This conversation with the Italian group Resistenze al nanomondo was first published in the July 2022 issue of the printed journal L’urlo della Terra and has recently also been made available online, again in Italian.
1. Resistenze al nanomondo: Can you can tell us about your story, your path, when you started developing a critique of techno-scientific developments and what thinkers you learned from?
Paul Cudenec: I don’t think I could separate my critique of techno-scientific developments from the rest of my opinions and analysis. I have been an anarchist for 30 years now, but even before then, in my youth, I felt a strong instinctive aversion to high-tech consumer society. On the one hand it was associated with everything that I most disliked – big business, the state, the military, authority and control in general. On the other hand it stood against everything that I most appreciated – nature, freedom, community, a sense of historical and cultural continuity. The arrival of CCTV cameras in England was a wake-up moment for me. I worked at the time as a journalist with a local newspaper in one of the first towns to have cameras installed and, since I knew for a fact that there was very little crime there, it was clear to me that this project was nothing to do with fighting crime, as was claimed, but was the roll-out of something much more sinister. I wrote a punk song about this in the mid-1990s (which I put online last year), warning about “the cameras that steal our liberty” and the techno-tyrants who were going to scan our DNA, put microchips in our brains and turn us into robots. With the local anarchist group, which I subsequently helped to create, we used to hold annual protests against the cameras, marking the anniversary of their installation as “Big Brother’s Birthday”.
As you will gather from the above, George Orwell was, unsurprisingly, an influence on me. The history of the Luddites was another inspiration (via Kirkpatrick Sale among others), along with anarcho-publications like Green Anarchist, SchNEWS, Do or Die, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and various EF! publications. I also read David Watson’s Against the Megamachine, Fredy Perlman’s Against His-story, Against Leviathan, the Unabomber Manifesto plus a lot by John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen. I have more recently been influenced by reading the likes of Miguel Amorós, Jacques Ellul, Theodore Roszak, Charlene Spretnak, Renaud Garcia… But intertwined with that thread of my self-education have been other inspirations. The English nature mystic Richard Jefferies has been very important to me, as has René Guénon, who combined his metaphysics with a strong critique of modernity. I have also read elsewhere about sufism, Taoism, comparative mythology, English folklore, Indian philosophy, German idealism, Jewish anti-capitalist romanticism, Jungian psychology… What interests me, above all, are the connections between these accounts and traditions, or rather, perhaps, the new space that is opened up for our reflection when we consider them together, in the same conceptual context.
2. Resistenze al nanomondo: The Great Reset is a theme that you have dealt with a lot in your texts, we could say since the beginning of Davos’s work on the declared emergency. We now know that this elite largely no longer even hides its intentions and projects. Even before the declared pandemic, it has always been evident that emergency contexts, real or presumed, accidental or created ad hoc, always represent an excellent opportunity for the techno-scientific system to consolidate. Environmental disasters like Fukushima represent for the Left and for many environmental thinkers contradictions that will eventually tie them in knots. The past, and above all recent history, teaches us instead that the Great Reset feeds on these disasters, cannot do without them and will therefore do everything to ensure that there are always new ones, not only considering them as a continuous business, but also as a universe of meaning from which to draw inspiration: from this point of view the declared pandemic should have taught us a lot. This obviously also applies to the economic turmoil, often caused by the environmental disasters themselves, which represent an excellent opportunity for radical changes carried out with the help of techno sciences. As you wrote, this will lead to the embrace of specific technological innovations in the public and private sphere so that future generations can meet the new needs that the Great Reset will require by fueling new markets – but not only this – that revolve around towards digital innovations, electronic strategies, teleworking, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, the internet of things and internet of bodies by centralizing power in the hands of capitalist stakeholders under the benevolent pretext of reinventing capitalism through fairer and greener means. How are these processes happening and how will they evolve, thinking of Schwab's words that you quote that certain technologies will not only be confined to the physical world, but will become extensions of ourselves? But especially in what you call the second phase of the Great Reset with war as a new emergency?
