The Homeopathy of Evil. 
The Coming Man Revisited.

"The superman appears where man becomes meaningless. He is man capable of 
life in a world without meaning. The shattering of the old moral and 
hierarchical order does not shatter him. He finds his own rank and 
morality. All things become fluid again." - F.G. Jünger 

Disaster no longer threatens from outside. There no longer exists a 
tempting external world, inhabited by some evil genius who stains the 
virgin soul with propaganda. Society is no longer to blame. Nor does evil 
come from within anymore, out of some cesspool of banal urges and 
repressed desires that return with a vengeance. Nowadays, evil resides 
between the self and the world's double glazing. Beyond the id and its 
environment, there presently appear unforeseen thermopane spaces, the 
"interhuman sphere" where evil flourishes. Evil is not an absolute value, 
but a transient, indefinable vacuum created at ever-different points. You 
cannot submit to it nor support it. To resist it or to profess it is 
impossible. Flirtations with evil are idle. The slogan of the ecstatic 
nineties - "Dare to be wrong" - is imploding.

Lombroso is a legendary figure from the age of determinant science, when 
moral standards still existed and Good and Evil were still 
interrelatable. Today, images of the hairy-face, the hook-nose, the 
pockmarked cross-eyes, the hunchbacked witch, the drivelling lecher, the 
Neapolitan starter, and the Caucasian type mainly betray ethnic innocence 
and folkloric naiveté. Something similar is happening in psychology. The 
categories of both inner and outer have become popularized and 
implausible. Today, people suffer from troubled childhoods like they used 
to from complexion problems. There was a time when causes still had 
effects and both were stable, but nowadays people just don't know what 
they're doing anymore. A chain of missing links: "I'd never suspected it 
of him, not even in retrospect." Life's stages: Those who don't side with 
the wrong camp before they turn thirty have no conscience; those who fail 
to see what's right after that have no common sense. The cultural-despair 
model teaches that good automatically culminates in bad: Every good 
intention already bears the trace of a miserable outcome. Every personal 
initiative ends up as fierce commerce. Good takes root in Evil, where it 
flourishes till its inevitable return as Evil - "ashes to ashes, dust to 
dust."

The only way out is to do nothing - that is, the safe Nothing, not the 
horror vacui of men like Cioran and Camus. Conversely, malicious 
intentions need not necessarily exclude a positive outcome. The UN peace 
mission's adage: "Withhold all aid until a country is completely in 
ruins." The Internet, formerly a decentralized World War III command 
structure, is now leading to an unforeseen friendship among nations, a 
pen pal club without borders, in the best UNESCO tradition. Nowadays, one 
progresses from evil to good; but those who still stick to the "golden 
age of the Cold War"'s supercooled model, which saw advancement and 
progressive conformation as signs of personal development, inevitably end 
up members of the melancholy platoon of demagogues like Buchanan, Haider, 
Zhuganov, and Helms. At the same time, there remains the possibility of a 
pole reversal at all times: the Internet's cowardly child pornographers 
turn out more cunning than the benign intentions of vigilant 
'Netwatchers. Porn for kids is the key that will lock up the 'Net, though 
it remains unclear whether the evil resides in the Web regulators' 
puritanical attitude or in the software of smutty sex search engines. The 
craving for the Positive is the abstract vector. The sanitary 
organization of life prompts unlimited optimism and an obligation to look 
hopefully at the future, despite everything. Assume the American smile, 
and you will be beyond blame. Once liability has expired, there is no one 
to stop you from going on your way. Behavior and furniture indicate a 
susceptibility to anything that might pop up. As long as the sanitary 
attitude's contributions are duly paid, you may rest assured of the 
promise of a containable existence. But as soon as this personal economy 
of Good Hope collapses by painful coincidence, there is nothing to 
prevent a free fall into the dark.

