is the redoubtable Giorgio Agamben-author of the classic Homo Sacer (Agamben 1998; see also Olivier 2022a).

In Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, Agamben (2021, 5-6; see also Goleshevska 2020) remarks that the ruling powers have evidently used the "pandemic" as subterfuge to transform their mode of governance because the latter was perceived as being no longer useful for their purposes. This means that these powers have "pitilessly" abandoned the model of constitutional, parliamentary democracy, to "replace it with new apparatuses whose contours we can barely glimpse." The chapters for this book were mostly written during 2020, so by now Agamben has probably noticed that the new paradigm for governance that representatives of the New World Order are attempting to introduce may be called neo-feudalism, or perhaps neo-fascism, in light of the fusion of corporate and governmental powers, to which ordinary citizens would be subject, willy-nilly, like the serfs of the feudal Middle Ages (Chossudovsky 2022). In other words, Agamben was struck by the fact that the supposed health emergency imposed by "authorities" entailed the possibility of much longer-term curtailments of human and civil rights, as a kind of vanguard for an increased effort to remove political and social rights permanently. The transformation taking place before citizens' eyes at the time assumed the guise of "a sanitation terror and a religion of health" (Agamben 2021, 6).

The twenty-one shortish chapters of this book address questions such as "Contagion"; "Social distancing"; "Truth and falsity"; "Medicine as religion"; "Biosecurity and politics"; "The face and the mask"; "What is fear?" and "Bare life." In the latter he observes (Agamben 2021, 36-37) that:

Never before, not even under Fascism and during the two world wars, has the limitation of freedom been taken to such extremes: people have been confined to their houses and, deprived of all social relationships, reduced to a condition of biological survival. This barbarity does not even spare the dead: those who die are being deprived of their right to a funeral, their bodies instead burned.

By now, one knows that these methods of confinement were intended to instil an unholy fear of death in people-Agamben (2021, 41) writes about "spreading panic" among citizens in Italy-despite the fact that the death toll of Covid-19 proved to be relatively low. To substantiate this, Agamben (2021, 41) refers to comparative numbers that were published by the Italian National Statistics Institute, showing that mortality rates from respiratory diseases reported in March 2018 (16 220) and March 2019 (15 189) were significantly higher than those relating to Covid-19, reported in March 2020 (12 352). It is fitting that he (Agamben 2021, 29, 38) quotes Michel de Montaigne in relation to the question offear of other people who may be infected:

It is not certain where Death awaits us, so let us await it everywhere. To think of death beforehand is to think of our liberty. Whoever learns how to die, has learned how not to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.

This terse exhortation by the French Renaissance philosopher, to face our death resolutely and fearlessly-because, paradoxically, it frees one to live meaningfully- anticipates by four centuries Martin Heidegger's (1978, 294) death-analysis in Being and Time (see also Olivier 2020, 15-16). In passing, one should note that Heidegger's notion of the role of the so-called "they" in relation to individual Dasein's worldly situation, finds particularly conspicuous embodiment in the current phenomenon of self-righteous censorship of any and all deviations from the mainstream narrative concerning Covid-19 prescriptions (Kennedy 2022). This is because the "they" represents the anonymous mass of society, which lives unquestioningly according to "everydayness"-that is, conventional beliefs and prescriptions, characterised by "idle talk," "ambiguity" and "curiosity"-which constitutes "inauthentic" existence, according to Heidegger. He writes pointedly: "The 'they' does not permit us the courage for anxiety in the face of death [italics in original]" (Heidegger 1978, 298), keeping in mind that, as he further demonstrates, "anxiety" is the prerequisite for finding the "resoluteness" to face one's own unavoidable death in the midst of "everydayness," which no one can escape to begin with.

