Autonomy and the Automaton

by N.S. Lyons Jul 04, 2024 - theupheaval.substack.com/

A new conception of power has emerged, a potent and direct concentration. Holding out against this force requires a new conception of freedom, one that can have nothing to do with the washed-out ideas associated with the word today. It presumes, for a start, that one does not want to merely save one’s own skin, but is also willing to risk it.

That’s Ernst Jünger (German WWI hero, novelist, dissident philosopher) writing in 1951 in The Forest Passage, a slim volume on resistance to totalitarian tyranny that I’ve come to consider one of the most poetic meditations on the nature of individual freedom ever written. Densely, often even beautifully symbolic, his book aims to show us the importance of man’s individuality in maintaining our collective humanity. But it also helps reorient us, reminding us that the way in which we typically conceive of individual freedom today is indeed corrupted, “washed out,” and feeble compared to what we once understood.

Moreover, I believe Jünger helps resolve a paradox that I at least have wrestled with for some time (especially as a freedom-loving American): the paradox of individual autonomy. The paradox is this: we subsist under an increasingly totalizing and oppressive managerial regime, in which a vast impersonal hive-mind of officious bureaucrats and ideological programmers aims to surveil, constrain, and manage every aspect of our lives, from our behavior to our associations and even our language and beliefs. This rule-by-scowling-HR manager could hardly feel more collectivist – we’re trapped in a “longhouse” ruled over by controlling, emasculating, spirit-sapping, safety-obsessed nannies. Naturally, our instinct is to sound a barbaric yawp of revolt in favor of unrestrained individual freedom. And yet, as I’ve endeavored to explain several times before, it is also a kind of blind lust for unrestrained individualism that got us stuck here in the first place…

The paradox is that the more individuals are liberated from the restraints imposed on them by others (e.g. relational bonds, communal duties, morals and norms) and by themselves (moral conscience and self-discipline), the more directionless and atomized they become; and the more atomized they become, the more vulnerable and reliant they are on the safety offered by some greater collective. Alone in his “independence,” the individual finds himself dependent on a larger power to protect his safety and the equality of his proliferating “rights” (desires) from the impositions of others, and today it is the state that answers this demand. Yet the more the state protects his right to consume and “be himself” without restraint, the less independently capable and differentiated he becomes, even as his private affairs increasingly become the business of the expanding state.

Subject to the impersonal regulations of mechanistic processes and procedures rather than his own judgement or that of the people in close communion with him, the individual is molded into a more and more uniform cog to fit into the machine: a mere passive “consumer” and easily manipulated and programmed puppet – an automaton – rather than a true individual actor. In the effort to maximize his autonomy, his real autonomy has been lost.

Such an individual has succumbed to what Jünger fittingly describes as the all-encompassing “automatism” of our modern age, in which more and more of human life seems reduced to “mere functionality” and constrained by unliving mechanistic processes. Even our minds become subject to ideological machine code alongside base desires. And it is out of this loss of our humanity that totalitarianism and its atrocities are born.

To escape this automatism, achieve real individuality, and recover our humanity will require us to find a “new freedom” – or rather, an older and nobler freedom – that reconciles liberty with duty, independence with love, life with sacrifice, and the barbarian with the saint. This is the passage to freedom that Jünger seeks to offer us.

By 1951 the devastation of war was over but Jünger’s view of the future remained dark. Something ineffable about the world seemed to have shifted with the two world wars, characterized as they had been by “escalated mechanical development” of the kind “which approaches extreme limits of automatism.” And this mechanization – as exemplified by the German war machine – had not remained confined to the battlefield but had turned and conquered society as well. It had even entered the hearts of men and begun to wage “intensified assaults on nomos and ethos.”

Instead of feeling free and happy amid a lasting peace, post-war modern man had found himself increasingly hemmed in, dispossessed, and terrified. “In fact,” Jünger wrote, “the growing automatism is closely connected with the fear, in the sense that man restricts his own power of decision in favor of technological expediencies. This brings all manner of conveniences – but an increasing loss of freedom must necessarily also result.” True, modern man “enjoys the advantages of a peaceful age of technological comfort,” including near “automatized perfection” in the provision of his needs, alongside “theoretical equality” and greater individual freedom of lifestyle than ever before. But, Jünger warned: “Every comfort must be paid for. The condition of the domesticated animal drags behind it that of the slaughterhouse animal.” And today people are “incorporated into the collective structures in a manner that makes them very defenseless indeed.”

The individual no longer stands in society like a tree in the forest; instead he resembles a passenger on a fast-moving vessel, which could be called Titanic, or also Leviathan. While the weather holds and the outlook remains pleasant, he will hardly perceive the state of reduced freedom that he has fallen into. On the contrary, an optimism arises, a sense of power produced by the high speed. All this will change when fire-spitting islands and icebergs loom on the horizon. Then, not only does technology step over from the field of comfort into very different domains, but the lack of freedom simultaneously becomes apparent…

Even amid still pleasant conditions of “progress” many can sense something badly amiss. The atomized modern type is liable to constantly “feel haunted by malevolent forces, which penetrate even into his dreams, have a low capacity to enjoy himself, and have forgotten the meaning of a real festival.” And he knows deep down that “man is suffering a loss, and this loss explains the manifest grayness and hopelessness of his existence, which in some cities and even in whole lands so overshadows life that the last smiles have been extinguished and people seem trapped in Kafkaesque underworlds.”

