Men Without Faces

End times have been my obsession for years now. Not necessarily the eschatology of religion (though this cannot be ignored), but rather the impending annihilation of the Real forewarned in the dramatic works of Samuel Beckett. It was, after all, the bleak, barren, Godless landscapes of rubble and bones in Waiting for Godot and Happy Days, culminating with that chilling utterance in Endgame by Clov, who, looking through a telescope from the window of his moribund master's isolated, imprisoning mansion, surveying the deleted world closing in upon them–"There's no more nature"–that inspired my Masters thesis on the intersection of madness, modernity, technology and annihilation. It is this secular eschatology hinted at by Beckett, John Zerzan, Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Jung, modern cinema, the language of schizophrenia, the neuroses of modernity, the intangible, omnipresent, all-ensnaring, wrought iron grid of the global markets, social media, mass media, mass culture and modern entertainment that has gripped me since. Imprisoning me in its own, perhaps analogous, way.

We are doomed, the prophets, the writers, the poets, the drunkards, the obsessed and deranged and dispossessed and forsaken have been screaming. Perhaps the madmen had something to say all along after all.

But here's the thing. We were expecting something sudden—a glaring, obvious sign. A volcanic eruption. The sun going black. Lightning and brimstone and hellfire. We were expecting it to be fast and spectacular. Undeniable.

In the age of instant gratification, the age of the choreographed spectacle, we'd be forgiven for expecting anything less. But as we stood glued to our screen, holding tight through the endless parade of Monty-Python-Meets-The-Apocalypse adverts, holding up our phone ready to press record in high hopes our clips would be the ones to go viral, it crept up behind us. And not only behind us. But in front of us too. On the screen in our TV rooms, in those commercials, in that device in the palm of our hand. And it had been creeping up. For years. Quietly. Insidiously. Unnoticed. We were waiting for the bang, but we never noticed the whimper.

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In Simulacrum & Simulation, Jean Baudrillard spoke about how the rise of mass production, mass media and mass culture were leading to the loss of the Real. How we no longer lived in a world of real things, but shadows of real things. In other words, the further away from the Fall we get, the the greater our loss of contact with the divine. And as this machine of mass production sped up its process of totalization, those replications became replications of replications, which is to say increasingly fallen. What produced would no longer point to the real thing, but rather to another replication. If this process were to continue, eventually we'd get to the point where the Real and any memory of it had gone extinct. This is the point at which Clov found himself when he gasped, "There's no more nature."

Which is to say, we'd eventually reached the End of the Real. And after the events of 2020, I believe I can speak without alarmism nor hyperbole in saying, "Here we are". Consider this picture from a recent American baseball game:

As I see it, this image represents the grand finale of the totalization process of the simulacrum. The final death knell. And not for the obvious reasons. We'll get to those reasons in a little bit. They're nothing more than the dying ring of the bell's toll. Glance at this photo and ask yourself: What is this a picture of? Keep note of your answer. I want you to refer to it again at the end of this process. Now, that answer should be instinctive. But let's slow down a bit and answer it analytically. And let's start by asking a few others. Let's start with baseball itself. What is baseball? To answer that, we have to then ask, what is sport itself? And in doing see, we see how far down the rabbit hole this goes, and what a long time coming this confusing dystopia has been. I submit that sport itself is a simulacra–a replication–of something real. A civilized sublimation of warfare, as George Orwell points out:

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in violence. In other words, it is war without shooting.

So then, we have the first simulacrum, the game itself. Now let's build our way back up.

Upon that, the game, the sport of baseball, we have that corporate subsumption of the game into a franchised, monetized entity. A multimillion dollar business, complete with managers, CEOs, stocks and bonds, logos and advertisers. There again, another simulacrum.

And how do we participate in this sport-cum-corporate enterprise? As spectators in an audience. We are not part of the battle, that sublimated ancient war, taking place on the pitch. No, we are passive observers in the stands. Or rather spectators. And what do spectators spectate?