Paul Cudenec: I should say straight away that I was not personally the author of that latter article, although I very much appreciate and echo the content! One of the things that struck me most about Schwab’s narrative is the way in which he placed the so-called Great Reset in the context of a series of historical stages. He mentions 9/11, explaining how this shock-and-awe moment enabled the system to normalise all kinds of invasive and restrictive “security” measures that would otherwise not have been accepted by the public, such as body-scanning at airports and the need to “check in” and “check out” of buildings. Indeed, the “War on Terror” was, for me, a prelude to the “New Normal” of the Covid period. The constant recorded announcements in railway stations reminding people of the “threat” of terrorism, the suspicion and distrust (“If you suspect it, report it!”) were already being used to create the atmosphere of a permanent state of emergency, in which it was inappropriate to insist too much one one’s personal privacy or liberty. This was combined, in the UK at least, with a cult-like worship of the armed forces (henceforth relabelled “heroes”) which I personally found intolerable!
Before the War on Terror, of course, was the Cold War, which also encouraged a militaristic attitude, the fear of foreigners, and so on. The Second World War, also mentioned by Schwab, was another event which changed society, sweeping away so much of the previous European ways of living in favour of a “modernised” American (in the West) or Soviet version. The same is true of the First World War, which I know brought to an end, for instance, many of the folk customs which had always animated English culture. They were no longer regarded as appropriate in the post-war New Normal.
I suppose that most people would imagine these events to be nothing more than the playing-out of history and the consequent changes to society to be the necessary outcome of their impact, part of the same evolutionary process, if you like. But I see it differently. Many people are now aware that the “pandemic” was nothing of the sort, but a massive psy-op used to advance the agenda presented by Schwab as the Great Reset. Working back, and bearing in mind the vast literature on 9/11 and other “terrorist” attacks (including the analysis of the Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti), we can see that the War on Terror was a similar phenomenon. Most obviously, it justified imperialist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and so on, but it also enabled the securitisation of our society of which Schwab boasts – and it was evidently designed to do just this. The same is true of the “terrorism” of the Cold War era (Daniele Ganser’s work on Gladio is particularly useful here). Were the two world wars also deliberately used in this way?
We can see a definite pattern here. Shocking, murderous events take place which serve, simultaneously, several aspects of the same agenda: massive state spending is funnelled into private pockets (whether the arms trade or Big Pharma), with the resulting government debts further boosting the leverage of international banking institutions; fear is used to instill unthinking obedience to authority; previous customs and social structures are wiped out; new systems of control are introduced in the face of this “emergency”.
In this context, it is not difficult to understand how the current “war” situation might have been deliberately instigated in order to accelerate this process, as just the latest in a long series of stages (and I have only cited the most obvious ones above). People don’t want to have their food rationed or manufactured in labs, their spending controlled by central banking authorities, their movements tracked and their activities monitored, but may well accept all this in the “emergency” context.
All of this is purely about power and control. The Technik deployed by the system to achieve this is merely a tool, or a weapon. That is why it is never “neutral” as some like to claim: it only exists in order to increase the domination of those who own it, at the expense of everybody else, as the Luddites understood only too well 200 years ago!
3. Resistenze al nanomondo: The takeover of the new international emergency linked to the war, with its obvious energy consequences, seems for a moment to have replaced the general attention given to the declared pandemic with its nefarious aftermath that we have to suffer for years now. It is significant that the current war propaganda brings back in full the modalities and language that had served to paralyze most people on health grounds. It is evident, if they continue to follow this path, that the social engineering experiment has succeeded and that they are preparing for its subsequent evolutions, where the white coat is continuously interchangeable with the camouflage suit. This apparent easing of restrictions in almost all European countries except Italy seems to give us hope that we are heading in the direction of an exit from the declared health emergency and its symbolic instrument par excellence: the health pass (Green Pass). Yet, the good intentions, the rhetoric and the descriptions that are made do not coincide in the least with the present reality. Where, in the great global reset, it is now clear that precise directions of a transnational nature have already been given to individual states, especially when they are US colonies such as Italy, all that remains is to apply them. What we fear is the easing of attention and therefore of the struggle against these new developments and evolutions that do not represent any improvement in the situation, but rather its irreversible consolidation. But the real bigger problem is the loss of clarity and, along with it, any possibility of understanding what has been implanted in society: a concrete idea of a digital-cybernetic society with fearful individuals ready at any call to renew the gene serums inside their bodies or any other pharmaceutical or non-pharmaceutical product that is deemed necessary, effectively confirming the new normal in an mRNA genetic engineering paradigm.