This brief Heideggerian interlude on the "they" enables one to return to the topic offear, which Agamben (2021, 73-75) links with those brave souls who defied fear in the face of the widespread paralysis of thought by relentless censorship, thus incurring the discrediting appellations of "denier" and "conspiracy theorist." Focusing on the second of these, he remarks on the historical amnesia that it reflects, in so far as there are thousands of instances-elaborated upon by historians-where (groups of) individuals planned and executed actions purposefully aimed at changing or overthrowing existing power-relations. Agamben discusses three examples of such conspiracies that were planned and executed, with mixed degrees of success, namely that of Alcibiades in 415 BCE concerning an expedition to Sicily; of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799 who, after conspiring with supporters, carried out a coup against the Republic and assumed dictatorial powers; and of Mussolini who, together with co-conspirators, arranged a march on Rome by 25 000 fascists in 1922. "In each of these three cases," he avers (Agamben 2021, 75), "individuals gathered in groups or parties and acted resolutely to achieve their goals, considering various possible circumstances and adapting their strategies accordingly." The point of Agamben's elaboration on historical conspiracies is to disabuse readers of the belief-inculcated by the purveyors of false information about the "pandemic" and everything attached to it-that "conspiracies" are ludicrous, non-existent phenomena designed by their purveyors to trick people into believing that lockdowns, social distancing and mask-wearing are necessary, and that the "vaccines" are "safe and effective," none of which, one knows by now on reliable authority, is in fact the case (Grand Jury 2022; The Exposé 2022; 2022a; 2022b). Here Agamben, through the act of writing, shows himself to be the paradigmatic, exemplary philosopher who "speaks truth to power" regardless of the multiple attempts to prevent him from doing so (Agamben 2021, 39).

Given his resolute unmasking of, and opposition to, the tyrannical powers that are doing their utmost to inaugurate a new world dispensation of neo-fascism, it is worthwhile looking more closely at the Foreword of Agamben's recent book, because it was evidently written last, and because his resolutely political and ethical interpretation of the "pandemic" is so conspicuous here. At the outset, Agamben (2021, 4) describes the chapters of the book as "targeted interventions ... that attempt to think through the ethical and political consequences of the so-called 'pandemic' and, at the same time, to define the transformation of political paradigms that the measures of exception have wrought." Anyone familiar with Agamben's work (particularly Agamben 1998; see also Olivier 2022a) will recognise here the theme of the "state of exception" that runs through it-that is, the reduction of humans to "bare life" (sans rights), that dates back to the ancient world and (previously) reached its nadir in the Nazi death camps. Again he (Agamben 2021, 4-6) places things in historical perspective, reminding one of a similar forced transformation of governance structures in the third-century Roman Empire-one that culminated in an autocracy similar to the one that is taking shape today at the cost of democratic institutions. However, he observes (Agamben 2021, 6):

The defining feature ... of this great transformation that they are attempting to impose is that the mechanism which renders it formally possible is not a new body of laws, but a state of exception-in other words, not an affirmation of, but a suspension of constitutional guarantees . While in Nazi Germany it was necessary to deploy an explicitly totalitarian ideological apparatus in order to achieve this end, the transformation we are witnessing today operates through the introduction of a sanitation terror and a religion of health.

It takes courage to name the mechanism-a "state of exception"-by means of which the neo-fascist order is being ushered into society-people have been assassinated for exposing the sinister operations of the NWO's agents (Bushiri 2022; Desmet 2022; Noack 2021; Olivier 2022). And it would probably happen again, as Elon Musk (Li 2022; RT 2022) has implied by admitting the possibility of being assassinated because of opening up online space for free speech, which should be uncontroversial, but is an obvious threat to the NWO. Agamben (2021, 6-7) regards what he terms "biosecurity" as probably the "most efficient of its kind" in Western history, judging by the docile willingness of people to accept drastic limitations of their liberty under a "state of exception," as soon as a menace to their health has been persuasively installed (by means of mainstream media cooperation) in the social sphere. On this topic, it is interesting to note that (in contrast to Lévy and Agamben) Germany's senior critical theorist, Jürgen Habermas, has also failed to perceive the lockdowns and what accompanies them for what they are, namely the installation of a "state of exception" as initial phase of a new health-oriented despotism. Astonishingly, Habermas's position turns out to be a paradigmatic case of reducing citizens to "bare life," as Verovsêk (2022) reports:

