The Revolt and The Accident

Spengler, Virilio, and Industrial Society

"The fight against Nature is hopeless" - Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics

As I write this, there is no power at my residence. Due to the ice on the roads, some poor unfortunate soul has slipped off the road and hit a power line, knocking out the power in my area. Since you are reading this, I have transcribed it from my pen and paper to here on Substack. Since my time living here at the end of 2019, I have endured four consecutive "freezes," wherein the power was out, generators were on, and we relied on water that we had either bought up bottled or stored in containers before the cold settled in. Thankfully, the state of Texas has not experienced the problems of previous years in terms of power outages or a significant number of deaths caused by weather.

Mankind’s evolution from small nomadic tribes hunting and gathering to the megalopolis of today, has been formed by our ability to adapt to our environment through our technology. The small portable electric heater has been a comfort for myself and my family this winter, as a way to mitigate the cold. Our tools have fundamentally altered the way we look at the world, and how we view our relationships to other people. For instance, I no longer rely on the Pony Express for long distance communication to my friends and family that resides on the east coast, but rather I can enjoy a complex network of cables, satellites, and raw computation power to make this blog post accessible to countless thousands. With power being back on once more now that I’m writing it, I am using these tools to speak with you on the very nature of where our world might be going.

Throughout human history, mankind’s destiny has been fashioned by its ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome the circumstances of his environment with the tools he had available and the ingenuity of his intellect. The German writer and historian Oswald Spenger argues in his 1931 text Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life that man’s existence throughout world history has been determined by how he uses these tools. To complement the historical discipline, and to better understand the world of man both as an animal and as something outside the animal kingdom, he writes:

For the free-moving life of the animal is struggle, and nothing but struggle, and it is the tactics of its living, its superiority or inferiority in face of "the other" (whether that "other" be animate or inanimate Nature), which decides the history of this life, which settles whether its fate is to suffer the history of others or to be itself their history. Technics is the tactics of living; it is the inner form of which the procedure of conflict — the conflict that is identical with Life itself — is the outward expression. This is the second error that has to be avoided. Technics is not to be understood in terms of the implement. What matters is not how one fashions things, but what one does with them; not the weapon, but the battle. Modern warfare, in which the decisive element is tactics — that is, the technique of running the war, the techniques of inventing, producing, and handling the weapons being only items in the process as a whole — points a general truth. There are innumerable techniques in which no implements are used at all, that of a lion outwitting a gazelle, for instance, or that of diplomacy.

(Emphasis Mine.)

Spengler highlights that man’s existence has been paired with his tools since the very beginning days of the species, with the hand came the first tool to fit that hand, and the tool to be maximized by what our hands could do. Our ability to look at the suffering of the world has granted us the capacity to do just about anything and everything, from splitting the atom to landing on the moon. As a collective species, we’ve used our tools to eradicate certain diseases from the face of the earth, as well as use tools to eradicate millions of people from the face of the earth as well. However, we have always looked to technology as a ways and means of saving us from whatever life throws at us. From our rosy colored view of the future in Star Trek to New World Man by Rush, Western man in particular has set his sights on the future with the tools he can create by his eye for vision.

Spengler continues;

Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual — from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet.

Spengler observes one thing our tools have yet to conquer, our mortality.

Throughout mankind’s existence, humanity’s history has been marked by epochs of diseases and catastrophe’s. From the Great Flood as documented in Genesis, The Plague of Justinian, to COVID-19, man has always sought tools and means to think of a way to best his invisible and sometimes divine challenges. For our present era, we have be foisted upon this "new normal" of history where Western Man had to face both intense fear mongering and novelty, a disease in which forced them to look into the eyes of death more intimately than they had before. Our technics of public health and medicine have made cancer less of a death sentence, and even through immunosuppressant drugs make organs transplantable, so someone like me doesn’t die an early death. Now people were watching thousands go on ventilators, and were so scared of potentially being the cause of death of their loved ones that they let themselves be taken over by a domineering biomedical security state that would deem you anathema lest you wore a mask outdoors. We had become our own plague doctors, facial coverings, and flowery smells that came with scented hand sanitizers.

What was sold to the masses, crippled by fear, and made constantly aware of a death count that was very much fabricated? They went through with a faustian bargain that Goethe and Spenlger could only lament at: a return to "normalcy" in exchange for being the product of an experimental new treatment, a vaccine utilizing a novel means of delivery with its mRNA technology.

