wahdat al wujūd

David Graeber on calvinist morality of work as "salvation in suffering"

https://youtu.be/X9E1-grAvDk

on JFK's attempt to contain Israeli Damona nuclear project which potentially got him killed and how the history of it was systematically erased

https://youtu.be/3GABJfRdQDY

What makes something woke is a very simple operation: the transmutation of political demands into basically arbitrary standards of interpersonal conduct. The goal is never to actually overcome any existing injustices; political issues are just a way to conspicuously present yourself as the right kind of person. There’s no better example than the George Floyd protests three years ago. Three years ago, millions of people took to the streets in the largest mass action in American history, and what did it actually achieve? A few newspapers started capitalising the B in Black. A few gurning podcasters lost their jobs. That was about it. All the initial energy was sapped away, and after the riots we were all invited to the infinite circus of being good, addressing your biases and checking your microagressions and endlessly schmeckeling around with your terrible terrible privilege. Back in 2020, a few people in my vague social orbit started talking about how the real work of opposing racial inequality, the hard work, was all about confronting your own complicity. When I suggested that actually, no, the real hard work would involve some kind of massive state action to address poverty, they tended to react like I’d just shat on the dinner table. And they were right. I’d made the mistake of approaching what they were saying as a political statement, when actually they were just trying to be polite. The kind of mistake only idiots and foreigners make: it was as if they’d asked me how I was doing, and I’d actually told them. Sam Kriss, Wokeness is not a politics The reason "wokeness" as an etiquette is so popular among elites and managerial types is because of how effective wokeness is at defusing class-based antagonism. The whole point is to make us so concerned with how we're making each other uncomfortable, with interpersonal offenses and the rest of that catty bullshit, that we can't form a solidaristic base. And it's especially insidious in the hands of HR because they can dangle the threat of material penalties over our heads if we don't abide by these etiquette rules. Wokeness as etiquette isn't a problem for the rest of us when it's snobs gasping over how Aristocrat Joneserson forgot to wear his top hat this morning. It's a problem when it's Henry Ford sending agents to spy on the personal lives of his workers to see if they've been drinking too much. This tendency toward trying to control what people want to say is a major dysfunction among today's self-styled leftists. Let people say what they want to say, even if it's stupid or ugly. If they're wrong, argue with them. If you think someone is obnoxious, go ahead and say so. And if you've had enough, go do something else for a while, but stop trying to silence everything that offends you. It's a recipe for nothing but driving yourself crazy.

Caste, [Dumont] says, is a hierarchy based on ritual purity. And the concept of ritual purity does actually explain some of the more inexplicable things I’ve seen in this country. Like the filth. I might not be the first person to have noticed that public space in India is not hygienic. People keep their homes spotless, even if they’re living in a shack in the slums, and all the shops and restaurants and temples are impeccable too. But as soon as you step outside, it’s s game of dodge-the-turd, and not all the turds belong to animals. There are signs and murals everywhere begging people to care about their environment, but most people simply refuse. On the train here I was given a plastic tray with little compartments for the chana, dal, rice, chapati, and pickle, a kind of Indian bento box, and afterwards I was wandering around trying to find a bin that would take my dirty tray. Eventually the attendant snatched it from me, looked at me like I was an idiot, and chucked it out the open door of the moving train. It’s not like India couldn’t keep itself clean if it wanted to. This country has put a probe on the Moon. But it doesn’t want to. This is not a cultural value. And when you start thinking from the standpoint of ritual purity, this is actually completely reasonable. The world outside your home is inherently filthy and polluting, because this is where people of different castes mix. A Brahmin has to take a ritual bath whenever they go out. You could pick up all the litter and hose all the shit off the pavement, but it wouldn’t do anything at all to make those streets clean. So why bother? Sam Kriss, Numb in India, part 4: Dharma police

After just “10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it”. An MIT study showed that test groups who used ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels”. We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible. https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/aug/08/i-hate-what-ai-is-doing-to-the-minds-and-happiness-of-the-young-katherine-rundell-on-the-view-from-the-classroom TEN MINUTES. That's all it takes.

