Longsands.
Walking with Cicero.
The sea, very far out. Is it an extra low tide? Will it be followed by an extra high tide? Is the tsunami coming in?
Cicero, quoting: Everything is empty, everything is past. All our wells are dried up, even the sea has receded. Alas, where is there still a sea in which one could drown?
Exactly! Exactly!
The evil is massing, like clouds, Cicero says. The evil’s thickening. Covering the sky. We look up, and we don’t know what we’re looking at. We see the darkness, and we don’t know what it is.
Black waves will break, Cicero says. A black tide is coming in. Black skies are coming. But everything will look exactly the same.
What's that got to do with the Organisational Management move? Ava asks.
Shh – listen, I say.
You ask me about your role in all this, Cicero says. About what to do. You tell me you despair. But I say, hold on to your despair, because it's a way of becoming free of the world. I say understand your despair as a gift. Because it's an incitement, an awakening; a calling, and even the highest calling. Because it means you're not part of the demonic realm.
This world is refusable, Cicero says. It doesn’t have to be your world. We don’t have to succumb. You must live as not. Be Organisational Management philosophers as not Organisational Management philosophers. Be applied ethics philosophers as not applied ethics philosophers. Be tame academics as not tame academics. You have to live against the grain of the world.
Against the grain of Organisational Management? Hans asks. But what good will that do?
It will intensify your resistance, Cicero says. Your thought.
But we’ll be too busy teaching business ethics, or whatever! Ava says.
Your philosophy will have to go underground, Cicero says. Your philosophy will become an active principle of subversion, revolt and antinomianism. It will be an inward revolution. Pure refusal. Pure retreat. Pure withdrawal. Negativity will become an active principle. A way of living against the world.
Sounds like an active nihilism, I say.
Nihilism will flip and become something else, Cicero says. You’ll discover how to live in the opposite direction.
In the opposite direction of what? Ava asks.
Organisational Management, Cicero says. The endless administration of the world. Its ceaseless management. The coordinates we’re given. The social coordinates. The governmental coordinates. The biopolitical coordinates. The philosophical coordinates. You’ll become cryptophilosophers, working in secret. Working against everything.
Pondering.
So the Organisational Management move will be the making of us? Hans asks. How could that be? I mean, look at us … Look at Ava! Look at Carl – he's hardly the future of anything, is he!
Thanks, Ava says.
He's right, I say. We just make things worse. We're just a bad joke …
You’re full of disgust, Cicero says. You feel horror – at yourselves; that's your gift. There's a dynamics to your self-hatred. To your thrashings. To your convulsions. There's a life. You'll find salvation where it’s least sought. Where it's least expected. You'll find salvation in the lack of salvation. You'll find hope in the lack of hope. Which is why your role will be unique. You'll be the doom speakers. You'll voice disgust’s disgust. You'll be the philosophers of horror’s horror.
But why us and not you? I ask. Aren’t you the person to do this? You have the smarts. The background. You’ve done the reading. You see things as they are.
I have my role, Cicero says. You have yours.
So we have to write things? I ask. Magnum opuses? Start a new school of philosophy? Or is it about a practice of philosophy? A way of living philosophy?
Cultivate a true desire for the end of the world, and everything will come from that, Cicero says.
But we already want the end of the world, I say. We know the hideousness of it all. And we know our hideousness …
Not yet, Cicero says. You haven’t reached the depths.
You mean it's going to get worse? Hans asks. We're going to feel worse?
I thought you said we were the doom speakers, Ava says. That we were to voice horror’s horror, or whatever.
You will be, Cicero says. The hatred of air for air. The sky’s hatred of the sky. The earth’s self-hatred. That's what you'll know. That's what you'll speak – as prayer.
With the move to Organisational Management? Hans asks.
Exactly, Cicero says.
It’s like you welcome it – like you wanted it to happen …, I say.
There's a logic to what's happening, Hans says. Once you see it, you almost want it to accelerate. It's like they're intensifying the pressure. Like they're forcing their agenda ever harder. They’ll stop at nothing. We should just slit our throats now. We should hang ourselves now. It would make sense. It makes more sense than anything.
That's what they want, Ava says. For us to destroy ourselves.
I want the wave to break, Hans says. I want the flood. I want to go under.
And I want to think there’s an ark somewhere, I say. That will save all the good things – not us, maybe. Not the likes of us. But there’s an ark that carries all the beautiful things, all the good things. That saves the goodness.
All of creation longs for destruction, Cicero says. To be put out of its misery. But that cannot happen until the deepest nihilistic fall of the world.
What if we’re the madness? Hans asks. What if we’re the ones who should be eliminated? What if our destruction is the solution? Mad people like us. Mad so-called philosophers like us. Mad so-called thinkers, who've taken thought too far. Until it's merged with madness …
Maybe we've driven ourselves mad, Hans says. Spent too much time in mad company. Too much time reading mad books. Studying mad philosophy. Following you, Cicero.
There’s a way of living in disgust – pure disgust, Cicero says. There's a way of living in purifying hatred. You have to live in absolute tension with the world.
Is that what we're doing? Ava asks. What about you?
I'm not like you, Cicero says. I’m not a misfit … I’m not maladjusted. I’m too much of the world. Moses died before reaching the Promised Land: you know that. It was for the young to inherit the future.
But Organisational Management is hardly the Promised Land! I say.
It’s the opposite of the Promised Land: that’s the point, Cicero says.
Dialectics …, Hans says. So that's why you retired, or whatever … To abandon us to the end …
That's why you brought us here, I say. This was the plan all along. You knew what was coming …
That's why you trained us …, Ava says.
The ultimate source of hope in this world is its end, Cicero says. Don't forget that.
Work in Progress 