The sky is gray, overcast as if a bowl of depressive disorder had been placed over us by the gods.  It seems very quiet outside with little traffic along Western Avenue.  Sunday morning is not typically this silent.  But these are the days of pandemic, of worsening spread of the coronavirus.  I cannot say that mistakes have been made, causes resolving into this grim effect of mounting deaths in the winter months.  The president a majority of us elected to office in 2016 does not have the ability to care, the man is an empathic void, — thus his absence of motivation to conduct a national Federal program to combat the spread of of the virus.  The “red” states reluctant to encourage social distancing, the wearing of a mask in public, expressed fealty to Trump and his reelection to office.  The “blue” states offered strong advisement to social distance, to always wear a mask when in public.  So, the states have been in competition with each other — the virus has spread unimpeded across state lines.  The virus is non-partisan.

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Reason in Hegel
astutely asserts itself through
bloody and tortuous events
that turn the daily life of the people
into History,..
— a conceptual map
of the road to our present reality
marked by unremitting violence.

The drive toward totalization
has generated the wreckage
whose effects we are witnessing now,
in the age of Trump,
the age of dementia
fueled by the full realization of reason
in its techno-financial form. p. 57

Truth is revealed at the end
of the historical process
as an effect of conflict and re-composition.
…when modernity’s promise collapses,
when chaos replaces the project of reason
and war replaces the political order,
we leave these spheres of conjunctive concatenation
and historical realization.

At this point
say goodbye to Mr. Hegel
and enter the sphere of computation,
in which reason is not the end point
of the historical process, a telos
pursued by conscious action of men,
but its beginning…
Digital reason replaces historical reason,
and the spiritual necessity of historic realization
is replaced by the mechanical necessity
of a logical machine that
entangles human language and living events. p. 60

excerpt BREATHING Chaos and Poetry
by Franco “Bifo” Berardi

These lines from Berardi’s book are a photograph of our condition in the language of philosophy.  The philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel is a format for understanding history as the outcome of struggle.  An initial situation is confronted by it’s opposite, there is a clash of realities, then voilà the sound and fury (and blood) of conflict disappears and a “new” reality is born, the embodiment of sweet reason.  That is Hegelian dialectic in a nutshell as I understand it.  Rationality ultimately wins.

The initial promise of America has not been fulfilled.  We have not become a “city set on a hill” as asserted by John Winthrop in 1630. As to the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address:

a new nation conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Truth be told the inception of our society involved enslavement of peoples imported from Africa and then by genocidal warfare with Indian nations.  In our Father’s generation and our own we have witnessed a continued spread of the financialization of the economy, a society defined by the language of finance, where globalized corporations wield more power than the government.  “Small business” the much celebrated American ideal is in fact gradually excluded from the marketplace by regulation that favors size.  Now, the pandemic causes a severe cut back of cash flow for months to come.  We have an uber-wealthy class, the one-percent, — and the rest who are composed of unemployed, or under-employed whites and “essential” workers, educated poorly, ethic citizens without health insurance.

Modernity’s promise collapses.  History means conflict, period.  As to a realization of the American Century — it didn’t come to pass.  Reason, sweet reason does not triumph in the end.

Instead we contemplate accelerating deployment of digital reason, the beginning of a digitally managed society, inhumanly parsed into winners and losers by the algorithms of Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

Say goodby to Mr. Hegel.