Mystery, Authority, and The Will to Manipulate | Duncan Reyburn

Guest Column #024

The main trouble with many of the theories floating around these days is that they’re not theories but hallucinations.

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When the world presents itself as a perpetually unruly too-muchness, the will to manipulate often makes itself known with appalling ferocity. This has been especially noticeable since the world got covidified, and biopolitical technocracy found a way to get more than a few words in edgewise. During this time, there’s been a widespread rediscovery of the inhuman propensity to try to quash complexity into puny conceptual containers while preemptively dodging difficult questions. Even as the volume of the chatter has increased, the shape of our interactions has often been transformed into a range of gestures of avoidance. The meaning of being has been rendered simple: to be is to decide, control, diagnose, determine, identify, distinguish, categorize, confirm, manage, and fact-check. To be is to pick a side and stick with it, even when it becomes unhinged. In a word, to be is to manipulate.

Signs of James Burnham’s prophesied managerial revolution are everywhere around us thanks to this will to manipulation. Nor is this managerial hermeneutic, always accompanied by rigid bureaucratic regimens, the only one available. Still, it dominates this overmediated world. It presumes that what can be determined and delimited is all that is real. What can be fact-checked —always within parameters set by the rich and powerful— is all that matters. The chaos of coping with excessive managerialism is set aside as a freakish bug when it is, in fact, the central feature. It is precisely because such coping is more keenly felt, that it is more difficult to articulate. It is precisely because it is embodied —bound to its own unique quiddity more than to generalizable abstractions— that it is more convenient to ignore. 

During this plague, in the midst of what could have been the opportune time for all of us to have our calcified assumptions challenged and chipped away, the trend to commit to premature judgments has often intensified. Perhaps the will to manipulate is an attempt to recover a sense of intimacy with reality in the face of overwhelming alienation. After all, the ontological atmosphere was already contaminated with alienation long before the pandemic arrived. Perhaps the urge to restate and overstate all previously held certainties is born out of a desire to reclaim connection when the world stands over us like a bewildering monstrosity—like something H. P. Lovecraft dreamed up. Perhaps it reveals an urge to return to some prelapsarian state after a terrible fall, albeit via schizoid confabulation.

However, such a supposed return to innocence is really a further fall. The will to manipulate generates the very fragmentation it is trying to repair. Genuine simplicity, which attunes itself to being in all of its manifest mystery without annulling the necessity for humility, resonance, and faith, is replaced by the simplistic. This is the result of taking the world as built out of parts, rather than recognizing it as a whole, as a Gestalt.

So, yes, the world is bureaucratised by the will to manipulate. A nominalist fantasy is constructed to cope with lost realism. Boxes are set up for ticking. Surplus meanings are ridiculed for lacking pragmatic force. Even hesitancy becomes criminal and having an answer, whether in the form of a lockdown or a vaccine or a vaccine passport or Trudeauesque totalitarianism, might be confused with being reasonable. Resorting to the logic of the leper colony or the concentration camp is often mistaken for common sense. We’ve learned this again recently, as certain leaders and their supporters have merrily elected to tyrannize the unvaccinated. When a new variant of an old virus turned out to be less harmful, upholders of the managerial status quo have still wagered we should keep our fears firmly in place. Following the science has become a euphemism for keeping your fears firmly in place—as if science is some bizarre autonomous entity composed entirely of coherences and never contestations. As if science is the coagulation of feelings without referents. Baudrillard was right: real things still happen, but reality no longer holds as a metaphysical principle.

Since the masses have been beaten into submission by the ossification of the will to manipulate, it’s easy to assume this sort of thing is the new normal. That old interrogation technique of tiring out your opponent until they give in may still do the trick. Exposure is a euphemism for numbing. Switch on the lights of inquisition to blind people with too much information, and they’ll conform. Ironically, too much information is precisely why we struggle to understand. The age of transparency is also the age of ignorance.

And the age of ignorance is also one of empathy malfunction. Understanding and compassion, after all, involve a level of responsibility, and the will to manipulate abdicates responsibility. It’s the will to say, with sad resignation, “Look, everyone, it’s just reality, so the best we can do is react to it.” The ‘reality’ here is not reality per se, though; it is ‘reality’ as conceived of by the univocal mind, caught in the grip of the will to manipulate. It is reality equated with some apparently opaque appearance: ‘follow’ the ‘science’. We are soon rendered merely passive in the face of the seemingly obvious. We are left to react —agree or disagree— but given little room to reflect. Such reflection presupposes other modes of interpreting the world, and these are blocked by the (seemingly) obvious.