In 1334, the Papacy officially forbade any further use of the terms Guelph or Ghibelline, and anyone who kept up the rivalry was subject to excommunication. After this point, the factions dissolve and the names vanish from history. But the rivalry did not end. The Guelph-Ghibelline distinction is the secret axis of all European politics, into the present day. The precise nature of the sexually perverted supranational bureaucracy has changed a little since the fourteenth century, but not really all that much. Unlike the Church, the European Union does not supply an internal civil service for its member states. (It does for some non-member states, such as Kosovo.) It does not directly provide welfare and administration for the population, or directly collect taxes from them. There are some new powers: the European Central Bank issues currency and sets monetary policy for most of the continent; the Church could not. But the core functions—administering justice, guaranteeing contracts, recording transactions, maintaining archives, maintaining peace between the territorial powers, conferring legitimacy on their rulers, and, sometimes, withdrawing it—are the same. Both institutions also try to nudge the barbarian states towards a common European foreign policy; both claim to elevate humanity above its baser instincts. Most significantly, the classes that support or oppose the bureaucracy have remained basically unchanged. Mercantile interests are still solidly Guelph; the resentful peasants and their landowners both tend Ghibelline. Keir Starmer is a Guelph; Nigel Farage is a Ghibelline. Emmanuel Macron is a Guelph; Marine Le Pen is a Ghibelline. Donald Tusk is a Guelph; Vladimir Putin is a Ghibelline. Georgia Meloni, like any good Italian, switched sides. The split is not just between ideologies. Last decade, the British Conservative Party had a Guelph-Ghibelline civil war that cut across all its usual factional divides. Trotsky might have been a Guelph, but Stalinism was very explicitly Ghibelline. What keeps the opposition going is that both positions appear to be impossible. Every victory by either side is always temporary; they always seem to reproduce the same basic situation. What we call the Protestant Reformation was essentially a Ghibelline coup. Lutheran theology is a set of instructions, legible in terms of the bureaucracy’s Christological coding, for the nationalisation of the civil service. One thousand years after the barbarian kings bought into the supranational network, their heirs started dropping out of it. All the new national churches immediately started instituting clerical marriage. Subject the machine to the principles of the barbarian state. In the Thirty Years War both Pope and Emperor were aligned against the hyper-Ghibelline Protestant princes, and lost. The result was the rise of Westphalian sovereignty, in which a local bureaucracy is entirely subordinated to a territorial barbarian state. The State Department seems to think that this is a fundamental aspect of the Western tradition stretching back to Aristotle; it’s not. It’s a minor artefact thrown up by a temporary weakness in the supranational bureaucracy, and it didn’t even last two centuries before the French revolutionaries started once again organising all of Europe through a single, rational, universal, perverted administration. When the barbarian powers of Europe finally crushed the Napoleonic empire, they immediately replaced it with their own supranational institution, the Concert of Europe. In the twenty-first century, the bureaucracy has produced new and virulent forms of Ghibellinism, but already the various barbarians involved are talking about a nationalist international. Sam Kriss, What is Europe?

Europe is what happens when sovereign and administrative power are disaggregated, but for most of European history both sides have been trying to put them back together. There are two ways of doing this. The bureaucracy wants to seize territorial power from the barbarian kingdoms and rule in its own right; the barbarian kingdoms want to subdue the bureaucracy and bring it under territorial control. You could call these two opposing forces the Guelph and the Ghibelline. In northern Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth century, Guelphs were mostly burghers, who supported the Pope against the Holy Roman Emperor because their class interests aligned with the system of international governance; Ghibellines were mostly drawn from the aristocracy and peasantry, who supported the Holy Roman Emperor against the Pope as part of their general attachment to particular and parochial forms of government. They fought each other for over two hundred years, and the ferocity of the wars had a lot to do with the fractal network of local resentments it plugged into.

In a Roman context, Europe is just a landmass. The world is divided into citizens and noncitizens; Roman citizens in Britain and Syria have far more in common with each other than they do with their Pictish or Arab relatives just across the border. A distinctive concept of Europe, a specifically European mode of social organisation, could only emerge out of the ruins of the Empire, once the Americans had torn it open. The distinctly European form of government that emerged in the Dark Ages is the one that most of Europe still lives under today. Europe is not about nations and peoples, knights and maidens, art and culture, knowledge and power, or freedom and democracy. Its history is the history of a sexually perverted supranational bureaucracy. Sexually perverted bureaucracies are not really uncommon. Here I’m using ‘perversion’ in the proper, neutral, Freudian sense, in which perversion is any deviation from reproductive heterosexuality. (Freud says that the kiss is a perversion, since ‘the parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract.’) But traditionally, bureaucratic structures have been more sexually perverse than the societies they govern. The most common form of perversion is celibacy, which is sometimes enforced through castration, as in the eunuch-bureaucracies of dynastic Egypt and imperial China. But there have also been bureaucracies of homosexuals, pederasts, thigh-fuckers, transvestites, people only capable of getting off on various forms of humiliation and spite. Aztec officials dressed in the flayed skins of naked female sacrifice-victims. Everyone’s got their own thing, but you need to have something. An effective administration can’t have hereditary appointments; its ranking and sorting mechanisms must be endogenous, not outsourced to any crude biogenetic system; it must not breed. Sam Kriss, What is Europe?

https://youtu.be/yon5fqz6-v8

https://youtu.be/lgnUzs6oA7A

European society is literate and literary; America is fundamentally imagistic. A country of cave-painters. For the few Americans who can read, the written word is still magical in nature, a charm or amulet, a form of medicine, rather than an ordinary system for relaying meaning. (See, for instance, the basically savage invocation of Aristotle and Aquinas above.) For Europeans, freedom is imagined in social and sadistic terms; for Americans, both before and after Columbus, the notion of freedom is based in a metaphor of physically ranging unimpeded over large tracts of land. [...] Graeber and Wengrow don’t argue that Americans are noble savages, intrinsically more free than Europeans; they locate the origin of liberalism in a specifically American political history centring on the collapse of the despotic, city-building, human-sacrificing state based in Cahokia, near present-day St Louis. This might be true, but it’s worth pointing out that where contemporary America is brutal and despotic, it’s brutal and despotic in a specifically American way. Most European societies (after Rome, obviously) never had a sizeable domestic population of slaves; American ones did. Power in American societies was often embodied in potlatches or nextlaoallis, spectacular squanderings of wealth or life. This is essentially how the American world-empire, which continually consumes the wealth of the entire planet, governs itself. Sam Kriss, What is Europe?