Several times on your website you have dealt with the international struggles against the new biomedical normality, do you think they have been sufficient and have they lived up to the threat that is not so much ahead of us as already overwhelming us? Could you start from your personal experience, but also from other countries that have carried out important mobilizations in recent years, such as Canada which has seen the recent truckers’ struggle? Also, in these protests many anarchist groups were not on the right side of the fence, what is the reason in your opinion? Where the quantitative aspect of the protest has been reached, can the same thing be said about the contents, where, in general, immediate easily-digestible claims have been preferred to addressing the real issues behind the Green Pass? Doesn't talking about poor management of the pandemic emergency shift the plan to partialities that can be immediately recovered by power itself and isn’t it thus completely ineffective from the point of view of the qualitative objective of the struggle? Could you make some comments about all this?
Paul Cudenec: My personal experience has been in France, where I have been living for several years now. In the early days of Covid there was little in the way of critical response here, especially compared with England, where big protests quickly started up in London and scepticism about the nature of the “pandemic” seemed a little more common. Things really changed here in July 2021, when the “pass sanitaire” was introduced: massive numbers of people took to the streets and didn’t stop doing so. I felt a real change in the political atmosphere, in that people had broken through the taboo preventing them from challenging the Covid narrative and, suddenly, were expressing their opposition not just to the pass, but to the Great Reset agenda behind it. Predictably, the presence of some nationalists in these protests meant that they were presented in the media as being entirely “right-wing”, but this was clearly not the case: they broke through the usual classifications. In many ways this new movement was an evolution of the Gilets Jaunes’ uprising and their presence in its ranks was notable. But, because of the unprecedented scope of the attack on basic human liberties which the pass involved, it attracted many people who had not previously felt the need to get involved in political protest. Although critics felt that this meant the protesters were too politically disparate to represent a real “movement”, I don’t entirely agree. I have seen on a very local level, with a small anti-pass group with which I am involved, how a certain consensus, a certain shared vision, has evolved over the months and has not been disrupted by events in Ukraine. I recently presented my latest book, The Withway, to a group of fellow campaigners here and they were largely in tune with my perspective, whether regarding the dangers of Technik, the need for radical decentralisation, the importance of mutual aid, our belonging to place and nature or, indeed, the need for a spiritual dimension to our struggle. I don’t remember having ever found so many kindred spirits in a 100% official “anarchist” group.
It is difficult for me to know whether this is generally true in France or in other countries. You are right to suggest that the large numbers involved in the freedom protests does not necessarily imply quality of analysis or understanding. But what I have heard in interviews from Ottawa, for instance, suggests to me that there is, at the very least, the potential for building a coherent resistance movement. The very fact that this movement defines itself in terms of freedom, and has identified the principal enemy of this freedom as being the merged forces of big business, international institutions and individual states – a global technocracy – seems encouraging to me. I don’t think that it is a complete coincidence that the invasion of Ukraine occurred at the very point when this movement was picking up identity and momentum. I don’t think, either, that the war will decisively shatter that consensus: a shared analysis of the situation which goes beyond the US v Russia/China dichotomy has already taken shape in dissident circles.
The failure of anarchists on a whole to stand up to the technocratic coup d’état has been a source of great disappointment for me since March 2020 and I have written extensively (perhaps too extensively!) about this. I can see two main reasons for this tragic state of affairs. Firstly, there has been a long-term decline in the understanding of anarchist thinking among those who supposedly subscribe to the philosophy. This is probably not entirely new, as Gustav Landauer was complaining about the same thing more than 100 years ago, but it has certainly got worse! The influence of postmodernism and the cult of intersectionality have created a kind of cult of artifice which fiercely rejects all “essentialism” or the notion of innate human qualities and has thus turned its back on the crucial anarchist insight that we do not need top-down authority because we are innately capable of organising ourselves from below. Without the foundations of authentic anarchist thinking, these hollowed-out zombie anarchists were easily led into the absurd positions of supporting fascistic state control and medication on the basis of defending the “common good” as defined by our rulers. But this underlying ideological weakness has to be seen in the context of the second reason I want to mention, which is that there has clearly been a deliberate take-over and manipulation of anarchist structures in order to prevent them from challenging the new order.
