Author: Lars Iyer

The philosopher is always a not-yet philosopher. A not even philosopher.

The philosopher can never coincide with herself. Philosophy is the ache – the desire for philosophy. Philosophy is the full knowledge that being a philosophy is impossible. That you’ll never become what you seek to become.

Philosophy is the perpetual as not. You never philosophise as a philosopher. And we knew that.

Which is why idiocy is so important. The experience of idiocy.

 

Idiocy belongs to philosophy. It’s the most intimate part of philosophy. It’s the core of the philosophy. And weren’t we the truest proof of that?

Always experiencing ourselves as having nothing to say. As having no ideas. No means by which to express them. As never being entitled to philosophise.

Never wanting to pass ourselves off as philosophers. Never playing the part of the philosophical master.

 

The point is to affirm idiocy. Not to see it as a deficiency. Not to see ourselves as lacking anything.

The completeness of our stupidity: that’s what we expressed in our best moments. In our joy. Stupidity without apology: that’s what we became. The happiness of idiocy: it is possible to speak of that? Stupidity attained. Lived.

 

Dwelling in idiocy. A whole ethos of idiocy, a way of perceiving and engaging with the world, with ourselves, with others …

 

Perfect idiots. Beautiful idiots. Beautiful in our idiocy and because of it.

 

You have to know how to read idiocy. There’s a whole idiocy’s hermeneutics.

Perhaps it takes a non-idiot to understand it. A non idiot standing outside it. Who’s not part of it. Who doesn’t dwell within it.

Which is why Cicero never let herself reach the plane of total drunkenness. Why she held herself back. Why she never entered idiocy’s immanence. Idiocy’s completeness. She could never disappear into idiocy without remainder. As we could! As we did, almost nightly!

 

Weeping idiocy. With tears of joy. With tears if idiot-joy, running down our cheeks.

 

Idiocy’s the answer.

Idiocy’s the question. A duh. A scratching the head.

 

Great is erring, that’s what Heidegger wrote. Great is the uh-ing of the perfect idiot. Great is the duh-ring of the truly stupid.

It’s all about governing the future. Measuring the future! Analysing the future! Acting upon the future!

We’re at an inflection point. It’s all about preventing further breakdown and perpetual crisis. .. It’s all about trying to uncover a better, more sustainable, peaceful future for our people and planet …

We have to protect the needs and interests of future generations. Their well-being! It’s all about ensuring the future we want.

It’s all about transformation and renewal! About building and striving! About continuous and endless advancement towards the right things! Nothing can stand still! It’s all about paths and steps and road maps! About keeping pace! About acceleration!

The future depends on us. We have to demonstrate that we have the right amount of knowledge, foresight, skill, predictive capabilities to shape it in advance.

 

Only careful and continuous management can save us. A vast tutelary power. Defusing tensions. Resolving conflicts. Overseeing the pacific settlement of disputes.

 

The Organisational Management blueprint! The Organisational Management schema! The Organisational Management future, waiting to be opened before us.

Organisational Management has expanded human dominion. Into the future!

Seeing further than others: that’s what the Organisational Management can do. And authority rests with the one who sees farthest. Who see better than us! And know better than us! And want the best for us, as Organisational Management does …

Organisational Management can see better than us! It can model the future.

This is how Organisational Management grounds its power. This is how it secures its legitimacy. This is how it makes good on its lack of grounds. The absence of any moral justification.

The culmination of the scientific revolution! Of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment! A veritable revolution! A great leap forward!   

The future is a project: their project. There must be no alternative to what they’ve planned to happen. They had dibs. They have the AI. They have the Science. All our institutions must be aligned! All our organisations! Our networks! Our systems! Our fora! For our own good!

 

It’s all about our global neighbourhood. An agreed global framework for actions and policies! A strategy for global governance! To coordinate policy. For exploring areas of common concern!

Everyone and everything is to included in the general project of material and moral improvement.

It’s about improving our moral sensibilities. Our spiritual advancement! They want to lead us to salvation. Under their benevolent guidance!

 

They are in sole possession of the truth. No one must be allowed to corrupt the flock! Everyone must be brought into the Organisational Management sheepfold. Every head must be accounted for.

There must be no strays! No sickness in the head! Some can be rehabilitated. But some, regrettably, must be exiled. Excluded! If the interests of the good and the whole are to be served.

 

There is no authority other than Organisational Management. There is no source of truth.

This is why they fight so hard against misinformation! Disinformation! Malinformation! This is why they’re seizing new powers to combat countervailing narratives!

 

The absolute necessity of global governance … Problems far exceed the capacity of any particular state …

Inspecting the model.

It doesn’t show the underground levels.

Yes it does. The Apex detachable.

So it is. It just goes down and down.

The whole campus is just aching to be destroyed. Don’t you think? These towers …

Who by? Who would destroy it?

I don’t know. The people who live outside it. Zombie hordes. Whatever.

There are campus shields. Designed to keep anyone we want out. They’re really just in case. They aren’t actually activated yet.

What are you so afraid of? You’re gearing up for some emergency. Or you’re going to bring it about – that emergency.

