“The psychological conflict raging within individuals cannot but have casualties. Marazzi is researching the link between the increase in bi-polar disorder and post-Fordism and, if, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, schizophrenia is the condition that marks the outer edges of capitalism, then bi-polar disorder is the mental illness proper to the ‘interior’ of capitalism. With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, capitalism is itself fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance of ‘bubble thinking’) and depressive come-down. (The term ‘economic depression’ is no accident, of course). To a degree unprecedented in any other social system, capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations. Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.”

— Mark Fisher,
Capitalist Realism (chapter 5)

“The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls).”

— Mark Fisher,
Capitalist Realism (chapter 5)

“It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.”

— Mark Fisher,
Capitalist Realism (chapter 5)

“To become moral is not in itself moral. – Subjection to morality can be slavish or vain or self-interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or an act of despair, like subjection to a prince: in itself it is nothing moral.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Dawn of Day (97)

A post-capitalist world is possible!

Matrix (and similar) films are not made just for mindless consumption, nor are they really so much about AI or technology in general. Instead, they are metaphors, on the one hand, for socio-political systems of control (and oppression, exploitation), and, on the other hand, for revolutionary hope and liberation from those systems.

Liberalism as an 'order' founded on oppressive rationalism [rationalization]

“With the time of the bourgeoisie begins that of liberalism. People want to see what is ‘rational’, ‘suited to the times’, etc., established everywhere. The following definition of liberalism, which is supposed to be pronounced in its honour, characterizes it completely: ‘Liberalism is nothing else than the knowledge of reason, applied to our existing relations.’ Its aim is a ‘rational order’, a ‘moral behaviour’, a ‘limited freedom’, not anarchy, lawlessness, selfhood. But, if reason rules, then the person succumbs. Art has for a long time not only acknowledged the ugly, but considered the ugly as necessary to its existence, and takes it up into itself; it needs the villain. In the religious domain, too, the extremest liberals go so far that they want to see the most religious man regarded as a citizen, that is, the religious villain; they want to see no more of trials for heresy. But against the ‘rational law’ no one is to rebel, otherwise he is threatened with the severest penalty. What is wanted is not free movement and realization of the person or of me, but of reason – a dominion of reason, a dominion. The liberals are zealots, not exactly for the faith, for God, but certainly for reason, their master. They'll tolerate no impertinence, and therefore no self-development and self-determination; they impose their will as effectively as the most absolute rulers.”

— Max Stirner

“War is another thing. I am by nature warlike. To attack is among my instincts. To be able to be an enemy, to be an enemy – that perhaps presupposes a strong nature, it is in any event a condition of every strong nature. It needs resistances, consequently it seeks resistances: the aggressive pathos belongs as necessarily to strength as the feeling of vengefulness and vindictiveness does to weakness.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (§2. 7)

“If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible.”

— Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (ch. 1, §4)

Unser neuer Dreipfeil

“People are at pains to distinguish law from arbitrary orders [Befehl], from an ordinance: the former comes from a duly ennoscriptd authority. But a law over human action (ethical law, state law, etc.) is always a declaration of will, and so an order. Yes, even if I myself gave myself the law, it would yet be only my order, to which in the next moment I can refuse obedience. One may well enough declare what he will put up with, and so deprecate the opposite of the law, making known that in the contrary case he will treat the transgressor as his enemy; but no one has any business to command my actions, to say what course I shall pursue and set up a code to govern it. I must put up with it that he treats me as his enemy, but never that he makes free with me as his creature, and that he makes his reason, or even unrea­son, my plumb-line.”

— Max Stirner

“States last only so long as there is a ruling will and this ruling will is looked upon as tantamount to the own will. The lord's will is—law. What do your laws amount to if no one obeys them? What your orders, if nobody lets himself be ordered? The state cannot forbear the claim to determine the individual's will, to speculate and count on this. For the state it is indispensable that nobody have an own will; if one had, the state would have to exclude (lock up, banish, etc.) this one; if all had, they would do away with the state. The state is not thinkable without lordship [Herrschaft] and servitude [Knecht­schaft] (subjection); for the state must will to be the lord of all that it embraces, and this will is called the 'will of the state'.

He who, to hold his own, must count on the absence of will in others is a thing made by these others, as the master is a thing made by the servant. If submissiveness ceased, it would be all over with lordship.”

— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“The own will of me is the state's destroyer; it is therefore denounced by the state as ‘self-will’. Own will and the state are powers in deadly hostility, between which no ‘perpetual peace’ is possible. As long as the state asserts itself, it represents own will, its ever-hostile opponent, as unreasonable, evil; and the latter lets itself be talked into believing this—indeed, it really is such, for no more reason than this, that it still lets itself be talked into such belief: it has not yet come to itself and to the consciousness of its dignity; hence it is still incomplete, still amenable to fine words.”

— Max Stirner