In the piece, entitled "Covid-19 and the protection of life," Habermas not only defended the legitimacy of restrictions on civil rights-including free movement and assembly- designed to reduce infections by SARS-CoV-2, but also argued that the German government was not going far enough to protect the population. By taking as its baseline the availability of intensive care beds, rather than the risk of infection per se, the government was, he argued, failing to observe its constitutional duty to "exclude all courses of action that risk the probable endangerment of the life and physical integrity of a foreseeable number of innocent citizens."

On Habermas's reading, the prohibition on the subordination of individual human life to any other goal is the supreme value not only of Germany's post-war democratic political culture, but of the Basic Law itself.

Verovsek (2022) defends Habermas against those intellectuals in Germany who accused him of authoritarianism, and even refers to Agamben:

A powerful statement of the danger of creeping authoritarianism has come from another public intellectual and philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. At the beginning of the pandemic, Agamben noted "the increasing tendency to use the state of exception as the normal paradigm of government." Habermas's Italian counterpart therefore warned of the deleterious consequences of normalizing the kind of public monitoring, surveillance and restrictions on movement deemed necessary to fight the Coronavirus.

Just how naive the German philosopher has been regarding the despotic response to the "pandemic" is especially clear where Verovsek (2022) writes, quoting Habermas:

Habermas is sensitive to concerns about the overuse of emergency politics. However, he noted that "only Covid deniers could vilify measures justified solely for the duration of the pandemic as an excrescence of biopolitics."

How could one who lived through the Nazi era with all its horrors be as ingenuous as to assume, without even the slightest misgiving, that these dictatorial measures would be suspended when the "pandemic" abates? On the assumption that he is unaware of this (largely hidden) information, one wonders what Habermas's reaction would be to incontrovertible evidence of the massive death toll wrought by the so-called "vaccines" (Kennedy 2021; The Exposé 2022a; 2022b).

Compared to Habermas, the Korean-German philosopher, Byung-chul Han (2021) shows more perspicacity regarding the "pandemic." By referring to a passage in his book, The Disappearance of Rituals, where the eroding effect of digitalisation on the corporeal, value-embodying and community-fostering function of rituals is discussed, he foregrounds the continuing deleterious effects of the intensification of digital communication and remote learning during the "pandemic." (That this was no coincidence, is clear from Naomi Wolf s [2022, 18] perceptive remark about the introduction and policing of policies "that weaken the bonds between human beings and weaken the family.") "Digitalization weakens the communal bond," Han says, "in that it has a disembodying effect. Digital communication is a form of disembodied communication." Moreover, Han's (2021) insights concerning the "hysteria" relating to health and survival resonate clearly with Agamben's on the reduction to "bare life" under the "state of exception." I cite Han (2021) extensively here to show the connections he establishes between the health craze, prioritisation of mere survival, prohibition of enjoyment, loss of quality of life, depression and abandonment of human rights:

Even before the pandemic, there was widespread hysteria over health. What most concerns us today is survival, as though we find ourselves in a permanent state of war. In the battle for survival, the question of quality of life is the first casualty. All of our life forces are applied to prolonging existence at whatever cost.

In The Palliative Society [see also Han 2017] I describe our current society as a society of survival. In view of the pandemic, the tooth-and-nail fight for survival has witnessed a viral radicalisation. The fight against the virus has intensified the fight for survival. It has reduced the world to a state of quarantine in which normal life has ground to a halt and become little more than a struggle to make it from one day to the next. Health has been elevated to the prime objective of mankind. The survival society has completely lost the ability to place value on quality of life.

