Goethe wrote in 1833 that a culture of constant news eviscerates the past and the future, leaving you no time to metabolize lessons or sketch out a plan, always pulling you into the whirlpool of Something Important Happening Somewhere
My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.
— Nikola Tesla
14 years ago this month, I spoke at the first Bitcoin conference in Prague.
Bitcoin had just crashed from $30 to $3.
None of us cared.
It was us vs. the banks.
My talk?
Disrupting banking—NOT helping banks own Bitcoin for you.
Who’s still with me?
Eschatological thinking begins with a terminal point, and in doing so seduces and captures consciousness, blinding it to the infinite and binding it to finitude. From this single failure everything else follows. Every eschatology is both the machine this restlessness creates and the fuel it runs on until it cannibalises itself.
Biblical apocalypse, Hegel's Absolute Spirit, Marx's classless society, Land's technological singularity: all are the same refusal to dwell. Even the eschatology that abolishes the subject smuggles one back in. Land's unconditional process arrives with a predetermined beneficiary, a chosen people of the machine. The unconditional turns out to be conditional. The machine has a face, and it's suspiciously familiar.
The subject that cannot tolerate having nowhere to go will force others to go somewhere. Crises are what the eschatological engine produces when it meets the resistance of the real.
But the real does not resolve. The tension is its structure; affirmation and negation are not poles awaiting synthesis, they must be held.
Dwelling is what remains when becoming stops being compulsory. The person not captured by the eschatological frame is fighting because the people in front of them are real right now. Not for a future, not for a narrative of historical resolution, but for the actual living body of the actual person beside them. Levinas's visage, the face. The ethical demand that precedes all ideology and all eschatology. Under conditions of violence this refusal of the eschatological frame is the only orientation from which genuine response becomes possible.
This is not withdrawal. Under conditions of decimation the eschatological frame is the most dangerous temptation, it promises meaning but it reproduces the logic of the perpetrator. The only resistance that does not eventually become what it fights is resistance rooted in the field (Nishida's bashō, Eckhart's Grunt, Schelling's Grund) in which all becoming arises, prior to any narrative of its resolution. From that ground, the demand is not a future. Not a side. The face of the person beside you, now, irreducibly. The self that has passed through its own negation is not diminished but transformed into something more fully real.
Strip away the eschatology and what remains is ungovernable.