Mental Breakdown of a Nation

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Untitled #19, from Passengers by Chris Marker, 2011 Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York

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Franco “Bifo” Berardi

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Untitled #153, from Passengers by Chris Marker, 2011 Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York

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Nikon Ad, New York Times, November 2012

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(C1) Homo Sapiens.indd 2 13-01-11 3:55 PM

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(C1) Homo Sapiens.indd 3 13-01-11 3:55 PM

In Japan life is proceeding almost normally

(F1) Fate.indd 8 13-01-11 4:03 PM

The megalopolis is directly exposed to Fukushima fallout, but life is proceeding almost normally. Only a few people have abandoned the city. Most citizens have stayed there, buying mineral water as they have always done, breathing with face masks on their mouths as they have always done. A few cases of air and water contamination are denounced. Concerns about food safety have prompted US officials to halt the importation of certain foods from Japan. But the Fukushima effect does not imply a disruption of social life: poison has become a normal feature of daily life, the second nature we have to inhabit.

Franco Berardi, On Poetry and Finance

In Japan life is proceeding almost normally

Ken Straiton, www.kenstraiton.com, photographer.kenstraiton.com

(F1) Fate.indd 9 13-01-11 4:03 PM

In Britain there are no human beings

(F1) Fate.indd 10 13-01-11 4:03 PM

In Britain there are no human beings or citizens, no. There are live money beings. The population allows this to happen. They allow the state to tax them very hard and no real protest happens. They seem to like it, or they are just under the spell of a very organized propaganda. After all it is for the common good. Let’s all in Britain scream in one united voice that we want a very expansive private educational system perpetuating social walls. Here is another idea: why not, instead of letting older generations freeze in the winter, the banker boy just shoots them all. It would be more dignified. He could even privatize this and get some tax out of it. Britain is heading towards an intellectual black hole. In Britain there is no social critique or artist that inflames the masses. There is no one to sing “No future.” Britain is a master case study to understand how ideology and propaganda work in a free market. This is Britain.

Bruno De Oliveira

In Britain there are no human beings

(F1) Fate.indd 11 13-01-11 4:04 PM

In Canada people still care for each other

There was once a mythology about this place. It had its holes, but for a long time there was a sense that we, as a country, cared, or at least were trying to care. We were peacekeepers, we were a haven for the environmental movement and draft dodgers, we owned up to our mistakes and paid for our trespasses, we based our foreign policy on what was right, not what benefi tted the fi nancial bottom line and our ever-increasing bellies. This belief in our better selves, the belief that we’re still in a state of “becoming,” isn’t possible anymore.

At some point in the recent past we as a civilization came to embrace a terminal pathology: fi ve-planet lifestyles, energy obsession and the politics of military, environmental and economic belligerence. We forgot our roots … the dueling Canadian story of betrayal and benevolence, the moral lessons the sinister cowboy lurking in Ottawa would like us to forget.

Not a single newcomer on this continent would have even survived long enough to celebrate the fi rst harvest on this rock had it not been for indigenous hospitality. It was with the aid, protection and permission of the First Nations that newcomers were able to sink their fi rst roots, drive their fi rst posts, build their fi rst homesteads, raise their fi rst families. This kindness, this indigenous philosophy

(F1) Fate.indd 12 13-01-11 4:04 PM

In Canada people still care for each other

of the ever-widening circle, became the basis of our multicultural ideals, however troubled, and our modern welfare state. But the sinister cowboy wants to bash your skull with a hammer until historical amnesia sets in. He wants you to think that yesterday, today and tomorrow are one and the same … that we’ve always been like this … drunk on oil, fi nance, fi ghter jets and swagger. He would rather not have you remember that as the settlers’ numbers grew, they became obsessed with having it all. That they voted amongst themselves and made laws across the expanse that their ideal was superior to their neighbors. That they then waged war on the original people. That those who weren’t killed by disease, starvation or bullets were forced onto reserves … land that now stands as the last line of defense between the future of the largest industrial project on Earth, the Tar Sands, and ecocide … land that holds the very fabric of our better selves.

Ask yourself as Snuneymuxw chief, Douglas White, asked. Is Canada a place “where we can still care for each other?”

Then smash the amnesia of the sinister cowboy with a hammer.

Adbusters

Jensen Gifford, jensengiffordphotography.tumblr.com

(F1) Fate.indd 13 13-01-11 4:04 PM

In Europe the second act of the tragedy is about to begin

(F1) Fate.indd 14 13-01-11 4:04 PM

The first act of the European tragedy is over: debt has taken the central place in the material constitution of the Eurozone, ushering in the triumphant dismantling of democracy and the impoverishment of social life.

What are the maxims of the Financial diktat? Destroy life – urge on the collapse of the structures of civil life – in order to save the banking system. Meanwhile, new data from the EU shows that countries that have most ruthlessly cut their budgets in the name of austerity have seen their overall debt loads increase as a share of the economy. This provides crystal clear evidence that deep government budget cuts at a time of economic recession are permanently destroying any chance of economic recovery. Debt increase and recession are feeding each other, as resources and money shift from society towards the financial class.

The second act of the European tragedy now begins: the fracturing of national states, the rise of anti-German hatred, the growth of fascist parties in Greece, Italy, Hungary, Finland and elsewhere.

From the bankanization – submission of Europe to the interests of the banking system – to the balkanization: proliferation of nationalist and ethnic conflicts leading to the specter of continental civil war. The black hole of financial abstraction is swallowing social resources and destroying the productive potency of the general intellect while the social civilization is invested and corroded by the metastases of the financial cancer.

It is now clear that economic expansion is over and will never come back. Un-growth is no longer a moral or political choice that we can accept or refuse. In Europe Un-growth is a given, a consequence of the global redistribution of the division of labor, and the exhaustion of natural resources. If our future is synonymous with Growth, our future is dead.

But we should be able to change our expectations … to disentangle our notions of the good life from the capitalist expectation of never-ending Growth … to imagine a future outside of progress.

The financial dictatorship is cutting salaries and increasing work-time. But, by growing unemployment and spreading recession, they also make it possible for us to transform Un-growth into an enrichment of life and our collective pleasure.

A huge wave of protest is on the horizon but the traditional forms of activism have exposed their ineffectiveness: demonstrations, strikes, peaceful protests are ineffective because financial power now derives from disembodied dynamics which are untouchable by the physical bodies of our movement.

Only organized withdrawal, only massive insolvency can defuse the financial attack, and this requires solidarity. And solidarity can only be based on empathy.

How can we recreate solidarity in an era when precariousness has transformed us into de-personalized fragments of time isolated by our loneliness? In a world where competition has become the universal form of social relation, rediscovering solidarity amidst social breakdown is the first step towards the recomposition of the social insurrection.

In Europe the second act of the tragedy is about to begin

Franco “Bifo” Berardi is an Italian philosopher of revolutionary politics and mass media. He was an important figure in the 1970s Autonomista movement in Italy. His most recent book is The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance.

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Until we create healthier mental environments and cultural myths . . . mood

disorders, anxiety attacks and bursts of sociopathic violence will proliferate

throughout the land.

Until we create healthier mental environments and

(H1) Back Cover US.indd 2 13-01-11 4:16 PM

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