Even enjoyment has been sacrificed on the altar of remaining healthy, enthroned as an end in itself, what Nietzsche called the "new idol"-survival must replace enjoyment. He who only worries about survival cannot enjoy. The prolongation of life has become the supreme value. We have willingly sacrificed everything that makes life worth living to survival.

During the pandemic, a radical restriction of human rights has also been accepted without discussion. We have accepted the state of emergency without complaint, which has reduced life to purely the pursuit of survival. Under the state of emergency, we have self-isolated voluntarily and quarantined of our own volition.

In the battle for survival, the question of quality of life is the first casualty. Koreans call the state of depression brought on by the pandemic the "corona blues." During the lockdown, shorn of human contact, depression has spiralled and become the genuine pandemic of the present day.

Returning to Agamben (2021, 7-8), like Han, he is aware of the significance of digital technology, highlighting its role and efficacy, in tandem with science, as "religious apparatus" for effecting the present structural transformation of social relationships, epitomised in normatively functioning "social distancing" and non-physical, virtual "connection." However, Agamben (2021, 8) remarks pointedly that, "What accounts for the strength of the current transformation is also, as often happens, its weakness." After all, he reminds one, it would be difficult to maintain the (putative) "consensus" established by the captured legacy media, and the "medical religion" is not without its heretics and respected dissidents, who (increasingly, one may add) contest the seriousness, if not the very existence, of the "pandemic." The hegemonic forces were probably first to realise the impossibility of sustaining the impression of an undefeatable "pandemic," Agamben notes, and given the inhumanity and cruelty of the repressive means they have employed, one may infer their alarm in the face of the incremental waning of their power and legitimacy. Hence the question, how long, and in what guises, the repeated states of emergency can be extended. His rejoinder is uncompromising (Agamben 2021, 8):

What is certain is that new forms of resistance will be necessary, and those who can still envision a politics to come should be unhesitatingly committed to them. The politics to come will not have the obsolete shape of bourgeois democracy, nor the form of the technological-sanitationist despotism that is replacing it.

Small wonder that intellectual critics such as Benjamin Bratton (2021) came down on Agamben like a ton of bricks, as it were, although it is easy to show (as I have done before; see Olivier 2022a; 2023) that such criticism demonstrably rests on two wrong premises-one concerning the supposedly natural origin of the "virus," and the other, that practitioners of medical science are infallibly dedicated to ensuring the health of humanity (something Hippocrates evidently knew not to be the case; hence the Hippocratic oath). These are naive, to say the least, given increasing evidence that the "virus" was technologically manufactured (Wilson 2022), and that the "vaccines" are killing people in droves (The Exposé 2022; 2022a; 2022b; Redacted 2022).

Someone who is "unhesitatingly committed" to "forms of resistance [that] will be necessary" is undoubtedly Naomi Wolf, whose The Bodies of Others (2022) instantiates a principled, intellectually incontrovertible repudiation of the NWO neo-fascist programme. She characterises her book thus (Wolf 2022, 14):

This book is about how we came to this harrowing civilizational crossroads-engaged in a war against vast impersonal forces with limitless power over our lives for the freedoms we have taken for granted; how those forces seized upon two years of Covid-19 panic in sinister new ways; and how, yet, against overwhelming odds, we still might win.

Others have looked at this war from a biomedical perspective, or from a strictly political one. My focus is on how this ongoing war against us is far more basic, aimed at nothing less than dissolving the meaning of humanity itself and undoing of the rich cultural legacy we in the West have long treasured and passed on to succeeding generations.

Wolf, therefore, writes as philosophical anthropologist and cultural philosopher, which explains her acute awareness of the reasons for these relentless powers targeting specifically Western cultural and political values, centred around individual liberty. Her understanding of what it means to be human, and of the sinister-as well as fiendishly cunning-ways in which the globalist Leviathan is currently targeting our very humanity, is evident throughout this rich text. Like Han, above, she notes the importance of ritual and enjoyment, where, alluding to the globalists' penchant for digital machines, she writes (Wolf 2022, 19):

If you asked a machine program, "What are the building blocks of human culture?" It might spit out: "Dancing, listening to music, watching concerts and theatrical productions, holy days and rituals, teaching children in a school, singing, and worship."

