Horror fati, the rejection of reality

Horror fati, the rejection of reality

by Roberto Pecchioli

Source: https://www.ideeazione.com/horror-fati-il-rifiuto-della-realta/

A man obtains to become a woman by law without surgery or psychological pathways, simply because he wants to. His body is a mere accessory. He now has the legal right to be considered what he is not. The Trapani court ruling threatens to cause an avalanche: the latest episode of deconstruction before the trans and post-human outcome. Another guy asks to become a woman, have his uterus implanted so he can then have an abortion. In other times, they would have been entrusted to psychotherapists; today they get rights. Disney - the cutting edge of woke and gender regression applied to children - is producing a version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs without Prince Charming (intolerable heteropatriarchy) with dwarfs - multi-ethnic in homage to the anti-racist and inclusive obsession - who are not such: it seems bad to insist on the unjust short stature.

Every day new stages of an upside-down journey that leaves those who look at the gleeful twilight of the West with the eyes of reality stunned.  A kind of horror fati becomes common sense, a hatred for the fate assigned by nature, a tenacious will to change the course of things, an implacable resentment for what is. Amor fati was called the serene acceptance of reality, the acknowledgement of destiny. Marcello Veneziani writes that 'in the current sense, destiny is thought of as a cruel gendarme that snatches life away from a fate. In reality, destiny roots being in the future, gives meaning to happening, connects existence to a design and a persistence. To be is to have a destiny."

The horror of that destiny, the attempt to oppose it by any means is one of the characteristics of contemporary humanity.  There is something Faustian about it - a will to power, to control, to overcome all limits - that shows how Greco-Roman and Christian civilisation has come to an end.  Man entrusts himself to technology and technology not to improve but to become other than himself. What is technically feasible is not an opportunity to be explored and submitted to the tribunal of ethics, prudence, good and evil, but an obligation to be experienced at any cost.  One can, therefore 'must', provided, of course, that it fuels a profit-driven market.

The social decomposition becomes a breakdown and the school - the place for the formation of tomorrow's adults - encourages the 'alias' career, the identification according to individual desire and whim - always provisional and revocable - not with name, surname and natural characteristics. One must say 'the gender attributed at birth', as if parents and obstetricians had tossed a coin in the air in front of the newborn.  Friedrich Nietzsche's invitation 'become what you are' - the path of identification that liberates and recognises - is practised in reverse. Become what you want, because nature has enclosed you in a body and a condition that you have the right to reject, recreating them according to desire, arbitrariness, gibberish.

The horror fati, the resentment for what we are, is connected to a peculiarity of contemporary man unknown to past generations: the annoyance of not having had a part in the processes that led to birth. Western man wants with all his might to be the creator of himself. From individualism to subjectivism to a kind of insane 'egoism'. One girl explained in a video seen by millions that she had sued her parents in court for giving birth to her without asking her permission. She invites pregnant women - the father is not covered - to consult a medium to ask the foetus whether it wants to be born or not. We leave any judgement to those who read it, as on the proposal of the World Economic Forum (Klaus Schwab, Larry Fink, George Soros with homo child in tow and ugly company) to legalise, in the name of inclusion, sex and marriage with animals, bypassing the species barrier.

The mistake of those who - like us - feel horror at all this is to limit themselves to moral condemnation. Obvious, necessary, but missing the mark. We tend to reason in ethical terms, or in terms of sexual morality. Dante in Canto V of the Comedy says of Semiramis, the Assyrian queen, that "to vice of lust she was so broken, that libitus she made licit in her law, to ture the bromance in which she was led." That is, she legalised every private vice of hers. This is what happens here and now, but it is by no means a matter of unleashing the senses and instincts. If anything, these are the key to deconstructing man, destroying his rational and sociable soul as a 'political' creature, to reduce him to a confused mass of urges to be immediately satisfied.

What is rapidly changing the meaning of life, the anthropology and ontology of the human creature, cannot be assessed in ethical terms. There is much more to it than that. It is true that 'men have denied God, but in so doing they have not questioned the dignity of God, but rather the dignity of man, who cannot stand without God' (Nikolai Berdjaev). The drama is that we are beyond that: dignity is an unknown concept and God a remnant of the past, to be mocked as cultural backwardness, overtaken by the blinding light of modernity.

The denial of nature, truth and reality, the hatred of destiny and limits, the preference for the artificial, the enthronement of desires, whims, utopias, all have a terrible goal: man's escape from himself. The new ridge, the last, decisive battle, is between humanist cultures and post-humanist and transhumanist delusions, the final conflict in which what is at stake is not power or the victory of an ideology, but the persistence of the human creature, the species homo sapiens. The tremors we feel, the daily earthquakes that reduce the millenary conception of ourselves and the world to rubble, are settlements, the stages of a guided path whose intermediate goal is transhumanism, the overcoming of the 'natural' human creature, to hybridise it with the machine. Cyberman plus Artificial Intelligence plus every present and future technology destined to invade the body and mind of the biochemical mass known as man.