4. Resistenze al nanomondo: You have done a great deal of in-depth work on the impact of the universal rulers’ agendas on domains supposedly conveying a critique of this system, revealing a pseudo-subversion that is actually the bearer and promoter of the very demands of this techno-scientific and transhumanist system. You write about Extinction Rebellion and also about Black Lives Matter UK which was supported by Edge Fund. Can you tell us something more? We recall that the Edge Funds are speculative investment funds that invest not surprisingly also in the LGBTQ + cause where the Rockefeller Foundation co-chaired the Edge program committee and is also present on the board of directors of Edge Funders, where we find a representative of the George Soros' Open Society Initiative for Europe. These and others are not simply among the richest men on the planet, entrepreneurs, managers of biomedical and biotech multinationals: with their firms’ investments, their philanthropy and their research projects they are able to direct the political agenda on crucial issues such as health or the environment, for example. So we should ask ourselves if we find on their agenda investments in certain areas of the Left, environmentalism and “rainbow” politics. There are questions to be asked about the purpose, integrity and real critical stance of these milieux and how they are actually related to the major reset in progress. What do you think about this?
Paul Cudenec: We know that the Great Reset is a transition which has been in the planning for years, probably decades. As part of their planning, those behind it would inevitably have looked at potential sources of opposition to it and anarchists, very involved in the anti-globalisation protests 20-plus years ago, would obviously have stood out. Turning around anarchist thinking so that it no longer threatened, but in fact reinforced, the technocrats’ agenda would therefore have been a sensible move on their part.
I had long felt, intuitively, that there was something unhealthy about the direction that the anarchist movement was heading, but I perhaps assumed that this spoke merely of my own differences with the prevalent attitudes. It was only with the Covid moment that I was forced to really address this issue and explore what was behind it.
One significant development over the last 15 years or so has been the emergence of an “antifascist” movement, whose identity and ideological assumptions seem to have largely displaced those of the anarchist movement from which it was largely born. In the UK, this was prompted by the emergence of the English Defence League, a much-publicised anti-Muslim street movement regarded by many as having been deliberately manufactured by the system. I suspect that this was yet another example of the “gangs and counter gangs” counter-insurgency strategy much favoured by the British state (as explored by researcher Larry O’Hara, among others). In response to this physically real threat – the EDL initially attracted large numbers of white working-class supporters – anarchists felt obliged to react. I myself took part in local anti-fascist activity. But, with hindsight, the antifa cult effectively drew anarchists away from organising directly against our real state/corporate enemy in order to focus instead on groups of individuals who, while they were effectively acting as proxies for the system, were not the real problem. The emphasis on street fighting, self-defence and posturing bravado also depoliticised the anarchist milieu to a frightening extent, with one group, Berkshire Anti Fascists, even proudly declaring that they were, exactly like those they claimed to oppose, “more interested in action than political philosophy”! Subsequently, the same hyper-aggressive attitude cultivated towards far-right opponents was directed against newly-discovered “enemies”, such as “terfs” (feminists who challenge transgender dogma) and, subsequently, all those “right-wing” conspiracy theorists and “anti-vaxxers” daring to question the official Covid narrative. This looks to me very much like the deliberate creation by the system of a street-fighting militia with which to attack its opponents under the false flag of anti-fascism. The violent language used against Covid dissidents by many “official” anarchists has even extended (in Germany, Australia and Canada, for instance) to specific antifa mobilisations against freedom protests. Fortunately these have been small and ineffective.
I have been able to provide proof of a connection between left-wing/anarchist groups and the corporate world which they theoretically oppose, through my investigations of Guerrilla Foundation and Edge Fund. I was already aware of the existence of “funding” for anarchist and anti-capitalist activities, but had been led by comrades to believe that this came from anarchist sympathisers who happened to have inherited large sums of money that they wanted to use for a good cause. The reality, in fact, is that these funding organisations are closely linked to the world of impact investing and those promoting the transition of the Great Reset: their intersectional identity politics, their “sustainablity” and “inclusivity”, are closely tied to the ESG agenda of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, of which the main official promoter is the World Economic Forum.
You ask specifically about Extinction Rebellion (known as XR) and Black Lives Matter. The XR case represented a watershed moment for me in 2019. I had initially been pleased at the emergence of what seemed to be a radical environmental movement, after years of little activity, and knew through personal connections that genuine activists were involved in XR. However, the organisation shot itself in the foot by launching and publicising an “XR Business” group, through which its corporate backers made themselves visible. Many of these turned out to be from the impact industry which is so central to the new data-based economy envisaged under the Great Reset. XR’s self-exposure was, looking back, our first indication of what was to follow in 2020.