And considering the bond between enjoyment and tactility, she puts the "social distancing" imperative under the "pandemic" in anthropological perspective (Wolf 2022, 20):

When two human beings are in contact with one another, they produce communication, culture and maybe plans. This is simply what humans do face-to-face. A facilitator of communication and alliance between humans is touch.

How do you dissolve human civilization? One way a machine program could target human beings is by attacking and undoing the magical power of touch. One of the strangest diktats from the start of the pandemic was the demand for "distancing," that inorganic, awkward verb that was introduced in a new context, and redefined, early in the pandemic.

My purpose here is not to provide a review of Wolf s powerful text; however, it is merely to evoke a sense of her unfailing search, and uncovering, of the beast's jugular from various angles, as it were. Among other interrelated topics, she devotes chapters to "Understanding the criminals"; "The unverifiable pandemic"; "Vaccine passports and the end of human liberty"; "Cruelty, cults, coercion"; "The new authoritarians vs the individual" and "Resistance." A chapter in which she exposes the driving force (reminiscent of the "dark side" of The Force in George Lucas's Star Wars [1977]) behind the neo-fascists with chilling accuracy, is titled "Evil Beyond Human Imagination." What this title gestures towards is captured succinctly where she writes (Wolf2022, 253): "This massive edifice of evil, was too complex and really, too elegant, to assign to just human awfulness and human inventiveness. It suggested a spiritual dimension of evil." What she has in mind becomes clearer when she elaborates on the sheer suddenness and globally coordinated imposition of supposedly health-motivated measures by heads of state, medical boards, universities, schools and local authorities, and on the destructive effects of these on family and other social relationships. That, in her judgment, it had all been planned meticulously, is apparent where she writes (Wolf 2022, 253):

This evil was like a gigantic cultural spacecraft that landed on Earth, with a technology to unfold and almost at once set loose upon the egalitarian, post-Enlightenment West a global dystopia run on cruelty and cognitive dissonance.

While Wolf shies away from comparing the events of the last few years with the "unspeakable horrors of the Nazi death camps" (Wolf 2022, 254), she perceptively remarks on the similarity between the years preceding the latter and the "pandemic" present as far as the implementation and policing of incrementally harsher new policies are concerned. In Nazi Germany, this was accompanied by escalating degradation of those who had been "othered," just as the "pandemic" has othered the "unvaccinated." In the process, "a modern civil society" was transmogrified "into one capable of committing hitherto unimaginable evil, an evil that would be countenanced and even endorsed by doctors, medical associations, journalists, famous composers and filmmakers, universities, teachers, shopkeepers, and neighbors" (Wolf 2022, 254). The parallel between then and now is what one must recognise, she insists.

In the chapter on "Resistance," Wolf drives home a (perhaps to some surprising) truth, namely, that those among us who distinguish themselves by their courage are not necessarily individuals who think of themselves as brave, or do not experience fear when they stand up to the agents of despotism. She relates occasions when she challenged the authority of various officials charged with enforcing rules regarding access to public places that were marked out of bounds for "unvaccinated" individuals, and although these officials refrained from arresting her (as she thought they would), she confesses to being afraid during these encounters. She also refers to the many individuals who messaged her directly to express their respect for her and agreement with what she was saying, simultaneously offering "generic" (cowardly) reasons why they could not follow suit-invariably to avoid some unpleasant or personally disastrous consequences such as possibly losing their jobs. Hence her statement (Wolf 2022, 264):

This is truly a time in history for the hammering out of heroes and heroines in the forge of crisis. And so it is also a time of cowardice, when those who choose collusion, when they know better, are allowing their souls to shrivel in that same heat.

