Angel Jaramillo Torres
The death wish of the Dark Enlightenment and its relationship to Trumpism.
Many critics of Trump see his actions as the product of a deranged mind. Those accustomed to thinking in terms of classical economics consider his tariff war an irrational act that will lead to hyperinflation and, most likely, global economic recession. There is undoubtedly some truth in that.
But his actions — and not only those of an economic nature — could be due to a desire to liquidate the established order without necessarily putting something in its place: total anarchy on the Potomac.
At first glance, Trump’s tariff policy seeks to reindustrialize the United States, channeling foreign investment into developing new industrial and super-industrial plants. Apparently, the ones calling the shots in all this will be the conservative oligarchs of Silicon Valley, like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who now possess three great powers: media, economic, and political.
While Musk is a great entrepreneur, Thiel is a disruptive intellectual and a top-notch political philosopher who disguises himself as a risk-taking investor. For the same reason, his influence on Trumpism may be more lasting than Musk’s. His closeness to extreme right-wing groups is well known and has been described in great detail by his biographer. One of these groups is the one that calls itself the Reactionary Movement, which even has an abbreviation: NRx.
If there is a doctrine behind this group, it is the so-called Dark Enlightenment, and if they have a guru, it is the extravagant British thinker Nick Land.
According to Jordan Peterson, the problem with what he calls the postmodern left is that it was founded on the thinking of Karl Marx, as he made clear in his debate with Slavoj Zizek. The irony is that the radical right of the Dark Enlightenment also takes its ideas from none other than Karl Marx and the postmodern left. Nick Land’s ideas cannot be understood without reference to the postmodern philosophers par excellence, the Frenchman Gilles Deleuze and his co-author on several writings, the psychiatrist Félix Guattari—a strange genealogy for an author who has become a reference for the Trumpist far right.
Born in Great Britain over 62 years ago, Land obtained his doctorate at the University of Essex with a thesis on Heidegger: an interpretation of the poet George Trakl in the work of the sage of Messkirch.
In 1987, he began teaching in the philosophy department at the University of Warwick. There, he became a charismatic character given to exhibitionism: a mixture of the subversive spirit of Parisian bohemia and a Saturday Night Live comedian. At Warwick, he created, together with others, something called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), dedicated to investigating any subject where a radical interpretation could be made using the ideas of the philosophers of suspicion: from Nietzsche to Deleuze.
His first book was not about some conservative thinker, like Edmund Burke, but about another extremist of left-wing thought: George Bataille.
Addressing young people willing to welcome any subversive idea, Land earned the animosity of his colleagues more inclined to academic seriousness. Although he gained fans among young people, he soon came into conflict with the university authorities. He finally resigned or was fired and took refuge in Taiwan and Shanghai, China.
His stay there is not that of a dissident but of an admirer of the Chinese regime. What he praises is the combination of authoritarian government and savage capitalism. The word savage is not gratuitous. Like Marx, but contrary to him, Land thinks capitalism must be taken to its ultimate consequences so that it ends up dissipating itself. What is at the end is not Marx’s hedonistic and socialist paradise — where we will all be fishermen, poets, and philosophers — but the return to the wild animality of the primeval human being, but this time enveloped in a digital dystopia: the soulless world of algorithmic machines. As in the case of Curtis Yarvin, whom he has undoubtedly influenced, Land combines anti-democratic ideas with a cult of technology. If, for the father of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex determines us, for Deleuze, there is something more radical and savage behind it: the Dionysian schizoid. Deep within human behavior, radically irrational forces express themselves as desires in search of satisfaction beyond human laws and norms. In a way, this is the psychological foundation of capitalism.
In Land’s idea, there are elective affinities between the schizoid nature of the human being and non-human matter, which is not passive but also desires something. At the end of history, the schizoid and desiring matter meet.
That is the moment of singularity: when the universe becomes conscious. But this is by no means the Buddhist Nirvana of empty contemplation, but the chaotic disorder of conflicting desires. It is the triumph of Heraclitus: the perpetual war of the cosmos.
Attempting to descend from this metaphysics of schizophrenia to Trumpian politics, one could say that Trump presents an excellent opportunity for the unbridled Dionysian powers of schizoid capitalism. Land’s wild forces, embodied in Trump, will destroy the Cathedral of elite power Curtis Yarvin conceived.
In this light, Trump’s changes of opinion on the level of tariffs or his conspiracy theories are not evidence against the magnate but rather proof that the mad Caesar is carrying out the Dionysian destruction of the established order.
What comes next is nothing less than Thanatos’s triumph: a return to the African savannah and the violent death foreseen by Thomas Hobbes, but this time with metal machines and infinite algorithms as witnesses—faceless robots in the jungle.
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