As soon as we leave the bad-to-worse model in favor of the phantasmatical 
from-bad-to-good - or the more realistic "not-very-good-is-it" - or 
possibly even from-bad-to-indifferent - then life loses its unequivocal 
orderliness. There is no longer a point in defining or pinning down Evil: 
to understand it has become impossible for simple laypersons, now that 
the list of evildoers and baneful causes has grown so long and vague that 
even negative thinking cannot grasp it. Try, yourself, grappling with the 
question of whether capitalism is the problem or the solution some 
consciousness-raising weekend; it's enough to break anybody's back. No 
one even considers presenting the computer with this kind of 
mega-questions anymore. Now that causes have ceased to matter, attention 
shifts to the design of the golden mean. "Why have airplanes at all, now 
that we have the Internet?" "Africa shouldn't need to be poor now that we 
have low-orbit satellites." Having a blast for one night prevents 
long-term flipping out. Wrongdoing in order to prevent worse: steady 
decline can be averted by surgical operations on the level of politics 
(the Gulf War), the social (business junkets, inspiring informal 
conferences on new media), and sports; but also on the scale of 
individual psychology: a personal acceleration, alternated with extended 
low-intensity lifestyle periods. We know the outcome of World Revolution 
and the Long March: The former changes nothing, the latter gets bogged 
down. What remains is the spasmodic initiative to save the whole mess. As 
in those T-shirts: "No Time to Waste." Where engagement and no-nonsense 
may intermingle in either direction according to the time of day, ethics 
have no role to play. Polarization or reconciliation? Sure, nice idea. 
Midlife crises lead to nothing, now that people grow old too fast and are 
forever young. The converted fifty-year-old who crosses over from 
problems to solutions; the catechism as an unread bestseller; the absent 
fantasies on reading De Sade; the former dissident who thinks of the 
Communists as the great democrats; the suicide guide for bon vivants; the 
Liberal who warns against the consequences of global deregulation; the 
95-year-old who died "completely unexpectedly"; the American neo-Nazi 
extradited to Germany; thieving police; battering in lesbian couples: 
"All of that, and much more." The revaluation of all values has begun, 
and there is no way of stopping it. Nietzsche served his turn; none of 
the good man's anxious and excited writings can impress us anymore. When 
the masses and their elite pass beyond Good and Evil in a single move, 
the whole theology of ethics becomes a mixture of private notions. 
Everyone has their own day about it; "I'd just as soon say nothing."

When Evil becomes a fleeting hobby - a process of growth we all have to 
go through, a chance experience, a good idea taking a wrong turn, a vain 
bid for worldwide renown - then even conversion and reflection won't 
help. Dallying with texts or brooding on personal experience is just 
another pastime, not serious study, let alone harsh criticism. The 
distinction between the interpretive clergy and the mucking about of 
perfidious commoners has been lost. Sinister "hate speech" is at odds 
with the academic (in)difference industry that dumps every conflict on 
the theme market. The delinquent rhymester makes a fine confessant who 
can count on the judgmental classes' recognition without the need to 
provide insights. The relation between action and words has been 
disturbed; we now enter the stage of failing judges and impotent 
politicians, at prey to the hegemony of ambivalence or, rather, 
multivalence, like everybody else. The old specter of Evil keeps on 
haunting massive European Liberation Festivals, restored concentration 
camps, the Anne Frank House's new visitors' center, and American 
Holocaust museums. These exorcist rites no longer find a foothold in 
everyday order; they take provisional refuge in their monumental 
antithesis. Italian neo-Fascists present themselves as outspoken 
anti-Fascists. There is nothing left to say about historical Fascism, but 
plenty about its ill-considered presentation back then and the present 
logistical inability to cope with historical tourism's traffic flows. The 
urgent appeal of "no more Auschwitz" has lost all meaning after Bosnia. 
It's become a truth well understood by the perpetrators. What moral power 
could there ever be in the slogan "no more Bosnia"?

"We are agreed, then?" Beef-fed cattle, Japanese car industries taken 
over by Americans, South Korea as Great Britain's main investor, walkmen 
used for insulation, the gathering of knowledge supplanted by that of 
information. Pragmatism turns against itself on pragmatic grounds. The 
incongruous has become the reasonable. Now, all we have to deal with in 
the line of orientation are the last of the negationists, the buffoonish 
and dismal who deny the Holocaust, adore Stalin, still defend the 
Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Pact, and approve of Hiroshima. They are not the 
eternal have-beens, but the scapegoats who channel our fears as a 
conversation-starter - drifting Sputniks used for orientation by 
opinionating bodies running amok. Every consistent disturbance factor 
risks ending up part of this role play.

Medially speaking, the talk show's evil of the day - mass murder, civil 
war, blind terror, kiddie porn, earthquakes, epidemics, airplane 
disasters, etc. - is as neutralized as the old evils. "How could this 
ever have happened?" The idea that there's more to it than meets the eye 
is accepted from the start. This is where the mentally disturbed among us 
step in, joining the weirdest sects because at least they offer a 
coherent story. "Gaia's upset, what can you do." TV and the media's 
non-dimensional data can't cope with the human story's bouncy dialectics, 
and are too soft for the complexity addicts at any rate. At the expanding 
core of major events and obscure modi operandi appears a domain of a new 
species of political intervention with well-defined objects (i.e., 
victims) and identifiable suspects, but whose motive remains shrouded in 
mystery. Plans are never unfolded, nor can they be reconstructed in 
hindsight. The whole sad state of affairs should have been solved long 
ago through level-headed interventions by SWB (Soldiers Without Borders). 
So far, all we hear is more of the same; we're still waiting for the 
qualitative leap whereby disasters may radically exceed their regional 
limitations. Chernobyl gave a foretaste of the way in which humanity 
might be aroused from its slumber. It established a yearning for what 
might have been - something like a real stock market crash. The idea that 
the other is temporarily or permanently up shit creek no longer 
mobilizes; it inspires. It's still unsatisfying to see evil reduced to a 
local, temporary and elusive affair all the time. Evil deserves better, 
what with the bad state of the world. 
??