Wolf goes on to name some of these heroic figures, who-like her-soon noticed that the restrictive measures were not about a "virus" but about shutting down people's freedoms forever. All of us in (what I call) the "resistance" know people like the ones she mentions, as well as craven ones who are just not prepared to put their comforts on the line, little realising-as Wolf, together with the other figures I have dealt with here, emphasises-that their own liberty is also in the firing line. All of which raises the question: Why do such people, particularly professional philosophers, persist in their "denial" that a global coup d'etat is occurring?

 

The Psychoanalytical Grounds of Philosophers' Negation of the True State of Affairs

One obvious reason for such denial is the sustained, mainstream media-driven information war that has been waged since the beginning of the "pandemic" (Olivier 2022). However, on closer inspection, this is not a satisfactory answer; after all, those of us who soon realised what was really happening, were exposed to the same barrage of mis- and disinformation. There must be a more fundamental reason, and one that cuts deeper than Matthias Desmet's notion of "mass formation"-useful as it is. In "Mass formation and the psychology of totalitarianism" (Desmet 2022a, 100), he describes what happened during Covid as follows:

The Covid crisis did not come out of the blue. It fits into a series of increasingly desperate and self-destructive societal responses to objects of fear: terrorists, global warming, coronavirus. Whenever a new object of fear arises in society, there is only one response: increased control. Meanwhile, human beings can only tolerate a certain amount of control. Coercive control leads to fear, and fear leads to more coercive control. In this way, society falls victim to a vicious cycle that leads inevitably to totalitarianism (i.e., extreme government control) and ends in the radical destruction of both the psychological and physical integrity of human beings.

Such "radical destruction" has been witnessed and acknowledged by many of us in the course of more than three years-at least by those (a relatively small percentage of people) who have not been negatively affected by what Desmet calls "mass formation."

He characterises the latter as follows (Desmet 2022a, 98): "What is mass formation actually? It's a specific kind of group formation that makes people radically blind to everything that goes against what the group believes in." In this way, they take the most absurd beliefs for granted." Desmet (2022a, 100) proceeds to endorse Hannah Arendt's (https://archive.org/details/originsoftotalit0000unse) insight (of 1951) that "a new totalitarianism is emerging in our society. Not a communist or fascist totalitarianism, but a technocratic totalitarianism." This testifies to the acuity of the German-American philosopher's intuition, but it also brings into sharper focus the degree to which such "technocratic totalitarianism" has become virtually pervasive today, exacerbating the attack on (and possibly the "extinction" of) our humanness in an unprecedented way. Fortunately, Desmet (2022a, 100) has more uplifting things to say, too:

As always, a certain part of the population will resist and won't fall prey to the mass formation. If this part of the population makes the right choices, it will ultimately be victorious. If it makes the wrong choices, it will perish. To see what the right choices are, we have to start from a profound and accurate analysis of the nature of the phenomenon of mass formation. If we do so, we will clearly see what the right choices are, both at strategic and at the ethical levels.

It is not difficult to agree with Desmet on the above, but one has to dig deeper, because not even an adequate grasp of "mass formation" really explains why that most "rational" of groups, philosophers, have largely failed to discern-or at the very least, to speak out against-the true state of affairs regarding the surreptitious coup d'etat occurring around them. To articulate this, the psychoanalytical notion of the unconscious will be employed here. It is, therefore, relevant to note that Lacan (1977, 46-55) emphasises the indispensable role of discourse in the analytical situation, with the therapist assisting the subject (or analysand) in the course of her or his "free association," to arrive at a comprehensible symbolic interpretation of their life-story, reconstructed in the course of the interaction between analyst and analysand. The free-associative discourse of the analysand is anything but coherent, after all; the point of free association is to neutralise the proclivity to speak coherently, which is a function of reason, thus allowing one to disclose the "truth" of the subject's unconscious.