One of the chief temptations during this plague has been to set up a theoretical trap for reality to fall into. Everything we have not taken into account, everything that remains stubbornly hidden or confounding even when not hidden, is simply not real enough to matter to the will to manipulate. The will to manipulate is eminently ‘realistic’— which is why it clings so adamantly to illusions. Is it possible to decovidify a mind in the grip of the will to manipulate, perhaps by some kind of McLuhanesque reversal of the overheated medium? Chances are, as the pandemic ends, the will to manipulate will not disappear: it will simply migrate.

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This pandemic has often seemed like what Girard refers to as a crisis of distinctions, which describes how the pandemonium of the plague —the literalising of a psychopolitical virus— has brought so many into rivalry with everyone around them. Confusion exaggerates and confirms certain psychological disparities, as well as similarities. Clear answers are particularly welcome, even if they’re wrong, since they offer the promise of resolution. That said, what they provide in the end is not resolution but the multiplication of confusions and tyranny over personhood. 

Subjectivity is soon reduced to subjugation and subjection. Selves are exorcised by the managerial mind. Human struggles and deaths are turned into numbers. To a politician with a pandemic, everyone is a statistic. The objectifying of one sliver of the appearing world has been used to scapegoat the rest of reality. Thus, everyone is rendered as passive as possible. After all, passive people are easier to manipulate. Their inertia means that, once you get them going, they’ll likely stay the course already set for them. Unfortunately, rendering people passive tends to generate over-reactivity in those same folk.

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A fable told by Kafka symbolizes that common mistake of confusing certainty, that product of the will to manipulate, with understanding. A mouse is looking ahead, focusing his vision. “The world gets narrower with each passing day,” the mouse says to himself, admitting that this narrowness has helped keep his fears at bay. The mouse is alert. He can see ahead of him. There’s a mousetrap waiting. This is what he should avoid, right? Just then, when he is most aware of the trouble ahead, a cat announces itself behind him. 

The cat tells him that he should have changed his perspective and widened his horizon. Before the mouse can appreciate what this means, the cat gobbles him up. The mouse feared the mousetrap as if it was the only danger. He assumed that his end would be determined by his univocal minding of being. However, he instead came to an end chosen for him by reality itself. The will to manipulate reimagines the world as a space of absolute clarity. But this, Kafka reminds us, is not the world we live in. There are existential costs to idolising instrumentality. 

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The will to manipulate attempts to reduce being to knowing, even though the two were meant to be lovers. This turns out to be an exercise in trying to fit very large things into impossibly small receptacles. To convince ourselves that what we see is all there is, we miss the real danger: namely, the loss of contact with reality itself. The theoretical trap we set for reality does not hold enough reality to be genuinely realistic.

There is a particular temptation in our time, for instance, to confuse ‘following the science’ with knowing what is real. There is, mind you, an equal but opposite temptation to confuse adhering to any conspiracy with knowing what is real. The will to manipulate has given rise to both fanatical scientistic technocracy and rabid conspiratorialism. The difference in reasoning between them is one of degree, not of kind. Both manifest the will to manipulate.

The univocal mind that gives rise to the will to manipulate is evident in so many responses to the viral co(vi)dification of the world. Certainty proliferates; and the mass of people, like moths drawn to its unwavering electric light, nearly destroy themselves as they try to get closer to the promise of total transparency. Total transparency, of course, means nothing but blindness. We have all the information, and that is precisely why we struggle to understand. We have the facts and all the takes, and this is why the truth is so hard to situate. Paradoxically, idolising certainties creates anxiety.

Certain epidemiologists and co-conspiring health systems and political support structures hand out their managerial recommendations, and while these may make sense in a certain light, they can be baffling at the level of what they mean for life itself—for our actual existential situation. The kind of univocal reason that belongs to the will to manipulate has given rise to theories about the world that are partial at best. Indeed, the trouble with many theories floating around these days is that they’re not theories but hallucinations. If they were theories, most would accept that they’re full of holes. Most would hold them lighter, as mere attempts to deal with the impossible. Most would be willing to have their conceptions of things amended. But the proverbial mouse sees the mousetrap and nothing else. Unfortunately, that mouse is in charge of the rest of us. He is certain of the mousetrap because he has chosen to organise his pathologies around only the immediately conceivable. He has forgotten we are always governed by the inconceivable.

