The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

To acknowledge even the possibility of the irrational, to recognize disharmony, would place the fabric of existence at risk, since not just our reality, but every single aspect of the universe—whether physical, mental, or ethereal—depended on the unseen threads that bind all things together.

Kant had written that science demands that we be able to think of nature as a totality. You start by classifying the simplest aspects of the world—the shimmering tendrils of a creeping vine, the iridescent body of a beetle—and follow by ordering these phenomena in species, then genus, then family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and domain, working, all the while, under the premise that every conceivable wing, feather, root, rivulet, coil, and appendage will fall somewhere in that order, occupying its rightful place in a system that encompasses the entire universe, fruit of a wisdom so profound that it underlies and upholds the manifest and unmanifested forms of existence. But perhaps that wasn’t really the case, Nelly warned her audience; it may well be that nature is utterly chaotic, with no law able to subsume the apparent heterogeneity, no concept capable of whittling down its ever-increasing complexity. What if nature cannot be cognized as a whole? Our civilization had yet to come to terms with this terrifying possibility, and she very much doubted that it could, for it would be a death blow to science, philosophy, and rationality.

For modern art recognized no laws, no method, no truth, just a blind, uncontainable surge, a rush of madness that would not stop for anyone or anything but drive us onward even to the ends of the Earth.

We lie on our knees, praying to the wrong god, a childish deity who hides at the center of a corrupted world that he can neither govern nor understand. Or is it that we have made him ourselves, in our own fetid image, but then forgotten we have done so, as young boys birth the monsters and demons who haunt their dreams, without ever realizing that they have only themselves to blame?”

he felt, nevertheless, unable to protect him from his own reckless drive toward death and self-destruction, and knew of no way to keep him safe from the strange new rationality that was beginning to take shape all around them, a profoundly inhuman form of intelligence that was completely indifferent to mankind’s deepest needs; this deranged reason, this specter haunting the soul of science, which Paul could almost see as an incorporeal wraith, an unholy spirit hovering over his colleagues’ heads at meetings and conferences, peering over their shoulders, or nudging their elbows, ever so slightly, as they wrote down their equations, a truly malignant influence, both logic-driven and utterly irrational, and though still fledgling and dormant it was undeniably gathering strength, wanting desperately to break into the world, preparing to thrust itself into our lives through technology by enrapturing the cleverest men and women with whispered promises of superhuman power and godlike control. Paul sensed its budding influence, could hear the faint stirring of its tendrils as it slowly crawled toward us, and yet he could not name or place it, and hardly dared to speak of it out loud, for how could he tell if this morbid imagining, this inexplicable bane that he felt it was his duty to arrest, was the fruit of genuine foresight, or just another malignant growth of the delusion that was slowly overcoming his mind?

you can dance even with the devil knocking at your door.

When we finally finished and set the bomb computation going, we went for a walk in the desert, and he gave me a piece of advice that still haunts me: “You don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in, you know?” he told me.

“What we are creating now,” he said, “is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left! But it would be impossible not to see it through. Not only for military reasons, it would also be unethical, from the point of view of scientists, not to do what they know is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have. And this is only the beginning!”

According to Jancsi, faith had afforded the primeval peoples of the world a source of strength, power, and meaning that modern man lacked completely; and it was this lack, this profound loss, that now had to be addressed by science. “We have no guiding star,” he told me, “nothing to look up or aspire to, so we are devolving, falling back into animality, losing the very thing that has let us advance so far beyond what was originally intended for us.” Jancsi thought that if our species was to survive the twentieth century, we needed to fill the void left by the departure of the gods, and the one and only candidate that could achieve this strange, esoteric transformation was technology; our ever-expanding technical knowledge was the only thing that separated us from our forefathers, since in morals, philosophy, and general thought, we were no better (indeed, we were much, much worse) than the Greeks, the Vedic people, or the small nomadic tribes that still clung to nature as the sole granter of grace and the true measure of existence. We had stagnated in every other sense.