No amount of optimistic state propaganda can banish his unease, as “the individual still possesses organs in which more wisdom lives than in the entire organization – his very bewilderment, his fear, demonstrates this.” And if he finds his subconscious always “agonizing about finding a way out, an escape route, he exhibits a behavior appropriate to the proximity and magnitude of the threat.”

What is this abyss, the threat, that the aware individual can sense approaching? The wind he feels whipping by as Titanic speeds ahead informs him that progress is the rule of the day. Yet he intuits awareness of those “atrocities that are seldom absent whenever great changes are taking place.” And behind this he feels the march of automatism, the mechanization of society and of himself, proceeding to such an extent that it threatens to strip him of his individuality and humanity entirely, dragging him into the inhuman machine and its bureaucratic gears. He understands deep down that he is experiencing the abolition of man. And he knows that this brings mortal peril to his own person, as what is most “unsettling in the present case is that the brutality [of the machine] is threatening to become an element, a constitutive part of the new power structures, and that we see the individual placed helplessly at their mercy.” Brutality is the handmaiden of the machine, because machines are the creation of rational thought, and by this point in history we ought to understand “above all that rational thought is by its nature cruel.”

The yawning abyss ahead is the risk of managerial totalitarianism, the fruit of automatism, and the unprecedented capacity for calculated cruelty produced by its inhuman nature – by its boundless appetite for rationalistic schemes, ideology (the mechanization of the mind), social engineering, centralization, and technocratic control. Jünger – himself all too personally familiar with inhuman cruelty – understood that totalitarianism’s core nature had hardly died with Nazi Germany but had become a defining feature of the modern age.

The old mythic figures associated with tyrannical oppression – the great “man-eating ogre,” the “exploiter and taskmaster” – might have altered their shape and number but their menace was only the greater once taken up into the collective structures of the machine. Only now it’s more likely the bone-milling ogre-tyrant will manifest as a swarm of lawyers and bureaucrats, or that he “will appear as a serologist, sitting among his instruments and retorts and pondering how to use human spleen or breastbone to produce marvelous new medicines.”

In fact Jünger warned (rather presciently) as way of example that one “dubious development to be to be wary of in the highest degree is the constantly increasing influence that the state is beginning to have on health services, usually under philanthropic pretexts.” For medical professionals “whose treatments are supervised by bureaucracies… should be regarded with suspicion; overnight they can undergo alarming transformations, and not just in the event of war. It is not inconceivable that the flawlessly maintained files will then furnish the documents needed to intern, castrate, or liquidate.” Even human care can, if subject to automatization and separation from the dignity of individual relationship, become a mechanism for inhumanity.

In fact where once a tyranny might start and end with an individual, who could meet his end at an assassin’s blade, the machinery of modern tyranny is made only the more monstrously robust by the fact that so often no one seems to be in charge. The “combination of significant scenes with insignificant actors” has become a particularly characteristic feature of our times, noted Jünger. Only in the age of the automaton do we find ourselves ruled by so many men of “such trivial stature with such enormous functional power.” Yet “one must concede the zeitgeist an infallible hand in picking out just these characters” to carry on the great “demolition enterprise” of our times. For indeed all “the expropriations, devaluations, equalizations, liquidations, rationalizations, socializations, electrifications, land reallocations, redistributions, and pulverizations presuppose neither character nor cultivations, which would both actually impede the automatism.”

“Man has immersed himself too deeply in [his] constructions,” Jünger warned. “He has devalued himself and lost contact with the ground. This brings him close to catastrophe, to great danger, toward destruction.” And as the grip of a totalitarian machine grows tighter, for the individual there may appear to be no way out:

The automatism seems to effortlessly break down any remnants of free will, and the persecution concentrates and becomes as ubiquitous as an element. For a privileged few flight may remain an option, though it usually leads to something worse. Resistance only seems to invigorate the ruling powers, providing them a welcome opportunity to take offensive action. In the face of all this, the only remaining hope is that the process will be self-consuming, as a volcano exhausts itself in erupting. In the meantime, for the besieged, there can only be two concerns at this point in the game: meeting obligations and not deviating from the norm. The effects carry over in the spheres of security, where people are stricken by an apocalyptic panic.

“It is at this point,” says Jünger, “that the question arises, not merely theoretically but in every human existence today, whether another path remains viable.” 

Standing Axe in Hand

Jünger had first-hand experience with totalitarianism and the difficulties and perils of resisting it. He had lived through the rise and fall of Nazism in Germany, watching as his country was consumed and brought to catastrophe by a crude ideological machine he despised. He kept his distance from the regime (unlike his friend Carl Schmitt). And, contrary to accusations that he willingly collaborated (by agreeing to rejoin the army to fight for his country during the war, as he did), or that he remained wholly aloof, he helped back the plot to assassinate Hitler (if not to the degree that he later wished he had – a fact that seems to have haunted him for life). When that conspiracy failed he was saved from death only because his status as one of Germany’s most famous heroes of the First World War had left him too popular for Hitler to want to touch directly. His family, however, was not as lucky: his eldest son (imprisoned for saying Hitler ought to be hanged) was soon sent to the front as part of a penal battalion and killed under suspicious circumstances, likely, Jünger believed, by the Waffen-SS.

Totalitarianism and the nature of resistance would become Jünger’s primary literary focus for the rest of his life, and this agonized investigation came down to one great question: how can an individual remain free – and find the strength to do the right thing – amid overwhelming pressures to conform and obey?