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I’m reminded of something I read about a woman of sixty named Lizzy, who had suffered several strokes in her occipital lobes that rendered her blind. She somehow wasn’t at all perturbed by this. “Nothing is bothering you?” her doctor asked her in one consultation. Lizzie was chipper when she responded that she was fine. The doctor got more specific. He asked her if she was having trouble with her vision. Lizzie responded that her vision was perfect.

The doctor then asked her to look around and tell him what she could see. Lizzie did this, moving her head around as if taking a look. “It's good to see friends and family, you know,” she said. “It makes me feel like I'm in good hands.” There was, as it happens, no one else in the room. This misalignment between what was there and what Lizzie could apparently ‘see’ continued. When the doctor asked her what he was wearing, she answered, “A casual outfit. You know, a jacket and pants.” He was wearing fairly smart clothes and a lab coat.

This is an extreme case. Still, it’s a useful parable of how perception can fail a person even while they’re convinced it’s working. If we’re not careful, perception can become a kind of trained incapacity or habitual insufficiency —a way of keeping the real out of mind. We can place chains on perception to stop it from operating at full capacity. Lizzie was hallucinating the world but she had only, at best, a tenuous connection to it. Still, she was so certain. She had an answer to every question. Each answer was clear. This was the will to manipulate speaking. The subtext was this: “I’m in control. I’m fine. Everything is okay.” So let’s be honest. No, Lizzie, you are not in control and you’re not fine; everything is not okay. 

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This will to manipulate is the will to de-situate the person, to remove the person from their actual world and to hand them over to flawed imaginings. Is that not the pattern we’ve all been forced into by so many managerial decisions in our time, especially over the past two years or so? Are we being denied our experience? Certainly, we’re strongly encouraged to reframe everything we experience these days through the abstract impositions set up by the will to manipulate. Take this concept as an example: social distancing. 

The idea of social distancing is of astonishing conceptual power. Of course, it makes epidemiological sense, but what is less easily noticed is the effect it has beyond epidemiological reason. It can convince us that our separateness from others is more real than the reality of our entanglement with them. By recasting others as either diseased or potentially diseased —and ourselves as the same— that simple, unphenomenological notion may cause us to lose sight of the face of the other that is at the root of the call to the ethical. It does not help that others are defaced by masks, which function as veils of otherness. Yes, these also make good epidemiological sense—although sense can become nonsense in certain contexts. My point: the supposed neutrality of epidemiological interventions is a myth. The veiling of otherness in the name of safety does not only keep out monstrosity, but beauty too. It hinders even as it helps.

The will to manipulate is horrifically practical, clinical, and utilitarian. In the name of care —not care about you, but care about the abstract placeholder, someone like you or someone like someone in a position similar but not identical to yours—the will to manipulate breeds indifference. As much as we may think of perception as direct and unmediated, our minds are actively creating the world as they perceive it. Unlike computers, which solve problems external to them, human consciousness is caught up in the very world it wants to understand. We are never passive to the facts. 

And there are no facts, in fact, only interpretations. I don’t mean this in the stupid post-truth sense that we can’t know what’s real. That would assume that there are no interpretations but only unprovable hypotheses —and hallucinations. Rather, I mean that what is real is always already caught up in our interpretations, and vice versa. We are already caught up in the world that is caught up in us. Negative feedback, which calls our posture towards the real into question, is possible only when self-enclosure fails. Thus, to the will to manipulate, I offer the following negative feedback: the idea that this pandemic is something that has merely happened to us is crazy. We made this.

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The man-made dimension of this pandemic has often been more disturbing than the consequences of literal viral contagion. What people do with terrible things is often worse than the things themselves. It is common for us to point at other people and claim that they are bedeviled by their biases while we —and those on our team— are seeing things clearly. I think of the way the culture war spilt over into the vax wars. The ‘others’ are interpreting the world, but ‘we’ have the truth, right? Ideology, like halitosis, is always what everyone else has; we, however, wake with minty-fresh breath. But those ‘others’ turn out to be mere projections of a mind in the throes of a psychotic episode. We can be certain that we have fallen prey to the will to manipulate as soon as the other —whether pro- or anti-vax, whether pro- or anti-lockdown and so forth— is demonised. Such dualisms proliferate like flies around the rotting, covidified political body. They are signs of a will to manipulate that’s just getting started.