Modern Man (with a sizeable number of objectors) sought salvation through technics in the face of a mortal inevitability. So now in 2023, one must ask, "What have we unleashed?"

This is where I feel the need to insert the late French philosopher and writer Paul Virilio, and his concept of the integral accident. For Virilio, each new technology came innately with the corresponding accident for it. To invent the modern train, you have also invented the first train derailment, whether you know it or not. In his 2006 book, The Original Accident, Virilio argues that the growth of technology, namely television, separates man directly from the events of real space and real time. Whether it be various wars or events like the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, we are left with potential projections and experts to tell us about the benefits of acting on those projections. Virilio argues that man write large is losing the foresight of our immediate horizon and resort to the indirect truth. He argues for the concept of the "Museum of the Accident" fight our overstimulation to horror and violence, and our daily overexposure to terror, not of some preventive war purposes like what one might think when visiting Los Alamos, but a collective preventive intelligence that would help us deal natural and manmade disaster.

Spengler and Virilio give us a good way to look at this post-COVID world and, more importantly, a post-jab world in the midst of the fallout. While Virilio’s text is explicitly focused in the post-9/11 world, he makes mention of a possible accident that we have not yet truly experienced.

Virilio Writes;

Once upon a time the local accident was still precisely situated - as in the North Atlantic for the Titanic. But the global accident no longer is and its fallout now extends to whole continents, anticipating the integral accident that is in danger of becoming, tomorrow or the day after, our sole habitat, the havoc wreaked by Progress then extending not only to the whole of geophysical space, but especially to timespans of several centuris, to say nothing of the dimension sui generis of a ‘cellular Hiroshima’.

The "cellular Hiroshima" or the "genetic accident" may be what we are facing now. Between the growing concerns of excess deaths, myocarditis, and of course fertility, we may not know what the longstanding impact is on the human genome, despite the fact that, according to the latest statistics, roughly 70% of the earth’s population has received at least one dose. In a time where now more and more of our elites are pushing for a plant based diet, and the food that we eat is indeed bad for us, what are we to become? What is to happen to the species with falling birthrates, testosterone, and innovation? What would this jabbed, herbivore-esque Neu-Man be in the world?

Spengler tells us what a beast of prey is, the herbivore.

A herbivore is by its destiny a prey, and it seeks to escape this destiny by flight, but beasts of prey must get prey. The one type of life is of its innermost essence defensive, the other offensive, hard, cruel, destructive. The difference appears even in the tactics of movement — on the one hand the habit of flight, fleetness, cutting of corners, evasion, concealment, and on the other the straight-line motion of the attack, the lion’s spring, the eagle’s swoop. There are dodges and counter-dodges alike in the style of the strong and in that of the weak. Cleverness in the human sense, active cleverness, belongs only to beasts of prey. Herbivores are by comparison stupid, and not merely the "innocent" dove and the elephant, but even the noblest sorts like the bull, the horse, and the deer; only in blind rage or sexual excitement are these capable of fighting; otherwise they will allow themselves to be tamed, and a child can lead them.

If children like Greta Thunberg can lead the average liberal to a lessening of their quality of life, or tell men to reject their instinctual tendencies and simply accept this new world of no meat and women with meat between their legs, we are certainly headed towards the human cattle drive of countless dystopian visions. Even now as I type this, there are many prepping for yet another scare, another rogue flu outbreak, or some unknown virus that could be "Worse than COVID-19." We witness these innovations against our own nature in the sake of technological messianic madness as children parade themselves with chest scars and permanently altered bodies whose long term conditions we not yet know, other than their permanent reliance on the State for the rest of their lives.

Surely we must keep a record of what took place in COVID Era, a museum of accidents prior not just the errors that so many accepted or were coerced in, but also what had taken place from the Cutter Program with Polio, or the 1976 Flu Vaccine that was linked Guillain-Barre syndrome and heart attacks. The same museum must include the horrors of the young masses signing up and not looking back for the long black train of progress carrying them to the 21st Century Land of Toys only to be turned into something not yet fully human.

Time will only tell if the integral accident, the real genetic and cellular Hiroshima has taken place, but we must not let ourselves fall prey to credentialed and power-hungry experts so afraid of being wrong to a point of denying death itself, that we potentially accelerate our way to extinction.

After all, as Oswald Spengler wrote,

"The fight against Nature is hopeless and yet — it will be fought out to the bitter end."