It’s supposed to be a stronghold, the campus. In case things go bad. A place of last resort. For whenever what happens out there, happens. We’ll be safe. Or the campus will be.

And then you can go into full organising and managing mode. Organise or euthanise, right?

We’re not actually evil.

What’s the threat that you’re dealing with? What’s the risk? What’s happening out there that the rest of us don’t know about? What do you know that we don’t? Have you made First Contact, or something? Are the magnetic poles about to shift?

These are angry times, philosopher. They’re planning for collapse, I know that. The billionaires. All the bigwigs, who fly in. They do all these tabletop simulations here. Like, what would happen in food production collapsed.

If they made food production collapse, you mean.

If we lost all the sources of energy.

If we blew up the pipelines, you mean.

If there was total financial wipeout.

Which there will be.

If there was nuclear war.

Which they’re trying to provoke.

All these apocalyptic scenarios.

Manufactured apocalypses. Very convenient.

Such a cynic.

What the Plaza for?: that’s what I want to know.

It’s a bit big, I suppose.

You fell into a hole called philosophy, and now you’re never getting out again.

Maybe we could get Organisational Management itself to fall in.

How?

Ask a question so great that it devours the campus.

Second tier friends.

I like your optimism. No, really, I do.

Would my 15 year old self be proud of what I am doing?

This is a now moment for me.

I think I’m incapable of companionship.

Pillowtalk.

Are we wasting our lives? Tell me we’re not wasting our lives.

So on-brand.

Can’t we just talk about nice things?

Is there a pill for this?

Routed into the spam filter of life.

Having a moment of lucidity.

I feel like I’m unravelling. 

I’m drunk, but not enough.

I’m sorry – I have to be alone. For, like, years.

You can actually live off hatred.

‘Do you have a love life? I don’t even had a like life?’

I love parties. Going to them. Preparing for them. Giving them. Recovering from them.

White jeans were never in. You can’t carry them off. No one could.

Wallpapered his room with quotes from Bataille.

This is the future. This is what our grandchildren will be smoking.

I could use a really good orgasm. In a sports-fuck kinda way.

I’m getting a chub just thinking about it.

Thee temple of postgrad youth. Sex, magick and so on.

What are you wanking off to nowadays?

Tell her you’ve got a raging boner with her name on it.

Notorious horn dog. Like a walking hard on.

Knit your own orgasm lesbian bullshit.

There’s just no place for us in this world.

We used to fuck our golden Retriever. He was consenting.

Gun dogs are very good for blow jobs. Very soft mouths. Bred to be delicate with prey.

I might buy a sexbot. Clicking on 35 coolest robots to have sex with.

Scratch the surface, and there’s just, like, more surface.

Please rise above yourself.

You’re a barrel of monkeys.

FUK BOI numberplates.

Like slapping God across the face.

All-hoody wardrobe

Ride the bravery train.

When you kiss for the first time, and you feel your entire body is on vibrate.

Porking on a semi-regular basis.

There are wines you should drink on your knees,

 

Dionysius enters the grape and transforms it: that’s how the Greeks understood fermentation. It’s the Greek version of transubstantiation.

Dionysus entered the wine and died, more like.

 

The drunkenness of Noah: we should ponder that. Run a seminar on it.

 

Nothing to excess: that’s what was inscribed above the gate of Apollo’s temple, in Delphi, along with Know Yourself.

Only to excess: that was our motto. Fuck yourself.

 

The perfect balance of stalk and fruit. The soul, speaking through it.

 

The cellar in which her wines lay dreaming.

 

The divine orderliness of Cicero’s wine.

 

This wine flows like slime. Like drool.

Beelzebub’s drool.

It’s sticky.

Our disappointment. Our solemn walks along the shore (we’d long since moved to the coast, by then.) Along Longsands. Kind Edwards’s beach. Up to St Mary’s Lighthouse. Up to Seaton Sluice. All the way to Blyth, sometimes.

Our mourning ferry trips, from North Shields to South Shields and back again. Our grief chips, eaten in North shields, looking out at the waters. Our mussels of sorrow. Our cockles of melancholy. Our crab rolls of infinite desolation. Our fish ‘n ‘chips wakes.

And what about you, Fiver? Do you believe in these things, too?

There’s … another world, I know that. And it’s very close to us. So close. The angels and demons are battling just above our heads.

Is there an afterlife?

Yes, there is.

Is God real?

Maybe. I think so. There is … goodness. A great goodness. Just as there’s a great evil.

I’m glad you think that. I am.

And you’re really a punk? Can’t be many punk Christians. Are there punk priests, too? Are there punk churches? What’s a punk service like? Are there, like, Siouxsie and the Banshees masses? She did a version of the Lord’s sprayer, didn’t she?

Hang on, didn’t Johnny Rotten call himself the antichrist?

 

Was Jesus basically a punk? Is Christianity the new punk now? Has it gone underground?

 

Is there a punk philosophy, too? Punk philosophy as a spiritual practice?

God hates this. I know that. He hates all this.

Does he hate us?

He loves us. Even you. Every one of us is the centre of his love. Everything we do matters. Everything is known – remembered. Nothing is lost, not even in this abomination.