One would hope —at leastm, I have hoped, as I have struggled to make sense of life in this covidified world—that this time of plague would have taught humanity that we are courting contingencies at every moment of our fragile being. However, we tend to naturalise our ignorance. It takes almost no effort to assume that what that ignorance produces is nothing but insight. As if we are perpetually fleeing from the mysteries of being, this time of pandemonium and pandemic has often entrenched people even more in their hallucinations of univocal being. The will to manipulate is often a reflex. It excludes what it cannot immediately reckon with.

Reality, however —as that transcendent otherness that escapes our formulations— can be a rather powerful autocorrection for this nominalist fantasy. Reality is pure negativity when compared to the pure positivity of the will to manipulate. You can believe all you like that the world is simple, that this epidemiologised environment is easy to parse. But the mind cannot successfully dissolve all perplexities simply by hurling determinations at them. To remain sane, it must therefore relinquish an idol or two now and then. 

In any case, the sheer brutality and magnitude of the psychological side-effects provoked by the managerial interventions during this pandemic are enough to suggest that no hallucination can be good enough. Society ought not to be reduced to a society of survival as it has been. Life is not the bare life conceived of by bureaucrats and so many people in the media whose chief aim seems to have become the manufacturing of fear.

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At least two aspects of the will to manipulate are particularly clear in the recently covidified world. They happen to have been described by the rather prescient Chinese political theorist and adviser Wang Huning in his 1991 book America Against America. He wasn’t talking about any pandemic or even any possible pandemic when he wrote that book, but he nevertheless clarifies something of the prevailing instrumentalising consciousness behind it. The conditions for a covidified world have been in place for quite some time already.

The first component is that “American society is the least mysterious society,” and the second is that the American tendency to “demystify” is frequently accompanied by a paradoxical counter-tendency to sacralize or “sanctify” to an impressive degree. As a non-American, this strikes me as true of many of the ideas that have been transmitted from that nation to the rest of us via the devil’s electric nervous system. It therefore also strikes me that the trends Huning spots are no longer unique to America. These now widely-exported modes of thought are particularly dangerous because they frame reality as a kind of malignity that must be controlled for by thought and technique. If ever there were a betrayal of our need for reverence, it is in this.

Huning suggests that “[p]eople grow up in this society with little mystery about any matter. This is an inseparable part of the American culture.” While many other nations, people groups, and cultures have a strong sense of mystery, America tends to obliterate it. There’s a trend to literalise everything. Literalising is a fascinating thing. It can happen only after poetic realizations have had the life throttled out of them (see the work of Owen Barfield for more on this). It can be sustained only if there is no room for gratitude and wonder. Wherever aesthetic expression has been impoverished, no matter the kind of creativity or creation, there you’ll find the literalising mind —the will to manipulate.

Funnily enough, most conspiracy theories —and now has been a time for so many— emerge as literalisations of senses that escape the univocal mind. One early theory, for example, held that the internet caused this plague. In a way, it did. The sheer volume of information being hurled at each of us, together with bureaucratic overreach, would have been impossible without the viral restructuring of reality produced by the internet. More recently, we have the conspiracy of getting de-vaccinated. Is this not perhaps, at least in part, an expression of a desire to be freed from that same bureaucratic overreach? As soon as the literalism is read poetically, it makes more sense. Conspiratorialism is the birth pangs of folk phenomenology. It is a sign, coincidentally, that the will to manipulate might be redeemed by higher levels of thought.

Still, literalism remains interpretive shrinkage. It is no longer widely accepted, especially in highly educated circles, that the universe is made of meaning and intentionality and narrative and mystery. Unfortunately, the moment we obliterate poetic, mythological, aesthetic truth, which unifies without reducing anything, the world fragments into a billion little shards. We cling to our bare facts, believing that doing so will help put things back together. But the result is even greater fragmentation.

Demystifying everything renders the world essentially incoherent. The best we can do, once the work of demystification has been done, is find structures and build infrastructure. But this is an attempt to build a coherent experience out of the very intentionality that has generated incoherence. The symbolic, which gathers together, is replaced with the diabolic, which tears asunder —as the etymologies of those words suggest. If anyone wonders why it is so difficult to persuade ideological opponents in our time, this is at least part of the reason: it is impossible to persuade anyone who does not share your symbolic cosmos.