But the rabbit hole nor the distance ends there. This is (quite obviously?) not a picture from a spectator in the stands, but rather a TV camera. So we may watch the spectacle on screens in the comfort and safety of our own homes, regardless of however removed in physical distance we may be. So again, another replication, another veil upon the veils of the far distant Real.

And watching it there, removed as far as we may be–physically, spiritually temporally and psychologically–who do we see in the stands? You may say, "cardboard cutouts", two-dimensional replications of ourselves. You might be correct, but I submit that the answer is actually more startling. We'll return that observation in a moment. But for the time, let's return to this image. The players, those corporate workers, those simulacra of ancient warriors, what are they doing? Kneeling yes, but in reverence of what? Nothing other than our new religion, "Woke-ism". As Alexander Beiner of Rebel Wisdom points out, this decentralized, internet-spawned movement of postmodern social justice activism has become our simulated religion for our simulated times, weaving its way into centers of power replacing the old order, much like Christianity in the waning days of Rome. (Seen In this light, the recent wave of iconoclasm and statue toppling makes much more sense, however unsettling.)

I've written before regarding how our recent mass movements in this simulated world seem to assume a religious nature, the most obvious movement being the environmental movement headed by Greta Thunberg. And while this movement did have a sound materialist eschatology (though incredibly myopic in scope, ignoring the divine, sacred, psychological and spiritual extinctions we face beyond mere environmental devastation, and in some ways perhaps even actively precipitating those extinctions), it is lacking a certain something to fully take hold as a simulated Christianity in this simulated world.

And now it's all too clear. It is lacking the central focus of Christianity. The cross. The martyr. The sacred sacrifice. It is a Christianity without a Christ. And so it created one, a simulated Lord George. And it exalted it, in inverted form, as a man who had become god. However, unlike Christ, the god who became man, whose message was of unconditional forgiveness, the message of Wokeism is the opposite: insatiable revenge.

So then, let's refer back to the question I asked you at the beginning of this exercise. When I asked what you saw, I will assume you did not answer: "Warriors praying to their gods before battle". How could you see it? The chain has been broken, has been unraveling for 2000 years. It seems now we've arrived at the point where the Real is nearly irrevocably lost, but with nary a notice. The final dissolution of the sacred center of reality had begun too long ago. ****

This is not to say the final end, the final loss of the Real did not have some visible, palpable milestones along the way. We can look back to 1991 when our television enchanted us with a war that didn't quite actually happen.

2017 saw a cult of social justice and narcissism violently take over an important American university unencumbered, justifying their revolution on non-existent yet accepted-as-real offenses.

Things only got weirder from there, culminating in the great "pandemic" of 2020. A pandemic, mind you, we wouldn't even know existed if we didn't read about it on social media. (It's important, mind you, to question things on social media that you haven't seen with your own eyes.)

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I'm not interested here in the epidemiological ontology of this novel Coronavirus. Only with its social and psychological ramifications.

What was the effect of our quarantines and lockdowns? The answer is in the question. We became irrevocably quarantined from each other, from the Real, from ourselves, from our brothers and sisters in the human race. We turned to television, to Netflix, to Facebook, to Instagram and TikTok and Twitter and made our new homes there. And in our isolation, we submitted ourselves willingly and prostrate before the Code of the simulacrum, the great golden calf, the Ba'al of algorithms. We lost that most crucial human need, face-to-face contact, and responded appropriately.

