Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

how can you honestly believe the space of evolutionary possibility is bounded by your fuzzy arts-brain notion of the ‘human’? Besides, I thought all you people were poststructuralists or postmodernists or whatever it’s called this week. You all hate the human! A face in the sand! Wash it away in the tide and hurrah, let the orgy of perversion begin! Well, here’s the damn tide! That’s what I’m saying. You ought to be pleased about it, but instead you’re just whining. I wish you’d make up your minds.”

Society has a lot of interests. Preventing crime and terrorism, freedom of expression, and so on. Privacy conflicts with them all, every last one. Our patron, Herr Deuter, understood that.”

I did have friends, people I’d known for years, but something happens to men in middle age, to male friendships. You get focused on your work, your family, and somehow you fail to keep up. Before you know it, you haven’t heard from the people you think of as closest to you for six months, then a year; you’ve missed birthdays and new children and house moves and changes of job, and inevitably you wonder if your friend is resentful or angry at you for being so distant, and it feels artificial to phone them and invite them out for a drink and more so if your ulterior motive is to ask them for help, to ambush them by bringing up the creeping sense of dread that has hollowed out your life.

Little by little she fell into a kind of magical thinking, as if the reality of what had happened to her depended on its being told, put into words. Instead she swallowed it, forced it down into the pit of her stomach and barred its way back out with the gate of her teeth.

Maistre continues the sentence ‘until evil is extinct, until the death of death.’ So yes, the world is an abattoir, but he’s not saying that’s the end of it. That’s not the meaning of life. There’s redemption.

“Pop quiz: on whom does all greatness and all power rest?” Drunk as I was, I knew the answer. It was the most famous passage in Maistre’s writings. “The executioner.” “One point to you. You can’t have a state without the threat of violence. It’s the only way to get people to obey. The executioner is that threat. He’s the one who wields the axe.”

“Go ahead, call him names if it makes you feel better. But you rely on him. You know you do. You fear and hate him for doing something that you can’t do, that you secretly know has to be done. Society needs fear. It’s our dirty little secret.”

We drove for a long time in silence. Greg paid the driver and we got out on a dim street lined with concrete apartment blocks, pocked with satellite dishes. Breaking their ranks was a single-story arcade of little stores and cafés. We found an awning saying Okacbaşi, a steamed-up window.

As we walked in, we were hit by heat and smoke and the mouthwatering smell of lamb cooking on a charcoal grill. The room was decorated in blue and white tile, and packed with men sitting on plastic garden chairs, smoking and drinking beer and watching a football game on a screen mounted on the wall. A harassed-looking waiter took us to the back, where a table with no view was still free.

We sat down under a tourist calendar with a picture of the ruins of Ephesus.

responded as—I regret to say—I am programmed to do to a certain kind of woman, a woman who is performing superiority and desirability, demanding a tribute of attention. I twisted my mouth into a raffish grin and heard myself make some half-joke about her dislike of Turkish food,

“Your weakness,” he added, turning back to me, “is that you’re always surrounded by people who think just like you. When you meet someone who your silly shame tactics don’t work on, you don’t know how to act. I’m a racist because I want to be with my own kind and you’re a saint because you have a sentimental wish to help other people far away,

As long as you have walking-around money and are capable of following basic behavioral norms, anonymity is yours in a city, or if not actual anonymity then its ghost, what remains of it for us. No one in the café expected anything of me, and I didn’t care what they thought of the way I looked or dressed. I didn’t feel on edge. It was as if I’d suddenly remembered how to exist in the world.

Was my capacity for human relationships so stunted that I replaced real people with abstractions, “deserving” refugees who I’d never have to meet or interact with?

A good-looking young man came into the café wearing a military peacoat, his hair styled in the same nineteen-thirties undercut as Anton and Karl. I felt suspicious of him, and realized that this was yet another sign that things had changed. When had I stopped assuming that a fashionably dressed man in his twenties, in a cosmopolitan urban neighborhood, would hold liberal social views?

What Anton and his capering friends in their red hats call realism—the truth that they think they understand—is just the cynical operation of power.

Two rectangles of light. It’s not much, but I can say that the most precious part of me isn’t my individuality, my luxurious personhood, but the web of reciprocity in which I live my life. In Anton’s world, hospitality is the greatest sin and the essence of human relations is either subjection or domination.

Homme seul est viande à loups, as the medieval French proverb has it.