Rising Up, the group behind XR, has in fact been funded by Edge Fund, along with Black Lives Matter. The fact that both of these groups no doubt attract genuine supporters who genuinely think they are doing the right thing does not affect the reality of their total immersion in the intersectionality scam. A representative of Black Lives Matter UK praised Edge Fund for embracing “the issues of sex worker rights, housing, climate change, LGBTQIA+ rights, mental health, addiction recovery, and racial justice”. These are all issues dear to the impact investors’ plans, forming the basis of their commodification of our problems and disadvantages and their speculation on our “success” or “failure” in dealing with them, as tracked and assessed via permanent online surveillance in their digital panopticon. Interestingly, in view of my comments above, anti-fascist groups have also been funded by the impact capitalists of Edge Fund...
When “anarchists” condemn comrades as “conspiracy theorists” for exposing the big business backing of the “climate justice” movement, when they attack any challenges to the bio-technology industry’s transgender cult, or any questioning of the pharmaceutical industry’s experimental products, then the corporate agenda is hard to ignore. I quite agree that we are talking here about “a pseudo-subversion that is actually the bearer and promoter of the very demands of this techno-scientific and transhumanist system”.
5. Resistenze al nanomondo: In one of your articles you refer to these words of Gustav Landauer: “There is no need to fear the lack of revolutionaries: in reality they are born from a sort of spontaneous generation, that is, when the revolution arrives". What we ask ourselves is how will it be possible to implement a critique and a struggle against what is happening that goes down to the foundations of the issue, if there are no adequate tools to understand what, for example, these gene serums represent and, on the whole, to understand the current transformations? Milieux that have always considered the techno-sciences marginal, or have even derided the prioritisation of the struggle against them, now find themselves lacking these tools. But even some of the milieux that were opposing the advance of the Fourth Industrial Revolution found themselves unprepared, effectively creating a split with the reality they were contesting by failing to oppose with adequate determination and strength these gene serums and the broader transhumanist project to which these and other fundamental measures belong. Yet we thought that when the eugenic and transhumanist technocrats moved from other animals to penetrate and modify our bodies as well, there would be strong opposition. But, in retrospect, even the news of the two genetically modified girls in China had been accepted as a marginal issue, perhaps because it was happening in China and people did not want to see that the West, for all its phony bioethics, was waiting for the chance to do not just the same, but even better. Why do you think this situation has come about?
Paul Cudenec: Yes, it very frustrating to see how people tend, time after time and in various contexts, to stop short at a certain point and refuse to take their analysis any further. It’s not a question of being able to educate them, since the information is available – they just refuse to acknowledge its existence! This seems to be typical of the “Left”, in general: there are certain deeply-embedded ideological or social taboos which can never be broken without the risk, perhaps, of exploding the individual’s sense of personal identity, which has been built on a certain set of social assumptions. The problem, for me, is that too many have not really broken free from the system’s thinking. The fact that they adopt positions which seem to challenge the system only helps to blind them to the fact that they remain trapped within its overall framing of reality. As Guy Debord wrote in Commentaires sur la société du spectacle: “The individual who has been more deeply marked by this impoverished spectacular thought than by any other aspect of his experience puts himself at the service of the established order right from the start, even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention. He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learned to speak. No doubt he would like to be regarded as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax”.
In our societies, we have all been subjected to a lifetime of conditioning, starting within our families (where others passed on to us the results of their own conditioning!) and continuing through school, media, reading – we grow up and define ourselves using the terms and presuppositions taught to us. Breaking out of this conditioning is not easy, but it is essential if we are ever going to be able to think from within ourselves rather from society outside, and indeed find within ourselves the natural collective intuition that is hidden from us by our artificial social education. Normally we would achieve this through a succession of stages – I myself have been very aware of this process over the years, which has involved a peeling away of layer after layer of the illusion in which I had been living. The more “educated” you are – the more you have built your sense of reality on the fake version served up by the spectacle – then the more work you have to do in unlearning all the accumulated falsehood, which perhaps explains why people with very structured political ideas remain unable to grasp certain truths that seem obvious to others. I think this is maybe part of what Landauer was getting at with the quote you mention. The people who think they are revolutionaries, who have long dreamed of being revolutionaries, are not necessarily the people who will actually leap into action when the moment arrives! Their thinking is too rigid, their expectations too precise. They have, effectively, added extra layers to their own conditioning – “revolutionary” layers! – which immobilise them when the moment of revolutionary potential arrives in a form other than that which they would have imagined or preferred. The positive side of Landauer’s point is that the shattering of certainties by a revolutionary situation breaks down previously non-revolutionary people’s conditioning and inhibitions, propelling them to seize the moment and take part in the uprising. At powerful moments like this, the collective unconscious overwhelms the usual social taboos and takes hold of individuals who are open to its influence, who are guided primarily by their hearts, we might say, and are not held back by a fearful and ossified intellect. I think we can see this phenomenon manifesting in the various freedom protests, including the Canadian truckers uprising, even though all this obviously does not (yet!) amount to a revolution.