Huning offers a range of examples of the obliteration of mystery, which I’ll build on here. For starters, do people in this global village marvel at the mystery of the heavens anymore? Generally, no. There’s too much light pollution—another manifestation of the will to manipulate. Generally, Huning contends, people don’t marvel at the heavens; they just make spaceships and explore. Do people contemplate the mystery of nature? Again, no. Nature is not a mystery but a place to be mined and destroyed. You can study it, dissect it, and scrutinise it if you like. This echoes Heidegger’s insight into how a technological state of mind —another expression of the will to manipulate— turns the world into a warehouse. The perceived malignity in being is tamed, or so this world-as-warehouse-thinking has it, by creating apps that call the world to your front door, only when you want it.

The theory of control at work here is that if it can be named and claimed in simple terms, you own it. This theory is another hallucination. The assumption creeps in that when there’s a problem, we should solve it using one or another technology. It’s the assumption, by the way, at work in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). A major plot point of that movie involves trying to solve deeply rooted human evil through more advanced technology. If the audience will buy that, and signs are that it already has, it’s because it echoes what they already secretly believe. To assume that so-called scientific interventions address our deepest spiritual needs is one kind of hubris. To assume that we have no spiritual needs is another.

“One of the primary conditions for the development of science and technology,” Huning writes, is “the belief that nothing is outside of man's ability to know and create.” The will to univocalise and manage is just this ability, which is an illusion. Not everything is within our power to know and create. Still, we should not forget that every ability is an inability. Even what we do manage to know and create —and thus instrumentalise— will produce unforeseen consequences. We may marvel at what our technologies can achieve, while forgetting the myriad nefarious possibilities that those same technologies make manifest.

So, what about the mystery of the human being? As so many politicians and policymakers seem to believe, there’s no mystery there either. Man is an object meant for study and a cog meant to succumb to whatever political hallucination happens to be popular. Where this is believed, whether consciously or unconsciously, the human body can be treated as material for the vivisectionist. Where this is believed, society will be made subject to humiliations of all kinds all in the name of science.

Behind this reduction to stuff is a deep desire to rebirth the self. This is an echo of a desire we all have, which cannot be annulled. It is the desire at the heart of every story: the desire to be saved. It is the same desire that is nostalgic for some paradise lost. Thanks to materialism and the obliteration of otherness, however, this deeply human, profoundly shared soteriological dimension is narcissified —that is, made in the image of whichever atomized self wants to be saved. This hallucination produces further mimetic rivalry, violence, and scapegoating. Salvation always comes with a sacrifice, of course, but it can only be real there where self-sacrifice reigns. Only self-sacrifice allows for non-consumable otherness. Sadly, where this is not realized, others and otherness are sacrificed instead.

Unfortunately, since demythologising everything serves the annihilation of genuine otherness, self-sacrifice becomes unthinkable. Narcissistic hallucinations murder the unfamiliar. All of this is the result of trusting the will to manipulate to have the first and final say. Instead of assuming, for instance, that answers can only arise once the whole story has been heard, now we only have answers —things to agree or disagree with. It’s almost impossible to hold the middle ground in a world that’s in the grip of the will to manipulate.

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Huning also points out that there is also a trend in America —that is, everywhere— to sacralise or sanctify. It is human to worship, after all. But what does one worship when one has done away with the divine? Sacralising or sanctifying, Huning points out, is not the same as deifying, since that would presuppose reclaiming some intimation of the beyond. Rather, the trend is to elevate things in the mind that have already been demystified. “The process of sanctification,” Huning writes, “is the elevation of an earthly phenomenon to a very high status. The process is not initiated by any one person or organization, but is a process of socialization.” 

In other words, if enough people believe that some tiny aspect of the world is worthy of our attention, it clearly is. That small thing doesn’t account for reality, of course, but if the crowd says it does —well, then it does. The chief problem here is that the knowledge of reality —which is participatory even before it is articulated— is substituted with mere consensus —which is articulated even if no participation exists. Trouble is, the hallucination is not private anymore, but public. 