A transit, the prefix reveals, since 'trans' is what it passes through to arrive elsewhere, at a condition distinct from the initial one. The ultimate goal is post-man, the construction/creation of a new species. Hence the discredit, the outright horror - if not hatred - towards nature and its laws, which is given the reductive name of biology. A trans and post-technological, hybrid humanity, from which to expel free thought and right reason, to be subjected to the strictest surveillance through controlled artificial devices, owned by a restricted oligarchy to which we all become slaves, objects, worker bees in a beehive.  Artificial Intelligence is hitherto controlled by a few men. Tomorrow, biopower and biocracy - power over life - could slip out of the hands of postmodern Frankenstein doctors.  The risk must be serious, if the alarm has been sounded by a large number of dedicated scientists. Artificial intelligence apparatuses are delivering homilies, conducting orchestras and proudly asserting that they will soon be able to do everything better than us, including ruling in place of humans.

 Frightening is the silence of the innocent - us - the aphasia of the largely service-minded cultural milieu, the inaction of political power, deprived of the ability to make decisions, discredited in the eyes of public opinion. Another operation desired and pursued by the ruling oligarchy, to which the political class willingly lends itself in exchange for privileges.  Amidst the rubble, power wins, which becomes Leviathan, the only entity capable of directing a (dis)society that has now moved from the liquid state (Bauman) to the gaseous state.

We are at the initial stages of the decisive challenge: the struggle between those who support unlimited technological advancement, called progress to prevent debate, and those who are convinced that moral, political, material limits are needed, and that the insurmountable barrier is respect for nature and the human person.  The battleground is biopolitical, the control of life, the body, thought. Who, how will decide what to introduce into our organism in order to redesign it, modify it, hybridise it with the machine? What will happen to our brain, to our free will, how will we live, what will we eat? Natural or artificial products? Will we become GMOs, genetically modified organisms? What will man, person, mind, freedom mean?

We are living through a decisive transition in which modernity will shed its mask and unveil its face. It is the primacy of becoming over being, the Promethean struggle against destiny and nature. Offended at not being the creator of himself, man decrees Heraclitus' victory: everything flows, panta rei, the water in the river is never the same. In the beginning was the Logos, the Word, reason illuminated by transcendence that defeats Chaos. Then Faust burst in, the feverish inquirer of knowledge, and primacy passed to doing. Im Anfang war die Tat, in the beginning was Action. Marx was to be influenced by this, inaugurating the philosophy of praxis aimed at changing the world, with the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach. Sound the trumpet of modernity to the music of revolution: philosophers have so far interpreted the world, it is now a matter of transforming it, ordered the man from Trier.

The journey is complete. We no longer ask ourselves whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, but whether it is 'technically' possible, feasible and profitable. The postmodern alchemist no longer turns stone into gold, he transforms, modifies, transcends matter to recreate it. He trans-forms, that is, he redesigns, reworks, forges a continuously mutating world, whose ride resembles that of a train without a driver.

We are experiencing in the unconsciousness of thought a radical revolution that changes humanity's meaning and destiny. It is a revolution marching towards the neutralisation of original identities and differences, the removal of nature, the nullification of the arrangements, roles and relationships on which humanity is founded: the family, the sexes, procreation. At its root is the horror fati, the horror and rejection of what we are by nature.

The struggle against destiny spares no one: woman or man one becomes, the choice is subjective, revocable. If the ticchio blows, one is Italian in the morning, cosmopolitan at lunchtime and American in the evening. For sexual orientation, a wide range of choices, there are three or thirty-three sexes and we can experiment with them at will, skating between genders.

We self-create, but we are not the smiths of ourselves, rather clients of technology, transgender for life, according to fashion and preference. Destiny is replaced by progress, which however disappoints, an anxious, deferred expectation. Better the instant, the perpetual motion, the fragment, the global hermaphrodite that trans-forms, trans-ferences and trans-courses. Everything flows in transit, one crosses disguised and changing an eternally under construction motorway, every metre an exit and a diversion; the main thing is to pay the toll. Only the journey counts, the origin makes us angry because we have not chosen it 'freely'.

We are nomads in perpetual transit even without moving, sailors in the virtual ocean, one, no one and a hundred thousand, mutants and perfect trans. The insurmountable impermanence and absolute novelty of this time is staggering.  We go, we cross, we penetrate walls, we remove obstacles creating ruins, cluttering the road with debris in a race that is an end in itself. Or rather, the end is hybridisation with the artificial, the machine, the technical product.

It is the end of mankind as all previous generations have understood it, the turning point of an epochal turning point, a one-way street from which it will be difficult to find the way back. To go beyond man, to transcend him and transform him into a new, trans and ultimately post-human species.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, wrote the Roman Terence in times of amor fati. I am a man, nothing human is alien to me. What will the Artificial Intelligence say about the man who hates his fate?