6. Resistenze al nanomondo: You recently wrote: “But for this revolt to be successful, it is necessary to free a further element from the labyrinth of lies in which it too has long been imprisoned. This element is our sense of the sacred, our connection with the Whole, our spirit. The dominant culture has worked hard to stifle this dimension, not only by denying its existence through its modern one-dimensional materialistic mindset, but by caging it within the rigid and lifeless structures and dogmas of religion in the service of power and diverting it into cults or superficial pseudo-spiritualities that preach passivity and do not represent a threat to its domination”. Your reference to the dimension of the sacred makes us ask how a revolution can be possible, linking us to the previous question, if we do not have other values in opposition to the dominant ones, if we do not have an alternative vision of the world which is essentially different from the transhumanist and materialist one. In a completely materialistic world, the strongest fear is that of death, a fear which has been part of the basis of propaganda around the narrative on this so-called pandemic. And the removal of the dead was significant, the impossibility of burying them and the denial of the final goodbye during the first lockdown, when it was forbidden to hold funerals and to visit loved ones in hospital. Ernst Jünger, whom you have also invoked in another of your articles, pointed out that “No one is easier to terrify than those who believe that everything is over when its fleeting phenomenon is extinguished. The new slaveholders have noticed this, and this explains the importance for them of materialistic theories ... ". The cancellation of rites leads to the disintegration of a community that is also based on a dimension of the sacred. And, in the last resort, the desacralization of existence and the cancellation of the sacred makes the living available to predation and technoscientific manipulation, quoting your words: "The sacred is not ‘up there’ and we do not need self-styled intermediaries to get in touch with it. It is inside every living being".
The cancellation of the sacred dimension also has repercussions for critical analysis which, by only taking the economical level into account, and restricting itself to mere data, becomes unable to grasp a broader horizon of meaning and subjection, with consequences that go beyond to the purely material plane. The aim of what is being done cannot be reduced to a mere question of profit, but is the realization of a specific transhumanist worldview. For years we have been writing that the problem comes not only if the experiment reaches the set result – and with the techno-sciences the whole world and our very bodies have become living laboratories – but also arises from the path to achieve that result: this path renders possible the idea of being able to manipulate and artificialize the living and, as a consequence, something is transformed and lost in an irreversible way. We are faced with a desire to close the circle of total domination and bring about the total anthropological and ontological transformation of humanity. What do you think?
Paul Cudenec: Indeed. Very well put. And as you say, this is very much a continuation of the previous question. The peeling away of falsehood, which I was describing, starts on a social or political level but progressively comes closer to the very core of our being. The final layer of illusion to be peeled away is that of our individuality being the root of our existence. This discovery, which is the basis of all authentic spirituality, can empower our resistance in two ways. Firstly, as Jünger says, it removes the fear of individual death which so limits our courage to act. Secondly, it redefines our entire vision of who we are and what the purpose of our life is. I would say that simply living – being alive and being conscious of being alive – is a part of that purpose, as it is only through its constituent parts that the overall universal organism can experience its own physical existence. At other times in human history, this alone could have been seen as the meaning of life. But we also each have the purpose of acting on behalf of that whole, of allowing ourselves to serve as the vehicle for the universal organism of which we are merely a part (although bestowed with the conscious subjectivity which is necessary for our practical day-to-day life). The aim of true spirituality, as Sri Aurobindo points out, is not merely to become aware of this cosmic belonging, or withness as I term it in my latest book, but to allow it to guide our actions on every level. Paradoxically, we need to find great individual strength to embark on this process of going beyond individuality. And, paradoxically again, once we have stripped away our egos in order to become avatars of the cosmic whole, we become very powerful individuals.