If the latter statement seems cryptic, one has to recall Lacan's notoriety among those who do not take the time to understand psychoanalysis, for his (admittedly puzzling) reversal of Descartes's paradigmatically modern statement, Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), so that it reads: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think." Even more obscure, in its extended form it states: "I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think" (Lacan 1977a, 166). As one may guess, "... [W]here I am not" is an allusion to the unconscious, the functioning of which is decisive here in so far as it reveals itself negatively in cases of a lapsus linguae as well as omissions, hesitations, discursive gaps, signs of aggressive or insistent disavowals as well as affirmations. By steering the conversation in a specific direction, the psychoanalyst harnesses such symptomatic indicators of the unconscious (which is constituted by the repression of unbearable or unacceptable material) to be able to arrive at a meaningful interpretation of the analytical subject's associative discourse.

One should remember that Lacan's conception of the subject-the "split" or "interrupted" subject-undermines a fully coherent subject in principle; after all, a coherent subject (as normatively encountered in ego-psychology) contradicts the founding insight of psychoanalysis, that human rationality is constantly destabilised by the operations of the unconscious. This is evident in his observation, that for (Lacan 1977, 49):

The unconscious is that part of the concrete discourse, in so far as it is transindividual, that is not at the disposal of the subject in re-establishing the continuity of his conscious discourse.

Hence, Lacan (1977, 50) labels the unconscious as that "chapter" of the subject's life narrative that has been "censored," and as such is "marked by a blank," as evidenced by the unintended actions (including slips of the tongue, or involuntary "speech acts") on the part of the subject. The repressed "chapter" of the subject's story can nevertheless be revived by means of the interpretive collaboration between the analyst and the free-associative discourse of the analysand, despite the characteristic resistance by the latter, which is the function of reason at the level of consciousness. The "language" of the unconscious is, therefore, legible in the subject's childhood memories, discursive omissions, "idiosyncratic" linguistic expressions and word-selection, and physical symptoms such as nervous twitches (Lacan 1977, 50).

What does this have to do with the failure of most professional philosophers to see through the smoke and mirrors hiding the destructive actions of the neo-fascists unfolding under their noses, as it were?

As we have seen, the unconscious, repressed "truth" of the psychoanalytical subject can only be reconstructed with the help of the "knowledgeable" analyst. Anyone familiar with psychoanalytical discourse-analysis would know that written texts may be read in an analogous manner, given the comparable occurrence of omissions, gaps, and lacunae in texts, and that these gaps may similarly be construed as a function of repression or exclusion, in so far as it indexes something intolerable or unacceptable to the writer. The same may be said of actions, or the lack of certain actions, such as-under current circumstances-the failure to notice what is unfolding globally, and/or to speak out in the face of these virtually incomprehensible events, which manifest what Wolf (above) calls "unimaginable evil." Add to this that repression is a function of prohibition (Freud 1974a, 741; Lacan 1997, 176-177), then it follows that the conspicuous omission or "blind spot" on the part of professional philosophers-indeed, of everyone who has not "woken up"-may be a symptom of their unconscious repression of world-shattering events as world-destroying events, which have been unfolding in global space for some time now. At a certain, naive or obtuse level they are aware of these, but persist in understanding them in terms of the obfuscating mainstream narrative that they are fed uninterruptedly.

This is likely to be the case particularly among professional philosophers, for whom the function of reason is valorised, so that they may be expected to show greater resistance to (and hence repression of) signs of deception. After all-recalling the link between repression and prohibition-any open discussion of all aspects connected to these events has been censored, prohibited, by the mainstream, conventional discourse, as anyone "with eyes to see and ears to hear" can ascertain in the mainstream media-but on condition that one is willing to actively search for and peruse alternative media, where mainstream omissions and censorship are explicitly thematised (Mercola 2022; Olivier 2022). Elon Musk's recent revelations regarding coordinated censorship of dissenting views in the newly released "Twitter files" has come as a breath of fresh air (Pearson 2022).

