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by
Albert Camus
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December 3 - December 20, 2017
the word revolution retains the meaning that it has in astronomy. It is a movement that describes a complete circle, that leads from one form of government to another after a complete transition.
a revolution is an attempt to shape actions to ideas, to fit the world into a theoretic frame. That is why rebellion kills men while revolution destroys both men and principles.
The movement that seems to complete the circle already begins to describe another at the precise moment when the new government is formed.
the history of man, in one sense, is the sum total of his successive rebellions.
the regicides, who attack the incarnation of divinity without yet daring to destroy the principle of eternity.
Secular religions
But to kill men leads to nothing but killing more men. For one principle to triumph, another principle must be overthrown.
there is no equality in the world of power and that the masters calculate, at a usurious rate, the price of their own blood.
Until Rousseau’s time, God created kings, who, in their turn, created peoples. After The Social Contract, peoples create themselves before creating kings.
In other words, power is no longer what is, but what should be.
“It is in order not to become victim of an assassin that we consent to die if we become assassins.”
We are witnessing the dawn of a new religion with its martyrs, its ascetics, and its saints. To be able to estimate the influence achieved by this gospel, one must have some idea of the inspired tones of the proclamations of 1789.
“The day of revelation is upon us.… The very bones have risen at the sound of the voice of French freedom; they bear witness against the centuries of oppression and death, and prophesy the regeneration of human nature and of the life of nations.” Then he predicts: “We have reached the heart of time. The tyrants are ready to fall.”
a moment comes when faith, if it becomes dogmatic, erects its own altars and demands unconditional adoration. Then scaffolds reappear and despite the altars, the freedom, the oaths, and the feasts of Reason, the Masses of the new faith must now be celebrated with blood.
Especially relevant in our time. The emergence of micro religions
Eternal principles govern our conduct: Truth, Justice, finally Reason.
“The human heart advances from nature to violence, from violence to morality.”
“He who makes jokes as the head of a government,” he said, “has a tendency to tyranny.”
When politicians are joking
“A patriot is he who supports the Republic in general; whoever opposes it in detail is a traitor.” Whoever criticizes it is a traitor,
Tyranny
“Ah, what injustice! Who cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to save a great number?” A few—a faction? Naturally—and all historic actions are performed at this price.
This philanthropist wrote day and night, in the most monotonous vocabulary imaginable, of the necessity of killing in order to create.
Thus, evil must be either suffered or served, principles must be declared wrong or the people and mankind must be recognized as guilty.
that rebellion, when it gets out of hand, swings from the annihilation of others to the destruction of the self.
“I belong to no faction, I shall fight against them all.”
When principles fail, men have only one way to save them and to preserve their faith, which is to die for them.
contemptuous of the tyranny and the enigma of a people who do not conform to pure reason, he resorts to silence himself.
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die—
“you can build a palace or a tomb of the same stones.”
The reign of history begins and, identifying himself only with his history, man, unfaithful to his real rebellion, will henceforth devote himself to the nihilistic revolution of the twentieth century, which denies all forms of morality and desperately attempts to achieve the unity of the human race by means of a ruinous series of crimes and wars.
God is dead, but as Stirner predicted, the morality of principles in which the memory of God is still preserved must also be killed.
Thus lies and violence are adopted in the same spirit in which a religion is adopted and on the same heartrending impulse.
Only a god, or a principle above the master and the slave, could intervene and make men’s history something more than a mere chronicle of their victories and defeats.
If Nietzsche and Hegel serve as alibis to the masters of Dachau and Karaganda,2 that does not condemn their entire philosophy. But it does lead to the suspicion that one aspect of their thought, or of their logic, can lead to these appalling conclusions.
This primitive and passionate desire for recognition, which is confused with the will to exist, can be satisfied only by a recognition gradually extended until it embraces everyone.
Ones who dies for an idea seeks recognotion
Mastery is a blind alley. Since, moreover, he cannot renounce mastery and become a slave again, the eternal destiny of masters is to live unsatisfied or to be killed. The master serves no other purpose in history than to arouse servile consciousness, the only form of consciousness that really creates history. The slave, in fact, is not bound to his condition, but wants to change it. Thus, unlike his master, he can improve himself, and what is called history is nothing but the effects of his long efforts to obtain real freedom.
Values are thus only to be found at the end of history. Until then there is no suitable criterion on which to base a judgment of value. One must act and live in terms of the future. All morality becomes provisional.
“The mystery of God is only the mystery of the love of man for himself.”
These are the conclusions of individualism in revolt. The individual cannot accept history as it is. He must destroy reality, not collaborate with it, in order to affirm his own existence.
“The annihilation of the past is the procreation of the future,”
Chigalev, the philanthropist, is his guarantor; love of mankind will henceforth justify the enslavement of man.
“Beginning with the premise of unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”
Complete freedom, which is the negation of everything, can only exist and justify itself by the creation of new values identified with the entire human race. If the creation of these values is postponed, humanity will tear itself to peices. The shortest route to these new standards passes by way of total dictatorship. “One tenth of humanity will have the right to individuality and will exercise unlimited authority over the other nine tenths. The latter will lose their individuality and will become like a flock of sheep; compelled to passive obedience, they will be led back to original
...more
How different from hyper inequality
A new and somewhat hideous race of martyrs is now born. Their martyrdom consists in consenting to inflict suffering on others; they become the slaves of their own domination. For man to become god, the victim must abase himself to the point of becoming the executioner. That is why both victim and executioner are equally despairing. Neither slavery nor power will any longer coincide with happiness; the masters will be morose and the slaves sullen.
All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. 1789 brings Napoleon; 1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler.
Obama-Trump most contemporary example
The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror.
God is dead.
They were the first to construct a State on the concept that everything is meaningless and that history is only written in terms of the hazards of force.
To those who despair of everything, not reason but only passion can provide a faith, and in this particular case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair—namely, humiliation and hatred.
The Germany of 1933 thus agreed to adopt the degraded values of a mere handful of men and tried to impose them on an entire civilization. Deprived of the morality of Goethe, Germany chose, and submitted to, the ethics of the gang.
Gangster morality is an inexhaustible round of triumph and revenge, defeat and resentment.
That is why Hitler and his regime could not dispense with enemies. They could only define themselves, psycopathic dandies1 that they were, in relation to their enemies,
Perpetual strife demanded perpetual stimulants.
Junger drew the conclusion, from his own principles, that it was better to be criminal than bourgeois. Hitler, who was endowed with less literary talent but, on this occasion, with more coherence, knew that to be either one or the other was a matter of complete indifference, from the moment that one ceased to believe in anything but success.