I agree that we will never overturn the death-system enslaving us if we remain on the purely political level and do not found our resistance on this empowering spiritual transformation: it is the only weapon we possess that can enable us to take on the immense physical power of the system. But we have a difficult task ahead of us, to incorporate this spiritual dimension into our political struggle, because radical ideologies generally not only neglect this element, but actively reject it, with their fundamental outlook even constructed on a basis which definitively excludes this possible dimension. Their “materialistic theories”, to use Jünger’s words, are moreover just one means by which organised power has tried to prevent the emergence of a spiritually-awakened opposition, which it knows could threaten its control. It encourages religious dogma which defines divinity as an ultimate authority rather than our ultimate identity, along with degenerated spiritual disciplines which promote disengagement from the world as the end goal of self-realisation, thus attempting to push even spiritually-minded people away from an authentic and empowering form of metaphysics.
As far as the values which we uphold are concerned, these flow down from the vantage point of our metaphysical consciousness. We see clearly the unity of existence, the patterns and order which form the structure of matter, of nature, of the human body and the human mind, of our cultures, our thinking, our dreaming. All attempts to reduce life, to dominate, pollute or control it, are revealed as the abominations that they are. As conscious avatars of the organic whole, we know intuitively, unhesitatingly, that our task is to see off these toxic threats in every way that we can, to the utmost of our ability. At a time of danger, there can be no other meaning to our living than this.
7. Resistenze al nanomondo: “On the one hand there is the neoliberal system, rooted in the local and national political elite, which is always happy to sacrifice the land for the benefit of growth, development, profit. On the other hand, there is another way of thinking, a peasant way of thinking, a much older way of thinking which paradoxically today is often represented by the younger generations”. ["The French Resistance"] These past years, in which we have witnessed a health emergency declared by the transnational elites in power, and by the states then called on to carry out the programs, have been very educational in confirming the phases of what Mario Draghi called their "creative destruction". This, we think, should also have been the case for those who want to subvert the machine world, as the last few years have also clearly outlined the degraded state to which the human being has been reduced. One obvious thing, at least here in Italy, was how the intolerance towards what is happening came not from young people, but almost always from older people. The perception we have is that the power knew that only this small part of the population, destined to disappear, would hinder it, if we think of the elderly in many cases still isolated in the RSA (sanitary residence care): a memory that must not leave a trace. The new generations of young people, on the other hand, immersed in the virtual, who in many cases have no memory of what a relationship not mediated by the virtual could look like, are already ready for the Metaverse. Mind you, even young people have suffered much, and continue to suffer, from the pandemic emergency measures, but this has not turned into anger and revolt, the droves of school psychiatrists taking care to channel these feelings elsewhere, perhaps pre-empting the supply of psychotropic drugs. What do you think of these issues, starting from what you wrote, from which we quoted a few lines above, and do you think it will still be possible to have a real and living memory of the significance of freedom, nature and humanity in the face of this erosion of all meaning?
Paul Cudenec: The passage you quote was originally from a piece I wrote in 2015 about the wave of anti-industrial resistance in France, in ZADs like those at Notre-Dame-des-Landes and Sivens. These struggles very much involved young people who were reclaiming, in contestational form, the peasant values of their grandparents or great grandparents. It is true that this movement is less visible today: I suspect it may have been largely absorbed into the Gilets Jaunes and into the climate justice movement which, in France, has a radical non-corporate wing. Unfortunately it is true that, on the whole, younger people currently seem less open to questioning Technik as a whole, no doubt because their entire understanding of reality has been built on a lifelong experience of internet, mobile phones, gaming and so on. But I remain stubbornly convinced that this could change very rapidly! Why? Because this addiction to the toys and tools of the technocratic system is only superficial; it occupies only their brains rather than their hearts. There will necessarily be a reaction against the techno-tyranny that has revealed itself so clearly since 2020 and this will necessarily manifest itself in the youngest generation.