We have many examples of this sanctifying process. We have celebrities, influencers, and hype around new technologies, for starters. In this covidified world, hospitals have been turned into churches and medical staff are now our priests and saints; vaccines have replaced the baptismal font and the willfully unvaccinated have become the new apostates. Mere agreement about certainties has replaced faith in mysteries. I do not want to disparage the efforts made by many well-intentioned and often very ethically motivated people in the health profession. My issue is not with them but with idolising one limited conception of being. The idolisation of the health system, however, is not a religion, but —like that other ideology, wokism— a diabolical caricature of religion. Unlike true religion, it cannot abide mystery. Such a caricature of religion turns out to echo a further dimension of that archetypal desire for salvation. Where demythologising echoes the need for self-denial, albeit in an inverted form, sanctifying echoes the need to worship, likewise in an inverted form. It stops being about self-denial and ends up becoming about self-assertion and self-aggrandisement instead.

Huning’s description of demystification and sanctification turns out to be the expansion of an old media adage: “First, simplify, then exaggerate.” That old media adage, as a formula for disproportion, had and has a simple function; namely, to get news to travel. It’s an adage meant for the viral age. Consent and not illumination is the point. Sharing the hallucination —not challenging it, not questioning it, not asking how it fits into the larger scheme of existence— is the aim. To sell newspapers, to encourage people to hit like, to share, to spread the contagion—that is the point. Simplify, then exaggerate! It’s the motto of a world in the throes of a spiritual seizure.

Arguably, what we most need when the world shows itself as chaos is mystery and a genuine sense of the holy —a principle transcending both order and chaos, traversing while uniting them. We need that which is not us; we need that which we cannot reduce to what we think we understand. We need sheer otherness to make a claim on us. What we need is a way to live with and through everything that has happened and is still happening. Against the tide of the unphenomenological, we need to recover the phenomenological: a deep attention and attunement to our being in the world. We need the mind of the contemplative.

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I take seriously that the will to manipulate serves a function, of course. It’s a part of us. But it is one thing to notice that you have a useful tool for some things and quite another to claim that it is the best tool for dealing with all things. It is one thing to claim that a key can open a door or two, and quite another to say that it can open every door. If the key doesn’t fit the door you’re trying to open, perhaps it is the wrong key. Perhaps it is the wrong door. It is here —where the will to manipulate fails— that there is hope. At the moment the key won’t work, it can occur to you and me that it’s time to find another key or another way.

I recall, at the beginning of the pandemic, how one high profile South African epidemiologist kept on repeating that the ultimate objective in this time of crisis was to learn to “live with this virus.” He was adamant that epidemiological measures were not gods and absolutes to be worshipped. He was cautious in his assessments and keenly aware that the issue was not just managerial but existential. Management can only get you so far. Still, his wisdom was not perceived by everyone. Managing the virus has tended to hold prominence over the question of living with it. When the omicron variant was discovered in South Africa, the world lost its mind for a moment —again. I watched the will to manipulate reassert itself in its most reactive form. Extreme measures were adopted where moderation would have made more sense. So many people who needed to be treated with compassion were forced into the anxiety of trying to act, again, as cogs in a covidified machine. Overreach seems to be a sign of the times. It’s as if “Lessons Learned” must always get quickly get filed under “Things to Forget.”

Nevertheless, at the time of my writing this, we are witnessing a large-scale narrative collapse. Precisely because it tries to set a trap for reality to fall into, the will to manipulate forgets that reality itself is the trap. Every time you build Babel, unity gives way to a world of miscommunications as people try to justify why they believed x or y back then, even though it’s now been proven to be hogwash. Like the cat in Kafka’s tale showing up abruptly to confound the anticipations of the mouse, eventually, the truth makes itself known. 

Sometimes we are lucky enough to have been on the side of the real all along. Sometimes we become painfully aware of how misaligned with the truth were. Of course, the will to manipulate doesn’t ever completely go away. Many are in its grip and will do anything to keep their illusions alive. Still, in narrative collapse, perhaps as the world once again presents itself as a perpetually unruly too-muchness, albeit a slightly different kind of too-muchness than what we had previously faced, we will start to realise that the real question —the question beneath the one of how to live with this virus— has always been: How will you live in general, in this world of always-too-muchness? I have a few answers of my own, and my suspicion is that you do too. Chances are good, though, that those answers won’t be summarisable in terms that the will to manipulate can understand.

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Still for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960.

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Duncan Reyburn is an associate professor at the the University of Pretoria whose scholarship and teaching focuses on creativity and philosophical hermeneutics. Among other things, he is the author of Seeing Things as They Are: G. K. Chesterton and The Drama of Meaning (Cascade, 2016). He tweets @duncanreyburn and writes at https://duncanreyburn.substack.com/.