We became enemies with the people we once knew in the flesh. We warred online incessantly, calling for those we once knew as complex, yet human and humanly fallible people to be "canceled" at the slightest offense, the slightest bugging of the Code, the slightest deviation from the algorithmically prescribed norms of speech and opinion. And now, it seems the sacred, the Real itself is subject to cancellation. The algorithm loves this. The algorithm feeds on this. The Code, by way of social media and positive feedback loops–Twitter being the most egregious example–seems to demand more cancellations, more sacrifices. And mankind is happily serving it up. "This Code", if we shall call it that, has risen before. We've seen it in Communist Russia. We've seen it in Nazi Germany. It's a viral ideology that reprograms the way we think, while not allowing us to think. It voids us of the necessary Logos required to be human. It's goal is always the same: absolute totalization of mankind, the complete eradication of the soul, of the sacred, of the individual. The litany of Code-wrought standardizations, examples of the reduction of man to an arithmetically driven process continues on bleakly. When we were not consuming one another online and in the street, we were simply consuming. The leviathan Amazon, whilst listening in on our private conversations 24/7 and knocking on our door daily got to know us more intimately than ever, and used that information wisely. More and more of us were shackled into the modern slave trade of the algorithmically-run gig economy. Netflix programmed us with the liturgy of Wokeism. TikTok did what it was designed to do. Many became pornstars without leaving their own bedrooms–thus going a step further and becoming the product itself to be consumed–and many more of us consumed these simulations of the once sacred and Real with devouring intensity.

All the while our human relationships, even with the ones we lived with declined further and further. And too many even lost themselves. While Zoomed in, we were never able to zoom out and see what was happening: We provided a multi-month, nonstop of feast of data to Facebook, PR firms, ad agencies, social media marketers, multinational corporations and political campaigns. And worse yet, while doing so, we gave those very same social engineers unmitigated access to our pysches, allowing them to (re)program us completely and permanently. What is made by the algorithm is a slave to the algorithm, that's the guiding spirit of the Machine without soul–godless technology.

All of this is to say that with a little help, we did it to ourselves. We marched willingly back into Plato's cave where our slaughter awaited us. With mathematical, algorithmic precision we were dismembered. And as if that were not enough, we were re-assembled with equal precision in the image of the algorithm. But with one part missing. The one that the algorithm cannot account for, which thereby renders it a hostile element and for that reasons the algorithm strives to eliminate it. The one part Walter White could not mathematically account for when tallying up the relative percentage of every element comprising our physical bodies: the Soul. Which is to say the Real, the most Real.

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And so now the lockdown is easing, the screens say, and we, freshly stitched up as Brave New Men, may venture forth back from the cave. Weak and reconstituted, we may stagger our post-op corpses back, like zombies, into the streets and shops and malls and Walmarts and Chiles and Applebees and Wetherspoons.

But with one caveat: we must keep concealed the last vestigial trace of our humanity–our face–behind a mask. Those faceless interactions we'd become so accustomed to during lockdown were to carry on over to the physical, real world, leaving us indefinitely rendered a blank screen, a blank slate, a non-person, a zero–our histories as revealed in the language of our faces' contours and creases veiled and deleted.

Roger Scuton, in The Soul of the World, writes extensively of the importance of the face. In his account, the face, wherever it may be found, is the nexus where we encounter the transcendent. It is what makes us more than mere utilitarian flesh. He laments the loss of the divine face in modern architecture, supplanted as it is with the nihilism of cold, gray, overpowering facades and rightfully points out the mutilating, dehumanizing effects it has had upon us. I wonder what he'd say about our the loss of the final face, the Human face, whether it be online or off. In the Abolition of Man, CS Lewis spoke of modern man as "men without chests". Which is to a species of man who had lost its core, its heart, its nous, its ability to feel truth and make value judgements.

Little did he know the post-modern man would go one step further to also become men without faces.

Again, this is not a comment on the efficacy or necessity of masks. Only an observation of their effects. Yet there's something lost in all of this: effects are just as important, if not more, than causes. ****

So now, returning to the cardboard cut outs cheering in the stands at the opening baseball game. We analyzed it, and I, at least, affirm it as an epitome of the simulacrum. But consider this. In the wake of what we've become, in the steel grip of the algorithm, the inescapable Code, the world without heart nor soul, perhaps those cardboard cutouts, those two-dimensional replicas aren't so fake after all. Perhaps they're as real us in all our new fullness, us men without hearts and faces. Perhaps they're even more real. Perhaps they are us. And perhaps we're laughing at ourselves for what we've done. Us who stagger across this Disneyfied desert of mask-clad skulls and darkened Wheels of Fortune. The horror. The horror. The black laugh of horror.