I am thinking here in particular about the generation that has not yet come of age, whose worldview has not yet been entirely shaped. They will have experienced the newnormalist nightmare directly, in their schools and their homes, and will also have heard and absorbed the critical opinions of adults around them: the seeds have already been sown. Many of these youngsters will even now be trying to make sense of what they see happening around them, seeking out relevant information, exchanging views with their contemporaries. Combined with this will be the sense of rightness and of ethics, the love of justice and freedom which is innate to the human species and will always resurface, in superficially differing forms, in the spirit of each new generation. I think that the Great Reset could well be the spark for a mighty resurgence of this spirit of life among millions and millions of young people. And their youthful energy and idealism will mean that this will not just appear in the shape of theoretical critiques, but as a vibrant and epoch-shaping real-life revolt against technocracy and in defence of nature and of human life and freedom.
8. Resistenze al nanomondo: “The shell of the left, a stale ideological crust fabricated to limit the rebellion rather than to strengthen it, is cracking”. “These fraudulent and despicable 'leftists' have committed egregious crimes and betrayed humanity. […] On the one hand, the revolutionary left must define itself, separate itself from the corrupt 'left' and position itself as a stronger revolutionary force with the people in all fields of struggle against tyranny and oppression. On the other hand, beyond the left-right paradigm, if we are to defeat the global agenda of slavery and genocide, we must unite on the basis of our common humanity. Everything arbitrary that divides us is no longer relevant. Exposing the falsity of the false left ‘opposition’ offers us an unprecedented opportunity to re-imagine our resistance from scratch. […] Our resistance will be completely against this system and all its thinking and infrastructure.” We consider these thoughts of yours to be very important in helping to get out of the artificial quagmire – we are not talking about a real quagmire given the splendid biodiverse environment it represents! – into which critical thinking and therefore also resistance to the present times have sunk. Despite the talk of us being united by our common humanity, today it is our very humanity that is at stake. And in the fluid universe that is being created, will subverting power have the same meaning as now? Would you like to go deeper into all these issues, perhaps even with your latest reflections?
Paul Cudenec: I think that what has changed since 2020 is the clarity with which we can see the real identity of the Left. This realisation has left me, like many others I imagine, in a strange position. I am still motivated by principles which are generally regarded as left-wing, but feel entirely alienated from the Left as it is currently constituted. It suddenly seems peculiar to me that I could have ever regarded myself as being on the same general “side” as people who believe in both the power of the state (even a world state!) and in the domination of Technik advanced under the banner of so-called Progress. These people are not my allies but my enemies, as they themselves have made clear through the vicious attacks and smears on those sharing my position on the Covid coup. Looking back through history, I wonder if this was not always the case – we can see disturbing parallels between the capitalist funding of the Bolsheviks, for instance, and today’s funding of “radical” organisations by pretty much the same financial entities. These details very much complement all the ideological criticisms that I have long been making of the Left and of certain anarchists, leaving me with the overall impression that a complete rupture is needed. Obviously, this is not a question of leaving the Left to join the Right, as it is that very framing and limiting of political possibility which we have to escape. The same issues that reveal the incompatibility of our thinking with that of the general Left also point us to the pillars on which we can build what has got to be a new historical force of resistance: a rejection of power and Technik.
This project of decentralisation, deindustrialisation, reconnection and rehumanisation will be based on the natural ways of being and thinking derided as “reactionary” by our vitaphobic opponents. To allow this new movement to fulfill its true, vast, potential, we are going to have to abandon the existing political vocabulary, which is overladen with confusion and is not a language in which we can express ourselves in the way we need to. Our terrain will also have to be much wider and deeper than the current political discourse, taking in all the forms through which the human soul finds self-expression (poetry, art, music, dance, ritual, myth, storytelling…) and will include realms far beyond the current understanding of what “politics” is and ever could be. It will have to be imaginative, spiritual, holistic, joyful, sad, humorous, angry, defiant and, above all, visionary: living and acting in the present, it will find its roots in the past and fix its gaze on the future.
Author
“'This is not how things are meant to be; this is not how we are all meant to live.' Paul Cudenec (1963-) is a contemporary anarchist writer who very much fits into the organic radical tradition. In 2020 he became known for his outspoken criticism of the totalitarianism being rolled out worldwide on the back of the Covid crisis.' (nevermore.media) He describes himself as a"[d]eeply dissident journalist and author whose work also appears on the Winter Oak and Organic Radicals sites" and his work as "an exploration of deep dissent". His work appears at Substack, Winter Oak, Network23, among others.