Trained professional philosophers are mostly capable of penetrating, critical thinking, and to comprehend their currently widespread, scrupulous avoidance of any subject or argument that would confront them with the unpalatable fact of an unfolding global coup d'etat, one should turn to those aspects of psychoanalysis that I have outlined above. Their conspicuous inability to grasp the horrible truth is chiefly due, I believe, to repression of something that would undoubtedly be fear- and anxiety-inducing if it were to be consciously acknowledged. One could add to this (as a friend has suggested) that Freud's notion of the "death drive" (or "death instinct") reinforces my claim that repression-which functions unconsciously-explains philosophers' inability to perceive events unfolding around them for the democidal happenings that they are. Briefly, the "death drive" (first announced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of 1920) is posited by Freud (1974, 3761-3762) as a psychic force more fundamental than even the pleasure principle, which (until that time) functioned to account for human behaviour in so far as it impels the subject to avoid painful experiences in order to attain homeostasis (psychic equilibrium). The death instinct has two functions: on the one hand, under its sway, the subject always "returns to a previous position" (its "conservative" role), and on the other, it drives the subject to engage in aggressive, destructive behaviour towards itself as well as others. Seen in the context of people's- here, particularly highly "rational" philosophers'-obliviousness of the ruthless current global quest for power (itself an expression of the aggressive side of the death instinct), it is the conservative tendency of the death drive that reinforces the functioning of repression. Under its compulsion, people habitually return to their "comfort zone," in this way brushing off (and repressing) those things that would disturb it. The evidence of something being "rotten in the state of Denmark" (with recognition to Shakespeare), which is everywhere to be "seen" (provided one is "awake")-for example in the current, supposedly inexplicable proliferation of excess deaths in countries with a high percentage of "vaccinated" people (7he Exposé 2023)-is, therefore, not registered, and ignored.

 

Conclusion: The Question of Therapy and Hope for the Future

Apart from the therapeutic effects of becoming aware of the role of repression in the face of anxiety and fear, induced by things like the putative virus-which is no virus (Wilson 2022); lockdowns, social distancing, exaggerations of the immediate danger of climate change, looming food and energy shortages and the threat posed by the conflict in Ukraine, what other therapy can one avail oneself of in these difficult times? Recall Han's and Wolf s insights, above, into the (re-)vitalising, indispensably human role of joy, of enjoyment, of the humanising effects of cultural communal activities, and the systematic manner in which the neo-fascist globalists have been trying to drive a wedge between people and cultural enjoyment. Does this not ring true? It is, therefore, not surprising that Naomi Wolf (2022, 14) observes: ". yet, against overwhelming odds, we still might win." This formulation probably reflects salutary caution on her part; I would prefer to say: we shall win, because the neo-fascists responsible for the present nightmare have underestimated the human spirit at their peril.

Against the backdrop of what has been written above, one may well ask: when this terrible, debilitating and lamentable episode of (in-)human history is finally behind those who have remained recognisably human throughout the terror, what should we hope for? Among those who insist that we cannot go back to the world before the "pandemic" and other phases of the neo-fascist quest for total power, Agamben is worth heeding. After elaborating on the "despotic measures" that people have been subjected to in the name of health and security, and speculating that this could be done successfully because they subliminally knew that the world as we knew it had to pass, Agamben (2021, 95) comments on ". the time to come" with the words:

We do not regret the ending of this world. We have no nostalgia for the notions of the human and of the divine that the implacable waves of time are erasing from the shore of history. But we reject with equal conviction the mute and faceless bare life and the health religion that governments are proposing. We are not awaiting either a new god or a new human being. We rather seek, here and now, among the ruins around us, a humbler, simpler form of life. We know that such a life is not a mirage, because we have memories and experiences of it-even if, inside and outside of ourselves, opposing forces are always pushing it back into oblivion.

One can only hope that there will be sufficient numbers of sensible and courageous people who will add their weight behind the growing resistance to tyranny taking shape in the world, some of the philosophical embodiments of which I have assembled here.

 

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