https://youtu.be/jPhvic-eqbc

In its culture, institutions, and style of government, the US has no resemblance to France or Denmark, but it does look quite a lot like the Iroquois Confederation or the Aztec Triple Alliance. European countries are integral and territorial: each one is essentially a patch of farmland that could be conquered and defended by some warlord at some point between 476 and 1945, along with its population of bonded serfs. The basic unit of American sovereignty, meanwhile, is the pact, in which various disparate peoples invent institutions for globbing together in a theoretically limitless affiliative chain. The United States is also theoretically limitless: it bubbled away across the continent and then, once it hit the sea, started sweeping over Pacific islands like a tsunami. It may yet swallow up Canada too. This is entirely different to the process in which European territories are expanded or nibbled away at through conquest: the territory is simply wherever the pact is in force. [...] The original founders of the United States understood this entirely, which is why the Sons of Liberty dressed as Native Americans when they threw the Dartmouth’s cargo into Boston Harbour. The 1778 Articles of Confederation may have been substantially inspired by the Gayanashagowa or Great Law of Peace that cemented the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, but unfortunately by 1787 the project was entirely in the hands of Roman Republic cosplayers like John Adams, with the result that most accounts of the origins of American liberalism now involve this tedious traipse from Athens to Rome to Runnymede to Plymouth Rock. There have always been a few visionaries, like Walt Whitman, who saw things clearly, but only recently have people really started pointing out the obvious. The strongest counter-history is the Graeber-Wengrow thesis, which observes that at the moment of contact between Europeans and Americans, the Europeans mostly lived under systems of extreme and explicit hierarchy and domination, while the Americans mostly lived in deliberative communities, governed by elected councils, in which any chieftain’s orders could be countermanded by someone asking ‘Why?’ (Another feature is the democratisation of violence: in Europe, the state could impose hideous punishments, but in America a whole village might collectively torture you to death.) Our entire notion of freedom, they claim, originates here. Sam Kriss, What is Europe?

Sorry about the colour scheme I borrowed someone else's screenshot

Maybe a better way of describing what’s gone wrong here is that Christopher Nolan does not believe in the gods. They never really appear in the film: there’s Zendaya as an apparition that might be Athena, but she doesn’t really do anything and turns out to just be a manifestation of Matt Damon’s guilt anyway. A real god is something different, an image so intense it generates and obliterates a potentially infinite number of meanings. The only way to make a decent work of art is to believe in the gods. But he can’t, and he’s not alone. It’s strange how difficult cinema finds the Olympians. You can make statues of them, or paintings, or write about them, but unless you’re making Clash of the Titans-level shlock it’s very difficult to show them onscreen. Nolan is just the latest in a long line of movie adaptations of the Odyssey, and they all come up against the same problem. Cinema is not capable of representing the gods. Sam Kriss on Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, You have to believe in the gods

Ian Danskin video essay on themes of power and rules in Snowpiercer, High Rise and John Wick series https://youtu.be/IlCPnaJyZL4

Once you’ve seen LA from above, it’s obvious why nobody cared about the 250th. According to the myth, America was founded as a nation of yeoman farmers, prudent Anglos with buckles on their hats, reading Horace and Livy in their three-room houses, self-sufficient in wheat, rye, flax, wax, and lumber, guarding their homesteads and their liberty, urbanisation rate around 3.5%, fewer wage-labourers than outright slaves, with the two conditions generally held to be more or less the same thing. How on Earth could this have anything to do with the scenes outside your window? How could that rustic Jeffersonian fantasy have possibly created such a crystalline gigacity, hovering over the edge of reality? All these jobs and all this shopping: a society of total but invisible control, this impersonal grid that reaches deep down into the wet stuff of your brain and tugs you around by the desires. It’s not just the size of the place, although that is, obviously, terrifying: ten trillion neat bungalows slotted into ten trillion rectangular lots, stretching into Orange County and over the curvature of the Earth. What’s really unsettling about Los Angeles is how, from the air, it doesn’t really look like a city at all. That endless regular grid, with all those human bodies filed away; the bright specks shuttling along the avenues and onto the freeways: the sense of an enormous contraption, a massively complicated abacus with ordinary lives as its moving parts, flows of money and traffic and consumer goods and fame, zapping through logic gates, calculating—well, what? Once you’ve seen the city like that, it’s hard to be fully comfortable in whatever little bit of it you find yourself inhabiting. Here’s your nice house, here are your nice flowers, but you’re like Kelvin at the end of Solaris, living pleasantly on the surface of an alien star. Sam Kriss, Infinite America

Why Dune resonates so much today